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Today

Economic vs. Political Means

On March 30, 1864, German sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer was born.

This sociologist is most famous for his 1908 book The State, in which he elaborated some consequences of two means for acquiring wealth, the “economic means,” by which he meant private production or by trade, and the “political means,” by which he meant forcible extraction from one group or person by another person or group.

Oppenheimer taught in Palestine in the mid-1930s, and fled the Nazis to the United States, via Japan in 1938.

In 1941 he became a founder of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and died two years later.

Categories
Accountability education and schooling ideological culture

Bathroom Blundering 

school, bathrooms, trans

“A bunch of people from our school, John Jay, feel uncomfortable,” says a student at John Jay High School, Shauna Neilan. “We want to change that and give them their own spaces to make us more comfortable and them more comfortable.”

Students attending the Wappingers district school in New York State are rebelling against a government-imposed policy that lets students use bathrooms designated for the opposite sex. The protest has provoked a counterprotest by those who want the bathrooms to be open to all.

All this controversy even though, as Spectrum News reports, the school boasts “male and female restrooms, as well as a gender-neutral single-stall restroom that any student may use.”

Meanwhile, a school official says the school will “continue to provide a safe environment for all of our students. And ‘all’ means all, each and every one of them.” But this goal is self-contradictory if a few students are willing to make most others feel uncomfortable.

These administrators should at least say: “We agree 100% with students who object to this wrongheaded policy. Unfortunately, we are too worried about funding and/or legal repercussions and/or the possibility that the government will send troops to enforce the the current transgenderist orthodoxy.

“Until we can gather enough courage to rebel ourselves, we implore students eager to use the wrong bathroom to use, instead, the bathroom designated for their sex. Please respect the sensibilities of your fellow students even if you wish you were a member of the opposite sex.”

Three cheers for the students fighting the insanity, three jeers for the dishonesty of school officials.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Dmitry Rogozin

We can study bacteria, but we can also be studied just like bacteria.

Dmitry Rogozin, Director General of Roscosmos (2018-2022), as quoted in “Dmitry Rogozin: Aliens Could Have Visited Earth, Russia Investigating UFOs,” Newsweek (June 13, 2022).
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Today

Hyphen War

On March 29, 1990, the Czechoslovak parliament proved unable to reach an agreement on what to call the country after the “Velvet Revolution” — in which the Communist Party was booted from sole power. This sparked the “Hyphen War,” a tongue-in-cheek moniker for the dispute between Czechs and Slovaks about official recognition of the two nations’ equal status. (The Slovak representatives wanted to insert a hyphen into the name, to make the Slovak part stand out.) Eventually, the dispute was resolved with the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the two countries split up, on New Year’s Day, 1993, the two countries now being named:

Czech Republic, also known as Czechia;

Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic (Slovak: Slovenská republika).

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Richly Revealing

Donald Trump, gag order, censorship, courts, indictment

There is something rich in the latest gag order placed on Mr. Trump.

“Former President Donald Trump on March 27 criticized the New York judge overseeing his ‘hush money’ case and criticized the judge’s daughter,” explains Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times, “just hours after the judge handed down a gag order against him.”

Richly . . . ironic? 

Apt? 

Idiotic?

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is . . . well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false. 

They object . . . because . . . what he says makes them look bad.

And what they are trying to do is make Trump look bad.

Just rich. 

With meaning. 

More philosophically minded folks say we have a crisis of meaning these days. I don’t know. I see meaning everywhere!

But it’s not always meaning we like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Wyndham Lewis

Men were only made into “men” with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally “a man” any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

Wyndham Lewis, “Call Yourself a Man!,” The Art of Being Ruled (1926).
Categories
Today

Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa

On March 28, 1936, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born. This recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ran, in 1990, for the presidency of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. His novels include La casa verde (The Green House), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was filmed as Tune in Tomorrow.

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regulation subsidy

The Hail of It

Joe Biden, energy, green energy, spending

Early yesterday, an out-of-control container ship ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore. Early reports claimed that a dozen vehicles and 20 people went into the cold water, with only two survivors, so far, being rescued; last I heard, however, the total went down to six missing after the initial rescues.

It looks like an accident, and accidents happen, sometimes horrific ones. There’s a reason “thoughts and prayers” are mentioned at such times, all other talk seeming vastly inappropriate.

Nevertheless, President Joe Biden immediately promised that the federal government would pay to replace the bridge.

Eleven days earlier a more humdrum disaster gave us greater license to speculate. “Thousands of panels on a solar farm southwest of Houston, Texas, were damaged by a powerful hailstorm on March 15,” a Newsweek report informs us. “Aerial footage showed rows of cracked photovoltaic cells at the Fighting Jays Solar Farm near Needville in Fort Bend County. . . .” A vast array of solar panels, ruined by something not unheard-of in Texas: “baseball-sized hail stones” falling from the sky.

And seeping out of the panels? Toxic chemicals.

This is something that we, the voting public, must confront: the fact that most “green energy” replacements are fragile and often environmentally hazardous. Compared to natural gas they are ecological disasters.

While Joe Biden yammers about funding a new bridge, we need to force a more important conversation, about removing subsidies for pseudo-green alternative energy sources. 

To save us from the poorhouse as well as from environmental disaster.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

James Carville

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females —

“‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”

Democratic Party strategist James Carville, explaining to the New York Times why the Democratic Party is losing the male African-American vote.
Categories
Today

The Duck Man

On March 27, 1901, American illustrator Carl Barks was born. After much struggles as an artist, he found a place within the Disney empire, creating the Donald Duck comic books and characters such as Scrooge McDuck. But he worked anonymously for most his career, with fans dubbing him The Duck Man and The Good Duck Artist before his identity was discovered.

He died in 2001.