Common Sense with Paul Jacob

As the COVID pandemic experience is teaching us, there is something deeply wrong with medicine in America — if we did not know already. But we are ill, as Paul Jacob indicated on September 5, “Stay Puft America,” for other reasons, too. Like food.

There are now many resources online, however, that may help us understand just how far off the mark our doctors and nutritionists have become. Comedian Jimmy Dore recently explained, to the best of his abilities, a case against using statins. The problem is not cholesterol, he says, but sugar.

The danger of sugar, and not just refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup, has been warned against for ages. A famous book in the 1970s made a big hit, but the Big Gov/Big Agribiz complex fought back with the Low Fat story, and we have been arguing about this ever since.

None of this can possibly be adjudicated on this site. What is true? What should you eat? What should and shouldn’t you do to prevent strokes and heart attacks and diabetes? These are questions to answer somewhere else than on ThisIsCommonSense.org.

But still, it may be worth listening to the latest guest on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Jessie Inchauspé:

What is wrong with our diets and our doctors? Increasing numbers of scientists and doctors have joined a legion of food faddists to blame sugar. But is it really a molecule that is to blame? Or is it . . . government? Could it be that the Big Gov/Big Biz paradigm has poisoned us? Is poisoning us?

It sure looks like this malign entity has worked mightily to make billions off the bad habits that regulators, subsidizers, and lobbyists have — behind the scenes of advertising and product placement — enticed us into.

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.