I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Nothing, zero. No, and I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country. . . .
Jammin’ in New York (1992).
On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”
This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal (as well as political) event; with the court-forced disclosure of the tapes, it proved to be one of the most striking examples of “government transparency” in modern times.
They spray-painted Stonehenge.
The group says that mankind is doomed unless we stop using fossil fuels. Not instantly! That would be crazy. By 2030.
According to a Just Stop Oil spokesman, “Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas will result in the death of millions.” But if we stop, the climate will spare us.
Their website says that fossil fuels are right now “killing millions around the world.” (No mention of any lives saved by, for example, fossil-fuel-provided heat in wintertime.)
Worse is to come. The contours of apocalypse are elaborated on a helpful /genocide/ page of the site. “Scientists warn of untold suffering and death, of the collapse of whole nations, and the eradication by manmade global heating of entire peoples and cultures.”
I hope I need not stress that not all “scientists” have received this fact-free revelation.
What will cause the mass slaughter? More weather, sometimes extreme weather? The kind of thing that we use fossil fuels to cope with and protect ourselves from? And for which, barring much wider development and acceptance of nuclear power than we are likely to see any decade soon, there is no reliable substitute?
You can wash the paint off Stonehenge. Bringing irrational fantasists to reason is a much tougher job.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Arrogance in full bloom bears a crop of ruinous folly from which it reaps a harvest all of tears.
Aeschylus, The Persians (472 BC) lines 821–822 (tr. Christopher Collard).
On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
If a California lawmaker gets her way, it will stop, though, at least in the schools. Or at least slow way down.
Consider the pressure, the horrible grinding pressure of having to practice math problems, peer at chemical formulas, read assigned readings, summarize, spell, grammarize, memorize names and dates and Spanish vocabulary, and on and on and on . . . en casa. . . .
It’s the kind of thing that can curdle a kid’s physical and mental health. Not to mention cut into playtime.
So is the legislation AB2999 justified?
Is Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo warranted in hoping to require school boards to ponder the “reasonable amount of time spent on homework per student that should not be exceeded” or whether “homework should be assigned . . . in any elementary school grade, inclusive” or perhaps that homework be “optional and not graded,” et cetera?
Well, if we think about this, we must admit that there is one and only one reason to ever require students to spend time at home mastering what is introduced in class. Only to prepare them for earning a living and living life by helping them obtain knowledge and skills and realize their potential.
But that’s it. That’s the only reason.
Of course, individual teachers, if competent and conscientious, already think about what homework is appropriate to assign. They must, we hope, want their students to function capably in life. And maybe also to learn that learning is not torture.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world. Not — and that’s not hi . . . — sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., answering George Stephanopoulos’s question about taking a cognitive test and sharing it with Americans, Primetime Special Tonight, ABC, July 5, 2024.
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, New Jersey, was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
Hamilton died the next day of complications from a bullet wound at less than 50 years of age; Burr died on September 14, 32 years later at age 80.
But something else did go unseen: candidates independent of the two dominant parties — specifically, RFK, Jr.
“CNN RULES WOULD HAVE BARRED EVERY INDEPENDENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR LAST 112 YEARS,” read this month’s Ballot Access News (BAN) cover story.
Wow. That’s a long time.
Self-deputized to supposedly defend “democracy,” CNN sponsored the recent presidential debate using criteria pointedly designed to shut out independent voices — even those polling double digits.
The main culprit was their mandate that “the candidate must [be] certified for the ballot in states with at least 270 electoral votes, by June 20.”
That doesn’t make any sense given the calendar for ballot qualification. As BAN relates, “The rule about being on the ballot was probably written by individuals who had no knowledge of the typical time-line for presidential candidates running as independents, or nominees of new parties.”
Plus, “the rule” was applied with a double standard — one for Republicans and Democrats and another for other parties and independents.
“They require certainty for the independent candidate to show ballot placement,” notes BAN, “but they only require probability for the Democratic and Republican invitees.”
Once upon a time major news outlets were seen as playing a vital watchdog role, as referees, politically. Today, CNN and its ilk require their own umpires, a whole new set of watchdogs.
We are it — all of us on X, Facebook, podcasts and the blogosphere — we are those watchdogs.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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But when a man
Aeschylus, The Persians (472 BC) line 742 (tr. Janet Lembke and C. J. Herington).
speeds toward his own ruin,
a god gives him help.