The Austrians Saw It Coming

One tradition predicted what happened during the pandemic with unsettling accuracy. Most readers will have brushed against it only in passing, because its central figures wrote in the twentieth century, worked outside mainstream academic economics, and have been treated, where taught at all, as historical curiosities rather than live tools. The Austrian school, named for the nationality of its founders and built by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and their heirs, produced a body of analysis whose central claims line up with the pandemic record closely enough to demand attention.What follows is not a full treatment of Austrian economics, which fills the many volumes its founders wrote. It is a guided application of a few Austrian ideas to the patterns the pandemic exposed. The goal is to give a coherent vocabulary for what the record establishes, and to show that the patterns are not quirks of the COVID era but expressions of forces the Austrians named decades earlier. The essay builds toward the framework that gives the rest its force: Rothbard’s account of state coercion as the foundation the whole apparatus rests on, and the reason these patterns could be enforced on entire populations.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Cantillon Effect, AppliedIn the early eighteenth century, the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon observed that newly created money does not enter the economy uniformly. It enters at specific points and flows outward in predictable patterns, benefiting those nearest the point of injection first and most, and those farthest from it last and least. The phenomenon now bears his name. Mises developed it in his analysis of credit expansion. Hayek built it into his business cycle theory. Rothbard pressed it as the central indictment of central banking.The Cantillon effect is the theoretical name for what the monetary record of 2020 shows. The Federal Reserve’s emergency facilities that year, which expanded the central bank’s balance sheet by approximately $4.5 trillion, did not distribute the new money uniformly across the American population. The money entered through specific channels — the corporate bond markets, the Treasury securities markets, and the financial sector — and flowed outward to the holders of assets nearest those channels.The result was the largest upward transfer of wealth in modern American history, not as an accident but as the predictable way newly created money moves through an economy. The Austrian framework saw this coming three centuries before it happened.Hayek and the Knowledge ProblemIn a 1945 paper, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Friedrich Hayek argued that the central problem of organizing an economy is not allocating known resources. It is using knowledge that exists only in scattered, local, often unspoken form in the minds of people at the edges of any system. Central planning, however well meant, cannot gather that knowledge, and so cannot make decisions as well calibrated as the local actors would make for themselves.The pandemic public-health apparatus was an experiment, run at planetary scale, in central planning under extreme information gaps. One-size-fits-all orders — close every school, mask everyone, require vaccination as the price of normal life — were dropped on populations whose actual situations varied enormously. The small-business owner who knew his shop could operate safely, the parent who knew her child could not take more isolation, the local doctor who knew her elderly patients’ specific risks, the rural county whose epidemiology looked nothing like a dense city’s: each held knowledge the central planners did not have and could not gather.There is a deeper layer to the knowledge problem, and the pandemic exposed it. Hayek’s argument is not only that planners lack the dispersed knowledge; it is that a free system has a mechanism for putting that knowledge to use. In markets the mechanism is the price signal, which gathers countless private judgments into a number anyone can act on. In open inquiry the equivalent mechanism is unfettered debate: claims are made, contested, and revised, and the dispersed knowledge of many minds is incorporated through that friction. The censorship apparatus that operated through the pandemic was, in Hayekian terms, the deliberate destruction of that mechanism for ideas.This makes the censorship more than a civil-liberties problem. When platforms throttled discussion of the laboratory-origin hypothesis, of natural immunity, of vaccine effects on transmission, and when encyclopedias and fact-checkers fixed an official account in place against correction, they were not merely silencing dissent. They were disabling the only process by which a system can discover that its central estimate is wrong. The suppressed claims were, in several cases, the correct ones. A system that suppresses the signal cannot self-correct, and is left to discover its errors only when reality forces the issue, long after the cost of the error has been paid.The pandemic-policy failures — the closures that wrecked businesses with no public-health payoff, the mandates aimed at populations they could not protect, the messaging that made things worse for the very people it was meant to help — were not failures of execution. They were failures of the planning enterprise itself, the kind Hayek predicted eighty years earlier.Mises on BureaucracyInBureaucracy, published in 1944, Ludwig von Mises argued that bureaucratic management differs from profit-seeking business in one fundamental way: it has no means of matching its output to real value. A profit-seeking firm sells priced goods, and the prices customers pay tell the firm whether its output is wanted. A bureaucracy produces output whose value cannot be measured that way, so it expands to use up whatever resources it can get, whether or not the benefit keeps pace. Bureaucrats face a built-in push to grow their authority, their budgets, and their reach, because those are the yardsticks by which their success is judged.The pandemic expansion of public-health bureaucracies tracks this exactly. The CDC, the NIH, the FDA, the WHO, and their counterparts across the developed world did not shrink after the acute phase. They grew. Budgets climbed, authority multiplied, payrolls thickened, and their reach extended into territory they had not occupied before. None of it was justified by any clear gain in public health. It was justified by the bureaucratic logic Mises identified, which produces growth regardless of outcome because growth is what the incentives reward.Regulatory Capture and the Privileged FirmThe Austrian account of money explains who got the new liquidity first. A second Austrian theme explains who got the regulatory privileges, and it is at least as important. Mises argued that the interventionist economy, the “hampered market,” is unstable in a particular way. Each intervention creates distortions that invite the next, and the cumulative effect is a system in which political access, not consumer value, increasingly decides who succeeds. Rothbard pressed the point harder inPower and Market. He argued that monopoly power and cartel profits do not arise from free competition at all, but from government grants of privilege: the licenses, patents, purchase guarantees, and liability shields that protect favored firms from the discipline of the market.The pandemic supplied an unusually pure case. The companies whose products the state mandated were granted advance-purchase contracts that removed market risk. They received liability shields that removed legal risk, and emergency authorizations that removed the ordinary burden of proof. Meanwhile regulators and the firms they oversaw exchanged personnel through a well-documented revolving door. This is not the free market that its critics blame for the outcome, and it is not socialism either. It is the hampered market the Austrians described, in which the state and a circle of privileged firms each extend the other’s reach. The public is left to absorb the costs of an arrangement it could neither price nor refuse. Naming it correctly matters, because the reflexive response to pandemic profiteering — more regulation — would deepen the very alliance that produced it.Rothbard on the Court IntellectualMurray Rothbard, the most prolific and politically pointed of the Austrian thinkers, devoted substantial attention to a figure he called the court intellectual. InAnatomy of the Stateand elsewhere, Rothbard argued that every state requires a class of credentialed experts whose social function is to translate naked power into legitimate authority through the language of expertise.The court intellectual does not usually lie outright. He supplies the interpretive frameworks, the technical justifications, and the credentialed endorsements that make state actions look necessary, scientific, and beyond serious dispute. Without this class, state actions draw the kind of scrutiny that breeds resistance. With it, they are wrapped in the prestige of expert consensus and become hard to oppose without seeming anti-intellectual or anti-science.The pandemic produced this class in unusually concentrated form. