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Today

Yves Guyot

On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born.

A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari. Guyot died on February 22, 1928.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840 – 1885).

Stay Puft America

FDA, regulations, food, rules, diet, fads

“It was perhaps just a matter of time before issues of health — not policies over health-care provision but actual human health — would enter into our politics,” surmises Jeffrey A. Tucker in The Epoch Times. “We look at pictures of people in cities or at the beach in the 1970s and compare them with today and the results are shocking. We have changed as people and for the worse.”

Jeff Tucker is trying to explain the background for a big policy-interest shift, as a result of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endorsement of Donald J. Trump. Kennedy’s big issue is health, and Trump’s gone along with it, willing to make it a part of his agenda.

In “How Did Health Become a Political Issue?” Tucker focuses first on the COVID debacle, moving on to the real culprit: government.

Or, technically, government and industry, combined into one huge Stay Puft Marshmallow of Destruction. For behind our changing eating patterns and food habits are government tariffs, subsidies, researchstrategies, diet crazes, and much, much more.

Perhaps even bigger than Big Pharma is Big Agribiz, a conglomerate of companies pushing lab-created additives and worse on a trusting public, or, as Tucker puts it, “many decades of heavy government subsidies for the worst food, and so much in the way of corn, soy, and wheat are produced that we’ve invented new ways to use it.”

But it’s not really “we’ve.” The Standard American Diet (SAD) wouldn’t have existed were it not for the USDA and the FDA and a whole alphabet soup of bureaus captured by the industries they were assigned to regulate, working together in a Big Biz/Gov partnership to create a Big Problem in the general population.

Somehow, though, when asked about the government causes of SAD, RFKj said he wouldn’t abolish anything. He merely wants “better regulations.”

Someone needs a fast …from Big Government.

That someone? Kennedy.

And America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags diet, fads, FDA, food, regulations, rules

Thought

Herbert Spencer

Regarding Science as a gradually increasing sphere, we may say that every addition to its surface does but bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience. There must ever remain therefore two antithetical modes of mental action. Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something which phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge cannot monopolize consciousness — if it must always continue possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends knowledge; then there can never cease to be a place for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter is that which passes the sphere of experience.
Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1867).

Today

First President of Congress

Post author By Editor
Post date September 5, 2024
No Comments on First President of Congress

Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.

election law First Amendment rights

How Deep Is Your Fake?

deep fake, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, lizards

Monday last, a group of Democratic congressfolk “sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), asking the agency to adopt regulations prohibiting the creation of deepfakes of election candidates,” Emma Camp tells us in last Thursday’s Reason article, “These Democrats Want the FEC To Crack Down on Elon Musk’s Grok.”

Current law already “prohibits a candidate for federal office or an employee or agent of a candidate from fraudulently misrepresenting themselves, committee, or organization under their control,” the letter states, but candidates have already been caught using “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in campaign ads to depict themselves or another candidate engaged in an action that did not happen or saying something the depicted candidate did not say.”

OK. Regardless of the merit of current regulation, the apparent fact that some political actors have defied the rule (perhaps out of ignorance) doesn’t necessitate more legislation. Why not just let the wheels of justice, or what passes for it in the FEC realm, go on doing what they’re doing?

Because Elon Musk.

Specifically, his X (“Twitter”) platform recently launched “Grok‑2,” an AI for the creation of pictorial representations (not unlike those used here at ThisIsCommonSense.org). And, shock of shocks, there are no rules in place for ordinary people to take artistic license at those politicians they hate and and for those politicians they don’t.

As Ms. Camp notes, but the legislators don’t, most of these efforts have been for comic effect.

The Democrats don’t like this.

They request expeditious consideration for the creation, by the FEC, of new rules to “regulate” (suppress) AI by ordinary users to maintain the ostensible integrity of “our democracy.”

We have, Ms. Camp not unreasonably concludes, been pretty good at detecting “deep fakes” so far.

Besides, the big problem in politics is shallow fakes.

They’re everywhere. They’re called politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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