Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Update

Fists Up for the Lactase Resistance

Post author By Redactor
Post date October 24, 2026
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Is cows’ milk white supremacist?

Absurd, on the face of it, but the point sometimes made isn’t that milk is itself racist, promoting milk is.

The current controversy hails from early in the year, from Oregon’s Third Representative District, Maxine Dexter representing. “Please ask for the science-based regimens,” she urged her constituency in Hood River last February. “Not whatever RFK Jr is getting kickbacks on or, you know, whatever whole milk, white supremacy dog-whistling that’s happening right now.”

As seen from outside of Democratic circles, this is just Trump Derangement Syndrome and RFK anti-anti-vaxxer paranoia. That’s how it is still being shared about on social media.

From within these circles, however, it’s an echo of actual tradition, exemplified by Carmen Stănescu in her paper “‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, and the ‘Alt-Right.’” She argues against the “alt-right’s current use of claims about milk, lactose tolerance, race, and masculinity can be connected to similar arguments originally made during the19th century against colonialized populations and immigration groups.”

“I’m getting a little too political,” Rep. Dexter went on to say, as a means of drawing back a bit. She meant, however, too impolitic.

While Dexter and Stănescu may be right to notice that certain far-right larping and posting may seriously identify milk drinking with the denigration of non-white people, none of this makes the case against white milk as nutritious.

And as for the science as it pertains to ethnic populations and ability to process milk, we learn that lactase persistence developed only after using dairy. Recent work on the Yamnaya steppe people — progenitors of white Europeans — shows this (foundational papers: 2020–2022). Besides, dairy is widely used in India and parts of Africa despite widespread lactose intolerance, and there are pockets of lactase persistence in Africa itself.

The muddle makes you wonder: maybe the reason to link white milk with “white supremacy” is indeed because of that word “white.”

Thought

Max Stirner

If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.
Max Stirner, “The False Principles of Our Education,” Rheinische Zeitung
(1842).

Today

Thirty Years’ End

On October 24, 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

ideological culture Regulating Protest

What Is It?

America’s founding fathers talked a lot about virtue. Freedom requires it; there can be no liberty without virtue, they said.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” insisted John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“No government can continue good but under the people’s control,” Thomas Jefferson explained, declaring that the citizens’ must “be informed by education what is right and wrong; to be encouraged in virtuous habits and deterred from vice.”

These were not isolated sentiments. But what did they mean?

It’s time to renew discussion, as rioting expands from Paris to Milan to . . . all over Europe. Here is one notion of a virtuous people: folks who, when they protest injustice or folly do not themselves foolishly commit injustice. Virtuous people do not run riot, wreak havoc, commit mayhem . . . just because they have grievances.

If they have complaints about farming regulation, or school funding, they do not burn down shops.

Or the Louvre.

Whatever “social justice” is, it too requires a virtuous population.

The fact that there is increased political violence suggests that some folks are not virtuous.

There’s this notion that in France, at least, violent protests are just a part of French culture. A culture warped by the disastrous French Revolution centuries ago? My bet is that, if we inquired deeper, we’d discover that this is not exactly so. That certain groups push violent protest every now and then for reasons of political goals that are not about either social justice or liberty.

We in America, who have been blessed with the freest society on the planet, are not quite as prone as Europeans to the vice of violent protest. But we are not immune, and we must start taking virtue — responsible self-government — seriously. Again.

Make America Responsible Again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Wicksteed

The buyer and the seller have usually been opposed to one another, and the interplay of their rival interests has been regarded as the source of the phenomena of the market. But we shall try to go below this. The obvious and universally recognised fact that the same man may be a buyer under one set of circumstances, or a seller under another, and that even in the same market a man who would buy if prices were low may sell if prices are high, will lead us to a decisive simplification of the theory of markets, based on the consideration of buyers and sellers as a homogeneous group arranged and graduated on a single principle.
Philip Henry Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), Introduction.

