Category: Update

On May 3, Paul wrote about the then-upcoming appearance of former President (and current candidate) Donald Trump before the Libertarian Party quadrennial presidential nominating convention, amusingly and perhaps tellingly given the motto “Become Ungovernable.”

Much has been made of the invitation. The same invitation was also extended to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who, like Trump, accepted) and to President Joe Biden (who did not accept). A typical reaction to Trump’s scheduled appearance at the convention can be gleaned merely by reading the title of a recent Washington Post op-ed by Peter Goettler, President of Cato Institute: “Trump is hardly libertarian. But neither is today’s Libertarian Party” (May 23, 2024).

Well, the horror and dark thoughts about the appearance can now be judged by the facts, not speculations. The event happened. On Friday, RFK spoke, and was mostly courteously received. On Saturday — yesterday — Trump gave a perhaps too-long but mostly rational case for why Libertarians at the convention should endorse him, or at least, as citizens, vote for him. He also promised to place a libertarian in his cabinet. Additionally, Trump pledged to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence “on day one” if elected. It was an extraordinary occasion. But the crowd was restless, and there were a lot of boos.

Most truthful statement? “This is the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate.”

Juiciest statement? “[T]he Libertarians want to vote for me, and most of them will.”

But is it true? Will libertarians vote en masse — or even as a majority — for Trump?

Today the Libertarians vote among their candidates for the presidency and vice presidency to choose the party’s 2024 presidential ticket. Which will presumably garner the mere (?) 3 percent of the vote that Trump mocked them for.

Here at Common Sense the subject of Oregon’s “red” county secession movement — to move the border to form a “Greater Idaho” — has been addressed several times. Such movements being slow creatures, the advances move along andante. Perhaps Andante con moto.

The story was in the news again this week. For example, Tim Pool brought it up and mused again about the new “civil war” possibility:

But it is also in the papers. Newsweek, for example:

On Tuesday, Crook County in Oregon became the 13th county to approve a proposal to secede from the state and join neighboring Idaho by 53.5 percent of the vote against 46.5 percent, as part of what supporters are calling the “Greater Idaho” project.

Backers of the plan argue the more conservative areas of eastern and central Oregon are currently dominated by liberal-leaning cities such as Portland and Salem and argue their interests would be better represented in traditionally Republican Idaho.

James Bickerton, “Oregon Counties Voting to Join ‘Greater Idaho,’” Newsweek, May 23, 2024.

Talk of secession shouldn’t automatically conjure up “civil war” fears. The American experience in 1860 is the exception: usually secession is the peaceful alternative to unrest, avoiding civil conflict.

Rather early in pandemic there appeared a set of conspiracy theories to the effect that Great Britain’s National Health Service had used the coronavirus plague as an excuse to kill old people, thus pumping up the numbers of COVID deaths and fanning the flames of the pandemic panic while also thinning out the aging herd, relieving stress upon the medical system — which was said to be a paramount concern elsewhere, too.

As fuel for this theory were wild tales that the NHS had purchased vast quantities of Midazolam, a drug sometimes used in conjunction with other drugs at end-of-life situations.

What is the state of this accusation?

Well, Dr. John Campbell has been vlogging about Scotland’s COVID-19 inquiry, dealing with widespread malpractice regarding DNR (“Do Not Resuscitate”) orders in the country. Last week, Dr. Campbell provided an overview of where the Midazolam/COVID story is right now:

Note that Dr. Campbell is not taking seriously the extreme version of the Midazolam conspiracy theory, as cooked up early in the pandemic by David Icke. According to this accusation, there never was a new virus, and Midazolam was being used to kill thousands of patients to perpetrate a total fraud.

That theory seems a complete fantasy. But is the weaker version of the theory, where, for reasons not altogether clear, some COVID patients were given up on and “put out of their misery” — against the spirit and letter of the laws, as well as against the Hippocratic oath?

There does appear to be some evidence for that in Great Britain. We will see how this plays out. Though it may look like the fantasied projection of unhinged minds, the anecdotes are piling up, so perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss it at the start of inquiry.

Besides, we know that in several welfare states, Canada especially, euthanasia is all the rage — new subsidies and protocols by government to kill patients by “suicide,” designed (some say) to cut costs.

On Friday, Paul Jacob provided some vivisection services to a review of Jerry Seinfeld’s stance on what the woke have done to comedy, in “The French King Flip Flap.” On May Day, in “They Don’t Get It,” Paul had dealt with the same subject, Mr. Seinfeld’s long-running beef with the woke.

But the current context — the one that led to Friday’s target, an article in The Washington Post by Brian Broome — is the new movie on Netflix, Unfrosted, directed by Seinfeld and co-written by him with Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder.

Is it funny?

This is of course something everyone must judge for him- or herself. The intent is clear, a retelling of the “wars” between the breakfast cereal companies to create a new breakfast product — what has become known as a “Pop Tart” — in a zany, cartoonish fashion. It is designed as a silly movie. Mostly good clean fun. Family fare.

But a survey of critics and audiences at Rotten Tomatoes gives us an indicator to how it’s doing: Early reactions were that the movie stinks. But now that more people have seen it, we are seeing something like a “ratioed” split, with an average of critics’ responses placing it in the splatted green tomato (rotten tomato) range, at 40 percent approval, while audience scores have run higher, at 55 percent.

In recent years, the audiences have split with critics at much wider margins, on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics giving low scores for unwoke creative products, while audiences have given ultra-high scores, and vice versa.

Sometimes it’s not Wokianity at issue, but simply orthodox religion: Aronofsky’s Noah (2014), for example, which yielded a 75 percent positive for the critics and a 41 percent negative for the audience. Noah owed as much to The Book of Enoch as to Genesis.

