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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

COVID Cover-​Up Criminal

On February 11, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci participated in a conference call with about a dozen scientists. The nation’s highest paid government bureaucrat was told that the quickly spreading COVID might have leaked from and even been created in the Wuhan lab, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, which Fauci heads) was funding, in part, through EcoHealth Alliance. 

What did Fauci do?

He worked mightily to discredit the idea.

That is, he engaged in a cover-up.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci about all this. Indeed, he posed a number of very specific questions, and got — for his trouble — generalities and counter-​assertions from Fauci. 

The trail of evidence linking Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci of NIAID to the gain of function research (along with a Chinese plan to release “novel chimeric spike proteins” into Chinese air with the alleged aim of infecting bats) has been confirmed on the Pentagon end — Senator Paul referenced work by Project Veritas that performed this service. 

There’s really little question that gain-​of-​function was developed in Wuhan at the instigation of the Daszak-​Fauci team. And that it was done despite DARPA’s reluctance, despite U.S. law. 

Let’s hope that Fauci’s cover-​up was merely of a dangerous policy that would end in disaster and death, and the ruination of his reputation, not a genocidal conspiracy worthy of taking to The Hague for prosecution as a crime against humanity.

But everyone knows that cover-​ups imply criminality. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability First Amendment rights social media

The Expert De-Platformed

Dr. Robert Malone researched mRNA technology in the 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He helped develop mRNA vaccines. He is a founder of Atheric Pharmaceutical. He’s got plenty of credentials. 

So you might think social media companies would respect his voice in the area of his expertise.

But no: for disputing official government assurances about the super-​safeness of the vaccines, he’s been banned by Twitter (and copycat LinkedIn).

What precisely did he say that triggered the social media giants?

Well, Dr. Malone argues that for many youngsters the risks (like myocarditis) of being vaccinated outweigh the benefits of being vaccinated against what is a very low-​risk infection for most younger people.

“I may be one of the very few that has this depth of understanding of the technology that doesn’t have a direct financial conflict of interest,” says Dr. Malone, who is himself vaccinated. “If I’m not allowed to speak about my concerns, whether they’re right or wrong . . . who is a valid person to participate in the dialogue?”

Nobody, doc. It’s because you’re so credible that you finally had to be stomped by the likes of Twitter. You’re too credible.

At the strongholds of official government doctrine, it’s not about figuring out the truth, encouraging independent judgment of risks and alternatives, or logical persuasion. Argue all you want, as rationally or irrationally as you want — just as long as you hew to the protean prescribed dogma.

Unsure what the set-​in-​stone dogma du jour is, precisely, on matters pandemical and vaccinatory? That’s easy. Just look up the very latest utterances of one Anthony Fauci.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom

Against the Regime

Recently, a tyke and his mommy were booted from a Big Apple Applebee’s because the little boy lacked a vaccine passport.

That is, the mother possessed no proof that her son had been vaccinated against the disease of the day.

Now, parents have every right to refrain from getting their kids injected — especially given the low risk that kids will become seriously ill from COVID-​19 and the non-​negligible risk of harm from vaccine side effects.

But such considerations didn’t prevent a gang of police — no students of Mayberry’s Sheriff Andy Taylor — from ordering the expulsion. (There’s video.)

Residents of New York City’s vaccination regime can at least move to another town. People elsewhere, in larger jurisdictions — Austria, Australia, England — face greater difficulties escaping pandemic tyranny. But, like us, they can protest and they can sue.

In England, a group called Big Brother Watch is challenging the COVID Pass Scheme imposed by the government of Boris Johnson. Their lengthy “pre-​action letter” argues that no evidence exists that the passes will reduce the spread of the virus and that the scheme is “unnecessary and disproportionate.”

Amidst so much “information” under dispute, we know three things.

One, for all the suffering and death it has inflicted on the most vulnerable, the current pandemic is hardly the Black Death. It isn’t even the Spanish flu.

Two, being “vaccinated” against COVID-​19 does not prevent one from becoming infected or from infecting others.

Three, shutting down society also inflicts suffering. Great suffering. As must shutting down whichever segments of society decline Draconian mandates.

Maybe the scourge of tyranny isn’t the best balm for the scourge of COVID-19.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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national politics & policies too much government

No Federal Solution

In a virtual meeting, online, the National Governors Association talked with President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., last week. The biggest issue? COVID.

