Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Gun Group Deplatformed

Mailchimp is an “all-in-one integrated marketing platform” that helps businesses send newsletters and other email to customers, prospects, and supporters. In January it blocked the Virginia Citizens Defense League from sending email to members about an annual rally in defense of gun rights and told the organization to get lost.

Some help.

According to the president of the Defense League, Philip Van Cleave, “There was no justification. They provided nothing. Basically, they just said we need to get our stuff and be prepared to move on.”

Well, Mailchimp’s boilerplate letter did also state that its “automated abuse-prevention system, Omnivore, detected serious risks associated with [your] account. . . . This risk is too great for us to continue to support the account.”

What risk? Oh, why bother to specify. The point is, the automated system detected it. I’m guessing that certain scary words were flagged, like “gun,” “Second Amendment,” “Constitution,” “rights.”

It seems that any kind of assembling on behalf of certain constitutionally protected rights or to petition for redress of grievances is to be regarded as a rationale for summarily ejecting politically right-leaning customers — at least by firms going along with this accelerating strategy to abet repression.

Mailchimp has violated the terms of service upheld by those who respect freedom of speech and do not respect arbitrary assaults on costumers. If you’re using it, look for an alternative.

The Defense League’s “Lobby Day” rally was peaceful again this year — as the group’s website informs, “just a lot of patriots sending a strong message to the General Assembly to keep their hands off our gun rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, free speech, freedom

Thought

Richard von Strigl

[I]ncreasing the supply of money by means of additional credit will not merely cause a problem of transforming one price level into another. Beyond this it will have the additional effect of disrupting the price system and distorting the structure of production.
Richard von Strigl, Capital and Production (1934; Margaret Rudelich Hoppe and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, translators, 2000), final paragraph.

Today

Spain and Bagehot

On February 3, 1783, Spain recognized United States independence.

Walter Bagehot (pronounced “badge-it”; pictured), famed editor of The Economist and author of Lombard Street, was born on this date in 1826.

international affairs

The China Syndrome

Is the Chinese government under Xi Jinping becoming as murderously totalitarian as it was in the time of Mao?

Since Mao was responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions, today’s China is not, at least yet, Maoist bad. But as Doug Bandow reports in a recent overview (“China’s Terrifying Return to Maoism”), it is indeed awful.

The scuttling of presidential term limits is the merest tip of a titanic iceberg of tyranny.

Beneath the surface is China’s intensified repression of the Uyghurs, Tibet, and Hong Kong; prolific use of torture; a rise in coerced televised confessions; increased censorship and detaining of foreign journalists; massive expansion of the surveillance state with the help of technology firms like Huawei; and new crackdowns on practices of religion.

A few years ago, churches in many provinces of China could carry on without interference as long as they steered clear of politics. Hardly a minor restriction. But today, writes Bandow, “ministers are arrested, churches are closed or destroyed, members are barred from bringing their children and forced to display communist agitprop, and the [Chinese Communist Party] even wants to rewrite Scripture. Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism are also under sustained attack.”

Bandow bases his observations in part on a Human Rights Commission report just published by the UK Conservative Party.

Too often, journalists, politicians and others ignore or whitewash what the Chinese regime is doing at home and abroad. Whatever our policies toward China should be, they should be based on eyes-wide-open reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, freedom, human rights, slavery

Thought

Eric Weinstein

We have effectively entered a period in which we cannot trust our experts. We’ve got two generations of institutional experts that are corrupted, and we cannot wake up from this crazy fever dream that we’re all in, because we can’t figure out who we can still trust. The doctors are compromised; the professors are compromised; the journalists are compromised; the politicians are compromised. About the only thing that isn’t badly compromised are people with an independent source of sustenance.
Eric Weinstein, in interview for the Glitch in the Matrix non-fiction film.

Today

Groundhog!

On February 2, 1887, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, celebrated the first Groundhog Day. On the same day in 1976, the Groundhog Day gale hit the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada.

In 2009, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe officially devalued the Zimbabwean dollar for the third and final time, making Z$1 trillion now only Z$1 of the new currency, equivalent to Z$10 septillion before the first devaluation. Politicians in Zimbabwe looked up, saw their shadow, and realized that they had only a couple months more of their inflation binge. Indeed, the legalization of trading currencies, the previous month, had sealed the fate of Zimbabwe’s independent dollar. The Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned officially on the 9th of April, 2009.

ideological culture national politics & policies

The Day and the Hour

prediction, forecast, fortune telling, climate change, global warming, blue and red

Time is almost up!

“Three years ago, scientists gave us a pretty stark warning: They said we have 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of climate change,” John Kerry, former U.S. Senator (D-Mass.) and Secretary of State and current US Special Climate Envoy, stated last week.

“And now we have nine years left,” the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate added, “to try to do what science is telling us we need to do.”

Science speaks to Kerry. Just nine years, though? Not much time.

But it could be worse.

And apparently already is.

According to BBC environmental correspondent, Matt McGrath, who reported roughly 18 months ago that “there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis.”

“The climate math is brutally clear,” Potsdam Climate Institute founder Hans Joachim Schellnhuber argued. “While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020.”

“Healed”? Or brought to heel?

That time is running out “is becoming clearer all the time,” McGrath noted then, before quoting the eminent scientist, the Prince of Wales: “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” declared his royal highness, speaking at a reception more than 18 months back.

Prince Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor is also considered something of an expert on receptions.

For my part, regarding these prophecies, I’m with Gavin Schmidt, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who advised, “All the time-limited frames are bullsh*t.”

I can follow that science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags climate change, climate science, global warming, panic, prediction

Thought

Tim Shoebridge

Unfortunately, we live in some weird times these days and common sense is about as rare as an ARP 2500.
Tim Shoebridge, reviewing the Behringer 2500 synthesizer, a modular knock-off of the classic ARP.

Today

Slavery Abolished

On February 1, 1835, slavery was abolished in Mauritius. Twenty-six years later, in the American Civil War, Texas seceded from the United States. On this date in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed a Joint Resolution from Congress formally submitting the proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the states for ratification.

This Amendment abolished chattel slavery throughout the union.

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