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Today

9/11: Ante-, Post-

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”

The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.

The next day, September 11, “some people did something,” in the immortal words of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),* and nearly everybody forgot about Rumsfeld’s alarm. The terrorist attacks on 9/11, in New York and at the Pentagon itself, along with a citizen-led resistance on United Flight 93, resulted in 2,977 fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-term health consequences.

The unaccounted-for spending and receipts of the Pentagon and the Department of Housing and Urban Development increased ten-fold in the next 19 years.

Rep. Omar said these words on March 23, 2019. They were not a hit.

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Thought

Harper Lee

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Part I, Chapter 4.
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ideological culture international affairs media and media people

Disney’s Mickey Mouse Boycott Policies

Disney, China, Mulan, Uyghur Muslims

The state of Georgia and the country of China differ. The policies of one are much worse than those of the other.

Thus, the Walt Disney Company seriously mulled refusing to do business in Georgia but was eager to film in China, near internment camps used to imprison Uyghur Muslims.

Last year, Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger threatened to suspend Disney’s film work in Georgia if the state’s new restriction on abortion went into effect. The law would have prohibited abortion when a heartbeat could be detected in the fetus. Before the law was struck down, Iger said that Disney would likely leave Georgia if it survived challenge, because “many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes….”

Journalists and others have been excluded from the Xinjiang region. But satellite images and the accounts of victims and witnesses provide evidence that perhaps two million Uyghurs and others have been imprisoned in the camps there, where many have died. Others have been forcibly sterilized.

In addition to getting permission to film in Xinjiang for its new movie “Mulan,” a few years back Disney got the go-ahead to open a Disneyland in Shanghai.

In the film, Disney expressly thanks a propaganda arm of the CCP, the “publicity department of CPC Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee.” 

Disney’s conduct seems reprehensible. 

But let’s remember: the government of China is not exactly the government of Georgia.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. In previous episodes of Common Sense with Paul Jacob, the people here identified as “Uyghur” — following the spelling used by Disney — were spelled as “Uighur.”

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Rin Tin Tin

September 10, 1918, is the estimated date of birth for Rin Tin Tin, one of a litter of shell-shocked puppies found by an American serviceman in a bombed-out kennel in Lorraine, less than two months before the end of World War I. The dog went on to become the lead actor in a number of very popular films, and one of the great celebrities of his age.

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Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

[I]f two countries are placed under unequal conditions of production, it is that one of the two that is least favored by nature that has most to gain by free trade.

Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, “To Equalize the Conditions of Production.”
Categories
education and schooling folly general freedom

The Foam Rubber Bullet

OBEY

The reports say the color of the top of the Nerf gun is neon green. In the photo I saw, it seemed less colorful than “neon” — but that hardly matters. It is a toy gun. Its ammo is nerfy soft. And it was held by a boy, Isaiah Elliott, briefly, during a Zoom chat educational session as has become common during these days of the pandemic. And his teacher saw it.

And things spiraled out of control from there.

Now, while cities are burning and Marxists are sharpening their knives and dulling their wits for the summer season’s final gasps of “protest,” you might think that teachers and public school administrators would have obtained some perspective.

But no. This is 2020 and we are to be spared nothing.

In a decades-long tradition of educators freaking out at boyish (and girlish) play with pretend firearms, the teacher informed on Master Elliott — though she knew it was a toy gun. 

And the school suspended the lad for five days.

This has nothing to do with school safety, of course. The school is virtual, now. Pretense that this is about safety is an insult to not only adult intelligence, but child intelligence, too.

I guess what public school administrators want to teach their charges is that they are running a cult, that boys and girls and all on the sliding scale in-between must OBEY. 

Must not offend against the State by showing even playful reverence for the Great Taboo and Talisman of Freedom, the Gun.

Thankfully, young Isaiah is headed to a different school.

And his Nerf play days are not over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Injury and Insult (1861).
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Today

Leo Tolstoy

On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories entitled “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tolstoy died in 1910.

Categories
insider corruption

Titanic Hits Ice Cream

Nancy Pelosi, ice cream

A recent email from Amy White of MoveOn.org — an activist outfit that got its start defending Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions — theorized that, this election, “the GOP strategy to win is to use their billionaire donors to flood battleground states with fearmongering, racist ads. . . .”

The snuck-in assumption that Democrats lack Billionaire Donors is important, for the actual Trump strategy is to attack Democrats for their rich elitism. A Trump campaign ad targeting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous-like ice cream obsession is quite powerful.

And Pelosi’s flaunting of expensive freezers and confections is not mere fluke.

You see, Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) also smarts from recent revelations that she had flouted California lockdown rules and mask-wearing mandates to illegally rendezvous, sans mask, at a hair salon, speakeasy-style.

While MoveOn’s Ms. White seeks to “put an end to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism,” what she seems oblivious to is her own side’s elitism.

As shown in Pelosi’s hometown. San Francisco’s government-run gyms catering to police officers, judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and paralegals have been open for months — while privately owned exercise establishments serving the hoi polloi have been shut down the whole time.

“It’s shocking, it’s infuriating,” one gym entrepreneur told a TV station. “Even though they’re getting exposed, there are no repercussions, no ramifications? It’s shocking.”

But it’s not. 

Trump got into office because he was seen as an outsider. Insiders like Pelosi and Frisco “public servants” have special rules for themselves, while sticking it to the rest of us. We peons. We outsiders.

It’s old school classism, as in the “classless” Soviet Union or Marie Antoinette’s France.

Not a good look.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Statute of Kalisz

On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.

On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.