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and their counterparts were, in Rothbard’s terms, the court intellectuals of the pandemic state. Their job was not mainly to produce new scientific knowledge but to translate state pandemic policy into the language of expert consensus, and to coordinate the silencing of credentialed dissent that would have spoiled the appearance of consensus. The Great Barrington Declaration episode, in which three credentialed epidemiologists were subjected to coordinated reputational attack for proposing an alternative policy framework, is the cleanest example of the court intellectual class performing its defining function. Rothbard would have recognized it instantly.The court intellectual is not only the credentialed scientist. Rothbard’s category is functional, not occupational. It covers anyone whose work converts state action into legitimate authority, and the pandemic showed that the function extends across the institutions that shape public belief. The press performed it through what journalists themselves call access journalism. There, continued access to powerful sources depends on coverage those sources tolerate, so the official who controls access also shapes the resulting account. The fact-checking industry performed it too, by ruling contested questions settled in the official direction, with the rulings presented as neutral adjudication rather than the advocacy they often were.The function was also performed by organizations built for the purpose. The Trusted News Initiative coordinated major outlets and platforms around a shared line on what counted as reliable. A censorship nonprofit with roots in one country’s party politics supplied target lists and the vocabulary of harm. These were not, in the main, producers of new knowledge. They were producers of legitimacy, manufacturing the appearance of a settled consensus that made the state’s pandemic policy hard to question without seeming to stand against science itself. Rothbard’s insight is that this is not incidental to state power but structural to it: the apparatus of expertise and the apparatus of opinion are recruited, knowingly or not, to the same task of making coercion look like agreement.Hazlitt and the UnseenInEconomics in One Lesson, published in 1946, Henry Hazlitt boiled the foundational error of economic reasoning down to a single distinction. The bad economist, he argued, sees only the immediate, visible consequences of an action; the good economist traces the consequences that are unseen, delayed, or spread across people who never appear in the immediate tally.Pandemic discourse made this error at scale. The visible consequences of pandemic policy — the cases prevented, the hospitalizations averted, the lives extended — were counted and publicized. The unseen consequences — the businesses destroyed, the educations disrupted, the deaths from delayed medical care, the suicides from prolonged isolation, the developmental damage to children, the wealth shifted upward by monetary policy, the institutional powers locked in for permanent use — were treated as inevitable, regrettable, or unmeasurable. They were not unmeasurable. They were simply left unmeasured by the institutions whose authority depended on the visible consequences being treated as the only ones. Hazlitt’s framework names the error and points to its political use.Higgs and the RatchetRobert Higgs, an institutional economist working between the Austrian and public-choice traditions, gave us the ratchet effect in his 1987 bookCrisis and Leviathan. Government powers that expand during a crisis, Higgs argued, rarely shrink back to their pre-crisis levels. The crisis-era powers become the new baseline, and the next crisis expands from there, so the cumulative growth of state power across crises becomes the dominant story of modern American politics.The emergency powers invoked in 2020 did not return to their pre-2020 baseline. The biosecurity bureaucracies built or expanded in the response kept their crisis-era funding. The international preparedness architecture, including the WHO pandemic agreement, would lock the crisis-era arrangements into permanent international authority. This is what the ratchet produces. The COVID response was not a temporary expansion that later contracted. It was a permanent one that became the new normal, and the next crisis will expand from there.Hoppe and the Short HorizonThe political theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, working within the Austrian tradition, has argued that democratic systems give elected officials shorter time horizons than other arrangements do, because officials have strong reasons to extract value from institutions during their term rather than preserve them for whoever comes next.Pandemic decision-making fits the pattern. The agency heads who designed the response acted as if they would never be held to account for outcomes that would land after they left. The legislators who wrote the CARES Act and its successors acted as if the wealth-transfer consequences would scatter across an electorate too dispersed and distracted to organize against them. The officials who coordinated public messaging acted as if the dissent they suppressed would not produce organized backlash within their time in office. This short-horizon argument is more politically charged than the other Austrian frameworks here, but the record supports it, and it is worth naming for readers who want a systematic account of why officials behave as they do.The Foundation: CoercionThe frameworks so far explain why the pandemic patterns took the shape they did. They do not, by themselves, explain why ordinary people went along with arrangements that most of them would have rejected if offered the choice cleanly. They describe the structure of the grift. They do not yet describe how it was enforced. For that, the Austrian tradition’s most direct analysis comes from Murray Rothbard, whose work on state coercion is the most uncompromising treatment of the question in the literature.Rothbard’s foundational claim, developed acrossAnatomy of the State,For a New Liberty,The Ethics of Liberty, and many other works, is that the state is structurally unlike every other social institution because it claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. Every other institution — businesses, churches, associations, families — works through voluntary exchange, persuasion, social pressure, or moral suasion. The state alone works, in the end, through the threat and use of force. This is not a claim about whether state coercion is ever justified. It is a claim about what the state actually is, which sets it apart from institutions that may resemble it but lack its defining feature.The pandemic was, by this analysis, an unusually clear demonstration of what state coercion actually consists of, made visible because it was deployed at scales and across domains where it had not reached in modern peacetime. Closure orders backed by criminal penalties, vaccine mandates backed by firing, travel restrictions backed by exclusion from commerce and movement, speech moderation backed by deplatforming coordinated with federal agencies, contact tracing backed by digital surveillance, quarantine backed in some places by physical detention — these were not, in Rothbard’s framework, persuasion. They were coercion. The distinction matters because persuasion lets people dissent without penalty, while coercion attaches a penalty to dissent. The defining feature of the pandemic arrangement was that the penalties for noncompliance were severe enough to override what large parts of the population actually wanted. People complied not because they were persuaded but because the alternatives had been made unbearable.A useful illustration is the vaccine mandate, which became the most visible instance of pandemic-era state coercion in the developed world. The mandates did not require that citizens accept the vaccine. They required, formally, only that those who declined accept consequences: loss of employment, exclusion from education, denial of entry to commercial establishments, prohibition from travel, removal from professional licensure, separation from family members in healthcare settings, and in some jurisdictions, fines or detention.Calling the mandates something other than coercion rested on the formal availability of the refusal option. In Rothbard’s framework, that framing falls apart on inspection. Coercion does not require that the coerced party have no option. It requires that the coercer has deliberately made the alternatives to compliance worse than compliance. A robber who says “your money or your life” is offering a choice in the formal sense. The choice is coercive because the coercer has imposed the relevant consequences on noncompliance. The vaccine mandates operated by the same logic, on a population scale, with the imposed consequences being the loss of livelihood, education, mobility, and social participation rather than the immediate physical violence of the street-level analogy. The structure was identical. The scale was vast.The same analysis applies to the broader pandemic-era coercive apparatus. Closure orders were enforced through criminal penalties for noncompliant business owners; in multiple documented cases, individuals were arrested, fined, or jailed for operating businesses, holding religious services, or gathering with family members in defiance of them. Mask requirements were enforced through ejection, fines, and in some cases physical removal from commercial establishments and public transportation. Travel restrictions were enforced through denial of boarding, exclusion at borders, and in some jurisdictions mandatory quarantine in state-designated facilities under armed guard. Speech moderation, while not formally backed by criminal penalty in the American context, was coordinated between federal agencies and platforms in ways theMurthy v. Missourilitigation later documented as functionally state action operating through nominally private intermediaries. Rothbard would have recognized this last mechanism as a sophisticated extension of state coercion through coordination with private actors who could enforce restrictions the state itself could not directly impose under First Amendment constraints. The legal formalism was preserved; the coercive substance was delivered.What Rothbard’s analysis stresses, more than any other framework here, is that the coercion was the point. The other Austrian frameworks describe what state action produces: wealth transfer, bureaucratic growth, court-intellectual cover, ratcheted authority. Rothbard insists that none of those outputs would be possible without the coercive foundation that forces the population to accept them. The Federal Reserve’s wealth transfer required that citizens accept the dollar as legal tender and pay their taxes in it. The bureaucratic growth required that citizens fund the growing institutions through compulsory taxation. The court intellectuals’ authority required that citizens treat their pronouncements as binding rather than as opinions to weigh on the merits. The ratchet required that the expanded crisis-era powers stay enforceable after the crisis passed. Coercion is the foundation the rest of the apparatus stands on. Remove it, and the apparatus collapses, because people would simply opt out of arrangements that did not benefit them.The pandemic made that coercive foundation unusually visible, because the coercion reached new domains at new intensities. Citizens who had spent decades unaware of how coercive their relationship with state institutions really was — because the coercion operated in places they never personally hit — became aware of it when it reached their workplaces, their children’s schools, their churches, their travel, and their own bodies. The political fallout is still