Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 1878-1886.
What happens to civilization partly depends upon . . . dating?
Could be.
If successful men and women find themselves at an impasse in “the mating market,” and not producing children, the habits of success do not get passed to the next generation along with capital in the most natural and efficient way. And civilization itself can suffer. So, the perennial comedy of mate selection is no laughing matter:
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, Preface, 1942.
On December 5, 1933, nationwide alcohol Prohibition in the United States ended after Utah became the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75 percent of states needed to enact the amendment that overturned the 18th.
Will the government soon quarter troops in your home?
The Third Amendment prohibits that, sure — but if prominent and powerful Democrats are so anxious to toss out the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, who’s to say they wouldn’t jettison the Third?
Last year, every Democratic U.S. Senator voted to repeal the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and replace it with new, broad powers for them to regulate campaign spending, thereby speech.
Luckily, those 54 senators lacked the two-thirds margin needed for their amendment.
Now, in the face of “gun violence” and (pssst) terrorism, President Obama, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, and true-blue MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, want to scrap the Second Amendment. How? By first scrapping the Fifth, which guarantees that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” They demand that Americans on the so-called “terrorist no-fly list” be denied the Second Amendment right to a firearm, despite the fact that the bureaucratically created no-fly list offers not a scintilla of due process: no charge, jury, trial.
Would this new regulation have prevented the San Bernardino murderers from getting guns? No — they had recently flown across the world.
The frequent-flying Boston Marathon bombers didn’t make the list, either.
But the list did label an 18-month-old girl a terrorist, snatching her rights like taking candy from a . . . toddler.
“Just what will it take for Congress to overcome the intimidation of the gun lobby and do something as sensible as making sure people on the terrorist watch list can’t buy weapons?” Mrs. Clinton asked rhetorically at a campaign event.
Answer: an illegal abrogation of the most fundamental and cherished rights in human history.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On December 4, 1783, at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, General George Washington formally bade his officers farewell.
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146.
When some of America’s most illustrious public figures — Senator Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama, and Bill Nye the Science Guy — proclaim global climate change as the “obvious” cause of the rise of ISIS (and recent rounds of terrorism), it’s time to consider:
Is it climate change that is responsible for the recent rash of mass shootings in the U.S., most recently in San Bernardino?
There is a drought in California — a water shortage, anyway.
But that is caused more by overuse and underpricing of water resources — itself the result of public, not private, water resource management — than climate change.
Isn’t it more likely that people on the margin of stability — call them “crazy” or just evil — take cues from other shooters in the news, draw inspiration and then draw guns?
And fire.
America’s non-Muslim, home-grown mass murderers don’t seem to be making a clear point. Syrian refugee and European ISIS-sympathizing Muslim radicals do seem to be making a point — but one quite tangential to Bill Nye’s nifty causal chain: man-made global warming leads to droughts; farmers leave the country for the city; over-strapped cities lack water and jobs; frustrated male (and female) refugees go postal.
Hey Bill, don’t war and drone strikes, not to mention tyranny, also cause instability?
But then, so would cutting back on fossil fuels: the whole mid-east region runs on fuel sold to the West. If we fight ISIS by combatting CO2 emissions, and if the Sanders/Obama/Nye Theory is correct, we’ll just get more ISIS.
Copy-cattery and ideology explain this evil better. Not climate change.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On December 3, 1989, the leaders of the two world superpowers, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, declared an end to the Cold War, at a summit in Malta. A little over two years later not only had the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union was itself dissolved.
