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Today

1/11

On January 11, 1571, the freedom of religion was granted to Austrian nobility.

Two years earlier, the first recorded lottery in England was held.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the eleventh day of the first month of 1759, the first American life insurance company was incorporated.

On January 11, 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.

On this date in 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row based on the Jon Burge torture/duress scandal.

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Accountability education and schooling

Skill-Free Teachers

education, testing, public

The new non-requirement for becoming a teacher in New Jersey — pushed by the teacher’s union there — reminds me of some of my own classroom experiences as a kid.

Applicants no longer need to pass a test that asks basic questions about English and math and other subjects in order to get the job. Why not? Because formal confirmation of basic skills is an obstacle. New Jersey needs more teachers. Remove obstacle, get more teachers. Simple addition.

Schools have other ways to determine whether applicants have the basic skills they need in order to teach those skills. But the reason for scrapping the test is evidently to ensure that deficiency in these skills, as such, won’t prevent you from being hired.

My alternative plan: accelerate free-market reforms of education, school choice, so we don’t have to “rely on” illiterate, innumerate, government-foisted “teachers.”

In 1983, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he instituted a competency test that, according to a 1985 Washington Post story, ten percent of the state’s public school teachers flunked. More than one-third of teachers in the state’s worst county failed this basic test.

One reason that poor and minority communities had such poor outcomes was that many of their teachers were illiterate and couldn’t do math. If you asked my fifth-grade math teacher, a product of that system, what is the sum of two plus two, she’d have had to look it up.

I survived. I now know that two plus two make eleventy. But I would not want any of today’s students to undergo the same so-called instruction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Friedrich Nietzsche

monsters

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.
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Today

The First ‘Common Sense’

Paine, Common Sense

On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.

You can read this classic on this site’s library.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Bill Nye, the Jail-My-Debating-Opponent Guy

Bill Nye, science, climate, global warming, censorship, authoritarianism

The latest Joe Biden outrage is the handing out of Presidential Medals of Freedom to the blatantly undeserving.

Popularizers of science seem to have gone downhill these days. Or perhaps it’s just a few of the most visible ones who are so vile.

In their own day, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov espoused some lamentable left-wing views and advanced some dubious propositions as they explained the universe to nonscientists. But you could listen to, read, and enjoy them.

Neither ever suggested, not even once, that persons who disagreed with him on a scientific question might reasonably be incarcerated therefore — inasmuch as the disagreement impaired his quality of life “as a public citizen.” (An argument any totalitarian might use to rationalize violating innocent persons’ rights.)

But Bill Nye, “the science guy,” has expressed the greatest possible sympathy with the proposition that it might be okay to imprison scientists who disagree with him about climate, human impact on climate, or the advisability of trying to centrally plan climate.

In 2016, when asked about a proposal to imprison “climate skeptics,” Nye said that “extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my qualify of life as a public citizen. That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good.”

People don’t do their best thinking with a gun pointed at them, Nye guy. That is not good.

Note: it’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not the Presidential Medal of Craven Censorship.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Karel Čapek

CAPEK, REVOLUTION

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you’d have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1921).
Categories
Today

Balloon & Autogyro

Blanchard, balloon, flight

On January 9, 1793, Jean-Pierre Blanchard became the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States.

Precisely 13 decades later,  Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu, 1st Count of la Cierva, made the first autogyro flight.

Categories
ideological culture international affairs

Exit Trudeau

Justin Trudeau, Canada, truckers, Covid, vaccines, economy

America’s far-north (and far-left) autocrat, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is resigning.

His resignation may pertain to the fact that opposition parties promised to vote no confidence in Trudeau’s Liberal Party when the Canadian parliament meets in March.

Associated Press says that critics complained of Trudeau’s efforts to “strike a balance between economic growth and environmental protection,” i.e., sacrificing economic growth to environmentalist hobbyhorses. 

Critics have many other complaints too.

What’s the worst of Trudeau’s conduct and policies? Tough call. But his treatment of the Canadian truckers who launched a Freedom Convoy to protest Canada’s ludicrous COVID-19 mandates has to be near the top of the list. Among other measures, Trudeau froze the bank accounts of protestors — and even those of some supporters.

GoFundMe cooperated by blocking donations to the truckers and even, briefly, declaring that blocked donations would not be returned to donors who failed to make a special appeal but would instead be redistributed to “credible and established charities.” The outrage over the planned theft, even if perfectly in sync with Trudeau’s hooliganism, was too great, though, and GoFundMe reversed itself.

Trudeau is also one of many Canadian politicians who leapt into inaction as the Chinese Communist Party tested the limits of its ability to interfere in Canadian elections and politics and engage in transnational repression. I have discussed the problem here; and the sister site of Common Sense, StopTheCCP, has touched on it here and here and here and here.

Trudeau’s exit is good news for Canada and the free world. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fernando Pessoa

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), The Book of Disquiet (1982; posthumous); written (if not exactly published) under the “heteronym” of “Bernardo Soares.”

Categories
Today

Washington’s First

Washington, happiness

Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

On January 8, 1790, President George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York City.