Common Sense with Paul Jacob

international affairs national politics & policies

What, We Worry?

foreign policy, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, China, technology

For many decades, U.S. presidents have cited national security as a reason for this or that exercise of power . . . and spending.

Watching CBS’s 60 Minutes two weeks ago, it became painfully obvious that “national security” are simply two words our past leaders spat out when politically convenient and not at all a concept to which they have paid serious attention.

The first story in the popular TV news magazine’s March 22nd episode concerned rare earth metals.

“Right now, China holds a near-monopoly over these strategic metals that are key components in so much that makes the modern world go: smartphones, robotics, EV’s; also fighter jets, drones and radar technology,” explained correspondent Jon Wertheim. “That is, China controls materials essential to America’s ability to wage war.”

Quite a problem, especially considering that China is our most powerful and aggressive adversary.

Shipbuilding, or the lack thereof, was the subject of the segment that followed.

“The war in Iran is highlighting the importance of ships — not just warships but cargo vessels — like those carrying oil or gas trapped near the Strait of Hormuz,” Lesley Stahl reported. “But American shipbuilding is in shambles, due to decades of shortsighted policies and neglect.

“Our submarine building program is sluggish. And our commercial shipbuilding is nearly extinct,” she continued. “China makes roughly 1,000 cargo ships a year. The U.S.? Maybe three. The Trump administration has called this a national security crisis.”

Had presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama been awake and competent, and not lapdogs for Beijing, I wonder what they would have called it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, foreign policy, technology

Thought

Tom Paine

When the Truth deigns to come, her sister Liberty will not be far.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1795).

Today

The Bangorian Controversy

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 31, 2026
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On March 31, 1717, a sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ,” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.

The sermon’s text was John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced — supposedly at the request of King George I himself, who was present in the assembly — that there was no Biblical justification for any church government. Hoadly identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven, noting that Christ had not delegated His authority to any representative.

King George’s preference for the Whig Party, and for latitudinarianism in ecclesiastical policy, is widely thought to have been a strategic maneuver to degrade church power in political government.

Internet controversy litigation

Sony’s Scam Scuttled

Supreme Court, copyright, censorship, free speech, property

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can’t be forced to deprive customers of Internet access on the basis of an unverified complaint about copyright violation. And can’t be held liable for refusing to kill a customer’s access.

The ruling holds that a service provider “is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement. . . .”

The plaintiff? Sony.

The defendant? Cox Communications.

According to the ruling, Sony “alleged that Cox contributed to its users’ infringement by continuing to provide Internet service to subscribers whose IP addresses Cox knew were associated with infringement.”

Of course, Cox cannot “know” that a user had infringed some copyright merely because it got an automated notice that a user had done so. Cox is just an Internet service provider, not a judge, jury, or hander-out of penalties for unestablished crimes.

Had the high court ruled otherwise, the consequences would have been dire.

“Under the legal standard the labels wanted,” Reclaim the Net observes, “an ISP that received enough of these automated complaints and didn’t disconnect the account could face catastrophic financial liability. A Virginia jury bought that theory in 2019 and hit Cox with a verdict of over $1 billion.”

The decision bodes well for rulings on other attempts to transform ISPs — or PC operating systems, satellites, or any other gateway to modern life — into instant wielders of crippling punishment . . . no trial, no judgment, no justice allowed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, copyright, free speech, property, Supreme Court

Thought

Anatole France

Si 50 millions de personnes disent une bêtise, c’est quand même une bêtise.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France, as quoted in Listening and Speaking : A Guide to Effective Oral Communication (1954) by Ralph G. Nichols and Thomas R. Lewis, p. 74.

Today

SpaceX Re-uses Rocket

On March 30, 2017, SpaceX conducted the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket.

Update

Paying for War

Veronique de Rugy, at Reason, asks a good question: who will pay for the war? Or, how will it be paid for?

The Pentagon has requested $200 billion to fund the campaign. While circumstances could change the price tag, interest payments on that much debt would add $87 billion over 10 years. So that’s roughly $300 billion.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asked about this number, offered a memorable contribution to the fiscal debate: “Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys.” That’s true. It’s also true that the money must come from somewhere.
Veronique de Rugy, “How Will Congress Fund a $300 Billion War With Iran?,” Reason (March 26, 2026).

De Rugy mentions two obvious tax-and-spend choices, a supplemental appropriations bill and a budget reconciliation bill. But she goes on to make an interesting point:

Congress used to offset its emergency spending. It doesn’t anymore. Research by Dominik Lett at the Cato Institute shows that since 1991, Congress has passed $12.5 trillion in emergency spending for wars, disasters, pandemics, financial crises, and in some cases things that were emergencies in name only, like $450 million for space exploration. Almost none of it was offset. If you add $2.5 trillion in interest to the spending, the total amounts to one-third of today’s debt.

Which brings to mind a recurring theme at ThisIsCommonSense.org: the federal debt. So here is a current update on the general government’s most obvious but least talked-about (elsewhere) problem:

Note that, as reported here in November, the Congressional Budget Office had predicted hitting the $39 trillion level of debt some time after mid-year. Hey, we are ahead of schedule! Let’s celebrate?

Thought

Shaw

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 29, 2026
1 Comment on Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw, Candida (1894).

Today

Hyphen War

On March 29, 1990, the Czechoslovak parliament proved unable to reach an agreement on what to call the country after the “Velvet Revolution” — in which the Communist Party was booted from power. This sparked the “Hyphen War,” a tongue-in-cheek moniker for the dispute between Czechs and Slovaks about official recognition of the two nations’ equal status. (The Slovak representatives wanted to insert a hyphen into the name, to make the Slovak part stand out.) Eventually, the dispute was resolved with the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the two countries split up, on New Year’s Day, 1993, the two countries now being named:

Czech Republic, also known as Czechia;

Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic (Slovak: Slovenská republika).

Update

Fundamental Rights Fully Assessed?

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 28, 2026
No Comments on Fundamental Rights Fully Assessed?

“A Christian politician in Finland has been convicted of a crime for publishing her views on marriage and sexual ethics 22 years ago,” CBN reports.

“The country’s Supreme Court found parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen guilty of ‘hate speech’ for publishing her biblical beliefs. In a 3–2 decision, the court upheld a criminal conviction against Räsänen and a Lutheran bishop for ‘making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group.’”

She was fined €1,800.

That is about 2,080 in American dollars.

Paul Jacob has discussed the case in the recent past, in a more hopeful vein. That is, in the apparently vain hope that the highest court of “Suomen Tasavalta” (what Finns call their state) would find this mother of five, grandmother of ten, and wife of a Lutheran pastor innocent of the grotesque charges “of crimes against the humanity of gays and lesbians.”

Oh, that cannot be right. That is from the often-unreliable Wikipedia. The formal charge appears to be “incitement against an ethnic group” (kiihottaminen kansanryhmää vastaan) under Section 10 of Chapter 11 of the Finnish Criminal Code.

The country’s hate speech provision.

How do gays and lesbians constitute an ethnic group? Stay tuned for future updates.

It is noteworthy that not all the charges brought against her came to an ultimate guilty verdict.

What stuck in the court’s craw was that she had written that homosexuality is “a developmental disorder.” The reasoning the court went through to see such a statement as “an incitement to hate” has to be fascinating.

This is especially so after the assurances of Prosecutor General Ari-Pekka Koivisto that the case “is significant because the supreme court went through the fundamental rights assessment in detail.”