Category: folly

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crime and punishment folly too much government

Downshifting Before the Cliff

climate, global warming, energy, government

A scenario: You and millions of others are willy-nilly running toward a cliff.

You don’t want to go over the cliff; like Bartleby, you would prefer not to. But you’re caught in the surging mass. Enough of the stampeders think that it’s the greatest idea ever — long overdue, in fact.

But just as you’re coming within sight of the cliff, the Great Leader leading the charge raises his hand and asks to be heard.

“We have decided that we are running too fast toward the cliff. We need more time to make the transition. We will therefore reduce the speed of our blind hurtling toward the cliff by 11 percent.”

Fiction? No.

The above summarizes the amended policy of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vis-à-vis how quickly policymakers will shove Britain’s industrial society over the proverbial cliff in the name of pretending to fine-tune global climate. Various bans on various things that people need in order to function will reportedly be slightly delayed so that people have more time to . . . pretend . . . to prepare.

It won’t become illegal to sell petrol (gas) and diesel vehicles so that buyers of new cars would be stuck with more expensive and impractical battery-powered cars until 2035. 

Not 2030 as previously stated.

Instead of 100 percent of gas boilers being phased out by 2035, the new goal is 80 percent.

Off-grid oil burners will now be banned in 2035, not 2026.

Other slight delays of annihilative mandates are also in the works.

British people, enjoy your five-year and nine-year reprieves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly national politics & policies

Will We Comply?

Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, covid, masks

“To every COVID tyrant who wants to take away our freedom, hear these words,” intoned Donald J. Trump, eleven days ago, “we will not comply.”

The former president did not stop there: “So don’t even think about it. We will not shut down our schools. We will not accept your lockdowns. We will not abide by your mask mandates. And we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates.”

While Trump still boasts about his vaccine heroism, his supporters range from iffy to hostile on the subject. So Trump positions himself against mandates and for “freedom,” while in the past he was for masks and for lockdowns, as well as pushing the novel vaccines that cleverly (and perhaps dangerously) leveraged the spiked protein protuberances on SARS-CoV-2.

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Trump brought into the world conversation about the pandemic in 2020, is similarly trying to position himself with some trickiness and . . . care. 

Fauci foresees mask recommendations, but no mandates — but note that he focuses on what federal bureaucrats say and do, not on what governors in the states do under federal bureaucrats’ advisement. 

CNN’s Michael Smerconish interrogated Fauci about the many studies showing that masks are ineffective against respiratory diseases like COVID. 

Fauci’s reply? Against the big study cited here in February, Fauci mentioned “other studies,” lamely and unconvincingly. He admitted that, overall — as affecting the course of the pandemic — “the data” about mask efficacy have been “less strong.” But “on an individual basis of someone protecting themselves, or protecting themselves from spreading to others,” Fauci still insists “there’s no doubt that there are many studies” showing “an advantage.”

If you buy that, you’ll wear masks forever — or comply with anything.

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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folly media and media people public opinion

Volcano Denialism

science, global warming, climate change, volcano, weather

Some weather we’ve been having, eh? Record-setting heat in many locales. 

It must be global warming!

Well, it is hotter than usual. 

But this is summer.

And a volcano did blow in the ocean near Tonga, a year and a half ago, and scientists at the time did say that the water vapor it placed into the stratosphere could linger for years, affecting the climate.

Still, you won’t see recognition of this factor for warming on the major news sources. They keep pushing the AGW line: anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming: “climate change.”

Matt Walsh, on his podcast, ran through the vulcanism story last week. Water vapor is a more effective, broad-spectrum greenhouse gas than CO2, which all the journos cannot help but push (because it fits a statist agenda, and that’s their real business: propaganda).

Walsh calls mainstream AGW crusaders “volcano denialists.”

Our planet’s ecosystem is ultra-complicated. Cloud cover (which has something to do with water vapor, you might say) can also cool the planet by increasing high-altitude albedo, a point touched upon in The Epoch Times, “Nobel Winner on Climate Agenda: ‘We Are Totally Awash in Pseudoscience,” which focuses on physicist John Clausner and his contrarian views on climate.

“Contra the IPCC and other major institutions,” Clausner contends “that climate is primarily set by . . . the ‘cloud cover thermostat,’ a self-regulating process whereby more clouds start to enshroud the Earth when the temperature is too high and vice-versa.”

He was slated to give a talk to the International Monetary Fund on July 25, but that was cancelled. These elites have directed trillions of global dollars to “research” global climate, and Clausner’s caution that they’ve made “a trillion-dollar mistake” is not exactly welcome.

It’s not just vulcanism they deny. They deny water.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom international affairs

Austerity Theater

climate, elites, warming, ecology

Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?

Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.

But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?

She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.

While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious. 

She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.

For the show.

Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.

We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies? 

They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.

That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special. 

For them, the elites, austerity is just a show. 

To set us up to suffer — for real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Apocalypse California

Gavin Newsom, California, reparations, racism

The Democratic Party is a victim of its own success. Nowhere can we see that more clearly than in California.

Democrats have succeeded by pushing “victimhood,” gaining power by focusing on special groups, declaring them oppressed and offering compensation — though still never comes the day of full escape from the burden of this oppression.

Many stories of oppression are true.But no sized sliver of truth can guarantee that compensation attempts will redound to the liberation of the aggrieved.

California’s Democrats will face this soon.

Over slavery! And racism.

Never a slave state, California has been flirting, officially, with reparations. Several cities have “explored” the idea. An official “Reparations Task Force,” established by state law, has recommended a formal apology for slavery (in other states, over a hundred-and-fifty years ago). It’s also talking about giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation to Black Californians, descendants of slaves or not. 

The task force is scheduled to make explicit and detailed recommendations —  on July 1.

Which puts Democrats on the spot.

Powerful Democrats such as Governor Gavin Newsom. Considered a rising presidential aspirant should the current 82-year-old decide not to run again, Newsom signed the law to officially look at reparations . . . but then seemed less than fond of the price-tag. More than twice the yearly state budget!

Now the governor is keeping his mouth shut awaiting the final report.

And, as George Skelton at the L.A. Times asks, then what? Well, that is when “the governor and lawmakers will need to emerge from cover, face the public and devise a better response.”

But up until July they can still pretend.

Then, Democrats will have to face the reparations issue squarely — and in the context of the complete failure of their state, the blame for which they cannot place upon Republicans, much less long-dead racist slave-owners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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