being worked out. The rise of populist movements across the developed world after 2020, the collapse of trust in public-health institutions, the cross-partisan surge of medical-freedom and bodily-autonomy advocacy: these are not unrelated. They are the political response of a population that became, briefly and partly, aware of the coercive foundation Rothbard had described his whole career.What the Tradition NamesThe Austrian tradition, and Rothbard in particular, gives us a more precise vocabulary for what happened than the alternatives on offer in mainstream discourse. The pandemic arrangements were not failures of communication, as their defenders sometimes claim. They were not excesses of zeal, as the apologetic histories frame them. They were not necessary measures whose costs were regrettable but unavoidable, as the official accounts insist. They were applications of state coercion, deployed across domains and at intensities the population had not met in peacetime, in service of arrangements that produced predictable distributional consequences, benefiting politically connected groups at the broader public’s expense.The pattern across these frameworks is the same. Across the twentieth century, the Austrian tradition produced a body of analysis that anticipated how the pandemic institutions would behave. It predicted that newly created money would benefit those nearest its point of injection. That central planners would fail when knowledge is dispersed. That bureaucracies would grow regardless of any demonstrated benefit. That credentialed expert classes would provide cover for state action. That visible consequences would be counted while invisible ones were ignored. That crisis-era powers would become the new baseline rather than receding. That officials on short time horizons would strip value from institutions rather than preserve them. And that the coercive foundation under the whole apparatus would be deployed at scale to enforce arrangements that voluntary exchange would never have produced. Every one of these predictions was made before 2020. Every one was confirmed by the record.Three ObjectionsThe Austrian framework, applied to the pandemic record, has its critics, and an account that ducked them would do the framework no favors. Here are the three strongest objections. A reader who finds any of them persuasive is better placed to judge where, and how far, the Austrian analysis should be applied.The first objection is to the knowledge-problem argument.Hayek showed that centralized planners cannot aggregate the dispersed contextual knowledge that local actors hold. The strongest version of the objection grants the point and then qualifies it. The knowledge problem is real, but it does not by itself entail that no centralized response to a pandemic can succeed. Some interventions, particularly those targeted at the vulnerable populations on whom the benefit–cost ratio is most favorable, may be both centralized in their organization and well calibrated in their application, because the relevant information for those specific interventions is reasonably aggregatable. The Austrian argument is strongest against the most ambitious applications of centralized planning — universal, one-size-fits-all mandates applied without regard to the heterogeneous risk profiles of the affected populations — and weakest against narrower interventions targeted at populations on whom the underlying epidemiology is well characterized. My view is that the strong version of the Austrian argument applies to the pandemic-era arrangements documented here, which were ambitious in the relevant sense; I do not claim, and the Austrian tradition does not require, that every conceivable centralized public-health intervention is illegitimate on knowledge-problem grounds. The framework identifies the conditions under which centralized planning is most prone to failure. It does not, by itself, demonstrate the failure in any specific case.The second objection is to the Higgs ratchet argument.Higgs showed that emergency expansions of state authority tend not to return to their pre-emergency baseline. The strongest version of the objection grants the historical observation and then questions its normative implications. The ratchet effect is real, but it does not by itself entail that every emergency expansion of state authority is illegitimate, or that the failure of the emergency authorities to contract afterward indicates that the original expansion was unjustified. Some emergency expansions reflect the recognition of conditions the prior baseline had not adequately addressed, and the failure of those expansions to contract may reflect the persistence of the underlying conditions rather than bureaucratic self-protection. My response is that the burden of proof on this question runs in the direction the framework suggests. An emergency expansion of state authority that fails to contract after the emergency passes ought to be justified, explicitly and publicly, by reference to the conditions that continue to require it. In the pandemic case, the institutional expansions have not been so justified. They have been sustained by inertia, budget pressure from the institutions themselves, and the absence of organized political pressure for their contraction. That is the dynamic Higgs identified.The third objection is more fundamental.It says: the Austrian framework treats state action as structurally distinct from voluntary social arrangements by virtue of its coercive substrate, and this distinction does analytical work the framework needs. But the distinction is not as clean as Rothbard’s presentation suggests. Voluntary social arrangements also produce coercive consequences — loss of social standing, exclusion from communities, denial of economic opportunity — and some of these can be as severe in practice as the formal coercions the state deploys. The pandemic-era social pressure on vaccine-hesitant individuals was, in some communities, enforced more aggressively by social ostracism than by formal mandate. To treat formal state coercion as categorically different from informal social coercion, the objection runs, is to miss the way coercive substrates operate across the institutional landscape rather than being confined to the state’s monopoly on force. My response is that the distinction Rothbard draws is analytically useful even if it is not absolute. Formal state coercion is enforceable through mechanisms — criminal law, regulatory penalty, professional licensure, employment as a condition of continued legality — that informal social coercion is not. The pandemic period demonstrated that the formal and informal coercive substrates can be coordinated to produce compliance pressure greater than either could produce alone. The Austrian framework names the formal substrate. The pandemic experience adds the observation that the informal substrate, coordinated with the formal one, multiplies the compliance pressure the formal substrate could otherwise produce.None of these objections, in my reading, defeats the framework. Each identifies a limit to its application. The framework is strongest when applied to ambitious centralized planning that disregards heterogeneous local conditions, to emergency authorities that fail to justify their continuation after the emergency passes, and to formal-plus-informal coercive arrangements that achieve compliance through pressure greater than either substrate alone would produce. The pandemic-era record exhibits all three conditions. It is not, however, a universal solvent for the question of when state action is legitimately deployed, and I do not claim it to be.A Tool, Not a CreedYou do not have to accept the full Austrian framework, with all its libertarian politics, to find these specific predictions useful. The tradition is internally diverse. Hayek’s politics differed from Mises’s, which differed from Rothbard’s, which differed from Hoppe’s. What they share is not a unified political program but a set of analytical tools for understanding how state action, regulatory authority, central banking, bureaucratic growth, and ultimately state coercion produce predictable consequences that benefit politically connected groups at the broader public’s expense. Those tools are available to readers across the political spectrum, whether their commitments are libertarian, progressive, conservative, or none of the above. A reader who is no libertarian can still recognize, after the pandemic, that the question of when state coercion is legitimately used deserves more serious public debate than it got, and that the frameworks for thinking about it are older, deeper, and more developed than the recent arguments suggest.The Austrian tradition did not predict COVID. It predicted what would happen whenever a big enough emergency met a developed enough administrative apparatus running on the incentives modern central planning produces. The patterns are not a COVID story. They are the working out, at unusual scale and in front of unusual numbers of people, of forces the Austrians had named decades earlier.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share* * *BibliographyCantillon, Richard.Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général. London, 1755.Hayek, Friedrich A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”American Economic Review35, no. 4 (September 1945): 519–530.Hazlitt, Henry.Economics in One Lesson. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.Higgs, Robert.Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.Hoppe, Hans-Hermann.Democracy: The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001.Mises, Ludwig von.Bureaucracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.Mises, Ludwig von.Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949.Mises, Ludwig von.A Critique of Interventionism. 1929. Reprint, Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011.Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024).Rothbard, Murray N.Anatomy of the State. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1974.Rothbard, Murray N.Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market. 1962. Scholar’s ed., Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009.Rothbard, Murray N.For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1973.Rothbard, Murray N.The Ethics of Liberty. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: What a century-old school of economics predicted about the pandemic state — and why its vocabulary still fits the record better than anything in mainstream discourse


