Category: media and media people

License for Leftists

Libertarians should avoid taking sides in left-right antagonisms when promoting a principled third position would make more sense.

Regrettably, in “Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down ‘Activist’ Academic Departments. Here’s Why He’s Wrong,” libertarian magazine Reason fails to offer that alternative.

“In an essay published this week in City Journal,” author Emma Camp begins, “conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities — or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities — should shut down ‘activist’ academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.”

Tellingly, she never defines “routine” censorship.

Let me help: routine censorship is the governmental policy of preventing or punishing private speech on private property.

State colleges and universities are public institutions, politically established and subsidized by taxpayers. With few exceptions, “private colleges” are also routinely tax-funded at the demand end, and are further supported with research contracts.

Getting rid of Marxist professors preaching political revolution is no more anti-free speech than preventing the CDC and Anthony Fauci from conducting gain-of-function virus research within some college laboratory.

Ms. Camp quotes the Supreme Court about the importance of “safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Freedom sounds great, but as usual, the Supremes forget that taxpayers have an interest, and that constraints on public schools was once routine.

So how not to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom”?

Offer a third position: de-subsidize and dis-establish government “education” by empowering higher education’s customers. Let Marxist professors find payers in the private sector.

Instead, Emma Camp effectively tells conservatives they have no choice but to fund every leftist program that politics and the bureaucracy allow. She could have recognized that “Academic freedom” in the context of tax-subsidized schooling is merely ideological license.

Which is itself a sad alternative to real liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustrations created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags censorship, education, Marxism, propaganda, schools

First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Roald’s Revenge

Two centuries after the heady days of Elizabethan drama, Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler produced The Family Shakespeare.

In it they infamously “bowdlerized” the Bard.

History has accelerated. Roald Dahl, the beloved author of arch children’s books (and more adult fare, too), had been dead only 33 years when it came out that his publisher is sanitizing his books.

For the children.

For wokeness.

It’s not nice, you know, to call someone fat. Or to suggest that witches wore wigs because they were bald.

So snip-snip and a trip to the thesaurus later, and British kids can now read the word “enormous” instead of “fat.” And learn, via addition (something the Bowdlers didn’t dare: they only made careful cuts), that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Salman Rushdie called this “absurd censorship” and said that the culprits, Puffin Books and the Roald Dahl estate, “should be ashamed.”

The backlash has been huge, but the umbrella publishing house, Penguin, insists the unexpurgated Dahl will still be available, in a “Roald Dahl Classic Collection.”

Shades of New Coke versus Classic Coke!

In America, Penguin won’t even try to publish its sanitized editions.

There are several footnotes to the story.

One: a four-decades old conversation “has come to light, revealing that [Dahl] was so appalled by the idea that publishers might one day censor his work that he threatened to send the crocodile ‘to gobble them up.’”

Two: Ian Fleming’s James Bond is getting a similar treatment.

I’m reminded of the all-too-hungry crocs in Live and Let Die.

And where Dahl’s gobble-uppers should be when publishers place their toes in censorious waters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags censorship, ideology, media, woke culture

media and media people national politics & policies tax policy

Decreases & Increases & Krugman

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 28, 2023
6 Comments on Decreases & Increases & Krugman

Social Security was never designed for sustainability. The “Ponzi” element was there at the beginning: early recipients received HUGE benefits over their contributions, but as the population matured, that ratio of what working taxpayers put in compared to what they received in benefits decreased.

Further, because there never was a “lock box” much less any investment of funds — it was always a transfer scheme — as the system matured it hit the point of financial default. Back in the 80s this was fixed by raising the taxes on working people.

And then the kicker: with the rate of reproduction in the U.S. falling like Sisyphus’s rolling stone, the ratio of taxpayers to subsidized retirees went in the wrong direction. The folks assigned to keep track of the system’s finances predict that a major insolvency moment occurs about a decade from now, a few years ahead of earlier predictions.

So what does Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, of The New York Times opinion page, advise?

While we fret about the devastation that benefit cuts and tax hikes would cause, Reason’s Eric Boehm notes that Krugman doesn’t think the cuts are necessary. “First, Krugman says the CBO’s projections about future costs in Social Security and Medicare might be wrong. Second, he speculates that they might be wrong because life expectancy won’t continue to increase. Finally, if those first two things turn out to be at least partially true, then it’s possible that cost growth will be limited to only about 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over the next three decades and we’ll just raise taxes to cover that.”

Hope over reason! And the progressive’s blithe acceptance of always-increasing tax burdens.

