Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Vol. XII, “Eccentricity.”
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Henry Adams
Category: Common Sense
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Cooking with Gas
If you’ve been wanting to buy a gas stove but have been worried about the federal government’s determination under Biden to outlaw selling them and other nice things, relax. You’re now going to be cooking with gas.
I’m looking at a paragraph of one of the many executive orders issued by President Trump to get the government off our necks.
I refer, of course, to provision (f) of Section 2 of “Unleashing American Energy.”
To wit: “It is the policy of the United States … to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.…”
Water heaters … toilets and shower heads … and gas stoves?
It shouldn’t be such a big deal to be able to keep buying this or that modern convenience. We’ve already invented and can mass-produce, mass-distribute these things. We have a functioning market economy. And most of us don’t want to be Amish.
But if you’ve got successive administrations hell-bent on returning us all to the Stone Age in order to control global weather and spare Mother Earth further inconvenience — well, adamant interruption of this trend is indeed a very big deal.
It seems that certain insanities will be stopped cold at least for the next four years. Maybe even beyond.
Industrial civilization: a good thing. Let’s keep it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Flux and Firefly
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Happy New Year — 2025
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”
—Thomas Paine
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A Truce
This commentary, Common Sense with Paul Jacob, usually deals with man’s inhumanity to man — man’s insanity to man, oftentimes. But on this Christmas Eve, let’s for just a moment focus squarely on some beautiful days of sanity and humanity that somewhat magically broke out of the ugliness of “total war” back eleven decades ago: World War I, “The Great War.”
Let’s remember the good times.
The Christmas Truce
A Sign Of Friendship In The Midst Of War I
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE 1914
Christmas Truce of World War I
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Merry Christmas!
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Thanksgiving 2024
Links to the past:
2009: “Paul Jacob says ‘Thank You.’”
2011: “Plymouth’s Great Reform”
2012: “A Rafter of Turkeys”
2013: “Give Thanks for First World Problems”
2016: “Thanksgivings, 1623 A.D.”
2017: “Ingrates of the Fourth Estate”
2018: “My thanksgiving is perpetual.”
2020: “The Saddest Thanksgiving”
2023: “One by One”
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The African
The best manure for the land is the foot of the owner.
Quoted by Aristotle, who cites this saying to “The African,” whose words were cribbed by Benjamin Franklin — all explained by Arthur Latham Perry in Principles of Political Economy (1891).