The Ebola Story You're Getting Is True. It's Also Built to Be Forgotten.

The version in circulation goes like this. There is an outbreak of Ebola in central Africa. Case numbers are climbing. The World Health Organization has declared an emergency. The risk to Western readers is low.Each of those statements is accurate. Assembled, they form a story shaped to be skimmed and set down. The reporting that fills it in is harder to set down, and it is available to anyone who looks past the wire summary.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The numbers are estimates, and the people producing them say soA strain of Ebola called Bundibugyo is spreading through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and has crossed into Uganda. As of late May the combined count runs past a thousand suspected and confirmed cases and more than 230 deaths.Those figures are estimates, and the institutions issuing them describe them as such. The WHO’s director-general says responders are “playing catch-up” because the outbreak ran undetected for weeks before it was declared. In DRC there are roughly 900 suspected cases against about 105 confirmed. Health workers put the true total higher than either.The direction of the error matters. This is not authorities inflating a threat. The official count almost certainly runs low, because surveillance in an active war zone barely functions. The operative fact about the numbers is that they are soft, and a precise tally drawn from a region with no working surveillance system reflects confidence rather than measurement.The reassurance rests on tools that do not work on this strainAfter the 2014 West Africa epidemic, the world produced an Ebola vaccine and two approved antibody treatments. That is the institutional success story that underwrites every appeal to defer to the experts.None of those tools are approved for this strain. The vaccine and the antibody drugs target the Zaire strain. This outbreak is Bundibugyo. The existing antibody treatments were tested against it and did not improve survival. There is no approved vaccine and no approved treatment for the disease now spreading.Bundibugyo is rare, with only two prior outbreaks ever, in 2007 and 2012, which is why no countermeasure was developed for it. The current options are experimental: an antibody cocktail with strong results in monkeys and no proof in humans, and the antiviral remdesivir, the COVID drug, both being moved toward clinical trials that have not yet begun. Frontline care consists of managing fever, administering fluids, and supportive therapy.The implication for anyone inclined to defer to the apparatus is direct. The proven tools do not apply to this disease. The WHO is not claiming otherwise. Its director-general said the outbreak “will get worse before it gets better,” which is relevant to the question of whether this institution is overreaching or simply outmatched.The war is not context for the outbreak. It is the reason it continues.The sanitized framing fails most clearly here, and the cost of the failure is the explanation itself.The outbreak is centered in Ituri and the Kivu provinces, among the most violent regions in the world, where scores of armed groups operate. The largest, the M23 rebels, backed by Rwanda, seized the major cities of Goma and Bukavu this year. Several of the cities now reporting Ebola cases are under rebel administration rather than government control. The Congolese health system cannot operate freely in the areas where transmission is highest. That constraint, not any failure of medical technique, is the central reason the outbreak is not being contained.The population also resists the response, and the resistance is not simple ignorance. Treatment centers have been burned twice in a single recent week. Health workers have been attacked. Families have fought burial teams for their dead. Officials and much of the coverage classify this as “misinformation,” a framing that obscures more than it explains. The affected communities have been exploited for generations, are currently living under a foreign-backed rebel occupation, and are being instructed by outsiders to surrender their dead and trust unfamiliar health teams. Their distrust of institutional authority tracks their experience rather than contradicting it.The government issuing the instructions is itself compromised. President Tshisekedi is maneuvering toward a third term. His predecessor, an eighteen-year ruler stripped of immunity and accused of treason, is openly backing the rebels. A government in that position has limited standing to demand public compliance, which weakened the centralized response from the start.The minerals deal is the buried motiveThe element most often missing from short-form coverage is the economic and geopolitical one, and it reframes the entire event.Eastern Congo holds enormous reserves of cobalt, copper, lithium, tantalum, and gold, the critical minerals in demand for batteries and electronics. The war is, in large part, a contest over that wealth. In December 2025 the United States, the DRC, and Rwanda signed a set of agreements in Washington that traded mineral access for security guarantees. The American president stated the terms openly: the United States gets “a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo as part of it.” Human Rights Watch, not a marginal source, characterized the arrangement as “a mineral deal first, an opportunity for peace second.”The Congolese calculation was explicit. Hand over resource access in exchange for protection against Rwanda and M23. A Congolese critic described his own government as choosing “to give away its mining resources without restraint in exchange for American protection.” Congolese lawyers filed a constitutional challenge against the deal domestically.The protection did not materialize. Within a week of the December signing, M23 advanced toward another city. Fighting spread to new provinces. The rebels who hold the contested ground were never party to the negotiations, so the agreement bound the actors who could not stop the war and left the war itself untouched.The connection to the virus is concrete, not figurative. The gold-mining economy moved infected people around the region before the outbreak was identified. It began in a mining hub. The mobility that spreads the disease and the extraction that drives the war are the same economy. This is a resource conflict with a virus moving through it, and the governments with the most leverage have treated that conflict primarily as a procurement opportunity. Scrutiny directed at Washington, Kinshasa, and Kigali is at least as warranted as scrutiny directed at Geneva.The overreach question, tested rather than assumedDistrust of the WHO and its emergency authority is reasonable given the record of the past five years, and any expansion of an unaccountable body’s power during a crisis warrants scrutiny. The case is worth examining on its specifics rather than by analogy.The “public health emergency of international concern” is genuine institutional power. It triggers coordination, recommendations to governments, and the movement of funds. Concern about how that lever was used during COVID is documented and legitimate. Three facts distinguish this situation from that one.1. The recommendations are not binding. The framework issues temporary recommendations, and sovereign governments decide whether to act on them. The most aggressive measures on the ground, including Uganda suspending transport links to DRC and conducting border screening, are national governments exercising their own authority rather than directives imposed from Geneva.2. The lead actor is African. Africa’s own CDC declared a continental emergency and is running the cross-border coordination, convening the affected nations’ health ministers directly. Its director-general called the outbreak “not a DRC issue” but “a regional issue.” That is a regional institution asserting ownership, which sits closer to decentralization than to centralized global control.3. The apparatus is behind, not ascendant. The COVID-era objection was that institutions claimed more control than the situation justified. Here they are openly conceding they cannot keep pace: no vaccine for this strain, trials not started, “playing catch-up.” This is not a bureaucracy exercising surplus power. It is one unable to deliver what it is tasked with coordinating.A specific target does remain. Africa CDC has cited a need for roughly $264 million for operations and an additional $54 million for “preparedness” in neighboring countries that currently have no cases. Preparedness budgets for places with zero infections are the line items that justify itemized accounting, because that is where emergency spending tends to harden into permanent institutional structure that outlasts the emergency. Scrutiny of how the money flows and which structures survive the outbreak is better aimed than scrutiny of whether the outbreak is real.The personal-risk question, answered plainlyFor a typical Western reader the personal health risk is low, and that is worth stating without qualification. Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, not through the air, and is not comparable to an airborne pandemic in transmissibility. The US has imposed travel screening and recorded no cases. Two suspected cases recently surfaced in Italy in travelers from Uganda, which confirms that air travel is the relevant export route, but isolated imported cases in countries with functioning hospitals are containable rather than a repeat of 2020.The populations at serious risk are in eastern Congo and its ten neighbors, where weak health systems coincide with open borders and active conflict.The bottom lineSkepticism is most useful when it is aimed precisely.The clean numbers warrant skepticism. They are estimates from a place where counting barely works, and they likely run low rather than high.The “we have this handled” tone warrants skepticism. There is no vaccine for this strain and the trials have not started.The sanitized framing warrants skepticism. It reduces a war-traumatized population’s resistance to “misinformation.”The minerals-for-security deal warrants skepticism. The powerful signed it and short-form coverage largely omitted it.The “preparedness” budgets for countries with no cases warrant skepticism. The relevant question is where that money ends up.Two conclusions the evidence does not support are worth ruling out. This is not COVID: different disease, different transmission, and an institution conceding it is behind rather than claiming control it does not need. And the outbreak is not invented: Red Cross volunteers are among the first known dead.The accurate summary is neither “trust the experts” nor “it is all a power grab.” A lethal virus is moving through a region the most powerful governments on earth have chosen to treat as a mine, and the health apparatus responding to it is, in this instance, more overmatched than overreaching. The discipline is not in declining to look. It is in declining to look only where the official account points.A note on sourcing: case figures and clinical detail come from the WHO, the US and Africa CDCs, Médecins Sans Frontières, and on-the-ground reporting (NPR, CNN, Reuters, France 24, Al Jazeera). The minerals-deal reporting and analysis draw on Human Rights Watch, CSIS, the Atlantic Council, the Oakland Institute, and Public Citizen, sources that disagree sharply on whether these deals could ever work. Where the facts are solid, this piece says so. Where serious people are still arguing, it says that as well.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: There is an Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo. People are dying. The official account is accurate and incomplete, and the missing parts are the ones that explain everything.


Homesteading: RIP...

