Category: Update

Senator Rand Paul (R.-Ky.) has published his annual “Festivus Report” on federal government spending, and it doesn’t look good. The federal debt is on a multi-trillion-dollar spree, yet politicians keep throwing money around:

• Ghost Towns on the Government’s Dime: The federal government spent $10 billion on maintaining, leasing, and furnishing almost entirely empty buildings
• A Pandemic Plunder: A Florida man stole $8 million in COVID-19 Relief funds to buy an island and more
• Your Tax Dollars at Play: The Department of the Interior (DOI) spent $12 Million on a Las Vegas Pickleball Complex
• Taxpayers Fund a Disinformation Index: The Department of State (DOS) wasted $330,000 to fund censorship of non- liberal and conservative media
• Hold on to Your Steering Wheels: The Department of Energy (DOE) spent $15.5 billion to push Americans toward electric vehicles they don’t want
• The Influencer Effect Hits Foreign Policy: The Department of State (DOS) squandered $4,840,082 on influencers
• When Bailouts Go Bust: The United States Department of the Treasury (USDT) granted a failed trucking company a $700 million pandemic-era loan
• Flocking Together! DEI Takes Flight: The National Science Foundation (NSF) spent $288,563 to ensure bird watching groups have safe spaces aka “Affinity Groups”
• Interest-ingly Wasteful: Americans are paying $892 billion in fiscal year 2024 on the interest on Uncle Sam’s Credit Card
• Because Who Needs a Secure U.S. Border, Anyway? The Department of State (DOS) spent $2.1 million for Paraguayan Border Security

These are just a few highlights. Read the full report for more juicy boondoggles and drunken-sailor prodigality.

“This year, I am highlighting a whopping $1,008,313,329,626.12,” explains the senator. “That’s over $1 trillion in government waste, including things like ice-skating drag queens, a $12 Million Las Vegas pickleball complex, $4,840,082 on Ukrainian influencers, and more! No matter how much money the government has wasted, politicians keep demanding even more.”

The United States federal government has been charged with protecting us from foreign enemies. But have those butcher’s-and-baker’s dozen of intel agencies and the Pentagon and Homeland Security really done the job?

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top White House official on Wednesday said at least eight U.S. telecom firms and dozens of nations have been impacted by a Chinese hacking campaign.

Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger offered new details about the breadth of the sprawling Chinese hacking campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans.

Neuberger divulged the scope of the hack a day after the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued guidance intended to help root out the hackers and prevent similar cyberespionage in the future. White House officials cautioned that the number of telecommunication firms and countries impacted could still grow.

The U.S. believes that the hackers were able to gain access to communications of senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures through the hack, Neuberger said. 

Aamer Madhani, “White House says at least 8 US telecom firms, dozens of nations impacted by China hacking campaign,” Associated Press, December 4, 2024.

The report has not been all that widely discussed, oddly enough. How extensive were the cyber-incursions? “The number of countries impacted by the hack is currently believed to be in the ‘low, couple dozen,’ according to a senior administration official.”

For more information on Chinese communist aggression, see StoptheChinazis.org.

The Federal Aviation Administration has responded to the drone (UFO/UAP) wave over New Jersey and New York by imposing a ban on citizen deployment of consumer drone technology.

“The FAA temporarily banned drone flights in 22 areas of New Jersey where critical infrastructure is located,” reports News Nation. “FAA officials said the flight restrictions were requested by federal security agencies and are effective through Jan. 17.”

While the “nothing to see here folks” caveats are all in place, with the usual reassurances that there has been “nothing so far to suggest that any drones have posed a national security or public safety threat,” it backs up its new, allegedly temporary, drone restrictions with alarming threats of force, warning “that ‘deadly force’ could be used against the drones if they pose an ‘imminent security threat,’ and that the government is using ‘drone busters’ to take down unauthorized flyers.”

News Nation’s Thursday report ends on the standard ambiguous note: “Speculation has raged online, with some expressing concerns that the drones could be part of a nefarious plot by foreign agents or clandestine operations by the U.S. government.

Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said it’s unlikely the drones are engaged in intelligence gathering, given how loud and bright they are. He reiterated this week that the drones being reported are not being operated by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Kellie Miller, “FAA bans drones in parts of New Jersey,” News Nation (December 19, 2024).

But of course this denial does not say anything about a corporate contractor running the mysterious drone swarms. In a just-updated report also from News Nation, we learn that “Lue [Luis] Elizondo, who led Pentagon investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), aka UFOs, told NewsNation the public messaging surrounding the unexplained drones has been a ‘catastrophe.’” 

This is a point Paul Jacob made in his December 12th commentary.

In yet another News Nation report, “U.S. Rep. Chris Smith says he is ‘disturbed’ more isn’t being done by federal officials to bring down even one of the mysterious drones flying over that state in order to get answers.

Smith, a Republican serving New Jersey’s Fourth District, told NewsNation he has been disappointed by the lack of transparency and effort put forth by the Biden administration to quell concerns about who is behind the drone flap. 

“Why can’t they bring one of these down?” he asked. “Is our airspace so susceptible and so easily violated that we can’t go and say, ‘OK, here they are, let’s get at least one and find out . . . what’s the origin?”

Smith said many New Jersey residents have been “alarmed” by the flying objects, and all they want is answers and support to handle the air infestation. 

Safia Samee Ali, “NJ rep. says it’s alarming Feds can’t bring down one drone,” News Nation (Updated December 21, 2024).

Two obvious thoughts occur to anyone with a suspicious mind, however: Why would we think the Government would tell us if they had shot one down? and Why would the Government shoot down one of its own in-dev military-industrial-complex devices?

Even more suspicious minds would no doubt go much further, wondering if the Drone Mystery is really just a new form of the near-century-old UFO Mystery — or even the Great Airship Mystery of 1896-97! Surely most suspicions do not go quite that far, though.

It is the weekend. You have heard rumors of a shutdown in the federal government. What’s going on?

Well, sit back and watch a video. This explains it pretty well:

Incredibly well said
pic.twitter.com/wQloRXMuUP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024

Kaizen D. Asiedu, the tweeter/video commentator, calls the whole process broken. He is not alone.

He is also not alone in thinking Elon Musk’s influence on the process this time around has been largely beneficial.

But Nick Catoggio, at The Dispatch, does not seem so appreciative. Here is how Catoggio summarized the politics of it all:

What really happened here, in all probability, is exactly what it looks like. Musk wanted to flex his populist muscle by inciting a grassroots rebellion against Johnson’s bill, and he succeeded so spectacularly that even Donald Trump was caught off-guard and feared ending up on the wrong side of it. It wasn’t just congressional Republicans this time who were politically intimidated into abandoning a bill they supported. It was Trump himself.

The obsequiousness that some GOP members of Congress showed Musk as he pushed them around was also striking, as that sort of thing is typically reserved for the cult leader. “My phone was ringing off the hook. The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk,” crowed Rep. Andy Barr. After Musk replied to a Twitter follower who blamed Rep. Dan Crenshaw for the congressional pay raise in the bill, Crenshaw corrected him — while carefully prefacing his response with “I love you Elon.” Sen. Rand Paul proposed formally replacing Johnson with Musk, reminding followers that the speaker needn’t be a member of the House.

Never before in the Trump era has another populist commanded the political and financial capital needed to credibly threaten Republican politicians into doing his bidding. This is entirely new.

“Folie à Deux: President Trump and Speaker Musk,” The Dispatch (December 19, 2023).

Jonah Goldberg, also at The Dispatch, attempted a general overview of the problem with a carnival metaphor (among others), lamenting that “nobody wants to grapple with the hard things and hard truths that you have to face when you get home from the amusement park. Because that stuff is actually hard, requiring an attention span that risks the horror of boredom.”

But this read like an attempt to express some alarm about Musk’s role in killing the CR. And Mr Goldberg somehow seemed to suggest that the Republican and Democratic establishment (as the two factions have existed in our lifetime) has earned a reputation as, somehow — just possibly — hard-working and not clownish.

