Category: insider corruption

Categories
education and schooling insider corruption

Principal Gets F and Payoff

education, school, cheating

Former principal of Maspeth High School, Khursid Abdul-​Mutakabbir, exemplifies the who-​gives-​a-​crap approach to education.

After a foot-​dragging investigation, the New York City Department of Education finally fired the man for urging staff to concoct fake grades, fake classes, fake graduation rates.

His attitude: “I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45, it’s your job to give that kid credit.”

An official report outlines the many derelictions at this public school. Yet when the local DOE removed the principal, it also gave him a seven-​year sinecure paying $260,000 a year.

Wha — ? Why? 

Well, they’re all members of the same club.

Such nihilism and grift are rampant, if not universal.

Calling the settlement a “deeply symbolic insult” to taxpayers and students, columnist Bob McManus wants Mayor Eric Adams to “claw back” the payoff to prove that he really does mean to “fight for public education.” 

Frankly, the conduct of everyone involved is life-destroying — not just a matter of insults and symbolism. 

The minds and futures of young people are at stake.

In many schools, things only get worse. Maybe your kids are stuck in a public school that cannot be reformed, with perverse ideological agendas displacing reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, never mind how to learn and think. Maybe homeschooling isn’t an option.

Glenn Reynolds advises shutting down the imploding public schools and replacing them with “universal vouchers, in the name of public health.”

Regardless of what specific reform we take to this mess, remember the goal: a learning lifeline to every kid who wants better. A choice. A chance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

Pucker Up

term limits, lipstick, pig, Michigan

“Never have so few applied so much lipstick to such a pig.”

That’s what term limits activist Kurt O’Keefe told the Michigan Board of Canvassers last week, as it considered the official title for a citizen initiative that he argues is anything but.

The Detroit attorney points out that the proposed ballot measure — sponsored by a group named Voters for Transparency and Term Limits — actually comes from “current and future politicians” and “current and future lobbyists.”

These insiders, who’ve “never been in favor” of term limits, seek to replace the 6- and 8‑year cap now in place in the House and Senate, respectively, with a 12-​year overall limit in both houses. At the hearing, proponents argued that the ballot title should declare simply that their measure reduces the current term limits — even though it would double terms in the House and up the Senate cap by 50 percent.

The initiative would also allow former Speakers and previously termed-​out legislators to return like the undead to their former capitol haunts. 

“This is a trick,” warned U.S. Term Limits National Field Director Scott Tillman. “We know it is a trick. They know it is a trick. They had to sweeten it up with transparency.”

That’s the lipstick.

Yet, the transparency fix, instead of simply enacting a financial disclosure system, orders the legislature to do so. Of course, the legislature cannot be forced to legislate, so the measure encourages endless lawsuits against the legislature. 

As if to further show just how sincere these politicians are, their “voters” front-​group has raked in $5 million from “unknown sources,” according to the Michigan Information & Research Service. 

They are transparent only in their self-​serving insincerity.

Oink oink.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
folly insider corruption national politics & policies

Vax Con?

con job, con, sting, covid

Is the mRNA “vaccine” push a “con job”?

“‘Confidence games’ (or ‘cons’)” are, according to scholars Barak Orbach and Lindsey Huang,* “a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct” perpetrated “to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial.”

In their paper, Orbach and Huang list a number of typical cons, noting that many “cons succeed by inducing judgment errors — chiefly, errors arising from imperfect information and cognitive biases.”

This is not an extended analysis of how a major con could be pulled off, but inducing a “mass formation psychosis,” which I’ve talked about before, is key. Government lockdowns and mask mandates have been very effective in creating pandemic hysteria, leading to government vaccination mandates. 

But perhaps it is how government officials deal with data that we most clearly see the confidence game aspect. 

The province of Alberta has just been caught using misdirection and disinformation to keep up the fear levels, distracting us from considering the negative impact of the vaxxes. Government officials “claim very impressive vaccine effectiveness by following the fraudulent standard set by the drug manufacturers in the pantomime clinical trials,” as the Metatron Substack page explains, “to ignore the adverse outcomes in the first two weeks post administration.”

The beneficial effects of the vaxxes, we are told, take a fortnight to go into effect. But when governments place all hospitalizations and deaths for those 14 days under the rubric of “unvaccinated,” they misinform — effectively burying negative side-​effects of the promoted therapeutic. And the switcheroo is not insignificant: Alberta had counted more than half of its vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated.

Tellingly, the province took off its website the data that showed all this.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Con Men and Their Enablers: The Anatomy of Confidence Games,” 85 Social Research 795 (2018), Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 18 – 27).

