Name four famous men at random:
Well, we are cheating. That is not a random list. These are, instead, four of the fascinating people Paul Jacob talks about on his most recent podcast — the video version viewable on Rumble.
Bonus points if you know who is portrayed in the photo, above. Hint: it is not John Brown.
On October 24, 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
People are raging on the streets of Rome, Paris, Melbourne, London, and many other major cities around the world, even while the national press ignores them for fear of spreading discontent. In the US, the protests are taking the form of quiet seething, illustrated in part by a president who is ramping up the controls by the day, even as his approval ratings are underwater by double digit numbers. Crowds chanting “#uck Joe Biden” are re-rendered by the press as “Let’s go Brandon,” as if that is going to fool anyone.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “How Close Is Total Social and Economic Collapse?” Brownstone Institute, October 15, 2021.
One of the things that made 2019 a decent year was the robotics team at Farmington High School in Minnesota.
A former student at the school, Tyler Jackson, contacted the team to ask if they could help his son, two-year-old Cillian, become more mobile. He had been born with a condition resembling cerebral palsy that makes it hard to move around.
The Jackson family couldn’t afford the kind of power wheelchair Cillian needed.
The Farmington kids were eager to help. They replaced the electrical innards of a Fisher Price riding toy, added a bicycle seat, and used a 3D printer to design a joystick and other components.
The team applied skills gained by building robots for competitions, and they also got technical help from the University of Delaware, which had a program for designing mobility devices for disabled kids.
A local broadcast story about the wheelchair shows Cillian in action.
He isn’t the only child who has benefitted from the team’s tech prowess.
Early in 2021, the Rogue Robotics team at Farmington posted an appeal on their Facebook page after learning that Fisher Price had “discontinued the Power Wheels model Wild Thing we convert into wheelchairs for little kids” who either don’t fit into standard powered wheelchairs or can’t afford them.
They asked that anyone who happens to have a Wild Thing model in good condition consider donating it.
This kind of innovation can now be rolled out — pun intended? — broadly, not so much as mass production but as home and community and fix-it shop projects, with 3D printing tech aiding in the revolution.
Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.
Is it good news?
LinkedIn recently announced that it’s ending the current form of its service in China, citing the “challenging” environment.
“While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs . . . we have not found [the same] success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed. We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment . . .”
Part of the problem has been China’s unremitting censorship. Which was not openly discussed in the LinkedIn post, of course.
Another part has been the Microsoft-owned firm’s willingness, as the price of doing business in China, to do the Chinazi government’s bidding in censoring dictatorship-disfavored posts. Also not openly discussed.
So now LinkedIn will replace the full LinkedIn experience with an app for China-based users that is a “standalone jobs application.”
Whether this means that LinkedIn will no longer censor Chinese LinkedIn users remains to be seen. For example, China is likely to demand censorship of a user if it sees a disapproved organization mentioned in a job posting.
At that point, will LinkedIn leave China entirely?
Given the Chinese government’s history, why wait?
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to operate in China and to censor results at the behest of the Chinese government.
That public opinion has swayed Microsoft and LinkedIn to the extent that they will no longer abet China’s censorship of social media is good. But still doing business with CCP-controlled China is fraught with danger. Why? Because China is fraught with tyranny.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Creativity comes from the freedom to fail. And freedom to fail comes from experimentation, and that’s what gives something its individuality.
Peter Gabriel, as quoted in The Kate Bush Story (2012).
Glenn Greenwald calls it a “mountain of data.”
On his Rumble account, “System Update,” the journalist shows “how authoritarian self-identified followers of the Democratic Party have become.”
While admitting that “authoritarian tendencies” are in every group, Greenwald insists that “when you examine this data . . . and really compile it, and look all at once at it, it is extraordinary — no matter how low your expectations are of Democrats — how authoritarian they have become, particularly in the wake of the Trump years.”
Citing Pew Research from August, the well-known reporter begins by showing how opinions on free speech have diverged over the last three years: while Republicans wanting the federal government to “take steps to restrict false info online” declined from 37 percent to 28 percent, Democratic support rose from 40 percent to 65 percent.
And the itch to have tech companies do the dirty work for the federal government “even if it limits freedom of info” shows the same spread: R’s went down 9 points and D’s went up a whopping sixteen!
Greenwald also explores Democrats’ enduring affection for corporate media news, how enthusiastic Democratic politicians are for curbing the basic rights of their political opponents, and how much ardor Democrats show the CIA and the FBI.
All the data, Greenwald insists, shows Democrats getting “more authoritarian by the minute.”
Why?
It might best be looked at in an insider/outsider context. Democrats are becoming more authoritarian because it is their hold on power that they are defending, and Republicans are reacting against that stranglehold. An old principle may be at work: outside of power, people tend to demand freedom; inside, they demand more power.
Authoritarianism is more appealing to insiders, viewing themselves as “authorities.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Demian (1919).