About COVID tests, “I wish I had thought about ordering a half a billion two months ago,” Mr. Biden confessed. 

While serious people are taking this seriously, blah blah, the truth may be that tests do more harm than good. There have always been problems with the tests: too many false positives; they induce panics at mere “case” levels, thus feeding propaganda and unworkable government “solutions” to the “crisis.”

About which Biden now admits he’s got … nothing

Having run against Donald Trump and his alleged lack of a plan, boasting how the Democrats would conquer COVID, Biden now declares defeat: “Look, there is no federal solution.

“This gets solved at a state level,” acknowledged the president, “. . . and it ultimately gets down to where the rubber meets the road and that’s where the patient is in need of help, or preventing the need for help.”

That last phrase is odd. 

“Preventing the need for help” sounds like he might mean patients taking control of their health care and their own immune systems. Could Mr. Biden be alluding to Vitamin D, Vitamin K, zinc, HCQ, Ivermectin, and many other immune system boosters and virus blockers?

Or Biden could merely be fumbling. He’s made much of the Omicron Variant, including at the governors’ meeting. But instead of addressing the actual trend of the latest iteration, politicians and propagandists push the idea that Omicron is deadly, when the evidence is clear: it is much less deadly than previous variants. 

The great danger of COVID remains the governmental response.

Including, alas, Biden’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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general freedom ideological culture

The Pivotal Issue

A recent video about vaccination passports brought to mind an old parlor game: “If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Hitler?”

Most civilized people realize the moral problems of this thought experiment. Sure, Baby Hitler grew up to be Nazi Führer Hitler, a mass-​murderer worthy of assassination. But young Adolf wasn’t a monster. Yet. 

Moreover, every step on the way to becoming a monster was accompanied by situations in which civilized people could have stopped the coming horrors without murdering a child:

  • World War I was a choice (or set of choices).
  • The Versailles Treaty was a choice.
  • The Weimar Republic hyperinflation was the result of bad decisions.

More interesting than Killing Baby Hitler would be a parlor game about who could have stopped each horrific event that went into the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. What decisions could they have made that would have changed history?

The point of these counterfactual exercises? To learn how to make better policy.

Such as in a pandemic, when governments are expanding their power over citizens with lockdowns and business shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. While in America many such mandates are being struck down as unconstitutional, beyond the authority of officials, in Germany and Austria vaccine passports are going into tyrannical effect. 

We need to take seriously the warning in the video mentioned at top, This Pivotal Moment. Stop vaccine mandates. Reverse the mandates in effect. Abolish internal passports. Resist this tyrannical notion of a two-​tier society.

In Europe, masses of people have taken to the streets in defiance.

Open defiance is also necessary here … in “the land of the free.”

That’s how you stop Baby Hitler.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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too much government

The Big Lesson

“Panicked Americans surrendered a lot of power during the pandemic,” wrote J.D. Tuccille last Friday. “Now they want their country back.”

On the same day, Matt Welch concluded his somewhat more caustic piece, “They Just Keep Closing Schools and Mandating Masks,” with a warning: “If you think Tuesday was a bad day for Democratic busybodies, let them keep trying to squeeze the walls in on this rat cage of an American life.”

The main theme of these two Reason pieces is about right. Americans got snookered into giving up too much; the only silver lining is that we may have learned a few things.

One lesson? People who talk up “follow the science” are least reliable at relaying scientific findings, much less “following” those findings … or sticking to scientific method.

During the pandemic, the Science Pushers lied to us, hid truths, spun us helter skelter, pushed government force willy nilly, and stuck out on limbs with less reason than the hokey pokey.

But, through all the deception, fear-​mongering, and downright bullying, one thing became clear: elite pharmaceuticals, bureaucrats, politicians and corporate media shills nurture interests wildly at variance of the American people’s. 

For those who have read the economics of Public Choice, X‑efficiency, and old-​fashioned “political economy,” this is hardly a shocking lesson. It is as familiar as a well-​worn slipper.

Yet this lesson, pretty clear to most sane folks, needs driving home. Repetition will help it really sink in.

It’s too important to forget, for it was liberty that Americans surrendered, power being what was unconstitutionally expanded and exercised — making the limiting of government the proper response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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