Today

An Uprising

Budapest (10/23/1956) — The Hungarian Uprising begins when a delegation of students enter the building of Magyar Rádió to broadcast their demands for political and economic reforms to civil society, but are detained by security guards.

crime and punishment fraud national politics & policies

Fraud’s a SNAP

Seattle, EBT, scam, welfare, crime, corruption

This may shock you . . . or not . . . but independent reporters led by Nick Shirley have confirmed that food-stamp fraud is rampant. At least it is in the streets of Seattle. Their work supplements a police investigation reported in October 2025.

One scheme involves fraudsters approaching “groups of unsheltered individuals . . . who had an EBT [electronic benefits transfer card] with money on it,” a Seattle police captain reported last year. They would “then take that person to a store with a shopping list.”

The fraudsters keep the goods for resale while paying the original card holder half the card value in cash. Alternatively, the fraudsters buy EBT cards at half-price directly from card holders.

Sometimes fraudsters let drug dealers know which persons living on the street have just gotten cash for their cards. The dealers then swarm into a homeless camps to sell their wares.

Shirley’s work shows that although police arrests of eleven of the scammers made a dent, the scams still go on — in Seattle and doubtless many other cities.

He found that local store clerks proved willing to adjust food prices charged to match the balance on an EBT card, say $120. Then, if all goes “well,” the clerk and the fraudster presumably split the take.

Shirley’s video doesn’t document the last part of the process because, to avoid being complicit in the scam, he kept entering a false PIN.

Welfare fraud is, apparently, easy to perpetrate, hard to patrol.

It used to be understood that the only way to distribute general benefits to the poor was to refuse to make it easy to receive, and to administer such programs as locally as possible. Incentives for bureaucrats and disincentives for abusers must always be made painfully clear. And punishments swift.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

F. A. Hayek

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, ‘a new form of servitude.’
F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False” (1945), in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).

Today

Sartre’s Nobel

On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.

Sartre rejected the award on account of having rejected previous honors. In this he was not dissimilar from philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who refused many doctorates late in life, on the grounds that such awards did an old man no good, and perhaps because he was a cantankerous old coot — a judgment that surely applied also to the later French philosopher.

Sartre is best known for his novel Nausea (1938), his play No Exit (1944) and his treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). One of his main themes was freedom, a concept better explored at the fundamental level of the individual human being than politically, since he become a “Marxist” of sorts . . . the precise nature of which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He failed to complete his tetralogy of novels, Roads to Freedom, never finishing the final volume.

ideological culture

France’s New Look

One Parisian woman has become the poster child for French politics. Antifa and Middle Eastern and African Muslims are rioting in the streets — burning, stealing, breaking, bullying, and worse — presenting us with the full panoply of protest gone completely wrong.

A distraught woman pled with masked men not to destroy a store, identified by reporters (not memesters) as a Franprix supermarket on Rue du Faubourg du Temple. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded, then screamed “this is not the cause!”

All for naught. The rioters brushed past her, breaking windows, looting, committing mayhem.

The mob cheered.

Her look — of bewilderment and betrayal — has become the new face of France. FAFO, in French fashion.

The “FA” part of the principle is what most of the “meme”-based commentary has been about. The French elites and their rah-rah brigades on the far left — or merely in the “liberal” class — have pushed a thousand bad policies, none worse than allowing refugees to swamp the country, placing them on the dole, while demanding of them nothing in return: no loyalty; no appreciation; not even civility.

A breeding ground for a revolt of the imported masses.

In sum: the elitist French political and liberal classes “effed around” and “found out”: FAFO in its purest political form. President Macron himself asked “how can French people do this to France?” as if the rioters think of themselves as “French.”

“Inclusion” in its most absurd form.

This woman, and so many like her, have supported extraordinarily foolish policies for decades, presumably because it makes them “feel good” and “look good.” You know, “morally,” pharisaically.

But the current look? Bafflement.

Yes, a million French women can be wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.