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Accountability general freedom local leaders term limits

Freedom in Granite

Governor Sununu, New Hampshire

“In the past two years,” the Cato Institute announced last January, “Governor [Chris] Sununu and the State of New Hampshire have topped Cato’s rankings for both our Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors and our recently released Freedom in the 50 States report.”

How? Why? 

The governor points to “a long history of local control,” insisting that “town meetings matter.” 

He also cites the state’s executive council which, along with the governor, publicly debates “every contract over $10,000,” as well as a two-year gubernatorial term that “sucks” for him but gives citizens “all the say.”

Most of all, consider the sheer size of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives.

“When you have one of the largest parliamentary bodies in the free world with 400 members representing only 1.4 million people,” Gov. Sununu explains, “by definition” it has to be “one of the most representative bodies of government in the world.”

He elaborates that “they only get paid a hundred bucks a year. I mean, it’s like herding cats. Don’t get me wrong, it has its ups and downs. But that’s one state representative for about every 3,000 people. Like town selectmen, your representative in Concord is going to be somebody you know, somebody you see at the grocery store, somebody you can easily reach and who can hear you. It’s very different from other states where you have one person representing a district with tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

“Which means the control is really at the individual level,” Sununu adds, and “an individual citizen has much more say on how their taxes are spent or what’s going on in their schools or whether that pothole is going to get filled or not.” 

Sounds like citizens are more in charge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

William H. Prescott

The history of literature is the history of the human mind.

William H. Prescott, “Chateaubriand’s English Literature” in Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (1845), p. 245.

Categories
Today

Cinco de Mayo

In 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza stopped a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico — an event leading to the popular “Cinco de Mayo” celebration.

No cause for celebration, however, is the anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth 204 years ago.

Categories
government transparency progress responsibility

UFOs and Other Foes

invisible, invisibility cloak, UFO, defense, disclosure

Frivolous federal spending: you don’t approve; I don’t approve. Which is why I’m usually on Reason magazine’s side when it comes to government prodigality. But complaining about the money spent by the Pentagon to make sense of the UFO phenomenon misses the bigger story.

In “The Feds Spent $22 Million Researching Invisibility Cloaks, UFOs, and a Tunnel Through the Moon,” Fiona Harrigan sets up the problem: “The 2008 Defense Supplemental Appropriation Act included $10 million for the AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] and the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act allotted $12 million, amounting to $22 million over five years. It is unclear how much of that money went toward researching UFOs and how much went toward invisibility cloaks, because how the money was used has been shrouded in secrecy.”

If when I’ve talked about these programs before I didn’t much discuss invisibility cloaks or spintronics and other ancillary aspects of UFO disclosure, it’s because I knew little about them . . . and neither, I gather, does Ms. Harrigan.

What they all show is the first teensy bit of transparency . . . on the apparently non-dismissible persistence of aerial phenomena that were dubbed UFOs* by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt in his 1956 study, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The military has apparently known about the puzzling reality of this phenomena for a long time. If we are to believe current reports, or past leaked documents like the Twining Memo, the objects observed by the military are (contrary to official statements) real objects intelligently controlled that do not behave according to the laws of physics that we were taught in school.

Ms. Harrigan warns us of a very different irregularity: how the research was contracted under the authorizing legislation.

That sure seems like the lesser story. 

The biggest story? Cover-up. Investigation into UFOs couldn’t be done in-house because of the layers of secrecy already in place. Non-disclosure agreements’ and top-level secrecy compartmentalization required outsourcing. We may have to accept some irregularities . . . the regular methods having led to secrecy of extreme sorts. 

The kind that makes the Deep State deep.

And as for invisibility cloaks: they are associated with UFOs, and would obviously be very useful for the military. Besides, cloaking technology is now in use, no longer a mere sci-fi dream.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ruppelt thought the initials should be pronounced as one word: YOU-foe!

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Karl Jaspers

Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.

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Today

Prescott, Tiananmen, and the Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1796, American historian William H. Prescott was born. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and his Conquest of Peru remain classic works of well-researched, “scientific history.” Prescott, Arizona, was named in his honor.

The May Fourth Movement began on May 4, in 1919: Student demonstrations took place in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, protesting the Treaty of Versailles, which transferred Chinese territory to Japan.

In 1961 on May 4, the “Freedom Riders” began a bus trip through the South.

Categories
education and schooling subsidy

Education Fraud

student, debt, relief

It’s a mess.

Families are often sold a bill of goods regarding higher education.

Unless a student pursues a subject like computer science, architecture, engineering, or medicine, it may take decades to pay off student loans.

Graduates who specialized in Advanced Basket Weaving, the Sociology of Postmodern Literary Stylings, and Marxist Techniques for Making White People Feel Guilty just might snag a high-paying job as an Ivy League professor or senior manager of a corporate “antiracism” task force. But beyond those few spots, opportunities are scant.

And, of course, many people who pursued legitimate studies in the liberal arts or technical subjects also don’t make enough to emerge from massive debt any decade soon. Nor does every STEM grad necessarily cash in. Individual results vary.

What to do?

The Biden administration has decided to wipe out student debt en masse, expanding the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program so that about 40,000 student-loan borrowers escape debt immediately and the debt of millions of others is slashed.

But is forcing others to pay this debt through their taxes — parents and children who perhaps carefully avoided taking out student loans — a just and practical answer to the problem?

The long-term solution is to get the government out of the business of subsidizing higher education in any manner, whether in the form of direct payments to schools or loans to students. Without the massive subsidies, tuition costs would decline.

The short-term solution? Launch an investigation into whether the U.S. Department of Education, colleges and universities — along with both Republican and Democratic administrations — have engaged in fraud against those who took out the loans. 

If students were defrauded, first seek redress from the perpetrators. Not the taxpayers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Matt Walsh

Outlets like Time magazine tell us eating bugs is the solution to all of your problems, and, you know, the people telling you to do it aren’t doing it themselves, as always, but they want you to eat bugs. That’s why recently I’ve come to the realization of something: It’s not enough to not eat bugs; you have to be anti-bug-eating. And that requires action against the bug-eating movement — “Big Bug.” The best way to do this is to eat more meat.

Matt Walsh, on his podcast touting a sponsor, GoodRanchers.com/WALSH.
Categories
Today

Between the crosses

https://flic.kr/p/MwgUv

In 1791, the Constitution of May 3, the first modern constitution in Europe, was proclaimed by the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

On May 3 in 1915, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae composed the poem “In Flanders Fields,” the most famous poem of World War I. The Canadian physician wrote it after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. It is in the form of a rondeau.

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Homeland Censorship Board

Elon Musk, Twitter, free speech, censorship, First Amendment

We’re in a twilight zone beyond mere “mission creep” now. 

Two months ago, creeps at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created a new censorship board, secret until its existence was revealed in congressional testimony.

This disinformatively named Disinformation Governance Board is headed by an open critic of the First Amendment, Nina Jankowicz. The purpose of the amendment being to protect freedom of speech and other rights from governmental assault, the new board and its director are especially alarming.

The DHS was formed after 9/11 to protect national security and combat terrorism, a form of politically motivated violence. And whatever the exact definition of “terrorism” should be, we can at least agree that arguing about the origins and issues of elections, pandemics, or Russian invasions doesn’t qualify. The bitterest clashing over facts is just speech, unless part and parcel of criminal acts.

But the purpose of the Disinformation Board is to combat and “address this threat” of election disinformation.

Merriam-Webster defines “disinformation” as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread” to “influence public opinion or obscure the truth.”

The First Amendment protects dishonest and mistaken honest speech, not just infallible honest speech. But by “disinformation,” foes of freedom of speech often mean “any speech we dispute.”

If the government can repress any speech that it chooses to label “disinformation,” that portends the end of freedom of speech. 

The very existence of the Disinformation Board warrants a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

And since disinformation was coined to designate, specifically, government-concocted and distributed misinformation — a term of art in the “intelligence” and propaganda biz, called dezinformatsiya by Stalin  — it is especially rich to see the current administration apply it directly against the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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