On April Fools’ Day, 1957, the BBC offered for viewers of the current affairs program “Panorama” the infamous spaghetti harvest report hoax.
By sheer coincidence (?), one definition of “noodle” is “fool.”
The “this” was a visit by the Internal Revenue Service to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi while he was testifying to Congress about his Twitter revelation research.
Normally, the Regime’s collection wing, the IRS, does not just ‘stop on by’ unannounced.
The timing, Rep. Jordan suggested, is suspicious.
And the condemnations are coming in from more than just the “right.” A journalism professor at DePauw University joined the tide of free speech advocates to note that the “this” indeed “runs contrary to every principle” of the American press freedom as instituted in the First Amendment.
The IRS has not so far clarified the visit, and Jordan is threatening to subpoena all documents related to the event.
Journalist Sharyl Attkisson — who “has long contended the Justice Department during the Obama administration illegally surveilled her while she was at CBS News,” explains Fox News — not unreasonably contends that the “IRS would have to know how their visit to Taibbi’s house would be construed, which suggests that’s exactly as they wanted it.”
The chilling effect is by design.
But why would The Regime be so blatant?
So clear in intent and corrupt in method?
Does The Regime feel impregnable?
Maybe the old lore of deviltry and contracts with the Principalities and Powers is true: evil feels compelled to signal what it is doing, at least nominally. Leaving it up to good people to see the signs.
Which we now cannot unsee.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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As social animals, we live in a narrow but apparently logical world with a well-defined identity and position. But man is the satellite of a double-star; there is also an inner-world that seems to have a completely different set of laws from the rational universe.
Colin Wilson, Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), p. 167.
On March 31, 1717, a sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ,” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.
The sermon’s text was John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced — supposedly at the request of King George I himself, who was present in the assembly — that there was no Biblical justification for any church government. Hoadly identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven, noting that Christ had not delegated His authority to any representative.
King George’s preference for the Whig Party, and for latitudinarianism in ecclesiastical policy, is widely thought to have been a strategic maneuver to degrade church power in political government.
The Army fell 25 percent short of its 2022 goal; the Air Force is 10 percent below; the Navy met its target for enlisted folks but not officers; and the Marines hit their mark but said “never before” has it been so challenging.
“The Pentagon has attributed its difficulties to a variety of factors,” reports The Washington Post, “including the nation’s low unemployment rate, school closings during the coronavirus pandemic that limited recruiters’ access to high school students and faculty, and a shifting culture in which more teens gravitate to jobs with work-life balance.”
As The Post paraphrased Army Undersecretary Gabe O. Camarillo, “the most significant barriers to service [include] fears of death or injury, suffering psychological harm, and leaving behind friends and family.”
Indeed, what with possibility of overseas deployment and combat, the job of soldier certainly does not score well in the “work-life balance” category. While a sense of mission — and the country’s need — has helped spark interest in the past, that need has been blurred by a long string of misguided military adventures in recent decades.
Sure, President Joe has repeatedly promised American military force in defense of Taiwan against repeated Chinese threats to invade.* But do young Americans perceive this as anything to them? Has the wokeness mission, stressed by the administration and the Pentagon and interrogated during the Senate hearings, occluded the more traditional sense of mission upon which the AVF has relied?
It’s time for Mr. Biden to speak to the people on the military’s core mission — including his promises, and those of other politicians. Asking them to keep his word.
Plus, a personal presidential request might add an element of responsibility and accountability from the commander-in-chief to the soldiers recruited.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch, as quoted in The Observer, September 13, 1987.
Also by Iris Murdoch on this site:
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.
First, there was another classic 20th century writer bowdlerized by publishers and copyright holders so as not to offend the easily offended: Dame Agatha Christie.
As Robby Soave wrote in Reason, the great mystery writer has had her texts altered before, in the form of the title to her 1939 novel, And Then There Were None, which was originally published as Ten Little Indians. No, that’s not right. It was something far more offensive in America — but in U.S., one edition did use the less-offensive Ten Little Indians.
But now interior content of a much more innocuous sort has been changed. “A character in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who was referred to as a Jew — because, well, he is a Jew — is now just a person,” Soave explains. “And a servant identified as black no longer has a race at all.”
Nicety-mongering went much further in the second case, however, after the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The young woman who murdered three students and three adults at the school, and was then herself shot dead, sported, online, the pronouns “he/him.” In between blaming Republicans and the talking heads of The Daily Wire for this trans-gendered person’s suicide-by-cop murder spree, some journalists couldn’t help but scold others for mis-gendering . . . him?
At least one report referred to the perpetrator (whose name I see no reason to publicize) as a “trans-woman,” though, in current lingo, she (“he”) was a “trans-man.”
It does get confusing — but as sad as it can get, there’s no mystery here.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.
Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956), chapter three, “The Romantic Outsider.”
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.