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Accountability crime and punishment Fashion property rights Second Amendment rights

Don’t Make It Easy

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

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

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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Fifty-​One & Nine & Two

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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Back-​Pedaling at the Speed of Lies

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” challenges Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Never. I never did,” he told the New York Times last week.

We sure are a long way from the heady days when he proclaimed, “I am the Science.” It’s more like in the book of Genesis, where Cain asks the great rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

In other words, Fauci’s trying to set the record … crooked.

For Fauci was the Authority that bolstered all the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere, urging mask mandates and lockdowns and what-have-you.

Now, he is doing more than back-​pedaling. He is shifting blame. Blame for failed policies.

But he’s not alone in this. For The Epoch Times, Petr Svab notes another famous back-​pedaler: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Watch Ms. Weingarten declare on C‑Span, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” but click that link and read the Twitter crowd-​sourced fact-​checks, showing how that’s … deceptive:

We still argue about how much COVID leaders lied during the heat of the panic. I advised, at the time, to give them a little leeway.

Regarding policy, that is.

Not lying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability crime and punishment property rights

Half-​Win for Forfeiture Victim

In August 2020, Jerry Johnson made a mistake: he carried a large sum of money while flying from Charlotte to Phoenix to buy a semi truck for his business. Police grabbed the cash when he arrived in Phoenix.

Mr. Johnson had decided to use cash to avoid certain fees and on the assumption that traveling with cash is legal.

Perhaps it is legal according to mere law. But police often grab any large amount of cash they see someone carrying. They accuse the naïve owners of drug-​running and care nothing about actual evidence.

Threatened with jail when interrogated, Johnson signed a form that, he later understood, stated that the $39,500 was not his. The government kept the cash until he could wrest it back in court.

This, you may remember, is par for the course for civil asset forfeiture in America, where government agents behave like highway robbers.

But in this case — this course — the story didn’t end well for the robbers, for Jerry Johnson has gotten back his money. 

But he has not been made whole. As Land Line points out, in addition to all the time and trouble, there were the legal expenses that Johnson incurred before he obtained the help of Institute for Justice. 

And Johnson also lost business revenue: “There were a lot of business opportunities I’ve missed out on because that money was just sitting in a government account.”

Thankfully, the story is not over, yet, for there are organizations like Pacific Law Foundation and Institute for Justice to help victims of government predation at no charge. In this case, it was Institute for Justice that represented the victim in court.

IJ will continue the case to press for compensation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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