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Eclipse
Category: media and media people
There’s good news about inequality?
In late March, George F. Will argued that the truth about inequality in America, according to his op-ed title, is “awkward for the left and right.”
He points to the reality of transfer payments in the United States.
Ignoring that reality is what leads to awkwardness.
On the left, critics of capitalism portray low-income earners as a growing class of the impoverished . . . and high-income earners as a growing class of filthy rich.
But by “not counting about 88 percent of government transfer payments that enlarge the buying power of lower-income households, and not counting taxes that lower the wealth of higher-income households, government statistics purport to prove that the average income in the top quintile of earners is 16.7 times that of the average in the bottom quintile. Counting transfers and taxes, however, the actual ratio is 4 to 1.”
So leftists ignore the “successes” of the very system they set up, the better to complain and demand more of what has already been done.
But what do rightists ignore?
That’s where Mr. Wills’s Washington Post editors (a class of professionals who usually determine titles and blurbs) may have given us the wrong impression. Most of his column explodes leftist interpretations of contemporary reality. But he does talk about “the populist right,”: the “national conservatives” who mimic the progressive left in favoring “industrial policy” that, he notices (as I’ve noticed here at Common Sense) “regressively funnels money upward to corporations.
“The populist right advocates protectionism (tariffs to shield corporations from competition), and the populist left advocates hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies (for semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, etc.).” Both favor the rich when it comes to regulations, while complaining about the rich in other contexts.
A poor way to help the poor.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UFOs and “flying saucers” made newspaper headlines, and government officials had contradictory things to say about them. Then, soon after 1952’s summer UFO flyovers of Washington, D.C, the government got into the denial game, and the general tenor of the conversation changed.
The federal government, it seems, had instituted a policy of “cover-up.”
This has changed in the last few years, after a military investigation into UFOs went public, and as Congress began making public and confidential inquiries.
What do we really know?
Not much.
Still, that startling 1952 UFO wave appears to have received some additional evidence . . . from an unexpected quarter.
A team of astronomers compared old sky plates from the Palomar Observatory —photographed in the 1950s — to modern digitized pictures of the heavens, searching for “vanishing stars.” Appearing and disappearing stars are a fascinating study, in this research the aim being to detect “instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole.” The scientists found none of these “failed supernova” events.
But what they found surprised them: “several images where multiple star-like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again.”
They tested many possible explanations for the mysterious data, and then an automated search coughed up a doozy: “The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS-I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure. . . . The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself.”
These were not single bright dots on photographic plates, but multiple simultaneous dots.
As scientist Beatriz Villarroel writes, “our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.”
One wonders whether later mass-sighting events, such as the “Belgian Wave” (November 1989–April 1990) and Arizona’s “Phoenix Lights” (March 13, 1997), might have recorded similar transients above, ready for study.
Thankfully, we do not need to rely directly upon government agents to do the research.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“The Republicans,” said Tucker Carlson — speaking of elected Republicans — “who really do hate their own voters in a way that’s pathological, are just re-upping the spy laws to allow the Biden Administration to spy on their voters.”
Mr. Carlson is not wrong, at least about Republican leaders aiding Democrats in spying on conservatives and others who sometimes vote GOP.
Yes, the federal government’s surveillance and criminal “justice” apparatus has been directed by Democrats — the Biden Administration specifically, and whoever runs that — to target, as The Enemy, conservatives and others associated with (or merely adjacent to) the Republican Party.
This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Democratic thought leaders pushed this new anti-terrorism paradigm from the first moments of the Biden Administration, in public.
Or at least on MSNBC, where John Brennan clearly reconceived opposition to his Democratic Party as a movement looking “very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”
“Even libertarians,” he said, constituted “an insidious threat” to, not the Democratic Party, but “our Democracy.”
This perspectival shift, of seeing policy and political opposition as “insurgency,” is key to the new anti-democratic mindset.
And very real. It could end our small-r republican experiment.
Which brings us back to Republican politicians and their willingness to let Democrats institute a permanent pogrom against all who oppose Democrats’ big government programs.
Why do this? Out of hatred? Disdain? Fear?
Let’s not ignore the age-old impulse of politicians to squelch the speech of opponents. The longer in office, the more these careerists tend to view their own constituents as threats. After all, anyone might freely offer a complaint that emboldens or comforts the opposition. This is a bipartisan principle.
Better an enforced silence about the dictates of Washington, sadly, if you are a Washingtonian delivering dictates.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Tucker Carlson said harsh things about “Dollar Stores” and “libertarian economics” on Glenn Greenwald’s System Update for December 16, as summarized in the show’s tweet:
“Libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by
the beneficiaries of the economic system that theywere defending . . . I think you need to ask: ‘Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?’
