Free Republic

The researchers broke the students into different groups based on how much time they had spent attending in-person school during 2020-21 — the academic year with the most variation in whether schools were open. On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window. Some of those losses stemmed from the time the students had spent learning remotely during the spring of 2020, when school buildings were almost universally closed. And some of the losses stemmed from the difficulties of in-person...

Whenever the trucking market slows, truck drivers look for someone to blame. Normally, a slowdown is just a function of supply and demand. The market has too much dispatchable capacity compared to the total number of loads on any given day. This summer, the trucking market could have one of its steepest declines in recent years and there is an entity that deserves much of the blame – the Chinese Communist Party and its draconian and inhumane lockdowns.A Chinese containership. (Photo: ship-technology.com)While the motivations of the Chinese government are unclear, one thing is certain – anyone subjected to a Chinese...

What does this guy know? Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates says the world has not seen the worst of Covid yet. “We’re still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal,” Gates told the Financial Times. “It’s not likely, I don’t want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but it’s way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it.” Last year it was revealed that Pentagon scientists working in a secretive united created a microchip to be inserted underneath the...

The Yangshan Deepwater Container Terminal at the Port of Shanghai, where trade flows have slowed because of citywide COVID restrictionsA mixed bag of circumstances and time horizons are creating diverging narratives about whether shipping delays stemming from the shutdown of Shanghai and other Chinese cities are getting better or presage massive supply chain gridlock. There is no sign that Shanghai’s lockdown is easing anytime soon. Footage on social media shows steel fences being installed on public roads and inside residential compounds to keep people from traveling to other districts and moving in neighborhoods. On Monday, the Shanghai Health Commission reported...

The first human case associated with the H5 bird flu in the U.S. was detected in a Colorado man, just a few days after the same disease was reported in China. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shared information on the case with the public on Thursday, adding the “public health risk assessment remains low.” The CDC adds people who have job-related or recreational exposures to infected birds are at a higher risk of infection and should take appropriate precautions. But remember you should never believe CDC…

Tens of thousands of kids in the United Kingdom have been driven into clinical depression by coronavirus lockdowns, a study has found. Lockdowns hoping to curb the spread of the Chinese coronavirus have driven tens of thousands of kids in the United Kingdom to clinical depression, a study published on Wednesday has suggested.

The Next Ten BattlesIt is apparently much easier to tell the truth about state action the farther away it is from home. And hence even the New York Times seems alarmed at the covid lockdowns in Shanghai, and pretending as if nothing like that could happen here even though the whole practice of lockdown the world over was directly copied from the Wuhan model. “China is meddling with free enterprise as it hadn’t in decades,” says the paper. “The results are familiar to those old enough to remember: scarcity, and the rise of black markets.”The disruptions are especially difficult for...

Lockdowns in China are ravaging global supply chains as shipping containers pile up at ports and factories close their doors. Beijing’s aggressive action to curb the spread of COVID-19 is likely to further fuel inflation in the U.S., where companies are struggling to get products from their Chinese suppliers.

Hopes that the CCP might be easing its Shanghai lockdown were dashed this week as authorities loosened restrictions for manufacturers and others businesses, while mostly keeping restrictions on residential areas intact. Instead of winding down restrictions in Shanghai, authorities are now scrambling to suppress an outbreak in Beijing which they believe may have been spreading for as long as a week. The capital city reported 22 new local cases on Sunday, its highest daily tally this year. While the number of new cases would be considered inconsequential anywhere else, authorities have placed part of Beijing under high alert, cancelling classes...

A supply chain nightmare One in five container ships is now stuck at ports worldwide, with 30% of the backlog coming from China. And Lars Jensen, the CEO of the shipping container industry consulting firm Vespucci Maritime, told Fortune that the full impact of China’s policies will only begin to reveal itself over the coming weeks. “Companies are beginning to panic. The downstream impact is coming, and it’ll be heavy.” John Bree, the chief risk officer at Supply Wisdom, said. “The latest China lockdowns combined with the Russia-Ukraine war is too heavy a burden. The global chaos is going to...

Frustration is boiling over in Shanghai, as residents increasingly chafe under weeks of draconian coronavirus lockdowns. On Chinese social media Saturday web users fought to share a six-minute video called “The Voice of April.” The footage showed a panorama of the city’s empty streets, while also featuring voices of locals complaining about food and medical shortages that have plagued the metropolis.

