Tag: covid

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First Amendment rights ideological culture Internet controversy social media

Google Can’t Have That

censorship

Over the last several years, one has put one’s YouTube speech at risk by addressing such verboten or intermittently suppressed topics as pandemic policy, vaccine efficacy, origin of the COVID-19 virus, “climate change” (are winter, summer, and all natural disasters really caused by carbon footprints? inquiring minds want to know!), 2020 election fraud, and whatever else inspires post-Enlightenment institutional censors to clatter into action.

Because of the emails and other documents that have come to light in various lawsuits, we now know for sure that social-media companies have not been censoring independently. 

They’ve been in cahoots with government agencies — agencies eager to find corporate workarounds to the First Amendment.

A recent target of Google’s YouTube? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Running for president as a Democrat in competition with the alleged incumbent, Joe Biden, this son of assassinated 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy is disturbing the serene pools of so-called thought that constitute Acceptable Opinion and Settled Science.

I often disagree with Kennedy. But I feel that he isn’t just feeding me B.S.; he actually believes stuff. 

He may be mostly wrong, but I prefer that to mostly crooked.

Google has just deleted another Kennedy video, one in which he converses with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson about climate change, COVID-19, and a possible link between exposure to chemicals and sexual dysphoria.

This last musing seems dubious. But, whatever, let the guy talk. Except — hold on — isn’t RFK Jr. causing Joe Biden a lot of political trouble?

Can’t have that. 

Or, anyway, Google can’t have that. 

Or whichever Biden administration officials are directing Google (or vice versa) can’t have that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

Look Who Took a Mile

Deborah Birx, CDC, covid

Sometimes our dear leaders confess their lies just to prove to everybody how smart they are as grand strategists.

“Look at us! We out-manipulated, outfoxed everybody with our gloriously sophisticated strategy. Yes, we lied and provided political cover in order destroy the ability of so many people to walk around and make a living. This was the plan from the start. But we couldn’t say so. . . .”

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Deborah Birx, former CDC official and former Coronavirus Response Coordinator, clearly explains her give-us-an-inch/we’ll-take-a-mile method. “No sooner had we convinced the Trump Administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that.”

And: “The White House would ‘encourage,’ but the states could ‘recommend’ or, if needed, ‘mandate.’. . . The fact that the guidelines would be coming from a Republican White House gave political cover to any Republican governors skeptical of federal overreach.”

And: “Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to [avoid the] appearance of a full Italian lockdown. [But we had to match] as closely as possible what Italy had done — a tall order.”

Etc.

I disagree with those who say that Brix et al. should be tarred and feathered. But let’s not put them in charge of any future pandemics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom judiciary too much government

Hollowed-Out America

covid, freedom, hysteria

While Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s comments in Arizona v. Mayorkas are worth studying in full — the case is about immigration — his thoughts on the late pandemic panic stand out.

“Since March 2020,” Justice Gorsuch writes, “we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes,” and the judge goes through a long list of decrees, including:

  • Closing churches but not casinos
  • Threatening violators with both civil penalties and criminal sanctions
  • Surveilling church parking lots, recording license plates, and issuing warnings against attending even outdoor services.

And he adds that the federal government got in on the tyrannies.

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces,” he notes. “They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.” Gorsuch acknowledges this is not exactly a revelation: “Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

There is a deeper problem, though, for the “concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government.”

All the way through the pandemic, and even now, we have been barraged by messages about “misinformation and disinformation” about the disease and the treatments (proactive and reactive) against it. And the people in power — bureaucrats as well as politicians — were called “experts” while actual experts (along with earnest amateurs) were hounded, their ideas suppressed. 

Now we know that much of what was then held as good information was in error, even lies. 

Very unsound governance: Gorsuch characterizes it “a shell of a democracy.” 

“Hollow.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly national politics & policies

On the 1197th Day…

flatten the curve

Yesterday, the COVID crisis ended. Officially.

