On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
This was not a ban on the slave trade as such, of course, but of the buying of slaves from sources overseas.
Take “Learing.” If you haven’t seen Nick Shirley’s YouTube video blowing the lid off what has quickly become the biggest fraud story of our time, you may not get the joke.
Some 30 days ago, my “Red-Flagged Welfare Fraud” decried “the more than $1 billion in fraud” conducted mostly by Somalis in Minnesota, taking taxpayer money and siphoning it off for personal and perhaps even terrorist benefit. Two weeks later, a weekend update — “Walz Waltzes, Spins” — discussed the Governor of Minnesota’s lame attempts to seem “in charge.”
Now, the fraud total is estimated to be over nine billion!
A new element of the story is young Mr. Shirley’s reporting. He went to “day care centers” all over Minneapolis, confronting “workers” and noticing there were no children actually being fed or taught. These were sham programs.
In a partly funny moment, he appeared in front of one alleged day care that had misspelled its own name on the building’s sign: “Quality Learing Center.”
A whole lot of folks on X — but not on BlueSky — thought this was funny-haha.
The rest of us shake our heads. It may not even be funny-peculiar, as inquiries into more states have begun, with Washington and Ohio receiving the most attention so far.
We’ll need more Nick Shirleys to cover it all, for the mainstream press has shown … some reluctance to put in much elbow grease.
Meanwhile, there is a silver lining, expressed last night on Hannity by Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project: “It actually kind of makes me relieved that there were no children in these obviously corrupt and probably dangerous daycare facilities.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something … in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem … seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned.
Kenneth Arnold, 30 years after first seeing nine mysterious flying objects over Mount Rainier, while attending the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, curated by Fate to mark the 30th anniversary of the “birth” of the modern UFO age, “Pilot Kenneth Arnold 1977 still angry about disbelief,” on YouTube.
On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”
So those of us paying attention came to distrust the scientists.
Especially “scientists” in positions of political power.
Sadly, tragically, more than one scientific discipline has been perverted in shockingly non-scientific ways. A hidebound denialism about new data has crept in. Sure, it is about the money, but often we catch a whiff of ideology.
This is apparently the case regarding astronomy — about which Harvard astrophysicist Abraham “Avi” Loeb offered testimony on a recent podcast.
In 2014, a meteorite (CNEOS 2014-01-08) splashed into the Pacific Ocean — too fast to be solar-system native, says the U.S. Space Command. Without investigating, a published paper dismissed the evidence, discouraging further inquiry; Avi Loeb, on the other hand, led a team to the site, producing evidence from the ocean floor as well as an actual research paper.
Loeb’s first paper on the current obsession, the third officially recognized interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, was published only on the condition he took out his killer final sentence — about the possibility that the object might be technological in nature (as its anomalies suggested).
Loeb appeased the editor … and then wrote a whole new article on that unspeakable (alien tech) possibility — for another journal.
NASA’s also infected. After watching a recent press conference by NASA on 3I/ATLAS, Loeb argued it would have been better to have actual scientists field questions rather than feature NASA bigwigs dutifully reciting the currently acceptable (safe?) determination that the object is “just a comet.”
“The intellectual climate, right now in Academia, is such that any new knowledge is resisted by experts,” Dr. Loeb explains.
That’s the opposite of science.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Almost every organization … exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.
Kenneth Boulding, Joseph T. Mahoney & Anne S. Huff, Toward a New Social Contract. Theory in Organization Science (Faculty paper, University of Illinois at Urbana, 1993).
On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.
Which is understandable, since the U.S. State Department more than merely condemned the European Union.
In the words of Marco Rubio, the five just-sanctioned persons “have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”
Thierry Breton. Former EU commissioner and top proponent of the Digital Services Act, which seeks to force U.S. tech giants to “police illegal content more aggressively” or face big fines. “Illegal” here doesn’t mean speech deployed to commit bank robberies; it’s speech EU censors dislike.
Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg. Leaders of HateAid.
Clare Melford. Leader of Global Disinformation Index, which, the State Department observes, exhorts “censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press.”
Imran Ahmed. Leader of Center for Countering Digital Hate, described by Breitbart as the “deplatforming outfit which defined its central mission as ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter.’ ” CCDH also worked hard to get Breitbart and other sites blacklisted from social media.
Maybe none of these villains was planning a trip to the United States anytime soon.
And, doubtless, much more could be done to combat overseas attempts to censor Americans. But at least this much action against enemies of our First Amendment rights is warranted, even if mostly symbolic.
Just give us a little more time, European leaders. We’ll do more to oppose and thwart your obnoxious global censorship agenda.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.
Kenneth Boulding, quoted in Leonard Silk, The Economists (1976).
On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.