Category: general freedom

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folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Energy Trap

madness of crowds, energy policy, electric cars, fuel, oil

After the spectacular failures of the COVID response, “the experts” appear to be on a roll. That is, they are once again not “following the science” but being led by politics, ideology, and the madness of crowds.

The big issues right now demonstrating mass folly on a societal level? Aside from agriculture policy, trade, subsidy, banking and high finance, and “climate change,” the big one — not unrelated to most of the rest — is the power grid.

About which our leaders seem to be nuts.

What we know is the supply of “renewable energy” is nowhere near enough to meet the general demand for energy. California’s a great example, announcing “the end of fossil fuel-powered car sales by 2035” but sporting a power grid that is already unable to handle demand, which became bitterly funny when the Golden State asked citizens not to charge their electric cars during high-demand hot days.

“US Power Grid Needs Trillions in Upgrades to Accommodate Renewable Energy Demands,” reads a recent Epoch Times feature.

Trillions.

It’s not as if America is rolling, like Uncle Scrooge, in trillion-dollar surpluses. As I type these words, the US Debt Clock shows the federal government quickly approaching $31 trillion in public debt.

So now we’ll need more trillions to keep the lights on?

Yes.

Our lives depend on electrical energy, our civilization runs on electricity, but our leaders have been painting us into a corner. Bad policies that hobble efficient fuel sources and pushing inefficient sources have set a trap.

And the only real way out of the trap is one politicians don’t like: admitting they were wrong and reversing their policies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

A Thousand Times Yes

strength, unity, purpose

“Yes,” President Joe Biden stated unequivocally in answer to an October 2021 CNN townhall question on whether he would “vow to protect Taiwan.” Biden repeated that “yes” three more times in his full reply.

Months earlier, this president spoke of democratic Taiwan as one of our key allies that we have a “sacred commitment” to defend. 

“Yes,” Mr. Biden emphatically informed a reporter back in May of this year who inquired, “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”

Last Sunday on 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley asked President Biden point-blank: “Would US forces defend the island?”

Again, the president replied, “Yes.”

“So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, U.S. forces — U.S. men and women — would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” Pelley followed up.

“Yes,” answered Biden.

Handlers-R-Us at The White House have walked back each and every one of these statements by the commander-in-chief to maintain the charade of “strategic ambiguity” — the U.S. strategy of not saying quite how we will respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A thoroughly silly policy.

And — come’on man! — the cat is out of the bag! Mr. Biden’s statements, as Aaron Blake wrote in The Washington Post, amount to “firmly committing to send troops to defend Taiwan if China invades.”

I hope the United States and other countries will stand — militarily — with Taiwan, and thereby prevent the Beijing bullies from snuffing out the freedom of 24 million free Taiwanese. 

Strength and unity and clarity of purpose are our best weapons against war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

The Indicted Have Gun Rights

self defense, gun rights, gun control, 2nd Amendment

The idea that those who are indicted for a serious crime may not buy a gun, is, I think, what many in America might think of as “common sense gun control.”

But it isn’t, for it rubs against the grain of the American legal tradition.

The pseudo-commonsense view appears nonsensical when boldly defended by the U.S. attorney’s office, which, The Texas Tribune informs us, argued that a “law to prohibit those under felony indictment from obtaining guns does not interfere with the Second Amendment ‘because it does not disarm felony indictees who already had guns and does not prohibit possession or public carry.’”

That argument boils down to this: if you retain some relevant gun rights, others may be taken away. 

Compare it to free speech: if the government allows you to talk freely with your family, its regulation of your conversations with neighbors is hunky-dory!

“The Second Amendment has always allowed laws restricting the gun rights of groups viewed by legislatures as posing a public-safety risk,” the prosecution elucidated, “including those accused but not convicted of wrongdoing.”

But U.S. District Judge David Counts, introduced in every account of this I’ve read so far as “appointed by former President Donald Trump” — so that must be important, eh? — denies this. He found no historical precedent for disallowing the accused and indicted from buying firearms.

Therefore, based on the recent Supreme Court decision,* Judge Countssays the government has no case. It’s still innocent until proven guilty.

That is, governments may not “take away” our rights until convicted of a specific crime, punishment for which is loss of liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* That U.S. Supreme Court case is New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights folly general freedom

Freedom of Disassociation?

forced inclusion

Groucho Marx famously quipped that he wouldn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member. Some people take this hankering to an extreme: they want to force every group averse to their membership to accept them.

Keywords: forced inclusion. The current political rage — thought to be a “right.”

