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folly national politics & policies

On the 1197th Day…

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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folly media and media people social media

Pray Tell

At the beginning of the week, Tucker Carlson found himself unemployed.

The Fox News commentator and host of his own show was fired, so abruptly that his people didn’t know it until they showed up for work Monday morning.

Carlson was Fox’s first-string, pulling in not only more viewers than anyone else on Fox, but anyone else on cable television. Since his ouster, viewership of Fox’s line-up — and most significantly the Tucker Carlson Tonight time slot — plummeted

Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch made the decision. This sort of self-sabotage is breathtaking to behold. It’s the second time in recent years that Fox News has ousted its most lucrative talent.

You may remember that Bill O’Reilly, whom Tucker replaced, was let go because of the many sexual misconduct lawsuits Fox had been forced to pay out. It was not immediately clear why Tucker Carlson got the boot. 

Initial theories focused on the Dominion lawsuit, but that seemed implausible to those who followed the story closely. Most viewers believed the firing was ideological in nature. Murdoch is very establishment-oriented, and Tucker Carlson has increasingly become anti-establishment. And on his semi-penultimate show, he lectured about the dominance of Big Pharma advertising on cable TV, and 

This. 

Is. 

Just. 

Not. 

Done.

As the week wore on, a more intriguing theory emerged: Rupert Murdoch did not like Tucker’s Heritage Foundation speech over the weekend, in which the Fox anchor entreated his audience to pray for the future of America. Murdoch is said to hate that sort of thing, especially since he jilted a former future Mrs. Murdoch (that is, a fiancée) for her over-religiosity.

I cannot imagine anyone praying for Fox News.

Not, it seems, even Rupert Murdoch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly Fourth Amendment rights property rights

Can They Do That?

Residential tenants in Zion — and their landlords — can breathe a sigh of relief.

The Zion, Illinois, government can no longer send officials to barge into rented homes at will to conduct obnoxious inspections.

The inspection regime was instituted in 2015 by a mayor who blamed an excess of renters for the town’s financial troubles. The motive for the searches, then, may have been to make it more uncomfortable to rent in Zion. Seriously. As dumb and thuggish as that.

Robert and Dorice Pierce and their landlord were among the victims of this regime.

When an inspector showed up at the Pierces’ door, they told him to get a warrant. But judges don’t generally accept “important to harass tenants” as a reason for issuing warrants. In any case, any respect for constitutional constraints was incompatible with the very nature of these intrusive practices.

So Zion’s response was to threaten the landlord, Josefina Lozano, with daily and mounting fines until she compelled the Pierces to capitulate. That’s when the trio turned to the Institute for Justice and decided to go to court.

This was familiar territory for IJ, which in the 1990s had successfully fought a similar inspection regime in Park Forest, Illinois.

And now, after three years of judicial proceedings, IJ and its clients have secured a consent decree prohibiting the warrantless inspections and prohibiting the fines.

But those who enacted this outrageous regime deserve a reprimand more stern than merely a loss in court. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly free trade & free markets too much government

Make Them Pay

Thanks to renewable-energy mandates and other regulations, California muddles along with crippled power markets in which rolling blackouts are routine when demand for electricity is high and sun and wind are unavailable.

Apparently, this and other burdens on energy usage in the Brownout State are insufficient to fully immobilize everybody who relies on things that need to function. So the state’s utilities are preparing to also impose socialist billing on its customers.

Pacific Gas & Electric, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison are proposing that the flat-rate component of power bills be based on income. Once regulators sign off, there is to be an ongoing transfer of wealth from richer to poorer.

The utilities aren’t acting independently. 

They’re obeying a legislative mandate.

In addition to a flat-rate component of utility bills that would be $15 for the poorest customers and $85 for the wealthiest customers, there would still be a component based on power consumption. So the impending looting of nonpoor customers could be worse.

The socialism isn’t full bore yet.

But I doubt that initial limits on this redistribution agenda would remain intact were the scheme implemented and to persist.

In addition to other objections, there is also the matter of how utilities will know their customers’ incomes. Will customers be required to report and prove these incomes? The central planners presumably regard this invasion of privacy as not worth fretting about. 

They’re too busy creating perfect equality . . . of brownouts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling folly international affairs

Doctor-to-Be of Theology

“The year 2023 is the centenary of the passing of the Freedom of Religion Act in Finland,” writes “conferer” Martti Nissinen, promoting a future ceremony of the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Theology — in which one degree will go to . . . Greta Thunberg.

Much has been made, online, of theologians, of all people, awarding an honorary degree to a young environmental activist demonstrating no academic much less godly accomplishments. The obvious suggestion: “what she’s selling is a religion”! 

But what stands out to me? Mr. Nissinen’s declaration of this year’s ceremonial theme: “Freedom.”

Ms. Thunberg has been pestering and entreating leaders of the world to “do something” to “save the planet” from “climate change.”

What she demands is not freedom, but more

  • taxes
  • mandates
  • prohibitions. 

Whatever the actual threat may be, there is no hint of freedom in her agenda. And if you want more of that message, consult the latest alarm from the IPCC.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a bizarre restatement of past pronouncements, warning “that we are almost half way through the ‘last chance decade’ to pull the brakes on climate change.”

“The world is only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels,” explains The Guardian. “On current trends, we will shoot past the target within a decade.” 

Dooming the planet

Pushing this fake “global accepted goal” has a historical context. Many similar past warnings that haven’t come true. But, more pressingly, the worldwide panic over a pandemic that even to politicians increasingly appears to be a complete failure of the experts.

Why trust the Expert Climatologists when the Expert Epidemiologists have so disastrously failed us?

Just don’t ask Dr. Greta.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly international affairs national politics & policies

Imprudent Skeptics?

“For nearly three years, anyone asking whether COVID-19 originated as a lab leak outbreak was silenced and branded as a conspiracy theorist,” stated Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo), on Monday. “Now these prudent skeptics stand vindicated.”

While I enthusiastically support the bill he and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) introduced, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, may I be excused if I get caught up on that term “prudent skeptic”?

Apparently Hawley means “skeptics” such as himself. But who are the imprudent skeptics? 

What would Hawley say should they be vindicated?

The bill, unanimously passed the Senate, would require the Biden administration to “immediately declassify all intelligence reports pertaining to the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Hawley insists that we, the people, “deserve to know the truth.”

But is it a mere curiosity that neither he, in his above-quoted statement, nor The Epoch Times, in its article on the bill, finger any likely entity other than the Wuhan Institute for Virology and the Chinese government?

For, as noted here many times, the evidence of culpability for conducting dangerous gain-of-function bat coronavirus research in China does not point merely to the Chinese. 

It points to the U.S. Government, the offices of Dr. Anthony Fauci, specifically.

Hawley doesn’t mention that evidence, nor does The Epoch Times.

This is not to let China off the hook for the pandemic, a Debacle At Best. (I’m not known for being “soft on China.”) I bring this up because of the implication: we skeptics of the Zoonotic Origin Theory have not been pointing only to the Chinazis, but also to our own governmental conspirators.

Surely it’s not imprudent to be skeptical of our own government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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