But 2019’s Captain Marvel was indeed about the woke issue, and audiences judged the movie at a weak 45 percent, while critics placed it pretty high, at 79 percent. Even more dramatic, in the same vein, went on with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2019), which critics raved about at 91 percent, but audiences yawned at 42 percent.

But the ultimate split between audiences and critics may be Amy Schumer’s 2023 Netflix stand-up special, with critics granting the comic a whopping 100 percent approval, while audiences scorned her product with jeers at a mere 18 percent. The split in appreciation was an epochal moment in the current culture wars.

Ms. Schumer plays Marjorie Post in the new Seinfeld flick.

As Covid becomes normalized as a disease . . .

1. “Moderna posted a $1.2 billion loss in the first quarter of 2024, with the drugmaker blaming crashing sales of its COVID-19 vaccine,” explains an Epoch Times article. “This decline aligns with the anticipated transition to a seasonal COVID-19 vaccine market,” Moderna said.
2. We reminisce how we navigated the worst period: “In December 2021, visitors weren’t allowed in the hospital, so Amy Williams had to find another way to get the medicine to her father,” another Epoch Times piece tells us.
3. “I believe that the truth about the COVID vaccines is starting to come out,” says Dr. John Campbell:

A lot of people still express incredulity over the UFO subject, are exasperated that Congress is spending any time on it, and simply deny that the Pentagon is honestly worried about the issue. This is all more than understandable, but it is the case that incredulity over why we are talking about this is completely misplaced. For a lot of highly connected professionals are talking UFOs these days. People with deep connections to Pentagon research.

Take Chris Mellon.

Here is Richard M. Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973, talking about Mellon’s recent Substack article:

This is a snippet from a longer Dolan video from just a few days, where he appraises the issue of crashed UFO retrievals. Mellon disclosed some information about an alleged UFO crash in Kingman, Arizona, back in the 1950s.

So who is Christopher Mellon? Here is the beginning of his Wikipedia biography:

Christopher Karl Mellon (born October 2, 1957), is a private equity investor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and later for Security and Information Operations. He formerly served as the Staff Director of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a member of the influential Mellon family out of the Greater Pittsburgh area.

And Mellon is not alone. The number of government officials, military personnel, armament contractors, airline pilots, and many others say really odd things about phenomena we would normally associate with science fiction. They could all be lying, but they are talking this way. So one can no longer honestly express shock at the issue coming up.

And if they are all lying — if there is nothing to UFOs — then that is quite the conspiracy, too. There is a conspiracy here no matter how you look at it.

What did they know and when did they know it?

This classic question, derived from Senator Howard Baker and the Watergate brouhaha of the 1970s, continues to echo as we uncover each new scandal. But no one is calling the pandemic debacle as “COVIDgate” or “WuhanGate” or even “FauciGate,” for the scandal is broad.

How broad? In Britain, a very small minority is getting a handle on it:

In America, keeping track of all the pieces has been an ongoing issue for a number of podcasters, not least of whom is Tom Woods, whose book Diary of a Psychosis (2023) is itself a good indicator of where we are at. A recent podcast of his (“Ep. 2481 Yale’s Harvey Risch: The Corruption of American Medicine”) shows just how daunting a task this endeavor can be.

“At least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus genetically very similar if not identical to COVID-19,” informs Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) “Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research.”

According to information on the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security page, foreknowledge of the gain-of-function research program that led to the development of SARS-Cov-2 may have been rather widespread:

“Despite at least fifteen federal agencies having knowledge of the DEFUSE project in 2018,” the page continues, “its existence was not revealed to the public until 2021 and the involvement of NIH Rocky Mountain Lab in the initial proposal has never been previously disclosed. Dr. Paul expressed that the failure of these agencies to disclose their awareness of the risky research proposed in the DEFUSE project raises serious concerns.”

This reminds Common Sense of a catchphrase of the Watergate era: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” But in 2020, the U.S. President was kept in the dark about the origin of the novel coronavirus — as was the American public. But a whole lot of members of the Administrative State knew a whole lot that they did not let on.

Who knew about the U.S.-subsidized origin of the Wuhan Institute-created virus, and when did they know it?

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Past coverage of the origin of the “novel coronavirus” here at Common Sense is extensive, but these four articles might be a place to start:

• Twelve Monkeys in Charge? (June 18, 2020)
• Lab Rats (March 31, 2021)
• Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy (April 6, 2021)
• Lab Rats III: Doubling Down on Danger (April 7, 2021)

What’s the latest on the prosecution of the January 6th “rioters” at the Capitol?

Well, take the case of Mr. Daniel Goodwyn, 35, of Corinth, Texas. He pled guilty on January 31, 2023, to one misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority. 

“A sentencing requirement that Jan. 6 defendant Daniel Goodwyn have his computer monitored by the government for “disinformation” has been vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,” explains The Epoch Times:

The court on March 26 published a mandate sending the case back to U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton to remove the computer monitoring requirement he issued as part of the sentencing judgment in the case on June 15, 2023.

“Judge Walton had no legal basis to issue the special condition,” Carolyn Stewart, Mr. Goodwyn’s attorney, told The Epoch Times in an April 3 email.

The judge had also censured the defendant for his interview with Tucker Carlson, who, said the judge, had minimized Goodwyn’s involvement on the fateful day.

As The Epoch Times story relates, it’s been a colorful case, with the judge showing he was misinformed about some of the facts of the case, and adamantine in his error. He also disagreed with the defendant’s contention that Ashli Babbitt had been murdered by the police.