It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or, of remedying it.
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Josiah Warren
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SpaceShipOne
On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.
Satire exaggerates not just for a laugh, often employing the reductio ad absurdum for cutting effect — casting our attention on human follies and crimes.
While the classic literary satires include Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii — “The Pumpkinification of (the Divine) Claudius” — and Jonathan Swift’s 1729 “Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick,” we nowadays often turn to humor websites, like The Onion.
Or, increasingly, The Babylon Bee.
Last week, as I set out for the Far East, the Bee story that topped the page was “New Genderfluid Dolls Emit Blast Of Pepper Spray, Alert Authorities When Children Use Wrong Pronoun.” On the same date I caught “Man Sure Is Glad He Switched From E-Cigs To Regular, Healthier Cigarettes.”* And laughed until I coughed.
Worthy of The Onion, sure, but better than most recent Onion efforts.
How did the Bee leap to the forefront of modern satire? Well, it’s a Christian site, actually, which seems to help. The Bee’s writers do not accept any dominant strain of contemporary culture as an admirable norm — like today’s “woke comics” must — so it is easier to find the absurdities in this current epoch’s conflicted and contradictory politics and culture.
The Bee so effectively lampoons dominant culture that snopes.com, the progressives’ most popular (putative) fact checking site, warned that the Bee’s great Chick-fil-A satire confused some readers because it “altered some details of a controversial news story.”
Satire is funny. Not getting satire? Priceless.
The Babylon Bee’s biggest competition may not be The Onion.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Nick Gillespie of Reason mentions some titles that caught his attention: “‘Trump Is Being Influenced by The Russians, Screams Communist!’ and ‘Woke Polar Bear Apologizes for Being White.’ Classics include ‘Trump Proves He’s Not A Racist By Showing His Rejection Letter From The KKK’ and ‘Local Christian Would Do Anything For Jesus Except Believe Things That Are Unpopular.’”
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Buchanan & Vidal
On October 3, 1919, James M. Buchanan was born. Buchanan would go on to an illustrious career in economics, developing the theory of “Public Choice,” and receiving the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work. His books include Cost and Choice, The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock), and The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Some of his most interesting research was into the realm of constitutional theory and practice.
He died January 9, 2013.
In 1925, on this date, Gore Vidal was born. Vidal would go on to become one of the leading post-WWII liberal essayists as well as a major novelist and screenwriter. His most famous novels include Burr, 1876, and Lincoln, installments in his American history series; his collection of essays, The United States, was one of his many bestsellers. Vidal was an elitist who expressed sympathy for populism and socialism, but also was a radical civil libertarian, and may occupy the extreme of the “liberal” quadrant in American political ideology: great on personal liberties but quite bad one market/property liberties.
He died on July 31, 2012.
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Wilhelm von Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (1792; 1852, posthumous), English edition The Sphere and Duties of Government, as translated by Joseph Coulthard (1854). The book also appears in English as The Limits of State Action.
The grand, leading principle . . . is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity; but national education, since at least it presupposes the selection and appointment of some one instructor, must always promote a definite form of development, however careful to avoid such an error. And hence it is attended with all those disadvantages which we before observed to flow from such a positive policy; and it only remains to be added, that every restriction becomes more directly fatal, when it operates on the moral part of our nature,—that if there is one thing more than another which absolutely requires free activity on the part of the individual, it is precisely education, whose object it is to develop the individual.
Is there a good, presumptive reason to believe what the government tells us?
Not when it comes from the “intelligence” agencies.
One of the more breathtaking developments of recent years has been the transformation of Democratic Party politicians and activists from skeptics of alphabet soup intelligence agencies — CIA, NSA, FBI and many more — to becoming enthusiastic cheerleaders.
On the bright side, Republicans are drifting in the other direction, from their old-fashioned lockstep support of “intelligence agencies” to a new realism — the relentless Deep State “coup” attempts against the Trump Administration having proved . . . instructive.
While we might wish to think that, whew!, these agencies are comprised of loyal Americans, consider what Senator Chuck Schumer said earlier this year, almost approvingly: “You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
But more important than all this is the developing techniques the Deep State can marshal. I refer to Deepfake tech, where anything video can be faked, convincingly and completely. If not now, then very soon, technicians within the Deep State — and outside, too — will be able to videofake anything, from Trump cavorting with Moscow hookers to an Iranian “attack” to . . . UFO landings.
We shouldn’t have trusted intelligence agencies in the run-up to the Iraq conquest, now we have good reason to doubt anything and everything they tell us.
Which means Congress should take very tight control of them, rein these agencies in — for Congress is indeed worried about deepfake tech.
How?
Well, de-classifying old secrets might be a good start. The last bit of the JFK assassination files? Maybe. UFOs? Maybe. But it’s what’s not on our radar that may be the most important.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.
On the same date in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion, making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, cattily referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”
His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.
The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s’, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and Wilson’s “stroke of luck.”
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J. W. von Goethe
If you treat an individual . . . as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Politicians are all over the vaping issue, like packrats on pet food.
The House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, C-SPAN explains, held a hearing on the relationship between e-cigarettes and an outbreak in lung disease. Government experts spoke. There was only one empaneled pro-vaping witness, Vicki Porter, who said that vaping was “a health miracle to me,” since it got her off of smoking tobacco.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D–Fla.) insisted that the record show that she was not to be trusted, since she merely expressed her own opinion as to the superiority of vaping over smoking, noting that Ms. Porter “is not a public health expert.”
But it was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) who really came out swinging for the interventionist government. Her main concern, writes Robby Soave at Reason, appeared to be Porter’s direct challenging of “the tortured logic of the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee hearing.”
Rep. Tlaib said she “wanted to know more about you,” to Ms. Porter. “You call yourself a ‘converted conservative,’” Tlaib stuttered, “and a reformed Marxist.
“Are you a conspiracy theorist?”
Wh-what?
Ms. Porter answered reasonably. Then Tlaib questioned her regarding why she had winked at one of her colleagues. Porter said they knew each other.
In the 1960s, the CIA pushed the phrase “conspiracy theorist” as a way to publicly marginalize anyone who questioned official pronouncements on the JFK assassinations and even trickier subjects, like UFOs. Rep. Tlaib is either one of those who bought into the CIA line, or is part of some less-than-transparent agenda.
So, are you a conspiracy theorist?
My answer might have been, not until right about now.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Adams
“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”