That is, on May 11, 2023, the “public health emergency” expired, following the termination of the “national emergency” over a month earlier.

Jordan Schachtel, writing at The Dossier on Substack, did the math and noted that this “marks an incredible 1196 Days To Slow The Spread.” 

“That’s right,” Mr. Schachtel elaborated. “Almost three and a half years of engaging in peak absurdity in the name of stopping [the] virus. And yet, the ‘experts’ don’t have a single thing to show for it.”

Remember why our leaders wanted to “slow” that “spread”: not to save lives over all. They admitted that the gross numbers of the affected couldn’t be affected by the half-a-month lockdown and mask mandates that Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump pushed. They argued merely that lockdowns might “flatten” the distribution of cases and personal crises over time to alleviate a bottleneck — crowding — for a brief, initial pandemic period in the nation’s hospitals.

That was it.

That was the rationale.

But after the 15 days were over, almost none of the emergency pandemic units set up by the military had been used to take hospital overflow.  Either (a) the 15 days had been enough, or (b) it had all been unnecessary. The answer is (b).

Everything else was just politics — the extended lockdowns, mask mandates, suppression of alternative treatments, the massive subsidies and vaccine mandates and passports and much else. What it sure seemed like? A vast jury-rigged scheme to get people to take the experimental “vaccines” then being rushed through the regulatory process.

Indeed, one thing was very clear from Day 16 onward: a “national” policy made no sense, for the pandemic hit regions of the country at different times and to different degrees. New York got hit hard in 2020, but the Pacific Northwest’s hospitals were mostly empty during the pandemic — causing a very different “beds” stressor. 

Yet our politicians pushed a national policy of emergencies that lasted, at the very least, 1181 days too long.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Back-Pedaling at the Speed of Lies

Dr. Fauci, covid, blame

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” challenges Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Never. I never did,” he told the New York Times last week.

We sure are a long way from the heady days when he proclaimed, “I am the Science.” It’s more like in the book of Genesis, where Cain asks the great rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

In other words, Fauci’s trying to set the record . . . crooked.

For Fauci was the Authority that bolstered all the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere, urging mask mandates and lockdowns and what-have-you.

Now, he is doing more than back-pedaling. He is shifting blame. Blame for failed policies.

But he’s not alone in this. For The Epoch Times, Petr Svab notes another famous back-pedaler: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Watch Ms. Weingarten declare on C-Span, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” but click that link and read the Twitter crowd-sourced fact-checks, showing how that’s . . . deceptive:

We still argue about how much COVID leaders lied during the heat of the panic. I advised, at the time, to give them a little leeway.

Regarding policy, that is.

Not lying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom property rights

Rent-Free in Oakland

Covid, rental, eviction, moratorium

The city council of Oakland, California just voted 7-1 to end the town’s pandemic-rationalized moratorium on eviction for nonpayment of rent.

But it’s not over yet.

The moratorium will linger on until July 15. Three years is supposedly insufficient time for tenants to gird themselves to again honor the contract with the persons who provide them with shelter.

And then it still won’t be over.

The council’s slow-walk phaseout comes with a permanent new limitation on what landlords can do. This explains the lone dissenting vote, that of Council member Noel Gallo, who says that the rights of landlords are still being insufficiently protected.

As the text of the legislation passed by the council makes clear, its revision of the city’s “just cause” ordinance further violates the property rights of landlords. In part, the new ordinance provides that any failure to pay rent during the last three years which a tenant can plausibly attribute to the pandemic is sufficient to prevent an eviction, even if not relieving the tenant of the obligation to pay that rent.

Will the reprieve be too late and too little for property owners like John Williams? For the last three years, Williams has been stuck with a freeloading tenant who has been financially able to pay rent but who has refused to do so and refused to move.

The tenant, occupying half of the duplex where he also happens to live, owes him $56,000. And Williams is facing . . . foreclosure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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