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Strange Days

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We live in a strange time when a possible official UFO disclosure by the government doesn’t seem strange at all.

What’s odd is one of the two major American political parties proudly talking up socialism.

What’s weird is the increasing financial instability of the country’s top two social programs, Medicare and Social Security, while Americans seem unworried and politicians push not to shore the programs up, but expand them.

What’s bizarre is over $22 trillion in federal debt, and the current president and Congress piling on ever more with new trillion-dollar deficits.

What’s strange is . . . well, OK: UFO disclosure is a bit strange.

It is worth noting that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have unearthed quite a lot of information on UFOs already. When FOIA mechanisms were first set up, no one expected the avalanche of requests that would be related to UFOs. But that is what happened — and they haven’t dredged up nothing.

When President Trump was asked about the issue by George Stephanopoulos, his response was dismissive, however. “People are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”

Like me, he probably has seen nothing first-hand, experienced nothing. But by now he has surely been briefed.

Or has the de facto Deep State coup attempt against his presidency entailed keeping him in the dark?

Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders, running for Trump’s job, told YouTuber Joe Rogan that he would pass on whatever he might learn about UFOs if president. “Alright, we’ll announce it on the show. How’s that?”

Yet even that is not the strangest thing Sanders has said.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Courage and Wisdom?

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President Donald Trump responded to the weekend’s two shooting atrocities by decrying hatred and making five substantive proposals. 

“They include tools to identify early warning signs in mass shooters, reducing the glorification of violence, reforming mental health laws, enacting ‘red flag’ laws to stop dangerous individuals from gaining access to firearms, and enacting the death penalty for mass murderers,” the Epoch Times summarizes.

But how useful are these?

  1. The “early warning signs” of a criminal are often identical to grumpiness and even righteous indignation in others — “tools to identify” could easily serve as excuses for unwarranted meddling and worse.
  2. Who would enforce lessening the “glorification of violence”? The federal government that is always at war?
  3. Is it mental health laws that should be reformed, or the practice of putting whole generations of boys on Ritalin and worse . . . made especially ominous by the percentage of shooters on such drugs?
  4. Denying “dangerous individuals . . . access to firearms” remains problematic under any semblance of due process and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
  5. Since “death by cop” is often one of the apparent goals of many would-be shooters, how much of a deterrent could death by sterile procedure actually be?

But if you are looking for even worse reactions, look beyond Trump. The Democrats took the occasion to raise funds. 

And complain to the New York Times, which “changed a headline on its front page because it presented Trump in a neutral light,” reports independent journalist Tim Poole. “This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”

Ideological bias or old-fashioned market pressure?

If it is in tragedy that we find our greatest tests of courage and wisdom, the weekend’s shootings show a lot of political and media failure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Into and Out of the Muck

Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, debate, prosecuter, criminal justice, reform,

Yesterday I referenced “pigs flying” . . . and Icarus’s waxed-wing fail. 

Today, it’s just about the muck.

Now, I am on the road and definitely not catching every word of the Democratic debates. But amidst much nonsense and embarrassment — and there was a lot of it, from what I can tell, not excluding the much-googled New Agey blather of Oprah’s favorite guru, Ms. Marianne Williamson — one exhange stood out: Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s takedown of Kamala Harris’s shockingly punitive and ugly career as a prosecuting attorney.

Now, Rep. Gabbard snuck in her attack* on Harris in place of answering a question about Harris’s own sneak attack, in the previous debate round, on former U. S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden’s 1970s’ opposition to mandatory bussing. Gabbard ably shifted away from dealing at all with Sleepy Joe — who is a buzzkill and soon-to-be buzzard lunch. She deflected, addressing, instead, a real issue, Kamala Harris as callous crime-fighter. 

This shows that Gabbard is developing real politicians’ chops — if you cannot carefully answer a question different from the one asked, you aren’t a true [sic] politician in America.

After the debate, the two candidates took further whacks at each other. The Jezebel article I consulted used the metaphor of “wrestling match” rather than my pigs-in-muck figure, but we are talking about the same thing.

But note, Rep. Gabbard is always calm and well-spoken. She seems able to descend into the muck and coming out without too much stink.

Does this give her an advantage over Donald Trump?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana: she blocked evidence . . . that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so; she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. . . .” etc.

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Bernie and Economic Law

Bernie Sanders, minimum wage,

One of the things Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is known for is his push for a $15 per hour “living wage.” But this is politics — a policy position is never complete until its advocates demonstrate just how idiotic the policy actually is.

As Bernie just did.

His presidential campaign has been embroiled in labor union negotiations and a mini-scandal.

Some staffers have been paid a flat salary, not according to a per-hour contract, making Bernie’s “living wage” commitment a bit murky. You see, these salaried employees worked longer hours than a typical 40-hour work week (as is common in political campaigns), dipping their wage breakdown below the $15/hour “minimum.” 

