Author: Redactor

Categories
insider corruption

Jesse Jackson, Jr., Fraudster

Guilty. That’s what Jesse Jackson, Jr., former congressman, pleaded in court yesterday.

Fraud. That’s the name of his crime, though it was a particular kind of fraud, the taking of campaign contributions for personal use.

Partnered. The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s famous son was not alone, nor did he merely “fall into” crime out of lax record-keeping. His wife was also involved in the pattern of embezzlement and tax fraud, and the level of their misappropriations was not trifling.

Sandra Jackson admitted to not reporting $600,000 of income, and the couple confessed to using re-election campaign funds to

  • buy a gold-plated Rolex for more than $40,000;
  • purchase $5,000 worth of fur capes and parkas;
  • over $9,000 worth of children’s furniture.

This is corruption, the most obvious kind to which a democratic republic is susceptible.

It is only made more frequent and more expensive in our modern times by the enormous power a congressman can hold over Washington’s tossing about of billions and trillions of dollars.

Who even notices the millions?

Jesse Jackson, Jr., isn’t alone in wanting a piece of the Washington action. Nor is he alone in thinking about himself first, and . . . well, not having time to think about anything second.

I’ve even seen this happen to minor-party candidates. It’s too easy to see a political campaign as about the candidate and not the principles — about personal advancement, not representation.

We’ll never have perfect people in public office, but we can do a whole lot better. And it’s good to see the guilty caught and prosecuted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Feb 20, Prohibition ends

On February 20, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution (to end alcohol Prohibition in the United States) was proposed in Congress.

Categories
education and schooling folly

A Pointed Reminder

“In schools,” the Washington Post headline warned, “a pointed finger or a toy gun can spell trouble.” The front-page feature detailed a far too extensive and growing list of zero tolerance, zero commonsense punishments meted out to children as young as five at various “educational” institutions.

A ten-year old boy in Alexandria, Virginia, showed kids on the bus his new toy gun, which sported a bright orange tip to let even the most dense person know its essential toyness. Police arrested him the next day.

His mother points out that her son did not threaten anyone. Or pretend to. Nevertheless, he has been “fingerprinted and photographed,” writes the Post. “He now has a probation officer, lawyers and another court date.”

In my Virginia county, Prince William, an eight-year-old boy contorted his hand and fingers into an apparently loaded pistol and through insidious manipulation of his mouth and lips may have imitated the sound of firing hot lead at a classmate, while said classmate was, in an evil orgy of violence, simultaneously pretending to be shooting arrows from an invisible bow.

The finger-slinger was suspended for “threatening to harm self or others.” He did neither, of course, but his offense is equivalent to having waved a loaded gun. (No word on the whereabouts of the silent-but-deadly pantomime archer.)

A five-year-old girl was interrogated by three school staff members, summarily found guilty of issuing a “terroristic threat,” and suspended for ten days for allegedly attempting to murder her friend and then commit suicide. She offered to unload her weapon all over her friend and herself. The weapon? A Hello Kitty gun, which fires bubbles.

The Post suggests the schools are jumpy after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. But this zero tolerance insanity didn’t begin last December.

My grandson was suspended from his public school more than a year ago. He was six and playfully shot his finger at several fellow students.

Educators, who long ago abandoned the distinction between play and reality, must have been shocked at the lack of fatalities.

Does the crusade against crime really require public institutions to reject, utterly, common sense?

Shouting “No!” . . . I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Robert Nozick

It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.

Categories
Thought

Robert Nozick

You can’t satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.

Categories
national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Drone Strikes at Home?

The main controversy over the current administration’s drone strikes program has not been about committing acts of war without a declaration of war.

It has not been about committing acts of war within the boundaries of allied countries.

It has not been about killing innocents.

And it has certainly not been about the reliability of information that gets to the president’s desk that might cause him to order a drone strike.

No, the controversy has centered on the killing American citizens abroad with drone strikes. Some people favor it, since the main American targets are “traitors” and “terrorists.” But many others balk: Without a trial, how do we determine their guilt?

The usual response to that? “This is war!”

But no war has been declared. And, ahem, our side often blows up people far away from any battlefield and in allied territory . . . including a 16-year old American citizen killed in Yemen for being related to his father, Anwar al-Awlaki.

This, however, is just the tip of the enormity. The language from the folks in the administration suggests that borderlines mean nothing to them. Which raises a big question: “What about within our borders?”

The administration has been evasive.

This disturbs Sen. Rand Paul. “What I’m asking is about drone strikes on Americans, on American soil. The president will not answer that he cannot do this. In fact, he seems to be asserting that he can do this; all he’ll say is he doesn’t intend to do this.”

Sending drones to kill foreigners, innocents as well as enemies, on allied soil, in secret, without any method of accountability, is the behavior of a rogue nation. To claim the same power  on our own soil? That’s tyrannical.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Aaron Burr arrested

On February 19, 1807, former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr was arrested for treason and confined to Fort Stoddert. He would later be acquitted.

In 1861, on this day in February, serfdom was abolished in Russia.

More than 60 tornadoes struck the Southern United States, on February 19, 1884, one of the largest tornado outbreaks in U.S. history. It must have been due to global warming.

Categories
Thought

Robert Nozick

Philosophical argument, trying to get someone to believe something whether he wants to believe it or not, is not, I have held, a nice way to behave towards someone; also it does not fit the original motivation for studying or entering philosophy. That motivation is puzzlement, curiousity, a desire to understand, not a desire to produce uniformity of belief. Most people do not want to become thought-police. The philosophical goal of explanation rather than proof not only is morally better, it is more in accord with one’s philosophical motivation.

Categories
too much government

Meteorite, Meteorwrong

The most exciting atmospheric event of recent times had nothing to do with global warming.

The bus-sized meteor that burst into the atmosphere over Siberia on Thursday has deservedly garnered a lot of attention. It’s the biggest such atmospheric explosion since the Tunguska Event, in 1908, and took place many miles above the surface of the planet, its hundreds of kilotons of energy mostly absorbed by the atmosphere. And a million Chelyabinsk windows.

What remains is the clean-up. And the “lesson”:

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space.

“At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies” to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

American astronomer and celebrity Neil deGrasse Tyson explained that, below a certain size, such asteroids approaching Earth are undetectable. (Nomenclature clarification: an asteroid is a rock in space; a meteor is one that hits the atmosphere; a meteorite is one that hits the ground.) And there’s nothing we can do about them. They almost literally come in “under the radar.”

But bigger objects could be tracked, are tracked. And potentially something could be done about those. Which is good, since they could be Earth killers.

Not surprisingly, deGrasse Tyson’s followers were blessed with a meme blast saying, “Asteroids… are nature’s way of asking: ‘How’s that space program coming along?’”

For my part, NASA’s current bowing out to industry is a step in the right direction. For it’s only when there’s a lot of space traffic that we can expect expert space traffic cops — who (whether public or private) would be better equipped to stop the next big wannabe-meteorite.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
Today

Feb 18, WHITE ROSE

In a sad day for the cause of human liberty, on February 18, 1943, the Nazis arrested the members of the White Rose movement.