On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.
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Student of Law
Last year, I noted complaints by Virginia officials about the high proportion of Asian students attending Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. These students studied too hard, supposedly.
Now we learn that TJ High administrators have been conniving to prevent students who won National Merit awards, issued for excelling on the PSAT, from being informed of this. Principal Ann Bonitatibus and another official, Brandon Kosatka, have been memory-holing the notifications for years.
You can’t report having won a National Merit award on a college application if you just don’t know.
The policy is consistent with the Fairfax County school district’s ugly new Harrison-Bergeronesque ideal of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”
Kosatka told a parent that the idea was to “recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” a nonsensical proposition. Individuals don’t just sit around being themselves; they do stuff. Kosatka also said that the principal didn’t want to hurt the feelings of non-winners of the Merit awards by acknowledging winners.
Bonitatibus and Kosatka should be fired — at least. Their job is to help students achieve, not to undercut them.
We’ll never rid the world entirely of resentment against achievement — or, for that matter, the benefits that flow from achievement. But we can teach kids that the proper response to disappointment at doing less than their best is to resolve to do better at the next opportunity.
And to be inspired — not, heaven forfend, demoralized — by the heights that others do achieve.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Friedrich Hölderlin
What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion (1797), Michael Hamburger, translator.
On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.
For well over a century, politicians have pushed Big Government/Big Business partnerships. The policy, indeed, is as old as politics. While we who like free markets often like [some of] the products of today’s biggest businesses, we must recognize that much of what these corporations sell us comes with strings attached — as we’ve found out to our dismay in the corruption of major social media outfits; as proven by the attacks on our speech and to the undermining of free elections.
Before the #TwitterFiles revelations, Michael Rectenwald, author of The Google Archipelago and other books, wrote a commentary that appeared in the pre-Christmas edition of The Epoch Times: “Who Really Owns Digital Tech?” In less than a thousand words, Rectenwald makes clear how deep governments have been involved in the tech space — particularly the Internet Space.
“Given the evidence of government start-up funding,” Rectenwald reasons, “we may have to concede the argument that the internet might have developed differently, more slowly, or not at all if the Defense Department hadn’t been involved at the outset. Likely, what we know as the internet would have become a system of private networks” — and in this dispersed-power system, free speech would not become a major issue, because not as easy a target.
As it is, however, “Twitter has operated as an instrument of the uniparty-run state, squelching whatever the regime deems ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” Rectenwald writes, giving us an ominous list of the topics of xinformation:
- warfare
- economics
- pandemics
- elections
- climate change catastrophism
- the Great Reset
There are big gains for . . . some. Big Biz/Big Gov partnerships imply gains for both partners: business people gain access to governmental power and favors, and politicians and functionaries gain leverage to mold the citizenry.
And that is where we have seen the partnership’s worst.
So far.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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For well over a century, politicians have pushed Big Government/Big Business partnerships. The policy, indeed, is as old as politics. While we who like free markets often like [some of] the products of today’s biggest businesses, we must recognize that much of what these corporations sell us comes with strings attached — as we’ve found out to our dismay in the corruption of major social media outfits; as proven by the attacks on our speech and to the undermining of free elections.
Before the #TwitterFiles revelations, Michael Rectenwald, author of The Google Archipelago and other books, wrote a commentary that appeared in the pre-Christmas edition of The Epoch Times: “Who Really Owns Digital Tech?” In less than a thousand words, Rectenwald makes clear how deep governments have been involved in the tech space — particularly the Internet Space.
“Given the evidence of government start-up funding,” Rectenwald reasons, “we may have to concede the argument that the internet might have developed differently, more slowly, or not at all if the Defense Department hadn’t been involved at the outset. Likely, what we know as the internet would have become a system of private networks” — and in this dispersed-power system, free speech would not become a major issue, because not as easy a target.
As it is, however, “Twitter has operated as an instrument of the uniparty-run state, squelching whatever the regime deems ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” Rectenwald writes, giving us an ominous list of the topics of xinformation:
- warfare
- economics
- pandemics
- elections
- climate change catastrophism
- the Great Reset
There are big gains for . . . some. Big Biz/Big Gov partnerships imply gains for both partners: business people gain access to governmental power and favors, and politicians and functionaries gain leverage to mold the citizenry.
And that is where we have seen the partnership’s worst.
So far.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Immanuel Kant
The deceiver is really the fool.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).
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Arrest; Resignation
On December 28, 1797, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason, after being tried (and convicted) in absentia on December 26. Prior to moving to France, Paine had been an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense. Paine then moved to Paris to help along the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him. Paine had not earned friends in the Revolution with his vocal opposition to capital punishment.
“During the whole of my imprisonment,” Paine later wrote, “prior to the fall of Robespierre, there was no time when I could think my life worth twenty-four hours, and my mind was made up to meet its fate. The Americans in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim me, but without success.”
Paine’s imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America. Future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.
With the publication of Paine’s secular tract, The Age of Reason — a great part of which he wrote in French prison — the American population turned against him, and he died penniless in New York in 1809.
On this date in 1832, John C. Calhoun resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first to do so.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, China’s behavior has been . . . opaque. Unhelpful. Suspicious. The Chinese Communist Government may have been involved in the creation of the virus, but, if so,
- it was likely created with the help of Fauci and U.S. taxpayers, and
- could have been deliberately or accidentally leaked to the Wuhan population. In any case,
- the lack of transparency early on meant a worldwide spread of the contagion.
That latter neglect may be especially galling to all of us outside of China, but it was no comfort inside China either, since as the disease hit the Chinese their leaders quickly resorted to nazi-like tactics. Most specifically, the government stuck to a Zero-COVID policy, which was astoundingly cruel and totalitarian.
That policy has been shown to have zero efficacy. “As many as 37 million people are contracting COVID-19 in a single day in China,” The Epoch Times informs us, “according to leaked minutes from a meeting of the country’s top health body confirmed by multiple news outlets.”
What’s gone wrong? Well, “the regime’s stringent zero-COVID policy has left the Chinese public with little natural immunity against COVID-19’s highly contagious Omicron variant, which appears to be spinning out of control in the country.”
Alas, both in China and in the West, the notion of natural immunity was evaded. America’s government-funded experts have discouraged discussion of it, and the Chinese rulers thought it more important to prevent any form of spread. Hence totalitarian lockdowns.
All pointless, now, as hospitals and morgues are flooded with COVID patients from a weakened populace.
Is this just human stupidity? Or is it something more sinister?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jamsetji Tata
Freedom without the strength to support it and, if need be, defend it, would be a cruel delusion.
Jamsetji Tata