Controversy this week! And not just the Rittenhouse case:
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Author: Redactor
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Robinson Jeffers
Meteors are not needed less than mountains.
Robinson Jeffers, from “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1925).
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Citizens Advancing Science
On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.
Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.
In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.
November 13 is World Kindness Day, which has been celebrated in various countries since 1998. It is not an official celebratory day of the U.S.A., or of the United Nations. But individuals are free to be kind this day . . . or any day, for that matter.
Some people have it tough to begin with. Then others make their lives even tougher for no good reason.
Fifth-grader Brian Hickman has cerebral palsy. Inspired by his mother, Adriana, he doesn’t let it keep him down.
His resilience has recently been tested. One of the things Brian loves to do is dance, and he spent weeks preparing for a talent show at his elementary school.
Then the school said no.
He wanted to dance to “We Shine,” a contemporary Christian song that mentions Jesus. In accordance with the school district, administrators told him he couldn’t use it.
Too offensive.
The principal opined that permitting the song would violate “separation of church and state.”
Well, “separation of church and state” is a term of art for what is in the Constitution: the right to free exercise of religion, and a prohibition on establishing a state church.
Letting Brian dance to his preferred music could not have resulted in the imposition of a prayer schedule on the citizenry, in forcing Episcopalians to become Lutherans or vice versa, or in otherwise coercively establishing religion.
No, officials were merely consulting their own sensibilities and deciding that they or the students could not abide exposure to Christian sentiments. Since Brian likes only Christian songs, any alternate he might have come up with would probably also have been refused.
But why make him start from scratch anyway?
His mother knew what to do: enlist the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, which promptly filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District. Which promptly reversed course and let Brian dance to the music he wanted.
Case closed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Graham Sumner
Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man” (1883).
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John Locke
The great question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of their mischiefs … has been, not whether be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689.
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The Pushers
They’re skulking around, speaking in furtive tones, lurking in dark places . . . hiding from oversight so they can do their dirty deeds unimpeded.
Who?
The disinformation pushers.
They grab hold of one or more incorrect propositions and, indifferent to how wrong it is to be less than infallible in their utterances, willfully communicate their blunderful asseverations to others.
Some pushers use encrypted services to peddle their verbal wares and evade beneficent censors who want only to help.
Public policy is one of the topics the pushers brazenly yap about.
Result? Political discourse is a mess, with not everybody agreeing about everything, as they simply must.
In Brazil, for example, where “Far-Right Disinformation Pushers Find a Safe Place on Telegram,” experts worry that the Telegram messaging app “could become a powerful vector for lies and vitriol before next year’s presidential elections,” explains The New York Times. And that would be regrettable, making for “a tense political moment in the country.”
Thank goodness for the Times, eh?
Now we finally know that people disagree in Brazil, sometimes indelicately. Even during elections!
Note the unmentioned presuppositions.
First, that there’s no far-left disinformation in Brazil, as anyone who peruses all the inaccessible encrypted messages on Telegram would know.
Second, making do by relying upon better speech as the only way to counter erroneous or dishonest speech is out of the question.
At least according to the Times.
Which, being in the Better Speech/Better Press business, does seem a bit odd.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Blemishes on journalists for leaping to conclusions, rather than doing actual reporting and investigation, are now erupting like terrestrial super-zits of stratovolcano proportions.
I could be talking about the Kyle Rittenhouse case, or any number of other issues where corporate media has spectacularly failed us, but the Trump years left us with one humungoid blot on the landscape, Russia-Russia-Russia.
“Russiagate is already a sizable boil on the face of American journalism,” wrote Matt Taibbi last week, “but the indictment of Danchenko has the potential to grow the profession’s embarrassment to fantastic dimensions.”
That’s Igor Danchenko, key player in the Democratic conspiracy to take Trump down. But the “professional” about to be disgraced to “fantastic dimensions” is none other than MSNBC’s star pusher of the Steele Dossier, Rachel Maddow.
Taibbi calls her response to Danchenko’s prosecution “a thing beyond.”
The case for the Steele Dossier, upon which Trump and his cronies were accused of massive corruption and even treason, is now in complete tatters. Danchenko has been caught in lies, and Hillary Clinton campaign insiders have been caught pushing, paying for, and plotting to promote those lies.
But Rachel Maddow? She’s in sneaky defense mode.
Dr. Steve Turley, in video con brio, quotes Erik Wemple’s Washington Post characterization of Maddow’s one-sided coverage: “there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”
Now Maddow’s engaged in pointing out that Danchenko’s prosecutors, instead of making the case for Danchenko’s fabrications, concentrate on linking a trail of political connections with the Clinton campaign. Not true: the prosecution makes much of Danchenko’s lies.
Yet, making “collusion” connections is precisely what Maddow did (relentlessly) against the Trump campaign and various Russian figures.
That’s a symmetry!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Carlos Castaneda
The average man is either victorious or defeated and, depending on that, he becomes a persecutor or a victim. These two conditions are prevalent as long as one does not “see.” “Seeing” dispels the illusion of victory, or defeat, or suffering.
Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality (1971).
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Cry of Independence
On November 10, 1821, the First Cry of Independence in the small, interior town of Villa de los Santos, occurred in Panama. The November 10 date has since become Panama’s “Cry of Independence Day” in the country.