Category: Internet controversy

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fraud ideological culture Internet controversy political economy

X Marks the Success

Elon Musk, grift, government contract, private enterprise, taxes, technology

Yesterday, I defended the honor, so to speak, of Elon Musk against Eric Peters’s charge — published, on his website — that the high-tech magnate is a “grifter.”

I focused only on the free speech angle. But Mr. Peters (“the libertarian car guy”) didn’t limit himself to criticizing X. He also criticized Tesla, SpaceX and DOGE.

Musk, Peters notes, “has just become a trillionaire by dint of the IPO of his Space Xcrement grift.” Folks bought into SpaceX, he says, because “they believe there is a Tesla roadster in orbit around the Earth and that we’ll soon be able to buy tickets for a trip to Mars.”

Is Peters suggesting that Musk did not send a Tesla Roadster into space? Is this some new sort of (forgive me) “conspiracy theory”? Truth is, the Roadster orbits the Sun, coming back from beyond the Martian orbit.

What does he think is really going on here? What Musk’s investors “have bought into is the grift of government contracts,” he says, “which are paid for with dollars fleeced from the tax sheep. People who buy Space Xcrement stock can share in the grift, of course. But it does not change the nature of the grift.”

While the bulk (but definitely not the whole) of SpaceX’s clients are government agencies, most importantly NASA, remember something that one might forget while reading Peters’s fun rant: Musk is indeed putting objects into orbit, with new and astounding technology of amazing efficiency, and NASA has announced that SpaceX’s biggest and best will soon take astronauts back to the Moon.

As for Tesla, these cars are on the road. They work. I wouldn’t buy one, but I wouldn’t call it a grift a million times, or even once. And Musk himself has said he’d happily produce cars without the subsidies. But he continues to use the system set up for more than just him — the usual businessman rationale.

Criticizable? Yes. Wholly a grift? No.

And as for DOGE, it’s not as if Musk did not try. He just got little support from Congress . . . or the President. Too bad. Still not a grift.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Internet controversy political economy

A Quiz to Teach

affordability, inflation, costs, bureaucracy, government, regulations

I’m too old.

I’m too old, that is, to qualify as a contestant in the “million dollar question” drawing held, this summer, by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). To be eligible to win the million-buck prize (minus taxes!) one must be 18-35 years of age. (I’m a bit older than 35.) FEE is sponsoring this Million Dollar Contest Quiz as a way to promote the idea of a free society and its superiority to never-ending government regulation, taxation and subsidy.

What’s the question?

Nothing other than “what’s behind the affordability crisis?”

The answer, in short, is too much government.

But the quiz format helps explain that better.

“Most people blame capitalism,” we read, “but the reality is different. Healthcare, education, housing, and childcare are some of the most heavily regulated, subsidized, and mandated sectors in the American economy. They aren’t free markets. They’re crippled capitalism; markets distorted by decades of government intervention until they can no longer deliver quality at a price people can afford.”

If you are old, like me, you have probably encountered this case before. (If you read this column, you most definitely have!) But young people? They’re not so lucky. Most have endured public schools and government-regulated and -subsidized universities and received, there, increasingly Marxist nonsense about how capitalism enslaves us all.

When capitalism — basically, free markets with markets in capital goods, making up what Ludwig von Mises called “mass production for the masses” — liberates. 

Who? Just white males?

No. Free markets liberate all peaceful people. As the quiz and its answers make clear.

So take the quiz. Learn something. But, if you’re over 35, pass it on to a young person!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war general freedom ideological culture Internet controversy national politics & policies

Deuce Bigelow, Political Philosopher

Rob Schneider, the draft, conscription, freedom

Americans have not endured a military draft since the 1970s. Our bodies and very lives aren’t conscript. Just our fortunes.

Not perfect, true, but as political trades go it’s better for equal freedom than slightly lower taxes and a return of the draft, which conscripts some* to benefit (the story runs) “all.”

The all-volunteer force has produced the world’s best military . . . without “slave” labor.

Comedian Rob Schneider thinks differently.  

“We must once again recommit ourselves to one Nation under God, indivisible,” he posted to X recently. “Therefore, we must restore the military draft for our Nation’s young people.

“Each and every American, at eighteen years of age, must serve two years of military service. They could also choose to serve part of that time overseas or in country in a volunteer capacity,” he went on.

“Unlike in today’s Universities, our young people will learn how truly great their country is and how unique and incredible are the Freedoms that this Nation bestows upon them.” But wouldn’t the best place to learn of American freedoms be living free in America? 

Other criticism leaned to mockery, such as the parody movie poster of Deuce Bigelow Joins the Army. 

Schneider later clarified that he aims for less military action: “A military with EVERY SEGMENT OF SOCIETY REPRESENTED would make the DEPLOYMENT of TROOPS and foreign wars LESS likely as there would be MORE accountability at the highest levels of power.”

