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Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Not Nitpicky

Austin, Mayor, Steve Adler

Austin, woke capital of Texas, may have some difficulty keeping its mask mandates going in the face of Governor Abbott’s lifting of the statewide mask orders. 

Abbott formulated this new policy last week, to nationwide controversy. Officials in Austin and Travis County responded by announcing their intent to keep the old orders in full effect until April 15. 

At least.

“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Wednesday that his office will take Austin officials to court,” explains The Epoch Times, “if they continue to refuse to comply with an order lifting mask mandates across the state.” 

Austin officials may think that the pandemic gives them a special license.

It doesn’t.

In these United States, the primary governmental entities are the states.

The federal government is built on top of the union of states, supreme only regarding the limited number of explicitly defined powers given to it in the Constitution. But beneath that, government entities are creatures of the states. Cities, counties, and metro governments are incorporated by their respective states, which retain overriding authority.*

Yet, perhaps as a sign of the general lawlessness of trendy tyranny, a spokesperson for Austin Mayor Steve Adler told Forbes yesterday that the city does not intend to rescind the order and that officials “will continue to do everything within our power, using every tool available to us to reduce the spread of the virus.”

Is it nitpicky to demand that our public servants not do “everything in their power” — but only things within their authority?

No, it is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Under Abbott’s new policy, Texas businesses and individuals remain free to determine mask policies on their property. 

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Categories
Today

Daily Courant

On March 11, 1702, The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time. It was a one-sheet, concentrated on foreign news, sans commentary. The reverse side sported advertising. It was produced by Elizabeth Mallet (1672–1706), a printer and bookseller who lived, and published the paper, next to the Kings Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge in London.

Categories
Thought

Jeremy Bentham

Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.

Categories
media and media people

HCQ Blackout

Donald Trump, Covid, pandemic

“The race to find vaccines for COVID-19 has dominated the headlines,” runs the opening of a CBS News story, “but there’s been less news about how to keep people with COVID out of the hospital.”

Accurate, so far as it goes, but something is missing.

The story that follows is about an anti-depressant developed decades ago, and “a small but ingenious clinical trial and a series of coincidences [that] have led scientists to look closely at fluvoxamine as a possible tool to keep newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients from becoming severely ill.”

The drug, the story tells, may do what has been claimed for a number of treatments (vitamins, minerals, and the infamous hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ): that is, prevent patients from developing COVID’s severe, deadly respiratory distress.

Yet, in a time of crisis, discussion of such treatments were regarded as “fake news” by social media; doctors and researchers who discussed them online had their videos removed and their posts suppressed. Neil Cavuto and others raised alarms. But now the American Journal of Medicine recommends HCQ, along with “Azithromycin, and Zinc for the treatment of Covid 19 outpatients.” 

So when CBS tells us that there has “been great caution about recommending repurposed drugs for COVID after the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was promoted as a potential ‘game-changer’ by former President Trump — before it was tested in a large clinical trial on COVID patients,” let’s not forget what they are still hiding: that major media along with several governors and many “influencers” suppressed information about drugs that saved some lives and could have saved more.

All while seeking to eradicate the disease they feared most, Trump.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

S. I. Hayakawa

The prophecy of democracy states that if we indeed treat each other as created equal and therefore act on the principles of respect for all persons regardless of race, color, religion, or previous condition of servitude, we shall all of us — both the oppressors and the oppressed — be healed of the profound emotional scars that we inherit from earlier and less just forms of human organization, and attain a full human dignity. Like all self-fulfilling prophecies, this prophecy will not fulfill itself on the dawn of a sudden Day of Jubilee. It fulfills itself only as we accept its premises, accept the responsibilities it places on each of us individually, and prepare ourselves, not to fight over and again the battles of yesterday, but to take our places, with pride and dignity, in the changed world of tomorrow.

S. I. Hayakawa, “How to Be Sane Though Negro” (Contact 1, 1958), conclusion.
Categories
Today

The Mahatma

On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.

