Category: Accountability

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Accountability ballot access First Amendment rights

Zuckerbuck Sucker Punch

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, elections, democracy

Who should fund our public elections? 

Partisan billionaires? 

Last election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, “gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments,” reports The New York Times.

The idea was to help officials deal with holding an election during a pandemic. No laws were necessarily broken. Apparently, private individuals and groups can give money to government election offices — even “with strings attached.” 

“Some conservatives see this largesse of ‘Zuckerbucks,’” informs a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as a clever plot to help Democrats win.” In fact, a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis found the liberal non-profit “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.” 

“[A] deep dive into the available data shows that the funds were largely requested for get-out-the-vote efforts, influenced voter turnout in favor of Democrats, and may have impacted the results of the election in some states,” explains the Foundation for Government Accountability. “According to currently available information, less than one percent of the funds were actually spent on PPE nationwide.”

Can you imagine the outcry if a group with “conservative ties” funded by Charles Koch was giving grants to help Republican-rich jurisdictions rock the vote?

“[E]ven under the purest motives,” the Journal’s editorial offers, “private election funding is inappropriate and sows distrust.”

That’s why 16 states have since passed laws to restrict private funding of election programs.

Mr. Zuckerberg himself sees the danger in Zuckerbucks: “To be clear, I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens.” Last week, he announced he would not be providing such funding in the 2022 elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment

Oberlin Must Pay

Oberlin College, bakery, racism

Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, helped students defame a local business, Gibson’s Bakery, as “racist.”

The two organizations were not strangers, however: Gibson’s Bakery had an agreement with Oberlin to provide baked goods to the school.

It all began when a black Oberlin student shoplifted wine from the bakery. When an employee acted to stop the shoplifter, the thief and two others attacked the employee.

The assailants were arrested. The shoplifter and the others later pled guilty.

But instead of protesting against the thief and his thuggish cohorts, Oberlin students turned against Gibson’s . . . for acting to stop the theft. College officials helped students conduct their protests and later issued an official statement expressing gratitude “for the determination of our students and for the leadership demonstrated by Student Senate” in launching the protests and smear campaign.

The college also suspended its contract with Gibson’s Bakery.

Oberlin College said that it would consider resuming the contract if Gibson’s agreed to drop charges. In a legal filing, Oberlin asserted that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.”

I guess protecting private property and defending ownership rights is “archaic” — it being so much more progressive to let thieves carry on their thievery.

But that’s not the law of the land. At least yet. A state appeals court has upheld a judgment against the college of $31 million — compensatory damages plus legal fees.

Progressives’ race-based undermining of property rights has lost — for now. Crime still doesn’t pay. And socialists can be reined in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability deficits and debt national politics & policies subsidy

What a Relief

Covid relief money

Based on a quick look at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate’s splash page, I wasn’t immediately sure what, precisely, the institute’s raison d’être might be. On the top menu bar there’s a slogan: “Just Vote.” Big clue? 

On the About page, though, we are told its mission: “educating the public about the important role of the Senate in our government, encouraging participatory democracy, invigorating civil discourse, and inspiring the next generation of citizens and leaders to engage in the civic life of their communities.”

As for the vision thing, that’s supplied by its namesake, Ted “I Survived Chappaquiddick” Kennedy: “To preserve our vibrant democracy for future generations, I believe it is critical to have a place where citizens can go to learn first-hand about the Senate’s important role in our system of government.”

I guess that explains why the institute’s Boston location sports a replica room of the U.S. Senate chambers.

Which costs serious money, of course.

Paid for entirely by the ultra-rich Kennedys?

Fact check: no. 

Some of it is paid for by you and me — courtesy of Congress and COVID!

You see, part of last year’s $350 billion in pandemic relief went to Boston’s memorial outfit for its once-favored now-deceased multi-millionaire politician. Five million bucks, it turns out, was used (the AP tell us) to pay off the institute’s debt. 

But don’t worry: the Kennedy Institute wasn’t singled out. Relief funds — which you might think would focus on struggling local libraries, community centers, and the like — also went to building a posh hotel and a minor league baseball stadium. And much, much more.

While politicians are good at spending money, especially for “emergencies,” they aren’t good at spending it well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Lab Leak Not Disproved

Wuhan, lab, bats, virus, covid

A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.

Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*

He expounds:

  1. The cited research papers, still un-peer-reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
  2. Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
  3. One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
  4. The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.

But the outside-the-market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.

So: massive selection bias.

And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-gun type evidence for gain-of-function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.

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Accountability privacy tax policy

Stay On Call 

facial recognition, taxes, privacy, freedom

Backlash can be good. Against lousy ideas, for example. Sometimes, the response to the backlash is to relinquish the lousy idea, at least temporarily.

We must hope for more than a moment of reprieve from the Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require facial ID recognition of persons who use certain functions of its website.

Both Republican and Democratic congressmen, among many others, were outraged.

It’s good that many congressmen regard some forms of surveillance as beyond the pale. (Meanwhile, legislation to promote scanning of everybody’s online messages at will, Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act, is back in Congress. Bipartisan Backlash, can you take a look at this?)

The IRS said that it wanted to use facial recognition technology to help prevent scammers from posing as taxpayers.

But a database of such facial info would itself pose a huge security risk. For decades now, we have been inundated with stories about major databases being hacked.

Nor would legal access have been restricted to the less-than-trustworthy IRS. A third-party vendor would have been involved.

So the IRS has retreated, saying they grasp “the concerns that have been raised” and pledging to pursue “short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The Biden administration has also proposed expanding IRS staff by 80,000+ personnel and permitting minute governmental monitoring of the bank accounts of millions of Americans — notions now in abeyance but undead. And who knows what other innovations in overseeing us are coming up?

Stay on call, Bipartisan Backlash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom international affairs media and media people

A Proud Sponsor

Proud Sponsor

More on the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity:

All the Tyranny in China — Common Sense
Thriving Totalitarianism — Common Sense
Disney’s Memory Hole — Common Sense
Strait Democracy — Common Sense
The Sound of Sino-Silence? — Common Sense
Pandemics — and Something Far Worse — Common Sense
The Most Deadly Disease — Common Sense
Friends & Enemies — Common Sense
‘One Child Nation’ Exposes the Tragic Consequences of Chinese Population Control -— Reason TV
Totalitarianized — Common Sense

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Accountability general freedom international affairs

The Real Thing

Uyghurs, China, Coke, Olympics
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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

COVID Cover-Up Criminal

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Covid, Rand Paul

On February 11, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci participated in a conference call with about a dozen scientists. The nation’s highest paid government bureaucrat was told that the quickly spreading COVID might have leaked from and even been created in the Wuhan lab, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, which Fauci heads) was funding, in part, through EcoHealth Alliance. 

What did Fauci do?

He worked mightily to discredit the idea.

That is, he engaged in a cover-up.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci about all this. Indeed, he posed a number of very specific questions, and got — for his trouble — generalities and counter-assertions from Fauci. 

The trail of evidence linking Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci of NIAID to the gain of function research (along with a Chinese plan to release “novel chimeric spike proteins” into Chinese air with the alleged aim of infecting bats) has been confirmed on the Pentagon end — Senator Paul referenced work by Project Veritas that performed this service. 

There’s really little question that gain-of-function was developed in Wuhan at the instigation of the Daszak-Fauci team. And that it was done despite DARPA’s reluctance, despite U.S. law. 

Let’s hope that Fauci’s cover-up was merely of a dangerous policy that would end in disaster and death, and the ruination of his reputation, not a genocidal conspiracy worthy of taking to The Hague for prosecution as a crime against humanity.

But everyone knows that cover-ups imply criminality. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights social media

The Expert De-Platformed

Covid, Fauci, science

Dr. Robert Malone researched mRNA technology in the 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He helped develop mRNA vaccines. He is a founder of Atheric Pharmaceutical. He’s got plenty of credentials. 

So you might think social media companies would respect his voice in the area of his expertise.

But no: for disputing official government assurances about the super-safeness of the vaccines, he’s been banned by Twitter (and copycat LinkedIn).

What precisely did he say that triggered the social media giants?

Well, Dr. Malone argues that for many youngsters the risks (like myocarditis) of being vaccinated outweigh the benefits of being vaccinated against what is a very low-risk infection for most younger people.

“I may be one of the very few that has this depth of understanding of the technology that doesn’t have a direct financial conflict of interest,” says Dr. Malone, who is himself vaccinated. “If I’m not allowed to speak about my concerns, whether they’re right or wrong . . . who is a valid person to participate in the dialogue?”

Nobody, doc. It’s because you’re so credible that you finally had to be stomped by the likes of Twitter. You’re too credible.

At the strongholds of official government doctrine, it’s not about figuring out the truth, encouraging independent judgment of risks and alternatives, or logical persuasion. Argue all you want, as rationally or irrationally as you want — just as long as you hew to the protean prescribed dogma.

Unsure what the set-in-stone dogma du jour is, precisely, on matters pandemical and vaccinatory? That’s easy. Just look up the very latest utterances of one Anthony Fauci.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Major Media’s Major Corruption

MSM, mainstream media, CIA, Surveillance, propaganda, PSYOP

The revolving door between regulated big business and regulatory agencies is a known problem. “Regulatory capture” is one of the concepts economists have used to explain it.

We got used to this sort of corruption in finance: under the Bush and Obama administrations, with Goldman Sachs serving as the Executive Branch’s talent pool. The Pentagon and its major contractors have long had a cushy, cross-pollinating relationship. And we are just beginning to learn about Fauci’s close ties to Big Pharma.

But the most dangerous employment overlap? Between the Deep State and major media news services.

Glenn Greenwald, in a Substack column on Sunday, calls our attention to an MSNBC opinion article titled “Julian Assange extradition could mean even more legal trouble for Donald Trump.” It was written, explains Greenwald, “by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI’s attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this.”

We in America tend to think of the news media’s role as that of a watchdog — against government corruption. Instead, we see, that this direct seeding of media roles with Deep State agents “is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets.”

In the Sixties, there was a program called Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA used a variety of techniques to control the media. Now “the CIA is the media.”

This is not a “free press.” It is a controlled press, with the mechanisms of the control right out in the open — simply look at the “journalists’” resumes.

Is this big business capturing regulators, or regulators capturing business?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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