Tag: covid

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crime and punishment international affairs Regulating Protest

Crackdowns For Lockdowns

Covid, protests, lockdowns, police

Politicians and bureaucrats like some protests, fear others. 

You can tell a lot about a protest movement and its actual agenda by how a government reacts. You can tell a lot about a government by how it instructs police to respond to different protests.

So we should probably take a careful look at anti-​lockdown protests around the world, especially in Europe.

And how police are handling them.

Very violently.

Nils Melzer, Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow and the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has “requested more information on an incident in which a female anti-​lockdown protester in Berlin was grabbed by the throat and brutally thrown to the ground by riot police,” reports Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News. 

The response to Melzer’s request was “overwhelming, with over a hundred reports of violence flooding in,” Watson summarizes, citing a report in Berliner Zeitung.

While examples of police brutality are viewable on Twitter, YouTube, and other social media, reportage in America seems muted, perhaps thanks to our lockstep pro-​lockdown corporate media.

“Something fundamental is going wrong,” Melzer says. “In all regions of the world, the authorities are apparently increasingly viewing their own people as an enemy.”

There is no mystery. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and mandatory vaccinations amount to quite a holistic assault on personal liberty.

While protests that demand more power for the state, or that would increase the security of the ruling faction, get treated with kid gloves, protests directed against state power, or against a sitting regime — and especially against such a power grab — get cracked down upon.

It’s stands to reason, but not justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

Death By Definition?

Rand Paul

“What we’re alleging is that gain-​of-​function research was going on in that [Wuhan] lab and NIH funded it,” Sen. Rand Paul told Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 37 years and the chief medical advisor to the president, at a Senate hearing last week.

Paul contended that Fauci had lied to Congress by claiming “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” when NIH did indeed finance such activity in that lab.

But Fauci denied that research met the official definition of “gain of function.”*

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” the senator asked incredulously.

“That is correct,” replied Fauci, before adding, “And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Many scientists,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “think Paul actually does know what he’s talking about. One of them is Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert Richard Ebright, whom Paul quoted as saying this research ‘matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research.’”

The dispute pits Kentucky’s junior senator, concerned over what actually happened, against the bureaucrat, wiggling out from the bad odor of a terrible policy by, apparently, redefining terms. 

Mere logomachy.

“What everyone can now see clearly,” suggests Rogin, “is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk.”**

“Fauci is arguing the system worked,” the columnist maintains. “It didn’t.”

The senator has officially referred the matter of Fauci’s fibbing to Congress to the Justice Department for possible (but unlikely) prosecution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Any kind of animal virus that occurs in nature, that infects animals only, if you recombine it or mutate it or adapt it in the lab with other viruses so it has characteristics that change it from being an animal-​only virus to being a virus that now can infect humans, that you’ve gained in function, you’ve gained pathogenesis or you’ve gained virulence — you’ve made it more dangerous,” Sen. Paul explained to Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “Without question this is what happened in the Wuhan lab.”

** “According to an intelligence fact sheet released by the Trump administration and partially confirmed by the Biden administration,” Rogin also points out, “the WIV took our help and used it to build another, secret part of the lab, where they worked with the Chinese military.”

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initiative, referendum, and recall repeal

Voters, Govern Thy Governor

Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Covid, emergency powers, Unlock Michigan

Is the epidemic of gubernatorial abuse of power ending in Michigan?

During the last year and a half, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been widely criticized for prescribing and proscribing all manner of conduct in the name of combatting the COVID-​19 pandemic.

Whitmer claimed that her authority to do so was justified by the Emergency Powers of Governor Act of 1945. On this basis, she promulgated many silly and counterproductive edicts.

These ranged from commandments to stay at home except for certain urgent forms of sallying forth (a lockdown also mandated in other states) to banning the sale of gardening equipment. Among other injunctions, Executive Order 2020 – 42 prohibited advertising of sundry “unnecessary” goods and ordered stores to shutter sections selling carpets, paint, furniture, and gardening materials.

