Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture obituary political economy

The Bomb That Fizzled

Paul Ehrlich, population, science, economics, obituary

Paul Ehrlich was a biologist whose 1968 The Population Bomb went off when I was just a lad. He died last week at the ripe old age of 93. Professor Ehrlich warned of the dangers of overpopulation, proclaiming that in “the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

It didn’t happen.

Instead, for the first time in history, the percentage of the human population living in misery and dire poverty declined steadily.

But that did not mean his work was shelved as a bad theory, falsified by evidence.

Everywhere, when I was growing up, I witnessed a rising tide of anti-natalism, the doctrine that young adults shouldn’t have babies, or — if they did — should have only a few. Mankind was a cancer on the planet, we were told, and too many believed it.

Which affected breeding patterns.

And policy.

The current population reality is the opposite of what the Ehrlichs said it would be. All over the world, except for places in Africa, legacy populations are declining. In the United States, our population would be declining were it not for immigration. Elsewhere, the replication rate is plummeting — and it’s not just the West, but in China and Taiwan; both Koreas, as different as they are; and in Japan.

Without growing populations, our modern (if jury-rigged) social safety net pension systems are jeopardized, as is the possibility of finding caregivers to aging-and-dying populations.

We cannot blame it all on Ehrlich of course. There are many factors at work. But is it possible to be more wrong than he was? 

What should the young do now, to mark Ehrlich’s passing?

You could do worse than make some more babies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture subsidy

Ÿnsect Repellent

Klaus Schwab, WEF, World Economic Forum, insects

You vill eat ze bugs!

Sorry, Klaus. Not interested.

When the World Economic Forum (WEF) began trending a few years back, the world’s normal folk became somewhat alarmed at what we were hearing. (Notice how I include myself among “the normal”?) Witnessing a German player at the game of non-governmental organizations pitch “the Great Reset,” as WEF’s founder Klaus Schwab dubbed it, and boast about how he had snuck his acolytes into major governments across the world (especially in Justin Trudeau’s administration) was alarming enough. Seeing him dress up in Bond-villain garb and talk like a Hollywood caricature of a Nazi leader? Chilling. 

But perhaps worst of all: ze bugs.

Yes, he was trying to get us to eat insects. Great source of protein, he said; the food of the future, he said.

Looking the part, he inspired . . . revulsion, just as did the bugs he wanted us to consume. We were all ready to drop him into a remake of Soylent Green when his star faded; it had become clear that Americans, at least, were not copacetic with the creepy-crawly eatery plan.

And, as if to prove that Schwab’s Great Reset of our diet will not be driven by cartoonish elitists, Ÿnsect — Europe’s largest insect farm — has officially gone bankrupt.

The hundreds of millions in public and private funding, including nearly €200 million in taxpayer money from French and EU sources, could not stave off collapse. The mealworm producer, hailed as a sustainable protein pioneer for animal feed and pet food, entered judicial liquidation in December amid soaring costs, dismal revenue (just €656K in 2023 vs. €80M losses), and market rejection

Industrial-scale bug farming looks like a no-go.

Despite subsidies.

A win for civilization.

And this is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture Internet controversy

Run Rampant

conspiracy

We live in a great Age of Conspiracy Theories.

I’m not quite on board.

As the Internet grew up, with it came all the condemnations of conspiracy theories, run rampant. The Internet, we were told, was problematic in that not only was information readier at hand than ever before, but so was it easier to share and nurture all these goofy conspiracy theories.

You know: JFK was killed by someone other than Oswald, or also by others, in addition to Oswald. 

Or . . . UFOs are real, and the government is covering it up.

Or the Rothschilds are behind it all.

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. 

Ick.

Yet: The government now admits that UFOs are real, implying that it was, ahem, lying in the past.

Further: As we uncover the grotesquerie in the Epstein Files, we learn that he proudly served Rothschild banking interests!

So let’s not get started on the JFK assassination.

One reason conspiracy theories are prominent is that we are uncovering so many conspiracies. Actual conspiracies. Like the Wuhan lab business, or the suppression of information about the mRNA “vaccines,” or . . . must we go on and on? 

I don’t like conspiracy theories. I said I’m not on board. We need to work towards a world not built for conspiracies. This means whittling down government, with its current vast powers to take and to “give.” And siphon off wealth at each step. While sidestepping transparency.

Ask yourself: Does our political-legal environment actually discourage conspiracies?

That question almost answers itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Winning Through Identification

Javier Milei, Argentina, freedom, government

Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, perceives that many political battles amount to a clash between producers and thieves. Between those who work for living (using what sociologist Franz Oppenheimer called the “economic means”) and those who steal for a living (using the “political means”).

Politics can’t always be reduced to this conflict, of course. But it can pretty often — certainly in a country where socialists have been pulverizing the economy.

