Category: Update

Among the biggest stories of the day is the wokification of corporate America.

The update? Corporations’ are pulling back from their activism, at least according to a report in The Epoch Times:

Wall Street titans appear to be having an increasingly hard time reconciling the conflicting goals of progressive activism and shareholder returns.

Until recently, many banks, asset managers, and insurers portrayed these goals as complementary, asserting that climate risk is financial risk and that the competence of management can be assessed by its commitment to social justice goals.

Today, however, those narratives are rarely heard.

Kevin Stocklin, “Corporations Are Losing the ESG Battle, Forcing Them to Hide Advocacy,” The Epoch Times (March 08, 2024).

The story behind the story is perhaps even more interesting, for it shows how easy it is to control America’s corporations: control the investment groups that own most of the stocks. 

Which reminds us of Peter Drucker’s claim that socialism was coming to America via retirement funds.

Drucker sounded so … optimistic … about that. Didn’t he? 

But what if socialism is bad no matter how you achieve it?

The idea that one needn’t be a citizen to vote in America’s local, state and even federal elections is being flirted with in many of the country’s biggest, “bluest” cities. Coverage here, on this site, includes this piece from last year, about the strange political maneuverings in our “Alien National Capital”:

Now the wackos in Washington, D.C., have enacted a non-​citizen voting measure that goes further. It allows Russian nationals working for Mr. Putin at their embassy in our nation’s capital to vote on city candidates and ballot issues and welcomes onto Washington’s voter rolls Chinese citizens here promoting Xi Jinping and the interests of his genocidal regime. 

The District of Columbia’s ordinance extends the franchise even to people here illegally, allowing anyone from anywhere in the world able to avoid deportation to cast a ballot. Legally.

We’ve updated this story in a number of ways, but in case you think this isn’t a movement of some kind, here is just one additional city from the current season:

Yes, the “law-​made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate,” with minimal adaptability to new conditions. “By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.” Herbert Spencer had it right over a century ago. The latest example? The massive cluster-​muck that was school shutdowns during the lockdown period of the recent pandemic.

Here at Common Sense with Paul Jacob you read of the overkill that were the lockdowns, especially as regarding public schools. But now the evidence is pouring in, as reported in Reason magazine. Yes, government schools exhibit the old Spencerian principle:

When COVID-​19 shuttered virtually everything in 2020 and forced public schools to begin distance learning, those schools responded with the agility one would expect from a decrepit battleship forced to make a quick change of course in the face of an unexpected enemy. In other words, the state’s hulking K‑12 system barely responded at all, even as small and nimble private and charter schools quickly adapted to the new reality.

I remember news stories about public schools unable to set up even the most basic Zoom classes, of teachers who had no idea what they were supposed to do — and then of unions and administrators resisting efforts to re-​start classroom teaching even after the rest of society was getting back to normal. Instead of re-​ordering procedures to help kids stay current on their schoolwork, the school establishment mainly whined about not having enough money.

Anyone who needs a reminder about why government bureaucracies are incapable of providing quality public services need only look at the resulting disaster. A Stanford University study found, “a substantial decline in student learning in both English language arts/​literacy (ELA) and mathematics between the 2018 – 19 and 2021 – 22 academic years.” Those are the general figures, but the results for poor and minority students were a travesty.

Steven Greenhut, “More Evidence That COVID School Closures Wrecked Student Performance,” Reason, March 1, 2024.

The whole article is worth reading, though we add one caveat: “COVID-​19” did not shut down schools: governments did. In reaction. In over-reaction. For very little reason. The lockdowns in general were unnecessary and usurpative. But regarding schools — government or non-​government — they were baseless and grand folly.

And if you want to see how learning can happen in online chats, look to unschooling and home schooling and other systems with actual, working feedback systems.

Dr. Phil has a clip that is making the rounds on this subject. It is worth viewing:

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Related articles:

The Great School Reset, January 27, 2021
The Only Choice Left, February 11, 2021
The Young and the Unmasked, January 19, 2022
The Expulsion of the Sick, September 6, 2023 

Every now and then Paul Jacob covers “the climate.” This would fall outside of the scope of his commentary if politicians and activists would not step outside the scope of their expertise. In the real world, alas, “climate change” and “anthropogenic global warming” are huge political issues, driving trillions of dollars in “research” and, increasingly, in mitigation policies. Costly, sometimes horrendously destructive and dangerous policies.

