Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS, Don Juan, Canto XIV (1823).
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.
On July 1, 1766, François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, was tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France.
Suppose you have the right to walk across a room.
Yet you’re legally chained to a chair.
By your rights, you may get up and walk across the room. But you can’t, because of the chains. You could if only you could. Why, there’s even a document specifying your right to do so. You physically can’t exercise this right; that’s the only problem.
But your right to walk across the room is enshrined and protected.
Or is it?
In fact, we have no right in the sense of a legal ability to do a certain thing if its exercise is, by law, thwarted.
Recently, Idaho lawmakers passed and Governor Little signed a law making it almost impossible for citizens to place a question onto the ballot. Until now, Idaho required that 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts sign the petition to send a question to ballot. Gratuitously onerous, but at least possible to comply with.
That possibility was a big problem for opponents of citizen initiative rights, however. Hence the new law, requiring signatures from 6 percent of registered voters in each of 35 districts.
Reclaim Idaho challenged the law. The Idaho Supreme Court is currently hearing the case.
According to Reclaim Idaho co-founder Luke Mayville: “If you claim that the people ought to have a right to put something on the ballot [but] make it impossible to exercise that right, it’s not really much of a right at all.”
Do justice, justices.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821).
On June 30, 1801, Frédéric Bastiat was born. Bastiat became one of the most important French Liberal School economists, following Condilliac and Jean-Baptiste Say, best known for his books Economic Harmonies and Economic Sophisms and two monographs, “The Seen and the Unseen,” and “The Law.” He was a brilliant stylist and perceptive critic of state-managed trade. His influence on conservative, libertarian and “limited-government thought” has been vast.
The emergency number of “999” was introduced in London, June 30, 1937, the first of its kind — arguably the best innovation in better government service in modern times.
Just when you thought you knew all the ways our “authoritative” institutions have blocked information from us regarding the origin of COVID-19, another shoe drops.
Early in this pandemic, we learned that the World Health Organization (WHO) lacked any credibility, as their “scientists” shamelessly peddled the dishonest Chinese government line of no human-to-human transmission.
Still, Big Tech was there to help shut down dissenting opinions in America. “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” declared YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and be banned.
We now know that Dr. Peter Daszak, the man who funneled U.S. taxpayer dollars from the National Institute of Health to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses took place, also created The Lancet’s lying letter, which offered the media an official source to level a “conspiracy theory” charge at skeptics of a zoonotic COVID origin.
While claiming its authors, including Daszak, innocent of any “competing interest.”
Big Media — somnolent or else actively disinterested in checking the accuracy or even credibility of the WHO, Daszak, and other scientists — proclaimed the lab-leak theory debunked.
Thus, they could ignore China; blame Trump.
Facebook joined YouTube and others in actively preventing us from communicating about COVID, specifically its origin — using none other than Dr. Daszak as an advisor on their censorship strikes.
The other shoe?
Dr. David Feinberg, head of Google Health, acknowledged at a recent conference that the search engine had actively blocked users from finding information on the virus’s origin.*
Why? Feinberg said Google did not want to “lead people down pathways that we would not find to be authoritative information.”
Leaving us with authoritative disinformation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* This courtesy of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who also discussed The National Pulse report that “Google funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.”
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How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
On June 29, 1914, the day after the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austrian interrogations confirmed that the Serbian government was behind the assassination. Serbia denied involvement.
Thus continued the series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”
Modern UFO lore begins in World War II with the foo fighters, continues with Kenneth Arnold’s infamous June 24, 1947, Mount Rainier flying saucer report, the July 8 “crash” near Roswell, New Mexico (very near where the Enola Gay was deployed), and the “flying saucers over the capital” coverage a little over five years later.
In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was created, and 1952 gave us the National Security Agency. Coincidence?
President Harry S. Truman was regularly briefed about UFOs, and at the end of that era his successor warned us of the growth of a “military-industrial complex” completely outside of republican oversight or any democratic check to balance secret power and privilege.
The two issues are linked, UFOs and the Deep State. Many people deny the existence of both, and I understand the former denial — to those who have never seen anything inexplicable and weird in the skies? I’m with you. But the phenomena keep getting reported. And as for the Deep State, whatever its ontic status, its compartmentalized secrecy and not-quite-on-the-books budgeting were established by Congress. What evidence do you need to say it exists?
Public information?
The kind, ahem, now prevented by non-disclosure agreements and the layers upon layers of military security?
Last week, the Pentagon gave to Congress its report about UFOs.
Did it amount to anything?
Yes.
Was it the UFO Apocalypse so many had waited for?
No. The military confirmed these sightings are not optical illusions but “physical objects.”*
It is probably what you would expect from a secretive military’s congressional report. Some new admissions, sure, but mainly it was . . . a request for more funding.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Or, as Air Force General Nathan F. Twining put it in September of 1947, “The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.”
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SUBJECT: AMC Opinion Concerning “Flying Discs”
TO: Commanding General
Army Air Force
Washington 25, D.C.
ATTENTION: Brig. General George Schulgen
AC/AS-2
1. As requested by AC/AS-2 there is presented below the considered opinion of this command concerning the so-called “Flying Discs.” This opinion is based on interrogation report data furnished by AC/AS-2 and preliminary studies by personnel of T-2 and Aircraft Laboratory, Engineering Division T-3. This opinion was arrived at in a conference between personnel from the Air Institute of Technology, Intelligence T-2, Office, Chief of Engineering Division, and the Aircraft, Power Plant and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3.
2. It is the opinion that:
a. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.
b. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft.
c. There is a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena, such as meteors.
d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and motion which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.
Excerpt from “The Twining Memo,” September 24, 1947