It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.
Author: Redactor
Categories
Home to Gnomes
Oakland, California, serves as home to over a third of a million human inhabitants, but the city has made room for a very different denizen, the gnome.
The gnomes began appearing to observant pedestrians as painted figures on pieces of wood screwed onto utility poles. At ground level.
The gnomes were charming, and appeared in a wide variety of garb, juxtaposed with similarly styled (and painted) colorful mushrooms and other accoutrements and furniture of gnomedom.
The anonymous artist who painted the gnomes did it for fun, as a gift for his neighbors. Only a few people noticed at first. It was Oakland’s best-kept secret:
About 2,300 gnomes with pointy hats and white beards now live in Oakland. One resembles Santa Claus in a monk’s robe. Others wave or appear to be doing a little disco dance.
Yet until late last month, they had pretty much managed to keep their presence on the down low. Even Pacific Gas & Electric, whose poles are gnome homes, was unaware of their existence.
But when the officials found out, they promised to remove the gnomes. Their very existence, you see, might encourage others to likewise affix near-permanent painted figures, and soon gnomes would not only proliferate, but be joined by djinn, leprechauns, imps . . . and perversities.
When the charmed folk of Oakland found out, though, they rallied. They liked the gnomes. The artist came out of the closet, so to speak, but not to make a name for himself — he didn’t provide his name (though it’s an open secret) — for he didn’t want the gnomes to be about him, but about themselves.
And the people won. Public pressure moved PG&E, and the gnomes are safe. For the time being, anyway.
A charming story, reminding us that the character of a place can arise up in humble ways, and without an Arts Council grant, much less a Bureau of Gnomes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
A lot of big money in the Republican Party is now actively being marshaled to make sure that Tea Party efforts come to naught.
The latest endeavor bills itself the Conservative Victory Project, and has been written up in the New York Times, which relates the group’s intent: “to counter other organizations that have helped defeat establishment Republican candidates over the last two election cycles.”
You see, campaigns to unseat staid, big-government “conservative” Republican incumbents have not gone unnoticed amongst the Old Guard of the GOP. And these folks are worried about the quality of the gravy their gravy train returns. So they seek to shore up the “winners”:
“There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” said Steven J. Law, the president of American Crossroads, the “super PAC” creating the new project. “We don’t view ourselves as being in the incumbent protection business, but we want to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.”
Law is, of course, thinking of several Tea Party candidates in the last election who blew it, Big Time. You know the ones: the candidates who talked weirdly of rape.
But it’s not just Tea Party Republicans who shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, or place foot in mouth. Mainstream “conservatives” blow it, too, as Grover Norquist pointed out in the Times article. “People are imagining a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Grover.
I worry that “the real problem” Law and his cronies (such as Karl Rove) are fighting is the specter of a successful Tea Party contingent, with Rand Paul at its lead. Real change is awfully frightening to the whip hands on the gravy train.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Ugly in New York
Part of New York State’s emotionally motivated, hastily concocted new gun control law requires persons owning ugly-looking guns—semi-automatic rifles—to register them with the government.
Officials may protest that they don’t intend to go rounding up the ugly-looking guns. They may also insist that the new law makes it harder for a newsroom to publicize the names and addresses of gun owners (as the Journal News of White Plains, New York recently did).
But a registry that exists is a registry that can be accessed, and abused, despite any official’s alleged good intentions. Many advocates of gun control, including the Senate’s chief sponsor of a new assault weapons ban, admit that if they had their druthers, they’d outlaw all privately held guns. How would the registry be used then?
Many New York owners of ugly guns are up in arms, so to speak. Why? Because they don’t see themselves as criminal suspects properly tracked for exercising constitutional rights. There are good reasons why good people might refuse to voluntarily add their names and addresses to a list of targets.
Brian Olesen, president of one of New York State’s largest gun dealers, says he’s heard “from hundreds of people that they’re prepared to defy the law, and that number will be magnified by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, when the registration deadline comes.”
It’s not just some guns that look ugly. Turning peaceful people into criminals by a mere act of legislation is ugly in the extreme.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
This weekend at Townhall, another foray into the big issue of the day, what to do about preventing gun massacres. Click on over to Townhall.com — actually, here precisely — then come back here to consider the sources, and a few more notions:
- “The Great American Gun Frenzy,” Paul Jacob, Townhall.com, January 13, 2013
- “Let Teachers Bear Arms,” Paul Jacob, Common Sense, December 20, 2012
- “Newtown Votes for Armed Guards in Elementary Schools,” by Alexander Abad-Santos, The Atlantic Wire, February 1, 2013
- “Newtown Sides With NRA – Votes for Armed Guards in Schools,” by John Nolte, Breitbard.com, February 1, 2013
- Wikipedia entry
And this:
The law is reason unaffected by desire.
Who has benefited?
America’s bailout economy started many administrations ago, but really went Big Time under President George W. Bush . . . and then went Enormity Time with President Barack Obama.
The Washington Post provides the latest in bailout news by noting an inter-departmental squabble:
The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said Treasury approved all 18 requests it received last year to raise pay for executives at American International Group Inc., General Motors Corp. and Ally Financial Inc. Of those requests, 14 were for $100,000 or more; the largest raise was $1 million.
Though this is all quite scandalous, don’t expect policies to change or heads to roll — barring a joint Tea Party/Occupy uprising. The nature of the modern “regulatory” state is clear: government bureaus are quickly captured by the industries they aim to regulate. It’s an old story. The revolving door between business and bureaucracy is as well-established as between journalism and politics.
So why do we have bailouts?
- They show that politicians are “doing something”;
- They mimic the welfare state logic of “helping the poor” (if, with caustic irony, by stuffing the wallets of the rich);
- They aggrandize the showy machinations of the legislative and executive branches at the expense of the branch of government designed to handle massive business failure, the courts.
Perhaps Americans shouldn’t have voted in either an MBA grad (Bush) or a constitutional lawyer (Obama). Maybe what the country needs is a bankruptcy lawyer in the White House.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.