Tag: panic

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budgets & spending cuts too much government

How Audits Work in Real Life

DOGE, panic, civil service, public servants, control

Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are panicking. 

O, the prospect of any significant shrinking of the federal behemoth!

Any significant rooting out of the corruption that benefits them.…

Many combat this horror by flinging every fallacy in the book. Like the notion that Elon Musk and his team are unqualified. They ask, is Musk a certified public accountant? 

He’s only a mega-​successful serial entrepreneur, not an accountant.

Monster Hunter Nation’s Correia45 answers a slew of the fallacies, not in the most genteel manner. Cover your ears if you click in.

First, there’s nothing odd about an internal audit, which “is what Donald Trump (the man in charge) is doing now, by having his people (DOGE) audit the executive branch he runs. CEOs and owners do this all the time.”

Nor need you be a CPA to contribute. That’s essential for only certain types of accounting, which “isn’t even close to what DOGE is doing.”

Correia45, an accountant, has been on teams that included programmers, lawyers, machinists. Machinists because, when auditing a factory, “I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were b******t or not.”

Another thing: I can certainly think of reasons to have smart energetic young people on an auditing team. 

But, contra some assumptions (based on the fact that 20-​somethings are “who got doxxed first”), young people are not the whole team. Newsweek’s list of known DOGE staff includes persons ranging in age from 19 to 67.

And so DOGE goes. Godspeed. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Hurricane Algebra

hurricane, climate change, global warming, weather, panic, big government, regulations

Helene is x times worse than Katrina, but receives y less coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

When we finally plug in the numbers, we will likely discover that the coverage difference is best explained by two factors: there are fewer reporters yet more “journalists” than ever before, and (you guessed it) politics.

You see, Katrina coverage helped besmirch George W. Bush and the Republicans.

Covering Helene in the same way, or to similar extent, could hurt the incumbents (FEMA has been especially lame), and the presidential race is too close for the Democrats’ lackeys in the media to do that.

So let’s blame Helene on Trump.

Or, the low coverage on Trump. Trump’s the why of the y!

It’s just as sensible as blaming Helene on man-​made climate change. Nearly every newsperson intones the plausible-​sounding theory that the warmer the climate the more damaging the storms. It’s a great hypothesis. But pre-​Helene studies have shown scant evidence for it.

Further, the oft-​repeated line that “never before” has a hurricane reached so far inland is also untrue. Asheville, North Carolina, was destroyed by a similarly horrific hurricane in July 1916.

These are rare events. Or, perhaps, cyclical, on repeat by century. 

The pity with all this theory and conjecture and political nonsense is: less coverage means less knowledge outside the hurricane zone of how horrible Helene is, and thus less sympathy elicited from the general population of generous Americans. Thus, less aid.

Making major media complicit — with the U.S. Government (FEMA, etc.) — in not helping relieve the suffering. 

So maybe we should thank the climate change agenda. Without that devil to fight, we might get no coverage of Helene at all. 

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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general freedom government transparency too much government

The Allure of the Mask

Covid, masks

Early on in the pandemic, I promoted mask-​wearing as something we could do to protect ourselves, loved ones, and our communities.

But as the pandemic progressed, we learned some things.

Over time, I became more skeptical of much good coming from mask-wearing.

Now that the panic portion of the pandemic is mostly over — and what a long panic it was! — we should be able to more calmly review.

Two months ago, Vinay Prasad, an actual epidemiologist, looked carefully at the CDC’s study allegedly showing a high medical efficacy in universal mask-​wearing during a major contagion. The study, he argued, was plagued with “very poor quality data, insufficient to support community masking, particularly for years on end. Cloth masks had especially bad data. Data to support masking kids was absolutely absent.” And the CDC’s own reporting of what its study actually found was unreliable and … well, dishonest.

Take the case of Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Pre-​pandemic, community masking was discouraged because the pre-​existing evidence was negative,” explained Prasad. “This is why Fauci was critical of it in early March 2020 on 60 minutes.” 

But many of us were perhaps unduly pro-mask because Fauci appeared to be protecting the supply of masks used by medical professionals, thus, lying for a strategic reason. It was hard not to learn a … dubious … lesson: Fauci lied to protect professional mask use, so masks for the masses likely worked well.

Then he changed tune. And went off the deep end, ignoring his previous statements and advocating double- and triple-masking!

Still, the most ominous issue about mask mandates is how it became “a marker of politics. Good liberals wear them and bad conservatives don’t.”

Prasad does not go where Matthias Desmet and others have: showing how mask mandates became a means to induce panic and the politicization of medicine.

Voluntary masking without mandates — as has been commonly the case in Japan, for example — provides important signals about infection rates, and allows people to negotiate their own physical distancing. Universal mask mandates spoil the informative aspect and instead serve tyrants and mass hysteria.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom media and media people

Where We Are Now

Covid, panic, hysteria, crazy

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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Photo Credit: crazy person

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folly international affairs

Done to the Dogs

shelter dog

It shouldn’t have happened.

Shire councils should not be killing dogs “to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-​based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”

But that’s what happened. The Bourke Shire Council in the New South Wales region of Australia shot and killed several dogs, including a new mother, that were about to be picked up and taken to an animal shelter.

An Office of Local Government reported that the council did this “to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-​19 transmission.”

We all know that shelters sometimes put down animals when the shelter cannot find a home for them.

This wasn’t that. The council’s action wasn’t a reluctant last resort. It was a first resort.

It was, the argument runs, about preventing volunteers from going from here to there in the ordinary course of their work, work that has not been discontinued for the duration of the pandemic.

The council’s action is an example of what happens when fear displaces common sense. The thwarted shelter volunteers, who love animals and volunteer precisely to prevent needless killing, are distressed. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that they had safety measures in place to deal with the pandemic while getting the dogs.

This isn’t the worst kind of thing going on in this world, obviously.

But you don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be appalled by the viciousness of the conduct. 

And it does serve as a marker for the callousness and crazed panic of politicians in the current crisis. What else might they do?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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shelter dog

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