Serious people should confront facts . . . and avoid Krugman.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags economics, Paul Krugman, Social Security, taxes

Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

Lessons Not Yet Learned?

When will we learn to distrust big government?

While readers of this Common Sense have been tracking the Wuhan Lab Leak story for two years now, most people are still behind the curve. Fortunately, another government agency has weighed in on the Lab Leak side, as reported by Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel in the Wall Street Journal: “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.”

No wonder there’s disagreement and confusion, though: “The Energy Department made its judgment with ‘low confidence,’ according to people who have read the classified report,” Gordon and Strobel explain.

There remains much we do not know, of course. But we should understand that is largely because China’s totalitarian regime has purposely hidden information from the world. With the full assistance of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Government Science in the U.S. . . . and evasive coverage by our media.

Then consult Brett Stephens’ “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” in The New York Times last week.

Now, many of us embraced masks early on, when little was known, bascally advising mask wearing as a signal of hope. We can do something. But soon the masks themselves masked something other than hope: the raw powerlust of the elites in their lockdown tyranny over the masses.

But for actual reduction in the contagion of a virus, Stephens reports, masks are useless. Citing an Oxford epidemiologist with the great name of “Tom Jefferson,” not even N-95 masks do the trick: “Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

What about those studies we were informed proved the case? They were “nonrandomized,” “flawed observational studies.”

Yet lots of politicians and bureaucrats — including “the mindless” Centers for Disease Control — keep pushing masks.

It’s not that we cannot learn. It’s that they don’t want us to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags covid, Dr. Fauci, mandates, masks

Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

Justin Trudeau, freedom, authoritarianism

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.”

I’m going to quote an anarchist.

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order.

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags Canada, freedom, Justin Trudeau

general freedom government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

The 2021 Spike

The graph is startling. It shows VAERS reporting numbers in Florida from 2006 through 2022.

VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Little blips of data run along the bottom of the graph through 2020, a year in which there were 2466 reports of negative effects.

And then came 2021, the year in which mRNA and viral vector vaccines were rolled out in the United States, pushed heavily by the federal government and All Responsible Opinion, subsidized per the dose to the drug companies, as well as by lifting the burden of liability for . . . adverse effects.

The number of Floridians reporting such adverse effects soon after taking the vaccines spiked to 41,473.

The next year it subsided a bit, but to an otherwise walloping high of 9,104.

“In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period,” Florida Health tells us in the online “Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety,” of February 15. “The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign.”

“Just publish the data; give us the facts,” Dr. John Campbell stated in his online talk on the report. He’s appreciative of the Sunshine State’s newfound transparency: “Well done, State of Florida.”

But nearly all other governments have failed to acknowledge such data much less act on it “in meaningful ways”: “badly done, other 49 states. Badly done, the UK; badly done, Europe; badly done, Canada; badly done, New Zealand, Australia.”

Quite a spike in government “badly dones.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags covid, government, vaccines

Accountability media and media people responsibility

A Question Best Left

“One of the world’s most sensitive and consequential scientific questions will soon be grist for discussion among the members of a congressional subcommittee,” bemoaned David Quammen last month in The Washington Post. “The question is this: Where did the virus that causes covid-19 come from?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

Science writer Quammen admits “the origin question is a seductive one,” but argues it is a “mystery” these congresspeople “will be least likely and least qualified to solve — and they should focus their mission elsewhere.”

While our career congresspeople do not, on the whole, sport the credentials best suited to the investigation, I’m sure they’ll invite some real-life scientists to testify. Moreover, the idea of telling folks — even politicians — not to worry their pretty little heads about an issue causing them concern . . . well, that might understandably rub you the wrong way.

The “science journalist” says it’s “a scientific question best left to scientists.”

Though also not a scientist, Quammen seems somehow to have settled upon the answer to the question . . . that he doesn’t want Congress asking.

He calls the origin of COVID-19 a “not-quite-solved mystery” since most “experts say they believe this virus almost certainly reached humans by natural spillover — that is, from a nonhuman animal host.”

Not via a lab-leak, mind you.

Yet, “almost certainly” doesn’t sound scientifically very certain at all. It does, however, fit well with Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

You decide whether Quammen’s prose is inspired by science or politics:

Consider one implication you might draw from a lab leak: We need less science, especially of the sort that fiddles with dangerous viruses. And from a natural spillover: We need more science, especially of the sort that studies dangerous viruses lurking in wild animals. From a lab leak: It was those foolish scientists in a Chinese lab who unleashed this terrible virus upon us. Suspicion, accusation, presumption of guilt and even a tincture of racism may therefore inform our relations with China, not an effort to encourage transparency and scientific exchange.

