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folly ideological culture media and media people

Mr. Vehement

He’s vehement — vehement with the force of 600,000 Hiroshima-​class atomic bombs exploding each and every day. 

Because he cares. 

He really does. 

He really cares about putting the days of Wooden Al Gore behind him and ushering in Apoplectic Foaming-​at-​the-​Mouth-​While-​Bleeding-​From-​Every-​Pore Al Gore.

It’s just unfortunate though that whilst ratiocinating at Davos, Mr. Gore destroyed the atmosphere and disarranged the solar system, further accelerating global warming and cooling.

If you’re wondering whether I am now just making stuff up, thank you for noticing; yes: I learned it from the best. But I’m sincere. Okay? I’m emoting very hard right now, for which I fully expect to receive social-​credit points that I can tape to my COVID-​19 passport and wave at the grocery-​store clerk as I pay a thousand dollars for a half-​dozen eggs.

If only vehemence were facts and cogency, Al Gore would be the most empirical, most logical man alive. As it is, a billion flabbergasted refugees have fled before the force of his rhetoric.

If you don’t believe that Gore not whispered but roared, nay, expectorated, the following, etc., at Davos about how the (man-​made) greenhouse effect is trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-​class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth!! That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and … and … and —”

… then I refer you to the videotape. Roll it, Hal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly general freedom ideological culture

The Wreckage of Racism

In the “urban forests” of our nation’s capital, several abandoned autos have been discovered. Which can mean only one thing: racism

“Deserted cars may be driving a type of racism,” The Washington Post headlined its take.*

The paper introduces readers to Nathan Harrington, executive director of the Ward 8 Woods Conservancy, who has discovered four decaying automobiles in those woods. 

No one knows how the cars got there. 

All that is known is that their presence is, well, racist

Blacks make up 87 percent of Ward 8’s population, one of the most heavily black areas of the city. “Advocates,” explains The Post, “call this neglect of Black neighborhoods ‘environmental racism.’”

An assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at Boston College is offered to explain that, as The Post paraphrases, “environmental racism is linked to ‘racial capitalism’ — the idea that the economic value of a person is based on their race.”

And to think I was worrying that those rusting vehicles might be leaching dangerous elements into our environment!

“It’s deliberate inaction on the part of the agencies that control that land,” complains Harrington. Believable enough, on the surface, but we are presented with no specifics as to who has refused to help.

Nor are we provided any evidence that this failure of the DC government, if it even is one, can legitimately be ascribed to racial bias.

 The District of Columbia’s mayor happens to be black, as are eight of 13 city council members.

When four rusted-​out cars in the woods become front-​page fodder to focus on systemic racism, it seems things are looking up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* This punny headline adorned the dead-​tree edition. Online, the article’s headline is: “‘Environmental racism’ and the mysterious cars rusting in D.C. woods.”

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crime and punishment education and schooling

Justice (Almost) Done

It ain’t over until the money’s in the bank. But one wrong, long fought, may soon be righted. Justice done.

Years ago, Gibson’s Bakery won a judgment of $38 million against Oberlin College because of the Ohio school’s role in harassing the bakery and defaming it as “racist” after a 2016 shoplifting incident. 

The shopkeeper of the family-​donuts, racist, college bakery, Allyn Gibson, caught students trying to steal wine. They attacked him. They were black.

For whatever reasons, students on campus chugged into uproar mode, accusing the bakery of racism as if it prefers to be robbed only by persons of pallor. 

The shoplifters eventually pled guilty and acknowledged that the bakery is not racist.

The students’ irrationality was bad enough. Then Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo chimed in, working with protesters to defame the bakery. The school canceled its contract with Gibson’s and would claim in legal filings that the bakery’s “archaic chase-​and-​detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”

In 2017, the bakery sued Oberlin and won.

Oberlin has been appealing. Now it has lost in the Ohio Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal.

Only the U.S. Supreme Court can save Oberlin now. But according to the Legal Insurrection blog, the chances that it will even consider the case are slim.

Is $38 million the right award? Perhaps Oberlin should pay Gibson’s $50 million. Or a cool billion. 

But Oberlin deserves to be punished just as Gibson’s deserves to be compensated. 

May this finally happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

The Natural Immunity We Need

“This is two years too late,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “but it’s a good step.”

Interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, is talking about new official COVID-​19 guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC no longer recommends

  • the six-​foot “social distancing” rule, which led to maximum comfort for paranoiacs, introverts, and Scandinavians in supermarkets and other public spaces;
  • that the unvaccinated quarantine after exposure;
  • testing for the asymptomatic; and
  • contact tracing outside of hospitals and places like nursing homes.

Bhattacharya’s interpretation of all this is that the “CDC is admitting it was wrong here, although they won’t put it in those words.”

Much of the new regimen is the result of understanding that natural immunity is a huge factor in the epidemiology of the disease. Bhattacharya’s complaint is that this has always been the case, and that the CDC and government lockdowners should have recognized this early on.

While the expert class has inflicted much damage, the CDC continues to whistle past the graveyard. “We’re in a stronger place today as a nation,” the author of the new guidelines insists, “with more tools — like vaccination, boosters, and treatments — to protect ourselves, and our communities, from severe illness from COVID-​19.” 

But to get those mediocre-​at-​best vaccines past regulatory hurdles, government-​directed medicine suppressed information about (and public discussion of) the most basic tools we have to treat new diseases. Governments at many levels, along with social media companies and CNN and many doctoring outfits, actively suppressed a number of treatments that could have saved lives, with HCQ and Ivermectin being only the most infamous.

The natural immunity we need to encourage most is skepticism toward government bureaucrats and Big Pharma flacks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly insider corruption national politics & policies

Vax Con?

Is the mRNA “vaccine” push a “con job”?

“‘Confidence games’ (or ‘cons’)” are, according to scholars Barak Orbach and Lindsey Huang,* “a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct” perpetrated “to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial.”

In their paper, Orbach and Huang list a number of typical cons, noting that many “cons succeed by inducing judgment errors — chiefly, errors arising from imperfect information and cognitive biases.”

This is not an extended analysis of how a major con could be pulled off, but inducing a “mass formation psychosis,” which I’ve talked about before, is key. Government lockdowns and mask mandates have been very effective in creating pandemic hysteria, leading to government vaccination mandates. 

But perhaps it is how government officials deal with data that we most clearly see the confidence game aspect. 

The province of Alberta has just been caught using misdirection and disinformation to keep up the fear levels, distracting us from considering the negative impact of the vaxxes. Government officials “claim very impressive vaccine effectiveness by following the fraudulent standard set by the drug manufacturers in the pantomime clinical trials,” as the Metatron Substack page explains, “to ignore the adverse outcomes in the first two weeks post administration.”

The beneficial effects of the vaxxes, we are told, take a fortnight to go into effect. But when governments place all hospitalizations and deaths for those 14 days under the rubric of “unvaccinated,” they misinform — effectively burying negative side-​effects of the promoted therapeutic. And the switcheroo is not insignificant: Alberta had counted more than half of its vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated.

Tellingly, the province took off its website the data that showed all this.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* “Con Men and Their Enablers: The Anatomy of Confidence Games,” 85 Social Research 795 (2018), Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 18 – 27).

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folly general freedom media and media people

Where We Are Now

Two young people, a high school girl and a college man, have two very different COVID stories, but both reveal where we are right now in the pandemic.

“Abby Chenoweth was a healthy 16-​year-​old,” writes Emily Walker for MSN. “The Titusville teen took virtual school classes and wore a face mask when she left the house. Her mom said she didn’t have pre-​existing conditions, and she didn’t go out often.”

The report goes on to focus on her horrific COVID case, and readers’ hearts go out to her. But that opening paragraph is bald-​faced lie. 

Or at least a “white lie.” You decide.

You see, Abby Chenoweth is obese. She is obviously so in the photos provided by her mother. And not merely a “little bit” overweight.

Our hearts break all the same, but her obesity is a “pre-​existing condition.” We knew early on that COVID can be devastating for the overweight.

The article does not once mention her corpulence. Were it not for the photos, readers wouldn’t have a clue. They would read Abby’s mother’s mask apologia at the end as an earnest and honest plea.

Next to Ms. Chenoweth’s harrowing story, and the see-​through propaganda made out of it, 22-​year-​old Logan Hollar’s story is comic. The title delivers the punch line: “Rutgers student says he’s being stopped from taking virtual classes because he’s not vaccinated,” Karen Price Mueller’s piece summarizes.

“I believe in science, I believe in vaccines,” cautions Mr. Hollar’s stepfather, “but I am highly confident that COVID-​19 and variants do not travel through computer monitors by taking online classes.”

Do the professors and administrators at Rutgers know that?

COVID craziness seems more infectious than COVID itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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