Categories
insider corruption international affairs litigation

U.S. Aided Brazilian Tyranny?

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil, corruption, freedom

In a case with “serious repercussions,” insists journalist Brazilian-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald, a “U.S. federal judge concluded that an immigration record entered in the Customs and Border Protection system during the Biden administration was fraudulent.” 

While the idea of fraudulent behavior in a government bureau will hardly shock you, this record was special. It was used to imprison a Brazilian official.

The official? Filipe Martins. He filed suit in the U.S., and as a result a truth came out. “The fraudulent record reflected a non-existent entry into the U.S. by the national security advisor to former President Jair Bolsonaro,” Greenwald explains. “The fabricated entry was then somehow obtained and used by a controversial Brazilian Supreme Court judge to imprison that national security official.”

Behind all this lurks a rogue Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, Alexandre de Moraes. He’s Brazil’s éminence grise, exercising enormous power in his country far beyond his constitutional authority. He’s basically the country’s unacknowledged dictator. He hates free speech, as his run-ins with Twitter (X) and Elon Musk show. 

Moraes was gung ho for tyranny during the Biden years, but is justice catching up with this “justice”? U.S. intelligence agencies appear to have secretly nurtured the rogue judge, but with the change of administrations has come an official antagonism.

Now ramped up by a federal judge in the current case — which is “increasingly suspect and bizarre,” as Greenwald notes. “The political implications are obvious: did Biden officials — overtly hostile to the Bolsonaro government and strongly supportive of Lula — deliberately manufacture an immigration record to permit Moraes to order this top-level Brazilian official imprisoned unjustly?”

Americans traditionally think that their government shouldn’t meddle in the internal affairs of foreign states. We certainly shouldn’t allow our government to work sub rosa against freedom around the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Aldiss

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

Brian Aldiss, Barefoot in the Head (1969).
Categories
Today

Uruguay

Uruguay

On August 27, 1828, the South American states of Brazil and Argentina recognized the sovereignty of Uruguay in the Treaty of Montevideo.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

The Greed of Socialism

socialism, national debt

Do the young think that their trendy-again socialist notions are new?

There’s no hat older than socialism. Our civilization has been grappling with socialist ideas for at least two centuries. While the arguments for and against socialism are many and varied, maybe it all boils down to ignorance and greed.

“This century’s socialist wave starts at a big disadvantage,” wrote Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., for the Wall Street Journal, yesterday. “It arrives as the socialism we already have runs out of that famous quantity, other people’s money.”

Today’s allegedly “democratic” socialists use “the socialism we already have” as an excuse for more. Truth is, we cannot afford what we now must put up with.

“An American baby born today owes $376,000 in federal debt and unfunded entitlement liabilities, assuming the burden is evenly distributed,” explains Mr. Jenkins. “Of course, it isn’t. We oldsters plan on checking out before the bill comes due.”

The intergenerational conflict of actually-existing socialism has been buried under nice phrases like “Social Security” — even as that specific program teeters, insolvent, requiring re-jiggering to ratchet up burdens on the young every other generation. 

I see why the young would object. It’s harder to see why they would want more of the dog that bites them.

“Let me be the 1,000th to notice that the New York socialism of Mayor Zohran Mamdani seems to appeal especially to privileged young people, still supported in adulthood by their parents.” 

And let me be the millionth to observe that demanding other people do your work and pay your bills amounts to exactly what these very nice socialists have always railed against.

Greed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Homer

Οὐ μὲν σχέτλια ἔργα θεοὶ μάκαρες φιλέουσιν,
ἀλλὰ δίκην τίουσι καὶ αἴσιμα ἔργ’ ἀνθρώπων.

The blessed gods have no love for crime.
They honor justice, honor the decent acts of men.

Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIV (Robert Fagles, trans., 1996), lines 83–84.

Categories
Today

A Flag, a Vote, a Scandal

On August 26, 1863, the Swedish-language liberal newspaper Helsingfors Dagblad proposed the current blue-and-white cross flag as the flag of Finland.

In 1920 on the 26th of August, the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution — giving women the same access to voting as men — was certified.

In 2014 on this day in August, The Jay Report into the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was published.

Categories
crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights privacy

Goose/Gander/Flock

flock camera, surveillance, privacy, police

The people behind the Flock cameras that I talked about a month ago have not stopped trying to erect a total roadway surveillance state.

Pairing traffic cameras with artificial intelligence, the company behind the cameras provides a complete spy system, tracking drivers’ and automobiles every move. At least, they are trying. They have enough data to cook up a transportation profile on you right now, at least if you drive through the cities and freeways where Flock cameras are pointed at traffic.

The fact that the police with access to Flock’s database cannot keep their hands off the data is just the tip of the goosefeather. 

Musician, technology maven, and YouTuber Benn Jordan decided to test Flock Safety, to see if what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. So he registered as a journalist to attend Flock Forward 2026, the company’s swag-pushing, PowerPoint-heavy convention. But he was rebuffed: no journalists allowed. Not only barred from the convention floor, the good geese at Flock so feared exposure that they had the Hilton he had registered at cancel his reservation!

Using his technological expertise, Mr. Jordan recorded Internet traffic and open-mic conversations as well as — and this is genius — used a.i. face-recognition to answer Juvenal’s challenge, “who will watch the watchers”: he watched, finding policemen, politicians, businessmen and a former Minnesota state senator amongst the gaggle.

We are told that we have no expectation of privacy on public roads. But is a Flock of a.i.-backed cameras the kind of thing we want spying on us, tracking our every move?

While we say that “it’s only a conspiracy if they do it in secret,” what is it when the people who seek to destroy the last vestiges of our privacy demand their own privacy even as they plot against us?

Not good. That’s what.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Chief Joseph

You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.

Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph), “An Indian’s Views of Indian Affairs” (1879), The North American Review, 128 (269), 412–433.

Categories
Today

Galileo’s Telescope

On August 25, 1609, Galileo Galilei first demonstrated his new construction, the telescope, to Venetian lawmakers. Magnifying distant images at first by three times, then, soon after, by about eight or nine times, it quickly became a profitable sideline for Galileo, who sold his telescopes to merchants who found them useful both at sea and as items of trade. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March of the next year.

Galileo did not exactly invent the device, but perfected it for astronomical observation. It was called a “Danish perspective glass” in the version that had inspired him, and the idea might have been ancient. It was at least not wholly new, as suggested in the great short story “The Eye of Allah” by Rudyard Kipling.

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Deadly Shenanigans

Covid, conspiracy, cover up, crime

It has been five years since I first wrote about “The Man the Media Missed,” Dr. Peter Daszak. But this British zoologist, crucial in the funneling of U.S. taxpayer funds to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is now feeling heat from U.S. prosecutors. He may get away unsinged, but . . .

As reported here over the weekend, a man has confessed to conspiring to “evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.” His name is David Morens, and he received two bottles of a Napa Valley red blend wine from Daszak. And a note containing two killer sentences: 

“This is the first of what I hope will be a continued series of expressions of gratitude for your advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses [sic] boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the hill. It takes courage and commitment to do what you’ve done, given your job and the vindictive nature of the Administration.”

The effrontery: In April 2020, funding to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance was cut off. This is apparently the president’s “vindictiveness.” How awful of the administration, seeking vengeance for Daszak’s evading the prohibition on dangerous research . . . and unleashing a deadly virus upon the world! 

Daszak yearned for a more forgiving president, I guess.

For his part, Morens — now facing five years in prison — was more than forgiving, and advised Daszak to hide emails, also complaining that FOIA requests were “dreadful and paranoia inducing.”

Daszak may get away with his crime against humanity, but at least this fact is clear: Morens and his boss Antony Fauci conspired with Peter Daszak to bury the truth of their deadly “shenanigans.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts