Category: Update

Does the lack of curiosity by the press seem natural? Has the stone-​walling by government officials effectively squelched profitable discussion of last Saturday’s shooting of former president and current candidate Donald John Trump? Brett Weinstein notes the general lack of interest in facts by the “news media”:

Am I missing something, or has the usual series of post-​shooting press conferences simply not materialized? It seems we don’t even know the basics. How many of these questions have a satisfactory/​confirmed answer? Beyond ‘AR-​15’ what weapon, exactly? How was it equipped? What type of ammunition, exactly? How many shots? How many unfired rounds left in the magazine? In the backpack? How many people were hit/​grazed? Who are they and what are their injuries. What are President Trump’s injuries? How many fired rounds have been recovered? From where? Is the venue still an active crime scene, and if so, why was the roof being washed? What was the presumptive shooter doing over the several days prior? What was the transmitter for? What else was in the car? Was the shooter in contact with anyone by phone or other device while at the rally? Was the water tower covered? If so, how? If not, why not? Feel free to provide any answers you think we have official confirmation of. And please suggest other questions that should be readily answerable. 

Brett Weinstein, X.com, July 19, 2024.

Speaking of the water tower, as Dr. Weinstein was, a mobile something/​someone was caught on video on said tower:

Despite so many questions unasked and unanswered, revelations are bursting forth. According to Senator Josh Hawley (R‑Mo.), we have learned something about the make-​up of Trump’s security team in Butler: it wasn’t really filled to the brim with trained Secret Service agents!

“Whistleblowers who have direct knowledge of the event have approached my office. According to the allegations, the July 13 rally was considered to be a ‘loose’ security event. For example, detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas. Department personnel did not appropriately police the security buffer around the podium and were also not stationed at regular intervals around the event’s security perimeter,” Hawley wrote in a letter sent Friday to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

“In addition, whistleblower allegations suggest the majority of DHS officials were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). This is especially concerning given that HSI agents were unfamiliar with standard protocols typically used at these types of events, according to the allegations.”

Michael Flores, “Whistleblowers Bombshell! Untrained Security weren’t even Secret Service!” Substack, July 19, 2024.

On Monday, Paul Jacob concluded his column on the assassination attempt with these words:

Heads must roll at Secret Service. (Figuratively.) A new and beefed-​up detail should be protecting Trump. And it is past time for RFK, Jr., to be granted Secret Service protection as well.

I don’t say this often but … spend the money! 

Paul Jacob, “Serious Times,” July 15, 2024.

Well, Biden did finally grant RFK, Jr., a Secret Service detail, almost immediately after the Butler, Pennsylvania, event. But is there cooperation with the congressional investigation also immediately started?

Rep. James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has issued a subpoena to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle compelling her to appear before the committee on Monday for what is scheduled to be the first congressional hearing into the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

Comer said initially that the Secret Service committed to her attendance but that Homeland Security officials appear to have intervened and there has been no “meaningful updates or information” shared with the committee.

Comer said the “lack of transparency and failure to cooperate” with the committee called into question Cheatle’s ability to lead the Secret Service and necessitates the subpoena.

Rebecca Santana, Associated Press, “House committee subpoenas Secret Service director to testify on Trump assassination attempt,” PBS News, July 17, 2024.

Multiple investigations have been started, but how much investigating will actually go on, and what the purpose of these investigations really is, could be open to questioning:

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general also said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at his Pennsylvania rally.

In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”

There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.

Biden already had directed an independent review of the security at the rally.

The shooting has raised questions about how the gunman was able to climb onto a roof with a clear line of sight to the former president, who said he was shot in the ear.

Ibid.

Notice two things about that last paragraph. 

1. The focus is on one gunman, not multiple gunmen. This is a repeat of the Warren Commission focus.
2. A mid-​week report still treats President Trump’s injury not as a matter of fact but as a matter of testimony: Trump was not “shot in the ear,” but, instead, “said he was shot in the ear.”

“Actress Ashley Judd calls for Biden to step aside, says Trump supporters in her family leave her ‘shaken’” — a Fox news story tells us. In a not-​so-​classy move, “Actress Ashley Judd joined a growing list of celebrities and high-​profile Democrats who have called for President Biden to step aside, doing so by attacking former President Trump and her loved ones who plan to vote for him.” Gotta throw family under the campaign bus.

Referring to the current president as “a deeply decent man,” Ms. Judd thus echoes a trope throughout the left-​leaning media and celebrity circus, praising the corrupt ex-​senator and former vice president for his morality and kindness, while delivering the kicker: “I now ask President Joe Biden to step aside.”

She said this just after calling Donald Trump a liar.

Without actually citing a single untruth, demonstrating not even one error.

But the funny thing? Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is a known serial liar, a prevaricator from way back. Infamous in his heyday, sure, but lying even now, all the time — only now he has the tricky excuse of decaying gray matter. Glenn Greenwald devoted a segment of his Rumble program System Update to the outright deception involved in this de rigueur encomium prefixed to current calls for the senile politician to step down:

Greenwald concludes the segment arguing that this is really about Trump. Biden has to be righteous and decent and nicey-​nice not because of anything he has said or done, but because Trump is so icky. This narrative context trumps all. “I’ve often said,” Greenwald quips, “that if Adolf Hitler got reincarnated and he decided to denounce Trump, he’d probably get an MSNBC show the next day.” For he is a good and moral man, dontcha know.

“It’s really all about class loyalty.”

And Trump is déclassé.

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.