On December 12, 1939, Finnish forces defeated those of the Soviet Union in the first major victory of what became known as the Winter War, in the Battle of Tolvajärvi.
December 12th birthdays include:
Paul Jacob starts with TIME and ends with FIRE:
Paul Jacob talks up The Person of the Year:
Once a government commits to the principle of silencing opposition, it has only one way to go, and that’s down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes source of terror to all its citizens.
On December 10, 1884, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published. This novel, narrated in the first person by the title character, is a dark comedy of the antebellum South and slavery, and has been considered by many American critics and writers to qualify as the “Great American Novel.”
On this date in 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded — to economist Frédéric Passy (pictured above), co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; and to Henry Dunant the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Passy was an admirer of Richard Cobden and an active member in the French Liberal School of Political Economy that developed in the tradition of J.B. Say, Destutt de Tracy, and Frédéric Bastiat. His published works include Leçons d’économie politique (1860-61); La Démocratie et l’Instruction (1864); L’Histoire du Travail (1873); Malthus et sa Doctrine (1868); and La Solidarité du Travail et du Capital (1875).
Chinese students have created apparel that human eyes can see but that hides the wearer from security cameras and recognition software.
The InvisDefense coat looks ordinary. So it won’t by itself arouse the suspicion of other people on the street. But it is designed in such a way as to foil the kind of cameras that, for example, try to identify who is protesting Chinazi lockdown insanity.
During the day, the printed pattern of the InvisDefense coat blinds cameras. At night, the coat emits heat signals that disrupt infrared. It was invented by Chinese graduate students at Wuhan University under the guidance of computer science professor Wang Zheng. Their coat won first prize in an innovation contest sponsored by Huawei.
Wang observes that “many surveillance devices can detect human bodies. Cameras on the road have pedestrian detection functions. And smart cars can identify pedestrians, roads, and obstacles. Our InvisDefense allows the camera to capture you. But it cannot tell if you are human. . . .
“We use algorithms to design the least conspicuous patterns that can disable computer vision.”
And the coat costs only seventy bucks or so.
I’m not always a fan of the algorithms. In this case, shout Hooray for algorithms and for those who put them to such good use by inventing the InvisDefense coat.
I hope these students sell about eight billion of them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.
Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale (1915).
On December 9, 1958, the John Birch Society was founded in the United States. December 9 also marks the birthdays of
And New York State officials now feel entitled to compel social-media companies to restrict speech that the officials dislike.
The video-sharing platform Rumble, dedicated to making the Internet “free and open once again,” is teaming up with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in a lawsuit to stop the New York law.
The goal of AB A7865A is to force social media networks “to provide and maintain mechanisms for reporting hateful conduct on their platform.”
“Hateful conduct” is speech that some people dislike. Of course, even the most acidulous asseverations are protected by the First Amendment if they don’t entail actual violations of anyone’s rights. Gangsters and terrorists are not legally entitled to use speech, or anything else, to commit robbery or murder — certainly not on the specious grounds that they have rights to freedom of speech or to bear arms.
The new law is not about such things. Under it, if social-media companies fail to provide ways for users to complain about “hateful” comments, they could be fined up to $1,000 per violation and investigated by the state attorney general.
Clearly, the law would institute a massive incentive to bury social platforms in fines and investigations if they permit the “wrong” kind of speech. The number of those easily offended by others is infinite.
Also infinite? Excuses for those in power to stomp on opposition speech.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with DALL-E2
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We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Part I: The Prison Industry, Ch. 8 “The Law as a Child.”