In October of 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the 1945 Act unconstitutionally delegated legislative authority. Now voters have weighed in with a citizen initiative. The group Unlock Michigan collected enough valid signatures— “more than 500,000 signatures in just 80 days” — to send a measure repealing the Emergency Powers of Governor Act to the legislature.

Had lawmakers failed to approve the petition, its fate would have been decided by voters at the ballot box. But last week, in a 68 to 40 vote, the Michigan House joined the Senate to certify it — saving a lot of time and money.

In Michigan, a law presented to the legislature thanks to a citizen initiative and then enacted cannot be vetoed by the governor. So that’s it. Governor Whitmer’s access to this autocracy-​enabling law is gone. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

You Kill Me!

Biden, Covid, Facebook, censorship

“Facebook isn’t killing people,” President Joe Biden informed us yesterday. 

At least, “That’s what I meant,” he clarified ever-so-confusingly. 

Meant last Friday, after a reporter mentioned “COVID misinformation” and asked Joe: “What’s your message to social media platforms like Facebook?”

“They’re killing people,” replied the president. “I mean, it really, look — the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

CNBC noted that Facebook “reacted defensively” to Biden’s friendly murder accusations, failing to hit LIKE on the administration’s characterization of its pandemic performance. 

“The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” a company spokesperson countered. 

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people,” Mr. Biden chided the social media giant, “that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.” 

After all, the Biden Administration has certainly rolled up its sleeves, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki put it: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Yes, behind the scenes, this administration works with these behemoth social media corporations to help determine what hundreds millions of Americans will be permitted to say and share and discuss — on matters such as medicine, theories of disease origins, etc. 

Didn’t we just ride this pony? Remember the supposedly baseless, debunked, conspiracy-​nut-​fueled Wuhan lab-​leak theory? 

That idea was blocked from us by Facebook (and Google and YouTube) at the behest of Big Government Science … until just weeks ago.

It’s hard to keep up. 

Perhaps we are not supposed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

Optimized for Attack

Whence came this pandemic? 

Now that we can investigate the lab leak theory without being smeared as conspiracy nuts or buried in an avalanche of disinformation from China, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. scientific community — all protected in their deceit by Big Tech and our mainstream media — we might make progress in our inquiries.

On June 29, in a little-​covered hearing before Republican-​only members of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis, several renowned scientists testified, most notably Dr. Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at Cal-Berkeley.

“I would like to emphasize five points,” Muller stated, “each of which is capable of separating or distinguishing between a natural origin — a zoonotic origin — and the lab origin” of SARS-​CoV‑2: 

  1. “The absence of pre-​pandemic infections,” which he called “unprecedented”;
  2. “The absence of a host animal” (which was lied about early on); 
  3. “The unprecedented genetic purity.… Again, MIRS, SARS, previous viruses don’t have this, but it is exactly what you would expect if you’ve gone through gain-of-function”; 
  4. “The spike mutation … there is no known way for that spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory”; 
  5. “This virus was optimized to attack humans. Again, something that has never happened in natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”

“All the scientific evidence argues in favor of the laboratory origin,” he concluded. “The evidence in favor of the natural, zoonotic origin? There isn’t any.”

But here comes the even bigger story, one that Dr. Muller called “horrifying” and “chilling.”

Muller had asked colleagues to assist in his lab-​leak investigation. But they declined to help because that would anger China, which would then blacklist those labs. 

“The idea that China has managed to interfere, to break United States’ freedom of expression, freedom of investigation, freedom of thought, through this collaboration effort,” the doctor explained, “is really scary.” 

If you think the Chinazis are merely a threat to “their own people” and neighboring Taiwan and countries bordering the South China Sea … think again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Here and here are links to additional testimony at that June 29th hearing. Coverage of Dr. Muller’s testimony first appeared in these pages as a “Thought.”

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government transparency national politics & policies social media

Authoritative!

Daszak, Covid, censorship

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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