Weekend Insights – RIP Walter Williams and more

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

As is my custom (for now), here’s yet another reminder that LCI’s new book Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions is now officially launched. Get it while it’s hot!

I was saddened this week to hear of the death of legendary economist Walter Williams. Tributes to his legacy are pouring in, of course. Econlib posted one of the early announcements. FEE remembered him with 30 of Walter’s best quotes on liberty and economics. RIP Walter.

The ignorance of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows no bounds. Here’s the latest in the saga of how profoundly ridiculous her views are regarding billionaires and economic development.

COVID rages on, and the state continues to demonstrate its own stupidity in the face of a pandemic. They keep creating new rules and promise to be brutal enforcers of them, yet they themselves are above such restrictions. Pandemic rules are for peasants, apparently. And this viral instance of the mayor of my former hometown Austin, Texas telling people to stay at home while he was in Cabo was just beyond the pale.

On the research front, I found a really interesting Nature Communications paper released very recently that observed correlations of blood type and COVID-19 severity. The short of it is that non-O-types show a statistically significant increase in infection prevalence, and A- and B-types are at a lesser risk of death than AB (and relative to O-type). Rh-type may have a protective effect for prevalence, death, and intubation outcomes. The reason for the significance is unknown but there is a growing body of evidence that blood-type factors into COVID-19 disease symptoms. The paper is open-access (as most research is regarding COVID right now) so if you’re data-minded take a look and see what you think.

Book I’m reading: I just started Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Yeah, I know, I’m like 20 years behind schedule in reading classic science fiction, but I’m catching up!

Cheers, and have a great week!