The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples. A noble artist, he has visions of excellence and revelations of beauty which he has neither impersonated in character nor embodied in words. His life and teachings are but studies for yet nobler ideals.
Stay is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary. But if one does not stay while staying, better let him go where he is gone the while.
Over at Townhall this weekend, your Common Sense columnist considers President Obama’s emotionalist focus on the Newtown massacre as an excuse for irrelevant “gun control.” Go there. And come back here to cogitate on a few of the more controversial points:
And you thought Ron Paul was lonely as “Dr. No”!
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
The current issue of The National Interest contains a perceptive essay by former Senator Jim Webb, “Congressional Abdication.” George F. Will echoes Webb’s arguments at The Washington Post, in “A bipartisan abdication.”
So, some abdication has occurred. Of what?
A congressional role in making U.S. foreign policy:
When it comes to the long-term commitments that our country makes in the international arena, ours can be a complicated and sometimes frustrating process. But our Founding Fathers deliberately placed checks and counterchecks into our constitutional system for exactly that purpose. The congressional “nuisance factor” is supposed to act as a valuable tool to ensure that our leaders — and especially our commander in chief — do not succumb to the emotions of the moment or the persuasions of a very few.
The problem, Webb argues, is that Congress has given up most of its power and authority, just letting presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama do pretty much whatever they want. And recently it’s gotten much worse. “President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress,” writes Webb, “at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”
Will summarizes the problem thusly: “Imperial presidents and invertebrate legislators of both parties have produced what Webb correctly calls ‘a breakdown of our constitutional process.’ Syria may be the next such bipartisan episode” of undeclared war . . . where the Congress merely sits on its hands and waits for the CNN reports.
The imperial nature of our system has been a long time emerging. As with ancient Rome, Big Men usurped power, and legislative bodies ceded authority, step by step, over time — becoming less republican.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
While the Supreme Court’s hearings on gay marriage stole the headlines, Senator Rand Paul was doing something interesting in the Senate. Teaming up with his fellow Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell along with Oregon’s Democratic delegation, the increasingly influential senator pushed S.359, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013.
Together with its twin in the House, sponsored by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, the bills seek to amend the Controlled Substances Act, which has outright prohibited the domestic raising of industrial hemp since 1970.
Hemp is marijuana, but grown for its fiber. And not potent in THC, so its recreational and medicinal value is nil. It was raised in colonial days, and by several of the Founding Fathers. I learned about it in Third Grade History. You probably did, too.
I wasn’t told that, if carefully cultivated, the same plant served other uses. There’s scant evidence that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington — two enthusiastic if not completely successful hemp growers — exhibited any interest other than curiosity and acquisitiveness in their hemp growing.
The legalization move in Congress is about, pardon the expression, high time. Hemp is a great product, and the idea that, for the convenience of suppressing its cultivation as a psychoactive substance, not only a whole species but a whole industry would be suppressed is typical federal overreach.
Why the concentrated Kentucky interest? Well, it was the Bluegrass State where hemp was historically grown after the Civil War.
The Oregon angle? You’d have to ask Senators Wyden and Merkley. But I’ve known a number of Oregonian cannabis activists who’ve talked as much about the virtues of industrial hemp as the delights of their “grass.” Perhaps the idea is blowing in Oregon winds.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.