Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Jack Woodford

It has been said that youngsters go to jail to learn crime as others go to college to learn who won the Peloponnesian wars and the names of the generals, and how to play football.

It’s true. All penitentiaries are crime schools for the young with brilliant professors, empirical professors, doing the pitching. How any criminal could go to such a school and fail to come out a better criminal, I cannot imagine — because the teaching and the ideas are brilliant, even if in most cases the premise stinks, as in paranoia.

It would be hard for a you gster to see wherein the premise is faulty. A class in just this in the educational department would be a very good idea.

For instance, one thing youngsters are taught by old cons is that it is vaguely wrong to steal from individuals; but that to heist a corporation is the acme of Robinhoodesque virtue. It does not occur to the youngsters that corporations are composed of individuals. . . .
Jack Woodford, on prison life in his personal report on his short time incarcerated, Home Away From Home (1962), p. 194.

Today

On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.

Sartre rejected the award on account of having rejected previous honors. In this he was not dissimilar from philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who refused many doctorates late in life, on the grounds that such awards did an old man no good, and perhaps because he was a cantankerous old coot — a judgment that surely applied also to the later French philosopher.

Sartre is best known for his novel Nausea (1938), his play No Exit (1944) and his treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). One of his main themes was freedom, a concept better explored at the fundamental level of the individual human being than politically, since he become a “Marxist” of sorts . . . the precise nature of which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He failed to complete his tetralogy of novels, Roads to Freedom, never finishing the final volume.

Independent of the Box

Karine Jean-Pierre, Democratic Party, media, news, outside the box

Today, Karine Jean-Pierre’s “long-awaited” Independent, a book on her recent transformation into an “independent” political activist/theorist/shill, hits the bookstores, with Amazon promising to deliver the tome on the 24th.

I write about it now hoping never to have to write about it later. You guessed it: I’m not planning on reading the thing.

I did, however, cover her turn-of-coat re-alignment/what-have-you in June. “I think we need to stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes,” I quoted her in “Rats-a-Jumpin’.”

Whatever else, she had certainly not resisted cliché!

But can we be sure of her sincerity? It’s hard to imagine a paid fibber writing a book and expecting it to be taken at face value. Still, the story is her story, not the full story, so there may be some truth in it.

“The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career,” The Epoch Times quotes h e r in apparent sincere mode. “Everything I’d done to make people’s lives better had been connected to it. The party was the vehicle that allowed me not just to have a front seat to history, working first on [President Barack] Obama’s presidential campaign then in his administration, but also to make some history of my own as the first Black woman and openly queer person to ever be a White House press secretary. Never had I considered leaving the party until now.”

This may possibly be seen as galling to long-term independents: much ado about a latecomer’s anguish.

Tellingly, there’s no mention, in the pre-publication buzz, of Russiagate or the Epstein case — that is, something that might make the book worthwhile. Only her in-the-box account of Biden’s competence provides any interest at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

George Santayana

All philosophies have the common property of being speculative, and, therefore, their immediate influence on those who hold them is in many ways alike, however opposed the theories may be to one another: they all make people theoretical. In this sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality, it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation, accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and makes the sorry escapades of human nature from convention seem even more ignominious than its ruling prejudices.
George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (1916), Chapter XVI, “Egotism in Practice.”

Today

Harding Spoke Out

On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.

crime and punishment ideological culture national politics & policies

The FBI vs. the Anarchs

antifa, gaslighting, terrorism, terrorist

Glenn Beck got a visit from the FBI.

It wasn’t one of “those” kinds of visits, where you don’t know whether to reach for your lawyer, your publicist or your . . . Get Out of Jail Free card.

The visit was arranged by Kash Patel, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As Mr. Beck tells the tale, this was all in response to his recent analyses of Antifa.

“So we dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network and we went from the street thugs to the support groups, eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” said Beck.

Beck is enthusiastic about the president’s defining of Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Is this good?

Yes. And maybe no.

Yes, in that watching its leaders now flee the country is a joyous occasion; and yes, in that Antifa is a terrorist organization — and treating it as such is a recognition of fact, of reality. Governments shouldn’t operate under delusions or lies.

Antifa has been very localized in practice, engaging in violence on the streets of big cities from Washington, D.C., to Portland, Oregon.

And in most of those Democrat-run cities, the authorities have turned the other way, saying (as covered last week) that Antifa “doesn’t exist” and “isn’t a real thing.”

Local law enforcement should have started rooting out this vile nest of anarchs years ago. Making federal cases out of Antifa should not be necessary.

But maybe it is — since Antifa’s mob violence supports one national party and is so often given license by that party. While police and voters are supposed to ignore the masked “protesters’” violence because “they do not exist.”

As Glenn Beck relates, this trickery does not appear to be working any longer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Leo Tolstoy

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess.
Leo Tolstoy, written for 1908’s The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, but published later, in 1917, as quoted by Antony Flew, Equality in Liberty and Justice (2001), p. 89.

Today

Boundaries

On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.

Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for much of its length.

Update

A Few Isms … from Above

Women miss the ancient experience of being mainly with women, says Camille Paglia:

How Christendom replaced Jesus-as-God with Hitler-as-the-Devil — historian Alec Ryrie elaborates his thesis (discussed in these pages before) as developed in his newest book:

As the House of Representatives hold hearings on “UAPs,” ufologist Richard Dolan speculates what it all means. Caution — he believes that ETs are here now:

Meanwhile, the transit of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is on the other side of the Sun; it’s gone past perihelion; and NASA is not releasing any better images of the object, under cover (not implausible) of the federal government shutdown. Lots of discussion on YouTube. From all over the map. Happy searching. And for a search engine, try Freespoke.com.

Thought

J.S. Mill

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862).