Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Why Paranoia

conspiracy, Northwood, Cuba, Kennedy, Parkland, shooting, crisis actors

Goofy conspiracy theories? Worth a chuckle, maybe. But not when they are about live, blood-running-in-the-street topics. Then, cries Kevin Williamson of National Review, “shame.”

Paranoia-spinners “have failed to learn the sad lesson of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Williamson warns. “When people have come to assume that every other word out of your mouth is a lie, it becomes very difficult to tell the truth effectively.”

Well, yes. But that cuts every which way, no?

Apropos of this, comedian Dave Smith, on his most recent Part of the Problem podcast, brought up Operation Northwoods, an early-’60s clandestine false flag proposal.

“The operation proposed creating public support for a war against Cuba by blaming it for terrorist acts that would actually be perpetrated by the U.S. Government,” Wikipedia summarizes. “To this end, Operation Northwoods proposals recommended hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government.”

This outrageous moral horror was actually signed off on by “responsible” people . . . such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff.*

“Why do these conspiracy theories persist?” Dave Smith considers, referring to the trying-too-hard conspiracy conjectures such as the now-infamous “crisis actor” hoopla. “Well, there’s . . . these conspiracies that are absolutely real — and you guys [in the media] have no interest in talking about them. And the only people who do talk about them are people like Alex Jones.”

Seeing governments lie and cover up the truth, while media too often turn blind eyes, everyday concerned folks are obviously more open to conspiracy theories.

Everyone should remember that it is the truth that will set you free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It was signed by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and sent to the Secretary of Defense. President John F. Kennedy nixed it in 1962, and it was never implemented, thank goodness.

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Tags conspiracy, crisis actors, Cuba, Kennedy, Northwood, Parkland, shooting

Thought

Simon Newcomb

“Scientific method consists in applying to those subjects which lie without the range of our immediate experience those same common-sense methods of reasoning which successful men of the world apply in judging of matters which concern their own interests.”

Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy, 1886, chapter III, “Of Scientific Method”

Today

Whipped for sleeping in church

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 28, 2018
No Comments on Whipped for sleeping in church

On February 28, 1646, Roger Scott, of Lynn, Massachusetts, was tried for sleeping in church. Awakened in church by a tithingman’s long, knobbed staff hitting him on the head, he struck back at the man, and garnered a whipping as punishment, as well as the dark designation as “a common sleeper at the publick exercise.”

Accountability moral hazard term limits too much government

Dictatorship with the Usual Characteristics

Post author By CS Admin
Post date February 27, 2018
1 Comment on Dictatorship with the Usual Characteristics

Mao, term limits, China, Xi Jinping, censorship, Mao Zedong

“Argh, we’re going to become North Korea,” a dejected Chinese citizen wrote on his country’s social media site, Weibo.

His comment, later removed by China’s “safe space” police, responded to the Communist Party’s announcement that it would soon remove term limits on President Xi Jinping.

While neighboring North Korea has been ruled in totalitarian dynastic fashion by the Kim family since 1948, the Chinese have had their own experience with extended one-man rule, 33 years of Mao Zedong.

“From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people,” the Washington Post clarified, “easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.”

A decade after Mao’s death in 1979 — there’s always that ultimate term limit — even Communist Party apparatchiks embraced a formal limit on the president and the vice-president of two five-year terms . . . to block dictatorship.*

Talk about a reform popular across the political spectrum!

So popular that, as Business Insider explained, “Criticism of the Chinese government’s desire to abolish presidential term limits has seen censorship soar since Sunday.” Searches for “two term limit,” “third consecutive term,” and “Emperor Xi” were blocked.

“There are no longer any checks and balances,” complained a political analyst at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.

This is bad news for everybody everywhere.

The need to limit those in power is universal. At National Review, John Fund reminds us of our “ongoing job here at home to limit the insatiable urge of incumbents to remain in office for years, even decades, and sometimes until they die of ripe old age.”