And if it does, it’s not a system that you want, because it degrades people — and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in
your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil.
So if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores?”
At Reason, Liz Wolfe fell for the same trap that has apparently ensnared Mr. Carlson. She defended progress in the U.S. since the time he was born. What?
Contra Liz Wolfe, and in defense of Tucker, I’d say we are indeed living in tough times. Inflation’s way up, the birth rate is down, life-expectancy’s dropping, and a whole lot of Americans struggle to pay bills and keep even, financially, much less “get ahead.” The proliferation of dollar stores shows that the upscale stores are too expensive for too many.
They are a refuge for the poor.
But are they evilly uglifying, though?
Perhaps not as pretty as Safeway or Target, but they’re clean and you can buy a can of soup for four bits, a dollar less than at an upscale market.
Are the rise of discount consumer goods stores, like Dollar Tree and Dollar General, especially hideous and indicative of a blow to . . . the American spirit?
Seems more revelatory of a weird elitist streak in Tucker.
And what does libertarian — free-market — economics have to do with it? Libertarian economists have opposed all the major drivers of the current system: central banking, deficit spending, sovereign debt accumulation, taxation for redistribution, subsidy. The policies that have truly “hollowed out” the last semblance of progress.
But Tucker blames libertarian economists’ defense of equity markets for not only social decline but Dollar Stores.
He’s fallen for the progressives’ perennial scam: see a problem in our mixed economy and blame the freer part . . . not the role of elitist schemers with political power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On Saturday, before yesterday’s election in Argentina, The Washington Post called him “Trump-like”; The New York Times, on Sunday, compared him to Donald Trump in the first sentence of its results profile, proclaiming his win, in its title, a “victory for the world’s far right.”
The two pieces deserve careful study of how American media primes its center-left readership to fall in line with its ideological poses. Sad that I cannot provide that careful study, here; but happy for the occasion to probe the issues laid bare in these two less-than-stellar election coverages.
A decent profile of Argentina’s new president would inquire more honestly and deeply into just how badly Peronism and Kirchnerism have wounded the inflation-ridden South American country, and with less prejudice explore the actual beliefs of president-elect Javier Milei. Then, and only then, would they figure out why Milei’s been so successful.*
Against all previously determined odds.
For whatever else one may say about Milei, he’s not only the most thoroughly and vehemently anti-leftist politician in the world, but also the most thoroughly successful libertarian one.
Which is why the Times tries to make him sound “right-wing.” The factuality of the characterization is merely Milei’s fervent anti-socialism. But the comedy of the characterization is that, in previous times, North American leftists have characterized Peronism, which Milei opposed, as right-wing. So how does the “far right” win for defeating “far-right fascism,” as we used to think of Argentine mainstream politics?
This is a dance of misdirection, of course.
Truth is, Milei’s the ultimate outsider, making Trump seem insider-ish by comparison.
Our miseducating media doesn’t want you to consider that!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Javier Milei’s victory margin was “the widest since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983.”
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It’s a truism of popular political discourse: corruption in Washington is endemic.
The fact that so many people who serve in Congress come out far richer than when they went in is testament to the corruption, not selfless service. Studies document how it is done, regulatory regimes monitor the money and a line of cases have put some of the easiest-to-nab offenders into the pokey.
Nevertheless, the corruption continues.
Yet, the festering congressional slime may be nothing compared to what’s in the White House.
How the corruption has worked may vary president by president, though.
Remember that the Clinton clan’s Clinton Foundation was brought out into The Almost Open, in 2015, for all to see (if they wished), which certainly had something to do with the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016.
The response of the insiders against Trump, however, showed corruption going much deeper. He was attacked throughout his term in office by “his own” agencies, for corruption. And now we know for certain that many of these attacks were without foundation. Just made up.
It is not with the billionaire who left office less wealthy than he entered that official corruption is revealed, but with the ghastly Biden family.
“Sen. Chuck Grassley has accused the FBI of trying to keep quiet,” explains a recent Epoch Times story, about the “information provided by 40 human sources about possible Biden family wrongdoing.”
Though none of this has been proven in a court of law, the brazenness of it all — the corporate board spots, the payments to multiple Biden family members — swamps the senses. Still, the biggest part of the story remains — elusive. Not because there’s no evidence, but because major media and government agencies simply and continually deny the evidence as it stands, refusing to report or pursue the truth.
Allowing corruption to thrive.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ours is a warring world. Long into the second year of Russia’s major incursion into Ukraine, there are not unreasonable fears in Poland and the Baltic countries that the hostilities might cross their borders as well.
Now the Middle East erupts following the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, and the IDF’s response, which our Secretary of State says carry “a likelihood of escalation.”
