Tag: covid

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media and media people social media

Hidden Dissuader

Rumble, Dan Bongino

“It’s one thing to let people post UFO content about crop circles in Arkansas,” Ciaran O’Connor was quoted in a recent Washington Post article, talking about YouTube competitor Rumble. “It’s another to allow your platform to be used by someone claiming vaccines are actively harmful and that people should not take them based on conspiracies and misinformation.”

As a cited expert for the Post’s hit piece, O’Connor is the big gun, whom reporter Drew Harwell uses to conclude his vivisection of the upstart video platform: “There’s a duty of care and responsibility as your platform grows and scales up.”

After a year and a half of government lies and flip flops about the novel coronavirus and its treatments, coupled with Big Tech censorship, we must not allow O’Connor’s bald “vaccine” assertions to go unnoticed, but we have other fish to fry.

Sizzling on the platter? Ciaran The Expert.

Who is he?

Well, writes Harwell, O’Connor’s “an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-​extremism think tank in London that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.”

Rumble, claims O’Connor, has “become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-​right communities in the U.S. and around the world.”

But let us consult one of those right-​wingers, Rumble investor and online commentator Dan Bongino, to learn something more about this “Institute for Strategic Dialogue.”

Bongino points out that the institute gets its funding from various governments, including our own, as well as from Rumble’s competitors Facebook and YouTube. 

And several more subdivisions of YouTube’s parent company also support this critic of Rumble.

The Post, of course, disclosed none of that.

You know, cuz Journalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly international affairs

Done to the Dogs

shelter dog

It shouldn’t have happened.

Shire councils should not be killing dogs “to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-​based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”

But that’s what happened. The Bourke Shire Council in the New South Wales region of Australia shot and killed several dogs, including a new mother, that were about to be picked up and taken to an animal shelter.

An Office of Local Government reported that the council did this “to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-​19 transmission.”

We all know that shelters sometimes put down animals when the shelter cannot find a home for them.

This wasn’t that. The council’s action wasn’t a reluctant last resort. It was a first resort.

It was, the argument runs, about preventing volunteers from going from here to there in the ordinary course of their work, work that has not been discontinued for the duration of the pandemic.

The council’s action is an example of what happens when fear displaces common sense. The thwarted shelter volunteers, who love animals and volunteer precisely to prevent needless killing, are distressed. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that they had safety measures in place to deal with the pandemic while getting the dogs.

This isn’t the worst kind of thing going on in this world, obviously.

But you don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be appalled by the viciousness of the conduct. 

And it does serve as a marker for the callousness and crazed panic of politicians in the current crisis. What else might they do?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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shelter dog

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local leaders

Political Intimidation Unmasked

mask, child, children, student

Last week, Illinois state regulators threatened Dr. Jeremy Henrichs with “personal and professional consequences,” specifically loss of his medical license, if he continued to oppose mandatory mask-​wearing in schools.

Henrichs is a board of education member and a medical doctor.

He questioned the necessity of masks. Why? On the basis of his best medical judgment — and he is hardly alone in seeing good reasons to oppose mask mandates, especially for children. In response, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation “has threatened my medical licensure unless I expressly support and enforce a mask mandate for all students.”

In his public protest, Henrichs added that it’s bad for democracy when people tolerate this kind of intimidation.

Fortunately, in this particular case the intimidation is not being tolerated, for state lawmakers called for hearings on the matter.

The agency that threatened Dr. Henrichs soon apologized, apparently ending the threat to him. (According to the letter of apology, though, the complaint won’t be formally closed until the Medical Disciplinary Board meets on September 1.)

In addition, the entire Mahomet-​Seymour school board of which Henrichs is a member has signed an op-​ed defending him.

Their op-​ed argues that board members should be “free to express their opinions, debate with their colleagues . . . and vote their conscience without the threat of coercion. . . .”

So it’s looking good for Dr. Henrichs. But power-​holders with censorious mentalities are still out there, eager to crack down on speech with which they disagree.

Whenever they can get away with it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people social media too much government

Ceding “Science” to Totalitarians?

Covid, fascism, vaccination

A recent Reason article on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made …” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made. 

What case is it?

Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-​sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.” 

Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.

The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-​to-​spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.

Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.

“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S‑based’ Covid-​19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of … the rate of vaccine coverage.”

Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.

Is he right? I don’t know. 

But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-​approved “scientific” opinion.

Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Ineffective because suppressed on major social media, in part. You can find their discussion on Rumble, Brighteon, Bitchute and other upstart sites.

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crime and punishment insider corruption

Cuomo, Exit Stage Left

Cuomo resignation

Out in a fortnight. 

Yesterday, New York’s governor said he’d resign in 14 days.

Dominating the headlines has been Andrew Cuomo’s sexual misconduct scandals.

“It’s [a] shame this is what the Democrats choose to go after Cuomo for, rather than for killing tens of thousands of elderly New Yorkers through his policy of putting COVID-​positive patients into nursing homes,” we read at InfoWars.

But this is the usual thing to say … at least, for those of us who live and breathe and think outside the usual right-​left continuum. And in this case, it may not be applicable.

How so?

Well, on Monday, Assembly Member Charles D. Lavine (D‑13th A.D.), Judiciary Committee Chair, made it quite clear that the investigations (yes: plural) going into the impeachment of the governor are not limited to matters of sex. Allegations also considered?

  • Cuomo’s “improper use of government resources to write and produce a book”;
  • “allegations concerning [the] nursing home” fiasco; and
  • “that he provided preferential access to COVID-​19 testing to certain friends and/​or family members.”

But Cuomo himself isn’t talking up these other issues, which are critically important for the state he “runs.” In his resignation announcement, he dubbed one such indiscretion literally “thoughtless,” openly proclaiming that he “want[ed] to personally apologize” to a female state trooper who accused him of embarrassing sexual banter and unwanted touching.

Up front, however, was his proud proclamation of his support for “diversity.”

That is to mollify the current cultural left. But he quickly switched to blaming today’s loud and rash (rather than “sound” and “reasonable”) politics — on Twitter.

You don’t have to love social media to instead blame Cuomo for his own most grievous faults.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

The Lollapalooza Loophole

Lori Lightfoot, Lallapallooza, Chicago

When the Lollapalooza music festival took place in Chicago, on the hinge of July and August, with oodles of attendees (some masked), a few people cried bloody foul, on account of super-​spreader event potential. But Fox News’s Ben Domenech noted that the number of murders in Chicago over July was three times the number of COVID deaths, and the nation’s capital sports a similar ratio.

When Domenech asked guest Tim Pool about the lack of interest in gun violence in gun-​controlled Chicago, Mr. Pool expressed bafflement.

But — really? Politicians seem bent on focusing on regulating us with masks and jabs rather than regulating criminals. And for a reason.…

More striking was Anthony Fauci’s public worrying about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, while ignoring the Lollapalooza event — as well as Barack Obama’s 60th Birthday Party, which revealed/​reveled in plenty of celebs unmasked.

A familiar double standard: how the elites get to behave vs. how they say we “must” behave!

The concept of “Anarcho-​tyranny” may explain much of this. Politicians of a certain sort prefer to regulate peaceful people (tyranny) while letting real criminals go free (anarchy). It is easier to police the peaceful and law-​abiding, while criminals on the loose reinforce the need for a more powerful state.

The Lollapaloozans are on the “right side” (the left side?) of the cultural divide, while the Sturgis rally is on the “wrong side.”

And make a good target. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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