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability government transparency insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Major Media’s Major Corruption

MSM, mainstream media, CIA, Surveillance, propaganda, PSYOP

The revolving door between regulated big business and regulatory agencies is a known problem. “Regulatory capture” is one of the concepts economists have used to explain it.

We got used to this sort of corruption in finance: under the Bush and Obama administrations, with Goldman Sachs serving as the Executive Branch’s talent pool. The Pentagon and its major contractors have long had a cushy, cross-​pollinating relationship. And we are just beginning to learn about Fauci’s close ties to Big Pharma.

But the most dangerous employment overlap? Between the Deep State and major media news services.

Glenn Greenwald, in a Substack column on Sunday, calls our attention to an MSNBC opinion article titled “Julian Assange extradition could mean even more legal trouble for Donald Trump.” It was written, explains Greenwald, “by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI’s attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this.”

We in America tend to think of the news media’s role as that of a watchdog — against government corruption. Instead, we see, that this direct seeding of media roles with Deep State agents “is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets.”

In the Sixties, there was a program called Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA used a variety of techniques to control the media. Now “the CIA is the media.”

This is not a “free press.” It is a controlled press, with the mechanisms of the control right out in the open — simply look at the “journalists’” resumes.

Is this big business capturing regulators, or regulators capturing business?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption media and media people

Mount Maddow Blows

Rachel Maddow, Russia

Blemishes on journalists for leaping to conclusions, rather than doing actual reporting and investigation, are now erupting like terrestrial super-​zits of stratovolcano proportions.

I could be talking about the Kyle Rittenhouse case, or any number of other issues where corporate media has spectacularly failed us, but the Trump years left us with one humungoid blot on the landscape, Russia-​Russia-​Russia.

“Russiagate is already a sizable boil on the face of American journalism,” wrote Matt Taibbi last week, “but the indictment of Danchenko has the potential to grow the profession’s embarrassment to fantastic dimensions.”

That’s Igor Danchenko, key player in the Democratic conspiracy to take Trump down. But the “professional” about to be disgraced to “fantastic dimensions” is none other than MSNBC’s star pusher of the Steele Dossier, Rachel Maddow. 

Taibbi calls her response to Danchenko’s prosecution “a thing beyond.”

The case for the Steele Dossier, upon which Trump and his cronies were accused of massive corruption and even treason, is now in complete tatters. Danchenko has been caught in lies, and Hillary Clinton campaign insiders have been caught pushing, paying for, and plotting to promote those lies.

But Rachel Maddow? She’s in sneaky defense mode.

Dr. Steve Turley, in video con brio, quotes Erik Wemple’s Washington Post characterization of Maddow’s one-​sided coverage: “there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”

Now Maddow’s engaged in pointing out that Danchenko’s prosecutors, instead of making the case for Danchenko’s fabrications, concentrate on linking a trail of political connections with the Clinton campaign. Not true: the prosecution makes much of Danchenko’s lies. 

Yet, making “collusion” connections is precisely what Maddow did (relentlessly) against the Trump campaign and various Russian figures.

That’s a symmetry!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption Regulating Protest

De-​Licensing the Opposition

Scott Jensen

Scott Jensen is a family physician and a candidate for governor of Minnesota who opposes counterproductive lockdown measures.

His medical license is being officially investigated — for the fifth time — because of complaints about . . . well, what, exactly?

He has produced a video on the theme of “if it can happen to me, it can happen to you.” Here’s the kind of complaints that instigated the latest fake investigation:

  • Dr. Jensen challenged the validity of President Biden’s national vaccine mandate. Guilty as charged, he says.
  • Dr. Jensen is not vaccinated. “I’m not. I have a plethora of antibodies, because I have recovered from COVID.”
  • Dr. Jensen has opposed mandatory masks for school children. “Last I checked, school boards are making those decisions. I have my opinion, and I’m entitled to it.”
  • Dr. Jensen has promoted the use of ivermectin. “That’s a decision between a patient and a doctor.”
  • Dr. Jensen has “inappropriately” promoted the benefits of natural immunity. “I can run for office if I so choose.”

On the other hand, all this is pretty damning, isn’t it? Dr. Jensen has done perhaps the worst thing that any American can do: uttered opinions. 

Publicly.

I hope, Gentle Reader, that you yourself have never articulated an opinion in mixed company while also being licensed to do whatever it is you do to earn a living. Apparently, in the eyes of some people, these two things don’t mix.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts