Category: Update

After last week’s presidential debate on CNN, the panel of “experts” expressed their shock at how senile the current president seemed. Shock, they tells us. And sadness. How could they have known?

Glenn Greenwald, in his last System Update of the week, carefully lays out the case that these people were lying in the weeks prior to the debate, in their numerous assertions of Joe Biden’s competence. He runs the clips. They are breath-taking. 

For every media consumer not under the spell of corporate “news” knew what everyone came to see — unmediated by claims of “cheap fakes” — at the debate: that Joe Biden’s mind is fading, and fading fast.

He was suffering even in 2019, on the campaign trail. He said goofy things, like “You know the thing!” when he was straining to remember, or not correctly repeat, the theological bits of the Declaration of Independence:

It seems now’s the time to declare our independence from the corporate media entirely. We can start by watching Greenwald on Rumble:

Of course, readers of Common Sense with Paul Jacob have been following the decline of Joe Biden’s mind (such as it ever was) all along.

“The North Carolina General Assembly wrapped up this year’s chief work session Thursday,” explains Gary D. Robertson for the Associated Press, “after overriding Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes, putting a constitutional amendment about citizens and voting on the November ballot and sending to Cooper’s desk many additional bills.”

Kyle Ingram, writing in the Raleigh News & Observer, describes the override vote as having “passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support.”

Bipartisan support?

“Yes,” Paul Jacob clarifies (via email), “I’d say so: The votes were 104 – 12 in the House and 40 – 4 in the Senate.”

The Lake Gaston Gazette-​Observer quotes North Carolina’s leaders for the measure, who insisted that “‘President Joe Biden has been asleep at the wheel the past four years, letting millions of people illegally cross the border into our country. Now, as voters are fleeing the Democratic party in droves, Democrats are seeking to fill the gap by extending voting rights to noncitizens,’ Sens. Brad Overcash (R‑Gaston), Buck Newton (R‑Wilson), and Warren Daniel (R‑Burke) said. ‘To combat this movement, we are empowering North Carolinians to approve a constitutional amendment to make it crystal clear that our elections are for U.S. citizens only.’”

“The constitutional amendment heading to the ballot seeks to change language in the state constitution to clarify that only U.S. citizens at least 18 years of age and meeting other qualifications shall be entitled to vote in elections,” explains the AP. “Voting by noncitizens is already illegal, but some supporters of the amendment say the current language in the constitution could be challenged so that other people beside citizens could vote.”

The market for organ transplants faces extreme supply problems. One is not allowed to sell one’s own organs, and even if it were legal to do so, the ethical and legal problems are obvious, since most organs are not optional. We have two kidneys and two eyes, for example, and can do with just one each, but others we must have to live. Now most organs come from those who donate their organs for harvesting after death (at which point they are no longer needed). And this makes getting patients replacement organs quite tricky, since organs are not fungible.

But there is one source for ready organs: China. But there the supply problems have a workaround: the government and its clandestine businesses simply take them from prisoners, criminal and dissident and persecuted alike.

Related to this is Delaware’s House Concurrent Resolution No. 143, which seeks to “encourage the Delaware medical community to educate the citizens of Delaware about the forced organ harvesting that occurs in China, in the event they decide to travel to China for an expedited transplant.”

Among the resolution’s many Whereases are:

• extensive and credible reports have exposed the People’s Republic of China’s engagement in the vile practice of forcibly removing human organs for transplant; and
• this practice violates not only ethical guidelines of medicine but also Chinese tradition that requires bodies to be preserved after death, which contributes to the country’s deficient registration for organ donation; and 
• the Chinese government claims that ninety percent of organ transplant sources come from executed prisoners; and 
• in 2016, a bombshell investigative report, estimated that China is performing sixty thousand to ninety thousand transplants per year which disputes China’s claim that they conduct only ten thousand transplants per year; and 
• this evidence suggests that deceased prisoners’ organs are being removed without their consent and prisoners are possibly being murdered based on the organ market’s demand; and
• nonemergency cases were quoted in weeks, while in other countries, patients can wait years for a transplant; and 
• this evidence suggests that deceased prisoners’ organs are being removed without their consent and prisoners are possibly being murdered based on the organ market’s demand; and
• both American and Chinese media outlets have reported instances of American patients traveling to China for organ transplants due to the significantly shorter wait times.

A report on this resolution appeared in The Epoch Times: “On June 20, the Delaware House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Chinese regime’s lucrative industry of forced organ harvesting. The resolution aims to raise awareness about the risks associated with traveling to China for expedited organ transplants.”

The subject of the Chinese organ harvesting horror has been covered by Paul Jacob previously, including in April.