It has been a really hard week here, and honestly, I am not even sure I can write about it.We lost our wonderful silly goose, Gonzo, and one of our beautiful young pea-boys to what was most likely a bobcat or a fox.It all started with the rain.A heavy, cold rain that should not even exist in mid-May. The kind that chills everything right down to the bone and makes the whole farm feel unsettled.We think our young peacock must have decided to sleep under a vehicle that night instead of high up on a roofline or tucked safely into a tree like he usually did.One of the unsettling realities of living on a homestead is that the predators are always watching. Always. Day and night. They wait for one mistake, one moment of bad weather, one lapse in routine, one rainy night when the dogs aren’t on duty.Normally, our dogs are excellent guardians. Bella, especially, takes her job very seriously. Most nights she sleeps just outside the door, keeping watch over the farm like a little furry security guard. She chases off anything she considers suspicious, which basically includes the entire wildlife population of Virginia.But with the rain pouring down, the dogs stayed inside that night. We have a pet door, so they make their own decisions about where to sleep, and on miserable nights like that, comfort won.Around midnight, all the dogs exploded into barking and ran outside. Well, all except Kitty, who is too tiny to work the pet door - which is just how we like it.I slept through it. Robert did not. But at the time, he did not realize a bird had actually been taken.The next morning, white and colored feathers were everywhere. The bird bath had been knocked over. Feathers were stuck halfway up a tree. There were more scattered across a mulch pile, and then the trail disappeared down the hill into the woods.It must have been an epic fight. He did not give up easily.That part broke my heart the most.This happened on Saturday, and both of us knew immediately what it meant. Once a predator discovers an easy meal, it almost always comes back.The two peaboys - my beautiful pied is the one that got taken.I worried the elderly guinea fowl would be next. There are only four left now, and they move around the farm like a tiny, confused neighborhood watch committee.But we were wrong.Three days later, the predator struck again.For years, every single night, we put Gonzo to bed in one of the horse stalls. And if we forgot, she would march herself there indignantly and put herself to bed anyway. The horse barn is actually a pretty safe place.But that is not where the predator found her.At twilight, just before dark, Gonzo liked to graze in the little patch of grass between the new arena and the horse barn. That was her spot for the last feed of the day.And that is where she died.Gonzo had known nothing but kindness her entire life. She trusted everyone. Dogs, horses, cattle, people. Frankly, she was fairly certain she outranked all of us and was serving as head supervisor of the property.So I suspect she never even saw danger coming.Her struggle appears to have been short. The feathers told that story. And while that does not erase the pain, it helps a little to remember she lived a far better life than most animals ever do. Geese are surprisingly long-lived creatures, and for three years she had freedom, companionship, fresh grass, ponds to splash in, and endless opportunities to harass unsuspecting visitors.She was the mascot of this place.She greeted strangers and friends alike at full volume. She snuck into the house whenever she found an open door.But even the peaboys like to find their way inside.  This was the last photo I took of the peaboy #1 - dated May 17th.Gonzo the goose liked to bathe enthusiastically in fountains, puddles, stock tanks, kiddie pools, and anything else containing two inches of water. She was the clown of the farm.And yes, Gonzo had a boy’s name because she was so outrageously loud we were convinced she had to be male. She eventually proved us wrong by laying hundreds of eggs over the years.I can honestly say it has been very difficult to write any of this down.If you keep livestock long enough, eventually you will have deadstock.That is simply part of farming.But these were not just livestock. They were pets. They were personalities. They were part of the rhythm and joy of daily life here.What made it even harder was watching the surviving young pea-boy after his brother disappeared. The two of them had been inseparable since birth.For two straight days, he wandered the front yard, where they lived most of the time - calling for his friend. A low, mournful sound over and over again.  A sound that I have never heard a peacock make before. He would sometimes disappear into the tree line - deep into the forest, calling and calling, hoping for an answer that never came. I half expected that he would be taken each time he wandered into the forest - searching vainly for his friend.It just about wrecked me to hear it.Eventually, he paired up with our older male, his father, Prince Caspian, and now follows him everywhere. But he has changed. He startles easily now. Sudden movement sends him darting away. Loud noises make him jump.I suppose that is probably a good thing. Hard lessons are still lessons.So now Robert and I live with the understanding that it is likely only a matter of time before the predator returns. And honestly, there is not much we can realistically do beyond keeping the dogs free to patrol.A trap would probably catch one of our own dogs before anything else. Neither of us has the time or energy right now to sit in a hunting blind through the night. So we do what farmers and homesteaders have always done. We reinforce what we can, pray for a little luck, and accept that nothing living is ever completely safe.In the meantime, foals are to be born mid-June, so the mares have to be moved into the lower pasture - which has what is called “no-climb” wire - basically, expensive animal wire mesh with 2x3 inch openings - 4 foot tall, with then a board topper on top of that, raising the fence to five foot tall and coyote proof.Even our coop, which resembles Fort Knox for chickens, is not perfect. And the free-ranging birds certainly are not.Is there a lesson in all of this?Not really. At least not a tidy one.Only the reminder that predators and prey have always coexisted in this world. Nature is not cruel, but neither is it sentimental. We do our best to protect the animals placed within our care, and sometimes, despite all of that effort, loss still comes.Predators have to eat too. Which means we all have to be careful out there.That does not make it hurt any less.JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share