Now, no one is more deserving of this bit of policy blowback than resplendent millionaire Bernie Sanders.

Yet, it’s his campaign’s response that is especially droll: reduced hours!

So, while in one sense staffers got a pay raise, they did not get more money. Which is, as Matthew Yglesias acknowledged at Vox, “exactly the point that opponents of minimum wage increases are always making — if you force employers to pay more, they’re going to respond by cutting back elsewhere.” 

Ryan McMaken, at mises.org, dug deeper, noting that there are a number of ways that the new union deal could amount to cuts in real wages. By “cutting worker hours, the Sanders campaign elected to provide fewer ‘services’ in the form of campaign activities. In practice, this will likely mean fewer rallies, less travel, or fewer television ads.” Less chance for growth. And decreased likelihood for increased employment of other workers.

Not exactly shocking. But a lesson. A terrible way to run a business.

Or a campaign. 

Perhaps we should say, “Thanks, Bernie!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Less Hate

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Just how awful are Americans? Racist and sexist “hate crimes” are all said to have ramped up since the election of Donald Trump.

Wilfred Reilly took a close look, in Quillette, at the hate crime cases in Seattle, which had been reported as having increased “by 400 percent since 2012.” What he discovered throws cold water on the heated assertions. It turns out that “most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all.”

As you might expect, defining “hate crime” isn’t easy, and Seattle has “remarkably broad municipal hate-crime policies” which go far beyond “attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus.” Crimes relating to issues such as “marital status, political ideology, age and parental status” also count.

But for there to be a “hate crime” there must first be a crime. Looking for the “archetypal Seattle hate incident” in the data, what Wilfred Reilly found was “a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone.” What this really suggests is that Seattle has a homelessness problem.

Which it does.

Behind the panic? We see mis-reporting, based on a need for generating clicks, as well as mis-perceptions, often based on availability bias — where we judge trends by a few ready-at-hand examples, not with careful attention to full data sets.

The Quillette article does not discuss a more ominous possibility, where some folks yearn for the worst, the better to hate their political opponents. Though Reilly addresses this sort of hate-generated “hate crime” panic in his book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, published earlier this year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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America, the Debatable?

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“A divided America gathers for Fourth,” The Washington Post headlined its lead story about the Independence Day celebration on the National Mall.* 

Give me two minutes to unite us.

On the night of July 3rd, stuck in horrendous holiday traffic, I stumbled upon a National Public Radio broadcast discussing the punk rock song, “’Merican,” by Descendants. The operative lyrics being:

I’m proud and ashamed
Every fourth of July
You got to know the truth
Before you say that you got pride

“Truth,” now that’s heavy, man. What’s the truth about ’Merica — er, America?

It is certainly true that our government — in our name — has done some terrible things. And, accordingly, to suggest that criticism is unpatriotic is, well, to miss the point of why I feel very proud to be an American. 

On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge called July 4, 1776 “one of the greatest days in history” and “not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles.” Those being “that all men are created equal, . . . endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that . . . the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

What this offers us is a standard to criticize America.

That is why it seems strange to witness folks criticizing current policy and behavior based on principles derived from the Declaration, yet, in the same breath, spurning America in the process. When America is wrong, let us right it — in true American style.

We may be divided on many issues, but on the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence we should all stand united.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This was the headline in the print edition dropped on my driveway July 5th; the online version carried a different headline: “Trump’s Fourth of July celebration thrills supporters, angers opponents.”

** Love him or despise him, Rep. Justin Amash made a similar point in his op-ed about leaving the GOP to become an independent: “Our country’s founders established a constitutional republic . . . so ordered around liberty that, in succeeding generations, the Constitution itself would strike back against the biases and blind spots of its authors.

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Greener Pastures

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There is climate change going on. And some of it is attributable to increasing levels of Carbon dioxide (CO2). 

It is uncontroversial and quite politically convenient to say that — despite Al Gore’s infamous propaganda positing climate change dogma as An Inconvenient Truth. The worldwide “green” movement to “fight climate change” has been supported by trillions of tax dollars and the eager, lip-smacking glee of major media mavens as they trot out story after improbable story, linking every storm, warm spell, cold spell, and summer ice melt to “man-made global warming.”

But there is no real “settled science” as non-scientists like to term the case for anthropogenic global warming, because there are

  1. troubles with the temperature data, 
  2. difficulties separating weather events from climatic trends, 
  3. problems identifying CO2 level variations as the cause of climate change rather than as a result,
  4. a certain amount of dunderheadedness using a statistical construct of “average global temperature” to track actual trends, and 

so much more. But we do know about one extremely positive effect of increasing atmospheric carbon: it makes the deserts bloom.