Now, Yeshiva University, which calls itself “the world’s premier Torah-based institution of higher education,” does not accept homosexuality. It’s against the Law.

And by “the Law” they mean: the ancient Jewish scriptures.

For those of us who are neither Jewish nor gay, we might look upon both groups as “clubs.”  And being in neither, we might just shrug; we aren’t going to be accepted in the either ranks and that’s just fine.

But some students at Yeshiva University tried to form an LGBT group on campus. The university resisted, the case went to court, and a court ordered the university to accept the group. And then last week, the Supreme Court refused to order a stay on the lower court’s order.

In reaction, Yeshiva University has suspended all campus club activities.

“Every faith-based university in the country has the right to work with its students, including its LGBTQ students, to establish the clubs, places and spaces that fit within its faith tradition,” the university’s president proclaimed. “Yeshiva University simply seeks that same right of self-determination.”

Since the right to “freedom of association” is part of the Bill of Rights, one might think this would be non-controversial in America. And settled law. 

But one would be wrong. On both counts. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights general freedom social media

Facebook, the FBI’s Snitch

Facebook, FBI, spying

All we have is the word of Department of Justice whistleblowers.

They told the New York Post that over the last 19 months, Facebook has been cooperating with the FBI to spy on “private” messages of users “outside the legal process and without probable cause.”

The targets were gun enthusiasts and those who questioned 2020’s election results.

“They [Facebook and the FBI] were looking for conservative right-wing individuals. None were Antifa types.”

According to the whistleblowers, Facebook flagged allegedly subversive private messages and sent them to the FBI to be studied by agents specializing in domestic terrorism.

Facebook provided the FBI “with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena.” Subpoenas were then issued to obtain the conversations that Facebook had already revealed to the FBI.

According to one DOJ source: “As soon as a subpoena was requested, within an hour, Facebook sent back gigabytes of data and photos. It was ready to go. They were just waiting for that legal process so they could send it.”

Facebook has issued a denial. The FBI has issued a non-denial denial.

The allegations might seem very implausible but for the fact that as the November election approaches, the DOJ has been openly targeting Trump allies for claiming “that the vice president and/or president of the Senate had the authority to reject or choose not to count presidential electors.”

In short, for talking out of turn.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

Okay Not to Harm

freedom, slavery, equity, health, trans

A recent appeals court ruling means that (some) doctors and other medical practitioners won’t be forced to violate their ethical principles against doing harm.

The Fifth Circuit ruling affirms a lower-court decision “permanently enjoining [HHS] from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs.”

What is troubling about the decision is its apparent incompleteness.

In a truly free society, no private professionals or organizations would be coerced to offer their services to anybody. Everybody would be free to participate or to decline to participate in any transaction with a prospective customer related to any medical procedure. Just as any person is now (mostly) free to patronize or not patronize any provider of a good or service.

We don’t live in that free society. But at least we can hope that no person will be compelled to provide the types of services that violate the person’s moral conscience.

Like services they believe harm others.

That harm children . . . including the unborn.

So the court’s ruling is fine — as far as it goes. But it seems to protect only persons making religious objections, or only members of the Franciscan Alliance, not also non-religious medical practitioners who also morally object to providing abortions or sex-change operations.

Which means that there is more legal work to be done to protect the rights of all of us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fifth Amendment rights First Amendment rights general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Just a Board Whose Intentions Were Good?

Homeland Security, censorship, spying, social networks, free speech, disinformation

They say it was all a terrible misunderstanding.

The Department of Homeland Security has caved and is now closing its new Disinformation Governance Board. Critics had been disinformatively saying that the board would probably be used for censorious purposes.

Au contraire, says DHS — even though the board was originally headed by an exponent of countering wrongthink about such matters as the “alleged” Hunter Biden laptop. No. Per DHS, this board really, truly, deep down, supposedly had only benign intentions.

When announcing the shutdown, DHS also announced that it has a bridge to sell you.

(Gotcha! DHS didn’t announce anything about a bridge. That’s just a bit of disinformation that I perpetrated with the help of my woefully abused First Amendment–protected freedom of speech!)

In May, DHS Secretary Mayorkas insisted that the board was no threat to free speech. The point was to address threats “without infringing on free speech.” Rather, the board would be doing things like disputing the strangely persuasive misinformation that the U.S. now has an open southern border.

Even early on, though, the board had been planning to coordinate its anti-disinformative efforts with Big Tech social media firms, which have been censoring on behalf of government. And various government officials will still be working to delegate the nuts and bolts of violating the First Amendment to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al. No letup on that front in sight.

