Freedom is the possibility of isolation . . . If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Richard Zenith, translator, 2001), text 283.
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Fernando Pessoa
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Dictator Overthrown
On December 22, 1989, Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife fled Bucharest with a helicopter as protesters erupted in cheers.
The couple was quickly caught and, on Christmas day, tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad.
There’s an old saying — some say it’s an ancient “Chinese saying,” but I first heard it attributed to an Indian philosopher — to the effect that “the best time to plant a tree is thirty years ago; the second best time is today.”
Eric Boehm, writing in Reason, riffs on it regarding federal spending: “The best time to stop borrowing heavily was yesterday (or several years ago), but the second-best time would be today. Instead, Congress is likely to make this problem even worse — again — by continuing to spend like there’s no tomorrow.”
In November, the federal government ran a $249 billion deficit, which, Boehm informs, is up $56B from the previous November.
Talk about November chills.
But worse yet is that Congress is gearing up for more. The omnibus spending bill in the works “will add between $240 billion and $585 billion to this year’s budget deficit.”
After a lifetime of deficit spending, this may seem only worth a furrow above the eyes, not an actual arched brow. But it does make a mockery of President Joe Biden’s boast of decreasing deficits on his watch. As Boehm explains, that’s merely an artifact of the Trump Era humungoid pandemic giveaways. There had to be some sort of let up from that binge. Nevertheless, the “underlying figures showed all along that the deficit situation was continuing to worsen, and that President Joe Biden’s policies were adding trillions of dollars to the deficit over the long term.”
It’s almost as if they think “money grows on trees.”
Would that it were the case, though, since there are only a limited number of trees. Taxation and especially debt are, to politicians, closer to infinity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Update: Senator Mitch McConnell said, yesterday: “I’m pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” The Republican Leader predicted passage on the 22nd.
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Will & Ariel Durant
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968), p. 72.
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Rock & Rebellion
On December 21, 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declared their independence on December 21, 1826, starting the Fredonian Rebellion.
Avant-garde rock ’n’ roll guitarist, band leader, and composer Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. In 1985, Zappa testified before the United States Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music organization co-founded by Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore. Zappa was a passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship. Describing his political views, Frank Zappa categorized himself as a “practical conservative,” or “independent.” He died in 1993.
Using PayPal never guaranteed smooth sailing.
But until recently, the problems users encountered mostly pertained to PayPal’s targeting of fraud — not with whether a user uttered wrong thoughts or pursued projects disfavored by corporate implementers of a Chinazi-style social credit system.
More and more, though, PayPal is informing individuals with unwelcome thoughts that they can no longer use PayPal and that PayPal will hold their funds “for up to 180 days . . . we’ll email you. . . .”
PayPal has, for now, rescinded — or partially and temporarily rescinded — policy provisions pledging to fine users $2,500 for “misinformation” or “hate speech.”
But PayPal is still targeting thinkers of wrongthink.
An example is Eric Finman, whose Freedom Phone provides access to apps banned elsewhere. After ousting him, PayPal held onto $1.2 million in his PayPal balance. Finman eventually recovered the money, but the delay “killed all the momentum.”
Biologist Colin Wright was ejected for criticizing gender ideology. PayPal won’t confirm this without a subpoena. But these and many other examples follow a similar pattern. Often, PayPal comes down like a ton of bricks right after a user utters a viewpoint PayPal dislikes.
I’m appalled. Many of PayPal’s founders — Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin — are appalled. They say that PayPal’s original mission of empowering people is being perverted.
We’ve seen how government officials and partisan political operatives have whispered in the ears of Facebook and Twitter, instructing such companies to censor and deplatform users. Are they also instructing PayPal?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Philip K. Dick
We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
Philip K. Dick, Man in the High Castle (1962).
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Diplomat, Spy
On December 20, 1740, Arthur Lee — Revolutionary Era diplomat, spy, and Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress — was born. He practiced law in London from 1770 to 1776, where he wrote polemics against slavery and in defense of the American colonies’ resistance to the Townshend acts and other tyrannical British policies.
He was brother to Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee.
With Twitter in the news, and revelation after revelation coming out about how governments and politicians used the social media giant to skew public opinion with algorithmic fiddling and outright bans, let’s not forget Facebook.
Adam Schiff hasn’t.
Last week, the Democrat Congressman from California, together with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), sent what amounts to an open letter to Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nicholas Clegg, urging Meta to maintain its commitment to keeping dangerous election denial content off its platform.
These Democrats worry that Facebook — Meta’s most successful product — might “alter or roll back certain misinformation policies, because they are temporary and specific to the election season,” say Schiff and Whitehouse.
Rollbacks on censorship, they say, “would be a tragic mistake. Meta must commit to strong election misinformation policies year-round, as we are still witnessing falsehoods about voting and the prior elections spreading on your platform.”
Why “must” Facebook continue to patrol its platform, striking down or underplaying “unfounded election denial content”?
Schiff and Whitehouse assert that Donald J. Trump spreads “the Big Lie” and it would be a huge mistake to allow that lie to air on their platform. They don’t want Trump allowed back on Facebook.
It’s been just weeks since Trump was permitted back on Twitter, where he has not taken up his old hyper-posting habits. Trump’s so far confining himself to his own “Truth Social” platform.
But as far as “the Big Lie” goes, would Schiff & Co. argue that The Epoch Times should also be censored? After all, in its coverage of this issue, by Frank Fang, the concluding section of the article was devoted to showing that Trump’s “Lie” might be in parts, uh, true.
Would Democrats ask Meta to suppress The Epoch Times, too?
Censorship is a hard habit to break.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Fernando Pessoa
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Richard Zenith, translator, 2001).