History will look back at the legalization of online gambling as one of the greatest policy mistakes in American history. With the normalization of smartphone-enabled gambling, Americans - mostly gullible men - are being ripped off like never before. The smartphone-based gambling industry sees no issue with playing all sorts of dirty tricks to separate Americans from their dollars, and its wreaking havoc for all of us. Here is an excellent rundown by Cam James, who just uploaded an excellent how-to guide on “How NOT To Die From Measles,” from two years ago:
The revolting integration of gambling apps into sports broadcasts is utterly depraved and frankly ruins the entertainment value of sport. Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi have expanded on what you can gamble on beyond sports and into real-world events such as elections and natural disasters. News channels such as CNN in fact now pretend that betting markets provide valuable insights on American politics.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “Among the questions with the highest trade volume on Polymarket was when Washington will carry out military action against Iran,” in which we murdered over one hundred schoolgirls in cold blood. “The current trading volume for that question is over $238 million.” Yes, platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket profit from letting the public gamble on the murder of children as if it’s a spectator sport. Insider trading is rife on these platforms, letting a select few pocket millions of dollars. Kalshi founder Tarek Mansour proclaimed: “The long-term vision is to financialize everything,” as covered by Ayesha A. Siddiqi:
The Depravity of Osterism
So, it should not be at all surprising that economist Emily Oster recently cashed in a check from Kalshi to speak at an event after, as reported on by Inaed Oh for Mother Jones in an excellent piece titled “The New Faces of Optimized Motherhood”. This is right after Kalshi was brought up on felony charges for facilitating illegal gambling. As we’ve covered before, Emily Oster’s gambling problem became apparent in 2020 when she decided that she, an economist, knew better than doctors treating patients, research scientists in laboratories, and concerned pediatricians on all things COVID-19 and kids. Tragically, this gamble paid off incredibly well for Oster, attracting the financial backing of reactionary billionaires who are fundamentally opposed to democracy, such as Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg.
Here’s a question worth pondering: If Emily Oster takes enormous amounts of money from reactionary fascists who oppose democracy, what does that make her?
Oster was willing to gamble with the lives of tens of millions of American children that were not her own, having little care for what harms COVID-19 is capable of to pediatric health and development. Now she is taking money from a company profiteering from a manufactured public health crisis; that of unchecked gambling addictions. It is undeniable at this point that there is no low in which Emily Oster will stoop to in order to promote herself and make a quick buck.
Oster isn’t alone in her willingness to gamble with other people’s lives and health; especially children. Economist Jay Bhattacharya, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, and Biden’s COVID Czar Ashish Jha were all willing to roll the dice with other people’s children. In fact, Jha was advising his kids’ private school on how to mitigate COVID-19. When kids wound up hospitalized in record numbers and the medical research showing the harms of COVID-19 came flooding in, they refused to acknowledge their errors.
If you were a more cautious gambler and continue to take precautions against COVID-19 infection or even better, advocate for layered mitigations, you were the unfortunate target of an alignment between both liberals and reactionaries. They decided that the real villain of the COVID-19 pandemic was people who simply didn’t want to get sick constantly and roll the dice on having their lives upended. On one hand, you had outright science denial insisting that layered mitigations simply do not work. On the other hand, you were smeared as anti-vaccine for not blindly putting faith in the Biden Administration’s disastrous silver bullet strategy.
Mother Nature’s Viral Casino
In the wake of an H5N1 (bird flu) death and a surge of influenza deaths, these people don’t seem to realize that they have internalized Emily Oster’s terrible gambling instincts. The compromised, pro-pestilence Department of Health and Human Services is not going to be prepared, much less honest, should a bird flu pandemic kick off in the next few years. You will likely be told that it’s your civic duty to get infected and roll the dice with your health and life, well before a vaccine is available.
Instead of using all the tools on hand to improve our odds, we as a nation have chosen to instead gamble against the house that is Mother Nature’s casino of tragic deaths. As we stumble into a potential H5N1 bird flu pandemic as a consequence of our poor decisions, all of the worst cranks who got got everything about COVID-19 wrong, like Emily Oster, will be back in full force to mislead the public all over again. That is why I built the Pandemic Accountability Index as a freely available public resource.
We cannot afford to entertain the same charlatans who have, year after year, gotten everything wrong and doubled down on their falsehoods. There are too many lives at stake. They shouldn’t be sacrificed so that disingenuous, immature economists can live action roleplay at being experts of topics they refuse to understand.
Not "refuse to understand" but "are incapable of understanding."
IMO.
I had not seen that Emily Oster quote before. Mind blowing. It tells the story of pandemic misinformation in one line. She had the unmitigated arrogance to insist that economics left her better prepared to interpret epidemiology than epidemiologists and physicians. I had not seen it stated so clearly before.