The SoundCloud platform has something new to listen to . . . and tell your friends about:
Categories
This Week’s Two Biggest Stories (podcast)
Categories
Happy Birthday, Baruch!
November 24th marks the birthdays of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632) and three influential Americans: ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1868), self-help writer Dale Carnegie (1888), and conservative editor, writer, and television personality William F. Buckley Jr. (1925).
Paul Jacob, in this episode of This Week in Common Sense, recaps the big stories of the week, focusing especially on the bizarre resurgence of the Equal Rights Amendment and on Massachusetts’ heinous push to steal the property of vapers.
Categories
Areopagitica
On November 23, 1644, British poet John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.
Let us not attribute to malice and cruelty what may be referred to less criminal motives.
Jane West, The Loyalists (1812), clearly expressing the principle today referred to as Hanlon’s Razor.
Back in the 1970s, the late Phyllis Schlafly charged that, if the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) were ratified, women would be subject to the military draft.
Funny thing, though — the ERA was not ratified, yet any return to the draft means our daughters would be forced into combat just like our sons.
The 14th Amendment already requires equal protection of the laws.
Congress proposed the amendment in 1972 with a seven-year period for ratification by the necessary 38 states. Even with an extension, the ERA fell three states short . . . well, make that eight, since five states* rescinded their initial ratifications.
“One thing we are going to need to do right away,” declared Senate Democratic leader Dick Saslaw, “is pass the Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia.”
But it’s back, sorta. In recent years, Nevada and Illinois have ratified the timed-out amendment. And with Democrats taking control of both chambers of the Virginia Legislature in this year’s election, the state could now become the 38th to ratify.
Not so fast. Even Supreme Court justice and progressive action-hero Ruth Bader Ginsberg has made it clear that the amendment has expired, that the process must begin anew. No amendment should be bum-rushed into the Constitution.
Though some conservatives warn the ERA may undermine women’s rights. I support the language of the amendment as it plainly reads: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”**
Possible wrinkle: can anyone read plainly?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
** There were two boilerplate clauses, in addition: Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
Categories
Robert Nozick
Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is there really one kind of life which is best for each of these people?
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 310.
Categories
The Day JFK Was Shot
November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of English-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-English novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.
The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.
Recommended reading from these authors include:
Silas Marner (1861), a short and brilliant novel by George Eliot. Her most generally esteemed classic is the much longer Middlemarch (1872).
Earthly Powers (1980), a massive novel about life in the 20th century, by the ever-iconoclastic and hard-to-pin-down Anthony Burgess. His most famous novel is undoubtedly A Clockwork Orange (1963).
“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the former being C.S. Lewis’s thoughtful essay on the nature of modern tyranny, and the latter being what some regard his best fiction effort, a retelling of the Psyche myth. He is most famously known for The Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956).
Brave New World (1931) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the former is Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire on technological tyranny-by-hedonism, and the latter is the author’s survey of the issues raised by — and the degrees to which reality conforms to — his earlier fictional prophecy. The two books have been printed under one cover as well as separately.
One reason to talk about corruption a lot is that there is a lot of corruption to talk about.
The scheme was to get Kaiser Permanente to buy 20,000 copies of her children’s book, Healthy Holly, at a decidedly non-discounted price of $5 a pop, while the health provider was negotiating a contract with UMMS and while she was serving on the UMMS board deciding that contract.
It’s been several months since I’ve discussed Baltimore, Maryland, a hotbed of Big Government degeneracy. Now that former Mayor Catherine Pugh has been indicted — this Tuesday — on multiple federal charges, we should take a moment to appraise her own tricky larceny against the city’s taxpayers and the patients of University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS).
What a scam.
And not her only one. She leveraged this scam to fund her mayoral campaign, for example.
So, it is good that she is being prosecuted.
Odd, though, that it is the federal government doing the prosecuting. Baltimore is a corporate entity under the sovereignty of the State of Maryland, not the United States.
What have state and local investigators and prosecutors been doing?
While this might seem a picky point, the federalization of law and order is, as the college crowd says, ‘problematic.’ Tasking the Federal Government to the rescue is great, insofar as it actually rescues. Yet, it is also an unmistakable sign not only of the corruption of the criminal justice system, but also of a failure of representative democracy to hold government officials accountable in that state or locality.
This is certain: government, removed from citizens’ vigilance, almost necessarily breeds corruption . . . and not just in Baltimore.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Bertrand de Jouvenel
There are philosophers who have given their minds to the phenomenon of disregard of laws and have sought out its causes. Much more surprising, however, is the opposite phenomenon of respect for laws and deference to authority. . . . It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.
Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins (1903 – 1987), On Power