On September 21, 1897, the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial was published in the New York Sun. Note how long before Christmas this is. The Christmas season has long been a long affair.
On September 19, 1778, the Continental Congress passed the first budget of the United States.
Congress last passed a budget in 1997.
Should you talk to the police? Should you trust your mayor? Is it all about race? What about anarch0-tyranny and the Cloward-Piven Strategy? And the upcoming mid-terms?
In 1752, throughout the British Empire, September 2 was followed, the next day, by September 14, as the government adopted the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days.
On September 14, 1944, Maastricht becomes the first Dutch city to be liberated by allied forces.
John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
Paul Jacob looks at the reality of modern politics, and what people think of our major institutions. But it could be worse: people could accept that reality as the best possible, as even good itself. Increasingly, this is not the case. Which is the opposite of sad!
Yesterday he announced that (quoting The Epoch Times) “his administration will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off $10,000 in federal student loan debt for some borrowers,” with the Education Department giving the specifics: “individuals earning less than $125,000 a year or families earning less than $250,000 will be eligible for up to $10,000 in debt cancellation.” Pell Grant recipients in the same situation will be eligible for relief of up to twice as much.
The politic nature of the move is so obvious that . . . it isn’t getting enough attention from critics.
Most of those alarmed at the move concentrate on the unfairness: rewarding those who have not met their obligations and thereby penalizing those who have. Defenders of student debt relief make the usual arguments about the need to help the under-privileged — by giving them more privilege (if anything’s a privilege it is to be able to take out a loan and then not pay it back).
You may be wondering how a president can authorize spending billions of dollars. Isn’t that Congress’s job? Well, the administration has found a semi-plausible excuse — from Congress: a 2003 higher education law that allows the Education Department to provide relief in response to a national emergency.
And what is the emergency?
Pick one. Inflation, for example.
Which is spurred by overspending.
Which an extra $250 billion will merely increase.
You gotta wonder: isn’t it college graduates who cook up this stuff?
It’s ‘We the People’ who deserve not relief but a full refund.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Far-right white people are in a moral panic over Critical Race Theory,” Pennsylvania educators are being taught, “because they fear losing political power.”
Beth Brelje, at The Epoch Times, explains that this is the lesson of a “a webinar presented by Justice Leaders Collaborative, a Michigan-based social justice training organization.” Ms. Brelje quotes Shayla Reese Griffin, the webinar leader, who states that these “far-right white people” are “really just using Critical Race Theory as a kind of an umbrella term for any kind of cultural things that the far-right isn’t interested in.”
This is, of course, disingenuous. Critical Race Theory is not merely an umbrella term. It is a theory of power that tracks oppression (which is a specific variety of power) along rigid class lines, the classes being defined by race.
And it is a movement of the “far left.”
Which is why CRT’s defenders and obfuscationists identify their opponents as “far right.”
Heaven forbid were moderates and centrists also to object!
It’s a bluffing tactic, this extremist-identification, aiming to make moderates, centrists, and just normal, non-political people ashamed to criticize CRT.
It’s manipulative.
CRT’s way off, since power, broadly defined, is everywhere and omnipresent and omnidirectional — everybody has some power, nobody has all power. Critical race theorists aim to ply victimhood status as leverage against innocents who do not want to harm anyone; too often they pretend that everybody on one side of a racial divide is a victim and everybody on the other side is an oppressor. It’s a repackaging of a too-familiar “guilt trip,” as we used to say in the Sixties.
As for parents in most school districts, they’ve discovered they have little power to lose. But by confronting the people they vote onto school boards, they gain more.
Democracy proves itself as one method of holding the powerful to account.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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July 28, 1868, is the official date for the certification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Now it seeks to destroy many Dutch farmers by compelling them to drastically slash livestock herds to reduce nitrogen oxide and ammonia, thereby supposedly benefiting the environment. The government has also thwarted construction projects on save-the-planet grounds.
Farmers are protesting throughout the country. At one site, police opened fire. No one was hurt.
The prime minister objects to “intimidating” officials by, say, clogging highways with tractors — which protesting farmers have done.
Understandable, but shoe the other foot: Is using governmental coercion to destroy farmers a form of peaceful suasion?
Such irrational policies conform to ideologies that sure seem bent on the progressive destruction of civilization for the alleged sake of fine-tuning the weather. Yet nothing the Dutch could do — not even mass seppuku — would appreciably affect our far-more-massive-than-the-Netherlands global climate. But the government may succeed in making life harder for everyone in the habit of eating.
Just some overseas craziness that could never happen here?
It already is. Federal assaults on the oil industry have fueled skyrocketing fuel prices. Our current president says the burden is an acceptable part of “an incredible transition” to a world that will be “stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”
Will the U.S. government next decide that too many cows are emitting gases such as methane and mandate culling of herds here?
Who knows? It depends on the politics of the moment, how eager officials are to appease enemies of mankind, and other factors having nothing to do with respecting the requirements of human survival.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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