And that is impossible to believe, isn’t it? “Get Us Off This Roller Coaster,” Jonah demands, but it was the establishment that put us on the rickety roller coaster, not Trump and Musk. It was the run of the oh-so-serioso political mill that produced mid-December’s 1547-page Continuing Resolution bill!

Oh, and about that shutdown: with the last vote of the 118th Congress, the much-feared outcome was averted.

Stay tuned….

“We’ve got major fiscal problems and a completely unsustainable fiscal trajectory. I haven’t heard anyone, Democrat or Republican, witness or member, that [sic] doesn’t accept that fact,” Reason magazine quotes Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), chairman of the House Budget Committee. “We won’t know when the dominoes fall on us in a sovereign debt crisis, it’s going to be difficult to put the pieces back together and maintain our global leadership.”

Eric Boehm, the Reason author, relays the gist of last week’s committee hearing. He also acknowledges the limits of the committee’s wherewithal: “While there is little disagreement about the seriousness of America’s fiscal problems, the committee hearing also inadvertently highlighted the immense difficulty of solving them.”

Which is why many people have yearned for something like a constitutional balanced budget amendment:

Of course, lawmakers don’t need a constitutional constraint to prevent them from borrowing too much. They could simply pass a budget that doesn’t depend on trillions of dollars in annual borrowing.

Yes, yes, it’s okay to laugh. But that is the thing that must happen. 

Which brings us to DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” Trump’s brain trust on reducing government spending, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Which Ron Paul has advised.

And now, so has David Stockman.

In a long piece on Substack, the former Reagan era budget bulldog offers “Memo To Musk & Ramaswamy: How To Cut $2 Trillion of Fat, Muscle And Bone—The Complete Plan.” It’s comprehensive and daring, but we’ll quote only the setup, where Stockman paints the picture of the challenge America faces:

On Thursday, Paul Jacob addressed the wave of UFOs over the North American east coast and elsewhere, mostly thinking of them as drones. At that point, ufologists had not taken up the story in a big way, and it was local and national news sources that had been covering the story.

But UFO historians, enthusiasts, and theorizers have discussed them, to some extent, both before and since. On her “Earthfiles” channel, on Wednesday, Linda Moulton Howe chatted with a very speculative Whitley “Communion” Strieber about the issue. And on Friday, Richard Dolan, author of a multi-volume history, UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, looked at the subject with some care:

Meanwhile, the fascinating YouTube channel “Earth Watchman” by “MrMBB333” presented extended plane-controller conversations about truly outré UFOs over Oregon. These are not propeller-driven drones, but classic “woo-woo” UFOs. The New York Post covers this story too:

“You are cleared to maneuver as necessary left and right to avoid the UFO out there.”

The LifeFlight pilot, 37-year-old Joe Buley, told KGW he and two medics onboard the fixed-wing aircraft reported flying from Aurora, Colorado, to North Bend, Washington, when they saw the orange lights.

“The biggest thing that stood out was it was changing direction. Usually, things don’t change directions unless it’s an aircraft,” Buley told KGW Thursday.

So the subject just gets stranger and stranger. While much of the east-coast phenomena seems drone-like, if breathtakingly advanced, simultaneous encounters elsewhere suggest more traditional “alien” interpretations.

An interesting part of the human reaction was noted by Mr. Dolan: “You get a real local-national divide here.” The federal level is not helping locals deal with what looks like an invasion of sorts.

Meanwhile, The New York Times dutifully feeds readers the official nothing-to-see-here-folks line:

Federal authorities investigating the sightings have provided few answers about what the objects are or their origin, leaving residents unsettled and local leaders frustrated.

U.S. officials on Thursday said that they had been unable to corroborate the reported drone sightings, and suggested that many of the objects might in fact be manned aircraft, such as airplanes or helicopters.

That latter suggestion from officials seems extremely dubious regarding the New Jersey sightings, and preposterous regarding the “above Oregon” ones — though the debunking interpretations of those Oregon encounters finger Starlink satellites, no matter how dissonant that explanation is with the pilots’ descriptions of maneuverings.

The east-coast/west-coast differences have not been lost on the Post, which mentions the breadth of speculation, as well:

The strange sightings on the West Coast come as residents in New Jersey have been reporting mysterious drones hovering over their skies — with no explanation offered from White House officials.

