Category: Accountability

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Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .” 

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for 

  1. a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China; 
  2. for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and 
  3. for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing. 

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc. 

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime. 

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on Common Sense:

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Accountability ideological culture

No Vacation from Antisemitism

Yoni Birnbaum, antisemitism, Israel, Judaism, blacklist, discrimination

Is it possible to discriminate against a Jew for being a Jew without knowing that this is what one is doing?

Yoni Birnbaum, a Jewish man and rabbi, reports on what happened after he reserved a vacation rental in France.

The property owner emailed to say that he had noticed the word “rabbi” in Birnbaum’s email address and therefore felt it necessary to inquire whether Birnbaum was sufficiently critical of Israel before letting the booking stand. If not, the reservation would be cancelled.

This wasn’t a litmus test to which all prospective renters of the property were being routinely subjected. The owner acknowledged that only because he had noticed that Birnbaum was Jewish was he demanding to know his views on Israel.

Birnbaum replied, in part: “No doubt, you wrote your email to me out of some kind of twisted sense of virtue. But it seems clear to me that what lies at the heart of your demand for me to declare my views on the conflict in the Middle East, is that to you, before anything else, I am a Jew. Therefore, at the very least, you feel you have to test me and family. . . .

“In other words, you wished to subject me to a purity test. Am I one of the ‘good Jews’ or one of the ‘bad Jews’?”

Not the worst thing that can happen to somebody. But it has something in common with the very worst that can happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

Secrets of Liars & Calumniators

SPLC, hate group, racism, indictment

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, last week, on 11 counts including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Department of Justice claims that the organization deceived donors and banks about its use of charitable contributions from 2014 through 2023.

Now, the shocking accusation that “the SPLC’s paid informants (‘field sources’) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance” is not what the SPLC is being prosecuted for. Neither is the SPLC’s distribution of over $3 million to such secret agents. Like the SPLC’s public strategy of lying and calumny, undercover support of infiltrators (as the SPLC defends its agents) isn’t illegal. 

Of course, those same agents encouraging crimes does implicate the SPLC in conspiracy to commit acts of terror, but that’s not the crime being prosecuted. 

The charges come, instead, from the methods allegedly used to keep these disreputable methods secret. 

Not everyone’s impressed with the case; the DOJ may lose. So the bigger question becomes, will the progressive media continue to exalt the SPLC? 

And for the SPLC itself, will anti-racist benefactors still give money to an organization shown to gin up hatred the better to soak in donations? 

Upon learning that the organization you funded to fight the evil, violent racists turned around and funded the evil, violent racists, would you continue to donate?

Yet the lines of ideological loyalty remain clear. In normal fraud cases, it is the defrauded who feel the most aggrieved. But here it is their political enemies who express the outrage that the defrauded should be feeling.

That may be the saddest element of this sick situation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies partisanship

The AOC-Schiff Thesis

Congress, AOC, Adam Schiff, Eric Swallwell, controversy

I wonder how many others were amused, as I was last week, to hear Senator Adam Schiff praise members of his party for the ouster of his fellow Californian and Democrat, Rep. Eric Swallwell, from Congress.

The tale, as told on this website on Sunday, is that Swallwell — one of Schiff’s closest colleagues pushing the Russiagate gambit against the first Trump administration — was pressured to resign over the massive amount of complaints against him for sexual harassment and other unwanted sexual advances. There is even an accusation of rape. 

Also resigning was a Republican from Texas, Tony Gonzalez, for similar reasons.

Schiff — who claimed to be “sickened” and “aghast” at the accusations and what Swallwell “has done” — followed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in scorning the Republicans for postponing dealing with the Gonzalez problem. He accused the Republicans of not wanting to abandon Gonzalez because they wanted to continue to maintain their majority in the House.

But this works both ways. Sure, Republicans postponed pressuring the ousting of Gonzalez until Democrats likewise agreed to pressure Swallwell to resign. Both parties maintain the previous balance. This is politics. Not great high-mindedness. On either side.

Further, the big issue was Swallwell’s gubernatorial run — contributing to the splitting up of Democratic votes thereby threatening to allow two Republicans to appear on the run-off on Election Day in November in California’s screwy Top Two system. 

Finding an excuse to undermine Swallwell’s run was surely a big part of the magnanimous Democratic effort to remove him from Congress.

“You think you know someone, and it turns out you don’t,” said Schiff about Swallwell. “I didn’t socialize with Eric Swallwell, but I worked with him on the Judiciary Committee — I would never have imagined that he was capable of something like this.”

