Common Sense with Paul Jacob

If at First You Secede

The secessionists won.

Last year, I reported on the seemingly quixotic attempt by rural Oregonians to divorce themselves, politically, from the cosmopolitan woke-crazies in Portland, Salem and Eugene by voting via initiative, county by county, to leave to form a “Greater Idaho” with the neighboring state. Well, those secesh ballots were cast on the 18th, and voters in Malheur, Sherman, Grant, Baker, and Lake counties “approved various measures that require county officials to take steps to look into moving the Idaho border west to incorporate the counties.”

The Epoch Times story, from which I learned the news, is oddly titled “Oregon Counties Vote to Secede Into Idaho.”

Well, one doesn’t secede into anything, one secedes from.

The plan is, after secession, to accede into Idaho.

The opposite concept of secession being accession.

Disgruntled rural Oregonians are begging their governments to allow a double maneuver: secede-then-accede.

The secessionists won the vote, but what happens next? The idea that the Democratic-controlled state government in Salem would allow this is a stretch. And though Idaho’s Republican governor hasn’t pooh-poohed the idea, no guarantee there, either. Plus, the deal would take congressional approval.

Still, the secede-accede strategy makes sense — political bodies are less kludgy if made up of somewhat like-minded people, not people who cannot stand each others’ guts. The sad truth of government today is that the malign intent of many is not “Divide and Conquer” but “Lump Us All Together and Glory in Making Our Opponents Pay and Pay and Pay for What They Hate.”

Arguably, this is driving us crazy.

And some to secession . . . and into new states.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Colombia

Post author By Editor
Post date May 21, 2021
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On May 21, 1851, slavery was abolished in Colombia, South America.

Thought

George Sutherland

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.
Associate Justice George Sutherland, Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 251 (1936).

ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Chicago, journalism, Lori Lightfoot, media, race

Today

Mill and Passy

French economist and co-winner of the first (1901) Nobel Prize for Peace, Frédéric Passy (pictured above), was born on May 20, 1822.

English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.

Thought

Charles de Montesquieu

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

paternalism too much government

Doom, Still Pending

Has our ‘wife, mother, and daughter’ betrayed us?

In late March, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, went off-script (her words), reflecting on what she called her “recurring feeling” of “impending doom.”

COVID case numbers were up. “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope,” she said. “But right now I’m scared.”

You might think this is no way to lead a country in a crisis — after all, she had just been given the top job at the Centers for Disease Control.

“I’m speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director,” she pressed on National Public Radio, “not only as your CDC director but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer.”

Last Monday, Dr. Walensky “first signed off on changing her agency’s mask guidance,” The Washington Post reported, only to continue “to defend the CDC’s sweeping guidance that Americans wear masks in public, including in a Senate hearing Tuesday,” before Thursday’s announcement that the vaccinated don’t need to go about wearing masks, indoors or outdoors, for their own sake or others’.

The policy lurch leaves us in some weird territory. If the vaccinated may go about un-masked, then the unvaccinated should remain masked — yet it remains illegal (courtesy of HIPAA regulations) for businesses to ask about our medical records. Which implies, for want of enforcement, the controversial (and unwanted) “vaccine passport” idea.

Further, many who have endured the disease claim immunity. Others who have had COVID, like Dr. Jordan Peterson, took the jab because they were told their immune levels were too low.

But “the science” on that is far from settled.

Thankfully, the CDC is not really in the regulation business. And increasingly Americans on all sides are ignoring Walensky, Fauci and Co.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags CDC, covid, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, masks, vaccination, virus

Thought

John Locke

Post author By Editor
Post date May 19, 2021
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The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Today

Wilde Released

On May 19, 1897, Irish author, playwright, and poet Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was released from Reading Prison, where he had finished, in ill health, his hard labor sentence for “gross indecency.” His “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” first published pseudonymously in a periodical with wide circulation amongst criminals, quickly achieved the status of a classic.

He died less than three years later, in exile in Europe. His most famous works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the fascinating essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”

Today

Slavery and Heresy

On May 18, 1652, Rhode Island passed the first law in English-speaking North America making slavery illegal.

On May 18, 1593, playwright Thomas Kyd’s accusations of heresy led to an arrest warrant for fellow playwright Christopher (“Kit”) Marlowe.

Kyd was the famed author of The Spanish Tragedy, and Kit Marlowe [pictured] was known for a number of plays, including The Jew of Malta and The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.

Marlowe died a few weeks later, on May 30, without having been arrested. The circumstances of his death were bizarre, suspicious — as if written by a playwright.