Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Conservatorships Now!

“Libertarians Want Control Over Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell,” the headline read.

That’s odd. Libertarians don’t usually want control over anyone.

But at issue is whether Sleepy Joe and Motionless Mitch have control over themselves.

“The U.S. Libertarian Party has filed for conservatorships for President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, referring to them as ‘geriatric elites’ mentally unfit to properly serve the American populace,” Newsweek reported on Tuesday.

“Both subjects’ ability to receive and evaluate information effectively, make decisions, and to communicate are impaired to such an extent that they lack the capacity to represent themselves or the interests of Americans,” explained a party news release.

“These men, and others like them (like Diane Feinstein and John Fetterman) are not well enough to be left alone in the house all day,” Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle argued. “How are they well enough to govern our lives and spend our tax dollars?”

She added: “so we’ve compassionately decided to step in and make those important decisions for them.”

At 80 years of age, Mr. Biden is the oldest president ever. If re-elected in 2024, he would be 86 at the conclusion of his term. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 81 years of age, has been in public office in Washington for the last 38 years.

The problem, of course, is not age as a number, but that both men have exhibited behavior that concerns us for their health and well-being. Mitch has repeatedly frozen in public, to be led away like a zoned-out sleepwalker, while the president, on his recent Vietnam trip, closed a press conference with “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”

Still, their string-pullers persist in milking each to the last drool-drip of inertial power. Their families should step in.

Until then, the Libertarian Party will have to do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Niels Bohr

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr, as quoted by Edward Teller, in “Dr. Edward Teller’s Magnificent Obsession” by Robert Coughlan, in LIFE magazine (September 6, 1954), p. 62.

Today

Missing Eleven Days?

In 1752, throughout the British Empire, September 2 was followed, the next day, by September 14, as the government adopted the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days.

On September 14, 1944, Maastricht becomes the first Dutch city to be liberated by allied forces.

general freedom individual achievement national politics & policies

Swim Against the Swamp

Mark Tapscott says Republicans should be made of sterner stuff.

He points to Senator Tommy Tuberville (R.-Ala.) as one who is showing Republicans “How to Win the Budget Battle Against the Swamp.”

Senate rules are such that a single U.S. Senator can prevent military promotions and appointments from being approved by unanimous consent (without a recorded vote). Tuberville has blocked hundreds, saying he’ll retreat only when the Biden administration drops its policy of paying for abortion-related expenses of military personnel. The policy violates the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits using tax dollars to pay for abortions.

Tuberville has stuck to his guns despite abuse. Emulate him, Tapscott enjoins.

Don’t mistake Tapscott to imply that negotiating a compromise is always legitimate, while he acknowledges: “nobody gets everything they demand, but everybody must get some of what they demand. [But only] when both sides realize that’s the only way out of an impasse.”

Demand what, though?

The principles, if any, that bring you to Congress should not be compromised. Whether forsaking them entails making any given unpalatable agreement isn’t always obvious. But often, it is. And you betray yourself by pretending otherwise.

What if, over the last 90 years, relatively decent lawmakers had never accepted deals — about spending, taxes, regulations, foreign policy, and other questions — that entailed violating the proper function of government as they understood it?

The battles, the outcomes, the procedures, and the precedents would have been much different. And I think we’d be far better off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags courage, integrity, Senator Tommy Tuberville

Thought

Richard Feynman

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Richard Feynman, address “What is Science?,” presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320.

Today

John Calvin & Desmond Tutu

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 13, 2023
No Comments on John Calvin & Desmond Tutu

John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American culture, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.

On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.

crime and punishment general freedom Second Amendment rights

Balking at the Ban

Key Albuquerque officials won’t enforce the New Mexico governor’s recent order.

At a press conference last Friday, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham had vowed to suspend the right to publicly carry firearms “in any public space” in the Albuquerque area. The temporary order, declared in response to recent shootings, was justified by the governor as an “emergency health measure.”

The response has been far from uniformly positive. In addition to officials balking, a gun-rights group, National Association for Gun Rights, is suing to block the order. And there has been talk of impeaching the governor. There was even an armed protest.

The governor is either unaware or heedless of the possibility that bad people with guns can be stopped by good people with guns — a lesson that would-be robbers belatedly learned in Maryland a couple weeks ago when they failed to rob a pub full of police officers. (They had missed the cop-bar scene in Code of Silence.) Violent criminals in the area, for their part, have somehow not agreed to defer their activities for a month in deference to her wishful thinking, however.

Officials who say they won’t cooperate with the governor’s aggressive power grab include Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, Police Chief Harold Medina, and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman.

Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen says he is wary of the risks “posed by prohibiting law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense.”

District Attorney Bregman says, “As an officer of the court, I cannot and will not enforce something that is clearly unconstitutional.”

Thus raising a standard to which people in positions of authority should repair much more often than they do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags gun ban, gun control, Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico

Thought

James Fenimore Cooper

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.
Equality of rights is a peculiar feature of democracies. These rights are properly divided into civil and political, though even these definitions are not to be taken as absolute, or as literally exact.
James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America (1838).

Today

Switzerland federalized

On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.

In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.

Accountability folly national politics & policies

Will We Comply?

Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, covid, masks

“To every COVID tyrant who wants to take away our freedom, hear these words,” intoned Donald J. Trump, eleven days ago, “we will not comply.”

The former president did not stop there: “So don’t even think about it. We will not shut down our schools. We will not accept your lockdowns. We will not abide by your mask mandates. And we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates.”

While Trump still boasts about his vaccine heroism, his supporters range from iffy to hostile on the subject. So Trump positions himself against mandates and for “freedom,” while in the past he was for masks and for lockdowns, as well as pushing the novel vaccines that cleverly (and perhaps dangerously) leveraged the spiked protein protuberances on SARS-CoV-2.

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Trump brought into the world conversation about the pandemic in 2020, is similarly trying to position himself with some trickiness and . . . care.

Fauci foresees mask recommendations, but no mandates — but note that he focuses on what federal bureaucrats say and do, not on what governors in the states do under federal bureaucrats’ advisement.

CNN’s Michael Smerconish interrogated Fauci about the many studies showing that masks are ineffective against respiratory diseases like COVID.

Fauci’s reply? Against the big study cited here in February, Fauci mentioned “other studies,” lamely and unconvincingly. He admitted that, overall — as affecting the course of the pandemic — “the data” about mask efficacy have been “less strong.” But “on an individual basis of someone protecting themselves, or protecting themselves from spreading to others,” Fauci still insists “there’s no doubt that there are many studies” showing “an advantage.”

If you buy that, you’ll wear masks forever — or comply with anything.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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