Category: national politics & policies

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Internet controversy national politics & policies social media

Dys Glitch

dys, dystopia, dysphonia, Joe Biden, Ron DeSantis, Elon Musk, twitter

After some technical glitches in livestreaming Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s announcement of his presidential run, the snide tweets poured in.

“‘This link works,’ Biden posted on his Twitter account,” The Epoch Times attempted to regale us, “sharing a link to a donation page for his campaign as the DeSantis team and Twitter owner Elon Musk struggled to resolve the glitches plaguing their scheduled Twitter Spaces interview.” 

But the worst was also from The Biden — nobody believes that Joe himself is in charge of his own Twitter account — in which a few “positions” of DeSantis received mockery, leading popular YouTuber/Rumblist Viva Frei to respond with “Is this really the best you could piece together? You couldn’t fragment the sentences more if you tried. Pathetic.”

And that’s really where we’re at. Newscasters and the Twitterati made much of the Twitter Space glitch, but not even Donald Trump, Jr., with his hashtag “#DeSaster,” did much more than weakly echo his father’s heyday on Twitter.

This is not 2016. 

Everybody seems tired.

There are a number of challengers, already, in the running to oust feeble Joe Biden. Donald Trump himself, of course, and now Ron DeSantis, whom we are told runs a distant second to the former president. Neither man seems likely to reach beyond the conservative half of the electorate. Only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat, offers much “newness,” and he’s afflicted by a hard-to-listen-to cracked voice: spasmodic dysphonia, “a specific form of an involuntary movement disorder called dystonia that affects only the voice box.”

Metaphor for the race so far? There’s a lot of “dys” in the tone of our times, but it’s just not very profound. If the future weren’t at stake, one wouldn’t even bring it up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Survival Requirements

climate change, global warming, energy, EPA

Suppose you have a roof. Now you punch holes in the roof. The next time it rains, do the holes help or hurt? You’ve still got a roof, right? Mostly?

Actually, it’s bad to have holes in your roof. And the more holes you have, the worse it gets.

I elaborate this object lesson not primarily for you and your common-sensical friends, but to those determined to make it ever-harder for us to provide ourselves with food, clothing, and shelter by progressively crippling our means of doing so.

Example? The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to kill uninterrupted generation of power in the United States.

New rules the EPA has proposed would require plants powered by coal or gas to eliminate almost all of their carbon emissions by 2040. The plants would have to shut down or switch to less reliable sources of electricity like the sun (unhelpful when it’s cloudy or post-sunset), wind (unhelpful when there’s no wind), and wishful thinking (never helpful).

Fossil-fueled power plants provide some 60 percent of production of electricity in the country. Jim Matheson, head of National Rural Electric Cooperative Associations, warns that the EPA rules would put the reliability of the power grid at risk.

Yes. Rolling blackouts currently the norm in a few states especially plagued by anti-energy policies would become the norm throughout the country.

Like us, proponents of such policies may already know that deliberately creating shortages of energy is bad. 

Unlike us, though, they may think that others, and not themselves, will bear the brunt of the downpour.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Flush The White House

water pipes, ecology, Joe Biden, dishwasher, toilets

The people who gave America the double- and triple-flush toilet have set their sights on our automatic dishwashers.

Well, that’s not quite right. It was Congress that gave us the regulations that turned our toilets into a nightmare of clogging and extra time with plungers and flush levers. I wrote about this nightmare for years, advising readers to “Flush Congress.”

Now it isn’t Congress directly, but “the White House” — and the Department of Energy in particular, according to a story in The Epoch Times. “The Administration is using all the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” states Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

She’s talking about new efficiency standards for power and water usage which the DOE insists will “cut energy use by 27 percent and water use by 34 percent in new conventional household dishwashers.”

But anyone who has endured the toilets that came out in the 1990s knows that these putatively well-intentioned schemes burst the pipes, so to speak, making a mess and a mockery of any concept of efficiency. The Biden is enthusiastically pushing the piety that intentions matter most in regulation — the If We Mandate It, It Shall Be philosophy. Yet,The Epoch Times contrasts the current administration with the previous: “Trump criticized the push to raise efficiency standards, arguing that they made some appliances work less effectively and so were counterproductive” . . . and then mentions the multiple flushes of toilets that I cannot help but remember.

Trump’s surely right; The Biden’s surely wrong. And the ultimate result will be to raise the costs of appliances, thus hitting the poor hardest. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fifty-One & Nine & Two

Joe Biden, intelligence agency, spy, laptop, Hunter Biden

When 51 ex-intelligence officials signed the October 2020 “laptop letter,” they were lying to get Joe Biden elected as president. Yet, they also contributed to antagonizing Russia, further instilling distrust, and perhaps playing a part in the calculus prompting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a year after Biden was installed into his perilous perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The former spooks, spies, and psy-op masters claimed that the Hunter Biden story possessed “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Yet, anyone who’d been following the strange story of Biden family corruption, now clearly laid out in detail in a 36-page memorandum by House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), knew from the beginning that those 51 former intel bigwigs were lying through their teeth.