So “Fixation on CO2 Ignores Real Driver of Temperature, Experts Say,” a recent article by Katie Spence in The Epoch Times is worth consulting for a contrarian take.

The current pseudo-​consensus driven by massive coordinated propaganda holds that increases in atmospheric carbon is the main destabilizer to past low temperatures, which are almost unaccountably regarded as ideal. Ms. Spence notes that the cold temperatures of pre-​industrial Europe were not pleasant. But then gets to a major point:

“If emissions of CO2 stopped altogether, it would take many thousands of years for atmospheric CO2 to return to ‘pre-​industrial’ levels,” the Royal Society states in a report on its website. The organization describes itself as a “fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists.”

“Surface temperatures would stay elevated for at least a thousand years, implying a long-​term commitment to a warmer planet due to past and current emissions,” the report states. “The current CO2-​induced warming of Earth is therefore essentially irreversible on human timescales.”

If this be true, then a lot follows. But would politics actually follow the consequences of this and other arguments? There is a social addiction, at present, to the AGW claims about CO2.

The article relies heavily on the work of Ian Clark, emeritus professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, who argues that CO2’s driving of climate is only apparent; in actuality is follows temperature changes “It lags by about 800 years.”

“If we completely cut out emissions, CO2 would stop rising at its current rate,” Mr. Clark said. “But it would probably continue to rise to a certain point, and then it could come down. But that would be driven by temperature.”

Mr. Clark said that in different parts of the world and at different times of the year, CO2 fluctuates “between 15 and 20 percent,” and that’s driven by the temperature of the seasons.

“If we start having cooler summers and colder winters, those fluctuations would start driving CO2 further down. But overall, climate is going to do whatever the sun dictates,” he said.

In Thursday’s Common Sense, “Paid Invaders,” Paul Jacob discussed the U.S. taxpayers’ subsidies going to the ongoing illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. But the sheer size of the subsidies and handouts is hard to grasp. So consider just one state of the union, on the border with Canada, not Mexico, but which found a way to find the funds to help migrants who came up from the South.

“Washington State diverted over $400 million of federal relief funds to illegal aliens in 2023,” reports Anthony Brian Logan. “The money was taken from a COVID-​19 fund and was not meant to shore up migrants’ inability to make ends meet. Under this program, migrants who were not entitled to stimulus money due to their illegal status were given checks of up to $3,000 each. An estimated 300,000 illegal aliens may have been given cash through this method in Washington State alone.”

An article in The New York Post, linked to by Mr. Logan, places the 2023 total of hijacked funds at $60 million less:

A new report is highlighting how federal COVID funds were used in Washington state to give $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants who were ineligible to receive federal economic impact payments during the pandemic due to their immigration status.

The report, by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), points to money administered by the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF), which was created by the American Rescue Plan Act and was intended to help state and local governments with their response and recovery from the COVID-​19 pandemic. 

Washington state received $4.4 billion in funding overall from that program.

The report from the group, which calls for a smaller federal government, highlighted how $340 million in funding went to a program that sent $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants in the state.

Adam Shaw, “Washington state diverted $340M in federal COVID funds to migrants,” New York Post, February 3, 2024.

The program was announced in 2022, by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, expressing the usual press-​release pride:

“The DSHS Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance has been honored and humbled to work with our community partners over the past two years to support the WA COVID-​19 Immigrant Relief Fund,” said Sarah Peterson, who heads the Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance. “This is a tremendous opportunity for DSHS to help people who may have been left out of other federal and state resources to address the economic impact of the pandemic.”

The agency’s goal is to get these resources into the hands of community members in a timely and thoughtful manner and has partnered with many different immigrant-​led organizations to implement this fund effectively and safely.

“Washington COVID-​19 Immigrant Relief Fund launches new application period Sept. 19-​Nov. 14,” Medium, September 19, 2022.

In his discussion of the program, Anthony Brian Logan notes that the federal source of the hand-​outs to migrants was, by law, disallowed for that purpose.