“They don’t change directions. If they do, not rapidly. Not at this rate of speed,” [Buley] told KGW.

Speculation over the origin of the drones ranges from the US military testing out new, secret technology to an Iranian “mothership” sitting in the ocean deploying the objects over the Garden State.

---

NOTE: UFO illustration at top is not representative of any recent report, is placed there for aesthetic (?) reasons alone.

Last week, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its major report. The press release, “FINAL REPORT: COVID Select Concludes 2-Year Investigation, Issues 500+ Page Final Report on Lessons Learned and the Path Forward,” shows that at least some people in high places are coming around to answering questions — and taking positions — similar to those you’ve read in past entries on this website, Common Sense with Paul Jacob.

Here are a few passages:

COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:

• The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
• Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
• Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
• Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
• By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.

… 

EcoHealth — under the leadership of Dr. Peter Daszak — used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. After the Select Subcommittee released evidence of EcoHealth violating the terms of its National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commenced official debarment proceedings and suspended all funding to EcoHealth.

… 

NIH’s procedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security. Further, NIH fostered an environment that promoted evading federal record keeping laws.

… 

The Paycheck Protection Program — which offered essential relief to Americans in the form of loans that could be forgiven if the funds were used to offset pandemic-era hardships — was rife with fraudulent claims resulting in at least $64 billion of taxpayers’ dollars lost to fraudsters and criminals.

… 

Fraudsters cost the American taxpayer more than $191 billion dollars by taking advantage of the federal government’s unemployment system and exploiting individuals’ personally identifiable information.

… 

At least half of the taxpayer dollars lost in COVID-19 relief programs were stolen by international fraudsters.

… 

The WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was an abject failure because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China’s political interests ahead of its international duties. Further, the WHO’s newest effort to solve the problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic — via a “Pandemic Treaty” — may harm the United States.

… 

The “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation — which shut down schools and small business across the country — was arbitrary and not based on science. During closed door testimony, Dr. Fauci testified that the guidance, “sort of just appeared.”

… 

There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19. Public health officials flipped-flopped on the efficacy of masks without providing Americans scientific data — causing a massive uptick in public distrust.

… 

Prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens. Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life.

“In October 2022, Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a secret meeting instructing top state officials — overseeing political, intelligence, and influence operations — on a new strategy to target the Falun Gong religious group internationally,” reports The Epoch Times in a new 2000+ word report.

“At the core of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s new anti-Falun Gong strategy is launching disinformation campaigns via social media influencers and Western media outlets; and using the American legal system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners.”

The report concludes by quoting Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) on the need to counter-act the CCP’s anti-Falun Gong initiative. “‘The Communist Party of China is essentially a criminal organization running a country,’ Perry said, adding that since the United States doesn’t allow criminal organizations to use government systems to persecute adversaries or violate basic human rights, ‘we certainly shouldn’t let the CCP do it either.’”

Since the election in early November, we’ve seen a lot of think-piece essays on the meaning of it all. Here are some examples:

The end of an American world

Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term on Wednesday, November 6, and the success of the Republican Party, of which he has taken total control, represent a major turning point for the United States.

It’s a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It’s the famous “shining city on a hill,” extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.

Editorial, Le monde, November 6, 2024.

Ding, Dong, the Cult is Dead!

The national mass psychosis is finally dealt a blow, making it safe to be sane again

Yes, it’s a cult. The mass movement that continually renamed itself (appearing as #Resistance, antiracism, “prodemocracy,” etc) hits most all the classic definitions. It demonizes outsiders, rejects critical thought, encourages cutting off family and friends (never more than this week), demands adherence to bizarre/nontraditional beliefs, embraces lies in recruitment (cough cough Russiagate), worships secrecy, exaggerates sinfulness of old beliefs, and has an answer for everything. It lacks a charismatic leader. But the lodestar is Trump, cause of all bad things. It’s really an Anti-Trump cult, the perfect postmodern movement, where the animating emotion is panicked rejection of an anti-leader.

Matt Taibbi, November 10, 2024

Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.

This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.

But the new future is much more open and uncertain than that dark vision. While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.

We don’t know which perspective, if either, will be vindicated. All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.

All this indicates the first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.

Ross Douthat, “Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs,” The New York Times, November 16, 2024.

The End of the Age of Scientism

The only way to save science from itself is to apply it in proper ways while recognizing the limits of the ability to construct the world according to the imaginings of a handful of intellectuals. It’s tragic we had to come to the point of nearly destroying the globe to discover this but here we are. Let the rebuilding begin.

Keep the real science, but throw out the scientism.

Jeffrey Tucker, The Epoch Times, November 29, 2024.

The End of the Age of Hitler

In the age of Hitler, the post–World War II age in which we live, “humanity” is our shared faith. The concept of “human rights” is of course much older, going back to the age of Enlightenment and beyond, and most famously to Thomas Jefferson, who held it to be self-evident “that all men are . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” And yet this claim is a problem. Not only because Jefferson wrote it while holding hundreds of men and women in slavery, but also because it is simply, factually wrong. Jefferson and a few of his Enlightenment friends thought that the existence of human rights was a self-evident truth; but it can’t be, because a great many people in a great many historical settings have not believed in any such thing. The claim that “We hold these truths to be self-evident” reveals the doctrine of human rights for what it is: a castle in the air, a defiant existential assertion of values.

But that is not the deepest problem. The deepest problem is that most of us, most of the time, neither know nor care whether “human rights” have a solid foundation beneath them: like Jefferson, we have come simply to believe in them in their own right. Now, in the post-1945 era, in the age of Hitler, we really do hold the existence of human rights and human equality to be self-evident. We can’t, intellectually, prove it to be true; but that doesn’t matter, because we feel that it is true. For now.

Why do we believe that human beings have rights? Even asking it feels uncomfortable, a questioning of what ought not to be questioned. To raise the problem is almost to blaspheme.

Alec Ryrie, First Things, November 2024.

“In 107 days, what typically takes us a year and a half to two years in our presidential campaign, we were defining someone who was wholly undefined from the start, trying to remind people about the opponent and what life was like underneath him, and also take into account what the political environment was and the realities that we had to deal with,” the Harris–Waltz campaign senior adviser for strategy messaging Stephanie Cutter said on the November 26th episode of the progressive podcast “Pod Save America,” hosted by Dan Pfeiffer.

“When asked on ‘Pod Save America’ if Harris should or should not have done more to distance herself from Biden,” summarized The Epoch Times, campaign chair Jen “O’Malley Dillon said that it wouldn’t have helped to separate herself from Biden by cherry-picking what should have been done instead.

“Look, vice presidents never break with their presidents,” O’Malley Dillon said. “The only time in recent memory is when Pence broke with Trump.”

Harris chose to remain loyal to Biden to avoid changing precedent, O’Malley Dillon said.

“Our focus was to look at the future,” she said.

On the failure of the campaign to secure a spot on the most influential podcast in the world, Ms. Cutter was politic: “We had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows. But it didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or the other.”

The general consensus of podcasters seems to be that Kamala Harris appearing on Joe Rogan’s Spotify podcast would have only doomed her campaign. Rogan is known for authentic long-form interviews; few observers believe Harris could fake authenticity for ten minutes, not to mention two hours.

As for these excuses made by campaign staffers, eighty-year-old Democrat campaign guru James Carville is on record with a ‘slightly different’ take:

“The vice president (Harris) was thinking about going on the Joe Rogan show and a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit,” Carville said.

While Carville reiterated Harris’s staff claim that avoiding Rogan was not the determining factor for her election loss, he unleashed a vulgar rant about their management of her losing campaign.

“When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people: What I would tell them, ‘Not only am I not interested in your f***ing opinion, I’m not even going to call you by your name. You’re 23 years old. I don’t really give a s*** what you think.’”

“James Carville rips Kamala Harris staffers over choice to skip Joe Rogan podcast,” Toronto Sun (November 28, 2024).

In point of fact, Ms. Cutter was born in 1968 and Ms. Dillon in 1976.