And I’ve yet to mention the most serious threat the people of this planet face: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In the throes of the largest military expansion in modern history, China now wields the world’s biggest army and navy. Along with the second largest economy on the planet. By comparison, Russia’s economy holds 11th place, roughly 10 percent of China’s, and Iran ranks 42nd, one-fiftieth of China’s.
Historically, the CCP is the “greatest” killing machine of all time. And now dictator-for-life Xi Jinping seems intent on bringing back those gloriously murderous Mao days — only with greater technological efficiency.
There is:
- The ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjing.
- The long-running and viscous pogrom against Falun Gong.
- Organ harvesting from political prisoners.
- The totalitarian surveillance state crushing of peaceful political dissent.
- The breaking of an international agreement in order to kill civil liberties in Hong Kong early and block the push for democracy.
- Brutal repression continues in Tibet.
- Constant harassment and threat of military invasion against free, democratic and peaceful Taiwan.
- Killing Indian soldiers in border clashes in recent years.
- Sinking Vietnamese fishing boats.
- Harassing Philippine vessels.
After building islands in the South China Sea against international law and then militarizing those islands (after telling the world they were not doing so), the CCP is today increasingly aggressive and belligerent in this essential waterway, which carries one-third of the world’s total shipping. China claims 90 percent of this international waterway — even swaths of the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other countries, long recognized by international treaties.
The CCP position is ridiculous . . . but don’t laugh, because these Chinazis (as Hongkongers call them) must be taken seriously.
And by preparing to meet their threat, by demonstrating our ability to mount a credible defense of Taiwan, the Philippines, and other allies in the region, hopefully we can prevent hostilities.
As individuals, we can help as well. To better “know” this enemy and to track their Chinazi aggression against their own people and those of other countries, we have launched a new website whose name says it all: StopTheChinazis.org.
As if to drive home the Nazi-esque nature of today’s CCP, most of the people writing for the site have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by the CCP . . . even against Americans . . . even here in America.
But we won’t be silenced.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Is it a mystery?
“I really think if we can identify the ‘why,’ especially amongst the juveniles, we might be able to change our approach on how to slow this down,” says Carlos Heraud, an assistant chief at the DC police department.
Along with other crime in Washington. D.C., carjackings are up. Why?
Some people choose to be criminals. And some policymakers choose to aid and abet them.
It’s a matter of incentives and disincentives, but also choices and character.
Since different people react differently to being born into poverty — or being disrespected, being peer-pressured, being bored, being fired — we cannot simply say that criminals are created by difficult circumstances.
Most do not become thugs and hoodlums.
Some who make criminal choices pull back and determine to do better. Others commit offenses forever. Chief Heraud and D.C. mayors and lawmakers should heed the insights of Stanton Samenow’s Inside the Criminal Mind. Although criminals make excuses for themselves and latch onto the excuses made for them by others, they know they’re responsible for their actions.
But while circumstances don’t create the criminal mind, circumstances can abet crime. For example, if you make it easier for criminals to get away with assault and theft, they’ll likely commit more assaults and thefts.
The government of our imperial capital makes it hard for potential victims to arm themselves, easy for criminals who are “caught” to walk away. If you’re a criminal operating in a town like that, it’d have to be encouraging to receive by this kind of encouragement?
After all, it’s not a question of bad incentives incentivizing all to be wicked. The effects can be seen on the margin, among those most likely to be induced by corrupt incentives, or to not be dissuaded from criminal action by reduced disincentives.
No great mystery.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Libertarians Want Control Over Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell,” the headline read.
That’s odd. Libertarians don’t usually want control over anyone.
But at issue is whether Sleepy Joe and Motionless Mitch have control over themselves.
“The U.S. Libertarian Party has filed for conservatorships for President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, referring to them as ‘geriatric elites’ mentally unfit to properly serve the American populace,” Newsweek reported on Tuesday.
“Both subjects’ ability to receive and evaluate information effectively, make decisions, and to communicate are impaired to such an extent that they lack the capacity to represent themselves or the interests of Americans,” explained a party news release.
“These men, and others like them (like Diane Feinstein and John Fetterman) are not well enough to be left alone in the house all day,” Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle argued. “How are they well enough to govern our lives and spend our tax dollars?”
She added: “so we’ve compassionately decided to step in and make those important decisions for them.”
At 80 years of age, Mr. Biden is the oldest president ever. If re-elected in 2024, he would be 86 at the conclusion of his term. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 81 years of age, has been in public office in Washington for the last 38 years.
The problem, of course, is not age as a number, but that both men have exhibited behavior that concerns us for their health and well-being. Mitch has repeatedly frozen in public, to be led away like a zoned-out sleepwalker, while the president, on his recent Vietnam trip, closed a press conference with “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”
Still, their string-pullers persist in milking each to the last drool-drip of inertial power. Their families should step in.
Until then, the Libertarian Party will have to do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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