On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer placed the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States.
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Nineteen Hundred Eighty-four
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Franklin W. Dixon
“You look as if you’ve just discovered the secret of perpetual motion.”
“Franklin W. Dixon,” in The Hardy Boys’ Guide to Life (2002), cited as if from the 18th Hardy Boys’ mystery, The Twisted Claw (1939; 1969), not confirmed.
The title of Robert Bidinotto’s bracing new collection, Rebel in Eden: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism, may occasion objection to the word “environmentalism.”
Of course, if “environmentalism” pertained only to how best to reduce pollution and litter and so forth, who would have need to combat it? Freedom-minded individualists, for example, would debate means, not ends.
But that’s not the kind of thing that the environmentalists themselves — or “radical environmentalists,” to distinguish them from people who manage cleanup crews — focus on.
Radical environmentalists regard humanity as a blight on the face of the earth; they regard nature as an end itself (an “intrinsic value”) that should be left alone regardless of the cost to that mere interloper, man. In their view, plants and animals have “rights,” men and women do not; mining is “raping” the earth — all documented here.
These are issues that Bidinotto has been reporting on and analyzing since at least the early 1980s, in places like the On Principle and Intellectual Activist newsletters and Reader’s Digest. So this collection has been in the making for some forty years.
Some of the don’t-miss essays: “Death by Environmentalism,” “The Great Pesticide Panic,” “Animal Rights: A New Species of Egalitarianism,” “Global Warming and the New Totalitarianism,” “California, Thank Environmentalism for Your Wildfires,” “Environmentalism or Individualism?” I might list the whole table of contents.
Take a look. Bidinotto, by the way, has also contributed a piece “On Courage” to our sister website, StoptheCCP.org.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Bulwer-Lytton
Fate laughs at probabilities.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eugene Aram (1832).
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Cobden & Chevalier
On January 23, 1860, the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty was signed between France and Great Britain. The treaty was named after the two main proponents of the agreement, Richard Cobden (in England) and economist Michel Chevalier (in France). The treaty had been suggested the year earlier, in British Parliament, by Cobden’s colleague John Bright, who looked upon the policy as a peace measure, an alternate to a military build-up.
Yesterday, I refrained from completely quoting Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, saving for today the juiciest part. After declaring the fraud in Minnesota dwarfed by what he saw in California, Oz said, next: “which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care.”
“Cultural”?
Dr. Oz clarified at length: it’s about the cover-up. Minnesota’s fraud network? Bureaucrats knew. But when a whistleblower tried to toot on the proverbial whistle, these folks, Oz explained, were “culturally . . . dissuaded, intimidated, from speaking up.”
This would happen “any time people raised the possibility that, for example, the Somalian subpopulation, who have different cultural mores than the folks who have historically been in Minnesota, might be taking advantage of systems that were built for Minnesota nice people.”
The “cultural” aspect is the pseudo-niceness of political correctness. “So you have well-meaning people trying to be nice, trying not to ruffle any feathers. If you do ruffle feathers, you get outed.” The auditors lacked the temperament to actually audit, with those daring few speaking up systematically prevented — shuffled away — from doing any actual work.
“Although you may still have a job there, you don’t get to do anything in that job.”
While Oz claims not to know how high up cover-for-fraud goes, I’ve a hunch that the smart ones in government know all-too-well what they are doing. They certainly know the fear. And use it.
It’s suffused throughout: “cultural.”
This story is not unrelated to the grooming gangs in Britain, Finland and elsewhere, allowed for years by police to carry on what we used to call “white slavery” because the cops feared being called racist.
You cannot have watchdogs too “nice” to bark.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Franklin W. Dixon
We live in a dangerous world, never knowing where our next meal may come from. Learn a little botany in case you’re ever marooned on a jungle island.
“Franklin W. Dixon,” in The Hardy Boys’ Guide to Life (2002), cited as if from the sixth Hardy Boys’ mystery, The Shore Road Mystery (1928; 1964), not confirmed.
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January Uprising
On January 22, 1863, the January Uprising broke out in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. The aim of this nationalist movement was to regain the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth from occupation by Russia. The uprising was not a success, completely crushed the next year.
Ten days ago, I quoted Veronique de Rugy, warning that Minnesota’s day-care fraud scandal was “only the tip of the iceberg.”
Beyond subsidized daycare? Health care, home health care, Medicaid.
Fraud, fraud, fraud.
But it wasn’t just a lone Reason scholar saying it. “What we’re seeing in Minnesota … is dwarfed by what I saw in California,” The Epoch Times quotes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Minnesota, Dr. Oz said, “is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Just in California’s hospice and home health care, Oz figures, fraud rockets up to at least $4 billion.
Add a few billion here and there and soon you’re talking real money.
I titled my commentary quoting Ms. de Rugy “The Tip of the Socialism-berg.” Remember Mr. Socialism? Karl Marx? He introduced to the world a complicated, rather magical theory of exploitation in market society focusing on “surplus value.” While I have trouble making heads or tails of his theory — seems utterly nuts — I do know something about its origin.
Marx nabbed it from classical liberal French scholars who preceded him. But they said the exploitation was through government mechanisms: it’s those who skim off of taxes who exploit the masses.
Marx turned it upside down.
So let’s turn things right-side up: we all know that when it comes to policy, good intentions don’t make up for bad consequences. And those who de-fraud the taxpayers don’t have “good intentions.”
They’re thieves.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Anthony Trollope
Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.
Anthony Trollope, Miss Mackenzie (1865).