That’s the thing about Americans, they’re the most propagandized people in the world and they have no idea. People in China know when they’re being propagandized and people in the old Soviet Union knew . . . but people in America think that — “what? I’m just watching the news!”
Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).
March 18 marks the eleventh anniversary of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement. Students occupied the Taiwanese legislature to block a trade agreement between Taiwan and China, which the public came to believe gave too much economic leverage to China, a power that regularly threatens to invade the free and democratic island nation.
The event awakened a deep concern about China’s dangerous encroachment as well as further impressing a “Taiwanese identity.” The protest may have influenced the 2014 Umbrella movement in Hong Kong as well as leading to electoral victories in Taiwan for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in 2016 and again in 2020.
On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.
The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.
In December, the House Subcommittee investigating the subject concluded that there was evidence for a lab leak and none for a zoonotic origin of the disease.
Throughout the period, corporate news sources barely covered the story, despite its obvious importance and inherent interest. Instead, they covered for the culprits, the better to push a “vaccine” that was more novel than the “novel coronavirus” itself.
Journalists seemed immune to acknowledging, for example, “the man the media missed,” Dr. Peter Daszak. Years before the leak, the doctor publicly boasted about using a Chinese lab to engage in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. And yet, he was placed on the World Health Organization team investigating the Wuhan situation!
Meanwhile, the CIA waffled.
Now we learn that German intelligence reported to then-Chancellor Angela Merkel favoring the lab leak hypothesis.
In 2020.
“Two German newspapers say they have uncovered details of an assessment carried out by spy agency BND in 2020 but never published,” explains the BBC. “According to Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the BND met in Berlin in 2020 to look into the origin of coronavirus in an operation called Project Saaremaa.”
The “spy agency,” as the BBC neatly puts it, “assessed the lab theory as ‘likely,’ although it did not have definitive proof.”
And, as Dr. John Campbell notes, neither Merkel nor her successor came clean with any of this.
Dr. Campbell finds his resulting loss of trust has a bright side: “it’s made me re-evaluate many, many things.”
“The age of deference,” he concludes, “is past.”
All of our major institutions failed the pandemic test.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.
I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Letter to William Lloyd Garrison (1853).
On March 17, 1941, the U.S. Selective Service held its first lottery for the draft, in preparation for World War II. (Image, above, from the Morning Oregonian, from that year.)
On March 17, 1780, General George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”
“Ever since billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump won his second presidential election, tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and of course Elon Musk have made no bones about shedding their progressive skin and embracing the new administration,” explains Joe Wilkins at Futurism. “Gates, too, is cozying up to the returning president. In early January, the Microsoft founder spent three hours dining with his fellow billionaire, telling the Wall Street Journal he was ‘frankly impressed’ by Trump’s grasp on the issues dear to him.”
The Futurism article is entitled “Bill Gates Gives Up on Climate Change” and is blurbed “That’s enough of that.”
A major chapter in climate giving has ended,” is how Heatmap puts it. “Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C. . . .”
Courtesy of GeekWire, we learn of the New York Times’s coverage:
The Seattle-based organization has scrapped its U.S. climate policy team, its European team and employees working in partnership with other climate groups, said the Times, citing an internal memo issued Tuesday and unnamed sources.
“Bill Gates remains as committed as ever to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” according to a statement provided to GeekWire by a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson.
“His work in this area will continue and is focused on helping drive reliable, affordable, clean energy solutions that will enable people everywhere to thrive,” she added.
Lisa Stiffler, “Report: Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy cuts climate policy team and partnership support,” Geek Wire (March 12, 2025).
“Gates, who is worth $106.5 billion,” GeekWire further explains, “donated $50 million to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, according to earlier reports from the Times.” The article goes on to explain just how many billions Gates has invested in this cause, and how many more billions have been gathered up from other sources. Many, many billions: $2 billion raised in two rounds; an $839 million fund; and $4 billion from Gates himself.
On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.
James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.
People who want to police “hate speech” hate speech.
Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).
Climate scientist Michael Mann has appeared in these pages before, the subject of some criticism for his less-than-honest science and public pronouncements. So a recent news story is worth sharing, even if we leave the commentary to you. Quoting from Roger Pielke, Jr.:
The DC Court that heard the defamation case brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against two bloggers has ruled today that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” during the case, by presenting false claims on multiple occasions related to Mann’s grant funding:
Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Dr. Mann, through [his lawyers] Mr. Fontaine and Mr. Williams, acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding. . . The Court does not reach this decision lightly.
This ruling follows closely on the heels of the same court reducing the punitive damages awarded to Mann against one of the defedents from $1,000,000 to $5,000. That reduction follows the Court’s order that Mann pay $530,820.21 of legal expenses that his lawsuit resulted in for National Review — which Mann had also sued, but whose case was dismissed.
Roger Pielke, Jr., “In Bad Faith” (March 12, 2025).
The judge was none too pleased with Mann and his lawyers:
They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.
As those who have followed Michael Mann’s sorry career pushing Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) may remember, Mann has been caught conspiring to keep hidden in his data and graphs the reality of the Medieval Warming Period. As a public figure and one of the main faces of the AGW “climate change” hysteria, he has helped diminish the public’s confidence in scientists in general.
So maybe we should thank him? After he pays off the damages and court costs, of course.
“The irony here is deep,” concludes Mr. Pielke. “The lawsuit Mann brought on the basis that he was intemperately accused of misconduct winds up revealing that Mann engaged in misconduct that was ‘extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent.’ It’ll be interesting to see what the climate science community does now.”
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval (June 12, 1816). The Latin phrase bellum omnium in omnia means “war of all things against all things,” and is Jefferson’s play upon bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning “the war of all against all,” which is the formulation that Thomas Hobbes gave to human existence in the state of nature in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). Jefferson is certainly tipping his hat to his friend C.-F. Volney’s concept of this sort of war carried on within modern states, as discussed in The Ruins (1802), the bulk of which Jefferson himself translated from the French.