Or, at least, greener.

Six years ago a study of satellite data concluded that arid regions have gone greener. Increased atmospheric CO2 levels makes photosynthesis more efficient, allowing plants to use less water, thereby creating more leaves.

Earlier this year, however, Forbes reported that a NASA study had just demonstrated that expanded agriculture and silviculture in India and China were responsible for most of that greening — but if you compare the Forbes article with the original paper, the CO2 contribution persists. 

Atmospheric carbon is plant food, so to speak, and without it, life on the planet would die.

An awkward truth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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They Aren’t Lying Now?

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“You lie!”

When U.S. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted this at President Barack Obama during 2009’s State of the Union — scandal!

How dare he?

At issue was whether federal tax dollars would aid illegal immigrants under Obamacare. Democrats denied that any such thing would happen. Indeed, the very idea constituted a calumny, a mere paranoid Tea Party delusion.

This came to a lot of people’s minds after last week’s televised Democratic Party presidential candidates’ debates. 

On Thursday, all ten on-stage candidates assented, with hands held proudly high, to giving undocumented aliens free health care. And several from the previous night’s debate are also on record for the same thing, none of them more insistent than Senator Elizabeth Warren, who proclaims that health care is a right.

Democratic opinion leaders now eagerly assert what they took offense at a mere ten years ago. 

There are two very basic things we can learn from this.

First, what politicians say about what they want changes over time.

A decade ago, Democrats took offense when called socialist; now they revel in the term. So what are we to make of Democrats’ current s-word usage? Now they insist they don’t want to nationalize the means of production — but will they tomorrow?

Second, the debate over immigration is not really between restrictionists and open borders supporters. It is between proponents of restricted immigration, on the one hand, and those who demand subsidized immigration, on the other.

A true open borders policy could look very different from what Democrats now push.

Less socialistic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Birth of a Twitterstorm

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“Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a self-described black American activist, after the California Senator’s presidential debate performance. “I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history.”*

On Friday, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted Alexander’s tweet (before later deleting it). His traipsing into the details of Harris’s birth immediately sparked comparison to his father’s “birther attacks” suggesting that President Obama wasn’t born here.**

Seemingly, the entire Democratic presidential field was quick to condemn the tweet and Don Jr.’s retweet as “racist.” So did much of the media. Although months ago, CNN’s Don Lemon argued, “Jamaica is not America.”

The New York Times article identified Ali Alexander only as an “alt-right fringe figure” and “a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities,” but nowhere informed readers he is African-American.

“This stuff about Harris, about her status, about her blackness,” Jason Johnson, politics editor of TheRoot.com, told Joy Reid on MSNBC, “that’s about black people.”

In fact, on Reid’s program back in February, Johnson was part of a discussion about the senator’s — gasp! — white husband. “She needs to find a strong black man advocate,” advised Tiffany Cross, co-founder and managing editor of The Beat DC. “Let’s just be candid,” Johnson remarked, “it’s not going to be her [white] husband.”

How important is the color of a person’s skin or their ancestry or the skin color of their spouse to that person’s fitness to be president?

It only matters to racists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Kamala Harris,” Alexander also pointed out, “comes from Jamaican Slave Owners.” True enough, but how is she responsible for what her ancestors did? Would it matter if she supported . . . reparations?

** For the record, Sen. Harris was born in Oakland, California, which was then and is still part of the United States of America.

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Who’ll Stop the Wars?

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“Why were you the lone voice out there going after the neo-cons, going after the people who took us into these wars?” Chris Mathews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, asked presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) after Wednesday night’s debate. 

Pro-peace candidates do well with voters, but still most politicians and the media remain hawkish. The only time “the mainstream media fawned” over President Trump was after airstrikes against Syria.  

“I deployed to Iraq in 2005 during the height of that war,” she told Mathews. “I served in a medical unit where every single day I saw that terribly high human cost.”

Contrasted with former Vice-President Joe Biden, who voted for the Iraq War as senator, Gabbard pledged not to “bend to the whims of the military-industrial complex or the foreign policy establishment.”

“Today the Taliban claimed responsibility for killing two American service members in Afghanistan,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had posed during the debate. Noting that “leaders as disparate as President Obama and President Trump” have wanted “to end US involvement,” Maddow inquired of Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), how he might get us out?

Instead, he argued: “We must be engaged in this.” That led Gabbard to cut in, calling Ryan’s answer “unacceptable.” 

“We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan,” she declared. “We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began [nearly 18 years ago].”

Offered the opportunity, not one of the other eight candidates on the stage addressed the country’s longest war. 

This is a problem, since, as I’ve repeatedly posited in this space, there is no plan to defeat the Taliban, only to negotiate power-sharing with them.

Ceaseless intervention.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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