Mass travel by air made possible by the Jet Age may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb. For there can be no atom bomb more powerful than the air tourist, charged with curiosity, enthusiasm and good will, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and races.
Juan Trippe, The Pan Am Story (1958), p. 8.
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.
It is certainly a time to be jolly. For some time now, Santa and his legislative elves have been striving to give you and yours an ever more overbearing medical regime.
Take a gander at some of the goodies that have been proposed in the Empire State’s Legislative Workshop:
Santa sure has been working overtime the last couple of years.
Will such bills, lapsed at the moment, soon see the light of day? Let’s hope! You people of the State of New York really need this kind of bounty. Especially if you’ve been suffering any delusions about the propriety of independent judgement and personal discretion in such matters.
Did I say Santa? Maybe I meant the Grinch. Or Krampus. The real Santa would be putting moving-expense vouchers in everyone’s stockings to help them get the heck out of this beleaguered state.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with DALL-E2, John Tenniel, JG
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People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
A.J. Liebling, The New Yorker (April 7, 1956).
The revelations are called The Twitter Files, and I linked to the first two installments, tweetstormed last week by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, on Monday.
But Musk’s released information to his select set of journalists did not stop there.
The third set was also made public by Taibbi, and dealt with the company’s deliberations and politics of January 2021, and the banning of a sitting president — and Twitter’s most popular user — from the platform.
Michael Shellenberger had the honor of delivering to the public the fourth set, showing how Twitter executives changed policies and made up stuff on the fly to ban the aforementioned Donald J. Trump.
The fifth batch, ushered into our view by Bari Weiss, again, included an especially interesting tidbit: “Internal correspondence shows those assigned to evaluate Trump’s tweets didn’t see proof of incitement of the Capitol riot” but “[t]hat didn’t stop for massive internal calls to ban the president” — quoting The Daily Mail’s synopsis.
“Between January 2020 and November 2022,” Taibbi tweeted in the sixth outing, “there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth… a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.” Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” team appeared to go out of its way to find excuses to ban accounts, and is egregiously misnamed.
Michael Shellenberger’s contribution in the seventh Twitter File blast is perhaps most shocking of all:
To top it all off, Lee Fang supplied the eighth set, complete with poop about Pentagon pressure, propaganda, and “concierge service.”
In sum, the federal government made Twitter its b . . . uh . . . disinformation agent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Yes, Virginia, “twitterpated” is a word!
Illustration created with DALL-E2, John Tenniel, JG
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Freedom is the possibility of isolation . . . If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Richard Zenith, translator, 2001), text 283.
On December 22, 1989, Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife fled Bucharest with a helicopter as protesters erupted in cheers.
The couple was quickly caught and, on Christmas day, tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad.
Eric Boehm, writing in Reason, riffs on it regarding federal spending: “The best time to stop borrowing heavily was yesterday (or several years ago), but the second-best time would be today. Instead, Congress is likely to make this problem even worse — again — by continuing to spend like there’s no tomorrow.”
In November, the federal government ran a $249 billion deficit, which, Boehm informs, is up $56B from the previous November.
Talk about November chills.
But worse yet is that Congress is gearing up for more. The omnibus spending bill in the works “will add between $240 billion and $585 billion to this year’s budget deficit.”
After a lifetime of deficit spending, this may seem only worth a furrow above the eyes, not an actual arched brow. But it does make a mockery of President Joe Biden’s boast of decreasing deficits on his watch. As Boehm explains, that’s merely an artifact of the Trump Era humungoid pandemic giveaways. There had to be some sort of let up from that binge. Nevertheless, the “underlying figures showed all along that the deficit situation was continuing to worsen, and that President Joe Biden’s policies were adding trillions of dollars to the deficit over the long term.”
It’s almost as if they think “money grows on trees.”
Would that it were the case, though, since there are only a limited number of trees. Taxation and especially debt are, to politicians, closer to infinity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Update: Senator Mitch McConnell said, yesterday: “I’m pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” The Republican Leader predicted passage on the 22nd.
Illustration created with DALL-E2, John Tenniel, Thomas Cole, JG
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On December 21, 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declared their independence on December 21, 1826, starting the Fredonian Rebellion.
Avant-garde rock ’n’ roll guitarist, band leader, and composer Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. In 1985, Zappa testified before the United States Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music organization co-founded by Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore. Zappa was a passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship. Describing his political views, Frank Zappa categorized himself as a “practical conservative,” or “independent.” He died in 1993.
But until recently, the problems users encountered mostly pertained to PayPal’s targeting of fraud — not with whether a user uttered wrong thoughts or pursued projects disfavored by corporate implementers of a Chinazi-style social credit system.
More and more, though, PayPal is informing individuals with unwelcome thoughts that they can no longer use PayPal and that PayPal will hold their funds “for up to 180 days . . . we’ll email you. . . .”
PayPal has, for now, rescinded — or partially and temporarily rescinded — policy provisions pledging to fine users $2,500 for “misinformation” or “hate speech.”
But PayPal is still targeting thinkers of wrongthink.
An example is Eric Finman, whose Freedom Phone provides access to apps banned elsewhere. After ousting him, PayPal held onto $1.2 million in his PayPal balance. Finman eventually recovered the money, but the delay “killed all the momentum.”
Biologist Colin Wright was ejected for criticizing gender ideology. PayPal won’t confirm this without a subpoena. But these and many other examples follow a similar pattern. Often, PayPal comes down like a ton of bricks right after a user utters a viewpoint PayPal dislikes.
I’m appalled. Many of PayPal’s founders — Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin — are appalled. They say that PayPal’s original mission of empowering people is being perverted.
We’ve seen how government officials and partisan political operatives have whispered in the ears of Facebook and Twitter, instructing such companies to censor and deplatform users. Are they also instructing PayPal?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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