I think we know quite enough about Schiff and his partisanship, as we do so many in Congress. They are capable of anything.

Meanwhile, the vote to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) — accused of expropriating FEMA funds to the tune of $5 million — has not exactly proven the AOC-Schiff thesis on swift Democratic self-policing. She’s still in Congress, though a vote may occur tomorrow, we’re told.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability international affairs national politics & policies

Weaponized Data via Silencer

data collection, China, surveillance, authoritarianism

“Authoritarian regimes have developed strong cyber espionage capabilities that enable their influence and coercion operations,” explains a National Intelligence Council “assessment,” dated April 7, 2020.

This report goes on to say that the “collection and aggregation of vast quantities of personal data” by commercial enterprises, and the willingness to share this data with third parties, “increases both the likelihood and the impact of data breaches.”

The report, which is highly redacted though declassified in late 2022, fingers Iranian hackers as well as foreign governments for having obtained private data on U.S. citizens. In 2013, Russia’s Federal Security Service “sponsored a theft of 3 billion accounts” off an American web service, and in 2017 Chinese agents “stole 147 million from a US credit-reporting agency.” And more.

Reading on, a sense of déjà vu develops. The report calls this technological capacity “digital authoritarian capabilities” — yet our own government has the same. 

It accuses China of marshaling “mass surveillance and AI-driven algorithmic tracking of its citizens’ behavior at home to inform the use of soft or coercive incentives and disincentives to control them,” but that, I’m afraid, is what our government does, too.

Now we learn that all this and more was known by American intelligence agencies during the first Trump administration.

But was kept from him. 

That is, “intelligence analysts downplayed China’s actions because they had disdain for the ‘vulgarian’ Trump,” explains Just the News, and at least one agent kept evidence of possible Chinese interference in the 2020 election from the president because that might have led to “policies against China” that the agent didn’t like.

That, right there, we call a datum.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture responsibility

Everyone Dies?

AI, Artificial Intelligence, prediction, action

After Friday, when I worried about robots taking over, I was glad to read a debunking of the AI Will Destroy Us All meme, so in vogue. In “Superintelligent AI Is Not Coming To Kill You,” from the March issue of Reason, Neil Chilson argues that we shouldn’t freak out.

Not only do I not want to freak out, I don’t want to use AI very much — though I understand that, these days, sometimes it makes sense to consult the Oracles.

Chilson is reviewing a new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who argue that “artificial intelligence research will inevitably produce superintelligent machines and these machines will inevitably kill everyone.”

Just like I feared on Friday!

Where the authors go wrong, Chilson argues, is that by “defining intelligence as the ability to predict and steer the world, Yudkowsky and Soares collapse two distinct capacities — understanding and acting — into one concept. This builds their conclusion into their premise. If intelligence inherently includes steering, then any sufficiently intelligent system is, by definition, a world-shaping agent. The alignment problem becomes not a hypothesis about how certain AI architectures might behave but a tautology about how all intelligent systems must behave.”

Today’s AI’s are “fundamentally about prediction. They predict the next element in a sequence.”

They aren’t necessarily taking action.

I hope Chilson’s critique holds true.

But we’ve caught AI lying, “just making stuff up” — though considering the nature of “Large Language Models” (the method by which modern AI works), “lying” may be the wrong word. Still, it just seems to me that at some point somebody’s — everybody’s! — gonna link the predictor to some sort of truly active mechanism. 

Like street-ready robots.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment public opinion

ICE Melt in Minnesota

ICE, Minnesota, shooting, protest, riot, violence

Americans are strongly united against people being gunned down on our streets by federal agents. 

Saturday, the victim was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse working at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. Pretti was an American citizen with a conceal-carry permit. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino quickly informed the public: “During this operation, an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots.

“The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID,” added Bovino. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Had this farfetched narrative been even close to true, maybe we could partly reconcile the killing we witness relentlessly in cellphone videos. I like to reserve judgment until all the facts are in, but to me the videos don’t implicate Pretti as a “terrorist” in the slightest and leave little doubt that, in law enforcement lingo, this was not at all a “good shoot,” i.e. a justified use of deadly force.

Yesterday, President Trump told The Wall Street Journal that he had a “very good telephone conversation” with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “The president agreed the present situation can’t continue,” offered Frey.

This change is driven democratically: Republicans at the White House, in Congress and across the country know the voters will crush them if this continues through the fall elections. 