Now, this knowledge is not kept by Milei as a dark secret, about which he would be embarrassed to be caught mentioning to a select few supporters.

Milei is not coy! That we learned during his campaign for president; and, no matter what his ups and downs in office, he still seems to be just as candid, just as willing to blast his opponents, to their faces, for —

Well: “Listen up, you ignorant fools! ‘Social justice’ is theft. It implies unequal treatment before the law and is preceded by theft. You bunch of thieves! Criminals!”

Also: “The world has only two kinds of people: those who live off what others produce — that is, the parasites, that is, you — and those who produce everything that is possible in modern life.

“The true battle of our time is cultural, philosophical, and moral. It is about choosing the system that lifted millions out of poverty. It is about ceasing to be an immature nation that squanders the future to distribute benefits in the present. . . .”

Probably even better in the original Spanish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

DC Stench No Longer Metaphorical

Washington D.C. , Potomac, sewage

Matt Walsh says that “one of the worst ecological disasters in American history is currently unfolding. A river of sewage is flowing into the Potomac. When you dig into this story, and who is responsible for it, you start to see why the media doesn’t want to talk about it.”

He’s not wrong, the disaster began January 19th but we’ve heard little about it. On his podcast, No. 1736; Mr. Walsh goes all into a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” explanation.

According to The Daily Wire’s most socially conservative host, the responsible agencies are filled with hires based not on qualifications or competence or conscientiousness, but based on their color. 

He highlights, specifically, two individuals in the current muck: one, DC Water CEO David L. Gadis, partly responsible for the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and the other, the current head of DC Water Board of Directors, Dr. Unique N. Morris-Hughes, a doctor in philosophy. Walsh regales us with her inanities and her over-spending on departmental entertainment junkets. 

While there may be a detectable odor to Walsh’s relentless critique of hiring blacks, specifically, under DEI, the odor from the Potomac, right now, is much less metaphorical.

In between retches, ask the question: Why would there be a general incompetence rising in public utilities now? 

Is it race as such? Of course not. 

Is it DEI putting race over competence? Maybe in part. 

But the general trend for a long time has been to put more and more domains of everyday life under direct government control. There’s a principle lost on the Mamdanis of this world: the more tasks set for government to govern, the less capable it becomes to manage even its core tasks. And, as that capacity declines, so goes even the will to bother trying.

Besides, if there is any apter metaphor for Washington, DC, than hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage sloshing into the Potomac . . . I can’t think of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs

Tropic of AOC

AOC, this is fine

On her European junket, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.-D) elicited chuckles over her comments on the arrest of Nicolás Maduro by means of a military incursion, mistakenly identifying Venezuela as “below the Equator.” The country lies entirely north of the dividing line between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. 

Was this her “Aleppo moment”?

Hardly. Darlings of the major parties get away with faux pas that minor party challengers cannot escape. (Remember in 2016, when Governor Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, spaced out on the Syrian city then in the news?) 

Besides, AOC said (or didn’t say) worse.

Asked about China, she yammered interminably, very understanding of the “ascending global power . . . acting in its own self-interest” but not once mentioning the authoritarian, anti-democratic and generally tyrannical-exploitative nature of communist rule there. 

Instead, Ocasio-Cortez castigated the United States for not “investing in science and technology” enough. A very left-Democrat thing to do, going on to characterize “privatized research” as not helping a country maintain global power status. 

China does the internal improvements thing oh-so-much-better than the U.S., she insinuates.

But “would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops,” she was asked, “to defend Taiwan if China were to move?”

AOC stammered for 20 seconds. All that public investment in alternative energy is supposed to, somehow, prevent China from trying to nab Taiwan!

The U.S. should “make sure that we are moving,” she concluded, “to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.” 

Can we retreat that quickly? It has arisen.

On the world stage, our Bronx savant is in her own very special hemisphere.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Medicine Reverses Course

gender affirming care, health, fads, hysteria

Scott Jennings reports on what he calls “a political earthquake”: both the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association have “gone on the record saying the same thing. There is insufficient evidence to justify ‘gender transition surgeries’ for minors, and these surgeries should generally be deferred to adulthood.”

The ASPS made its statement on February 3, which the New York Times explained was prompted by “a lack of quality research on the long-term outcomes for young people who had undergone surgical interventions like mastectomies and cited ‘emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms.’”

The next day, the AMA, the nation’s largest medical organization, spoke up. 

When this issue came to the fore a few years ago, the usual response was “this is only happening to a tiny group of young people, if any.” Now, according to TheTimes, a review of “hospital data from 2016 through 2020 identified about 3,600 patients aged 12 to 18 who had received gender-related surgery. The vast majority were mastectomies.” 

