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First Amendment rights ideological culture international affairs

Elon Musk’s Right Answer

“By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.”

These words are from a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which beleaguered industrialist Hank Rearden rejects “this court’s right to try me” and refuses to put on a defense. Thereby giving the best defense of all.

Elon Musk didn’t give a speech.

Instead, when an EU muck-​a-​muck, Thierry Breton, sent him a letter on the eve of Musk’s Twitter interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump, a letter babbling about dire consequences for Twitter if it were to “amplify potentially harmful content [i.e., any deviation from current government dogma] in connection with events with major audience around the world,” Musk responded with a quote and a clip from the movie Tropic Thunder.

Other EU officials are now rushing to disavow Breton’s letter, widely castigated as an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election.

I can’t repeat the line Musk quoted, because we don’t use cuss words here. If you don’t like to hear such words, don’t click into the video clip. Just don’t go there.

Mega-​magnate Elon Musk is often badly wrong about China. But when he’s right, he’s right. Even super right. 

And we need a million more CEOs to be thus willing to stand up to regulators foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
Thought

Marcus Aurelius

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”

Emperor and Pontifex Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, Book XIII, § 50

Categories
Today

Against Central Banking

On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-​establish the Second Bank of the United States. This made him deeply unpopular with his former supporters in the Whig Party — which was the party of “internal improvements” as well as an anti-​Jacksonian party, and Andrew Jackson had previously set himself against central banking. It is apparent that Tyler did this because he had come to believe a central bank was unconstitutional.

We have a central bank, now, of course. It is called the Federal Reserve.

Categories
education and schooling First Amendment rights

The Racial Land Mine of First Grade

You can’t let kids get away with anything.

Schools must apply some discipline. Otherwise, chaos would ensue. Talking out of turn, pulling pigtails, passing notes … and, not least, an epidemic of expressing benign thoughts inconsistent with the poisonous race-​conscious ideology that some schools seek to inculcate.

In March 2021, a little girl known as “B.B.” in court documents got into trouble for drawing a group of classmates of different races. She added the words “Black Lives Matter” and, below that, “any life.” She gave the drawing to a black classmate to try to comfort him, as she later explained.

Had B.B. been more attuned to the racial controversies of the day — does she not follow The New York Times and CNN? — she might have realized what treacherous waters she had dived into. 

As it was, she was surprised when the school forced her to apologize to her classmate and forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school and from attending recess for two weeks.

The parents sued. A district court ruled in favor of the school, but the parents, helped by Pacific Legal Foundation, are appealing.

The district judge says that whether First Amendment protections of free speech apply here depends on whether such speech, however innocent, would “significantly interfere with the discipline needed for the school to function.”

The drawing could hardly have thus interfered unless part of the school’s “function” is to impose race-​conscious orthodoxy. 

And suppress even the slightest peep of unwary dissent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Thought

Jack Vance

It is foolish to be outraged by a fact of nature.

Jack Vance, The Brave Free Men (1972; 1973).

Categories
Today

The Wind & the Window

On August 15, 1281, the Mongolian fleet of Kublai Khan was destroyed by a “divine wind” for the second time in the Battle of Kōan.


On August 15 in 1971, President Richard Nixon ended convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors. The dollar has remained fiat money ever since, but — mysteriously! — did not succeed in retaining its previous value.

But then, the dollar under the previous quasi-​gold, Bretton-​Woods Agreement wasn’t stable either, which is why Nixon felt compelled to close the gold window.