Categories
Update

Elon, the CR & the Shutdown

Elon Musk, Twitter, deal, bargaining, woke

It is the weekend. You have heard rumors of a shutdown in the federal government. What’s going on?

Well, sit back and watch a video. This explains it pretty well:

Kaizen D. Asiedu, the tweeter/video commentator, calls the whole process broken. He is not alone.

He is also not alone in thinking Elon Musk’s influence on the process this time around has been largely beneficial.

But Nick Catoggio, at The Dispatch, does not seem so appreciative. Here is how Catoggio summarized the politics of it all:

What really happened here, in all probability, is exactly what it looks like. Musk wanted to flex his populist muscle by inciting a grassroots rebellion against Johnson’s bill, and he succeeded so spectacularly that even Donald Trump was caught off-guard and feared ending up on the wrong side of it. It wasn’t just congressional Republicans this time who were politically intimidated into abandoning a bill they supported. It was Trump himself.

The obsequiousness that some GOP members of Congress showed Musk as he pushed them around was also striking, as that sort of thing is typically reserved for the cult leader. “My phone was ringing off the hook. The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk,” crowed Rep. Andy Barr. After Musk replied to a Twitter follower who blamed Rep. Dan Crenshaw for the congressional pay raise in the bill, Crenshaw corrected him — while carefully prefacing his response with “I love you Elon.” Sen. Rand Paul proposed formally replacing Johnson with Musk, reminding followers that the speaker needn’t be a member of the House.

Never before in the Trump era has another populist commanded the political and financial capital needed to credibly threaten Republican politicians into doing his bidding. This is entirely new.

“Folie à Deux: President Trump and Speaker Musk,” The Dispatch (December 19, 2023).

Jonah Goldberg, also at The Dispatch, attempted a general overview of the problem with a carnival metaphor (among others), lamenting that “nobody wants to grapple with the hard things and hard truths that you have to face when you get home from the amusement park. Because that stuff is actually hard, requiring an attention span that risks the horror of boredom.”

But this read like an attempt to express some alarm about Musk’s role in killing the CR. And Mr Goldberg somehow seemed to suggest that the Republican and Democratic establishment (as the two factions have existed in our lifetime) has earned a reputation as, somehow — just possibly — hard-working and not clownish.

And that is impossible to believe, isn’t it? “Get Us Off This Roller Coaster,” Jonah demands, but it was the establishment that put us on the rickety roller coaster, not Trump and Musk. It was the run of the oh-so-serioso political mill that produced mid-December’s 1547-page Continuing Resolution bill!

Oh, and about that shutdown: with the last vote of the 118th Congress, the much-feared outcome was averted.

Stay tuned….

Categories
Thought

Edward Bernays

Domination to-day is not a product of armies or navies or wealth or policies. It is a domination based on the one hand upon accomplished unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally characterized by a high degree of disunity.

Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).
Categories
Today

A Rock

On December 21, 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on the shores of what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. One-hundred twenty-one years later one specific rock was identified as the disembarkation spot, and it became known as Plymouth Rock.

American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declared their independence on December 21, 1826, starting the Fredonian Rebellion.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Trump Ponders Privatizing Post Office

USPS, Postal Service, public service, privatization, free enterprise

Donald Trump can’t turn the U.S. Postal Service over to private hands with a wave of his hand. But he can push to make it happen.

Three people “with knowledge of the matter” say that he has discussed the possibility with Howard Lutnick, his choice for commerce secretary.

USPS never makes money. It costs taxpayers billions every year. In fiscal year 2023, it lost $6.5 billion; in the next fiscal year, $9.5 billion.

If privatizing the agency does happen, the transition probably won’t be seamless, not even if we can surmount the opposition of the powerful postal union. 

Fortunately, we already have many private alternative ways of shipping information and packages, from encrypted email to UPS and FedEx.

The latter have come to rely on the post office to handle part of delivery, typically the last mile or two. They’ll have to find alternatives if a privatized USPS does not immediately assume these contracts. 

Thankfully, delivery services are already supplementing their local-area shipping. For example, UPS has Roadie, a company that relies on independent drivers to provide same-day delivery within a town for stores like Best Buy.

