Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.
Francis Bacon, Apophthegms, New and Old (published 1625).
“Our focus was to get Trump out of office,” explains CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester in video surreptitiously recorded and recently released by the gotcha video journalists of Project Veritas.
The group had reached higher at the cable network, last December, unveiling comments made by CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker and Political Director David Chalian during an internal conference call to spike coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story . . . with plenty of obvious political prejudice.
Last summer, as the presidential campaign settled into a two-man race pitting Republican Donald Trump against Democrat Joe Biden, The New York Times reported that, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says,” adding, “The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.”
“There may not have been Russian bounties on US troops in Afghanistan after all,” reads the Military Times’ headline, after the Biden Administration acknowledged “low to moderate confidence” in the intel that previously seemed gospel-true.
Calling it “one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020,” Glenn Greenwald notes, “It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless.”
Yet another big narrative has unraveled with the Washington, D.C., medical examiner concluding that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick “suffered two strokes and died of natural causes.”
“So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died,” Greenwald summarizes at Substack, “and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible.”
That’s “the news”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.
The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?
Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” Cato Policy Report January/February 1998
Declaring a coming end to “the forever war,” President Joe Biden announced last week that U.S. military forces will be leaving Afghanistan by September 11th* — a four-month-and-ten-day delay from the May 1 deadline that was set for troop withdrawal by the Trump Administration last year.
“Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” chided Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the Senate floor.
But wait a second . . . McConnell knows that negotiating for the enemy Taliban, the horrific human rights violator and sponsor of terrorism, to put down arms and join the government to share power has been the U.S. policy objective from the Obama Administration’s embrace in 2013 to the Trump Administration actually inking the agreement.
Dealing the Taliban back into the political mix, after having gone to war to dislodge them, never made sense. But neither does an ad infinitum military occupation seem rational . . . chewing up generations of soldiers until Afghanistan miraculously metamorphoses into a sustainable democracy. Two decades of U.S. nation-building offer no serious promise that the mission could be accomplished in another decade.
Or two.
Or ever.
Plus, plugging the problem in Afghanistan has not worked more broadly. “The terrorist threat has changed dramatically since we went to war in Afghanistan 20 years ago,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained. “Al-Qaeda is in Yemen and Syria and Somalia. ISIS is across that border region in Iraq and Syria and in multiple countries in Africa.”
Policy futility is a bad thing. Recognizing it is good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it — as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.
Some stories linger in the background, under-acknowledged, never really addressed, driving us a bit crazy.
Example? Deficit spending and debt accumulation.
The problems that deficit financing inflicts upon us are many and devastating. We would be a lot wealthier, healthier, and wiser were the federal government not so madly out-of-control. We could invest in all sorts of great things, and prices would be more stable, and . . . and . . . and . . .
But what can we do about it?
It’s not obvious. So we don’t talk about it much.
And the debt only grows, with destructive hyperinflation looming as an ever-increasing danger.
The other under-discussed story is even more disturbing — so we ignore it even more studiously.
Within the last several years headlines in The New York Times and on TV have covered it, yet . . . very few people talk about it, despite the startling revelations.
The issue? UFOs — a strange subject at face value, which, once you poke into it, gets even weirder.
We level-headed yokels used to deny the existence of UFOs, but now the Pentagon has confirmed their persistent plaguing of Navy jets and seacraft, and the Army has acknowledged its ongoing study of UFO-derived “meta-materials.”*
In June, the Senate will be briefed on the subject, per instructions in a recent stimulus bill. (Which brings us back to our first blank-out issue.) Meanwhile, as we wait for what could be big news, new revelations of repeated incursions by UFOs against a Navy fleet 100 miles off the California coast back in 2019 appear in specialty media** but barely make a ripple in major media.
Wait — Fox just featured a segment on a Pentagon confirmation of flying pyramids!
Will we make headway on UFOs before the debt?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* French scientist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee is also engaged in research on UFO-site-retrieved mystery alloys.
** See Richard Dolan discuss these recent Channel Island incursions, based chiefly on the report in The Warzone.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
previously on Common Sense with Paul Jacob:
It’s Aliens (May 30, 2019)
The Whys Behind the Whats (June 25, 2019)
Stranger Things 2019 (January 2, 2020)
Two Conspiracies Unearthed (December 10, 2020)
Why We Still Live (December 18, 2020)
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (1954).
“Microaggression” is the alleged sin of committing a verbal slip that the alleged victim, eager to be offended, aggressively interprets in the most invidious possible way. It’s one of many faddish notions used to rationalize the squelching of speech and to abrogate basic rights.
In October 2018, Kieran Bhattacharya, a medical student at the University of Virginia, attended a discussion on “microaggression.” He asked questions like: “Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?”
Beverly Adams, an assistant dean, told him no, it isn’t, and the two argued about it for a bit.
Afterward, an organizer of the event, Nora Kern, filed a complaint against Bhattacharya that led to demands that he get counseling, and, ultimately, to his suspension. His protest was taken as proof that the complaint and demands made against him were justified.
Bhattacharya has sued the school for retaliating against him. His crime, so to speak, was nothing more than asking the wrong questions — or asking them wrongly.
Even if he had asked them heatedly (which he denies), so what?
A district court says Bhattacharya has a point and is allowing his lawsuit to proceed: “Bhattacharya sufficiently alleges that Defendants retaliated against him. Indeed, they . . . suspended him from UVA Medical School, required him to undergo counseling and obtain ‘medical clearance’ as a prerequisite for remaining enrolled, and prevented him from appealing his suspension.”
Some kind of aggression is happening here, and it’s pretty macro.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme,’ not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter 2, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.”
Major League Baseball has renewed its contract with a Chinese telecommunications company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Professional baseball thus avoids the fate of the National Basketball Association, ejected from Chinese airwaves for a year after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
This doesn’t mean that the folks running MLB lack a moral compass.
It could be just a skewed one.
One day after Chinese state media confirmed that American baseball games would continue to be shown on Tencent’s streaming platform, MLB yanked its All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia. The idea? To protest the state’s new election reform.
Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred would have us believe that demonstrating “our values as a sport” requires
MLB’s press release does not bother to explain what is wrong with the law except to say that the league “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
All restrictions?
MLB officials ignored the Epoch Times’s inquiry about “how continuing business with China demonstrates its values considering the recent U.S. recognition of a genocide being carried out by the CCP against the Uyghur Muslims.”
Hmm. Chinazi dictatorship or Georgia election reform: Which is worse?
I guess for those with a skewed moral compass, that’s a tough one.
But for the rest of us the question answers itself.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts