On Jan. 27, 1973, President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, announced an end to the military draft in favor of a system of voluntary enlistment. Since 1973, the United States armed forces have been known as the All-Volunteer Force.
Weeks ago, elementary school teacher Abigail Zwerner was shot by a first grader in their Newport News, Virginia, classroom. Authorities are not sure of the precise motive but have called the attack “intentional.”
Zwerner remains hospitalized in stable condition, while her child assailant is in emergency custody undergoing “court-ordered mental health treatment.”*
School officials received a tip that the boy had brought a gun to school but did not find the weapon in their search.
More disturbing, The Post interviewed “educators claiming that Zwerner raised alarms . . . and sought assistance” but “that school administrators waved away grave concerns about the 6-year-old’s conduct.” The lad reportedly “threw furniture and other items in class,” once “barricaded the doors to a classroom, preventing a teacher and students from leaving,” and “was known campuswide for disruptive and violent behavior.”
One educator revealed that “the boy wrote a note telling a teacher he hated her and wanted to light her on fire and watch her die.” When brought “to the attention of Richneck administrators,” however, the teacher “was told to drop the matter.
“Several teachers said they received no support when they faced violence in the classroom or attacks from students,” the article informed. “Some speakers claimed the district is more interested in keeping discipline statistics low than in taking meaningful action to address students’ problems.”
The Post’s story was hampered by numerous school personnel refusing to talk citing their fear of reprisals from school authorities.
While mental health help must be addressed, there is no solution to problems if administrators act like crooked politicians, simply sweeping aside serious issues.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In Virginia, a person must be seven years of age to be charged with a crime, so the first grader will not be prosecuted.
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Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone’s B.S. too seriously, especially your own.
Robert Anton Wilson, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1993, 1996).
On January 26, 1992, Boris Yeltsin announced that Russia would stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.
She even gave China a run in that race to medical totalitarianism.
Tellingly, the coverage in the Washington Post went through tens of paragraphs — much of it holding her up as some kind of hero for pushing lockdown and vax mandate policies as if they exemplified her fabled “personal style of consensus-based governance” — before explaining the most likely reason for her resignation: “In recent months, Ardern’s broader popularity had begun to slip” and “her party is widely expected to lose this year’s election.”
My, “consensus” sure evaporated fast.
Top-down commands are of course not consensus, which voters tend to figure out sooner or later.
The once toothsome, now merely skeletally toothy, politician leaves in ignominy as “the consensus” about COVID shifts worldwide, as people realize they’ve been had: that the lockdowns didn’t save lives (excess deaths now being a big deal around the world) and the vaccines were problematic at best. From the start.
Ardern is not the only politician who rode the wave of the forced pseudo-consensus on coronavirus only to collapse in defeat. New York Governor Cuomo was the first to suffer that disgrace. There will be many others — not least, perhaps, contenders for the 2024 presidency, Trump and Biden.
Perhaps more important than the fate of any single politician is what scientists and other “experts” are beginning to admit: that the figures of hospitalizations and deaths that spurred much of the panic constituted demonstrable misinformation. Bad data — which of course we realized here early on.
Unfortunately, the media’s “experts” — like CNN’s and WaPo’s go-to gal Dr. Leana Wen — tend not to leave in infamy, despite their complicity in spreading falsities that allowed politicians to wreak so much damage.
That would require, you see, CNN and WaPo to admit they had spread the dreaded “misinformation and disinformation” which they proclaim only others do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, “To know one’s self.” And what was easy, “To advise another.”
Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book I: “The Seven Sages.”
On January 25, 1787, Shays’ Rebellion experienced its largest confrontation, outside the Springfield Armory, with four of the rebels dead, 20 wounded.
The rebellion was a key moment in United States history. Daniel Shays and his followers objected to Massachussetts’s high taxes and rampant cronyism. The revolt, which was completely suppressed, led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and drawing George Washington from his retirement.
The Chinazi regime bans all kinds of communication, even images of Winnie the Pooh (because of its use as a symbol of chubby Dictator Xi). It has imposed all manner of censorship on the Internet, often with the help of western technology companies. And it has imprisoned many of its critics.
China would like the whole world to be the same way. It would be easier to shut critics up if they had no place to escape to, no place where they could continue publicly rebuking the Chinese government.
And China has a new weapon with which to expand its censorship regime, the globally popular excuse for outlawing disagreement with official doctrines that consists of characterizing all contrary opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
The Chinese government wants nations to go much further than merely urging social media companies to ban posts or suspend users, the approach that U.S. officials have been following in recent years. At a recent United Nations meeting on cybercrime and in a related document (p. 18), China has urged that disseminating “false information that could result in serious social disorder” be everywhere established as “criminal offenses.”
Reclaim the Net observes that this proposal “is likely to be contested by Western countries, even though many of them have been copying parts of China’s playbook.”
Certainly, the governments of other countries would be in a better position to oppose China’s global censorship agenda if they relinquished their own censorship agendas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it.
Robert Anton Wilson, Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998).
On January 24, 1732, French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American) Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was born. He proved instrumental in securing armaments for the America Revolution, but remains best known for his three “Figaro” plays, Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro and La Mère coupable. The plays remain memorable today chiefly for their operatic settings by Mozart and Rossini.
Beaumarchais died May 18, 1799.