What Then Must We Do?

"Good cops kill Jesus," says Dominic Scarcella, author of "Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen: Reflections on the core social conflict revealed by Jesus Christ's Way of the Cross."
We cover a lot of ground in this interview: Can one be a good neighbor and also a "good citizen"? Or are the two fundamentally at odds? Should Christians put their faith in the authority of the Bible, or religious leaders? Or are they responsible for discerning truth for themselves? When and how did Jesus' church become more aligned with "good citizenship" than with good neighborliness? How does one find a spiritual community that is aligned with the true principles taught by Jesus? And of course... was Jesus an anarchist?
Dom blogs here, and you can find him on Twitter here.
You can find his book, "Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen" at Amazon (paperback), Amazon (Kindle), Barnes & Noble (paperback), Barnes & Noble (ebook), and Lulu (paperback).
It's a fantastic little book, and will make a wonderful Christmas gift for some of the more thoughtful people in your life!

"A Paradise for Parents" is not your ordinary assisted-living facility. While the past four years have witnessed elder care descend to what can only be described as abusive levels of isolation and neglect, Hal Cranmer, who heads up "A Paradise for Parents'" five locations in Arizona, does things very differently.
We talk about Hal's approach to giving his elderly residents their best possible lives, including a commitment to dietary and exercise regimes that have helped many to improve both physical and mental health. Hal says they've actually had seven residents go back to their own homes because their conditions improved to the point where they no longer needed supportive care.
We talk about the remarkable effects of a low-carb diet and the promise it holds for those struggling with memory issues, and about Hal's partnership with "A Mind for All Seasons", an organization that is doing groundbreaking work to slow cognitive decline.
We also talk about Hal's recent Twitter spat with former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was not happy to hear that "A Paradise for Parents" was not locking down its residents out of fear of a virus.
The elder-care industry could stand to learn a lot from Hal Cranmer.
Links:
A Paradise for Parents (with the Bohemian Rhapsody parody video).
A Mind for All Seasons.
Apollo Health.
The Bredesen Protocol.

I speak with Kerry McDonald, unschooling mom and vocal advocate of homeschooling, about how governments may have inadvertantly sparked a homeschooling revolution, and about what homeschooling families can do to continue giving their children "old normal" lives.

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019). She is also an adjunct scholar at The Cato Institute and a regular Forbes contributor.

Kerry's research interests include homeschooling and alternatives to school, self-directed learning, education entrepreneurship, parent empowerment, school choice, and family and child policy. Her articles have appeared at The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, NPR, Education Next, Reason Magazine, City Journal, and Entrepreneur, among others. She has a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Bowdoin College.

Kerry lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children.
You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.

I speak with Swedish ER doctor Sebastian Rushworth, about the workings of the immune system and Covid-19. Among other insights: The media (and much of research) focuses on antibodies, but T-cell immunity may be better suited to viral infections; antibodies always wane over time, this is nothing new; the evidence shows that the lockdowns have had no effect on transmission; as the data piles up, it is becoming clear that Covid-19 is indeed very much like a bad flu virus in terms of deaths. Oh, and Sweden is back to normal and we all should be too.
You can read Dr. Rushworth's blog here.
And the article I mentioned, "Herd Immunity Without Antibodies?" is here.

“Unfettered capitalism” creates a “dog-eat-dog” world in which the strong profit at the expense of the weak, everyone only looks out for their own interests, and society becomes selfish, atomized, and less human, with its members caring only about making money, not about each other.

So goes the standard mainstream view of a free society, and free markets. If you went to a government school, you heard some version of this.

Economist Guido Hulsmann has a new book out that tears this caricature to shreds. In Abundance, Generosity, and the State: An Inquiry into Economic Principles, Dr. Hulsmann systematically demonstrates the ways in which people naturally tend to help each other and to produce goods and services that do not directly benefit them in any material way.

He then shows us how government intervention works to stifle and even squash much of this activity – from government control in money and banking encouraging irresponsible financial behavior and discouraging voluntary donations (if you take nothing else from this interview, be sure to take note of the “saturation mechanism” and what happens to it in an interventionist system), to the tragic outcomes of the welfare state.

Dr. Hulsmann turns the standard caricature on its head, and shows us in painstaking detail, how it is not freedom, but coercive interventions in the lives of free people that work to create a society of self-centered and atomized individuals.

Dr Hülsmann is a professor of economics at the University of Angers in France. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute and a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

His website is here.

And his book, Abundance, Generosity, and the State: An Inquiry into Economic Principles, is here.

The book he mentions, The Welfare State We’re In, by James Bartholomew, can be found here.