We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion.
William Hazlitt, ”On Court-Influence,” in Political Essays: with Sketches of Public Characters (1819).
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William Hazlitt
The big news? Daylight Saving Time may soon be history. “The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the Sleep Research Society and other medical groups have advocated for ending the practice, calling for the adoption of a permanent standard time that would not involve shifting forward each spring and falling back each autumn.”
That’s an important organizational voice for getting rid of Congress’s current jury-rigging scheme for commerce and recreation in America.
It has costs. Imposed on us. On our sleep patterns.
But the passage quoted from CNN was not the news angle that the “Cable News Network” story, by Jacqueline Howard, emphasized.
The deleterious effects of lurching back and forth twice a year is not what CNN headlined. The fact (and commonsense conjecture) that these bi-annual shifts are bad for us? Not as interesting as that it could all be racist.
The title of Howard’s piece is “Daylight Saving Time sheds light on lack of sleep’s disproportionate impact in communities of color.”
The key piece of information? “Growing evidence shows that lack of sleep and sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea, remain more prevalent in Black, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino communities, and these inequities can have long-term detrimental implications for physical health, even raising the risk of certain chronic diseases.”
If true, this is a political reason to get the Social Engineering Class to finally balk at the pseudo-Saving chronometer-jiggering laws.
But what does that say about said class? (A class not limited to, but somehow paradigmatically represented by, Democrats?) That they don’t care about the harm they do unless it can be shown to accrue predominantly to racial minorities?
There’s something sick here, oddly racist.
But we can accept this nonsense for the win, if it helps stop our ritual springing forward and falling back.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Monroe Doctrine
On December 2, 1823, U.S. President James Monroe delivered a speech establishing American neutrality in future European conflicts. The policy became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Though a much-discussed principle of American foreign policy, it was undermined by the Spanish-American War and proved a dead letter as the U. S. entered World War I.
Apple Inc. has a good side and a bad side.
A strong work ethic, oodles of innovativeness, much neat technology.
But a taste for censorship and a willingness to abet the censorious efforts of China’s totalitarians.
One manifestation of Apple’s contempt for unfettered discourse? Its apparent threat to kick the Twitter app off the iOS platform now that Twitter is run by someone friendlier to freedom of speech than the previous management.
Obnoxious though this would be, it’s not half as horrible as knowingly facilitating Chinazi repression. Yet Apple has recently crippled the iPhone AirDrop feature that protestors in China have used to share files like videos of the surging protests against the government’s insane zero-COVID mega-lockdown policies.
Because of a new iOS update, iPhone users in China — and only in China — can now only send files to persons not on their contact list for just ten minutes, hampering the ability of protesters and others to evade Chinese government censorship.
The company’s officers read the news. If Apple really didn’t intend to do this, all it has to do is roll out another update pronto to restore full AirDrop functionality.
Reclaim the Net notes, however, that Apple has often helped the Chinese Communist Party conduct its censorship: for one thing, by removing thousands of apps from its Chinese store at their behest. The deleted apps include VPN apps that helped users evade China’s wide-ranging and determined censorship of the Internet.
Think Different, Apple, not in lockstep with tyrants.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Alexander Pope
Never gallop Pegasus to death.
Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace (1733–1738), Epistle I, Book I, line 14.
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The “Stolen Election”
On December 1, 1824, with neither John Quincy Adams nor Andrew Jackson receiving a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the United States House of Representatives was given the task of deciding the winner in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The House selected Adams. Jackson and his supporters felt deeply aggrieved, and immediately set about preparing for the next election, which Jackson won handily. Jacksonian supporters referred to the election of 1824 as “the Stolen Election,” in no small part because Jackson had received more popular votes.
Early this year, Canadian truckers rebelled against the Canadian government’s tyrannical response to the pandemic by protesting en masse — in their trucks.
The truckers objected to being forced to accept experimental non-vaccines in order to go back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border.
The Canadian government could have instantly solved the problem by rescinding the nonsensical travel ban and letting truckers truck freely.