Categories
education and schooling

Suspended for Dissent

SUNY, university, PC, political correctness

Don’t state the “wrong” opinion while studying at SUNY-Geneseo.

That is, if you want smoothly to sail through your academic career.

Owen Stevens violated the school’s “inclusivity” creed, according to which “a diverse campus community [is] marked by mutual respect for the unique talents and contributions of each individual.”

Would-be future teachers like Stevens, the university contends, must respect “all forms” of gender identity. But he has argued publicly that there are only two sexes or genders (male, female).

“A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one un-inclusive Instagram video. “The biology is clear.”

So, faster than we have time to remember that “academic freedom” was once a hallowed standard of university conduct, he was suspended from the field teaching programs that are a requirement for all education students at the school. Stevens has refused to cooperate with the school’s plan to rehabilitate him.

The toleration and respect promoted by SUNY-Geneseo apparently does not include tolerating and respecting the right of others to express opinions about politics, society, and biology with which a university censor might disagree.

Of course, what constitutes “official” acceptable doctrine keeps changing. One can never know which once obviously untenable claims — about biology or anything else — will suddenly be upgraded to sacred dogma by persons with the power to penalize disagreement.

Regardless of one’s views of transgender contentions, though, Americans should judge a policy of forcing people to salute certain government- (or administrator-) approved conclusions intolerable.

It’s the school administrators responsible for suspending Stevens who should be suspended — or fired — for their conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

William Cobbett

March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws as well as his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.

In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith first published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”

Categories
Thought

Theages

Universally therefore, virtue is a certain co-adaptation of the irrational parts of the soul to the rational part. Virtue however, is produced through pleasure and pain receiving the boundary of that which is fit. For true virtue is nothing else than the habit of that which is fit. But the fit, or the decorous, is that which ought to be; and the unfit, or indecorous, is that which ought not to be. Of the indecorous however, there are two species, viz. excess and defect. And excess indeed, is more than is fit; but defect is less than is fit. But since the fit is that which ought to be, it is both a summit and a middle. It is a summit indeed, because it neither requires ablation, nor addition; but it is a middle, because it subsists between excess and defect.

Theages, Treatise on the Virtues, found in Iamblichus, Iamblichus’ ‘Life of Pythagoras,’ or ‘Pythagoric Life’ / Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his ‘Opuscula Mythologica,’ and have not been noticed by any editor (Thomas Taylor, translator, 1818).

Categories
international affairs

Now Safe to Blame?

Joe Biden, China

Is it safe yet for big media to tell the truth about China’s virus? 

“Beijing’s efforts from the very start of the crisis to hide information, silence whistleblowers, put out false data and thwart any real outside investigation are too extensive to fully recount,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote over the weekend, pointedly adding, “the Chinese government’s actions were both reckless and deliberate.”

Leading to many more deaths — the official tally being 2.6 million souls worldwide. So far. 

Yes, the Chinese Communist Party leaders are actually “bad folks.” 

Last year, though, the media treated candidate Trump’s attacks on China as just so much posturing and blame-shifting. The Post, for example complained of “too much political heat” regarding the pandemic — “some generated by China” and “some by Donald Trump in his attempt to distract attention from his catastrophic pandemic response as president.”

A month ago, a World Health Organization team traveled to China to finally look for the source of the contagion. “International experts investigating the origins of Covid-19,” the BBC reported at the time, “have all but dismissed a theory that the virus came from a laboratory in China.” 

It turns out, as the Post explained, “the team lacked the training and forensic skills required to investigate this possibility” and “were under strong pressure from China to steer clear of the subject altogether.” The editorial urged the WHO to renew their investigation and “forcefully insist that China not stand in its way.”

“Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered a fragile understanding between Washington and Beijing,” Rogin had informed readers at the outset of his essay, “and put the most important relationship of the 21st century in the hands of a novice.”

I call that a reprieve.

But the fact that our current prez is an old political pro? 

Worrisome.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* There is “no going back to the stance that the Obama administration had taken toward China in 2016,” Rogin argued, “when . . . most uncomfortable issues were swept under the rug.”

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