DHS may be ending its ill-named board. But beware: its spirit and agenda live on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: This board was previously discussed in these pages on May 2, in “Homeland Censorship Board.”

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general freedom ideological culture Voting

Thoughts on Nothingness

Liberty playing cards with Aristotle by DALL-E

“Democracy has nothing to do with liberty,” the Libertarian Party announced on Facebook, “just as so many of the world’s greatest minds have warned.”

Huh? Just exactly which “greatest minds” are we talking about?

Not Aristotle!

The party’s statement introduced a meme quoting Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the “Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher,” Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It read: “Democracy allows for A and B to band together to rip off C. This is not justice, but a moral outrage.”

Dr. Hoppe has a point, of course. The ‘will of the people’ can be just plain wrong . . . even, at times, malevolent.  A democratic vote can lead to the tyranny of the majority and even to a tyranny of the minority, as those politicians promising to serve ‘We the People’ end up serving themselves and their cronies.

I’ve not read Professor Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, where he sort of argues for monarchy over democracy, but I offer two points: (1) no one in their right mind talks of democracy without including the protections of basic individual rights, which have become the hallmark of democratic countries across the globe, and (2) no one in the real world thinks democracy is God.

Still, we won’t trade it for monarchy. 

My issue with this social media post, however, is really with the Libertarian Party’s comment that “democracy” — including the democratic means the party has purportedly been employing across the country for decades — has provided no past benefit and offers no future hope for sustaining or expanding our freedom.

So, don’t vote Libertarian this November?

I’ll take that under advisement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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“Liberty Playing Cards with Aristotle” by DALL-E (note that the AI has chosen to show Lady Liberty as bruised and beaten. Her torch appears to be made of tissue.-)

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The Natural Immunity We Need

CDC guidelines

“This is two years too late,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “but it’s a good step.”

Interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, is talking about new official COVID-19 guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC no longer recommends

  • the six-foot “social distancing” rule, which led to maximum comfort for paranoiacs, introverts, and Scandinavians in supermarkets and other public spaces;
  • that the unvaccinated quarantine after exposure;
  • testing for the asymptomatic; and
  • contact tracing outside of hospitals and places like nursing homes.

Bhattacharya’s interpretation of all this is that the “CDC is admitting it was wrong here, although they won’t put it in those words.”

Much of the new regimen is the result of understanding that natural immunity is a huge factor in the epidemiology of the disease. Bhattacharya’s complaint is that this has always been the case, and that the CDC and government lockdowners should have recognized this early on.

While the expert class has inflicted much damage, the CDC continues to whistle past the graveyard. “We’re in a stronger place today as a nation,” the author of the new guidelines insists, “with more tools — like vaccination, boosters, and treatments — to protect ourselves, and our communities, from severe illness from COVID-19.” 

But to get those mediocre-at-best vaccines past regulatory hurdles, government-directed medicine suppressed information about (and public discussion of) the most basic tools we have to treat new diseases. Governments at many levels, along with social media companies and CNN and many doctoring outfits, actively suppressed a number of treatments that could have saved lives, with HCQ and Ivermectin being only the most infamous.

The natural immunity we need to encourage most is skepticism toward government bureaucrats and Big Pharma flacks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom Second Amendment rights

Cannabis and Carry

guns, gun control, marijuana

The Biden Administration wants to make sure that marijuana users do not own guns. 

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried, a Democrat, is not with the administration on this matter. Her department oversees concealed carry permits as well as some cannabis regulation, and she “argues that prohibiting all cannabis consumers from owning guns violates the Second Amendment” as well as violating “a congressional spending rider, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, that bars the Justice Department from interfering with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws,” explains Jacob Sullum for Reason magazine. Fried has sued the federal government to allow Florida to grant concealed carry permits to marijuana users — something the federal government disallows.

The Justice Department has now asked the courts to dismiss the case.

This is especially rich, since President Biden himself has been on the liberal side of marijuana regulation — though certainly not with guns, where he’s on the tyrants’ side.

Among many inconsistencies, current law does not prohibit people addicted to legal psychoactive drugs from owning guns, as Sullum notes, nor make a big deal about alcohol, the abuse of which has a well-understood linkage with violence, while marijuana does not.

One could go through all the inanities, here, but we should not assume government makes sense on these issues. The federal government should generally not be in the business of regulating either gun ownership or drug usage.

States that recognize “constitutional carry” show how Florida could advance beyond the current mess of too much government interference in this realm. 

It wouldn’t be an issue were Florida to get out of the concealed carry permit racket.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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