Categories
Update

Porch, No Privacy

Since the outside of your house is public, the government may video-record your house sans search warrant. “Law enforcement in Kansas recorded the front of a man’s home for 68 days straight, 15 hours a day, and obtained evidence to prove him guilty on 16 charges,” according to Jalopnik:

“Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” said the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision on U.S. vs Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”

Maxwell Zeff, “Feds Can Film Your Front Porch for 68 Days Without a Warrant, Says Court,” Jalopnik (March 21, 2024).

Outside the jurisdiction of the Tenth Circuit, this ruling does not strictly apply. But it shows where courts are heading, no?

Categories
Thought

La Rochefoucauld

Truth does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil.

François de La Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Maxims (1665), no. 67 (Leonard Tancock, trans.)
Categories
Today

Coercive

The Intolerable Acts was the American Patriots' name for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea party. They were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston harbor. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts.

On March 24, 1765, the Kingdom of Great Britain passed the Quartering Act, which required the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.

On the same date in 1855, slavery was abolished in Venezuela.

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Categories
Update

The Birx/Pence Factor

Yesterday, Paul Jacob explored the chief issues surrounding the fourth anniversary of “Fifteen Days to Flatten America.” He concluded by blaming mostly Fauci and Birx for the massive tyrannies and ineptitudes of the lockdowns and other measures associated with the pandemic.

While one of those names, Anthony Fauci, is more than familiar to readers of Common Sense with Paul Jacob, the other — Deborah Birx, the author of a memoir of the pandemic, Silent Invasion (2022) — is much less familiar. And it may be tempting to downplay her role.

But as a recent documentary argues, au contraire! She was key. Birx did the bulk of the damage. It was her bizarre reactions that led the federal government response.

Watch it and weep: “It Wasn’t Fauci — How the Deep State Really Played Trump”:



Yes, it is about the Deep State, but mostly about the dread Dr. Deborah Birx . . . and the perfidy of Vice President Mike Pence.

Categories
Thought

Gogol

You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842). The same passage in D. J. Hogarth’s translation: “ As things are now, the world has grown stupid to a degree that passes belief.”
Categories
Today

“Give Me Liberty”

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

On this date in 1992, economist and social philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek died. He remains best known for his 1944 political tract The Road to Serfdom.

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture too much government

Fifteen Days to Flatten America

Fauci, Trump, Covid

The most important lesson of “Fifteen days to flatten the curve!” occurred on the 16th, when  governors kept lockdown measures going.

No state limited its lockdown measures to a mere 15 days.

The public rationale for the lockdowns had been to save hospitals from being swamped with COVID patients — though the Army Corps of Engineers had built emergency COVID care centers near pandemic hot spots around the country, which were unceremoniously dismantled, without having been used, even as governors continued their hysterics.

And tyrannies.

Out west in Washington, for example, Governor Inslee shut down the whole state with a March 24, 2020, order, and, on April 3, unilaterally extended it to May 4, despite the fact that most of the state had hardly experienced the virus yet. On May 29, the stay-at-home order was still in effect, with the governor dictating a county-by-county re-opening order that he fiddled with incoherently for the next year. 

Across the country, most hospitals suffered from under-use.

John Stossel just “celebrated” the four-year anniversary of the lockdowns with an article titled “‘15 Days To Slow the Spread’: On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again.” Mr. Stossel provides a concise litany of the idiocy of that brief, if far too long, epoch of . . . . what he calls “government incompetence.

But does incompetence exhaust the fault?

At the beginning I had expressed caution, even suggesting a little lenience for our leaders. Then came the enormity of the mass liberticide.

It was President Trump who put out the “guidelines” for shutting down the country; it was Trump who stuck to his guns on the efficacy of the lockdown “mitigations.” Trump did so because he was mesmerized, perhaps, by Drs. Fauci and Birx — whom he had promoted into the spotlight.

Little did Trump know, however, that Fauci had funded the very disease he was allegedly fighting, and that Birx, privately, had pushed lockdowns not in good faith for reasons stated, but with every intention of pushing “longer and more aggressive interventions.”

Trump? Played, yes; incompetent, sure. 

But Birx and Fauci? Malevolent. Evil. Pick the word.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Thought

John Adams

“Go and see with how little wisdom this world is governed.”

John Adams, in a letter to John Quincy Adams (received June 3, 1794), advising of a diplomatic position opening up. See Phyllis Lee Levin, The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams (2015), first page.
Categories
Today

Colony

On March 22, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. Exactly eight years later, the colony expelled Anne Hutchinson for her religious dissent.

In 1812 on this date, Stephen Pearl Andrews was born. Andrews would go on to become an important American abolitionist, free love advocate, and theorist of “individual sovereignty,” promulgating the reforms of Josiah Warren.

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights judiciary

Most Important Time Periods

First Amendment, US Constitution, free speech, censorship

The attorneys general of a few states, a few activist groups, and a few congressmen have acted to bring to light a mass of eyewitness and documentary evidence that the federal government has been working hard, behind the scenes, to censor our speech.

The guilty parties have been caught red-handed.

Now that the matter is before the U.S. Supreme Court, reports on oral arguments suggest that not every justice is as acquainted with the point of the Bill of Rights as we’d like.

Its function is to stop government from doing various rights-violating things at will. But Justice Ketanji says: “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in most important time periods.”

Justice Kagan, chiming in: “I’m really worried about that.”

Tyrants worry about having too little flexibility to stomp our speech “in most important time periods,” prevention of which stomping is the very purpose of the First Amendment.

We, for our part, worry about having our speech stomped.

Some of the justices also seem not to grasp that when government officials contact you and ask you to do this and that, no overt threats are necessary for officials to rely on the threat of governmental power.

The bossing is not always subtle, though. Perusing the evidence, Justice Alito says he couldn’t imagine officials “taking that approach to the print media.” The federal speech police treat “Facebook and these other platforms like they’re subordinates.”

Are they?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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