Category: Update

On July’s last day this year, Paul Jacob considered the sad self-parody that is “the governor of California, unhappy with a popular video.”

The full story turns out to have long legs:

The video’s maker may have thought he was covering every base by calling it a parody in the very title, an indignity of self-labeling that Jonathan Swift would never have permitted. People consuming Swift’s satire were left to figure out for themselves that when he proposed that the children of poor people be eaten to render them “beneficial to the publick,” he was engaging in satire.

In contrast, the Kamela Harris campaign ad parody in question is called “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Parody.” Clear. Unmistakable. 

Like the content.

Still, this video has not escaped the agenda of would-be censors like Governor Gavin Newsom. The parody uses a “deepfake” AI-generated voice that sounds like Harris. It’s even got the Harris Cackle. So Newsom wants to outlaw it.

“Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” he says. (Why?) “I’ll be signing a bill . . . to make sure it is.”

But as Reclaim the Net points out, California has already outlawed certain uses of deepfake media. 

These forbidden uses do not, however, include parody, which is constitutionally protected speech.

Today’s update finds that the story became big news this week, as the governor did indeed sign the bill into law.

There have been many reactions, including by Dave Rubin, who got a rise out of California resident Drew Pinsky. “As goes California, so goes Canada and the EU . . . and now Brazil, too,” Dr.Pinsky who went on to characterize Newsom as a man who “thinks he is a trendsetter.” That’s a kind of power. The power to lead. Even if for evil, against the Constitution of the United States and the American free speech tradition.

But why is the story really coming up again, after a lag of several months?

The Babylon Bee. The satire site ultimate AI parody of Newsom had been making the social media rounds:

And that is not the only tweak of Newsom from the Christian humor site.

The big news this weekend should have been SpaceX’s big accomplishment this past week. But talk of it has been oddly muted. Some have drawn political conclusions from the silence, such as Friday’s post by “DogeDesigner” on X (@cb_doge on Twitter): “SpaceX, an American company, just completed the first-ever commercial spacewalk, the farthest from Earth in over 50 years. Yet, no recognition or appreciation from the President. For [the] Democratic party, politics always comes first, not America.”

Elon Musk replied with a “Sigh.”

But in the Democrats’ defense, they have a whole lot to lose by saying anything nice about Elon Musk’s two outfits in question, X and SpaceX. Further, just maybe the president of the United States (Biden?) has been waiting for the mission’s completion.

Wait no more!

“Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis completed the first-ever commercial spacewalk in SpaceX-designed suits,” we read at Devdiscourse. “The Polaris Dawn mission tested new spacesuit technology in extreme conditions and conducted 36 experiments. This mission marks a significant milestone in commercial spaceflight and advances scientific knowledge for future space endeavors.”

The space walk occurred on Thursday, with all five crew members participating. The flight began on Tuesday. Splashdown of Polaris Dawn’s Dragon spacecraft occurred early Sunday.

Oh, and the new space suits look snazzy.

Paul Jacob has been following SpaceX for years here on Common Sense with Paul Jacob.

H.R. 8281, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration. It passed the House in July and is hovering in the Senate where . . .

Wait. Something happened. It’s been placed in the latest Continuing Resolution (CR) on the budget!

But before you get too excited, Thomas Massey, Republican Representative from Kentucky, calls this a “Bright Shiny Object” which will be voted for by Republicans and voted against by Democrats and, according to the rules of “political theater” will be removed before the CR goes to the president’s pen.

Besides, the SAVE Act can’t save the election we’re worried about, since the general election will be held just a few weeks from now and everybody’s been registered and . . .

Well, watch Massey on X.

Vice President Kamala Harris is a flip-flopper.

She changes her “policies” to fit . . . whatever the climate is.

It may be her most endearing trait.

Her latest? Plastic straws. She says they may remain legal.

Whoah.

But why?

Christian Britschgi explains at Reason.com: “People’s frustration with paper alternatives to plastic straws eventually saw support for straw bans subside. By 2020, the policy had become synonymous with liberal overreach. Conservatives and freedom-lovers rallied behind plastic straw use,” Mr. Britschgi wrote on Friday. “The Trump campaign even started selling Trump-branded plastic straws and singled out Harris’ support for straw bans in attack ads.”