Human Augmentation Is No Longer Science Fiction

Audio:Three years ago, we wrote about a joint UK and German Ministry of Defense report titledHuman Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm (1,2). At the time, many critics dismissed the document as speculative futurism, military fantasy, or the fever dream of transhumanists intoxicated by Silicon Valley ideology.It is no longer possible to deny the reality of the situation - human augmentation is being developed more rapidly than we all could have imagined.What was once presented as theoretical is now becoming operational doctrine.The discussion has shifted. Human augmentation is no longer framed primarily as a distant ethical dilemma. It is increasingly being treated by military planners, AI developers, and national security bureaucracies as an unavoidable strategic necessity. The language has changed from “should we?” to “how fast can we deploy it before our adversaries do?”That should alarm everyone.The original report argued that future wars would not be won by whoever possessed the best machines, but by whoever most effectively merged human beings with machines (2). At the time, that sounded like science fiction to many.But look around today. AI copilots are everywhere. Autonomous drones -which rumor has it are capable of deciding who lives and who dies without a human pulling the trigger- dominate modern battlefields. Machine-learning systems increasingly assist intelligence analysis, targeting, surveillance, logistics, and command decisions.The battlefield envisioned by the report is arriving faster than even its authors predicted.And the missing piece is no longer the machine.It is the human.Military planners are now openly discussing ways to optimize cognition, decision speed, stress tolerance, fatigue resistance, emotional regulation, and direct brain-machine communication. Not someday. Now.DARPA has aggressively advanced programs designed to create high-performance brain-computer interfaces for military personnel (3). The stated goal is to allow soldiers to directly interact with autonomous systems, including drone swarms and AI-assisted battlefield platforms. Recent military papers openly discuss reducing “cognitive overload” through neural interfaces linked to machine-learning systems (5).Think carefully about what that means.The problem modern warfare faces is not merely firepower. It is information saturation. The side that can process information faster, fuse data more efficiently, and shorten decision loops gains overwhelming advantage. Human augmentation is increasingly viewed as the solution.This is not about stronger muscles or robotic exoskeletons, although those continue to be developed for logistics and battlefield endurance (8). The real focus has shifted toward the brain itself.Cognitive warfare.Neurostimulation.Behavioral optimization.AI-linked command systems.Pharmacologic enhancement.Predictive biometric monitoring.Direct neural integration with machines.This is where the money is going.And once again, the same rhetorical pathway appears that we have seen so many times before. The technologies are introduced under the banner of therapy, rehabilitation, safety, and medical necessity. Advanced prosthetics become enhanced prosthetics. Neurological rehabilitation becomes cognitive optimization. Monitoring for wellness becomes monitoring for performance and compliance.The line between treatment and enhancement rapidly disappears.That is not speculation. That is exactly what military and bioethics literature is now openly discussing (7,9).One of the most disturbing developments over the last three years is how quickly ethical resistance has softened inside defense circles. Increasingly, military ethicists argue that democratic nations may need to loosen ethical restrictions on enhancement technologies because authoritarian adversaries will not hesitate to deploy them (6).In other words, the moral argument is becoming secondary to geopolitical competition.The logic is brutally simple:If China develops enhanced warfighters and the West refuses to compete, the West loses.That argument is now appearing with increasing frequency in military policy discussions.The original UK-German report bluntly stated that human augmentation should not ultimately be decided by ethicists or public opinion, but by national interest (2). At the time, that statement shocked many readers. Today it reads less like a warning and more like a roadmap.Perhaps the most profound shift since 2022 is cultural.The public has already been conditioned for much of this transition.Millions of people now voluntarily wear devices that continuously track sleep, heart rate, movement, stress, location, temperature, and biological activity. AI systems increasingly monitor behavior, communications, productivity, and emotional state. Entire generations have normalized the idea that biological and behavioral data should be constantly harvested, analyzed, and fed into algorithmic systems.Human beings are gradually being transformed into integrated biological data platforms.And once that infrastructure exists, military and state applications inevitably follow.The old industrial model treated humans as machine operators.The emerging biotech model treats humans themselves as programmable platforms.That is the real paradigm shift.What makes this especially dangerous is the extraordinary hubris driving much of the field. Increasingly, scientists, technologists, military planners, and governments speak openly about directing human evolution itself through genetic engineering, neurotechnology, and AI-assisted biological modification (4).Six million years of evolution are now viewed by some as merely an outdated starting point to be “optimized.”History suggests caution here.Every era that became convinced it could engineer a better human being eventually descended into ethical catastrophe. The tools change. The rhetoric modernizes. But the underlying temptation remains the same: centralizing power over biology itself.And unlike the crude eugenics movements of the past, modern human augmentation is emerging wrapped in the language of medicine, national security, efficiency, resilience, and technological progress.That makes it far more politically durable.The greatest danger may not be some dramatic moment when governments announce the arrival of “enhanced humans.” The real danger is incremental normalization.Small steps.Therapeutic uses.Military exemptions.Workplace optimization.AI-assisted monitoring.Cognitive enhancement “for safety.”Genetic modification “for resilience.”Until eventually the infrastructure for total biological integration already exists before society fully understands what has happened.Three years ago, many people laughed at the idea that governments and militaries were seriously planning for large-scale human augmentation.They are not laughing anymore.The frightening part is not that the technology is coming.The frightening part is how quietly the debate is disappearing.JGM/RWMThanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareIf you value work like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Researching, writing, editing, fact-checking, sourcing, and publishing essays like these takes an enormous amount of time and effort. Behind every article is not just our work, but the work of a dedicated team helping to manage research, production, editing, technical support, and the daily demands of keeping this platform running.We do not have the backing of large corporate media organizations, pharmaceutical advertisers, or institutional funding streams. This publication exists because readers choose to support independent journalism, independent analysis, and the freedom to ask difficult questions.Your subscription directly supports our staff, our investigations, our writing, and our ability to continue producing long-form work that many other outlets will not touch.If this work matters to you, please help us continue.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ReferencesMalone RW.Human Augmentation: The Dawn of a New Paradigm.Malone News. January 2022.https://www.malone.news/p/human-augmentation-the-dawn-of-aUK Ministry of Defence and German Federal Ministry of Defence.Human Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm: A Strategic Implications Project.May 2021.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60c749f8d3bf7f4bd0e3b1a5/Human_Augmentation_SIP_access2.pdfDARPA.Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3).https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/next-generation-nonsurgical-neurotechnologyDARPA.Safe Genes Program.https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/safe-genesShendruk TN et al.Brain Computer Interface Technology for Future Battlefield.arXiv. 2023.https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07818Small Wars Journal.Neither Ironman nor the Hulk: Human Enhancements for Military Purposes.January 2025.https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/01/24/neither-ironman-nor-the-hulk-human-enhancements-for-military-purposes/BMJ Military Health.Emerging Military Applications of Neuroenhancement and Cognitive Optimization.2025.https://militaryhealth.bmj.com/content/early/2025/08/18/military-2025-002964Wired Magazine.The US Army’s Vision of an Exoskeleton Future Lives On.https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-armys-vision-of-an-exoskeleton-future-lives-onNational Library of Medicine / PMC.Ethical and Policy Challenges in Human Enhancement Technologies.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12799693/

Summary: Audio: Three years ago, we wrote about a joint UK and German Ministry of Defense report titled Human Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm (1,2). At the time, many critics dismissed the document as speculative futurism, military fantasy, or the fever dream of transhumanists intoxicated by Silicon Valley ideology.


Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Companies: Mental Privacy is Doomed