This notion is, explains The Epoch Times, “part of a public appeal for Americans to return to traditional values.”

But surely the all-volunteer service is more traditional, the norm for most of our history, and, especially in the sense that freedom to join, or not, embodies liberty better than coercion does. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The all-volunteer force is admittedly not an exact replica of our society, representing “every segment.” It is better than that. Better educated. Better motivated. In better shape. Consider that the military cannot use at least 12 percent of the population for any purpose.

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Internet controversy litigation

Sony’s Scam Scuttled

Supreme Court, copyright, censorship, free speech, property

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can’t be forced to deprive customers of Internet access on the basis of an unverified complaint about copyright violation. And can’t be held liable for refusing to kill a customer’s access.

The ruling holds that a service provider “is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement. . . .”

The plaintiff? Sony. 

The defendant? Cox Communications. 

According to the ruling, Sony “alleged that Cox contributed to its users’ infringement by continuing to provide Internet service to subscribers whose IP addresses Cox knew were associated with infringement.”

Of course, Cox cannot “know” that a user had infringed some copyright merely because it got an automated notice that a user had done so. Cox is just an Internet service provider, not a judge, jury, or hander-out of penalties for unestablished crimes.

Had the high court ruled otherwise, the consequences would have been dire.

“Under the legal standard the labels wanted,” Reclaim the Net observes, “an ISP that received enough of these automated complaints and didn’t disconnect the account could face catastrophic financial liability. A Virginia jury bought that theory in 2019 and hit Cox with a verdict of over $1 billion.”

The decision bodes well for rulings on other attempts to transform ISPs — or PC operating systems, satellites, or any other gateway to modern life — into instant wielders of crippling punishment . . . no trial, no judgment, no justice allowed. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Modern Tech Irrelevant

censorship, Fauci, free speech, First Amendment

“I’ve never been more pleased by ‘losing’ in my life,” tweeted Jay Bhattacharya.

What makes the Director of the National Institutes of Health a “loser”?

Well, the doctor (who also serves as current Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control) has not always served in the federal government. In his days between Trump administrations he’d run afoul of censors on social media. Now he’s jubilant that a major case against censorship has come to a freedom-of-speech conclusion.

Aptly, he started that post on X with “Huzzah!”

The actual news? “The New Civil Liberties Alliance, on behalf of its clients Jill Hines and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty,” reads the official press release of the lawyers, “has reached a settlement agreement and Consent Decree concluding the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against government-induced social media censorship.”

This follows an executive order by President Trump on the first day of his new administration. The president had declared that the federal government, under President Joe Biden, had “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

This not a judicial ruling. It’s an agreement, the key point being, “The Parties agree that modern technology does not alter the Government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.”

Specifically, the agreement (in the lawyers’ words) “prohibits the U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and YouTube.” And more.

Director Bhattacharya calls it a “huge win for all Americans.”

You bet Huzzah!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy privacy

Think of the VPNs

UK, surveillance, VPN, censorship

It’s for the kids. Let’s remember that. If bureaucrats and politicians get massive amounts of new power to lord over us, this is just a happy side effect.

Reclaim the Net reports that during recent debate in the U.K.’s House of Commons about a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, lawmakers rejected proposed amendments that would have required age verification to use virtual private networks (VPNs) and certain other services. 

That’s good. People use VPNs to avoid being tracked and identified by such tyrannical governments as those of China or the United Kingdom.

And any ID requirement would increase the chances that governments discover the identity of users no matter what rules VPN providers are supposed to follow to prevent this.

But Brits cannot relax just yet. Amendments that lawmakers did approve would compel Internet service providers to “restrict children’s access to specific online platforms, impose time-of-day limits on when services can be used, and mandate age verification across nearly any platform that enables users to post or share content.”

Time-of-day limits? Aren’t parents the ones who tell their kids when it’s bedtime?

If we do descend into a dark totalitarian night with no freedom, no privacy, a telescreen in every room, we’ll have to look on the bright side: It was for the kids. The kids needed to be protected from algorithms, choice, freedom, the deficiencies of merely parental oversight, and books with pages addictively connected to adjacent pages. 

Those kids. Always causing trouble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture Internet controversy

Run Rampant

conspiracy

We live in a great Age of Conspiracy Theories.

I’m not quite on board.

As the Internet grew up, with it came all the condemnations of conspiracy theories, run rampant. The Internet, we were told, was problematic in that not only was information readier at hand than ever before, but so was it easier to share and nurture all these goofy conspiracy theories.

You know: JFK was killed by someone other than Oswald, or also by others, in addition to Oswald. 

Or . . . UFOs are real, and the government is covering it up.

Or the Rothschilds are behind it all.

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. 

Ick.

Yet: The government now admits that UFOs are real, implying that it was, ahem, lying in the past.

Further: As we uncover the grotesquerie in the Epstein Files, we learn that he proudly served Rothschild banking interests!