Early retirements for all!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* There are also five-year limits on the tenure of those serving in the National People’s Congress. Do I hear six years for our Congress?

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Tags censorship, China, Mao, Mao Zedong, term limits, Xi Jinping

Today

Arthur Latham Perry

On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry was born.

The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states on February 27, 1951.

Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.

Thought

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

[T]hrift is never popular. . . . If parliaments have historically been the guardians of thrift, they now have turned much rather into its sworn enemies. Nowadays, the political and national parties — maybe not exclusively in our own country, but certainly also here — tend to develop a certain covetousness, almost considered to be dutiful, for all kinds of benefits for their own electorate at the expense of the general public.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, as quoted by Ludwig von Mises, “The Economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk” (Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, August 27, 1924) — described by Mises as “the last words that Böhm-Bawerk addressed to Austria’s financial authorities.”

meme

The Deadliest Mass Shooter

Post author By CS Admin
Post date February 26, 2018
No Comments on The Deadliest Mass Shooter

Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as “the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder”. Government-sponsored large-scale killings for racial or political reasons would be considered democide under Rummel’s definition. Democide can also include deaths arising from “intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life”; this brings into account many deaths arising through various neglects and abuses, such as forced mass starvation. Rummel explicitly excludes battle deaths in his definition.

He put the total number of people killed by governments during the 20th century at 262,000,000 of which he says 148,000,000 were killed by communist regimes

Summary and Conclusions [20th Century Democide]

I BACKGROUND

2. The New Concept of Democide [Definition of Democide]
3. Over 133,147,000 Murdered: Pre-Twentieth Century Democide

II 128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS

4. 61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
5. 35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
6. 20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
7. 10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

III 19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGA-MURDERERS

8. 5,964,000 Murdered: Japan’s Savage Military
9. 2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
10. 1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey’s Genocidal Purges
11. 1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
12. 1,585,000 Murdered: Poland’s Ethnic Cleansing
13. 1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
14. 1,072,000 Murdered: Tito’s Slaughterhouse

IV 4,145,000 VICTIMS: SUSPECTED MEGAMURDERERS

15. 1,663,000 Murdered? Orwellian North Korea
16. 1,417,000 Murdered? Barbarous Mexico
17. 1,066,000 Murdered? Feudal RussiaReferences Index

More information here

R.J. Rummel’s published work listed here

Tags 2nd Amendment, guns, meme, Second Amendment rights

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Self-Defense, Implausible?

Post author By CS Admin
Post date February 26, 2018
2 Comments on Self-Defense, Implausible?

gun, gun free, school zone, control, schools, teachers, Israel, defense, gun control

Don’t take a GUN-FREE ZONE sign to a gun fight.

Whenever there’s a horrific incident of mass murder, advocates of citizen disarmament blame the right to protect oneself against armed attackers. The thinking seems to be that if we make it illegal for all civilians to have guns, bad guys willing to kill people will also refrain from using guns as they try to kill people.

This is implausible.

And if you do not see its implausibility immediately regarding firearms, consider drugs. Not taking them, but the war on same. Drugs didn’t vanish upon prohibition. Neither would guns if prohibited.

President Trump argues that students would be safer were schools a harder target. Why not arm well-trained teachers? “If you had a teacher who was adept with the firearm, they could end the attack very quickly.” He’s right.

Not a new idea, of course. It’s been argued, for example, by the NRA, whose chairman says that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.

This idea is being practiced right now — in Israel.

As Tzvi Lev argues at the Arutz Sheva 7 site, Israel proves the NRA’s point.

Even Israel — where Arab communities are “rife with illegal weapons” despite their illegality — has not always been quick to recognize that it’s better to have lots of armed civilians when terrorists start shooting at civilians. But after terrorists attacked a school in 1974, the government began arming and training teachers — somehow failing to defer to the terrorists’ preference for gun-free zones.

In both of the only-two school shootings in Israel since then, teachers killed the attackers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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