Catch that? It’s important that COVID’s origin be as Big Science says . . . or the racists win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags Congress, covid, investigation, science

media and media people term limits

Hypocrisy Not at Issue

“I’ve never said I’m going to unilaterally comply,” Senator Ted Cruz told Face the Nation.

The Texan Republican was talking about term limits. On January 23, he and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to impose term limits on Congress.*

But he was also addressing a complaint.

“Ted Cruz wants two-term limit for senators – and a third term for himself,” ran the headline in The Guardian; “Ted Cruz Confronted on Seeking 3rd Term Despite Pushing for 2 Term Limit” was the story on MSN. “Why aren’t you holding yourself to that standard?” asked Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. The insinuation is inconsistency, hypocrisy.

Yet, the senator’s run for a third term isn’t either of those things.

Term limits make sense as a systemic fix. As a strategy for any one voter or any one politician, it’s another matter.

Why does so much of the media fail to understand this difference?

Simple: They don’t like term limits. Period.

They envision a big government run by career politicians and reported on by expert journalists while we little people lap up their narratives, keep quiet, and pay the bills.

Who wins, after all, if those who seek to make government more responsive and responsible through reforms such as term limits cede the congressional arena to the Washington insider incumbency, which stays and stays term after term?

Devoid of any rational argument that could sour Americans on the term limits that four of five of us love, the press plays this phony “hypocrisy” game.

Ted Cruz sees through it. He not only understands the advantages of term limits, but also knows that applying them to himself alone makes no sense for his career or for the term limits movement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The amendment would limit senators to two six-year terms and members of the House to three two-year terms after the date of its enactment.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags strategy, Ted Cruz, term limits

crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people

Police Supremacy

The homicidal beating of Tyre Nichols by five cops made the news, the reels and the opinion columns, quickly and “bigly.” You know that the first reaction was to cry Racism!, and that then, after it came out that the policemen charged with his murder were all black . . . it was still Racism!

You might have laughed. If bitterly.

Van Jones’s headline seems, on the face of it, ridiculous: “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism” (January 27, 2023).

Yet, the actual arguments aren’t completely absurd.

Just the big picture is.

Today, we’ve been given a new set of definitions. Racism is no longer prejudiced discrimination against individuals based on antipathy against a hated group, now it’s “prejudice plus power,” and . . . somehow the new anti-racists don’t realize that power isn’t just about race.

It wasn’t likely internalized hatred for blacks that these black policemen exhibited. Far more likely it was exasperation and contempt for a man who wouldn’t submit to their control.

Police have a job, and are given a lot of license and leeway to take away our liberty after a suspected crime. Tyre Nichols did not readily submit to an arrest for reckless driving, but bolted, running away. When the cops caught up with him, they gave him a beating. Was it because he was black? Not likely, or at least not primarily. It was most likely because he wouldn’t obey.

This old police attitude is more understandable than racism, no?

But “understandable” isn’t excuse.

We can meaningfully talk about reforms — such as getting rid of qualified immunity — but first, let’s stop calling it racism and “white supremacy.” The issue is cop supremacy, and it’s not really a mystery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags police, police brutality, race

folly ideological culture media and media people

Mr. Vehement

He’s vehement — vehement with the force of 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding each and every day.

Because he cares.

He really does.

He really cares about putting the days of Wooden Al Gore behind him and ushering in Apoplectic Foaming-at-the-Mouth-While-Bleeding-From-Every-Pore Al Gore.

It’s just unfortunate though that whilst ratiocinating at Davos, Mr. Gore destroyed the atmosphere and disarranged the solar system, further accelerating global warming and cooling.

If you’re wondering whether I am now just making stuff up, thank you for noticing; yes: I learned it from the best. But I’m sincere. Okay? I’m emoting very hard right now, for which I fully expect to receive social-credit points that I can tape to my COVID-19 passport and wave at the grocery-store clerk as I pay a thousand dollars for a half-dozen eggs.

If only vehemence were facts and cogency, Al Gore would be the most empirical, most logical man alive. As it is, a billion flabbergasted refugees have fled before the force of his rhetoric.

If you don’t believe that Gore not whispered but roared, nay, expectorated, the following, etc., at Davos about how the (man-made) greenhouse effect is trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth!! That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and . . . and . . . and —”

. . . then I refer you to the videotape. Roll it, Hal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and DALL-E2

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags climate change, global warming, hysteria, religion