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Update

Trans Is Out at HUD

“Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced a new proposed rule on Thursday,” explains The Epoch Times, one “that seeks to end the use of ‘gender identity’ across all departmental programs, which is intended to ‘restore biological reality and protect women.’”

HUD plans to “remove radical definitions of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender, replacing them with sex” an April 23 statement from HUD clarifies.

Common terminology — including mother, father, woman, man, girl, and boy — will return to a commonsense usage, relating to a person’s sex as understood universally until just a few years ago with the rise of “gender theory” and “queer theory” and transhumanism, transgenderism and other now evidently transient fads in ideology.

In February the HUD secretary claimed that the new standards are in line with the infamous executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office.

“In its February 2025 statement,” the Epoch Times concludes, “HUD said that the 2016 rule allowed men to take advantage of department programs directed at women.”

Categories
Thought

Charles Dickens

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

Categories
representation

What We Want and How to Get It

Mick Jagger, government, democracy, elections, voting, initiatives, recall, referendum

British-American philosopher Mick Jagger put it best: “You can’t always get what you want.”

A universal verity.

But what about a sadder situation? “You must always get what you don’t want.”

Only the deepest pessimist thinks this pertains to our lives, our “lived experience” in even these our mixed-up times. But it does apply to one huge domain of life: our representation in Congress.

Or so says Stephen Erickson. “The American people consistently rank career politicians among the least trustworthy professions. At the same time, professional politicians are supposed to represent us, and they have more power over our lives than any other profession.”

I don’t think this needs to be argued. Though Mr. Erickson does cite evidence, the thesis hardly needs massive data sets. Or British-American philosophers. So what to do? Erickson, being a practical man, takes the bull by the bumps on its head, two of them:

“First, we need to show how representative democracy might work without professional politicians.” The basic proposal is to “Reduce all local electoral districts to no more than 10,000 residents” where “every district becomes walkable and winnable with handshakes, flyers and yard signs.” This would work because small districts turn politics into “personal reputations and relationships, not money and marketing. Special interests therefore lose their influence.”

His second show-and-tell is “a realistic path forward.” That path lies with “the citizens’ initiative and referendum.”

As readers of this column know, my support for this more direct approach is both long-standing and thorough-going. The initiative process is the only decent process for serious reforms of our representative system because our representatives will block serious reform otherwise. 

Please read Stephen Erickson’s essay, “How to Eliminate Politics as a Profession.”

No one wants to be their Beast of Burden.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Dostoyevsky

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734.
Categories
Today

Library of Congress

The United States Library of Congress was established on April 24, 1800, when President John Adams signed legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.”

Categories
election law litigation partisanship

Un-Redistricting Virginia

Gerrymander, Virginia, Circuit Court, voting, elections, democracy

A circuit court has ruled that Virginia’s new voter-passed congressional map, gerrymandered to give Democrats in the state a prohibitive advantage in the next congressional election, is unconstitutional.

Judge Jack Hurley, of the Circuit Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the 29th Judicial Circuit, Tazewell County, denied a motion to stay his injunction blocking certification of the election using the new districts. Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli reports that once a final order is drafted and entered, “it will be immediately appealed.”

If the rejiggering survives the challenge, it could be the factor that tips the balance in the House of Representatives toward the Democrats next November.

Cuccinelli, who is now national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, had been saying that passage of the gerrymander would not be the last word. In their rush to get the measure to voters and enacted before November 2026, lawmakers ignored sundry constitutional requirements.

The 2024 special session that took up the redistricting measure had been convened to legislate about the budget. “Its governing resolution limited the session’s scope. Expanding it to include a constitutional amendment on redistricting required a two-thirds vote that never occurred.”

Also, says Cuccinelli, the state constitution requires that “an election must intervene between first and second passage” of a proposed constitutional amendment. “Here, first passage occurred during an election cycle — not before an intervening one.”

Among other problems is the constitutional stipulation that “every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.” The proposed map violates this requirement “badly.”

When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and this partisan map must go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Tolstoy

Every government explains its existence, and justifies its deeds of violence, by the argument that if it did not exist the condition of things would be very much worse. After assuring the people of its danger the government subordinates it to control, and when in this condition compels it to attack some other nation. And thus the assurance of the government is corroborated in the eyes of the people, as to the danger of attack from other nations.

Leo Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism (1895), as translated in The Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï, Vol. 20, p. 44.
Categories
Today

A Bach Premiere

Du Hirte Israel, höre (“You Shepherd of Israel, hear”), BWV 104, a church cantata, was performed for the first time in Leipzig 302 years ago on April 23rd, the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, conducting.

Categories
national politics & policies progress voluntary cooperation

Dream & Achieve More, Not Less

Artemis, moon, space exploration, private enterprise, NASA

The successful Artemis II mission is one answer to what we have been told for way too long, that exploration “beyond known boundaries” is unaffordable and “too risky.”

“We are told not only to consume less but to dream less,” writes John Tillman. “Always the same chorus: lower your expectations. Stop reaching.” SpaceX and Artemis II have interrupted this tune.

And Artemis II has a lot to do with SpaceX, Tillman stresses. It’s NASA, it’s a government program, but one heavily reliant on markets.

NASA deserves credit for managing a complex mission. But 2,700 private companies were involved in providing crucial components.

Lockheed Martin. Made the Orion spacecraft that carried the crew.

Boeing. Made “the massive core stage of the Space Launch System rocket.”

Northrop Grumman. Made rocket boosters and an abort system.

Aerojet Rocketdyne. Made engines and thrusters.

“That’s just the prime contractors. Beneath them sat a supply chain of extraordinary depth.”

There’s more. In the five decades that NASA avoided lunar exploration and colonization, private enterprise had been providing reminder after reminder as to just how much could be accomplished by tapping dispersed knowledge and talents — from feeding the masses to connecting everyone via computer networking — making any lingering timidity or depressive preconception ultra-passé.

“SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches for $67 million, lands its boosters, and flies again within weeks. That’s a nearly twenty-five-fold cost reduction through competition and innovation. When companies bear the risk, they solve problems creatively. When taxpayers bear the risk, you get decades of stagnation.”

That’s how markets and dreams work — when they’re allowed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Dostoyevsky

The best definition of man is: a biped, ungrateful. 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734.