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insider corruption national politics & policies partisanship

Breaking the Jell-O Mold

jello, Congress, term limits

American politics has become amazingly “gerontocratic.” 

Congress is run by really old people, the faces of the Supreme Court Justices are as wrinkled as the Constitution they allegedly serve, and the oldest U.S. president in our history is a Silent Generation stumbler with one foot in the grave and the other in his mouth. 

Enter Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, sporting an “I” and not an “R” or a “D” next to her name, followed by a hyphen and the state from which she hails: “AZ” for Arizona. She won office as a Democrat in 2018 but with some ballyhoo left her party last December. Wikipedia says she still caucuses with the Democrats, but in recent reporting Sinema has denied this: “I’m formally aligned with the Democrats for committee purposes,” Sinema was quoted in The Daily Wire. “But apart from that I am not a part of the caucus.”

Indeed, she stopped going to the Democrats’ bi-weekly caucus lunches because, as she puts it, they are “ridiculous”: “Old dudes are eating Jell-O, everyone is talking about how great they are.”

Ah, Washington!

“The Northerners and the Westerners put cool whip on their Jell-O, and the Southerners put cottage cheese,” she adds, laying it on a bit thick.

While Senator Sinema makes much of her status as an Independent, and the increasing popularity of that stance in her home state, getting re-elected without a major party is tricky business. Politico quotes Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as being on the verge of endorsing her, as well as expressing hopes that Republicans can seduce her to the GOP side.

There is nothing wrong with slurping down Jello, per se. The real problem is unbridled power that calcifies our career politicians . . . and with them our political system.

We need term limits. If not age limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Coercive

The Intolerable Acts was the American Patriots' name for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea party. They were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston harbor. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts.

On March 24, 1765, the Kingdom of Great Britain passed the Quartering Act, which required the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.

On the same date in 1855, slavery was abolished in Venezuela.

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Categories
Thought

Anders Chydenius

[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.

Anders Chydenius, The National Gain (1765), §5.
Categories
general freedom international affairs

The Farmers Strike Back

Dutch farmers, strike, protest, global warming, climate

Dutch farmers are making progress.

As we’ve noted, farms in the Netherlands or any other European country should not be destroyed on the altar of cockamamie EU climate goals.

Dutch farmers have been calling attention to their plight by clogging the streets with tractors. What may have a longer-term salutary effect is the showing that their new party, BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer Citizen Movement), which didn’t exist five years ago, has made in the recent Dutch election.

The election had the largest voter turnout in 30 years, and the BBB are expected to secure 15 Senate seats with about 20 percent of the vote. While that may not sound like a lot if you’re used to a two-party system, but eighteen parties are represented in the Dutch parliament.

A Green-Labour alliance is also expected to win 15 seats. The ruling four-party coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, all in favor of the assault on farmers, is losing eight seats and will have 24 seats.

Wopke Hoestra, a leader of one of the government parties, said that the BBB showing was “a landslide we haven’t seen for years.” His party’s traditional farmer support “has evaporated,” reports UnHerd.com.

Hoestra: “It is an extraordinarily bitter pill.”

Aw gee. The Dutch central planners have been trying to strangle agriculture and deprive Dutch farmers of their livelihood, and the farmers — along with people who eat stuff grown on farms — don’t appreciate it!

Perhaps alienating 100 percent of a major constituency doesn’t always pay off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi

No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 27.
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Today

“Give Me Liberty”

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

On this date in 1992, economist and social philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek died. He remains best known for his 1944 political tract The Road to Serfdom.

Categories
education and schooling folly international affairs

Doctor-to-Be of Theology

Dr. Greta Thurnberg

“The year 2023 is the centenary of the passing of the Freedom of Religion Act in Finland,” writes “conferer” Martti Nissinen, promoting a future ceremony of the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Theology — in which one degree will go to . . . Greta Thunberg.

Much has been made, online, of theologians, of all people, awarding an honorary degree to a young environmental activist demonstrating no academic much less godly accomplishments. The obvious suggestion: “what she’s selling is a religion”! 

But what stands out to me? Mr. Nissinen’s declaration of this year’s ceremonial theme: “Freedom.”

Ms. Thunberg has been pestering and entreating leaders of the world to “do something” to “save the planet” from “climate change.”

What she demands is not freedom, but more

  • taxes
  • mandates
  • prohibitions. 

Whatever the actual threat may be, there is no hint of freedom in her agenda. And if you want more of that message, consult the latest alarm from the IPCC.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a bizarre restatement of past pronouncements, warning “that we are almost half way through the ‘last chance decade’ to pull the brakes on climate change.”

“The world is only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels,” explains The Guardian. “On current trends, we will shoot past the target within a decade.” 

Dooming the planet. 

Pushing this fake “global accepted goal” has a historical context. Many similar past warnings that haven’t come true. But, more pressingly, the worldwide panic over a pandemic that even to politicians increasingly appears to be a complete failure of the experts.

Why trust the Expert Climatologists when the Expert Epidemiologists have so disastrously failed us?

Just don’t ask Dr. Greta.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Karl Popper

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence ‘democracy,’ and the other ‘tyranny.’

Karl Popper, as quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954) by Maurice William Cranston, p. 112.
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Today

Colony

On March 22, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. Exactly eight years later, the colony expelled Anne Hutchinson for her religious dissent.

In 1812 on this date, Stephen Pearl Andrews was born. Andrews would go on to become an important American abolitionist, free love advocate, and theorist of “individual sovereignty,” promulgating the reforms of Josiah Warren.

Categories
general freedom international affairs

Now and Then

Tibet, China, Dalai Lama

This March in San Francisco, hundreds of Tibetans and their supporters rallied to protest the government of China and to commemorate the Tibetan uprising of 1959.

“As we are in a free nation,” one of the protesters, Lobsang Chodon, told the Epoch Times, “we have the rights to rally and protest; we have the rights to parade and speak out. We can say whatever we want to say. So we have to speak out loudly for our brothers and sisters who cannot speak out. We will fight until the end, until Tibet is freed, until we can get back to our homeland.”

In March 1959, the Dalai Lama (born 1935), champion of the rights of the Tibetan people and autonomy for Tibet, was forced into exile by the Chinese Communist Party.

This had not been the plan. 

The plan had been to kidnap the Dalai Lama as he attended a theatrical performance at the invitation of People’s Liberation Army. The PLA’s invitation or demand that the Dalai Lama attend included an insistence that he not bring his guards with him and that no one be told that he would be leaving the palace.

The Dalai Lama accepted or pretended to accept the invitation.

Word of the danger spread rapidly. On the day that he was scheduled to travel, many thousands of Tibetans surrounded his palace before the CCP could get its hands on him. And the Dalai Lama managed to flee into exile.

I welcome these protests, for they remind us of a history we must not forget.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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