For years, the public was told that brain-computer interfaces were about compassion. The sales pitch was simple and emotionally powerful: helping a paralyzed person communicate again, allowing someone with ALS to type with their thoughts, restoring movement after a catastrophic injury. Few people would object to that. It is difficult to look a suffering patient in the eye and argue against technology that might give them some measure of independence back.But that is not where this is going.And increasingly, the companies involved are not even pretending otherwise.What we are witnessing is the rapid normalization of direct human-machine integration at a speed that should alarm every sane person paying attention. Not cautious development. Not slow, heavily regulated medical adoption. Not decades of careful ethical consideration. Instead, this technology is being pushed forward with the manic urgency of a Silicon Valley app launch. The rationale behind it all is revealing.There simply are not enough paralyzed patients in the world to justify the scale of the investment pouring into brain-computer interface companies. Investors are not throwing billions into this sector because they are humanitarians. Venture capital is not a charity. The real target market is everybody else.Gaming.Consumer electronics.Augmented reality.Mood tracking.Productivity optimization.Advertising.Military applications.Cognitive enhancement.Surveillance.The paralysis market is the moral doorway through which the rest of this agenda enters.[1][2]Once you understand that, the current frenzy begins to make sense.Consider the landscape now emerging. Companies such as Neuralink, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, Blackrock Neurotech, and Kernel are all racing to wire human cognition directly into digital systems.[3][4][5] Synchron alone has announced partnerships and integrations involving Apple and NVIDIA, while positioning itself as a leader in minimally invasive neural implants.[6][7] Meta has developed Brain2Qwerty, an AI brain-computer interface (BCI) capable of translating neural activity into text as users type on a keyboard.And we are supposed to believe this will stop at helping quadriplegics move a cursor?Please...The language used by these companies tells the story. “Human-computer integration.” “Cognitive augmentation.” “Immersive environments.” “Thought-based control systems.” “Adaptive emotional feedback.” In plain English, they are building systems designed not merely to observe human behavior, but to interface directly with cognition itself.[8][9]This is not simply another medical device category.This is the potential end of mental privacy.Once a technology exists that can reliably decode intent, emotional state, preference, impulse, or attention in real time, every institution on earth will want access to it. Governments will want it. Militaries will want it. Intelligence agencies will want it. Advertisers will want it. Employers will want it. Social media companies will want it. Insurance companies will absolutely want it.And history tells us the same thing over and over: if something can be weaponized economically, politically, or socially, eventually it will be.The truly astonishing part is how casually this is all being normalized.Headlines describe brain implants the way technology blogs once described smartphones or gaming consoles. Investors talk about “scaling.” Market analysts discuss “consumer adoption pathways.” Journalists marvel at people controlling video games with their thoughts, as though humanity has collectively learned nothing from the last twenty years of technological overreach.[10][11]We already live inside an attention-harvesting ecosystem that has profoundly damaged children, destabilized public discourse, amplified addiction, fueled anxiety and depression, distorted politics, and created unprecedented mechanisms for censorship and behavioral manipulation.And now these same industries are moving upstream, toward the brain itself.What could possibly go wrong?Even the current non-invasive systems should concern people. Companies are already marketing EEG-enabled devices for focus optimization, emotional adaptation, workplace productivity, meditation tracking, and gaming immersion.[12][13] Universities are openly discussing systems capable of decoding internal speech from brain activity.[14]Think carefully about that trajectory.Today, it is helping a stroke victim communicate.Tomorrow, neural enhancement will be linked to software capable of determining attention, emotional response, ideological engagement, fatigue, impulse control, stress levels, and cognitive performance in schools, workplaces, military systems, airports, vehicles, and digital platforms.And eventually, inevitably, someone will propose that refusal to participate represents a safety risk. That mandates are necessary for the well-being of society: for safety, for well-being, for longevity, for compliance.We have seen this movie before.Every major technological intrusion into personal liberty arrives wrapped in convenience, safety, compassion, or progress. Surveillance becomes “security.” Censorship becomes “harm reduction.” Tracking becomes “public health.” Behavioral manipulation becomes “user engagement.” Now, direct neural integration is being sold as accessibility and entertainment.The gaming angle alone should terrify people.The fact that companies are racing to connect brains directly to immersive digital environments before we even understand the long-term neurological, psychological, developmental, or societal consequences is sheer madness.[15][16] We are talking about systems specifically designed to blur the boundary between biological cognition and engineered virtual environments, deployed into populations already suffering epidemics of screen addiction, anxiety, loneliness, attention fragmentation, and social isolation.Children can barely escape smartphones and algorithmic feeds now.What happens when immersive systems no longer require hands, keyboards, or even speech?What happens when digital environments become emotionally responsive in real time to neural feedback?What happens when AI systems learn to optimize not just your behavior, but your neurological reward pathways directly?And perhaps most importantly: who owns the data?Because make no mistake, neural data will become the most valuable commodity on earth. More intimate than your browser history. More revealing than your DNA. More predictive than your purchasing patterns. A direct map of attention, preference, impulse, and emotion.Once collected, it will not remain private.It never does.Supporters insist safeguards will emerge. Regulations will protect users. Ethical frameworks will evolve. But this is the same fantasy we heard during the rise of social media, mass surveillance, smartphone tracking, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence. The technology always outruns the oversight. The money always outruns the ethics. And once infrastructure is embedded into society, reversing course becomes nearly impossible.The frightening thing is not that brain-computer interfaces are being developed.Some of the medical applications are genuinely remarkable.The frightening thing is that humanity is sprinting toward mass adoption before we have even begun to grapple seriously with the implications.We are watching the construction of systems capable of penetrating the last truly private domain humans possess: the interior space of the mind itself.And we are racing towards this future, so someone can play a video game faster.That may be the most absurd part of all.JGM/RWMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.VIDEOSHere are some of the best recent videos and demonstrations on brain-computer interface (BCI) research, ranging from Neuralink and Synchron to university and commercial research projects.A particularly striking theme across these videos is how quickly the narrative shifts from medical restoration toward broader “human augmentation,” AI integration, immersive environments, and direct interaction with consumer ecosystems. The promotional language increasingly resembles the early days of social media and smartphones: frictionless, inevitable, transformative — with very little serious public discussion about long-term psychological, ethical, military, or surveillance implications.Neuralink Human Trials & UpdatesNeuralink Update — March 2026A recent overview of Neuralink’s human trials, speech-restoration work, and expansion plans.Neuralink Update, Summer 2025Discusses human implants, cursor control, and Neuralink’s stated goal of “merging with machines.”Neuralink Patient Makes YouTube Video With Brain ImplantA nonverbal ALS patient reportedly edited and narrated a video using a Neuralink implant and AI voice synthesis.Neuralink Patient Makes YouTube Video With Brain ImplantSynchron & Non-Surgical BCIsHow Synchron’s BCI WorksGood short technical explainer on Synchron’s Stentrode system, implanted through blood vessels rather than open skull surgery.Synchron’s Brain-Computer Interface Now Has Nvidia’s AIWired coverage of Synchron integrating NVIDIA AI and Apple Vision Pro into a thought-controlled smart-home ecosystem.University / Advanced Research DemonstrationsA New Generation of Brain-Computer InterfaceColumbia Engineering demonstration of a wireless high-bandwidth BCI platform aimed at expanding “human-machine interaction.”First In-Human Recording with New Wireless BCIParadromics and University of Michigan demonstration of a temporary implant used during epilepsy surgery.Paralyzed Man Controls Robotic Arm Using Only His MindResearch from UCSF using implants and AI-assisted decoding to control a robotic arm.Ethical / Critical PerspectivesThe Brain-Computer Interface ParadoxA discussion specifically addressing the risk of “mind control,” surveillance, and ethical implications of BCIs.References[1] Grand View Research. Brain Computer Interface Market Size Report.https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/brain-computer-interface-market[2] Fortune Business Insights. Brain Computer Interface Market.https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/brain-computer-interface-market-102556[3] Neuralink.https://neuralink.com[4] Blackrock Neurotech.https://blackrockneurotech.com[5] Precision Neuroscience.https://precisionneuro.io[6] Synchron.https://synchron.com[7] CNBC. Synchron integrates with Apple accessibility technologies.https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/30/synchron-apple-brain-computer-interface.html[8] Nature Reviews Bioengineering. Brain-computer interfaces: current challenges and future directions.https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-023-00091-9[9] IEEE Spectrum. The Rise of Brain-Computer Interfaces.https://spectrum.ieee.org/brain-computer-interface[10] McKinsey & Company. The economic potential of generative AI and immersive technologies.https://www.mckinsey.com[11] World Economic Forum. Neurotechnology and the future of human augmentation.https://www.weforum.org[12] Muse Headband.https://choosemuse.com[13] Neurable.https://neurable.com[14] Nature Neuroscience. Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9[15] Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Ethical issues in brain-computer interface applications.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.628878/full[16] NIH BRAIN Initiative.https://braininitiative.nih.gov

Summary: And the first amendment won't protect us from ourselves


Friday Funnies: Cue the Monkeys

I read the above - and thought… “Time to fact check.”Yes, in fact, the above is true.Under Senate Republican Conference Rule III, five Republican senators can force a meeting of the Republican Conference by submitting a written request.The Conference Chair (currently Tom Cotton) is then required to call the meeting.Once the conference is meeting, a motion could be made to hold a leadership election or vote of confidence.Republican Conference rules then require a secret ballot. It would take 27 Senators out of 53 to vote to remove Thune as Senate Majority Leader.The people need to demand action!Aliens walk among us!Somewhere along the way, between No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and the Obama years, math apparently stopped being about getting the right answer and started being about explaining your feelings to the number seven.A generation of Millennials was told there are twelve different ways to solve 2 + 2, provided they can draw a colorful diagram, write a reflective essay, and form a small discussion group about the emotional journey of addition.Back in the day, if you got the answer wrong, your teacher handed the paper back with a red mark.Under New Math, getting the answer wrong just means you haven't fully explored your mathematical truth yet. The result is a generation that can create a 47-slide PowerPoint explaining why 2 + 2 equals 5, but still needs a smart phone with a calculator app to figure out the tip at a diner.Which reminds me of a certain song…Cuing up next!Monkeypox is waiting in line…Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.SharePrince Caspian, the peacock is on tick patrol duty - while hanging with his humans.Yes, our peafowl hang out with us.A little farm update:A few days ago, we had a single pea-baby hatch.  Normally, the solution is to go get some chicks to keep him company, but more chickens is not what we need. Our coop is at full capacity, we have juvenile turkeys in our smaller run, and eggs are overflowing on the kitchen counter.We hopefully have more eggs to hatch in a few days, so the little guy will get avian company soon enough.So, for now - I am playing peahen. We have a little peababy under foot, on the sofa when we watch TV, and on our bed as we drink coffee in the morning… You get the idea.He has become quite tame and seems to be thriving.JGM

Summary: as in Pox...


