Common Sense with Paul Jacob

NPR’s Wide Stance

When the term “the Deep State” entered our vocabulary, establishmentarians and insiders were annoyed. They argued the term was meaningless or vague or designated something that did not exist.

The rest of us accepted the term to identify the parts of the administrative state — coupled with the military-industrial complex’s corporations — that keep big secrets and act mostly independently of our democratic-republican institutions, including those who work behind the scenes to effect policy and mold public opinion.

The Deep State is all-too-real.

Now that National Public Radio has been dubbed “state-affiliated media” by Elon Musk’s Twitter, it may be time to add a new term to our lexicon: the Wide State.

“It was unclear why Twitter made the move,” writes David Bauder of the AP. “Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as ‘outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.’”

When NPR objected on Twitter, Musk tweeted back: “Seems accurate.”

But, but, but, they sputter: only 1 percent of NPR’s budget is from the federal government, and the organization has a well-established editorial independence!

Well, as the power of the Deep State has shown, directorial independence does not really constitute a non-state nature.

It’s obvious that many “private” institutions do exert immense political and governmental power: corporations through regulatory capture; news media through rank partisanship; all organizations that express eagerness to (and have demonstrated repeated instances of) collaborating with partisans in power.

These constitute the Wide State.

Of which NPR is a part.

Besides, if NPR lives “only” with a single percentage-point subsidy, why not cut the umbilical cord and prove its independence?

And get Twitter to change the label.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags deep state, government, NPR, regulatory capture

Thought

Walter Duranty

But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent because they are animated by fanatical conviction.
Walter Duranty, perhaps more than hinting at the extent of the devastation he was otherwise covering up for the Soviets. “Special Cable to The New York Times,” The New York Times, New York, March 31, 1933, page 13.

Today

Salt Rebel

On April 6, 1930, Mohandas K. Gandhi raised a lump of mud and salt, declaring, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”

Thus began the Salt Satyagraha.

education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Down-Shifted Demographics

Until recently, the most obvious demographic trend has been the “squaring of the curve”: more people were hitting an apparently natural limit in their eighties and nineties, rather than dying off in their forties, fifties, and sixties.

Now, however, longevity stats are showing a new feature. A graph in a fascinating article puts it like this: “Americans die earlier than the English across the income distribution, despite typically earning significantly more,” with the article quickly clarifying the specifics: “America’s mortality problem is driven primarily by deaths among the young.”

The most vulnerable members of traditional society are newborns and the aged. But now it’s those reaching their alleged prime: “one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday.”

Is it COVID? No. This trend is older than 2020, and remember, in the recent pandemic it was the aged, not the young, who experienced higher rates of morality.

An article by Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt suggests that the problem may loom beyond America, for their work shows that “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Is International,” and I don’t think it is at all out of bounds to take higher youth rates of suicidality, desperate recreational drug use, and expressed anxiety and despair — and skyrocketing transgender rates, too — as stressors related to increased death rates.

It is vital to study these things, for their main conclusion is startling and a general sign of deep cultural decay: “Teen mental health plummeted across the Western world in the early 2010s, particularly for girls and particularly in the most individualistic nations.”

We should ask ourselves: could this be related to the rise of a gerontocracy?

A society run by old people for old people may have nasty inter-generational side effects.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags children, depression, education, gerontocracy

Thought

W.H. Auden

Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
W. H. Auden, included in The Collected Shorter Poems of W. H. Auden, 1927–1957 (1964), and also retrievable from numerous websites. See also “Law Like Love.”

Today

Two Washingtons

On April 5, 1792, George Washington exercised the first presidential veto of a congressional bill, a new plan for dividing seats in the House of Representatives, which would have increased the number of seats for northern states. Washington vetoed only one other bill during his two terms in office, an act that would have reduced the number of cavalry units in the army.

On April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington (pictured above), American educator, first leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, author of 14 books, including his autobiography, Up From Slavery, was born a slave in southwestern Virginia. Though Washington faced criticism from leaders of the new NAACP, especially W.E.B. Du Bois, for not protesting the lack of civil rights more strongly, he secretly funded litigation for civil rights cases, such as challenges to southern constitutions and laws that disfranchised blacks.