So let’s not get started on the JFK assassination.

One reason conspiracy theories are prominent is that we are uncovering so many conspiracies. Actual conspiracies. Like the Wuhan lab business, or the suppression of information about the mRNA “vaccines,” or . . . must we go on and on? 

I don’t like conspiracy theories. I said I’m not on board. We need to work towards a world not built for conspiracies. This means whittling down government, with its current vast powers to take and to “give.” And siphon off wealth at each step. While sidestepping transparency.

Ask yourself: Does our political-legal environment actually discourage conspiracies?

That question almost answers itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy regulation

Hating X: The Naked Truth

DEMS, censorship, Senate, EU, X, Twitter

Why do so many U.S. Democrats, like some Europeans, want to outlaw X?

The current stage of the U.S. assault on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter takes the form of senatorial demands that X be removed from iOS and Android app stores.

Why the enmity? 

Well, under the ownership of Elon Musk, X lets people say and write stuff that Democrats dislike. Such as criticism of Democratic policies and politicians, just the kind of speech the First Amendment was drafted to protect. (Criticism of Republican, Libertarian, communist, and anarchist policies and politicians? Also protected.)

The rationalization for the proposed ban is that X’s AI software, Grok, can generate pictures of nude or nearly nude people.

The ability to generate such images is hardly unique to this particular chatbot. If X is to be banned from app stores because of the possibility that users may post generated nudes on the platform, many more social media platforms would, logically, also have to be snared by the censorship net.

Yet, reports Reclaim the Net, the letter sent to the CEOs of Apple and Google “by Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Luján, and Ed Markey asked the tech giants only about X and demanded that the companies remove X from their app stores entirely.”

Unsurprisingly, X has announced that the nude-ifying feature of Grok has been limited. I asked Grok, and it said that “there is now a taboo/restriction on generating or editing nudes (or near-nudes/revealing attire) of real, existing people from photos. It will refuse prompts to digitally ‘undress’ or sexualize identifiable real individuals. Attempts often result in refusal, blurring, or error messages.”

Fixed?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs Internet controversy

Starlinking Iranian Protest

Iran, protests, Elon Musk, Starlink, technology, freedom

In June 2025, Elon Musk helped protesters in Iran by providing free access to his Starlink satellite service. The service restored a means of communicating with each other and the rest of the world that had been blocked when the Iranian government shut down the country’s Internet. 

The mullahs tend to do that when the pressure on their regime reaches a certain pitch. As has certainly happened again over the last few weeks.

Some 500 protesters have been killed so far, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, as the unrest spreads.

Again, the Iranian government has shut down the country’s Internet.

Is Musk stepping in? Middle East Online has reported that Iranians with smuggled Starlink terminals, which are illegal to possess in Iran, will again have Starlink-provided Internet access, asElon Musk’s Space X activated Starlink “as of January 9, 2026.” If the story is accurate, protesters with a terminal will again have free access to the Internet for a limited time.

In the past, Iran has complained to international bodies about Starlink’s satellites . . . and tried to jam their signals, but to no avail.

The few reports on the Starlink access attribute the news to Israeli Channel 14. Other recent reports, though, suggest that President Trump “will speak with SpaceX owner Elon Musk” about restoring Iran’s Internet.

Let’s just stipulate that if Starlink has not yet been made available to the protesters, it would be great if it were.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture international affairs Internet controversy

Constant Caved

China, censorship, FreeWeChat, free speech

Sometimes people suggest that the People’s Republic of China is no threat beyond its borders.

You can’t reach this doctrine based on a thorough canvass of the evidence. From China’s perspective, though, it is true insofar as the Chinese government treats its borders as encompassing the entire earth and perhaps even the moon.

What is also true, though, is that not every person or organization outside of China that advances China’s totalitarian agenda is being threatened by China.

For example: the company Constant, which operates the hosting service Vultr. Based in Florida (a U.S. state), Constant has willingly cooperated with Beijing’s censorship agenda as promoted by the China-based conglomerate Tencent.

Tencent owns the social media platform WeChat. As the Chinese Communist Party demands of all such platforms within China, WeChat censors discussion of topics that the CCP dislikes, e.g., Tiananmen Square or Xi Jinping pictured as Winnie the Pooh. 

An organization called GreatFire produces a Chinese-language website, freewechat.com, which archives many of the posts on taboo subjects that get censored on WeChat.

Since 2015, FreeWeChat had been hosted by Constant’s Vultr — until several months ago, when Vultr started receiving harrumphing letters from Tencent, demanding that it stop hosting FreeWeChat. Vultr obeyed; dropped FreeWeChat.

Which, fortunately, managed to transfer its site to another hosting service.

Tencent’s letters offered an array of specious claims that GreatFire refuted in detail. GreatFire’s attempts to communicate with inconstant Constant about the matter have had no effect. Nevertheless, FreeWeChat and its noble mission survive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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