The Executive Order That May Change the Vaccine Debate Forever

Audio:President Trump just signed a newexecutive orderto align the pediatric vaccine schedule with best practices from other developed countries.At first glance, President Trump's new Executive Order appears to be about childhood vaccines. It is not. It is about who governs public health in America. The Order represents an attempt to shift authority away from an insulated public health bureaucracy and back toward elected officials who are accountable to voters.The most interesting thing about President Trump’s new Executive Order on childhood vaccines is not what it says about vaccines. It is what it says about who gets to make these decisions.The American Academy of Pediatrics lawsuit was never really about measles, polio, hepatitis B, or influenza. It was about process. The plaintiffs argued that the administration had improperly altered federal vaccine recommendations through an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) process that did not comply with long-established legal and administrative requirements. A federal judge appeared sympathetic to that argument and temporarily blocked implementation.The new Executive Order appears designed to sidestep that challenge.Rather than directly imposing a new vaccine schedule, the Executive Order adopts the HHS scientific assessment as a guiding federal resource and directs the CDC and ACIP to review that assessment and update recommendations “to the extent permitted by law.” This is a subtle but important distinction.I have long argued that the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) envisions advisory committees such as ACIP serving precisely that role: advisory. Under FACA, committees are intended to provide advice in response to questions and policy needs identified by executive branch leadership. Over time, however, successive administrations effectively abdicated much of that responsibility, allowing ACIP to evolve into a body that often appeared to set policy rather than merely advise on it.In my view, the proper process is straightforward. The CDC Director, acting under the authority of the Executive Branch, should define the questions to be addressed and the policy objectives to be considered. ACIP should then provide its scientific and technical advice in response. The committee should inform decision-making, not function as an independent center of policymaking.Viewed through that lens, the Executive Order seeks to shift the debate away from the actions of a single advisory committee and back to a fundamental principle of constitutional governance: executive agencies and advisory committees advise, while elected officials establish policy and are accountable to the public for those decisions.That distinction matters.The administration is effectively saying that vaccine policy should not be dictated by a self-perpetuating network of advisory committees, professional associations, and pharmaceutical stakeholders operating behind closed doors. Instead, it argues that elected officials, accountable to voters, have the authority to establish policy objectives and direct agencies accordingly.Whether courts ultimately agree remains to be seen. The legal challenges will continue. But the constitutional argument is clear: agencies exist to execute policy, not create it independently.For decades, vaccine policy has been largely insulated from democratic accountability. ACIP recommendations automatically trigger insurance coverage requirements, Medicaid obligations, participation in the Vaccines for Children program, school mandate discussions, and physician practice standards. A relatively small group of experts has wielded extraordinary influence over national health policy.The problem is not vaccination itself. The problem is regulatory capture.Vaccines are among the most important public health tools ever developed. Smallpox eradication alone stands as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and other diseases caused enormous suffering before effective vaccines became available.But acknowledging those successes does not require blind faith in every recommendation that follows.The public increasingly understands that pharmaceutical companies have financial interests and are financially manipulating the system through many mechanisms, including lobbying, advertising, ghost writing, grants and contracts, pharm marketing, and the revolving door. Professional societies have institutional interests. Government agencies have bureaucratic interests. Academic researchers have career interests. Pretending those incentives do not exist and influence the administrative state has become increasingly difficult.The COVID era accelerated this awakening.Americans watched experts make confident declarations that later changed. They watched dissenting physicians marginalized. They watched conflicts of interest minimized. People, including children, were subjected to arbitrary and capricious vaccine mandates for an experimental product under EUA. They watched recommendations evolve while institutions insisted that trust should remain unquestioned.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Trust does not work that way.Trust is earned through transparency, debate, and accountability. It is not achieved by suppressing discussion.Viewed through that lens, this Executive Order represents something larger than a vaccine policy dispute. It is part of a broader effort to reassert democratic oversight over a public health bureaucracy that many Americans have come to view as too closely aligned with industry interests and too insulated from scrutiny.Critics will characterize the Order as anti-vaccine. That is an easy headline.A more accurate description is that it is anti-monopoly.For decades, one coalition of federal agencies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical societies, academic experts, and insurers effectively controlled the vaccine policy conversation. Alternative views rarely received meaningful consideration. Questions about timing, sequencing, cumulative exposure, liability protections, informed consent, or international comparisons were often dismissed rather than debated.The administration is attempting to reopen those discussions.One can support vaccines while still demanding independent safety monitoring.One can support vaccines while still questioning conflicts of interest.One can support vaccines while still believing parents deserve greater flexibility and physicians deserve more discretion.One can support vaccines while insisting that public health recommendations be justified continuously rather than accepted as immutable doctrine.That is not anti-vaccine.That is what scientific accountability is supposed to look like.The larger question going forward is whether America will continue to rely on a model driven primarily by centralized expert authority or move toward one that places greater emphasis on informed consent, physician judgment, parental choice, transparency, and public trust.The Executive Order does not settle that debate.It merely guarantees that the debate can no longer be avoided.JGM/RWMThanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThis EO isn't about being pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. It's about whether pharmaceutical interests, medical societies, and federal agencies should have a monopoly on public health policy.

Summary: Trump moves to break the Public Health Monopoly


The Seven Techniques of the Pandemic GriftA framework for spotting the structure when the next one starts.In 1902, an American newspaper printed a word for a kind of small-time swindler who worked carnivals, racetracks, and hotel lobbies. The word was “grift.” It described a hustler who lifted small sums from a long succession of marks, never enough from any one of them to make resistance worth the cost. Through the 1930s, when David Maurer wrote the definitive study of these operators, the grift remained a category of petty crime: confidence work performed by individuals on individuals.The word has outlived the world it described. The hustler at the racetrack is mostly gone. The structure he worked is not. What changed is the scale.Read the public-health record of the last five years with the structure of a con in mind, and the events stop looking like a sequence of mistakes. They start looking like a sequence of stages: setup, convincer, send, touch, blowoff, fix. No one wrote it down as a script. No one had to. The structure of extraction at scale produces these stages whether the operators recognize what they are doing or not. This essay is about how to recognize the pattern in the public-health context. It draws on the technical literature of confidence work to do so, because that literature is the most honest account anyone has written of how the trick is done.What a grift actually isThe standard meaning of fraud is a discrete act: someone tells a lie, someone hands over money, and a transaction is consummated. A grift is something different. It is astructuredesigned to produce a steady transfer of resources from a many to a few, often without any single act that would be recognized as criminal by a court. The grift sets the terms. The marks fall into them.The most useful starting point for understanding how this works comes from outside the con-artist literature altogether. Gavin de Becker, who has spent his career studying interpersonal predation, makes an observation that travels: charm is not a personality trait. It is, in his words, “almost always a directed instrument which has motive.” When someone is being especially charming to you, the right question is not whether you like them. The right question is what they want.This is a hard observation to absorb because it cuts against the social grain. Most of us have been taught that responding to charm is good manners. de Becker’s point is that charm in the absence of an established relationship is a tool, and the tool always has a purpose. Watch for the deployment and you start to see the purpose.The institutional analogue is straightforward. When a large organization is being especially reassuring to you, when its messaging is unusually emotive, when its experts are unusually photogenic, when the call to action is unusually urgent, the right question is not whether you trust the speakers. The right question is what the operation wants, and what it is positioned to gain if you cooperate.A confidence game at scale requires four conditions. Each was present, in unusual concentration, in the pandemic period.The first isfear. The fear does not have to be unjustified. In fact, the most durable grifts are the ones in which the underlying risk is real. A real threat is what makes the mark willing to suspend the ordinary checks he would apply to a stranger asking for his money or his liberties. The grift does not need to invent the fear. It only needs to amplify it, sustain it, and direct it toward the operation’s preferred response.The second isurgency. Time pressure is the standard tool of the confidence operator because it disables the ordinary process of comparison and verification. A mark who is told he has weeks to decide will check his references. A mark who is told he has hours will not. The pandemic produced a sustained condition of artificial urgency, in which “we have to act now” was invoked to compress what would normally have been multi-year regulatory and political deliberations into days and weeks.The third isinformation asymmetry. The mark has to believe that the operator knows something he does not. In an infectious-disease outbreak, this condition arrives naturally: the public genuinely does not know what is in the air, and the institutions claiming to know are the institutions on which the public must rely. The asymmetry is real. What the grift requires is that the asymmetry be preserved against any voice that would close it. Dissenting experts who could give the public a second opinion are precisely the threat the operation must neutralize.The fourth isconcentrated spending. The grift is not interesting to its operators unless the prize is large and goes to a few hands. The pandemic response produced one of the largest mobilizations of public money in the history of the developed world, and the disbursement was structured around a small number of well-positioned recipients. The setup was almost ideal for what followed.Put the four conditions together and the rest becomes legible. Each technique catalogued in the next section operates on one or more of these conditions. The grift is not a single move; it is a system of moves that together produce the transfer.Our work below is for our paid subscribers.  Subscribe to read about case examples and the seven techniques commonly used in pandemic griftingMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Read more