Author: Redactor

Categories
media and media people social media

Ingested Invective Rejected

Covid, Ivermectin, propaganda

“There is a bizarre propaganda underway in the United States of America to brand Ivermectin a ‘horse dewormer,’” mused OpIndia, in its coverage of Joe Rogan’s recent brief bout of COVID and Alex Jones’s on-air Ivermectin ingestion stunt, “despite the fact that a version of the drug is known to be used for human treatment.”

The origin story is instructive. “The propaganda appears to have been triggered by an ambiguously worded tweet by the US Food and Drugs Administration.” 

Well, ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This FDA tweet led to virality of invectives against Ivermectin users. 

Then Katelyn Ogle, of KFOR in Oklahoma, upped the hysteria ante, claiming that a “rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the horse de-wormer medication, ivermectin, to fight COVID-19 are causing emergency room and ambulance back ups.”

This then went stampede, with Rolling Stone taking it up.

Apparently without a fact check.

In hardly any time at all, the hospital in question issued a statement repudiating the whole brouhaha.

It was Fake News — capital F and capital N — and Rolling Stone had to issue a . . . well, it wasn’t a retraction. 

Journalist Glen Greewald offered his take: “The only reason Rolling Stone is calling this an ‘UPDATE’ as opposed to what it so plainly is — a RETRACTION — is because liberal outlets know that their readers don’t care at all if they publish fake news as long as it’s done with the right political motives and goals.”

Dismissing Ivermectin as any kind of “de-wormer” is fraudulent. That this strain of invective against its COVID-suffering users was started by the government is especially galling.

Lots of people swallowed the meme. 

Will they develop immunity to future, similar spin?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born. A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).

Categories
Thought

Isaiah

None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.

Isaiah 59: 4-5. A cockatrice is a legendary winged dragon with a rooster’s head. Image features a decorative cockatrice figure over a door.

Categories
Accountability Thought

Yves Guyot

The Law of supply and demand was not promulgated in any code. Its power comes from elsewhere. It imposes itself upon mankind in as implacable a way as hunger and thirst. We furnish fresh demonstrations of its truth, whether willingly or not, even while we imagine ourselves to be violating it. If the Socialist excommunicates and abuses the economist, who formulates this law, he should also hold Newton responsible for all the tiles that fall on the heads of passers-by, and should declare that if some poor wretch, in throwing himself from a window, kills himself, it is the fault of those physicists who have discovered and taught the law of gravitation.

Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism (1894).
Categories
Today

Rome Fell

Odoacer, a German “barbarian,” ousted Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, thus ending that empire on September 4, 476 A.D.

Many common people did not notice a change.

Categories
Thought

Seneca

Qui grate beneficium accipit, primam eius pensionem solvit.

He who receives a benefit with gratitude, repays the first installment of it.

Seneca the Younger, De Beneficiis (On Benefits): Book 2, cap. 22, line 1.

Categories
Today

Dixy Lee Ray

On September 3, 1914, Dixy Lee Ray was born. Her stint as governor of the State of Washington was a controversial one, as she economized in startling ways, and proved largely unsympathetic to environmentalist politics. Indeed, she later wrote Trashing the Planet, which took on trendy “solutions” to environmental problems, based in no small part on her own experience and perspective as a scientist. She was an early critic of the developing “global warming” pseudo-“consensus.”

Categories
insider corruption term limits

On Glissando Skids

glissando

As corrupting as political power may be, not everyone is corrupted by it, at least not to the same grievous extent.

Yet, even if one starts out with some measure of integrity and good intentions, the longer one is entrenched in power, the more likely one is to lose one’s way. Little by little, and then in leaps and bounds, one goes along to get along, learning to appreciate the perks of power and the advantages of cooperating with party bosses, forgetting one’s desire to buck the establishment and always do the right thing.

Within just five years, formerly fiscally conservative U.S. Senators Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, both Republicans “representing” Idaho, started swerving toward the abyss. Now they’re on glissando skids.

Bryan Smith, vice chair of the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee, observes the dispiriting trajectory in a recent commentary.

He cites New American’s Freedom Index, which assesses how well lawmakers work for “limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and avoiding foreign entanglements.”

Risch and Crapo slid from a rating of 95% and 95% in 2012 to 80% and 80% in 2015, 50% and 50% in 2018, and 35% and 30% in 2020. Both have so far gotten a score of 90% the first half of 2021, yet both also voted Yes to the recent $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill.

Smith remembers how both men once proudly opposed runaway government spending.

This is hardly new — or confined to Idaho. As a 1994 Cato Institute analysis concluded: “members of Congress become more pro-tax-and-spend the longer they serve in Washington.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Henry George

September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George. George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made many other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).

Categories
international affairs responsibility

The War Presidents’ Debacle

Afghanistan, president, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden

President Biden yesterday called the now somewhat* completed withdrawal of U.S., Afghan and coalition soldiers and civilians an “extraordinary success,” arguing that “no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.”

There were a reported 120,000 people airlifted out, but with 13 U.S. soldiers killed in last week’s suicide attack at the Kabul airport, along with three British nationals and more than 160 Afghans — let’s cancel any victory lap.

Still, I’m more with Mr. Biden than with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who made the case on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace that the occupation of Afghanistan was a complete success, making the pull-out (now over) a horrendous policy mistake. 

McConnell’s case for a never-ending “Mission Accomplished” understates the costs in blood and treasure — by trillions of dollars, in part. Just like you would expect of a deficit-and-debt plotter.

“America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure,” argues David Rothkopf in The Atlantic, adding that “Joe Biden doesn’t ‘own’ the mayhem on the ground right now.” Instead, Rothkopf blames “20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders.”

Rothkopf errs in letting Joe “The Buck Stops Here” Biden and the generals off the hook for the withdrawal. And gifting the enemy with a vast and sophisticated arsenal.

All four Afghanistan War presidents deserve blame, along with the war establishment, in government and out.

Remember: wars that cannot be won even with military victory on the battlefield should not be fought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The Biden Administration continues to pledge they’ll work to get Americans left in Afghanistan out. However, in an ABC News interview a little more than a week ago, Biden had committed that, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.” 

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