Paul is all a-twitter about Christmas. Scratch that: he’s all about Twitter. But on Rumble:
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Yuri Bezmenov
As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. . . . he will refuse to believe it . . . That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.
Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, 1983 interview, as quoted in “38 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America” (July 18, 2018), Big Think.
Picture credit: Yuri Bezmenov — “Original publication: “Black is Beautiful, Communism is Not.” ISBN 0-935090-18-5
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Christmas Warfare
On Christmas Day in 1776, George Washington and the Continental Army crossed the Delaware River at night to attack, the next day, the Hessian forces serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey.
United States President Andrew Johnson granted an unconditional pardon to all Confederate veterans on Christmas Day in 1868.
A series of unofficial truces occurred across the Western Front to celebrate Christmas in 1914. The image, at top, illustrates the event: “British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches” with a sub caption explaining “Saxons and Anglo-Saxons fraternising on the field of battle at the season of peace and goodwill: Officers and men from the German and British trenches meet and greet one another — A German officer photographing a group of foes and friends.” Originally published in The Illustrated London News, January 9, 1915.
Paul Jacob re-caps the biggest story of the week, the Twitter Files:
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Juan Trippe
Mass travel by air made possible by the Jet Age may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb. For there can be no atom bomb more powerful than the air tourist, charged with curiosity, enthusiasm and good will, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and races.
Juan Trippe, The Pan Am Story (1958), p. 8.
On December 24, 1973, the District of Columbia Home Rule Act was passed, allowing residents of Washington, D.C., to elect their own local government.
Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas, denizens of the Sort-of-Great State of New York!
It is certainly a time to be jolly. For some time now, Santa and his legislative elves have been striving to give you and yours an ever more overbearing medical regime.
Take a gander at some of the goodies that have been proposed in the Empire State’s Legislative Workshop:
- A416 would let governors or health officials detain persons “afflicted with a communicable disease” as long as a state of health emergency has been declared.
- A279 would institute a statewide vaccine database. If you’re vaccinated, you’ll be in the database unless you make a point of requesting otherwise (who knows, maybe even then).
- A8398 would eliminate many religious exemptions from compulsory vaccination and limit the ability of local governments and private organizations to issue medical exemptions.
- A02240 would mandate flu vaccines for children in daycare.
Santa sure has been working overtime the last couple of years.
Will such bills, lapsed at the moment, soon see the light of day? Let’s hope! You people of the State of New York really need this kind of bounty. Especially if you’ve been suffering any delusions about the propriety of independent judgement and personal discretion in such matters.
Did I say Santa? Maybe I meant the Grinch. Or Krampus. The real Santa would be putting moving-expense vouchers in everyone’s stockings to help them get the heck out of this beleaguered state.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with DALL-E2, John Tenniel, JG
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A.J. Liebling
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
A.J. Liebling, The New Yorker (April 7, 1956).
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A Resignation
On December 23, 1783, George Washington resigned as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
Elon Musk’s sunlight on Twitter’s backroom censorship dealings has cast a black shadow upon the U.S. Government.
The revelations are called The Twitter Files, and I linked to the first two installments, tweetstormed last week by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, on Monday.
But Musk’s released information to his select set of journalists did not stop there.
The third set was also made public by Taibbi, and dealt with the company’s deliberations and politics of January 2021, and the banning of a sitting president — and Twitter’s most popular user — from the platform.
Michael Shellenberger had the honor of delivering to the public the fourth set, showing how Twitter executives changed policies and made up stuff on the fly to ban the aforementioned Donald J. Trump.
The fifth batch, ushered into our view by Bari Weiss, again, included an especially interesting tidbit: “Internal correspondence shows those assigned to evaluate Trump’s tweets didn’t see proof of incitement of the Capitol riot” but “[t]hat didn’t stop for massive internal calls to ban the president” — quoting The Daily Mail’s synopsis.
“Between January 2020 and November 2022,” Taibbi tweeted in the sixth outing, “there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth… a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.” Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” team appeared to go out of its way to find excuses to ban accounts, and is egregiously misnamed.
Michael Shellenberger’s contribution in the seventh Twitter File blast is perhaps most shocking of all:
- The FBI was deliberately lying about the status and contents of the Hunter Biden laptop before as well as after the infamous (and suppressed) New York Post story.
- The FBI “wargamed” about the laptop with social media executives before the story broke.
- The FBI “compensated” Twitter for the collusion — to the tune of over $3 million.
- And the FBI apparently has not stopped — its work with Twitter is ongoing.
To top it all off, Lee Fang supplied the eighth set, complete with poop about Pentagon pressure, propaganda, and “concierge service.”
In sum, the federal government made Twitter its b . . . uh . . . disinformation agent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Yes, Virginia, “twitterpated” is a word!
Illustration created with DALL-E2, John Tenniel, JG
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