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Today

Svetlana Made a Break for It (& Paul made his debut)

Lana Peters

On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States. She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.

The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the reason this site, ThisIsCommonSense.com, exists. (It continues, however, only through the continued support of readers like you.)

Categories
folly ideological culture

Peak Absurdity

Dr. Seus, cancel culture, censorship

We have gone on beyond nonsense. Theodore Geisel — Dr. Seuss — whimsically drew and rhymed his way into our hearts. But owners of his copyrights and trademarks have announced that they will no longer keep in print a handful of Seussiana, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, and On Beyond Zebra! 

“These books portray people,” says a press release from “Seussville,” “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

The objection appears to be that caricatures of Chinese and Africans and others are based on stereotypes and, therefore, “hurtful.”

After retrieving your rolled eyes from deep within their sockets, recognize that cartoons and caricatures rely upon stereotypes. Which is why I still own copies of the first two books on the list and will not hesitate to read them and show the pictures to any child of any race or ethnicity who might be interested.

While the woke guardians of the Seuss brand have every right to cease publication — just as eBay, the trading platform, possesses the right to prohibit sale of used copies — this is historic. The woke social justice crowd have pushed  their mania past absurdity.

Not, alas, a funny, Seussian absurdity. 

His very liberal voice, favoring individuality, diversity and just being nice, was utterly at odds with the implied calumny from the corporation that bears his pen name.

But I do hear chanting in the background: “boil that dust speck!” (A great line from Horton Hears a Who.) Seuss developed his case against intolerance and mob mania in a number of works, most of them not deprecated by his heirs, thankfully. 

Kids who read them possess the tools to understand the whys of woke nonsense. 

Pity that the adults in charge do not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Niccolò Machiavelli

In terra di ciechi chi vi ha un occhio è signore.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake, Act III, scene ix.

Categories
Today

A Banned Book

On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.

| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.

| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.

| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 64 today, beginning his 65th year of life.

Categories
Today

The Constitutional Congress

On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.

Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.

In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.

Categories
education and schooling

None of That Happened

Baltimore, schools, education

A high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland, has only passed three courses in his last four years of “study.”

But here’s the kicker: his 0.1373 Grade Point Average is average at his school. Out of 120 students in his class, the young man ranks 62nd, with 58 others failing to reach his hardly stratospheric GPA.

“Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June,” explained Project Baltimore, the local Fox affiliate’s watchdog effort on education. “But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over.”

The television exposé found that in three years her son had “failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days.”

But for some inexplicable reason, though the unnamed lad was flunking roughly nine out of ten classes, Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts continued to pass him on to higher grades and more advanced classes than those he had just bombed on.

“I’ve seen many transcripts, many report cards, like this particular student,” informed an anonymous (for fear of reprisal) administrator with the City Schools.

“He’s a good kid,” his mother offered. “[H]e’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?” 

Baltimore City Schools released a long statement detailing their bureaucratic procedures and protocols to prevent students from falling through the cracks. “France says none of that happened,” reported Project Baltimore.

I was privileged to have two parents who would never have allowed me to be so mis-educated. But when parents struggle, the theory is that public schools are there to help. In actual practice, though, this theory fails.

But gets passed along anyway.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

David Hume

It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Meritocracy a Myth?

meritocracy, work, effort, justice

COVID and the pandemic panic have not been kind to small businesses, but some entrepreneurs have skyrocketed their wealth. Months ago, CNBC’s Gary Cohn waxed enthusiastic for “the banner year for newly minted American billionaires,” citing among reasons to celebrate “the possibility that it can happen to other people. . . .”

Reporting on three new billionaires from Doordash and “the winner of the week, Brian Chesky, AirBNB CEO,” CNBC’s Robert Frank said the recent uptick was “really inspirational no matter what your point of view.”

Wrong, says Kyle Kulinksi, a thoroughly unimpressed progressive podcaster, dissing the segment as “everything that’s terrible about CNBC in one clip.”

Now, I can imagine worrying about the context of celebrating a few folks’ success while so many others have been hit hard by bad policy and a virus, all the while big business (especially banks) have been subsidized with “stimulus.” But, Mr. Kulinski explains, “the main problem” is that CNBC’s encomiasts “clearly believe in the myth of meritocracy.”

Kulinski then yammers on about hard-working folks who got nowhere in life working three jobs. “The idea that the reason why these people are getting wealthy is because they’ve just worked harder than anybody else — that’s provably not true.” 

And then proceeds not to prove it.

Kulinski errs in focusing on “working hard” in sheer physical and time-suck terms. But to the extent we have a meritorious meritocracy, the merit rests on what CNBC’s Cohn called “work hard and have a great idea.” Emphasize the “and” — remembering that “great ideas” are those that extend value to others via trade. 

Value isn’t measured in BTU’s and time-clock ticks. 

Kulinski should have noticed the big truth about these gig economy billionaires: they have allowed normal people to take their investments in household production — their homes and their cars — and turn them into capital goods for services on the open market.

They created new markets . . . wherein all participants gain.

That is progress.

But not, apparently, “progressive.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Today

Nations and National Isms

On March 3, 1924, the 407-year-old Islamic caliphate collapsed when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate was deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gives way to the reformed ofKemal Atatürk.

On the same day, the Free State of Fiume was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy.

On March 3 of 1931, the United States adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as its national anthem.

Mohandas K. Gandhi began his hunger strike in Bombay to protest at the autocratic rule in British India on this day in 1939.

Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari (pictured above) was born on March 3, 1819. Associated with French laissez-faire economists Frédéric Bastiat and Yves Guyot, he was the longest-serving editor of Guillamin’s Journal des économistes. Today chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his authorship of one article, “The Production of Security” (1849), he was, as Ludwig von Mises described, the most productive economist in his school. Despite this, and his worldwide recognition, only one of his many books was translated from the French into English during his lifetime, The Society of To-morrow (1904), his final book.

In the book he advanced the idea of “the free constitution of nationality.”

Molinari died on January 28, 1912.

Categories
Thought

Paul Valéry

A revolution does within two days the work of two years; thereafter it undoes within two months the work of two centuries.

Paul Valéry, quoted by André Maurois in his introduction to Anatole France’s The Gods Are A-thirst (Nonesuch Press, 1942).