Accountability crime and punishment property rights

Half-Win for Forfeiture Victim

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 4, 2023
2 Comments on Half-Win for Forfeiture Victim

In August 2020, Jerry Johnson made a mistake: he carried a large sum of money while flying from Charlotte to Phoenix to buy a semi truck for his business. Police grabbed the cash when he arrived in Phoenix.

Mr. Johnson had decided to use cash to avoid certain fees and on the assumption that traveling with cash is legal.

Perhaps it is legal according to mere law. But police often grab any large amount of cash they see someone carrying. They accuse the naïve owners of drug-running and care nothing about actual evidence.

Threatened with jail when interrogated, Johnson signed a form that, he later understood, stated that the $39,500 was not his. The government kept the cash until he could wrest it back in court.

This, you may remember, is par for the course for civil asset forfeiture in America, where government agents behave like highway robbers.

But in this case — this course — the story didn’t end well for the robbers, for Jerry Johnson has gotten back his money.

But he has not been made whole. As Land Line points out, in addition to all the time and trouble, there were the legal expenses that Johnson incurred before he obtained the help of Institute for Justice.

And Johnson also lost business revenue: “There were a lot of business opportunities I’ve missed out on because that money was just sitting in a government account.”

Thankfully, the story is not over, yet, for there are organizations like Pacific Law Foundation and Institute for Justice to help victims of government predation at no charge. In this case, it was Institute for Justice that represented the victim in court.

IJ will continue the case to press for compensation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags civil asset forfeiture, police, robbery

Thought

Sinclair Lewis

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Today

Tippecanoe (and, sadly, MLK, too)

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 4, 2023
No Comments on Tippecanoe (and, sadly, MLK, too)

On April 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia, becoming the first President of the United States to die in office and the one with the shortest term served (he died on his 32nd day as president). A renowned Indian killer (having risen to fame for his part in 1811’s Battle of Tippecanoe), a proponent of the expansion of slavery into Northwest Territories, and a Whig, Harrison won the presidency in part by turning the Democrats’ “log cabin and hard cider” aspersions on his character as the basic symbols of the campaign.

Though hardly a “limited government man,” some limited government history buffs proclaim him the Greatest President, on the ostensibly droll and possibly cynical grounds that he spent so little time in office.

On a much sadder note, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on this day in 1968.

crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

If It Can Happen to Trump

If it can happen to former President Donald Trump — something like the politically motivated ham-sandwich indictment issuing from an avid Trump-hating Democratic DA — can it happen to you and me?

It already happened to me. Fifteen years ago.

Handcuffs and leg-irons. Paul Jacob, Rick Carpenter, Susan Johnson.

The Oklahoma Three. Indicted by an arch enemy of citizen initiative, Oklahoma Apparatchik and Attorney General Drew Edmondson.

No, we hadn’t robbed a bank or gunned down the sheriff.

We were accused of not following all regulations in conducting a 2006 petition drive in Oklahoma. The fictional charge: “conspiracy to defraud the state of Oklahoma.”

The possibility of ten years in prison hung over our heads for a year and a half. In all that time, the AG started but never completed a preliminary hearing after which a judge could decide whether the indictment had enough evidence to warrant a trial. (Because it didn’t.) Then, the federal 10th Circuit declared unconstitutional the law we had allegedly violated, residency requirements for signature gatherers.

Gritting his teeth and with smoke pouring out of his ears, Drew Edmondson dismissed the charges.

If somebody with official power like Edmondson or New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg wants to wield it against you and is indifferent to the requirements of justice, he might just do that.

Can it happen to you? Maybe not. Keep your head down, never say anything somebody somewhere could dispute, don’t leave the house, always wear a disguise, never exercise your political rights in a way that might draw the attention of thin-skinned and scared denizens of the political establishment.

Do all this, and you’ll probably almost certainly be fine. Maybe.

Or just fight them anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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