The bureaucrats & science retards responsible for the last three years of destruction and mass medical experimentation are unrepentant and eager to do the same thing all over again

Also: Alpine Open Thread

The view towards the Bavarian alps from Austria.

While I travel and work on a longer piece, I thought you might enjoy some outtakes from this recent article in Welt, about the complete lack of self-reflection exhibited by German pandemic Science-Followers even after the failure of their policies:

Helge Braun … the former head of Angela Merkel’s Chancellery, was invited to Berlin’s Futurium to discuss science and politics. Behind the scenes, Braun was a key figure in the German Corona response. Time for a few awkward questions? The CDU politician need not fear them – despite his vehement advocacy of school closures and lockdowns …

He was joined by three members of the Leopoldina [that is, the German National Academy of Sciences] – climate researcher Gerald Haug, its president; paediatrician and adolescent physician Jutta Gärtner and sociologist Armin Nassehi. The Academy became known during the pandemic not for its balanced scientific advice, but primarily for its politicised demands for tougher measures. And as often as its members emphasised institutional independence from the government that evening, you could tell their intellectual independence was notably lacking.

“Team Caution,” as members of the Leopoldina members still like to call themselves, was full of praise for their own work … “The pandemic was a good example of science-based policy advice,” Haug explains – and by “good” he really does mean that the Academy advised well … “Team Caution” always did everything right … The sensible majority followed the recommendations of the government, the Leopoldina and the RKI. Everything else is nasty fake news from the internet.

Yet Haug himself is a good example of the Leopoldina’s convoluted self-perception. On the one hand, he insisted repeatedly that science only represents “the facts”; that is, he claims objectivity for his profession. On the other hand, Haug freely admits that the Leopoldina aimed to “really hit it out of the park” and “make a splash” with their recommendations. “We’re often too soft…”

A real problem with the technocrats, is that they only have relevance in one direction. As soon as the National Academy of Sciences issues an opinion that the virus isn’t much to worry about and people should continue to live their lives as before, their political relevance is finished. For this reason alone, technocratic systems will be biased towards intervention, even in harmless situations, and nothing they tell you to do can ever be trusted.

The damage inflicted by lockdowns, the vaccines, social exclusion and attendant social conflicts – nobody wanted to talk about that. Nor did anyone want to discuss Braun’s role as one of the main instigators of the German pandemic response, distinguished internationally especially by the long school closures. As is well known, Braun’s promise that all measures would end “as soon as we have made an offer of vaccination to everyone in Germany” turned out to be empty talk. His threat that the vaccinated should receive “more freedom” than the unvaccinated, on the other hand, became brutal reality. No matter. For Braun, the Corona era represents a positive interaction between politics and science, which serves as an important example for the future.

Braun claimed that “Citizens don't like arguments in politics. The strange democratic understandings of this unassuming Merkel confident could be summed up as “Dare to demand more expertocracy …

At the end, they moved on from Corona to discuss climate change. A scientist in the audience suggested that the Leopoldina should … take to the streets. The opinionated moderator suggested that, when it comes to climate, fear is rational; and that, in consequence, the rational mandate of science would be to spread fear …

Apparently, the politicians and academics who set the tone in the Corona crisis now feel encouraged to extend the Corona model to future grand programmes …

Mark my words: Should they ever be allowed to get the public panic juggernaut up and running again, what they do next will make Corona seem like a mildly rough case of cultural and political indigestion. They’ve learned that the hard limits on their power are far weaker than they ever imagined. Their dark ambitions will hang over us like a Sword of Damocles for decades now.