Common Sense with Paul Jacob

ideological culture media and media people

Cultural Erasure

Once upon a time, I didn’t think “culture war” issues were important. Give me liberty or — at least lower taxes and allow better representation in Washington.

But in recent years, as the left went woke and the right went MAGA, a number of cultural issues became . . . salient. Unavoidable. Key, even.

In “The Corporate Logo That Broke the Internet,” David French — late editor of National Review and now token rightist for The New York Times — defends the Cracker Barrel logo rebranding effort, where the image of an old man (Uncle Herschel, in Cracker Barrel lore) leaning against a barrel,” as French describes it, was removed.

Also removed? The tagline on the old logo: “Old Country Store.” All that was left was “Cracker Barrel” on a yellow field.

O, the uproar! And from the right!

Mr. French thinks it all very stupid. “Right-wing activists did the same thing that they mocked the left for in the [Sydney] Sweeney [American Eagle ad] affair. They looked at a completely normal, innocuous marketing effort, deemed it to be deeply politically coded and then lashed out.”

He contends that the protesting “voices never really explained how a plain logo with the restaurant’s name was woke,” yet the explanation is right before us, staring us in the face everywhere we go.

It was “woke” for corporations to remove beloved commercial icons such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben (now “Ben’s Original”), and “Mia,” the Land O’Lakes Indian maiden. In each of these logos the supposedly “offensive” and “stereotypical” images were removed ostensibly to avoid offending the easily offended. Leaving customers with blank, unoriginal, uninspiring and non-comforting signage.

Exactly what happened when the corporate bigwigs took out the iconography from the Cracker Barrel logo: All nostalgia liquidated.

Cultural erasure used to be a leftist theme, but thanks to today’s enlightened corporations, it has become universal, as the soullessness of modish symbology has become painfully obvious.

Define woke as erasure in the name of non-erasure. Opposing erasure generally is the defense of culture. That’s not a manufactured “outrage,” or a form of “bullying,” as French asserts.

It’s just Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Frank Herbert

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Frank Herbert, “Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual,” from Children of Dune (1976).

Today

San Marino

On September 3, A.D. 301, San Marino, one of the smallest sovereign political organizations in the world and the world’s oldest still-existing republic, was founded by Saint Marinus.

San Marino is bounded on all sides by northeastern Italy.

free trade & free markets insider corruption national politics & policies

Protection from Us?

On Labor Day, National Review pointed out that less than 10 percent of all U.S. workers currently belong to unions.

This percentage has been declining for decades. Even during the Biden administration, when the president and his puppeteers did their best to pump up unions, the percentage declined.

In the private sector, only 5.9 percent of workers are union members.

This is great news because unions are typically bad news. By using government-sanctioned force to compel membership and extract wage rates above the market rate, collective bargaining reduces the number of workers who can be employed in a company or industry — thereby distributing wealth from the many to the fewer — and makes firms less efficient.

Only long-run increases in economic productivity enable wage rates to be permanently and generally increased in real terms.

Now, a union devoting itself only to helping workers cope with problems in the workplace — problems like an abusive supervisor or gratuitously dangerous working conditions — would be fine. But unions as we know them don’t confine themselves to such support and often don’t even offer it. Union bosses prefer to secure above-market wages perhaps because they can then siphon off some of those “rents” (as economists put it).

Meanwhile, unionism is still going strong among public employees. Although government workers constitute only about 15 percent of U.S. workers, these workers “make up about half of the population of union members,”National Review reports.

Who are these government workers protecting themselves from?

Well, from you and me, basically.

We might pay them less and we might fire them more often — if we could.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags labor, union

Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Nature has provided, by means as simple as they are infallible, that there should be dispersion, diffusion, coordination, simultaneous progress, all constituting a state of things that your restrictive laws paralyze as much as they can; for the tendency of such laws is, by isolating communities, to render the diversity of condition much more marked, to prevent equalization, hinder integration, neutralize countervailing circumstances, and segregate nations, whether in their superiority or in their inferiority of condition.
Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, “To Equalize the Conditions of Production” — the “such laws” mentioned are protectionist measures, and protectionism was the chief target of Bastiat’s famous book.

Today

Roman Republic Ends

On September 2, 44 B.C., Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declared her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion. On the same day of the same year, Cicero launched the first of his 14 Philippicae (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. Just a few years later on the same day, in 31 B.C., the Battle of Actium ended off the western coast of Greece, where forces of Octavian defeating troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Thus ended the Roman Republic, with the consolidation of power by Gaius Octavius (Octavian; Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus), though he was not renamed “First Citizen” Imperator Caesar divi filius Augustus until January 16, A.D. 27.

ideological culture international affairs

Iranian Revolutionary Climate

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 1, 2025
1 Comment on Iranian Revolutionary Climate

I was once bitterly opposed to the climate change. One minute raining, then snowing, then desert sun. Enough already.

But now I see that we need the climate change to fight tyranny.

Not everyone agrees. Nina Bookout simply refuses to accept the latest super-sophisticated scientific reasoning about how widespread protests happening in Iran — ostensibly because of a theocracy that is stomping everybody — are secretly being motivated by the climate change!!!!!

You know it’s scientific if it’s in “Scientific” American, a lot smarter now that it has dumbed down its content in recent decades.

But Bookout just won’t follow the “science.”

Scientific American says climate change is “among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities. . . . A severe drought, mismanaged water resources and dust storms diminished Iran’s economy in recent years.”

Protests are happening most in places with “climate refugees.”

Bookout differs: “The Iranian people KNOW that billions of dollars was freighted to Iran on Obama’s say-so. Thus, for several years, the Iranian government has had financial resources available to help those impacted by the drought and the earthquakes. . . . Instead the Iranian government [have been using] their cash . . . to prop up Hamas, Hezbollah, terrorism in Syria, and build up their military. . . . The security forces aren’t attacking protestors because of climate change.”

I’m with Scientific American. Let us have climate change wherever autocrats oppress the people, so that people will resist this oppression.

Thank you for your help, climate change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Constitution Day

Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.

The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.

Thought

Frank Herbert

The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power.
Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment (1977).

Update

It’s Got a Tail

Our solar system’s third identified interstellar intruder, 3I/ATLAS, continues its course past the planets more-or-less within the plane of the ecliptic, and continues to surprise.

The least surprising thing is that it has finally developed a tail pointing away from the Sun:

On August 27, 2025, deep imaging of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS by the Gemini South 8.2-meter telescope — aided by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), revealed a weak tail with a teardrop shape in the anti-Sun direction (reported here). At that time, 3I/ATLAS was at a distance from Earth of 2.59 times the Earth-Sun separation. The Gemini South Observatory is located on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.
Avi Loeb, “Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS,” Medium (August 30, 2025).

Earlier observations had not seen the usual tail forming away from the point of origination of the solar winds, like a normal comet. Instead, the “coma” of dust or ice or gas or whatnot surrounding the object extended in advance of its trajectory — as if it were throwing out flak to take out dangerous objects ahead of it!

Yes, from the beginning the oddities of this intruder were being considered as possible indications of an artificial object.

While this is heartening for those who itch to relegate 3I/ATLAS to “mere” comet status (it’s already proved to be one weird comet, it comet it truly be), Abraham Loeb notes the accumulating oddities, too, which don’t fit the standard “nothing [challenging] to see here, folks” debunkers’ designations: “Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.”

And as Loeb just noted, measuring the nucleus of the object remains extremely difficult and uncertain.

Further, though detection of CO2 in the object’s coma (surrounding matter) is indeed what one would expect of a comet, the absence of water and carbon monoxide is . . . peculiar.