On March 11, 1702, The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time. It was a one-sheet, concentrated on foreign news, sans commentary. The reverse side sported advertising. It was produced by Elizabeth Mallet (1672–1706), a printer and bookseller who lived, and published the paper, next to the Kings Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge in London.
The corporate press’s “official” “fact” “checkers” mocked the idea, of course.
But then something . . . inconvenient . . . happened. Senator Marco Rubio asked Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland point blank: “Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?”
Her response was not, as Glenn Greenwald notes, what he was expecting. “Ukraine has biological research facilities,” she answered,* “which, we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”
It turns out that the United States has long been working with Ukraine “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.” And the relationship between defensive biological research and offensive is quite close, Greenwald suggests: “research that is classified as ‘defensive’ can easily be converted, deliberately or otherwise, into extremely destructive biological weapons.”
If this is at all puzzling, note those fact-checkers, again. These “defensive” warriors in the memetic arena are supposed to serve as antibodies to “misinformation” in the realm of spreadable ideas. By reflexively debunking any new attack on accepted government-approved opinion, they serve as spreaders of their own misinformation.
As in the war of ideas, so in the war of biological contagions.
The next question is: Does it make sense to place our labs on the border of our enemy?
But then, I thought it was a bad idea to subsidize biological research laboratories in Wuhan, China.
Our leaders think they know better.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Greenwald leaves in Nuland’s uh-stutters and the like. I’ve cut them.
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Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue.
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, Zanoni (1842).
On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.
Currently, Michigan state senators are limited to two four-year terms; state representatives to three two-year terms. The VTTL people want to bloat maximum tenure in a legislative seat to twelve years, which they call a “reduction” because the twelve years would nominally cap total service in both chambers.
A now-familiar gambit. The old, stock propaganda against term limits just doesn’t cut it anymore: arguments about how “term limits give lobbyist ginormous power, and, uh, we already have term limits and they’re called elections” are a nonstarter these days. Term limits are too popular and have been too effective.
So enemies of term limits now pretend that they’re the best friends term limits ever had. Indeed, they wish to strengthen term limits . . . we’re just not supposed to notice that by “reducing” the two-chamber overall limit by two years generally politicians will stay longer in office.
With 110 House seats and only 38 Senators, it is merely mathematics that few politicians successfully switch chambers to serve the current 14 year maximum. But, rest assured, this amendment means virtually every politician will stay in the same legislative seat for 12 years.
Greg Schmid, author of the definitive commentary on this hoax, predicts that VTTL will pretend to conduct a petition drive for a while, then invite incumbent politicians in the Michigan legislature to refer the measure to the ballot, skipping the initiative’s expense and hard work.
If you see the petition, don’t sign. If the amendment gets to ballot, vote No.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It’s news because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and because gas has gotten awfully expensive) and because Musk is a major industrial figure. But a businessman calling for deregulation of an industry — is that also headline-worthy stuff?
Unfortunately, yes, given how businessmen so often want liberty for themselves along with ever-expanding restrictions for competitors (or the same restrictions for everyone as long as competitors end up getting hurt more).
I want a world in which we can make no sense of the word “but” in this opening paragraph:
“Tesla may be the world’s leading seller of plug-in electric vehicles, but CEO Elon Musk wants the U.S. oil-and-gas industry to ramp up production.”
“But”?
Musk’s statement-by-tweet doesn’t help: “Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”
These words are not super-clear about what Elon Musk believes the government’s attitude should be toward markets during non-extraordinary times. War or no war, government policies safeguarding markets should not be resorted to only as emergency measures. No matter how much some may welcome sustained efforts to hobble an industry.
It’s rare that our businessmen clearly enunciate the principles of free enterprise that they are thought themselves to practice. We’re lucky if we get a tendency in that direction.
I guess that’s better, at least, than a fervent statism that seeks to wipe out all economic freedom all the time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.
Albert Camus, The Plague (1947).
That’s what Dr. John Campbell asked on his YouTube channel yesterday, reviewing several studies of ivermectin as an agent in the fight against COVID-19 — but directly regarding the results of research out of Brazil. It was an impressive large-number study, in which the researchers invited the whole population of Itajaí to participate, with 159,561 included in the analysis: 113,845 regular users of ivermectin and 45,716 non-users.
“Seventy percent reduction in mortality in this study” of those who took a very “tiny dosage of ivermectin every fortnight, acting as a prophylaxis” over those did not. “I mean, this is just huge!”
Dr. Campbell, who has been a voice of calm science during the pandemic, goes on to say that “It’s almost as if information has been deliberately suppressed throughout the pandemic, to be quite honest.” With a wry look, he went on to say “No one’s saying that’s true, of course, but it’s almost like that.”
Droll.
But non-ironically, he insists the evidence is “powerful, present, and overwhelming.”
“Seventy percent,” he marvels, “how do you argue with a number like that? It’s a very, very high number.”
And the decrease in hospitalization was 67 percent.
All in all, the study found less infection, fewer hospitalizations, and an astoundingly lower death rate in the ivermectin group.
Earlier in the video, the doctor considered another study, comparing the cheap anti-parasitic to the far more expensive remdesivir, a Fauci-pushed Gilead Sciences anti-viral, with similar results.
It’s “almost as if” the expert class that spurned ivermectin doesn’t care if people die.
No one’s saying that, but. . . .
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The studies:
Kerr L, Cadegiani F A, Baldi F, et al. (January 15, 2022) “Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching.” Cureus 14(1): e21272. doi:10.7759/cureus.21272.
I. Efimenko, S. Nackeeran, S. Jabori, J.A. Gonzalez Zamora, S. Danker, D.Singh, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database.” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 116 (2022) S1–S130.
Because of how the federal government operates, they really can do whatever they want to whoever they want and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Nick Fuentes, speaking in “The Total End of a Free Society” (February 23, 2022).
On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies.
One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces closed the port of Boston to all commerce.