Categories
Today

Giants

On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.

Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon, a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discovers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.

When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.

Categories
by Paul Jacob video

Watch: What If It Is Not Really About Race?

This Week in Common Sense, June 15 – 19, 2020.
Categories
Today

Grandfather clauses

On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.

Categories
audio podcast

Listen: Frank, Earnest, Practical

Paul has something to say about the kind of conversations we need to be having in this country:

This Week in Common Sense, June 15 – 19, 2020.
Categories
Thought

Aristotle

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle, Politics, Book VI.

Categories
Today

A Federation

On the 20th of June in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Oliver Ellsworth moved to confine legislative powers to two distinct branches, and to strike the word “national” from the document. Edmund Randolph of Virginia had previously moved successfully to call the government the National Government of United States. Ellsworth moved that the government should continue to be called the United States of America.

The final wording eventually became “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

And, yes, the word “national” does not occur anywhere in the Constitution.


John F. Kennedy authored the Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on Ellsworth. This was Kennedy’s only contribution to the Encyclopedia.

Categories
general freedom

Happy Juneteenth!

Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.”

Folks do not generally like to dwell on their sins. That is why we all think forgiveness is so swell.

But the first and most important step in redemption? To stop committing the wickedness, in this case to immediately emancipate those held in bondage. That “struggle,” as the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass would so eloquently refer to it, was anything but quick.   

Emancipation came only after Union forces won the Civil War, America’s bloodiest conflict by far.  

But it did come. Slavery was abolished.

And this wonderful news reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — a date that has lived on as the holiday “Juneteenth.” (Some call it “Emancipation Day” or “Freedom Day.”) And enslaved people were freed.

“This year, Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the arrival of the news of emancipation from slavery,” Veronica Chambers writes in the New York Times, “seems to be a bigger deal across the nation.”

By executive order, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has declared today a paid holiday for state employees. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, of blackface infamy, gave all state executive branch employees the day off and promised to push through legislation next year naming Juneteenth a state holiday to be “acknowledged and celebrated by all of us.”

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee says she will introduce a bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday. 

I like it. Is there anything more worthy of commemoration than freeing people from slavery? It cannot hurt to remind people there was once slavery in America, or that we fought and died to bring that awful institution to an end.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

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

Categories
Thought

James Baldwin

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
Categories
Today

Happy Birthday, Václav

In 1941, Czech economist and politician Václav Klaus was born; other June 19 births include Salman Rushdie in 1947, Kathleen Turner in 1954, and Laura Ingraham in 1964.

Categories
international affairs national politics & policies

Twelve Monkeys in Charge?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, current director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, served as a leader on the “Global Vaccine Plan” through partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates, late of Microsoft, Inc., is on record desiring to make a future coronavirus vaccine mandatory for travel . . . and to institute tracking of everyone’s interactions.

After the Obama Administration pressured National Institutes of Health to put a moratorium on “gain of function” research of coronavirus in America, according to Newsweek, Dr. Fauci devoted over $7 million to that very research . . . in Wuhan, China.

The idea? To see if the coronavirus in bats could migrate into humans, using ferrets and other animals to cajole the virus to “gain function,” i.e. transmissibility.

The goal being to prepare vaccines in advance of naturally occurring jumps over the barrier between humans and other animals.

But many scientists regard this kind of research to be morally questionable. 

And 12 Monkeys dangerous. 

In the midst of all this has been one Dr. Charles Lieber, a 61-year-old nanoscience researcher, who recently “has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of making false statements and will be arraigned in federal court in Boston at a later date.  Lieber was arrested on Jan. 28, 2020, and charged by criminal complaint.” He allegedly lied about his relationship with China’s Thousand Talents Plan and his role as a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China.

Where SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus of the current pandemic — apparently came from.

Nanoscience is the engineering of really, really small stuff. Like strands of RNA and DNA and . . . viruses.

Does this induce confidence about that vaccine allegedly in the offing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

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