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media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Bashing Climate Change

Vivek, climate change, global warming, debate

“[T]he climate change agenda and the policies are killing more people than climate change,” Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy informed CNN’s Dana Bash yesterday. “That’s the reality.”

He explained: “The climate-related death rate — tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves — it is down by 98 percent over the last century. For every 100 people who died of a climate-related disaster in 1920, two die today. And the reason why is more abundant and plentiful access and use of fossil fuels.”

Attacking the “anti-fossil fuel agenda,” Ramaswamy added, “Eight times as many people today are dying of cold temperatures, rather than warm ones. And the right answer to all temperature-related deaths is more plentiful access to fossil fuels.”

Her head having exploded, Bash responded by actually telling Vivek: “As you know, it’s not about people dying today. It’s about what is going to happen in the short term and long term.”

“Oh,” replied Mr. Ramaswamy, “I think it’s all about people dying today.”

Today does certainly come before both short term and long term.

“If you don’t want to cut fossil fuels,” Bash inquired, “what would your policies be to slow things like droughts, like flooding and other damage to our planet?”

“I think we should focus on adaptation and mastery of any change in the climate,” offered the candidate, “through technological advances powered by fossil fuels and other forms of energy.”

Celebrities, politicians and diplomats jetting off to international junkets where they jawbone over unenforceable agreements to cut carbon emissions may impress CNN talking heads. But will Vivek Ramaswamy’s more practical alternative convince voters?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Unspoken Contract

tiger chair, communism, torture

“After the Tiananmen massacre,” explained Washington Post editorial board member, Keith Richburg, “China’s rulers adopted an unspoken social compact with the population: The Communist Party offers them boundless economic growth, the opportunity to get rich and some expanded personal freedoms in exchange for its continued right to rule.”

Mr. Richburg doesn’t bother to name any of these “expanded personal freedoms” to which he refers. I’m sure the Chinese people are wondering as well.  

Richburg is certainly not alone in his delusion; one regularly hears this inane idea suggesting some sort of political legitimacy and justification for the CCP’s totalitarian state. In fact, in this same Post feature assessing China’s current economic woes, columnist Catherine Rampell likewise declared, “For generations, the Chinese Communist Party has held on to power partly through an implicit bargain with its citizenry: Sacrifice your freedoms, and, in exchange, we’ll guarantee ever-rising living standards.”

But there simply is no such bargain. No contract. No political compact between the Chinazi rulers and the Chinese people. That’s a figment of fuzzy Western elitist — and Rousseauvian — fantasy. 

The CCP doesn’t hold power via demonstrated public support. Their power flows from the barrel of a gun, as notorious mass-murderer Chairman Mao acknowledged long ago. Not to mention fear of today’s Tiger chair. 

Pretending otherwise only enables the tyranny.

Know your enemy. And if you know the Chinese state, you know it is your enemy and an enemy of the Chinese people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

In Evidence

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine, corruption

In yesterday’s Washington Post, fact-checker Glenn Kessler explained, per the headline: “How Republicans overhype the findings of their Hunter Biden probe.”

He has a point. For example, the official House committee staff carefully stated that they had “identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates.” But Committee Chairman Comer turned that into: “The Biden family received over $20 million from our enemies around the world.”

The whole $20M+ didn’t go to the Biden Crime Family. Kessler’s analysis puts that number at merely $7.5 million. 

I guess this is why gang members sometimes turn on each other.

But Kessler — like so many other mainstream media mouthpieces — gets something very, very wrong.

“No evidence has emerged that any of these funds can be traced to Joe Biden himself,” the fact-checker asserts before delving into the specifics of his checked facts. Near the close, Kessler reiterates: “No money has been traced to Joe Biden.”

That’s just not true.

In a text that was discovered on the infamous Hunter laptop (now verified even by big media behemoths), Hunter Biden tells his daughter that his father (now President Biden for those following closely at home) makes Hunter kick back roughly 50 percent of his income.

A statement made in confidence to a loved one is commonly referred to as evidence. Strong evidence.

There are additional communications and invoices showing Hunter paid bills for “the Big Guy,” including home repairs and improvements costing thousands of dollars.

No matter how hard “fact checkers” ignore the evidence, it is still there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly media and media people public opinion

Volcano Denialism

science, global warming, climate change, volcano, weather

Some weather we’ve been having, eh? Record-setting heat in many locales. 

