Category: Accountability

Won’t Come A-Knockin’

The Internal Revenue Service says it will end “most” surprise visits to homes, like the one an agent made to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi the day he was telling Congress about governmental use of social media to censor people.

According to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, the many surprise visits each year looked bad, and “making this change is a common-sense step.” (The IRS wants to still be able to surprise-visit taxpayers whose assets it is seizing. . . .)

Let’s hope that the reform, even if partial and inadequate, is for real. It’s long overdue.

But can we trust these “revenuers”?

The agency periodically says that it will now respect taxpayer rights, now be nicer, etc., usually soon after publicity about awful IRS abuses. As a result of such attention, some IRS personnel are then probably nicer in some ways to some taxpayers sometimes.

And things could always be worse.

Indeed, they may be getting worse. Our Congress recently moved to expand IRS funding by $80 billion over the next ten years (part of the laughably named Inflation Reduction Act). Over the last few years, the IRS has spent millions on “weaponry and gear.” And the question of what to do about the latest bad-looking IRS abuses of the taxpayer never seems to go away.

It will probably never be realistic to expect the IRS to always play nice and in strict accordance with all pertinent legalities and constitutional rights.

But if the Congress that funds the IRS actually represented us, the American people, maybe these issues would’ve been solved a long time ago.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags corruption, government, IRS, tax policy

Accountability government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies

Bless You, John Kerry

John Kerry, climate change, global warming

It is hard to find the words.

Having just finished wringing out a soaked handkerchief, soggy with tears of gratitude for your recent act of high nobility and raw courage in defying the worst aspects of current U.S. policy and your own dismal and dismaying track record of silly pronouncements as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, an actual title I might add, I wanted to take a moment to say Thank You.

Thank you, sir, thanks for declining to again deploy your eloquence, charisma, and illogic in the service of the same old dreary nonsense.

For when asked during a recent congressional hearing whether the United States would be contributing to a fund to pay “climate reparations” to countries harmed by extreme manifestations of weather, aka “climate-driven” natural disasters, you said, flatly, “No, under no circumstances.”

Wha . . . ? Was this the same man who likened the fight against “climate change” to the fight against the Nazis in World War II?

I mean, I’ll believe it when I don’t see it, but for now I just want to say: Wow!

Especially since last year’s Conference of the Parties, COP27, billed as “a defining moment in the fight against climate change,” where the United States did express support for such payments.

So the U.S. will not, after all, be using taxpayer money to appease other countries for also experiencing weather. Great news. For every minute it lasts, I really appreciate it.

I am veritably dripping with . . . gratitude.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom international affairs

Austerity Theater

Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?

Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.

But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?

She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.

While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious.

She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.

For the show.

Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.

We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies?

They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.

That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special.

For them, the elites, austerity is just a show.

To set us up to suffer — for real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags climate, Climate Change Austerity, elites

Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Infected by Politics

covid, science, scientist, politics, politicians

In 2020, circumstantial evidence suggested that the COVID-19 virus had originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Let’s say that the available data, limited by Chinese uncooperativeness, couldn’t exclude the possibility of a natural origin. Nevertheless, the evidence certainly sufficed to prevent the escape-from-lab explanation from being reasonably deemed an implausible “conspiracy theory.”

Years later, U.S. officials who probably also knew better three years ago have acknowledged that, yes, escape from the lab is likely how the pandemic began.

We’re also learning from communications that have come to light that the authors of an influential 2020 paper published in Nature “proving” that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct” fudged their reasoning for fear of China.

Co-author Andrew Rambaut, to co-authors: “Given the shitshow that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”

Co-author Kristian Andersen: “Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”

The paper itself asserted that the authors’ analyses “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct . . .” (emphases added). And: no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

This paper was then used to rationalize censorship of persons proposing the Wuhan lab as the site of origin. It was completely political; the scientists were acting as politicians and not scientists when they authored it. Better to blame bats than the dreaded Chinazis.

Funded by the U.S. Government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, politics, science, scientism

Accountability government transparency international affairs

Patients Zero (1, 2, 3)

Three-and-a-half years late, the U.S. Government is admitting and publicizing the first victims of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China — who just so happen to be scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a Substack article by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, we get something close to actual evidence strengthening “the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).”

The “patient zero” is not one but three, namely:

Ben Hu
Yu Ping
Yan Zhu

The Substack authors quote Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19, who identifies Ben Hu as the “star pupil” of “the bat woman of China,” who, with Yu Ping, co-authored a paper on the coronavirus strain in question with said “bat woman.”

David Asher, who led a State Department inquiry on the virus’s origin during the Trump Administration, told The Daily Mail: “I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in the hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus.”

Much of the talk from officials in the U.S. and in China has stretched our credulity — but they were obviously trying to cover their foolhardy and borderline illegal gain-of-function research program.

Unfortunately, a great deal remains unclear, like “who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.”

But on that latter point, we have a good idea.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

After Anarchy, Sue!

In 2020, in Seattle, Washington, “anarchists” took over a section of the Capitol Hill district and set up their own ersatz government, first called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and then, confusingly, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). At the crime scene, which went on for weeks during what Seattle’s mayor called “The Summer of Love,” the anarchistic element was always a bit hard to figure, but the Black Lives Matter (BLM) presence stuck in memory.

Now it’s routinely considered a BLM event.

What it accomplished was a lot of violence and property loss. So Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, a shop in the center of the 10-block CHAZ/CHOP territory, is suing.

Not Black Lives Matter.

Which the owner, Molly Moon Neitzel, takes pains to say she still supports: “At Molly Moon’s we hold race equity at the top of our list of our priorities for how we want to make the world better. Black Lives Matter. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday, June 7 is not meant to undermine that important message,” Ms. Neitzel explained.

She’s also not suing the individuals who organized and engaged in the insurrection/conquest, especially the 30 or so “protesters” eventually arrested.

The target? The City of Seattle.

Molly Moon demands compensation for revenue losses, of course, and the “team morale impacts we experienced during and for many months after CHOP caused by the City of Seattle’s decision to affirmatively create and assist the CHOP occupation of Capitol Hill, to abandon the police precinct and to stop responding to public safety needs in our beloved Capitol Hill community.”

In short: Blame the government for not protecting you from the criminals you support!

One might laugh were it not for all the violence that this very attitude excuses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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