Weekend Insights – The Federal Mandate is Here

Welcome back to Weekend Insights, your LCI “President’s Corner” of miscellaneous articles, events, books, vids, and whatever else I’m thinking about… 

We were treated toward the end of the week to a press conference at the White House where President Biden announced a new federal mandate for employers with 100+ employees to require their workers to get a COVID-19 vaccine or have a weekly COVID-19 test. Of course, one can simultaneously think that COVID-19 vaccines are a good idea and that they work while also being wholly against this kind of unconstitutional and outright foolish behavior by the US federal government.

Reason explained that Biden claims authority to issue this mandate through OSHA emergency rules. But these emergency rules, when challenged, rarely stand up in courts. And I cannot imagine that this won’t get challenged, or that the Biden administration doesn’t know this. My guess is that this is a prelude to actual legislation and is intended to rile people up and even distract from the Afghanistan debacle.

The Libertarian Party responded to the entire plan with scorn (as they should).

But moving on to other thoughts… I thought this Nature article on early career setbacks was interesting, since in many respects I had some setbacks myself.

And in Science, this short article definitely rings true for me too: Thoughts of work invaded my life—until I learned how to unplug.

My F&F co-author and good friend Dick Clark told me about this little gem of the internet: Ngram Viewer. With it you can track the frequency of words and phrases in publications going back over a hundred years. So you can see the evolution of the use of “woke” or “TANSTAAFL” or whatever else you want. Pretty cool!

As always, don’t forget to check out our book Faith Seeking Freedom! (You can get two copies by donating at least $20 via this link.)

Cheers, and have a great week!

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