Instead, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau deployed a dormant triple-the-tyranny measure called the Emergencies Act to make the truckers regret that they had ever dared lift a pinky in protest against the assault on their lives and livelihoods. The insanity included imposing freezes on their bank accounts and suspending their vehicle insurance.
Now Trudeau’s actions are being investigated in the Canadian parliament.
And guess what’s come to light? You’ll get a kick out of this if you’re one of my United States readers: Trudeau was urged to do something about those darn truckers by none other than the Biden administration.
February 10: the director of the U.S. National Economic Council spoke to Canadian officials.
Same day: U.S. Transportation Boss Pete Buttigieg asked the Canadian Transportation Boss about Canada’s plan to cure the protests.
February 11: President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau spoke.
Don’t worry, Trudeau told Biden. He had a plan to end the protests. Somehow I doubt that Biden said “Fine, so long as it’s not about stomping the truckers even harder.”
Three days later, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act.
Correlation ain’t causation, but a schedule of influence indicates . . . almost . . . a conspiracy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Hazlitt
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
William Hazlitt, from ”The Times Newspaper,” in Political Essays (1819).
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A Federalist Impeached
On November 30, 1804, the United States House of Representatives began impeachment hearings against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. The House thought he was too partisan, too “Federalist.”
The Senate later acquitted Chase.
On 1835 on this date, Samuel Clemens was born, later to achieve world fame as author and humorist Mark Twain (pictured above). His most beloved books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He died in 1910.
It is perhaps worth noting that Mark Twain did write about impeachment:
I have been here a matter of ten days, but I do not know much about the place yet. There is too much weather. There is too much of it, and yet that is not the principal trouble. It is the quality rather than the quantity of it that I complain of; and more than against its quantity and its quality combined am I embittered against its character. It is tricky, it is changeable, it is to the last degree unreliable. It has catered for a political atmosphere so long that it has come at last to be thoroughly imbued with the political nature.
As politics go, so goes the weather. It trims to suit every phase of sentiment, and is always ready. To-day it is a Democrat, to-morrow a Radical, the next day neither one thing nor the other. If a Johnson man goes over to the other side, it rains; if a Radical deserts to the Administration, it snows; if New York goes Democratic, it blows—naturally enough; if Grant expresses an opinion between two whiffs of smoke, it spits a little sleet uneasily; if all is quiet on the Potomac of politics, one sees only the soft haze of Indian summer from the Capitol windows; if the President is quiet, the sun comes out; if he touches the tender gold market, it turns up cold and freezes out the speculators; if he hints at foreign troubles, it hails; if he threatens Congress, it thunders; if treason and impeachment are broached, lo, there is an earthquake!
If you are posted on politics, you are posted on the weather.
Mark Twain, The Territorial Enterprise, December 4, 1867.
Can one cosponsor a racially discriminatory program without having any idea of its nature, even if this is implied by the program’s very name?
The University of Oklahoma and other universities are cosponsors of the Oklahoma Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, a program funded by the National Science Foundation that requires beneficiaries be members of certain minority groups: “African American, Hispanic, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.”
The Alliance’s goal is to “increase recruitment, enrollment, and retention of minority students in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] programs.”
Because of the program’s discriminatory criteria, the group Do No Harm has filed civil rights complaints against a dozen Oklahoma universities. Its leader, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, points out that the terms of the federally funded program “specifically exclude white students, students from middle eastern countries, and Asian students. . . . [B]ut it is illegal to engage in such discrimination based on race.”
When first asked about the complaint, the University of Oklahoma declined comment. But after The College Fix site reported on the matter, OU spokesman Jacob Guthrie said that the university’s site had been amended to reflect the fact that any student may apply, insisting also that the program “has never been restricted by race.”
It sure looks to me as if OU officials, like those of Ithaca College (subject to a similar federal complaint in October), are now suddenly worried about legal consequences.
Anyway, Do No Harm’s filing is already doing good, helping to re-establish that old liberal idea that governments must not discriminate on grounds of race.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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