Tag: covid

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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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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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