Airports have been the main stages for security and hygiene "theater.". Bureaucrats cling to power. It’s their institutional predisposition. So it was no surprise on Wednesday when the Department of Justice appealed the recent Federal court ruling that struck down the mask mandate imposed on mass transportation by the Centers for Disease Control. As the appeal demonstrates, governments are especially reluctant to give up emergency powers. When they do, the relinquishment is grudging and only partial. That is a big reason why big government keeps getting bigger. As economist Robert Higgs showed in his book Crisis and Leviathan, since the...

Now that local authorities have started to lift the lockdown on Shanghai, releasing 4 million people from being locked away inside their apartments yesterday, the true scope of the suffering is just starting to become apparent. Following myriad complaints about shortages of food and other medicine, Shanghai’s market watchdog (which has mostly been focused on mitigating the impact of the shutdown on Shanghai’s factories and its all-important port) has reportedly pledged to investigate. Shanghai’s market watchdog has pledged to tighten oversight of pandemic supplies after residents complained that rotten food was being delivered by authorities, leaving them with little, or...

NEW YORK, NY—After over two years of lockdowns and mandates, economists are now starting to think shutting down the economy for two years may have had some negative consequences. “I’ll admit, we were surprised a bit,” said Clark Phartzbubel, chief economist for the liberal economic think-tank, The Institute for Economic Asininity. “We may have misjudged the fact that going against the most fundamental of all economic theories could devastate our nation." Economists across the globe are now looking for answers on how the COVID-19 pandemic caused all of them to become blind to the damage to the economy caused by...

Britain's partygate controversy is spelling more trouble for UK prime minister Boris Johnson. For the longest time Johnson kept denying even attending the 10 Downing street gatherings during the 2020 lockdown, it turns out one of the celebrations held during the lockdown was in fact led by Boris Johnson himself. ...

Footage that widely circulated on social media shows residents entered a neighborhood clash with police in Shanghai due to local authorities’ decision to acquire some of their community’s apartment buildings as quarantine centers. According to the footage, dwellers in the Zhangjiang Nashi neighborhood compound rallied in protest of the local government’s eviction order that forced them to move out. Police in white protective gear pushed back demonstrators while some women were crying desperately for help.(Please go to the site to see the video)The Zhangjiang Group, which owns the compound, said in an April 14 statement that their quarantine construction “met...

An extremely interesting video was dropped recently by Greg Reese at Banned.Video. Titled, “Forced Lockdowns Are Coming Back To America,” it suggested that the reason we’re seeing so much coverage of the Shanghai lockdown that’s causing mass starvation, psychological damage, and countless deaths, is because American media is preparing us for lockdowns of our own. The theory is by seeing how bad things are in Shanghai, we won’t feel so badly about having to stay in our homes or shut down our businesses when Pandemic Panic Theater rears its ugly head again. Moreover, the video suggests that we’ve seen something...

Make no doubt about it, there’s something seriously disturbing about the state of the recent Covid lockdowns taking place in Shanghai. Even for China. Here is what the outbreak looks like, if we are to believe the numbers coming out of China. You’ll have to excuse me for being frank, but I simply don’t believe them. China has lied about nearly everything since the beginning of the pandemic, and they certainly don’t have the rest of the world’s best interest in mind now that they are allying with Russia economically. Source: NY Times Rather, I believe the numbers are likely...

In an interview on MSNBC, Dr Fauci finally admitted that he used lockdowns to force people to get vaccinated and complimented the China’s Communist government’s lockdown tactics. On MSNBC on Wednesday, Anthony Fauci revealed the truth about lockdowns: they are a form of theatre intended to terrify people into getting vaccines.Fauci openly complimented the Communist government’s tactics when asked about the developing lockdown hellscape in China by host Andrea Mitchell.According to Fauci, “China has a number of problems, two of which are that the complete lockdown, which was their approach, a strictest lockdown you’d never be able to implement in...

What were the benefits and costs of the COVID-19 restrictions implemented over the last two years? It's a good time to ask that question, especially now that the masks are coming off and the lockdowns are canceled. One useful scorecard comes from the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, in the form of a paper by three market-friendly economists, Casey Mulligan (University of Chicago), Stephen Moore (Heritage Foundation) and Phil Kerpen (Committee to Unleash Prosperity). They evidently disagree with the nation's most prominent advocate of massive restrictions, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently argued, "I don't think we're ever going to...