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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Bully for Your Thoughts

Professor William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor who also publishes the popular Legal Insurrection blog, got into trouble last summer by criticizing the violent Marxist organization Black Lives Matters.

BLM’s standard weapons include rioting, burning, looting, and screaming.

Jacobson had argued that the “Hands up, don’t shoot” version of the Michael Brown case is a lie and, in another post, that all the “bloodletting and wilding” around the country was primarily about tearing down the country, not about George Floyd.

These opinions upset the bullies.

Being a conservative professor on a liberal campus had all along made Jacobson feel like a “mouse waiting for the cat to pounce.” After 12 years at Cornell, though, the summer of 2020 was the first time that fellow Cornellians actively sought his ouster.

Six months later, we sure hope Professor Jacobson has managed to land on his feet. And he has. Back then, he was a professor at Cornell Law School. Today, he is a professor at Cornell Law school.

Why didn’t he seek friendlier pastures?

“I don’t see why I should be forced to change my life because they are so intolerant and they are so malicious,” he recently told The Daily Signal podcast. “Why don’t they leave? I’m not going to leave voluntarily. And if they do try to interfere in the renewal of my contract in a year and a half, I will take them to court over it.”

Bully for you, Professor. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Thought

Tully

The distinguishing property of man is to search for and to follow after truth.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, 44 BC.

Fun Fact: Roman politician, lawyer and philosopher Cicero was known as “Tully” by many of America’s Founding Fathers.

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Today

Montessori

On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.

In 1912 on this date, New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States, and in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.

Categories
crime and punishment

Finally Fed Up

We keep returning to Portland — from a safe distance.

Why?

Because rioters keep rioting there. 

And because the people tasked to protect lawful order keep making nicey-nice with the thugs.

But maybe not anymore.

Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, is apparently finally fed up, thanks to the most recent mass mayhem, conducted to ring in the New Year.

What’s motivating the newfound concern for innocent victims? More than any epiphany about the proper responsibilities of government, it may be the average age and modal hue of the current batch of rioters — as well as Wheeler’s awareness that Joe Biden sort of won the election, so haven’t the rioters already got what they wanted?

“Why would a group of largely white, young and some middle-age men destroy the livelihood of others who are struggling to get by?” Mayor Wheeler asks. 

Rhetorically.

You’ve had months, Mr. Mayor, to mull the motives of such persons as they ravage Portland. But I will assume you are sincere. So I will tell you.

Pull out your notebook. The “why” is: bad ideas plus bad character. They feed on each other. Gain insight into Marx, Marcuse, et al., on the one hand, and, on the other, thugs happy to rationalize their sprees. Then you will understand.

Yes, it’s time indeed to stop your “good-faith efforts at de-escalation”; it’s high time to use “additional tools,” like physical force, to stop the criminals who are committing their crimes right in front of you.

Oh, and by the way: it’s your job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Ron Paul

The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else’s rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it’s supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals. Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.

Dr. Ron Paul, Freedom Under Siege (1987), his campaign book for the presidency as a Libertarian.

Categories
Today

Ford Labor

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.

Categories
too much government

Distill This

This story started out lousy and then swerved into neutral. But there are still problems under the hood.

At the very end of 2020 (good riddance, 2020!), U.S. distilleries were suddenly faced with a ludicrous FDA tax of $14,000 for using their facilities to make alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

These adaptive distilleries — about 835 of them — have long used alcohol to make booze, of course. But early last year, lockdowns began to massively reduce demand for alcoholic beverages in certain venues. It made sense to begin producing hand sanitizer in order to meet the massively new pandemic-induced demand for sanitizer.

Win-win, until, in the last days of 2020, FDA decided that such flexible pivoting deserved what amounts to a penalty. Bureaucrats decided that producing hand sanitizer changed how the 835 distilleries should be classified. Entities so classified — as “over-the-counter drug monograph facilities” — are supposed to pay the $14,000 fee.

Media coverage and the outcry by already-walloped distilleries has, however, led the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind the penalty. HHS has told FDA to stand down. The fee has been cancelled.

So everybody is happy now, the way you’re happy when the sledgehammer swinging down doesn’t bash you in the head after all.

Aaron Bergh of Calwise Spirits wonders whether distilleries will still get hit with such a fee in 2021. What the government giveth, it can taketh. For now, though, like everyone else, he’s just darn relieved.

Happy New Year, folks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Richard Overton

And this is man’s prerogative and no further; so much and no more may be given or received thereof: even so much as is conducent to a better being, more safety and freedom, and no more. He that gives more, sins against his own flesh; and he that takes more is thief and robber to his kind — every man by nature being a king, priest and prophet in his own natural circuit and compass, whereof no second may partake but by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose natural right and freedom it is.

Categories
Today

King Charles

On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.

On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Liberty is the only thing…

This Week in Common Sense, January 2, 2021.