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national politics & policies too much government

The Long, Long Two Weeks

covid, hysteria, protest, obedience, disgrace, freedom

Nothing is so permanent, wrote Milton Friedman, as a temporary government program.

Six years ago, Americans learned that not only vaguely temporary measures go on and on, even precisely marked-out periods with clear starts and stops stated at the outset can be dragged on well past their expiration date.

Last week, Robby Soave “celebrated” the most astounding example of this in an article for Reason titled “This Was the Moment the COVID-19 Experts Betrayed Us,” about how the “two weeks to slow the spread” rationale for the lockdowns was shown to be a lie.

I wonder how many people were like me, at the time, noticing that the lengthening of the lockdown period was almost never justified by hospital numbers — a key point in the initial rationale, since we feared overwhelming the hospital system. The opposite happened almost everywhere, with hospitals becoming ghost towns in most locations, stressing the system in the opposite manner. By extending the duration of the near-universal quarantine, government officials and employees and their hangers-on showed how little interest they had in taking our health seriously.

What Soave focuses on is one tweet by National Public Radio, about how all crowds were bad for public health except those marching in protest of the death of George Floyd, a criminal with a long, violent rap sheet. NPR’s post began “by condemning the protests against lockdowns” and then drew “an explicit contrast with the racial justice protests, which are explicitly condoned.”

Soave calls this “junk science.” 

But it wasn’t any kind of science at all. It was pure ideological perversity.

Knowledge of that moment must be kept alive. Our expert class betrayed us by prioritizing their riot apologetics over our health.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTES:

See Milton Friedman, Tyranny of the Status Quo (1980) p. 115.
For a “Timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States (2020)” see Grokipedia.
The encouragement of the riots was, many hazard, an opportunistic psy-op to unseat President Trump in the 2020 election. It seems to have succeeded.

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Thought

Jaspers

Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward. . . . We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence.

Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (1968).
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Today

Beginnings

Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977. It was typographically styled as the “Apple ][” and the series continued long after the specific II model was superseded by the Apple II Plus and was discontinued in 1981. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.

Born on this day (June 10th): historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nathan Irving Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).

Hentoff wrote several works on the history and nature of free speech in America, including The First Freedom (1980). Sendak is most famous for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Wilson’s many books include Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).

Sendak died in 2012, Hentoff in 2017, while Wilson died on December 26, 2021.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship

Promising & Not

Endorsements, Democratic Party, socialism, Mamdani

“We are capitalist, not socialist.”

Those words are from the “Promise to America” pledge promoted by a new group of the same name and unveiled last week by Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California). 

“Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists,” explains a Washington Post article, dubbing it “a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.”

"We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist." Adam Gray, Tom Suozzi, Democratic Party

“We want safety,” their “Promise” continues, “not lawlessness.”

“No, duh,” would have been the response to such a statement years ago. But today? “Refreshing!”

These Democrats call for “secure borders, safe communities, honest government, and an orderly immigration system that protects the country, strengthens the economy, and treats people with dignity.” It’s a far cry from: Free healthcare for those here illegally!

“We believe America remains indispensable to global stability, democratic values, international security, and strong alliances,” the document expounds. “In a dangerous and uncertain world, America must lead with strength, purpose, and partnership.”

In closing, they declare: “We are proud, not ashamed of America.”

The Post suggests, however, that this slogan “could be polarizing on the left.” 

Sure, it is a much different message than Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner has expressed. On an online forum back in 2021, in a discussion on securing disability benefits from the VA, a fellow veteran vented, “Fuck Uncle Sam,” to which Platner added a clarification: “Fuck him and take his money.”

Which message for Democrats?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Sorry for the foul language but, frankly, I did not want to cushion the blow.

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Ellul

When we become conscious of that which determines our life we attain the highest degree of freedom.

Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of Technology (1993).
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Today

Nero’s Famous Last Act

In A.D. 68, on the Ninth of June, Roman emperor Nero committed suicide with the help of his secretary, Epaphroditus. With this act, Nero ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty and started the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors, which concluded under the rule of Vespasian. His famous last words?

Qualis artifex pereo

Which translates to “What a great artist dies in me.”

Categories
folly ideological culture

Obama’s Bonkers Beacon

Barack Obama, president, monument, Klingon, Obama Presidential Center, Chicago

We had the idea of a beacon,” said the architect who designed the Obama Presidential Center.

It looks like . . . a triumph of brutalist . . . whimsy? (Is that even possible?) A science-fictional housing for our ET overlords, maybe. Or something worse. 

Perhaps Baphomet poses inside.

You’ve probably seen the outside of the monstrosity by now. If you’re like me, you’ve marveled at this triumph of bad taste. It surely symbolizes something, but what?

It may serve as an icon for the 44th president’s monumental pretentiousness. 

Or his oblivious ideological bravado.

But it could stand for Political Hubris more generally.

“The Egyptians had their pyramids,” muses Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “The Anglo-Saxons had their barrows. And the Americans have their presidential libraries — the chief difference being that the leaders the U.S. venerates are usually still alive at the opening.” Wainwright notes that Americans lack “a royal family or a state religion,” and this has allowed an Imperial Presidency to bloom — filling “the void, transforming over the decades into a national personality cult, complete with its own secular temples to these powerful men.”

He’s not wrong.

But as politics has gotten more extreme, even bizarre, and America’s ideologues and beleaguered voters find themselves anointing a series of increasingly unfit pharaohs (hat-tip to The Guardian’s “pharaonic edifice”), this . . . oddly shaped (“like a Klingon prison”) eyesore . . . serves as a monument, perhaps, for the whole age.

Just don’t blame the architect. “The president was very, very hands on with the design,” Wainwright quotes the genius behind this laid egg. “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși.” 

No. 44 being hands-on in the design explains a lot.

The Center hasn’t opened yet; the Grand Opening ceremonies are scheduled for the 18th.

Please let me know how it goes, if you attend. I live near Washington, D.C., and lost my genuflecting and awestruck wonder at that city’s much less ridiculous monuments years and years ago.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Chicago, a city with beautiful architecture, will survive.

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Thought

Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Carl Gustav Jung, “The Transcendent Function” (1916).
Categories
Today

Nineteen Eighty-Four

On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.

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Update

Chinese Censorship

tiananmen, protest, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,

“On June 4, the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, internet users across China reported intensified online censorship, including tighter controls by social media platforms and messaging groups on content related — directly or indirectly — to the date.”

Thus begins a June 6 article from The Epoch Times. Quoted here apropos of Paul Jacob’s June 5 article, “The Nerve of Some People.”

The Epoch Times based its reporting on tips from “netiziens” (which is a not-so-common term for “citizens of the Internet”) who told the paper of “not only explicit references to the 1989 massacre, but also indirect expressions, numbers, images, and even routine daily posts appeared to be caught in automated filters or subject to account restrictions. Some described the moderation as unusually strict; one user said the surveillance felt “‘almost frenzied.’”

This shows how important public opinion is for even a tyrannical government. It’s not that the government aims to follow public opinion, but that the communists suppress public discussion to tamp down on opinions that might destabilize citizen acquiescence to the regime. “More than three decades after the Tiananmen Square protests,” the report concludes, “in which the communist regime deployed troops to massacre thousands of pro-democracy protesters, discussion of the event remains heavily restricted within China’s online ecosystem.”