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.
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William H. Prescott
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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.
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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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.
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Education Fraud
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.
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Between the crosses
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.
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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The one thing that the master craftsman envies in the apprentice is his fire.
H.L. Gold, The Fifth Galaxy Reader (1961), p. xi.