Here is a fairly long interview with This Is Common Sense’s Paul Jacob, from a recent radio show:
The first 33 minutes give a pretty coherent picture of the politics of common sense today. If you stop there, no one would think ill of you.
The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. . . . Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses any thing in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Herbert Spencer, “What Knowledge is of Most Worth,” The Westminster Review (July 1859) volume CXL
On January 14, 1514, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull against slavery. On the same date in 1639, the first written constitution to create a government, the “Fundamental Orders,” was adopted in Connecticut.
It’s neither “iconic” nor “ironic.”
“Storm fells one of California’s iconic drive-through tunnel trees, carved 137 years ago,” Travis M. Anderson’s title informs us. Calaveras Big Trees State Park is famous for its hollowed-at-the-trunk Pioneer Cabin Tree, a sequoia you have seen in hundreds of photos.
It fell, almost certainly, because of a storm. The ground got wet, undermining the sturdiness of the tree’s root system. And the winds got fast, sending the tree crashing to the ground.
But that’s not the hole — er, whole story.
The obvious reason it fell down is that the “hollowed-out” tunnel amounted to a huge cut. It is almost as if loggers started the felling job nearly seven score ago, and it took all that time to fall.
That is not “ironic,” in case you were wondering. It’s to be expected. The real wonder is that it stayed up so long.
Which should remind us: more than one cause can contribute to a singular effect. We are always tempted to focus on only one factor when we argue about an event. But in society, as in trees and forests, multiple influences are always at work.
Life isn’t monocausal, to put it in professor-speak.
Anderson dubbed the tree “iconic.” Now, an icon is an image used to stand in for other things that look similar. That tree didn’t stand in or represent, did it, other trees in the forest? It stood in memory by standing out as different, distinct — one of a very few hallowed, hollowed California sequoias. The opposite of “iconic.”
Still, in using the tree’s toppling as an object lesson in complexity, the fallen timber might be iconic. It stands for a common sense view of how tragedies happen.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Corporations can buy unfair favors from government…because government has unfair favors to sell.
Big Government is the problem.
Click below for a high resolution version of this image:
Nullification begins with the axiomatic point that a federal law that violates the Constitution is no law at all. It is void and of no effect. Nullification simply pushes this uncontroversial point a step further: if a law is unconstitutional and therefore void and of no effect, it is up to the states, the parties to the federal compact, to declare it so and refuse to enforce it. It would be foolish and vain to wait for the federal government or a branch thereof to condemn its own laws. Nullification provides a shield between the people of a state and an unconstitutional law from the federal government.
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century (Regnery, 2010), p. 3.
On January 13, 1833, United States President Andrew Jackson (pictured, top left) wrote to Vice President Martin Van Buren (pictured, top right) expressing his opposition to South Carolina’s defiance of federal authority in the Nullification Crisis. Jackson insisted that “the crisis must be now met with firmness” and “the modern doctrine of nullification & succession put down forever.”
South Carolina had blamed protectionist high tariffs for the severity of the economic slump of the time, and Andrew Jackson’s compromise Tariff of 1832 was still too much special-interest “protectionism” for South Carolina, which threatened to nullify the law as unconstitutional. Jackson, a nationalist at heart, had no sympathy for dissidents in the southern states. (The tariffs were designed by northern politicians to encourage the growth of industry. The belief among most economists of that time was that such high “protective” tariffs favored certain businesses at the expense of the general consumer, particularly farmers and agricultural producers.) After the crisis subsided, tariffs were further reduced from the 1832 level, much lower than of 1828’s “Tariff of Abominations,” which had been signed into law by President John Quincy Adams — and written mainly by Martin Van Buren as a way to precipitate the election of Jackson.
Since the somewhat ambiguous end to the Nullification Crisis, the doctrine of state prerogatives — “states’ rights” — has been asserted by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, proponents of California’s Specific Contract Act of 1863 (which nullified the Legal Tender Act of 1862), opponents of Federal acts prohibiting the sale and possession of marijuana in the first decade of the 21st century, and opponents of implementation of laws and regulations pertaining to firearms from the late 1900s up to 2013. State opposition to ObamaCare has also recently conjured up the issue.
On January 13, 1898, Émile Zola’s J’accuse exposed the Dreyfus affair.
Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Hillary Clinton . . .
Out from the Land of Might Have Been blurps the “news from nowhere” as to what Mrs. Clinton’s cabinet would have been. Some are calling it the “ghost cabinet,” the sadder version of a shadow cabinet.
And top on the list? Secretary of State John Podesta!
Mrs. Clinton’s own recklessness regarding secrets and security protocols while she was Secretary of State was apparently not enough. It turns out she aspires to insecurity, for she had planned to give her old job to the man who protected his computer with the immortal, hard-to-guess password “p@ssw0rd.”
The sheer effrontery here — or is it just witless, callous incompetence? — is astounding.
And the insanity* gets better. At least, if the public source for this information, former Politico chief political reporter Mike Allen (now of start-up news source Axios) can be trusted, “The Environmental Protection Agency and/or the Department of Education were to go to an African-American candidate. . . .”
Ah, tokenism!
Notice what is not mentioned: who. Just the what. The only admitted qualification being: skin-color.
Democrats are obsessed with racism these days. They never tire of charging anyone they disagree with as racist. And yet selecting someone because of their race is . . . suspiciously close to being racist.
Of course, Democrats do not see it that way.
They live in a race-based bubble. But like the Podesta-Clinton security measures, it may have just been hacked — er, compromised.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Other names have been leaked. Here is a list courtesy of The Daily Caller:
Attorney General — Current AG Loretta Lynch
Treasury Department — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
Labor Department — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
Defense Department — Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official
Health and Human Services — Center for American Progress executive director Neera Tanden
You can’t feed a part of it without feeding the whole damn thing.
Click below for a high resolution version of this image:
