July 3 marks the 1947 birthday of Dave Barry (pictured), American columnist and author.
Five years later on the same date, Puerto Rico’s Constitution was approved by the Congress of the United States.
Paul Jacob is on the road, but — in his regular week-end wrap-up — covering all the big stories of the week, from home-schooling and school boards to Biden’s Big Oil blame shame:
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth (1938), Vol. 2, Essais et Notes.
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress un-tabled the Lee Resolution and voted to sever ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain.
One year later, to the day, Vermont became the first American territory to abolish slavery.
The egalitarians who have pushed the great city into absurdity have suffered another setback.
The earlier victory for sanity was won in a landslide election this February when parents recalled three members of the local school board for doing things like renaming 44 schools to conform to a left-wing agenda, keeping San Francisco schools closed because of outsized fears of the pandemic, and using a lottery system to undermine the magnet school Lowell High.
The lottery ended Lowell’s merit-based admissions, preventing the most qualified students from getting in unless they happened to get a lucky number. A step was thus taken toward reducing all students in the district to the same low academic level. Obviously, kids too behind or lazy to be even good students let alone top students would not suddenly become stellar academicians merely by winning a lottery.
The three board members ousted in February were the only ones then eligible to be recalled. Now the reconstituted board has voted 4-3 against extending the lottery system. The vote restores merit-based admissions.
A victory, but way too narrow. One flipped vote and the district would be back to hobbling the best and brightest.
The three anti-education board members who voted against the best possible future for the best students are Kevine Boggess, Mark Sanchez, and Matt Alexander.
They should be recalled or at least defeated in their next election. Since district parents are on the alert and active, there’s a good chance that this will happen.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn’t know.
On July 1, 1766, François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, was tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France.
Speaking at a Christian conference in Chicago, Bill Barr said that our “whole civilization” is “under sustained attack by increasingly secular forces.”
Certainly, the western tradition in which we live is “Judeo-Christian,” yet the explicitly religious aspect of our civilization is openly mocked and undermined by major progressive institutions. But is the civilization itself under attack?
Well, if you lean left you might say No.
To others, the “woke” mob that dominatesso many major organizations in America is foursquare against freedom of speech and religion, and by demanding ideological conformity on a number of issues like sexual identity and racial “equity,” seems determined to re-make society from the ground up, and have that work done under mob violence threat as well as corporate compliance and state command.
But especially interesting is what Barr said was the foundation for today’s secular revolutionaries: the public schools.
“The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr argued, as quoted by The Federalist. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral any more.”
This radical a critique of government schooling is something I used to hear only from libertarians. Barr’s advocacy of school choice is not as cautious as Republicans would advance decades ago. His is an attack on government-run schools as such: the constitutional and existential crisis in American education requires,Barr said, a direct attack upon the government monopoly over the provision of education.
The culture war just ramped up a notch.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
On June 30, 1801, Frédéric Bastiat was born. Bastiat became one of the most important French Liberal School economists, following Condilliac and Jean-Baptiste Say, best known for his books Economic Harmonies and Economic Sophisms and two monographs, “The Seen and the Unseen,” and “The Law.” He was a brilliant stylist and perceptive critic of state-managed trade. His influence on conservative, libertarian and “limited-government thought” has been vast. He died on Christmas Eve, 1850.
The emergency number of “999” was introduced in London, June 30, 1937, the first of its kind — arguably the best innovation in government service in modern times.