It must be global warming!

Well, it is hotter than usual. 

But this is summer.

And a volcano did blow in the ocean near Tonga, a year and a half ago, and scientists at the time did say that the water vapor it placed into the stratosphere could linger for years, affecting the climate.

Still, you won’t see recognition of this factor for warming on the major news sources. They keep pushing the AGW line: anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming: “climate change.”

Matt Walsh, on his podcast, ran through the vulcanism story last week. Water vapor is a more effective, broad-spectrum greenhouse gas than CO2, which all the journos cannot help but push (because it fits a statist agenda, and that’s their real business: propaganda).

Walsh calls mainstream AGW crusaders “volcano denialists.”

Our planet’s ecosystem is ultra-complicated. Cloud cover (which has something to do with water vapor, you might say) can also cool the planet by increasing high-altitude albedo, a point touched upon in The Epoch Times, “Nobel Winner on Climate Agenda: ‘We Are Totally Awash in Pseudoscience,” which focuses on physicist John Clausner and his contrarian views on climate.

“Contra the IPCC and other major institutions,” Clausner contends “that climate is primarily set by . . . the ‘cloud cover thermostat,’ a self-regulating process whereby more clouds start to enshroud the Earth when the temperature is too high and vice-versa.”

He was slated to give a talk to the International Monetary Fund on July 25, but that was cancelled. These elites have directed trillions of global dollars to “research” global climate, and Clausner’s caution that they’ve made “a trillion-dollar mistake” is not exactly welcome.

It’s not just vulcanism they deny. They deny water.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

“You in Your Whiteness”

struggle session, communism, race, racism

The “antiracist” training now often inflicted in the west resembles the efforts to shame and remake people during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today’s western cultural revolutionaries are not (yet) going nearly as far as China’s, when people were routinely humiliated, beaten to a pulp, imprisoned, and murdered for “wrong” ideas or background.

In the west of 2023, people with “wrong” politics and background (i.e., white) are merely humiliated, censored, perhaps forced out of a job. But we can now add another similarity to Mao’s era: the possibility that hounded victims will commit suicide, as Richard Bilkszto recently did.

Yes, Mr. Bilkszto killed himself.

In 2021, Kike Ojo-Thompson — hired to conduct “antiracist” struggle sessions that Bilkszto, a fill-in principal in Toronto, was required to attend — blasted him for disagreeing with her officially-approved contention that Canada is “more racist” than the United States.

While the issue could be subject to much debate, most of it would likely be pointless. Neither side stands on firm ground.

According to Bilkszto’s eventual lawsuit against the school district, Ojo-Thompson berated, “We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people.” She also accused Bilkszto of being a white supremacist.

Repeatedly.

A workplace agency found that Ojo-Thompson had indeed engaged in “harassment and bullying.” And, perhaps because of his complaint with the agency, the school district declined to renew Bilkszto’s contract. His lawsuit contends that his reputation was “systematically demolished.”

Now that he’s safely dead, do those who punished Bilkszto for uttering the “wrong” view of racial claims now regret their conduct? 

No more, I bet, than they regard themselves as the bullies they are.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Bigger Boycott Before Bud Light

Bud Light, boycott, woke, wokism

It’s bigger than the beer.

“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.” 

Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”

However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”

Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games.”

Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”

Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.

“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)

But . . . why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?

Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”

Another case of so-called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Bud Lite, basketball, woke, wokeism

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First Amendment rights media and media people social media

First Amendment: Irrelevant?

censorship, social media, cat

For at least three years, we have all suspected — well, known — that the federal government has been pressuring social-media companies to censor speech that government officials dislike regarding the pandemic and other matters.

One clue: officials like Jennifer Psaki, White House press secretary from 2021 to 2022, forbiddingly and publicly demanded that social-media firms do more to suppress disapproved speech.

Even so, many left-wingers stressed that once allegedly open public forums like YouTube, Facebook, pre-Musk Twitter et al. were private entities with every darn right to set standards for posting. 

Just market decisions, that’s all that was happening here!

Now that litigation has delivered so much evidence that government agencies have been colluding to censor, directly and chronically “working with” social-media firms to suppress dissent, many on the left are not even pretending to favor protection of First Amendment rights to express speech they disagree with.

