On January 7, 1940, the Finnish 9th Division completely destroyed the much-larger Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi Road, in a crucial battle during Finland’s Winter War.
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Winter War
In 2019, California imposed a law to force many independent contractors to become standard employees if they wanted to keep working for erstwhile clients.
AB5 threw many gig workers out of work. Many lost all of their clients, who typically could not afford to simply convert contractors from whom they had been buying stuff once in a while into regular employees.
Even in the original legislation, exemptions from AB5 were granted for certain contractors. In response to angry controversy, many more categories of contractors were added to the exemption list. Then passage of Proposition 22 allowed Uber and Lyft drivers to continue as contractors.
But guess who still may not hire independent contractors in California? People running political campaigns and petition drives, who often can’t afford to hire many or any employees. The Wall Street Journal notes that today in California, “people who sell ‘consumer products’ count as ‘direct salespersons,’ while those who work on political campaigns or ballot petitions must be counted as employees.”
Thus, under the state’s current anti-contractor law, political speech is impaired in a way that sundry commercial speech is not.
A group called Moving Oxnard Forward has taken their First Amendment-based complaint about this injustice to court, with the help of the Institute for Free Speech. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the group. But the case can proceed now to the full Ninth Circuit or on to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the High Court, I think we petitioners and speakers of political speech would probably win.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Voltaire, Zadig (1747).
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Montessori & a Mess
On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.
In 1912 on this date New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.
On January 6, 2021, lame duck President Donald John Trump gave a speech in Washington, D.C., aiming to rouse his supporters to pressure the U.S. Senate not to certify some states’ Electoral College votes in Election 2020, to address “election fraud.” Before his speech ended, and under questionable circumstances, some of his supporters (along with some possible false flag agents) broke into the Capitol to set off one of the great political controversies of our time.
What do California and Canada have in common, aside from bone-chilling temperatures?
Well, the fact that they’re trying to chill the discourse of doctors.
In California, a new law empowers medical boards to punish doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19. The misinformative nature of a stated view about the pandemic is allegedly proved by the mere fact that it contradicts a putative scientific “consensus.”
Such laws rely on misinformation for their very existence.
When coping with complex, incomplete, sometimes murky evidence, do scientists and others ever simply disagree, even fundamentally, on the road to scientific “consensus”? Can a consensus ever be wrong? Does anybody ever hew to an asserted consensus out of fearful desire to conform rather than honest intellectual agreement?
To ask these questions is to answer them. But let’s move on.
To Canada — and the case of Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose professional status in the country is being jeopardized because of medical and/or political views, like opinions criticizing “climate change models,” “surgery on gender dysphoric minors,” and Canadian officials who threatened “to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protesters.”
Stated on social media, these opinions are apparently incendiary enough — i.e., candid enough — to vex Canada’s powerful medical censors.
According to Peterson, the Ontario College of Psychologists demands that he submit to “mandatory social-media communication retraining” because of his views. If he doesn’t comply, he may lose his license.
Such repressive impulses, he says, are “way more widespread than you might think.”
It’s cold outside.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ambrose Bierce
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 8 (1911), § “Epigrams” (p. 369.).
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Ford’s Five
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
“Is this just human stupidity?”
I asked that, last week, regarding the flourishing of the Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 in China. The Communist-run country is undergoing a huge spike in infections, millions of infections, after years now of totalitarian tracking and quarantine protocols.
I had mentioned the regime’s lack of interest in encouraging the growth of natural immunity, in its various forms. Instead of helping people cope with the new disease, the Chinazis thought they could corral their society to prevent the spread.
That broke down completely, this winter.
But was the quarantine policy and its breakdown just plain old stupidity? Folly in familiar forms? “Or is it something more sinister?”
Well, yesterday Dr. John Campbell focused his regular online talk on how the totalitarian quarantines fell apart.
The Chinese infection rate had been relatively low — to the extent that we can trust statistics from a lying regime — because of the thoroughgoing nature of the quarantine policies, which immiserated millions, and caused numerous deaths, just as lockdowns would do in almost any society.
While acknowledging the protests that swept China, Campbell argues that a bigger factor in ending the policy was the fact that many Chinese were bribing officials to obtain negative results on the mandatory tests, thereby gaining license to go about as normal. And spread the disease — quite rapidly — in a low-immunity society, low in part because the CCP chose the Zero COVID policy . . . rather than a strategy of a freer society.
Still, in China and America, the totalitarian itch remains. The dream of zero transmission seems “rational” to many people, especially those who demand that The State solve every problem. It hasn’t worked anywhere, though.
And not just due to the chronic bribery and corruption fostered by authoritarian societies, but because isn’t good medical or political science.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
Voltaire, Letter to Louise Dorothea of Meiningen, duchess of Saxe-Gotha Madame (January 30, 1762).
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King Charles
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.