Category: Accountability

Louder in Loudoun

“The drama that played out in upscale Loudoun County, Virginia over the last year or so,” Matt Taibbi writes at Substack, “cost Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe the governorship.…”

McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and previously governor (2014 – 2017) under Virginia’s one-term consecutive limit, lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin by 2 percentage points in Tuesday’s off-year election. That’s big news because Virginia is a blue state where just a year ago Democrat Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by a 10-point margin.*

“[T]he Loudoun County story,” notes Taibbi, “involves furious disputes between local parents and the school board over a variety of issues, including a pair of sexual assaults.”

Those two attacks involve a “skirt-wearing teen who raped a female classmate in [the] girls’ bathroom.” Convicted in juvenile court on two counts of sexual assault for the first incident, the lad has been accused of attacking another young female student — also in a school bathroom, but in a different school (having been transferred).

Yet, during a school board meeting discussion on transgender bathroom policies, one month after the assault occurred, school officials claimed there had been no incidents.

The lie was exposed only after the girl’s father, in attendance, became angry.

And was arrested.

“It was the woke cover-up that electrified the Virginia governor’s race,” declares the UK’s Daily Mail headline on their Election Day exclusive interview with the rapist’s mother.

That school officials would attempt to hide such incidents speaks to the crying need for accountability.

And for the right of parents to control their kids’ education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Republicans triumphed across the board, sweeping all three statewide offices — which breaks a Democratic Party streak dating back to 2012 — as well as winning back the Virginia House of Delegates. The GOP Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears will be the first black woman in that position and the Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares will become the state’s first Latino AG.

NOTE: Decided is this question: “How much say should parents have in what their child’s school teaches?” In a Washington Post exit poll, a majority of Virginians answered, “A lot.” Of those, 77 percent voted for Youngkin.

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Accountability general freedom media and media people social media

Unlinked at LinkedIn

Microsoft, Bing, LinkedIn, China, Uyghurs

Congressman Jim Banks is rebuking Microsoft for censoring its LinkedIn account holders who criticize the Chinese government.

This includes users in the United States.

“LinkedIn is pressuring U.S. citizens to remove posts critical of China’s dictatorship because, apparently, ‘regional laws’ compel them to do Xi’s bidding,” Banks tells the Washington Examiner. “That’s a lie. LinkedIn is simply selling out America’s values and national security in order to boost its bottom line.”

The congressman has written to the company, which connects job seekers to job providers.

He demands answers about how LinkedIn cooperates with Chinese censorship.

His allies include Carl Szabo, VP of a trade group called NetChoice. Szabo says that American tech firms “should actively push back on such [censorship] demands. China suppressing the profiles of American users should not be happening.”

Microsoft has a history of aiding and abetting the Chinese Communist Party, Chinazi Party for short.

Although Google withdrew its search engine from China in 2010 rather than (continue to) help China censor search results, the Bing search engine currently operates in China. And you can’t be a search engine in China without helping the CCP to censor.

Microsoft has even provided facial recognition resources used to track the Uyghurs, a Muslim population that the Chinese government has subjected to mass incarceration and torture.

A few years ago Microsoft apparently retreated on that facial-recognition front. But it shouldn’t be doing anything to help the Chinazi government to censor and repress.

Nobody should.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability ideological culture social media

Stossel Sues Facebook

“After 40+ years of reporting,” offers John Stossel on his Facebook page, “I now understand the importance of limited government.”

“I just sued Facebook,” Stossel posted yesterday. “I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t.”

What needs fixing?

Facebook’s fact-checkers dinged him with a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label for his StosselTV video “Are We Doomed?” — without challenging any specific fact. And regarding another video, “Government Fueled Fires,” Todd Spangler of Variety quotes the case, which accuses Facebook of “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.”

Stephen Green writes in support of Stossel’s $2 million lawsuit, demurring only to add that there’s only one little problem: “If there’s a way through the courts to change Facebook’s bad behavior, it’s going to take a judgment with a lot more zeroes on the end.”