Jonathan Turley notes that according to The New York Times, a recent ruling temporarily enjoining the Biden Administration from colluding to censor would, by fostering open discourse, lamentably “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.”

Washington Post editors and others on the left “no longer deny censoring,” agrees Jeffrey Tucker. “Now they defend censorship as a policy in the national interest. . . . They don’t even pretend to have respect for the First Amendment that gave rise to the national media in the first place. They now seek a monopoly of opinion and interpretation.”

Yes. Cat’s out of the bag.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs media and media people

China’s Many Rushdies

China, bounties, crime, censorship, protest

Since when do police place bounties on the heads of former residents who have committed no crime?

Since just now. 

But it depends on how you define “crime.”

For me, to be guilty of a crime you must have committed an objectively definable, willful violation of the rights of others — fraud, robbery, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder. Speech criticizing the crimes of a crime-committing government cannot count as “crime.” To pretend otherwise would be an abuse and usurpation of proper standards of thought.

But the dictatorial Chinese regime is unbound by such considerations.

On July 3, the Hong Kong police, mere lackeys of the mainland government, placed bounties of one million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 USD) on the heads of eight pro-democracy dissidents no longer living in Hong Kong.

“We’re absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror,” says top HK police official Steve Li. “We’re enforcing the law.” Oh.

CNN notes that “many of the activists have continued to speak out against what they say is Beijing’s crackdown on their home city’s freedoms and autonomy.”

“What they say” is Beijing’s crackdown? 

Just a smidgen of investigative journalism would enable CNN’s reporters to report, as fact, that there has indeed been a crackdown, that it’s not just “critics” who say that the 2020 National Security Law has been used to destroy the pro-democracy, pro-human rights movement in Hong Kong and “cripple its once vibrant society.”

But I guess folks at CNN dare not risk bounties on their heads, also.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Wannabe Dictator

Joe Biden, dictator

The question posed in boffo episode four of Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show is whether Joe Biden is a wannabe dictator, as asserted by a chyron that Fox News displayed for 27 seconds on the day his administration arrested Donald Trump: “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.” (Fox News hastened to apologize to the world and to fire the producer who so incontinently chyronized.)

Carlson spends a couple of minutes discussing absurd reactions to the brief-lived caption. But most of his satirical 13-minute monologue is about whether President Biden qualifies for dictator-hood.

Carlson suggests that you have to do much more than jail political rivals to qualify.

Dictators enrich themselves and their families, taking bribes or kickbacks from businesses or other dictators.

In a dictatorship, it’s no longer possible to fight the injustice of the system. If people “gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator, they’ll be arrested by state security services even years after the fact.”

In a dictatorship, you can’t even complain from your home; unauthorized opinions on the Internet must be censored.

In a dictatorship, major mental or physical lapses by the Dear Leader would be routinely covered up by a compliant media.

A dictator would say your kids belong to him. But Joe Biden says your kids belong to all of us; we have joint custody.

It’s a litany that could be extended, and Tucker Carlson does so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom media and media people

People Lover

China, children, population

Steven Mosher loves people.

Mosher is a student of China who, according to the bio at his Population Research Institute website, pop.org, “has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. . . .”

In 1979, the Chinese government let him pursue research in a village where he observed many instances of compulsory abortions under the country’s one-child policy. Some of the women were in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.

Perhaps the Chinese government expected Mosher to produce rosy-eyed, footnoted rationalizations of what he saw. When he published his unvarnished findings in a Taiwanese magazine, officials complained to the U.S. Embassy and to Stanford University.

Stanford appeased China by denying Mosher his PhD. I note the university’s injustice in part because Mosher tends to omit this detail. But it should not be forgotten.

Back then, he said he “did what was right to do. I told the truth.”

He opposes population control because, in his view, people are a good thing, not a bad thing.

This viewpoint is beautifully conveyed in a video on the pop.org home page, in which Mosher says that people “are the ultimate resource, the one resource that you cannot do without.” The Institute works to expose “the myth of overpopulation” and the violations of human rights that occur in the name of population control.

The prolific scholar argues that people “can become the agents of their own development without having to sacrifice their children in the process.”

My wife and I glad to hear it. We’ll let the kids know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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