Paul Jacob is on something like a diplomatic mission in London. He explains all, and covers the biggest story of last week in this latest episode of This Week in Common Sense.
We are presenting the video first — on Rumble, of course — because of, well, technical difficulties. (Most weekends the audio precedes the video.) Here we go:
Écrasez l’infâme!
Make War on Injustice!
Voltaire’s rallying cry, launched in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764) — literally, ‘Crush the infamous!’, but more idiomatically translated as ‘Make War on Injustice!’ or ‘Destroy Bigotry!’
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, was born on October 30, 1748.
On the same date two hundred twenty years later, American journalist, novelist and author Rose Wilder Lane died. Lane is perhaps best known, today, for her editorial work — some say “ghost writing” — of her mother’s Little House on the Prairie books for children. Her non-fiction The Discovery of Freedom was published in 1943, the same year as a similarly themed book, The God of the Machine, was published by her friend Isabel Paterson.
The In-N-Out Burger restaurant won’t kick out customers who fail to display a “vaccine passport” proving they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19.
In-N-Out has restaurants in California and the Southwest. And it has one in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has ordered restaurants to enforce the city’s vaccine mandate.
Arnie Wensinger, an attorney for the chain, has explained the company’s defiance.
“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” he said on KPIX-TV. “It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason. [This is] intrusive, improper, and offensive.”
In an age of weasel words and abject apologies for non-wrongdoing, In-N-Out Burger is forthright in defense of itself and its customers.
Not without cost. The health department closed the restaurant for mandate violations, and it was able to partially reopen only for takeout and drive-through orders.
Indoor dining is verboten.
The San Francisco health department says that the restaurant was informed “multiple times about the proof of vaccination requirement,” as if the mere repetition of such an order were enough to justify it. The “outreach team provided information so the restaurant could comply. . . .”
Of course, the folks at In-N-Out Burger know that they “could comply.” And the San Francisco government has also been provided with information on why they should leave In-N-Out alone. Would repetition help?
Leave In-N-Out alone.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Remember, to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.
Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), p. 12.
On October 29, 539 BC, Cyrus the Great entered the city of Babylon as conqueror. His general policy of religious toleration would be extended to the exiled Hebrews, who were, not long after, allowed to return to their homeland.
On the same date in 1923 AD, the Ottomon Empire’s dissolution marked the start of the Turkish Republic.
“Two words from Taiwan’s leader threaten to upend U.S.-China ties,” headlined The Japan Times’ story.
Weeks ago, China’s totalitarian leader Xi Jinping mentioned his itch for peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan.* Or else. No pause in his warplanes crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, nor withdrawal of the continual threat of military invasion.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen offered that the two countries were “not subordinate” to each other — which deeply hurt Xi’s feelings because . . . well, his Chinazis have their hearts set on subordinating Taiwan. In fact, the only thing preventing that deadly, freedom-suffocating Sino-subordination is the united weight — military and economic — of allied countries.
Japan, for instance. And the European Union, too — which just voted to deepen ties to Taiwan, ignoring Beijing’s demand to shun the island nation.
At a CNN “town hall” last week, President Joe Biden vowed the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Diplomatic folk tried to walk that back to “strategic ambiguity,” but billions of Asians heard him say it.
“To whom does Taiwan belong?” asked Pat Buchanan earlier this year, in a column trudging through 70 years of weaselly-worded communiqués and diplomatic understandings.
But comedian John Oliver counters that “people who aren’t Taiwanese making decisions for Taiwan is a bit f***ing played out, historically.”
“So maybe the best thing we can do is move past talking about Taiwan like it’s some kind of poker chip in a never-ending game of us versus them,” he concluded on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. “Because the fact is Taiwan is not a plucky bulwark against the Red Menace, nor is it some island-sized Viagra to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Taiwan is 23 million people who, in the face of considerable odds, have built a free democratic society and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit.”
Let’s call it: Not subordinate.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Since Taiwan has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China, there can be no prefix “re” in the threatened unification — by missiles and machine guns.
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Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.
James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasion (1917).
On October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland, despite the fact that the monument was not a federally funded project.
Resolved: pedagogic enthusiasm plus naivety about the likely reactions of the “safe space” brigade shouldn’t be a burning-at-the-stake kind of offense.
Or any kind of firing offense.
Bright Sheng, University of Michigan professor of composition and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, showed his class the 1965 movie “Othello,” which stars Laurence Olivier. Olivier was in blackface.
Sheng failed to give a trigger warning so that safe-space aficionados could either gird their loins or skip the class.
Uh oh.
As Reason magazine’s Robby Soave notes, Olivier’s use of blackface “was controversial even at the time.”
Given the sub-venial nature of the sin, what might any sane-but-offended student have done? Go up after class and say, “Gee, Professor Sheng, love your class, but shouldn’t you have made some preparatory comment about the blackface? Well, have a nice day.”
But no. It’s got to be a wailing reenactment of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with rabid students (and others) demanding Sheng be booted. No attention to context, no proportionality, no common sense.
Sheng has offered an abject apology, saying, in part, that “time has changed, and I made a mistake in showing the film, and I am very sorry.”
Was the mob demanding his ouster appeased? No. The mob never is.
The professor has for now stopped teaching his class, and the university is “investigating.”
The investigation actually needed, alas, will not be done. What administrators must discover is a backbone.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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