Now one of them, former CIA Director John Brennan, has been interrogated by Congress — and implicated another CIA Director for organizing the disinformation campaign.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had charged Brennan with recruiting the 51 signatories to the now-infamous letter, which not only provided ammo for Biden in the 2020 presidential debates, it enabled Twitter to suppress the story. But it now appears that the recruiter was, instead, then-Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell. 

In his four-hour testimony, Brennan confessed that the letter was “political” — that is, designed to get Biden elected.

The truth about the Biden family shake-down system, which evidence shows involved a whopping nine Biden family members, not just the “Big Guy” and his brother and his wayward son, taking in the big bucks from foreign sources, using a variety of bank accounts and shell corporations, but with no discernible product.

Back in 2020, those 51 trusted experts wrote: “It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

And past time for our Deep State to halt its very clear pattern of domestic election interference.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly national politics & policies

On the 1197th Day…

flatten the curve

Yesterday, the COVID crisis ended. Officially.

That is, on May 11, 2023, the “public health emergency” expired, following the termination of the “national emergency” over a month earlier.

Jordan Schachtel, writing at The Dossier on Substack, did the math and noted that this “marks an incredible 1196 Days To Slow The Spread.” 

“That’s right,” Mr. Schachtel elaborated. “Almost three and a half years of engaging in peak absurdity in the name of stopping [the] virus. And yet, the ‘experts’ don’t have a single thing to show for it.”

Remember why our leaders wanted to “slow” that “spread”: not to save lives over all. They admitted that the gross numbers of the affected couldn’t be affected by the half-a-month lockdown and mask mandates that Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump pushed. They argued merely that lockdowns might “flatten” the distribution of cases and personal crises over time to alleviate a bottleneck — crowding — for a brief, initial pandemic period in the nation’s hospitals.

That was it.

That was the rationale.

But after the 15 days were over, almost none of the emergency pandemic units set up by the military had been used to take hospital overflow.  Either (a) the 15 days had been enough, or (b) it had all been unnecessary. The answer is (b).

Everything else was just politics — the extended lockdowns, mask mandates, suppression of alternative treatments, the massive subsidies and vaccine mandates and passports and much else. What it sure seemed like? A vast jury-rigged scheme to get people to take the experimental “vaccines” then being rushed through the regulatory process.

Indeed, one thing was very clear from Day 16 onward: a “national” policy made no sense, for the pandemic hit regions of the country at different times and to different degrees. New York got hit hard in 2020, but the Pacific Northwest’s hospitals were mostly empty during the pandemic — causing a very different “beds” stressor. 

Yet our politicians pushed a national policy of emergencies that lasted, at the very least, 1181 days too long.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Big Guy, Little Guy

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine

“Prosecutors are nearing a decision on whether to charge President Biden’s son Hunter with tax- and gun-related violations,” The Washington Post reports. 

Last October, the paper disclosed that, after a four-year investigation, federal agents had “gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge him.”

Hunter Biden’s failure to honestly fill out the federal gun-purchase form, a felony, is punishable by up to ten years in prison. Poetically, that federal law, and penalty, was authored years ago by a certain U.S. senator from Delaware, his old man, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The tax charges stem from Hunter’s massively lucrative business dealings with corrupt Ukrainian and state-connected Chinese companies — jobs for which Hunter seems to understand his main qualification was proximity to his pop, at that time Vice President of these United States, whom oligarchs and genocidal totalitarians desired to influence.

Both President Biden and his son Hunter deny they ever “discussed” Hunter’s business. But that explanation doesn’t fit even the rose-colored glasses vision of Joe Biden, family man. Plus, it is clearly and repeatedly contradicted by evidence of meetings and favors — and Hunter’s international trips on Air Force Two.

Hunter has complained bitterly about how much money he had to kickback to his father and in one deal records show Hunter asking specifically for 10 percent of proceeds to be held for “the Big Guy,” whom others have identified as his father.

Further, we have long known that Hunter has paid phone bills, house renovations and other expenses for his dad, without scaring up much interest amongst news outlets.

Now, two new whistleblowers emerge: 

  • The first, an IRS employee, tells House Republicans that the Department of Justice is engaging in “preferential treatment and politics” to block Hunter’s prosecution. 
  • The second whistleblower points to a document in the FBI’s possession alleging “a criminal scheme” where then-Veep Biden traded policy for payola from a foreign national.  

I would certainly like to hear more.

On Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams decried Republicans for “going after a relative and a child.”

Hunter is 53 years old. And this isn’t about young Hunter, but “the Big Guy.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Back-Pedaling at the Speed of Lies

Dr. Fauci, covid, blame

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” challenges Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Never. I never did,” he told the New York Times last week.

We sure are a long way from the heady days when he proclaimed, “I am the Science.” It’s more like in the book of Genesis, where Cain asks the great rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

In other words, Fauci’s trying to set the record . . . crooked.

