Category: Accountability

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Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

Justin Trudeau, freedom, authoritarianism

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.” 

I’m going to quote an anarchist. 

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-​tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-​protest, anti-​free-​speech, anti-​due-​process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order. 

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

freedom,order, morn

* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-​pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-​type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

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Accountability meme responsibility

Governments and Experts

experts, Ohio, train derailment, explosion, poison

(pictured above: mostly peaceful explosion)

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Accountability media and media people responsibility

A Question Best Left

Covid, science, scientism, Congress

“One of the world’s most sensitive and consequential scientific questions will soon be grist for discussion among the members of a congressional subcommittee,” bemoaned David Quammen last month in The Washington Post. “The question is this: Where did the virus that causes covid-​19 come from?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

Science writer Quammen admits “the origin question is a seductive one,” but argues it is a “mystery” these congresspeople “will be least likely and least qualified to solve — and they should focus their mission elsewhere.”

While our career congresspeople do not, on the whole, sport the credentials best suited to the investigation, I’m sure they’ll invite some real-​life scientists to testify. Moreover, the idea of telling folks — even politicians — not to worry their pretty little heads about an issue causing them concern … well, that might understandably rub you the wrong way.

The “science journalist” says it’s “a scientific question best left to scientists.” 

Though also not a scientist, Quammen seems somehow to have settled upon the answer to the question … that he doesn’t want Congress asking.

He calls the origin of COVID-​19 a “not-​quite-​solved mystery” since most “experts say they believe this virus almost certainly reached humans by natural spillover — that is, from a nonhuman animal host.”

Not via a lab-​leak, mind you.

Yet, “almost certainly” doesn’t sound scientifically very certain at all. It does, however, fit well with Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. 

You decide whether Quammen’s prose is inspired by science or politics:

Consider one implication you might draw from a lab leak: We need less science, especially of the sort that fiddles with dangerous viruses. And from a natural spillover: We need more science, especially of the sort that studies dangerous viruses lurking in wild animals. From a lab leak: It was those foolish scientists in a Chinese lab who unleashed this terrible virus upon us. Suspicion, accusation, presumption of guilt and even a tincture of racism may therefore inform our relations with China, not an effort to encourage transparency and scientific exchange.

Catch that? It’s important that COVID’s origin be as Big Science says … or the racists win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom local leaders term limits

Political Babes

Robert Dover , Nebraska, term limits

Robert Dover is a freshman state senator in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, appointed last year by the governor to fill a vacancy. Dover says that learning the ropes at the capitol has been like “drinking from a fire hose.”

I sure hope he’s found the bathrooms. 

But have no fear: This rookie has already overcome that lack of experience, sponsoring a constitutional amendment, which faster than a Nebraska minute has 40 of 49 state senators enthusiastically signed on. 

What has folks at the capitol so excited? His amendment, LR22CA, would dramatically weaken their current term limit by giving legislators an extra term, so they can serve 12 years, before taking a break, and not be limited to just eight.

“Dover,” the Nebraska Examiner informs, “said he quickly learned how term limits were a bad idea after talking with legislative veterans, state agency heads and lobbyists.”

“Everyone I talked to said it was a horrible thing,” he offered. “To a person, they said (term limits) took away from the consistency at the Capitol.”

By which he means, the senator elaborated — and as the Lincoln Journal Star reports — maintaining “the right relationships between senators or interest groups to strike compromise.” 

Yes, indeed: the longer politicians stay in office the more they do “compromise” with special interests. 

“Dover said he understands term limits ‘are very popular’ among the electorate,” the Journal Star noted. Apparently, he just doesn’t get that those are the folks he is supposed to work for. 

The senator complained that Liberty Initiative Fund, my organization, is sending postcards to voters across the state to inform them about his bill, calling our effort “a waste of money.”

That tells me it is money well spent. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Term limits have a long history of battling the political establishment in the Cornhusker State, which I wrote about back in 2011.

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Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling

Problem Student, Problem Admin

school problem, problem student, gun, violence, education

“School downplayed warnings about 6‑year-​old before teacher’s shooting, staffers say,” The Washington Post headlined its Saturday report.

Weeks ago, elementary school teacher Abigail Zwerner was shot by a first grader in their Newport News, Virginia, classroom. Authorities are not sure of the precise motive but have called the attack “intentional.”

Zwerner remains hospitalized in stable condition, while her child assailant is in emergency custody undergoing “court-​ordered mental health treatment.”*

School officials received a tip that the boy had brought a gun to school but did not find the weapon in their search.

More disturbing, The Post interviewed “educators claiming that Zwerner raised alarms … and sought assistance” but “that school administrators waved away grave concerns about the 6‑year-old’s conduct.” The lad reportedly “threw furniture and other items in class,” once “barricaded the doors to a classroom, preventing a teacher and students from leaving,” and “was known campuswide for disruptive and violent behavior.”

One educator revealed that “the boy wrote a note telling a teacher he hated her and wanted to light her on fire and watch her die.” When brought “to the attention of Richneck administrators,” however, the teacher “was told to drop the matter.

“Several teachers said they received no support when they faced violence in the classroom or attacks from students,” the article informed. “Some speakers claimed the district is more interested in keeping discipline statistics low than in taking meaningful action to address students’ problems.”

The Post’s story was hampered by numerous school personnel refusing to talk citing their fear of reprisals from school authorities. 

While mental health help must be addressed, there is no solution to problems if administrators act like crooked politicians, simply sweeping aside serious issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In Virginia, a person must be seven years of age to be charged with a crime, so the first grader will not be prosecuted.

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Collapse of the Coronavirus Consensus

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand, authoritarian, Covid, zero tolerance

Jacinda Ardern is stepping down as New Zealand’s prime minister. In her teary farewell declaration, she glossed over her main contribution to world history: the policy of “Zero COVID.”

She even gave China a run in that race to medical totalitarianism.

Tellingly, the coverage in the Washington Post went through tens of paragraphs — much of it holding her up as some kind of hero for pushing lockdown and vax mandate policies as if they exemplified her fabled “personal style of consensus-​based governance” — before explaining the most likely reason for her resignation: “In recent months, Ardern’s broader popularity had begun to slip” and “her party is widely expected to lose this year’s election.”

My, “consensus” sure evaporated fast.

Top-​down commands are of course not consensus, which voters tend to figure out sooner or later. 

The once toothsome, now merely skeletally toothy, politician leaves in ignominy as “the consensus” about COVID shifts worldwide, as people realize they’ve been had: that the lockdowns didn’t save lives (excess deaths now being a big deal around the world) and the vaccines were problematic at best. From the start.

Ardern is not the only politician who rode the wave of the forced pseudo-​consensus on coronavirus only to collapse in defeat. New York Governor Cuomo was the first to suffer that disgrace.  There will be many others — not least, perhaps, contenders for the 2024 presidency, Trump and Biden. 

Perhaps more important than the fate of any single politician is what scientists and other “experts” are beginning to admit: that the figures of hospitalizations and deaths that spurred much of the panic constituted demonstrable misinformation. Bad data — which of course we realized here early on.

Unfortunately, the media’s “experts” — like CNN’s and WaPo’s go-​to gal Dr. Leana Wen — tend not to leave in infamy, despite their complicity in spreading falsities that allowed politicians to wreak so much damage.

That would require, you see, CNN and WaPo to admit they had spread the dreaded “misinformation and disinformation” which they proclaim only others do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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