Tag: hysteria

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ideological culture Voting

Don’t Kill Yourself

democracy, peace, freedom, elections, voting, propaganda, hysteria

As Donald Trump appeared to be winning last night, the number of Twitterers who proclaimed a hankering or a design to kill themselves rose dramatically. Michael Malice and others found humor in it, but it’s a super-​saddening development, if you ask me.

These Kamala Harris voters are not really going to kill themselves. It is just something to say on Twitter.

I really hope I’m not wrong about this.

I’ll leave to others the counsel of life. That is the job of friends and family and emergency hotline dispatchers. My counsel is different: talking about suicide because your candidate lost is undemocratic. If the authoritarian pronouncements of both major candidates alarmed you about the danger of anti-​democratic trend, this fad should raise the alarm several decibels.

The whole point of democracy is to allow a transition of power sans bloodshed. And that requires both contenders and supporters not to shed each other’s blood … or their own. When they fail.

It’s a requirement. Not to over-react.

The losers have to accept the loss, and the winners have to refrain from using the state to punish the losers further. 

It’s sort of that simple.

Resignation is key, as scientist Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) indicated: “Going to bed, reasonably resigned to Trump win at this point as it seemed to me from a distance for some time. He may be a nut, a liar, and a crook, but the bright side is a likely boost free speech and due process at unis and bump in tech sector, if we survive the rest.”

We will survive. If Trump wins the Electoral Vote (I’m going to bed, too, before a final determination), or if Harris does.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture partisanship

Biden’s Belief in a MAGA Republican Bloodbath

Joe Biden, propaganda, violence, threats, transfer of power, dictator, hysteria

Over the weekend, I was surprised to find Joseph R. Biden — our semi-​retired, caretaker president of these United States — on CBS Sunday Morning, for his first sit-​down TV interview since leaving the presidential contest.

Mr. Biden warned that former President Trump constitutes the greatest evil in the solar system, calling this “threat to democracy” an “ally” of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The most important thing … we must defeat Trump,” explained Biden. That’s why he let Nancy Pelosi and former President Obama (and insistent Democratic Party mega-​donors) push him out of the race. 

To save the Republic … by not losing to Donald Trump. 

Asked if he was confident of a peaceful transfer of power should Trump be defeated, Joe said, “No, I’m not confident.”*

“He means what he says,” our nominal president offered about Mr. Trump. “All this stuff about if we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, we have these stolen elections.”

Of course, “all the stuff about” Trump threatening a “bloodbath” has been conjured up in the noggin of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief. 

Trump made the “bloodbath” comment at a rally in Michigan. Speaking about the U.S. auto industry, he told the crowd that we had lost “34 percent of the automobile manufacturing business” to Mexico and promised to slap a 100 percent tariff on cars built by China in Mexico — to enthusiastic audience applause. 

“If I get elected,” conditioned Trump. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it — it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”

It’s all on tape.We can decide for ourselves whether it was a threat of post-​election violence or straight talk about the car business.

And, too, what it says that such dishonesty is welcome at the highest levels of government. And media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* All this talk about the transfer of power ignores a critical element: It will be Biden leaving office and either handing the keys to Kamala Harris, should she defeat Trump, or handing them to Trump, should he win. In this latter instance, I don’t see any quarrel coming from Trump. In the former, even the evilest version of Trump would still need an army to intervene.

Note: We can’t be too surprised, however, as four years ago Biden made a similar purposely “malevolent misinterpretation” of Trump’s comments about neo-​Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia (Biden’s Big Lie).

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crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Cold Truth

One of the climatic shifts supposed to be happening to our traumatized planet is the melting of polar ice into huge puddles of slush, with maybe a few polar bears helplessly drifting on the dwindling ice floes of a rising sea.

The alleged calamities of various alleged major climatic changes are allegedly due solely to human civilization. We can render the latter doctrine more plausible if we ignore all the major variations of climate that transpired for millions of years before mankind and industrial civilization showed up.

Anyway, if polar ice were indeed melting away over the long term, we could argue about the causes and effects.

But it doesn’t seem to be happening.

According to research at the University of Copenhagen using photographs and satellite data, the glaciers of Antarctica have been pretty stable over the last 85 years or so. (The SciTechDaily article about the findings calls this stability an “Antarctic Anomaly.”)

With the help of modern computer technology and aerial photographs going back to 1937, the researchers managed to track how the glaciers of East Antarctica have changed over the decades.

They found that “the ice has not only remained stable but also grown slightly over the last 85 years, partly due to increased snowfall.… While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10 – 20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance.”

Uh oh.

Chicken Little never had it so tough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies regulation

Children’s Crusade Goes Forth

climate panic

In 2015, a group of young people sued the federal government.

The government’s allegedly actionable dereliction was having “known for decades that carbon dioxide pollution was causing catastrophic climate change … and a nation-​wide transition away from fossil fuels was needed to protect plaintiff’s constitutional rights.”

The government “recklessly allowed” transport of fossil fuels, combustion of fossil fuels, etc.

I blame the lawyers more than the kids for the filing’s falsehoods and non sequiturs. Outlawing fossil fuels would be the actual catastrophe and actual reckless violation of individual and constitutional rights.

Climate variations are nothing new in the earth’s four-​billion-​year history. We should expect to see all the usual dry spells, hurricanes, and tornadoes that have buffeted human beings since we emerged as human beings. Fossil fuels help us to protect ourselves from these things.

Government cannot outlaw fossil fuels slowly or quickly without in effect putting a gun to the heads of everyone who wants to use a gas-​fueled car, bulldozer, or airplane and saying, “You have no right to take the actions required for your survival.”

Efforts by several states and the federal government to outlaw various uses of fossil fuels are what deserve lawsuits.

Judge Ann Aiken, who recently had a chance to end this litigation but is illogically allowing it to move forward, has one thing right: “Some may balk at the Court’s approach as errant or unmeasured.…”

I balk. It’s errant. And over the top.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Expulsion of the Sick

covid, college, quarantine, masks, lock down, hysteria

Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure. 

We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.” 

The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale. 

Never. 

Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.

“Students who test positive for COVID-​19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.” 

That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.

“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-​19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”

But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.

So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.

Doesn’t make sense. 

I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption national politics & policies

Un-​Masking the Maskers

covid, masks, hysteria

While we turned to face masks as easy-​to-​practice tools early in the fight against the novel coronavirus, folks at the Centers for Disease Control were … lying about said technology.

“In a recently obtained letter (pdf) sent in November 2021 to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” writes Megan Redshaw in The Epoch Times, “top epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and seven colleagues informed the agency it was promoting flawed data and excluding data that did not reinforce their narrative.”

By over-​stating the effectiveness of masks, the CDC “would ‘damage the credibility of science,’ endanger public trust by ‘misrepresenting the evidence,’ and give the public ‘false expectations’ masking would protect them from the SARS-​CoV‑2 virus that causes COVID-19.”

While Osterholm and others expressed alarm that the CDC’s selection of study citations was more conclusion-​oriented than process- (science-) oriented — “focus[ing] on the strengths of studies that support its conclusions while ignoring their shortcomings of study design” — we the patients (and doctors) were continually distracted from best practices during a pandemic.

Meanwhile, millions died.

The scientists’ letter was uncovered via aFreedom of Information Act (FOIA) process initiated by The Functional Government Initiative, which in making it public stated, “The story of official masking guidance should trouble the American public. Recall that Dr. Fauci at first said there was no need for masks. Then cloth masks were all that stood between you and COVID. But as evidence against cloth masks appeared.…”

Well, the rest is history: Big Government Science masking the truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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