Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Naomi Wolf

Freedom is not free, as many veterans have said. I never understood what that meant except superficially. But you don’t get freedom back so easily if you yourself committed massive crimes. Freedom is not free. You don’t get to take away the freedom of others and enjoy it, without penalty for yourselves. The people you harmed, the parents of the children you burned — they are coming. Not violently, not vengefully, but with the righteous sword of justice in hand. Don’t rest too easy, leaders who did wrong, in this bright American sunlight. You don’t get America back as if nothing had happened.
Naomi Rebekah Wolf, described by Wikipedia as “an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist,” in Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age (2023).

Today

Statue of Liberty

On October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland, despite the fact that the monument was not a federally funded project.

national politics & policies subsidy

Community Chest

When it’s time to go home, the circus manager has a trick up his sleeve, just to get people off the property: turn off the rides.

The U.S. is something of a circus today, so policymakers may want to take the cue.

This applies especially to illegal immigration on the southern border, which is increasingly being acknowledged as a major problem. While it may be interesting to learn, say, that this past month more Venezuelans than Mexicans were nabbed coming north (and, presumably, more not caught), the big picture truth is that since taking office President Joe Biden has presided over a huge increase in the overall illegal flow of economic migrants.

Switch off the subsidies and surely the rate would go down.

But what are the subsidies?

A recent article in The Epoch Times explains: “Identification cards for illegal immigrants are increasingly being issued by non-government organizations (NGOs) to help [border-crossers] establish a foothold in U.S. cities and access services they can’t get through federal programs.”

The programs are mainly in blue cities and states, and thrive under the imprimatur of DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Often called “community IDs,” these instruments seemingly out of Monopoly, the board game, “are accepted by police departments, school districts, and food programs” across the country.

What’s worrisome is that “the federal government grants billions of taxpayer funds to NGOs that help illegal immigrants who cannot usually access federal programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).”

This makes the problem not one of “free immigration” but of subsidized immigration.

And that can, at least theoretically, be much more easily slowed. Stop giving money to NGOs to support this traffic. Existing taxpayers deserve at least that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags immigration, incentives, subsidy

Thought

Lysander Spooner

Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), p. 14.

Today

Times for Choosing

On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for the United States Presidency, Barry Goldwater, thereby launching Reagan’s political career. The speech came to be known as “A Time for Choosing.”

Two years earlier, Vasili Arkhipov, a flotilla commander present on the Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 in the Caribbean sea, defied the order of the sub’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, to launch a nuclear device. The captain had concluded that war had started while the submarine had been submerged. He had inferred this from the depth charges that American ships had deployed in order to force the submarine to the surface during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Captain Savitsky, seeking the necessary approval of two others on board, ordered political officer Ivan Masslenikov and the flotilla commander Vasili Arkhipov to launch a nuclear torpedo.

Masslenikov agreed. Arkhipov refused.

The date was October 27, 1962, and World War III was prevented by this one man, Arkhipov, who held his ground while facing the increasing anger of the submarine commander, refusing to approve a nuclear torpedo launch that would most almost certainly have triggered a conflict that would have doomed civilization, perhaps most or all of humanity.

That, we can now agree, was a “time for choosing” — and the correct choice was made.

insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

The C-Word

It’s a truism of popular political discourse: corruption in Washington is endemic.

The fact that so many people who serve in Congress come out far richer than when they went in is testament to the corruption, not selfless service. Studies document how it is done, regulatory regimes monitor the money and a line of cases have put some of the easiest-to-nab offenders into the pokey.

Nevertheless, the corruption continues.

Yet, the festering congressional slime may be nothing compared to what’s in the White House.

How the corruption has worked may vary president by president, though.

Remember that the Clinton clan’s Clinton Foundation was brought out into The Almost Open, in 2015, for all to see (if they wished), which certainly had something to do with the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016.

