Author: CS Admin

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education and schooling folly nannyism

Well-Substantiated Insanity

Well-Substantiated Insanity
In what sort of place are children taken from their parents, or parents investigated by the authorities with that in mind, because they allowed their 10- and 6-year-olds to walk to a park to play?

Not a forced 20-mile march across Death Valley, mind you, but a Saturday stroll of less than a mile under normal earth conditions.

What sort of place? These United States — Silver Spring, Maryland, to be specific.

That’s where Danielle and Alexander Meitiv’s two kids, Rafi and Dvora, were picked up by police, on their way home from a neighborhood park.

A two-month Montgomery County Child Protective Services (MCCPS) investigation followed. Now, there’s no law against youngsters walking in public by themselves. Local public schools don’t provide bus service for kids within a mile of the school, deeming that close enough to walk. Nevertheless, this week, authorities announced that the Meitivs were “found responsible” for “unsubstantiated child neglect.”

The good news is that the neglect charge is completely “unsubstantiated.” The bad news is that official “Free State” busybodies seem to have not one clue as to what that word means.

MCCPS will keep a file on the suspicious family for five years. “We don’t know if we will get caught in this Kafkaesque loop again,” says Mrs. Meitiv, noting that the agency left unanswered the question of what might happen if they ever again dare allow their kids to walk outside the house without adult supervision.

The family is appealing the nonsensical MCCPS “finding.” In the meantime, the Meitiv children will continue to walk in public as if it’s a free country.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly judiciary

Contemptible Court

Judge Tim Grendell

Judge Tim Grendell missed his calling. Given his dictatorial impulses, he should have been a Soviet commissar or ancient Egyptian vizier. O, but for time, and place, and the mismatches of metempsychosis!

Grendell has lashed out punitively at Nancy McArthur, chairman of the Geauga County (Ohio) Republican Party, for seeking to undermine his authority with “vile” criticism. What happened? Did she interrupt courtroom proceedings with her aspersion-casting? Shout obloquy as he sought to instruct a jury?

Nothing like that. McArthur was never in Grendell’s court.

She did badmouth the judge, however . . . in private conversation.

The person McArthur was talking to is involved in a case presided over by Grendell, and, in a private email, reported on McArthur’s comments. Grendell, somehow, got hold of that email.

His response? Slap a subpoena on McArthur, demanding that she show cause why she should not “be held in Contempt of Court for making vile, contemptuous, slanderous, and insulting language directed at the Judge which reflects negatively on the integrity of the Court and impedes the Court in the administration of justice. . . .”

Yikes. McArthur was actually threatened with incarceration for speaking of this judge as if he were the type to do the sort of thing he did. Fortunately, his attempt to hold her in contempt has been blocked by an appellate court.

This isn’t the first time Grendell’s judicial reach has exceeded his ethical and constitutional grasp. Guilty of outrageous malpractice, he deserves a boot — to his rear, ejecting him from the bench.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom nannyism responsibility

Millions to Move 400 Villagers

Kivalina,

Apparently, it takes a federal government to move a village.

Thinning ice sheets have made it hard for the people of Kivalina, a seaside village in Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. The Iñupiats who live there have lived off the sea, especially bowhead whales, for a mighty long time. And climate change, town officials say, has raised havoc with their traditional occupation.

Worse yet, the federal government suspects that soon Kivalina will become uninhabitable. “The question now facing the town, the state of Alaska, and the nation,” Chris Mooney writes in the Washington Post, “is whether to move the people of Kivalina to a safer location nearby, either inland or further down the coast — and who would pay upwards of a hundred million dollars to do it.”

If you look at the sandbar upon which Kivalina rests, you can see why it might be subject to erosion and the vagaries of the weather.

But does that make it a government concern? Really?

In times past, it wasn’t up to taxpayers to guarantee every outpost of humanity’s continued existence. When a way of life became untenable in a given place, the people moved.

Now, folks tend to look to governments, seeing their “communities” as something others owe them, rather than something they must work to keep.

A bad sign if climate change proves real and massive.

If it takes over a $100 million to move a village with 400 people, what happens when whole cities must be abandoned? I’m sure government will be involved, but if a million Americans must move, we cannot afford to spend the Kivalina ratio: $250 trillion is quite a price tag.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Non-neutral Net Neutrality

Worried about its costs, Netflix has asked millions of customers to support so-called “net neutrality” policies to curtail the freedom of action of broadband companies like Comcast. Netflix, a huge suck of bandwidth, doesn’t want to have to make deals with ISPs like Comcast to deliver service to its customers.

One goal of “net neutrality” is to prevent Internet providers from affecting Internet access via such nefarious practices as charging different rates for different levels of service (a ubiquitous form of “discrimination” without which markets cannot function). Mises Institute writer Ryan McMaken wants to know what problem the new regulations are supposed to solve: “Who is being denied access to the web?”

Since the Internet first became generally available, it has become only more widespread, service only faster.

Any problems caused by existing government barriers to entry should be solved by dismantling those barriers. But according to FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, the voluminous new regulations go in the opposite direction, giving the agency “power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.”

The FCC has voted to proceed with the regulations. The result will likely throttle the quality of broadband service.

Netflix and other advocates of the regime have also foot-shootingly increased the chances of intrusive new regulations of their own net-based businesses.

