Categories
Today

Two Moons & Two Herschels

Moon Hoax

On August 28, 1789, William Herschel discovered a new moon of Saturn: Enceladus. Over four decades later, the New York penny daily The Sun perpetrated the infamous Great Moon Hoax using Herschel’s son’s name to legitimize its science-fictional “reportage.” The fourth of six installments hit the streets on August 28, 1835, in which “Sir John” tells us of the small, furry human beings with bat-like wings who (from their gesticulations) seemed to be rational. Eventually Richard Adams Locke confessed to having written the work — as “satire.” Edgar Alan Poe accused Locke of plagiarism while The Sun benefitted, on the whole, with increased circulation.

Categories
free trade & free markets regulation

Regulating Refineries to Death

California, regulations, fuel, engery

Punish them! 

That might as well be the explicit goal of California’s regulators and politicians — and all too many voters — for the results are clear enough. All who refuse to use electric cars and solar energy must suffer . . . with ever-higher gas prices, at the very least.

Two major oil refineries that provide gas for California as well as a few neighboring states have announced that they are closing their doors. They can’t hack it.

One analyst predicts that in consequence of these closures and related destruction of production, the price of gas will shoot up to $8 per gallon.

Lane Riggs, CEO of Valero Energy, which is closing a refinery near San Francisco, says the state’s tough “regulatory enforcement environment” is to blame for the loss of the sixth-largest refinery in the state.

Also throwing in the towel is a Los Angeles refinery, this one the state’s seventh-largest, operated by Phillips 66.

Brittany Bernstein notes that Phillips announced the closure “just 72 hours after California passed ABX-2, which requires refineries to hold additional inventories of finished stocks.” Yet another arbitrary burden on a company’s ability to function.

Last year, Chevron moved its headquarters from California to Texas because of the toxic environment for producers in California.

The researcher who’s predicting $8 per gallon gas, USC Professor Michael Mische, says Californians have “legislated ourselves into a situation where the costs are extraordinarily high and the political environment is extraordinarily harsh.”

Solution: reverse and undo. Please permit me to assume that this is possible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Isabel Paterson

Whether it does any good or not, a law enforced must hurt someone.

ISABEL PATERSON The God of the Machine (1943), p. 92.

Categories
Today

Uruguay

Uruguay

On August 27, 1828, the South American states of Brazil and Argentina recognized the sovereignty of Uruguay in the Treaty of Montevideo.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Too Virtuous to Win?

politicians

The Democrats lost a presidential election where the biggest issue, shared by both contenders, was The Other Side Is Off-putting, Icky and Crazy. 

Third Way, a think tank pushing for “moderate” policy, almost acknowledged this in a widely-shared memo: “For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying.”

So it’s not without reason that Third Way suggests Democrats drop the “therapy-speak,” for example — words like privilege, violence (“as in ‘environmental violence’”), othering, etc. Also to be nixed? “Seminar room language,” featuring jargon like subverting norms, systems of oppression, heuristic, etc.

Then there’s the far-out lefty nonsense, like chest-feeding and Latinx, along with the “criminal-excusing phraseology” — elaborate euphemisms like incarcerated people.

The upshot? “Communicating in authentic ways that welcome rather than drive voters away would be a good start.”

Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin seems to think his party failed by trying too hard to persuade. 

“After six months as chair, I’ve learned that a lot of people, especially folks in DC, think they can change things by winning arguments,” Martin explained. “You know what winning the argument gets you? Maybe a nice round of applause and a few likes on Instagram. But the reality is, it doesn’t make life any better for any person. We have to stop settling on winning arguments with each other. We have to win elections.”

This is covered in an Epoch Times article that also shows the Democrat leader pressing the Too Virtuous to Win meme: “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve gotta stand up and fight. We’re not gonna have a hand tied behind our backs anymore.”

This pose, that “our side” is too good and noble and rule-following is, of course, echoed among Republicans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Ben Bankas

“That’s the one thing good about ‘woke’ is that it is fake. Right? The natives are like ‘land back’; and then the white people are like ‘land back’ — right? And the natives are like ‘so we’re gonna get it back?’ and then we’re like ‘not . . . not really. It’s kind of just a thing we say — we do t-shirts.’”

Ben Bankas, comedy bit placed on Facebook.

Categories
Today

A Flag, a Vote, a Scandal

On August 26, 1863, the Swedish-language liberal newspaper Helsingfors Dagblad proposed the current blue-and-white cross flag as the flag of Finland.

In 1920 on the 26th of August, the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution — giving women the same access to voting as men — was certified.

In 2014 on this day in August, The Jay Report into the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was published.

Categories
national politics & policies representation

Must the War Go On?

Gerrymander, Jerrymander, voting, elections, representation

“There is an easy way to end the gerrymandering wars,” a new video by The Recount asserts, “and no one is talking about it.”

Except them. And us. And others. 

“We need more members of Congress,” the anonymous male narrator continues. “This might sound weird, especially since most of us don’t exactly love the ones we have now. But the reality here is simple: the U.S. has the worst ratio of citizens to elected representatives of every developed democracy in the world.”

It’s true. Congressional districts have been capped at 435 since 1929’s Permanent Apportionment Act. That year, the average congressperson represented 243,000 people. That’s too many. But today, the average congressperson represents 761,000 people.

“So uncap the house,” Jeff Mayhugh and A.D. Tippet argue in The Hill, “and rein in gerrymandering at least a bit.

“Our founders believed that smaller congressional districts would lead to a better relationship between citizens and their government,” the authors contend. “Gerrymandering undermines this idea by splitting neighbors from each other or packing them in districts with others from the same party to secure a seat for the political party in control.”

And then there’s this: “Smaller districts are more representative and also harder to manipulate.”

“With more seats, districts can be smaller and more representative of smaller enclaves and communities,” explains the video presentation, “and when that happens, the chances of Republicans winning seats in Massachusetts or Democrats winning seats in South Dakota goes up.”

Entitled “Why Expanding Congress Would End Gerrymandering,” The Recount’s video also correctly points out that creating a smaller representative-to-voter ratio by increasing the size of the House is “fully within Congress’s power” and “doesn’t take a constitutional amendment.”

But it would take a great deal of citizen . . . push.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Robert A. Heinlein

No government has yet been able to repeal natural laws, though they keep trying.

Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold (1964).
Categories
Today

Galileo’s Telescope

On August 25, 1609, Galileo Galilei first demonstrated his new invention, the telescope, to Venetian lawmakers. Magnifying distant images by about eight or nine times, it quickly became a profitable sideline for Galileo, who sold his telescopes to merchants who found them useful both at sea and as items of trade. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March of the next year.