The lawsuit in question is a defamation lawsuit.

I confess: it is for breach of contract that I am most annoyed with Facebook. The company brought us all in with an openness ethos and now relentlessly pushes progressive talking points. I suppose it’s futile to compete with Facebook’s lawyers on grounds of Terms of Use agreements, so perhaps that’s why the focus is on slander and libel and all that.

It is as liars and promise-breakers that Facebook’s ideological tyrants most grate.

What they did to John Stossel is unconscionable. But, sadly, not nearly uncommon enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability too much government

[Not] Just Plain Bats

Covid, bat, gain of function, China, lab

It’s been several months since I’ve focused on Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), which was funded by your tax dollars to “improve” upon viruses found in nature.

The evidence for this has been out there for some time, but many avoid drawing any conclusion, finding it circumstantial. Or something.

Remember Daszak being caught organizing the open letter in The Lancet, proclaiming all talk of gain-of-function research as “conspiracy” theorizing and “dangerous”?

Well, now The Lancet is reported to be preparing to publish an article going so far as to say that “there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV‑2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible.”

Meanwhile, my co-podcaster, on his LocoFoco Netcast, quotes Daszak’s own public boastings (from YouTube), effectively laying out EcoHealth Alliance’s gain-of-function research, talking of insertions of the spiked protein, and referencing to his colleagues in China.

And now another revelation, via science writer Matt Ridley. Specifically, Drastic Research reve a ls an earlier Daszak grant proposal to inject “deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanised and ‘batified’ mice.”

This proposal — “named ‘DEFUSE’” — was not accepted by … oh, and this gets good … DARPA.

“In other words, a branch of the federal government had already judged aspects of EHA’s research … as falling under the definition of GOF [gain of function], only for [Health and Human Services] to approve similar work without P3CO review in 2018 and 2019,” the Drastic Research report summarizes.

So it was too iffy for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but hunky dory with our medical bureaucrats?

The story is more than just about bats, it’s about laboratory manipulation of existing viruses to create new viruses.

Which is, well, batty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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bat/Covid

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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).

Accountability national politics & policies

Death By Definition?

“What we’re alleging is that gain-of-function research was going on in that [Wuhan] lab and NIH funded it,” Sen. Rand Paul told Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 37 years and the chief medical advisor to the president, at a Senate hearing last week.

Paul contended that Fauci had lied to Congress by claiming “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” when NIH did indeed finance such activity in that lab.

But Fauci denied that research met the official definition of “gain of function.”*

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” the senator asked incredulously.

“That is correct,” replied Fauci, before adding, “And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Many scientists,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “think Paul actually does know what he’s talking about. One of them is Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert Richard Ebright, whom Paul quoted as saying this research ‘matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research.’”

The dispute pits Kentucky’s junior senator, concerned over what actually happened, against the bureaucrat, wiggling out from the bad odor of a terrible policy by, apparently, redefining terms.

Mere logomachy.

“What everyone can now see clearly,” suggests Rogin, “is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk.”**

“Fauci is arguing the system worked,” the columnist maintains. “It didn’t.”

The senator has officially referred the matter of Fauci’s fibbing to Congress to the Justice Department for possible (but unlikely) prosecution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Any kind of animal virus that occurs in nature, that infects animals only, if you recombine it or mutate it or adapt it in the lab with other viruses so it has characteristics that change it from being an animal-only virus to being a virus that now can infect humans, that you’ve gained in function, you’ve gained pathogenesis or you’ve gained virulence — you’ve made it more dangerous,” Sen. Paul explained to Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “Without question this is what happened in the Wuhan lab.”

** “According to an intelligence fact sheet released by the Trump administration and partially confirmed by the Biden administration,” Rogin also points out, “the WIV took our help and used it to build another, secret part of the lab, where they worked with the Chinese military.”

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