Author: Redactor

Categories
budgets & spending cuts too much government

Everybody Pays–Nobody Wants

Festivus, Christmas, Rand Paul, government waste

Senator Rand Paul has just issued The Festivus Report 2025, in part a laundry list of absurd government spending at your expense and mine — to buy things that nobody wants but all of us American taxpayers must pay for.

Well, not nobody-nobody: The recipients of the largesse? They’re the exception; they want it. But these exceptions can’t justify expenditures wholly unrelated to the proper government function of protecting life and liberty from foreign and domestic threats.

“Congress keeps shoveling money toward pet projects and special interests while hardworking Americans pay the price through inflation and crushing interest rates — even after President Trump took action to end most foreign aid programs,” says Paul.

Examples:

  • $5 million for cocaine for dogs.
  • $3.3 million to Northwestern University to fund “safe space ambassadors” and combat “systemic racism.”
  • $7.5 billion for an EV charger network that built just 68 charging stations throughout the country.
  • $244,252 for a Pakistan cartoon series about fighting “climate change.”
  • $2.8 million “for aborted fetal tissue to be implanted in humanized mice.”
  • $2 million for “gender-affirming care” and influence campaigns in Guatemala.
  • $200 billion to schools in pandemic-relief money “wasted on things like rooms at Caesars Palace, renting out MLB stadiums, and ice cream trucks.”
  • $22.6 billon on “things like furniture, car repairs and home down payments, as well as welfare for illegal immigrants.”
  • $700,000 to fuel anti-gas-stove propaganda.

And so much more. Take it all back, Santa!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

R.A. Lafferty

Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade. 

R.A. Lafferty, The Flame Is Green (1971).

Categories
Today

First, First, First

Henry Lee III’s eulogy to George Washington in Congress declared the former general and president to be “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Washington had died on December 14th, 1799, and Lee’s eulogy took place twelve days later.

Categories
media and media people regulation too much government

Submit to Our Plans, Shivering Peasant

Colorado, natural gas, climate, energy, fuel, regualtions

How to defuse resistance to tyranny: helpful information.

Colorado now mandates that emissions from burning natural gas be cut, over the next ten years, by 41 percent — the perfect percentage, elsewise it would’ve been rounded to 40. 

No more natural gas emissions at all by 2050. 

“News that Colorado has set hard target dates for an end to burning natural gas in our daily lives prompted many ‘wait, what?’ questions from Colorado Sun readers,” says Sun columnist Michael Booth. He is here to help.

Propane tanks? These may not be banned by the current law, but do try to convert to electrical appliances. (If the power goes out, Coloradans can always use some other electrical thing as backup. Think batteries, lots of batteries!)

Also, the “new rules are not aimed at homeowners,” Coloradans will be relieved to know. Just at utilities . . . which serve homeowners. “Under current rules, no one is showing up at your door to rip out a gas water heater against your will.” 

Those helpful government agents will show up at your utility’s door with a court order forcing your utility to rip up natural gas lines, instead.

What if the switchover happens too slowly for regulators? 

Column for another day.

Any advice on reversing the ban? 

Mr. Booth might protest that it’s not his job to lead any rebel alliance, only to give information on things. Oh, sure. Well, he might have offered info on how to contact Colorado state legislators and the governor’s office. 

Not for any purpose but just to keep readers well-informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

R.A. Lafferty

Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that.

R.A. Lafferty, The Flame Is Green (1971).

Categories
Today

Home Rule

On December 24, 1973, the District of Columbia Home Rule Act was passed, allowing residents of Washington, D.C., to elect their own local government.

Categories
Thought

Kenneth Arnold

It seems impossible, but there it is.

Kenneth Arnold, quoted in the Chicago Times (July 7, 1947), characterizing the nine UFOs “flying at incredible speed” that he had seen on June 24. He said a man he had met reported seeing something similar over Ukiah, Oregon.
Categories
Today

Kingdom’s End

On December 23, 2007, an agreement was reached for the Kingdom of Nepal to be abolished and the country to become a federal republic with the Prime Minister becoming head of state.

Categories
international affairs regulation

Billionaire Baby Ploy

birthright citizenship, China, immigration, foreign policy

A Chinese billionaire tried. Give him that. But do we have to like what he was up to?

The trier in question is fantasy video-game mogul Xu Bo, and The Wall Street Journal reports that he is trying to gain a foothold in the United States in a somewhat novel way . . . for a rich man, anyway. 

He’s fathering children in America. Many children.

And by non-wives who are under surrogacy contracts to bear his children for him.

While domestic surrogacy is illegal in China, it’s not in the U.S. So, being a resourceful billionaire, and inspired by Elon Musk’s fathering of 14 known children, he took action.

A family court in California noticed. When it realized the man was petitioning for parental rights “to at least four unborn children,” explains the Journal, and “learned he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more through surrogates, it raised alarm,” and his request was denied.

A “rare rebuke to a little-known trend in the largely unregulated U.S. surrogacy industry” — and it’s a trend that the Chinese super-wealthy are taking advantage of. 

What advantage? Birthright citizenship: “Babies born via surrogacy in the U.S. are U.S. citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment.” 

This issue, which looms rather large as tens of millions flocked to America during the Biden years, is key. It allows for all sorts of abuse. 

Because the world has changed in 157 years.

Now that the “millionaires and billionaires” are horning in on the act, will Democrats re-think their commitment to birthright citizenship?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Kenneth Rexroth

Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

Kenneth Rexroth, “Tolstoy: War and Peace,” Classics Revisited (1968).