This Week in Common Sense for the final week of May, 2021:
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Watch: What the Heck Is Going On?
Author: Redactor
Paul covers China, UFOs, public schools, and other alien subjects that our major media lies about:
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Bill Sardi
For most clueless Americans, the State is now their God and the US dollar is their faith proposition. Modern Americans have never lived under the limited government spelled out in the Constitution.
Bill Sardi, “Did You Make a Conscious Choice To Be a Liberal, Conservative or Libertarian? Probably Not Where Are You in The Spectrum Of Political Thought?” LewRockwell.com (May 27, 2021).
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Rhode Island, Rite & Riot
On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last of North America’s original Thirteen Colonies to ratify the Constitution, becoming one of the United States.
On the same in 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring received its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a riot.
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The Interrogators
It’s the feel-good story of the year — or at least the year’s first five months.
In South Carolina, a man named Jovan Collazo, carrying an Army-issued rifle, hijacked a school bus. (This isn’t the feel-good part.)
Collazo wanted to go home. It’s unclear why he didn’t just thumb a ride or take a bus the old-fashioned way. But, whatever; criminals are not always the most rational actors.
Bus driver Kenneth Corbin says that 18 students, some in kindergarten, were scattered throughout the vehicle when the hijacker got on board. Captor Collazo decided that the best thing would be to group everybody toward the front so that he could keep a better eye on them.
Big mistake.
The regrouping laid the groundwork for what the UK Independent calls “incessant kindergarten questions” about Collazo’s background, motives, and intentions.
Rattled by the interrogation, he soon brought the bus to a halt, ordered everybody off, and tried to drive the bus himself. Not long after, he was arrested.
According to Corbin, Collazo “sensed more questions coming and I guess something clicked in his mind and he said, ‘enough is enough already.’”
That’s one way to escape a kidnapper. The strategy may not always work, obviously, but we can be glad it worked in this case.
Parents, the next time your toddlers pummel you with metaphysical queries about the universe, try to indulge the budding philosophers.
Their expertise in the Socratic method may come in real handy one day.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Not Being Norway
Aren’t Norwegians the good guys?
Yet, somehow, this bastion of human rights (and “best democracy in the world”) has, since 2010, “forcibly registered the nationality of Taiwanese residing in Norway as ‘Chinese’”?
“The action is considered an act of appeasement,” The News Lens paraphrases Joseph Liu, a Taiwanese lawyer based in Norway, “after the Norwegian Nobel Committee angered Beijing by awarding the peace prize to the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo the same year.”
Norway’s promotion of human rights upset the genocidal Chinese government, which had imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, and which then moved to “suspend trade talks with Norway and restrict exports of important commodities.” It took six years of placating the Chinazis before normal diplomatic and economic relations were restored.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese students living in The Land of the Midnight Sun are demanding their right simply to be Taiwanese. Joseph Liu formed a group, “Taiwan: My Name, My Right,” to lobby Norway’s government and is now legally challenging the policy. After Norway’s supreme court rejected their lawsuit last year, they have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
“The Applicants are Taiwanese,” argues Professor Jill Marshall of the University of London, “failing to state this on their official documentation and instead ascribing them with an incorrect nationality misidentifies them and violates their right to personal identity.”
Even as Norway denies Taiwanese identity, its own identity takes the biggest hit. Prime Minister Erna Solberg explained her 2014 snubbing of the Dalai Lama as “a necessary sacrifice in order to show China that it’s important for us to have a dialogue with them.”
Sacrificing what’s right and just for trade deals with totalitarians is no way to be Norway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Fravor’s Fake UFOs?
In just weeks, the Pentagon will report to Congress on the matter of UFOs.
Though the subject appears vast, beginning before World War II’s “foo fighters” and extending right up to Colorado’s ongoing (?) “drone” mystery, the impetus for much of the recent interest comes from one source: a declassified set of telemetry data and FLIR footage from an alleged UFO encounter off the coast of California on November 10, 2004.
Brought to the fore by former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, and backed up by the testimony of Navy fighter pilots who took the footage, Commander David Fravor, preeminently, these videos had been hacking around the Internet for years, and repeatedly “debunked.” 60 Minutes did a segment on the subject, recently, but ignored the debunkers. So a popular junk science debunker on YouTube, an engineer known as Thunderf00t, demonstrated how the technology used by pilot Fravor produces images of normal flying objects that can look . . . alien . . . to novices.
The problem with this debunking, as with previous ones, is that it deprecates the context. Specifically, the testimony. Thunderf00t dismisses the pilots as “UFO nuts.”
But he does not directly deal with the testimony. “This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it’s gone,” Commander Fravor explains — “we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers.” He also asserts that the “things” blocked radar and behaved as if they could read minds or instantaneously crack secure Navy communications.
If the debunkers are correct about the footage being grossly misinterpreted, the surrounding testimony amounts to lies. We novices might be fooled by FLIR, but not trained fighter jet personnel. And if they are lying, then the Pentagon should know and say.
For decades, the military has been telling us, publicly, that UFOs aren’t a thing. Now it appears they are telling us they are.
Am I the only one who is curious?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Virginia Woolf
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“The core of the dispute is this,” declares The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column: “Did the virus emerge from nature — ‘zoonotically’ from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?”
Ah, modern journalism: even when dealing with some actual facts, is the real point to maneuver the reader not to consider possibilities?
In “Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding,” the Post’s fact-checkers seem most concerned to tell readers that while it is now OK to question the origin of SARS-CoV-2, still, only within limits: as between normal viral evolution and an accident regarding gain-of-function research into viruses.
Outside this Overton Window, though, readers are still being instructed not to think about sabotage, conspiracy and biochemical warfare.
The upshot of the Post piece?
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) gets “two Pinocchios” for his alleged overstatements about NIH funding of Wuhan gain-of-function research.
After the Post’s listicle treatment of relevant facts, though, if you came to a different distribution of wooden noses — say, giving a few to Dr. Anthony Fauci, instead — you could make a plausible case.
After all, when Fauci himself says that he’s not convinced that the pandemic was not human-created — despite telling Rand Paul that the senator’s facts were “entirely and completely incorrect” — we should take that not merely as a cue to accept the Post’s latest Overton Window placement.
I say, open up that window all the way.
On Medium, science writer Nicholas Wade treated the actual evidence seriously, discovering that “the science” we were fed early on — the “science” that insisted that the gain-of-function story was highly unlikely — was actually orchestrated by the NIH’s subcontractor at Wuhan.
If you smell a rat — or a bat — at this point?
Your schnozz is in working order.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: While trying to put this story to bed, The Wall Street Journal broke news that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”
Previous coverage: here.
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Paul-Emile de Puydt
Does anybody want to carry out a political schism? He should be able to do so but on one condition, namely, that he will do it within his own group, affecting neither the rights nor the creed of others.
Paul-Emile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (1860).