“The blame is on the Chinese regime no matter how COVID-​19 arose, Sen. Mitt Romney (R‑Utah) said on June 18.” This is the lede from “‘China’s to Blame’ Regardless of How COVID-​19 Came About, Senator Says,” by Eva Fu, June 19th in The Epoch Times.

At StoptheChinazis​.org, the problem of actually determining the cause was identified: “it’s hard to come up with a ‘definitive’ conclusion regarding these matters when key players are heavily invested in the institutions that funded the Wuhan labs. A general consensus on the lab origin theory would imply guilt on many, many participants, including multi-​millionaire government functionaries such as Antony Fauci.”

Nevertheless, taking a step back and coming to a conclusion on what needs to be done isn’t difficult. 

Sen. Mitt Romney called for an end to funding gain of function research during a contentious Senate hearing Tuesday on the origins of COVID-​19, saying no one will every know with certainty whether the virus responsible for millions of deaths was created in a Chinese lab or emerged from a market selling live animals.

“We know what action we ought to take to protect from either. So why there’s so much passion around it makes me think it’s more political than scientific but maybe I’m wrong,” the Utah Republican said during his questioning of the expert witnesses appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Lisa Riley Roche, “What Utah Sen. Mitt Romney says about the origins of COVID-​19‚” Deseret News, June 19, 2024.

Romney’s liberal and forgiving “no matter how” statement is not universally shared. Professor Richard Enbright, of Rutgers University (also a laboratory director) insisted that “[o]nly after there is an acknowledgement that there is a very real possibility — not a remote possibility, but a very real possibility — of a lab origin will there be the political will to impose regulation on this scientific community that has successfully resisted and obstructed regulation for two decades.” 

At the conference, Enright had earlier stated that there is “zero evidence” for a zoonotic origin of COVID-19.

“The Supreme Court ruled on June 14 that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority,” reports Sam Dorman in The Epoch Times, “when it interpreted a federal firearms statute to outlaw the use of bump stocks.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in the case, Garland v. Cargill. “We conclude that semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machinegun’ because it does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,’” Justice Thomas explained.

The vote was 6 – 3, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a dissent joined by the other two liberal justices. Her dissent suggested that bump stocks effectively make semiautomatic weapons into machine guns.

A bump stock is a firearm accessory that allows users to shoot at a continuous rate, resulting in hundreds of rounds fired per minute.

“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she said.

Sam Dorman, “Supreme Court Strikes Down Bump Stock Ban,” The Epoch Times (June 14 and 15, 2024).

The core argumentation in the case did not focus on the Second Amendment, which says that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Instead, much back and forth tried to convince, as Dorman explains, “the justices that the phrases ‘automatically’ and ‘single function of the trigger’ within federal law (The National Firearms Act) either did or didn’t apply to bump stocks.”

As such, Garland v. Cargill is a constitutionally murky case.

Of course, most reactions depended not on the constitutional rectitude but on the outcome.

A statement from President Biden called for Congress to “ban bump stocks, pass an assault weapon ban, and take additional action to save lives — [s]end me a bill and I will sign it immediately.”

By contrast, Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Ky.) responded by suggesting the decision restored the proper separation of powers between the executive and Congress.

“In our Constitutional republic, Congress makes the laws, not the administrative branch,” he wrote on X. “The Supreme Court just acknowledged this in a 6 to 3 decision invalidating Trump’s bump-​stock ban.”

Sam Dorman, Ibid.

Though bump stock add-​ons to rifles are now legal in these United States, the issue remains contentious: there’s been a Supreme Court decision, but the people and the politicians aren’t decided.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the first independent candidate since Ross Perot to make a plausible run for the presidency of these United States. That does not please the Powers That Be. Or, we should say, the Duopoly (Republican and Democratic) Powers that run our elections.

They do not like competition.

Especially competition that might actually succeed.

The ruling Democrats, especially, fear RFKj. As Paul Jacob wrote in October of last year, the Biden Administration has balked at providing security for the candidate, though it that is indeed the usual courtesy.

It is almost as if Biden were saying: get shot; see if I care.

No joke.

The usual roadblock to an independent challenger who might upset the plans of the smoke-​filled rooms is the elaborate set of ballot access hurdles set by the two parties in each of the fifty states and the several territories. Paul wrote about that in April.

But now CNN steps in to do the dirty work, with clever interpretations of campaign regulations that, the establishment’s toady hopes, will prevent RFKj from debating the former president and the current president on stage:

The last thing Trump and Biden want is someone who might make them look bad on the pandemic response — as Bobby Kennedy would — and challenge them on their war policies.

Trump and Biden seemed awfully eager to join in a debate, though one has to wonder: did they know all along that they would not have to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.?

Trump is on record saying he will not.

RFKj has filed a lawsuit against CNN, and we can expect much back-​and-​forth among the relevant parties up until the scheduled event on June 27. If it actually takes place. If the aging candidates all survive till that date.