Any sweeping assault on our liberty is hardly “neutral.” Regulations like those proposed always favor some over others, the essence of partiality. What we need from government is not “neutrality” with respect to our freedom, but consistent upholding of our right to it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom meme

What one man cannot morally do…

“We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.”

—ALBERT JAY NOCK

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general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Marriage Savings

Paul Jacob on how governments can save money, and clean up the marriage business, too

We’ve all seen lawmakers yammer on and on about how they want to “streamline” government, or “save the taxpayers money.”

But they rarely show us much for all the talk.

Paul Woolverton, writing this weekend in the Fayetteville Observer, noted one such lapse after the North Carolina Senate voted to create a law to let magistrates “opt out of conducting any weddings if they have a religious objection.”

The problem? “No one in the debate,” Mr. Woolverton asserts, “questioned the underlying premise that a magistrate or clergy member is necessary to seal the marriage contract.”

The involvement of the state in the marriage contract biz is unnecessarily complicated, he explains. “As fiscal conservatives,” Woolverton insists, they could have taken the opportunity to ask something more fundamental:

A man and a woman pay the government $60 to get a government-approved marriage license. Why should they then have to visit another government office and pay the government another $20, or hire a government-designated third party for a fee or “donation,” to finalize their marriage contract?

Woolverton suggests streamlining the process: “. . . [G]overnment should make its involvement the least intrusive it can be. It should record marriages when couples visit the Register of Deeds to buy their marriage licenses.”

And that’s it.

Betrothed couples can legally testify to meeting any and all state requirements — and officially inform the state of their pre-marriage and married names.

Those who want the services of a priest or rabbi or preacher or imam can hire one, or cajole one. Or two.

That’s just not state business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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meme

Free Trade, Tolerance and Cooperation…

Free Trade, Tolerance and Cooperation lead to Peace and Prosperity

Free trade, tolerance and cooperation will lead inevitably to peace and prosperity. Envy, theft and redistribution will lead inevitably to ruin.

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Categories
folly ideological culture nannyism

The Problem of No Problem

A scientist has a problem: no problem.

Sounds like a Zen riddle, but it’s really about the riddle of victimhood-worship.

Emily Yoffe writes an advice column called Dear Prudence. A female reader reported a problem pertaining to workplace bias against women. Although she works in a “very masculine scientific field . . . I have never really suffered from sexism.”

Hmmm. Why not? “Maybe I’m just awesome at playing the man’s game (or in denial and don’t have an eye for sexism?).”

It is probably not denial. It is pretty easy to detect abusive treatment when you’re on the receiving end and not rationalizing it away. The bigger problem, though, is that “even quite reasonable and pleasant women” of her acquaintance get nasty when she can’t “contribute to their list of crimes committed by the patriarchy.”

What to do? She dislikes unpleasantness, but doesn’t want to lie.

One thing to do is recognize it’s not up to you to make unreasonable people reasonable. When no discussion is possible, take your conversation elsewhere. I also advise skipping gratuitous self-doubt.

Happily, Ms. Prudence and I are on the same wavelength.

“My general advice,” she writes, “is that it’s best not to engage with unpleasant people. . . . But if you feel like it, you can also counterpunch by saying something like, ‘It’s funny, but the only people who try to bully me are women who aren’t in my profession.’ ”

Commonsensical minds think alike, I guess. Ask me for advice any time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly meme

Net Neutrality Lunacy

“The very same government that couldn’t even build a functional website and leaked massive amounts of personal data while doing it just took over the entire Internet.

And people everywhere are telling me that places like Amazon (a company that can deliver almost anything to my door within 24 hours with the click of a button) are making the Internet less free.

Raving, barking lunatics.”

—Justin M. Stoddard

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crime and punishment national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights

Herd Immunity to Violence

I praised Juan Williams the other day. Let me balance that out.

On Tuesday’s The Five, a Fox news opinion chat show, in the wake of the Mall of America terrorist threat, Greg Gutfeld decried “gun-free zones” advancing the “more guns, less crime” argument that economist John Lott has more famously made.

Mr. Williams expressed incredulity. “I don’t think that makes sense, that everybody in the mall has a gun. Let the police protect us.”

Gutfeld laughed. There was banter. Some accusatory explanation. Oh, you lefties! But then Gutfeld regrouped.

“This is not an either/or — like everybody’s armed [or] everybody’s not. The concealed [carry] permit creates a level of uncertainty on the people that are choosing an attack.”

Other things being equal, the secretly (or discreetly) gun totin’ are safer than the rest of society. The more folks who secretly carry means that those prone to violence face higher risks.

There may be more than one reason why gun violence has plummeted over the past two decades. But one must be this: as Americans have accumulated more guns per capita than ever before, as more households possess guns than ever, the “celerity of punishment” (that old Benthamite term for swiftness of bad repercussions) has increased, nudging the marginally criminal to choose to commit fewer violent crimes.

Making society safer.

Since Williams seemed to have some difficulty with this, let’s translate it for him: compare gun violence and peaceful gun ownership to viral infection and vaccination.

It’s herd immunity, only to violence. Just as the more vaccinated make us all safer, the more peaceful people discreetly carrying guns make us all safer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.