The response of the insiders against Trump, however, showed corruption going much deeper. He was attacked throughout his term in office by “his own” agencies, for corruption. And now we know for certain that many of these attacks were without foundation. Just made up.

It is not with the billionaire who left office less wealthy than he entered that official corruption is revealed, but with the ghastly Biden family.

“Sen. Chuck Grassley has accused the FBI of trying to keep quiet,” explains a recent Epoch Times story, about the “information provided by 40 human sources about possible Biden family wrongdoing.”

Though none of this has been proven in a court of law, the brazenness of it all — the corporate board spots, the payments to multiple Biden family members — swamps the senses. Still, the biggest part of the story remains — elusive. Not because there’s no evidence, but because major media and government agencies simply and continually deny the evidence as it stands, refusing to report or pursue the truth.

Allowing corruption to thrive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags corruption, crime family, Joe Biden

Today

Continental Congress

On October 26, 1774, the first Continental Congress adjourned in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Exactly one year later, King George III of Great Britain went before Parliament to declare the American colonies in rebellion. And one year later yet, to the day, in 1776, septuagenerian Benjamin Franklin (pictured, above) departed from America for France, seeking financial support for the American Revolution.

Thought

Gore Vidal

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Gore Vidal, “The State of the Union,” The Nation (September 13, 2004).

international affairs Internet controversy media and media people

Stop the Chinazis

Ours is a warring world. Long into the second year of Russia’s major incursion into Ukraine, there are not unreasonable fears in Poland and the Baltic countries that the hostilities might cross their borders as well.

Now the Middle East erupts following the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, and the IDF’s response, which our Secretary of State says carry “a likelihood of escalation.”

And I’ve yet to mention the most serious threat the people of this planet face: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In the throes of the largest military expansion in modern history, China now wields the world’s biggest army and navy. Along with the second largest economy on the planet. By comparison, Russia’s economy holds 11th place, roughly 10 percent of China’s, and Iran ranks 42nd, one-fiftieth of China’s.

Historically, the CCP is the “greatest” killing machine of all time. And now dictator-for-life Xi Jinping seems intent on bringing back those gloriously murderous Mao days — only with greater technological efficiency.

There is:

The ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjing.
The long-running and viscous pogrom against Falun Gong.
Organ harvesting from political prisoners.
The totalitarian surveillance state crushing of peaceful political dissent.
The breaking of an international agreement in order to kill civil liberties in Hong Kong early and block the push for democracy.
Brutal repression continues in Tibet.
Constant harassment and threat of military invasion against free, democratic and peaceful Taiwan.
Killing Indian soldiers in border clashes in recent years.
Sinking Vietnamese fishing boats.
Harassing Philippine vessels.

After building islands in the South China Sea against international law and then militarizing those islands (after telling the world they were not doing so), the CCP is today increasingly aggressive and belligerent in this essential waterway, which carries one-third of the world’s total shipping. China claims 90 percent of this international waterway — even swaths of the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other countries, long recognized by international treaties.

The CCP position is ridiculous . . . but don’t laugh, because these Chinazis (as Hongkongers call them) must be taken seriously.

And by preparing to meet their threat, by demonstrating our ability to mount a credible defense of Taiwan, the Philippines, and other allies in the region, hopefully we can prevent hostilities.

As individuals, we can help as well. To better “know” this enemy and to track their Chinazi aggression against their own people and those of other countries, we have launched a new website whose name says it all: StopTheChinazis.org.

As if to drive home the Nazi-esque nature of today’s CCP, most of the people writing for the site have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by the CCP . . . even against Americans . . . even here in America.

But we won’t be silenced.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, protest, StopTheChinazis.org, Tank Man

Today

Max Stirner

Adapted from a sketch by Friedrich Engels

On October 25, 1806, German philosopher Max Stirner was born. Stirner was known for his radical individualism, which under the name of “egoism” became culturally chic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, a major work that was famously attacked by Karl Marx, he translated into German Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from its original English and J.-B. Say’s A Treatise on Political Economy from its original French.