Now if voters can only unite on reform beyond merely stopping the shooting. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment fraud

Watchdogs That Don’t Bark

Minnesota, watchdog, racism, fraud, thieves, nice

Yesterday, I refrained from completely quoting Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, saving for today the juiciest part. After declaring the fraud in Minnesota dwarfed by what he saw in California, Oz said, next: “which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care.”

“Cultural”?

Dr. Oz clarified at length: it’s about the cover-up. Minnesota’s fraud network? Bureaucrats knew. But when a whistleblower tried to toot on the proverbial whistle, these folks, Oz explained, were “culturally . . . dissuaded, intimidated, from speaking up.”

This would happen “any time people raised the possibility that, for example, the Somalian subpopulation, who have different cultural mores than the folks who have historically been in Minnesota, might be taking advantage of systems that were built for Minnesota nice people.”

The “cultural” aspect is the pseudo-niceness of political correctness. “So you have well-meaning people trying to be nice, trying not to ruffle any feathers. If you do ruffle feathers, you get outed.” The auditors lacked the temperament to actually audit, with those daring few speaking up systematically prevented — shuffled away — from doing any actual work. 

“Although you may still have a job there, you don’t get to do anything in that job.”

While Oz claims not to know how high up cover-for-fraud goes, I’ve a hunch that the smart ones in government know all-too-well what they are doing. They certainly know the fear. And use it. 

It’s suffused throughout: “cultural.”

This story is not unrelated to the grooming gangs in Britain, Finland and elsewhere, allowed for years by police to carry on what we used to call “white slavery” because the cops feared being called racist. 

You cannot have watchdogs too “nice” to bark.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

One Day an Audit?

gold, audit, UFO

“As U.S. debt soars and foreign central banks stockpile gold,” asserts a new article, “a U.S. senator today introduced a bill to require the first comprehensive audit of America’s gold reserves in decades.”

Reading the Mises Institute piece, I got a sense of déjà vu.

“Sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the Gold Reserve Transparency Act would require a full assay, inventory, and audit of all United States gold holdings,” the author, Jp Cortez, explains, “along with an upgrade in the purity of the gold so that it meets global market standards.”

The “haven’t I read this before?” thought hit me hard. Talk of auditing the gold reserves is not new. Earlier this year, in the heady days of Elon Musk and DOGE, a lot of folks dared wonder: does the federal government even have any gold at all? 

I asked the question in February, in the context (I kid you not) of UFOs!

A “Gold Reserve Transparency Act” has been introduced four times in the House since 2011, always by Republican sponsors aligned with sound-money advocates. But it has also never passed the House, let alone advanced to the Senate or become law. 

The House Committee on Financial Services received these bills but only the 2011 version got so much as a hearing. 

No Senate version existed until Sen. Mike Lee’s introduction (S. __, 119th Congress) weeks ago, which mirrors the House bill and remains unnumbered and in committee as of yesterday.

A gold audit would be very interesting. But I get the feeling this will be treated like UFOs: full disclosure forever forthcoming.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly political economy

Green Goes Red

Sweden, climate, pensions, economics

Well, at least they were earnest. Hopeful. Committed.

Swedes in the north part of their country channeled State pension funds — billions of kronor! — into climate-friendly projects.

Well, I’m not sure to what degree Swedish citizens were for this ideologically driven investment portfolio, but Swedish politicians sure were!

And now those investments appear iffy. “State pension fund AP2 had invested £117.7 million in Northvolt before its collapse,” explains GBN News, out of Great Britain. “It also holds £46.8 million in Stegra, plus a further £15.6 million exposure through its investment in Al Gore’s Just Climate fund.” And both Northvolt and Stegra — “once flagship companies of the energy transition,” as Blackout News puts it — teeter at the abyss of failure.

Northvolt was once Europe’s leading Great Green Hope, an electric vehicle battery company with a commitment to sustainability; in November it filed for bankruptcy protection.

Stegra was until recently seen as Sweden’s high-profile “green steel” leader, but now faces an £858 million funding gap.

There has been some shuffling of management, but even were the world’s most magical managers to pull these companies’ feet out of the fire — even if the endeavors can limp out of the current fire-sale conflagration — ask yourself: does it ever make sense to leave pension funds in the hands of zealots who seek to change the world for some utopian dream? 

It makes far more sense to let private equity fund risky projects, for private fund managers have more (voluntarily given funds) on the line.

Politicians, after all, are notoriously irresponsible — always willing to bet your future on their dreams.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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