We’ve become too passive. Human beings have created the most complex and superb civilization which has ever been known on the surface of this Earth. And yet we’re not particularly happy in it.
Why are we not particularly happy? Because we spend most of our time in a robotic state in which we do not appreciate what we’ve created.
Colin Wilson, in a talk entitled “Science Fiction and the Esoteric,” which can be found on Scribd.
On March 25, 1965, civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully completed their four-day, 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.
Congress is run by really old people, the faces of the Supreme Court Justices are as wrinkled as the Constitution they allegedly serve, and the oldest U.S. president in our history is a Silent Generation stumbler with one foot in the grave and the other in his mouth.
Enter Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, sporting an “I” and not an “R” or a “D” next to her name, followed by a hyphen and the state from which she hails: “AZ” for Arizona. She won office as a Democrat in 2018 but with some ballyhoo left her party last December. Wikipedia says she still caucuses with the Democrats, but in recent reporting Sinema has denied this: “I’m formally aligned with the Democrats for committee purposes,” Sinema was quoted in The Daily Wire. “But apart from that I am not a part of the caucus.”
Indeed, she stopped going to the Democrats’ bi-weekly caucus lunches because, as she puts it, they are “ridiculous”: “Old dudes are eating Jell-O, everyone is talking about how great they are.”
Ah, Washington!
“The Northerners and the Westerners put cool whip on their Jell-O, and the Southerners put cottage cheese,” she adds, laying it on a bit thick.
While Senator Sinema makes much of her status as an Independent, and the increasing popularity of that stance in her home state, getting re-elected without a major party is tricky business. Politico quotes Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as being on the verge of endorsing her, as well as expressing hopes that Republicans can seduce her to the GOP side.
There is nothing wrong with slurping down Jello, per se. The real problem is unbridled power that calcifies our career politicians . . . and with them our political system.
We need term limits. If not age limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Anders Chydenius, The National Gain (1765), §5.
[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.
As we’ve noted, farms in the Netherlands or any other European country should not be destroyed on the altar of cockamamie EU climate goals.
Dutch farmers have been calling attention to their plight by clogging the streets with tractors. What may have a longer-term salutary effect is the showing that their new party, BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer Citizen Movement), which didn’t exist five years ago, has made in the recent Dutch election.
The election had the largest voter turnout in 30 years, and the BBB are expected to secure 15 Senate seats with about 20 percent of the vote. While that may not sound like a lot if you’re used to a two-party system, but eighteen parties are represented in the Dutch parliament.
A Green-Labour alliance is also expected to win 15 seats. The ruling four-party coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, all in favor of the assault on farmers, is losing eight seats and will have 24 seats.
Wopke Hoestra, a leader of one of the government parties, said that the BBB showing was “a landslide we haven’t seen for years.” His party’s traditional farmer support “has evaporated,” reports UnHerd.com.
Hoestra: “It is an extraordinarily bitter pill.”
Aw gee. The Dutch central planners have been trying to strangle agriculture and deprive Dutch farmers of their livelihood, and the farmers — along with people who eat stuff grown on farms — don’t appreciate it!
Perhaps alienating 100 percent of a major constituency doesn’t always pay off.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 27.
On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
On this date in 1992, economist and social philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek died. He remains best known for his 1944 political tract The Road to Serfdom.
Much has been made, online, of theologians, of all people, awarding an honorary degree to a young environmental activist demonstrating no academic much less godly accomplishments. The obvious suggestion: “what she’s selling is a religion”!
But what stands out to me? Mr. Nissinen’s declaration of this year’s ceremonial theme: “Freedom.”
Ms. Thunberg has been pestering and entreating leaders of the world to “do something” to “save the planet” from “climate change.”
What she demands is not freedom, but more
Whatever the actual threat may be, there is no hint of freedom in her agenda. And if you want more of that message, consult the latest alarm from the IPCC.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a bizarre restatement of past pronouncements, warning “that we are almost half way through the ‘last chance decade’ to pull the brakes on climate change.”
“The world is only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels,” explains The Guardian. “On current trends, we will shoot past the target within a decade.”
Dooming the planet.
Pushing this fake “global accepted goal” has a historical context. Many similar past warnings that haven’t come true. But, more pressingly, the worldwide panic over a pandemic that even to politicians increasingly appears to be a complete failure of the experts.
Why trust the Expert Climatologists when the Expert Epidemiologists have so disastrously failed us?
Just don’t ask Dr. Greta.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence ‘democracy,’ and the other ‘tyranny.’
Karl Popper, as quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954) by Maurice William Cranston, p. 112.
On March 22, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. Exactly eight years later, the colony expelled Anne Hutchinson for her religious dissent.
In 1812 on this date, Stephen Pearl Andrews was born. Andrews would go on to become an important American abolitionist, free love advocate, and theorist of “individual sovereignty,” promulgating the reforms of Josiah Warren.