The Times references a York University social scientist studying “transgender medicine” who attributes the new positions, in part, to “the growing political backlash over gender-affirming care.” Just as Scott Jennings judges these two big turnarounds as huge blows to “the left,” which has supported those surgical practices in the cause of gender-fluidity and -identity along with inclusion and whatnot.

By advising against major irreversible interventions into the maturation process of young people, ASPS and the AMA have, at the very least, made a long-overdue advance for Common Sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture responsibility

Everyone Dies?

AI, Artificial Intelligence, prediction, action

After Friday, when I worried about robots taking over, I was glad to read a debunking of the AI Will Destroy Us All meme, so in vogue. In “Superintelligent AI Is Not Coming To Kill You,” from the March issue of Reason, Neil Chilson argues that we shouldn’t freak out.

Not only do I not want to freak out, I don’t want to use AI very much — though I understand that, these days, sometimes it makes sense to consult the Oracles.

Chilson is reviewing a new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who argue that “artificial intelligence research will inevitably produce superintelligent machines and these machines will inevitably kill everyone.”

Just like I feared on Friday!

Where the authors go wrong, Chilson argues, is that by “defining intelligence as the ability to predict and steer the world, Yudkowsky and Soares collapse two distinct capacities — understanding and acting — into one concept. This builds their conclusion into their premise. If intelligence inherently includes steering, then any sufficiently intelligent system is, by definition, a world-shaping agent. The alignment problem becomes not a hypothesis about how certain AI architectures might behave but a tautology about how all intelligent systems must behave.”

Today’s AI’s are “fundamentally about prediction. They predict the next element in a sequence.”

They aren’t necessarily taking action.

I hope Chilson’s critique holds true.

But we’ve caught AI lying, “just making stuff up” — though considering the nature of “Large Language Models” (the method by which modern AI works), “lying” may be the wrong word. Still, it just seems to me that at some point somebody’s — everybody’s! — gonna link the predictor to some sort of truly active mechanism. 

Like street-ready robots.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Not This King?

imperial presidency, power, executive branch, Kings

“This is why more Americans today identify as an independent than a Republican or a Democrat for the first time in American history,” argued Sarah Isgur during a panel discussion on ABC’s This Week program, the day after another fatal shooting by ICE agents in Minnesota. “Because no one actually believes that either side believes what they’re saying.”

Isgur, a writer and podcaster for The Dispatch, has worked on both Democratic (2016) and Republican (2012) presidential campaigns and even landed a job at the Department of Justice during President Trump’s first term, only later to be fired. 

“Look, honestly,” Isgur continued, “if Barack Obama’s federal officers had killed a member of the Tea Party, who had shown up, who had a concealed-carry permit, who was disarmed before he was shot, that [the protester was armed] would not be what the Right is saying.”

She went on: “And, frankly, the left was all for big executive power, as long as it was Joe Biden. They’re not ‘no kings.’ They just don’t like this king.”

Throughout President Donald Trump’s first term, I recall shouts that he had overstepped his authority under the law only to discover, oftentimes, that the power he was wielding had been bestowed upon our president by a feckless Congress. What I found even more disconcerting was that at no time did those complaining seek to limit these excessive presidential powers.

It appears, as Sarah Isgur suggested, that their concern was not with an imperial presidency, only with this current person as that imperial president.

“If you actually want to do something about the problems, both sides need to actually say, presidents shouldn’t have this power,” Isgur explained. “The federal government shouldn’t have this power.”

Wise government depends on limiting power . . . no matter who is president.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Rebel in Eden?

environmentalism, hysteria, authoritarianism, Robert Bidinotto, individualism

The title of Robert Bidinotto’s bracing new collection, Rebel in Eden: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism, may occasion objection to the word “environmentalism.”

Of course, if “environmentalism” pertained only to how best to reduce pollution and litter and so forth, who would have need to combat it? Freedom-minded individualists, for example, would debate means, not ends.

But that’s not the kind of thing that the environmentalists themselves — or “radical environmentalists,” to distinguish them from people who manage cleanup crews — focus on.

Radical environmentalists regard humanity as a blight on the face of the earth; they regard nature as an end itself (an “intrinsic value”) that should be left alone regardless of the cost to that mere interloper, man. In their view, plants and animals have “rights,” men and women do not; mining is “raping” the earth — all documented here. 

These are issues that Bidinotto has been reporting on and analyzing since at least the early 1980s, in places like the On Principle and Intellectual Activist newsletters and Reader’s Digest. So this collection has been in the making for some forty years.

Some of the don’t-miss essays: “Death by Environmentalism,” “The Great Pesticide Panic,” “Animal Rights: A New Species of Egalitarianism,” “Global Warming and the New Totalitarianism,” “California, Thank Environmentalism for Your Wildfires,” “Environmentalism or Individualism?” I might list the whole table of contents.

Take a look. Bidinotto, by the way, has also contributed a piece “On Courage” to our sister website, StoptheCCP.org.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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