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Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

Lessons Not Yet Learned?

When will we learn to distrust big government?

While readers of this Common Sense have been tracking the Wuhan Lab Leak story for two years now, most people are still behind the curve. Fortunately, another government agency has weighed in on the Lab Leak side, as reported by Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel in the Wall Street Journal: “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.

No wonder there’s disagreement and confusion, though: “The Energy Department made its judgment with ‘low confidence,’ according to people who have read the classified report,” Gordon and Strobel explain. 

There remains much we do not know, of course. But we should understand that is largely because China’s totalitarian regime has purposely hidden information from the world. With the full assistance of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Government Science in the U.S. . . . and evasive coverage by our media.

Then consult Brett Stephens’ “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” in The New York Times last week.

Now, many of us embraced masks early on, when little was known, bascally advising mask wearing as a signal of hope. We can do something. But soon the masks themselves masked something other than hope: the raw powerlust of the elites in their lockdown tyranny over the masses.

But for actual reduction in the contagion of a virus, Stephens reports, masks are useless. Citing an Oxford epidemiologist with the great name of “Tom Jefferson,” not even N-95 masks do the trick: “Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

What about those studies we were informed proved the case? They were “nonrandomized,” “flawed observational studies.”

Yet lots of politicians and bureaucrats — including “the mindless” Centers for Disease Control — keep pushing masks.

It’s not that we cannot learn. It’s that they don’t want us to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Thought

Angelina Grimké

The time to assert a right is the time when that right is denied.

Angelina Grimké, Pastorial Letter, as quoted in Stephen H. Browne (January 1, 2012). Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. MSU Press. p. 128..
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Today

The XXIInd!

On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry (pictured above) was born.


The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states of the union on February 27, 1951.

Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Betrayal?

This podcast covers two weeks of Common Sense stories. And quite a bit more:

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Sarah Grimké

I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.

Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837), Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
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Today

Dominican Independence

February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.

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Listen: Betrayal

Paul Jacob didn’t do a podcast last weekend. Betrayal? Well, he was on the road. But this weekend he makes up for it, covering all the big stories of past two weeks, and a whole lot more.

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Thought

Angelina Grimké

Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights.

Angelina Grimké, “Letter XII. Human Rights Not Founded On Sex” (October 2, 1837); reported in Isaac Knapp, Letters to Catherine Beecher (1838).
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Today

Grimke and Revels

February 25, 1805, saw the birth of Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the younger sister of the equally famed Sarah Moore Grimké.


On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.

Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.


In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.

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Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.” 

I’m going to quote an anarchist

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

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