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Today

Tyranny?

July 6 serves better as a “Today in Tyranny” marker than anything positive, at least when you consider these events:

  • 1415 – Jan Hus was burnt at the stake.
  • 1535 – Sir Thomas More was executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
  • 1887 – David Kalakaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was forced at gunpoint by Americans to sign the Bayonet Constitution giving Americans more power in Hawaii while stripping Hawaiian citizens of their rights.
  • 1939 – The Nazi “Third Reich” closed the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany.
Categories
Thought

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1973

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Who to Trust

Not the Deep State; not the major media; not the State of Idaho; not . . . Tucker Carlson?

Trust Paul Jacob!

This Week in Common Sense, June 28 – July 2, 2021.
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audio podcast

Listen: Who You Gonna Trust?

Why, Paul Jacob, of course!

Categories
Today

A Constitution

July 3 marks the 1947 birthday of Dave Barry (pictured), American columnist and author.

Five years later on the same date, Puerto Rico’s Constitution was approved by the Congress of the United States.

Categories
general freedom media and media people

Trust the Spies?

“The Biden administration is spying on us,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his Monday night audience. 

“On Sunday, we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government, someone with direct knowledge, who warned us the NSA was reading our electronic communications, our emails and texts,” he explained, “and was planning to leak them selectively in an effort to hurt us.”

Quite an explosive allegation.

“[T]he evidence for this claim is lacking,” a Vox story argued, adding that “on Tuesday the NSA took the unusual step of releasing a carefully worded statement denying it.” 

Carlson quickly responded that there was no actual denial in the NSA’s verbiage. Huh? Referring directly to Carlson’s charge, the National Security Agency’s statement read, in part: “This allegation is untrue.”

Awfully clear to me. In fact, so straight-forwardly worded that I wonder if the writer is new to Washington, D.C.

Of course, the problem isn’t really one of language.

The problem? Trust

Back in 2013, James Clapper, then-President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, was asked under oath if the NSA “collected any data at all on million of Americans.” Clapper lied to Congress. He has never been held accountable for making that knowingly false statement.

Carlson showed viewers 2006 footage of then-Senator Joe Biden voicing concerns about NSA spying. “And we’re going to trust the president and the vice-president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing?” inquired Biden. “Don’t count me in on that.”

On Tuesday, Carlson contended “the NSA does routinely spy on Americans. It won’t call it spying — that’s exactly what it is. Millions of Americans. And sometimes it does it for political reasons. And everyone knows this. Everyone.”

But many still deny it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Note: Today’s Thought about lying in the old Soviet Union is relevant to the “everybody knows”/“everybody denies” mentality. Share it far and wide. This wasn’t a feature of America three decades ago, was it?

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Thought

Elena Gorokhova

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs (2010), page 181. Several variants of this passage are being circulated widely on the Internet, usually misattributed to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
Categories
government transparency national politics & policies social media

Authoritative!

Just when you thought you knew all the ways our “authoritative” institutions have blocked information from us regarding the origin of COVID-19, another shoe drops.

Early in this pandemic, we learned that the World Health Organization (WHO) lacked any credibility, as their “scientists” shamelessly peddled the dishonest Chinese government line of no human-to-human transmission. 

Still, Big Tech was there to help shut down dissenting opinions in America. “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” declared YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and be banned.

We now know that Dr. Peter Daszak, the man who funneled U.S. taxpayer dollars from the National Institute of Health to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses took place, also created The Lancet’s lying letter, which offered the media an official source to level a “conspiracy theory” charge at skeptics of a zoonotic COVID origin.

While claiming its authors, including Daszak, innocent of any “competing interest.” 

Big Media — somnolent or else actively disinterested in checking the accuracy or even credibility of the WHO, Daszak, and other scientists — proclaimed the lab-leak theory debunked. 

Thus, they could ignore China; blame Trump. 

Facebook joined YouTube and others in actively preventing us from communicating about COVID, specifically its origin — using none other than Dr. Daszak as an advisor on their censorship strikes.

The other shoe?

Dr. David Feinberg, head of Google Health, acknowledged at a recent conference that the search engine had actively blocked users from finding information on the virus’s origin.*

Why? Feinberg said Google did not want to “lead people down pathways that we would not find to be authoritative information.”

Leaving us with authoritative disinformation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* This courtesy of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who also discussed The National Pulse report that “Google funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.” 

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Watch: A Tribute to John McAfee

Paul begins his weekend podcast with a tribute of sorts:

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Thought

John McAfee

All power corrupts. Take care which powers you allow a democracy to wield.

John McAfee, last public post to Twitter, as quoted in “Larger-than-life software mogul John McAfee dies in Spain by suicide, lawyer says” (Reuters, June 24, 2021).