Category: Accountability

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

After Anarchy, Sue!

Seattle, BLM, protests

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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Accountability national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Facing the Debt with Deceit

trillion dollar coin, platinum, folly

The “trillion dollar coin” solution to the federal debt reared its absurd head, again, during the recent “debt ceiling” brouhaha.

I wrote about it over ten years ago, when Big Talkin’ Republicans were challenging Big Spendin’ Democrats over raising the debt ceiling at that time. 

The idea is bold trickery, allowing the President to inflate the currency by leveraging Treasury’s Congress-given ability to coin platinum coins at any face dollar value. 

Typically, such collector coins sport on the reverse a value far below the metal’s value.* The trillion dollar coin would invert that, fixing the face value far, far above the metal value. The freshly minted coin would be sent to the Federal Reserve, covering the books that way.

It’s inherently deceptive and obviously ridiculous.

Thus it symbolizes contemporary politics quite aptly.

After the recent budget compromise that forestalled any real work of marshaling the federal government’s scarce (if astoundingly awesome) financial resources, however, the trillion dollar coin has been shelved.

For now.

Indeed, Democrats are tiring of the debt ceiling brinksmanship game. And it is mostly posturing. “Democrats have introduced a bicameral proposal to overhaul the debt ceiling process, leaning heavily into the recent default scare to push a bill that would essentially let Treasury ignore the debt cap and continue writing cheques with no limit,” explains The Epoch Times.

Would this any be better than the fake coin?

Perhaps more honest.

But, once again, it would be Congress giving away its authority. 

And until Congress can restrain its spending habits, we, the people, will always come up tails.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* On the day I checked, the spot price for an ounce of platinum was just over $1000, and the face value on the American Platinum Eagle remained $100, the ratio being a tenth of metal value.

trillion dollar coin, debt, Congress, folly

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Accountability crime and punishment Fashion property rights Second Amendment rights

Don’t Make It Easy

crime, robbery, stand your ground, duty to retreat

Rachel Rogers and Jennifer Ferguson, employees at a Lululemon in Georgia, were fired for neglecting to stand by mutely during a robbery and for then calling 911.

“They’re just full-blown, like, running circles around you grabbing as much as they can,” Rogers told WSBTV. “So, our reaction is to scream, ‘No! Get out! Leave!’ ”

The two employees called the police. The same thieves were caught when trying to rob another Lululemon store in the area the next day, perhaps because police were on the alert.

But two weeks later, Rogers and Ferguson were fired, without severance pay, for violating the retail chain’s policy of zero tolerance for calling 911 to report a robbery.

“We are not supposed to get in the way. You kind of clear path for whatever they’re going to do,” Ferguson said. “We’ve been told not to put it in any notes, because that might scare other people. We’re not supposed to call the police, not really supposed to talk about it.”

In a post blasting the company, Jennifer’s husband, Jason Ferguson, observed: “If we, citizens of the community, allow criminal activity to go unchecked, that is tacit approval for them to continue their ways.”

And how long can we hold onto our belongings and our civilization if we meekly usher in the Visigoths and Vandals and tell them go ahead, take whatever you want, we won’t try to stop you or even call the cops after it’s all over?

A lot of people, including higher-ups at Lululemon, have forgotten that property rights are at the foundation of civilization.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

Look Who Took a Mile

Deborah Birx, CDC, covid

Sometimes our dear leaders confess their lies just to prove to everybody how smart they are as grand strategists.

“Look at us! We out-manipulated, outfoxed everybody with our gloriously sophisticated strategy. Yes, we lied and provided political cover in order destroy the ability of so many people to walk around and make a living. This was the plan from the start. But we couldn’t say so. . . .”

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Deborah Birx, former CDC official and former Coronavirus Response Coordinator, clearly explains her give-us-an-inch/we’ll-take-a-mile method. “No sooner had we convinced the Trump Administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that.”

And: “The White House would ‘encourage,’ but the states could ‘recommend’ or, if needed, ‘mandate.’. . . The fact that the guidelines would be coming from a Republican White House gave political cover to any Republican governors skeptical of federal overreach.”

And: “Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to [avoid the] appearance of a full Italian lockdown. [But we had to match] as closely as possible what Italy had done — a tall order.”

Etc.

I disagree with those who say that Brix et al. should be tarred and feathered. But let’s not put them in charge of any future pandemics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Flush The White House

water pipes, ecology, Joe Biden, dishwasher, toilets

The people who gave America the double- and triple-flush toilet have set their sights on our automatic dishwashers.

Well, that’s not quite right. It was Congress that gave us the regulations that turned our toilets into a nightmare of clogging and extra time with plungers and flush levers. I wrote about this nightmare for years, advising readers to “Flush Congress.”

Now it isn’t Congress directly, but “the White House” — and the Department of Energy in particular, according to a story in The Epoch Times. “The Administration is using all the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” states Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

She’s talking about new efficiency standards for power and water usage which the DOE insists will “cut energy use by 27 percent and water use by 34 percent in new conventional household dishwashers.”

But anyone who has endured the toilets that came out in the 1990s knows that these putatively well-intentioned schemes burst the pipes, so to speak, making a mess and a mockery of any concept of efficiency. The Biden is enthusiastically pushing the piety that intentions matter most in regulation — the If We Mandate It, It Shall Be philosophy. Yet,The Epoch Times contrasts the current administration with the previous: “Trump criticized the push to raise efficiency standards, arguing that they made some appliances work less effectively and so were counterproductive” . . . and then mentions the multiple flushes of toilets that I cannot help but remember.

Trump’s surely right; The Biden’s surely wrong. And the ultimate result will be to raise the costs of appliances, thus hitting the poor hardest. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fifty-One & Nine & Two

Joe Biden, intelligence agency, spy, laptop, Hunter Biden

When 51 ex-intelligence officials signed the October 2020 “laptop letter,” they were lying to get Joe Biden elected as president. Yet, they also contributed to antagonizing Russia, further instilling distrust, and perhaps playing a part in the calculus prompting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a year after Biden was installed into his perilous perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The former spooks, spies, and psy-op masters claimed that the Hunter Biden story possessed “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Yet, anyone who’d been following the strange story of Biden family corruption, now clearly laid out in detail in a 36-page memorandum by House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), knew from the beginning that those 51 former intel bigwigs were lying through their teeth.

Now one of them, former CIA Director John Brennan, has been interrogated by Congress — and implicated another CIA Director for organizing the disinformation campaign.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had charged Brennan with recruiting the 51 signatories to the now-infamous letter, which not only provided ammo for Biden in the 2020 presidential debates, it enabled Twitter to suppress the story. But it now appears that the recruiter was, instead, then-Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell. 

In his four-hour testimony, Brennan confessed that the letter was “political” — that is, designed to get Biden elected.

The truth about the Biden family shake-down system, which evidence shows involved a whopping nine Biden family members, not just the “Big Guy” and his brother and his wayward son, taking in the big bucks from foreign sources, using a variety of bank accounts and shell corporations, but with no discernible product.

Back in 2020, those 51 trusted experts wrote: “It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

And past time for our Deep State to halt its very clear pattern of domestic election interference.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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