For Fauci was the Authority that bolstered all the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere, urging mask mandates and lockdowns and what-have-you.

Now, he is doing more than back-pedaling. He is shifting blame. Blame for failed policies.

But he’s not alone in this. For The Epoch Times, Petr Svab notes another famous back-pedaler: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Watch Ms. Weingarten declare on C-Span, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” but click that link and read the Twitter crowd-sourced fact-checks, showing how that’s . . . deceptive:

We still argue about how much COVID leaders lied during the heat of the panic. I advised, at the time, to give them a little leeway.

Regarding policy, that is.

Not lying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt international affairs national politics & policies too much government

Debt for Pakistani Trans

Pakistani transgender youth, American debt

Thirty-two trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money we don’t have.

I checked the U.S. Debt Clock last night. The federal government was, at that time, $200 billion shy of owing that amount, $32 trillion.

It’s such a big number that it doesn’t seem real.

Maybe that’s why politicians ignore it. And keep spending, adding to it.

All spending that seems fishy contributes to that debt. But so, alas,does spending that a majority of Americans may want. When you are over-spending, all spending contributes to the red ink.

Still, to witness elected government officials throw money around with reckless abandon is especially irksome. Consider all the taxes that pay for that debt, continually as well as eventually. And the misdirected investments that get derailed from productive activity just to fund that debt.

Today’s example of idiotic spending? A mere $500,000. Half a million bucks. Chump change — next to the trillions on budget lines.

So this half-a-million is slotted to go to Pakistan.

To train Pakistanis to speak, read and write in English.

But the kicker’s in the headline, courtesy of The Epoch Times: “Biden Earmarks $500,000 for Transgender Youth, Other Groups in Pakistan.” The blurb makes the obvious point I wish to drive home: “Biden ‘hell-bent on spending money we don’t have,’ said Rep. Ralph Norman’s office.”

Biden’s prodigality will provide “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth.”

The old saw about such foreign aid runs, “Don’t we have transgender youth in this country to help?”

But better to join Rep. Norman and point to the debt clock. And shake our heads.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Biden Brazenness Against Religion

Joe Biden, Christians, Christianity, religion

April is the cruelest month, wrote T.S. Eliot, but he wasn’t referring to the Biden Administration’s ramped-up war on Christianity.

Mid-month, the administration barred Catholic priests of the Holy Name College Friary from providing “pastoral care” to servemembers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The government contract had been granted, instead, to Mack Global LLC, which the archdiocese characterizes as “a secular defense contracting firm that cannot fulfill the statement of work in the contract.”

Not convinced that this Daily Signal story amounts to “a war on Christianity”?

Well, try The Epoch Times. In “Christians Say Government Targets Them Because They Oppose Left-Wing Agenda,” Kevin Stocklin lists a number of federal government policies that favor left-wing politics over the social and political activism of Catholics and other Christians. 

Abortion activists, pro- and anti-, do occasionally engage in what might plausibly be called “terrorist” activities, but the FBI appears avid in hounding pro-life protesters, yet uninterested in doing any actual work to curb the string of “violent attacks, including assaults and firebombings, against pro-life individuals and institutions.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s “subpoena to the FBI earlier this month demanding information on its alleged program to surveil Catholics for ‘signs of radicalization,’” spurred Stocklin’s reporting about the government’s increasing conflict with Christianity.

Why see traditional Christians as enemies of the State? Because they are.

Potentially, at least.

In part, simply because those who worship God see a worshipful attitude towards the State as something akin to idolatry. And apparently vice versa. But sociologists such as Robert Nisbet regard religion as a countervailing power against ever-growing government.

If you are looking for a jealous god, the modern total State fills the bill.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

Bioweapon

China, covid, virus, responsibility, bioweapon

Back in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton informed a Fox News audience that “just a few miles away from that food market [initially proposed as the epicenter of the outbreak] is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

The Senator’s mere suggestion that the fast-spreading virus might have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs — which were (a) known to be sloppy, and (b) doing U.S. funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — was immediately labelled a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” by The Washington Post (which has since corrected its story).

Some scientists and pundits also expressed outrage — erroneously — at Cotton’s “implication” that China had unleashed a bioweapon. In Cotton’s defense, he never said any such thing. 

Hmmm?

When the lab leak theory made a comeback — after a year or more of Fauci & Co. colluding to snuff out the very thought — it seemed the one thing “we” somehow “knew” was that it certainly wasn’t a bioweapon.

Yet, unsure of its precise origin, how can we know that? 

“It matters little whether it was intentionally leaked from a lab or not,” Brian T. Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, explained at a recent Hillsdale College speech, “what is clear is that they allowed it to spread throughout the world knowing the harm it would cause.”

The Chinese rulers did this both by covering up human transmission for many weeks and by knowingly allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel throughout the world spreading the new virus. That’s why Kennedy calls it “a biowarfare attack against the United States.” 

In his book, No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War with the West, Andrew Small writes about a well-placed Chinese friend who told him in January of 2020 that “the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.”

With friends like China . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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