Roadie drivers are gig workers. So let’s hope that even as the federal government paves the way for a hostile private takeover of the Postal Service, freelance contractors are not being regulated out of existence. 

For some reason, Trump has named a person in favor of that sort of thing to lead the Labor Department. So expect bumps ahead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Thought

James Baldwin

You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

James Baldwin and Margaret Mead: A Rap on Race (1971).

Categories
Today

Not-So-Wonderful Premiere

On December 20, 1946, Frank Capra’s holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life premiered at the Globe Theatre in New York to mixed reviews.

Categories
defense & war government transparency public opinion

Only a Test?

drones, military, defense, brainwashing, PSYOP, psychology

“This has been a test, and only a test. 

“Of the Emergency Propaganda System.

“In case of a real emergency, we would have bombed you already.

“Or infected you with a new disease from one of our gain-of-function labs.

“Or (and this is a real stretch) found the missing plutonium that’s always whispered about.

“Instead, the mystery drones were a scheduled test run of a newly developed drone technology, which the FAA had this last month scheduled as a testing period for the product. The developer is an above-board military contractor in New Jersey. The test period was indicated in a bulletin. Somebody outside the military must’ve read it.

“Now, if we had the interests of the citizens in mind we would have made a big deal out of the FAA bulletin. Or at least referred to it after people began noticing the drones.

“But let’s get real. We did not do either of those things. Instead, we reacted as if we knew nothing. And, of course, most government functionaries knew nothing. But the Biden administration knew,* and the Federal Aviation Administration knew, and the CIA and the NSA and the military knew. We could have told everyone the whole truth.

“We didn’t because we needed to learn how people would react to a swarm of oversized drones dotting the skyscape. This was a test of how Americans would react in a possible (and admittedly eerie) emergency.

“And, boy, did citizens react entertainingly. Some people — easily confused by parallax effects — saw more drones than existed, misidentifying normal airliners for drones, for grand example.

“Some people opportunistically made fake video footage. Some of those fakers may or may not have been paid by tax dollars.

“And some people noticed non-drone UFOs, and reported them. We won’t talk about those, either, even when they appear over the Pentagon.

“Remember: Only a test.”

And this, here at ThisIsCommonSense.org, is Common Sense. And I’m Paul Jacob.

* Unless nobody bothered to tell the Lame Duck-in-Chief. See Wednesday’s witless assurance.

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Categories
Thought

T. S. Eliot

They constantly try to escape 
From the darkness outside and within 
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, Choruses from The Rock (1934).
Categories
Today

American Crises

On December 19, 1776, Tom Paine published one of a series of pamphlets in the Pennsylvania Journal titled The American Crisis. Exactly one year later, George Washington’s Continental Army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

On December 19, 1828, Vice President of the United States John C. Calhoun penned the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing against the Tariff of 1828, a key moment in what became known as the Nullification Crisis.

Categories
crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights

Precogs in the Machine

pre-crime, Philip K. Dick, police, justice

Whether “predictive policing” is good or bad depends on what it means.

If it means using crime patterns to determine which neighborhoods should get more police patrols, that’s reasonable enough. 

But what if it means assuming that certain individuals may commit a crime if left to themselves? And then “preventatively” harassing them?

The Institute for Justice has just won an important victory against predictive policing as practiced by the sheriff’s office of Pasco County, Florida.

The office’s idea was to predict which residents were most likely to commit future crimes. Algorithms — or what IJ attorney Rob Johnson calls a “glorified Excel sheet” — were supposed to perform a function comparable to that of “precogs,” the psychics in the movie Minority Report, who envision future crimes.

To counter the precrime, the sheriff’s office made frequent visits to the homes and haunts of pre-guilty individuals to interrogate them and their families, “sometimes multiple times a week.” Families who objected would get slapped with citations for bogus code violations.

All that’s over with now, we hope. 

In response to IJ’s litigation, the sheriff’s office has admitted violating the due process rights and Fourth Amendment rights of the people they harassed, and it has dropped the program.

Scott Bullock observes that if the policy of harassing people based solely on guesses about what they or associates “might” do had been allowed to stand, such a program could easily have spread to other locales. 

This is much less likely now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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