So it’s no mystery why “Harris’ campaign handlers are reversing her past support for plastic straw bans.”

But isn’t this “a lot less consequential than Harris’ other policy switcheroos”? Britschgi thinks NO. “Harris’ history with plastic straw bans is a useful window into her evolution as a candidate.”

Paul Jacob has written about this sort of issue:

• “The Last Straw” — January 29, 2018
• “Are We Graduating from Plastic?” — March 9, 2020
• “How Quickly Can California Be Destroyed?” — October 2, 2020

See also: 

“How to Know” — January 5, 2019

The political party that demands that every last street person, hobo, convict and illegal alien have it made easy to vote has also worked mightily, behind the scenes, to make sure that at least one candidate not appear on ballots. The maniest-many should vote, but not more than two should be voted for! “For months, Democratic National Committee-backed lawsuits were focused on preventing independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on ballots in multiple states,” begins Jeff Louderback’s Saturday article for The Epoch Times.

But the party’s tactics changed “on Aug. 23 when Kennedy announced he would suspend his campaign in battleground states and urge his supporters to vote for former President Donald Trump in those states.”

On August 26, in “RFKj+T,” Paul Jacob had explained why Kennedy had switched to backing Trump. Today Louderback explains the ramifications for the Democratic Party of that switch.

Kennedy’s idea of taking his name off the ballot in ten key, marginal states — voting populations that could go either way — has left the Democratic Party with a new stance: try to keep Kennedy on the ballots they had previously fought to keep him off of.

The new tactic has met with mixed success. “Wisconsin is currently the only state rejecting Kennedy’s withdrawal effort,” Louderback reports. “On Aug. 27, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 to keep Kennedy’s name on the state’s ballot. Kennedy filed a lawsuit challenging the ruling on Sept. 3.”

And so “democratic” politics goes on.

On Friday, Paul Jacob (“Deep State in a Corner”) alluded to Elon Musk’s verbal and legal battles with Brazilian censorship, suggesting “why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel” out of the Portuguese-speaking country. And as that commentary was “going to press,” as we used to say in the print biz, the story grew much larger.

“X began to go dark across Brazil on Saturday after the nation’s Supreme Court blocked the social network because its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to suspend certain accounts,” explain Jack Nicas and Kate Conger in The New York Times. “The moment posed one of the biggest tests yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.”

Yes. It’s called “free speech.” It’s almost as if Nicas and Conger are trying to dysphemize it.

“Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.” But remember: X was pulling out so personnel wouldn’t get arrested for not complying with the maniac judge, Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes’s antics have been covered extensively by Glenn Greenwald of System Update on Rumble. As noted on Friday, Rumble is also not operating in Brazil, nor allowed to be accessed over the Internet.

But there’s a lot more to the censorship story, and some of it expands upon the points in “Deep State in a Corner”: Mike Benz, whom you may have caught on Tucker Carlson’s show, says he was told by a Brazilian congressman that behind all this is a batch of NGOs funded by the United States: “the Brazilian think tanks who are part of the legislative development of these censorship edicts and who pressuring Brazil’s government not to create a carve-X out for congressional parliamentarians because it would give a free pass for Brazilian members of Congress to spread misinformation online.” 

Political. Very political.

Ominous. Very ominous.

After the racial tensions over cops shooting black people became a big story with the Ferguson incidents, Paul Jacob worked on several citizen initiatives to require “body cams” on police officers in cities around the country. Resistance to the practice has come from several quarters, not infrequently the police themselves — despite the “cop cams’” utility being to protect cops as much as anyone.

But the strangest wrinkle to this ongoing story came recently. Consult Jacob Sullum at Reason, whose article “Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off” tells the strange behavior of Police Chief Harold Medina, who got in a crash after driving by a homeless encampment on the way to a press conference, with his wife in the department-issued pickup truck. And yes, he pled the Fifth.

“Medina is suggesting that cops have a constitutional right to refrain from recording their interactions with the public whenever that evidence could be used against them,” explains Sullum. “By turning on their cameras in those situations, he argues, police could be incriminating themselves. That is the whole point.”

But read the whole article. It’s quite a story.

“This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said on Friday. “But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do. And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.”

What he was referring to was his decision to dissolve his campaign for the presidency and endorse Donald Trump. After holding a press conference on Friday, RFK appeared on stage at a Trump rally in Arizona.

There is a lot here to think about, and we are all chattering. But the BBC mentions something interesting: “Before welcoming RFK Jr to the stage on Friday, Trump promised, if elected, to release all remaining documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy.”

It is worth mentioning that Donald Trump had promised to fully de-classify all the JFK assassination in his 2016 presidential campaign. But did not. Not fully.

Roger Stone, who has written a book on the subject, has discussed, many times, what we have learned so far from what Trump did release. (For instance, that Lee Oswald was an FBI informant who had gone to CIA language school to speak Russian.) But Trump did not release everything; “20 percent” he kept back. When Mr. Stone asked Trump why, Trump said he couldn’t. “It’s so horrible, you wouldn’t believe it,” is what Stone says Trump told him. (Judge Napolitano relates an almost identical explanation from Trump.)

Joe Biden, of course, did not release all of the remaining documents, as Stone relates. RFK Jr., now endorsing Trump, has a stake in the disclosures — his uncle being the subject of the whole issue, and his father (whom he believes was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan) was running for the presidency when he was himself assassinated, perhaps for being too close to obtaining information from The Files.

Maybe Bobby Kennedy’s deal with Trump was an assurance on full disclosure. After all, Trump — surviving a near miss from an assassin’s bullet — may now be more inclined to follow through. “So horrible” regardless.

We will see what happens.

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See also past Common Sense columns on RFK Jr.:

• “No Protection, No Duh,” Paul Jacob, October 20, 2023
• “The ‘We the People’ Party Pooper,” Paul Jacob, April 2, 2024
• “The RFK Challenge,” Paul Jacob, April 3, 2024
• “The Duopoly Gonna Duop,” update from June 15, 2024
• “Degrading Democracy, CNN-Style,” Paul Jacob, July 10, 2024

The old rule of journalists and the motives of their sources: “All I care about ‘are the documents verifiable’ and ‘are they in their public interest.’”

Now, says Glenn Greenwald — that is, after the 2016 election, in which journalists repented of their reporting that sure seemed to have helped defeat Hillary Clinton, their dearly beloved candidate — the rules have changed.

“As the 2020 campaign began approaching,” Mr. Greenwald related on System Update (#315), “and all of these institutions and establishment sectors were desperate to ensure Trump didn’t win a second term and Biden won instead, they did something that is now screwing them. And they deserve it so much because what they did was so corrupt. What they did was they announced that from now on, ‘even if we got in our hands material we that we know is authentic . . . and even if they are of great public interest, even if they shed enormous light on one of the two presidential candidates . . . if they believe it comes from a foreign country and it’s designed to influence our election.” Greenwald says this is a brand new rule. Journalists “radically revised” the rules of journalism to protect their candidates.

But now there is a dump of emails from the Trump campaign. Oh, how they would love to release them, promote them, comment upon them, etc. But their new rule means they cannot.

That is, if they honor it in a non-partisan way.

Place your bets now. Will they repudiate their rule and go back to doing journalism (and also helping their party), or will they stick to their new rule which usually (but not in this case) helps their candidates?

Since Paul Jacob’s Wednesday column, “Unburdened by the Leftism,” in which he mentioned the big story sidelined by the Democrats and media, more information about the July 13th attempted assassination of Donald John Trump — said “big story” — has come out.

One significant revelation has been the body cam footage of the local police who had encountered someone “on the roof” that the head of the Secret Service was “too steep” to place a sniper upon. The policeman caught on vidcam complains that he had warned the Secret Service before the event that the building should have been protected by a sniper:

“I (expletive) told them they need to post the guys (expletive) over here. I told them,” one video records a local police officer saying. “The Secret Service. I told them that (expletive) Tuesday.”

“Body cam footage from Trump assassination attempt: ‘I told them … Tuesday,’ says police officer,” Deseret News, August 9, 2024.

Paul has advocated for body cam usage since the Ferguson shooting, and this footage from the local police may be crucial to unraveling the mysteries of July 13th.