On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress un-tabled the Lee Resolution and voted to sever ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain.
One year later, to the day, Vermont became the first American territory to abolish slavery.
Bill Cosby is out of prison, but Britney Spears is still captive.
Once the titan of comedy, Cosby has just been released from prison because a judge threw out his three-year-old conviction on due process grounds. It may be the case that the ruling is correct, while the substance of the original judgment — Mr. Cosby’s guilt for aggravated indecent assault — remains sound. Sometimes the guilty go free.
The “Princess of Pop,” on the other hand, has not been released from her confinement.
After a series of hit singles and albums, and a wild phase in the mid-2000s, Ms. Spears was placed under a conservatorship. Though worth tens of millions, she was given a $2000 per week allowance, forbidden to marry or take out her birth control device, and forced to work under the direction of her father and managers.
She may be the world’s richest slave.
Conservatorships are designed to protect the health, welfare and rights of incompetent people. Ms. Spears has every appearance of being ultra-competent musically, but is undoubtedly deficient in other areas. As are we all. After her father suffered a severe illness a few years ago, she had a breakdown. But reports now say she has been trying to end her decade-plus conservatorship for even longer.
Some of her public statements indicate that she has been gaslit and traumatized by people she loved. “I’ve lied and told the whole world I’m okay and I’m happy,” she has testified in court.
“I’m scared of people. I don’t trust people with what I’ve been through. . . .”
Without pretending to understand the legal mess, I side with Britney: “It’s not okay to force me to do anything I don’t want to do.”
Exactly. Slavery is not okay.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS, Don Juan, Canto XIV (1823).
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.
On July 1, 1766, François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, was tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France.
Suppose you have the right to walk across a room.
Yet you’re legally chained to a chair.
By your rights, you may get up and walk across the room. But you can’t, because of the chains. You could if only you could. Why, there’s even a document specifying your right to do so. You physically can’t exercise this right; that’s the only problem.
But your right to walk across the room is enshrined and protected.
Or is it?
In fact, we have no right in the sense of a legal ability to do a certain thing if its exercise is, by law, thwarted.
Recently, Idaho lawmakers passed and Governor Little signed a law making it almost impossible for citizens to place a question onto the ballot. Until now, Idaho required that 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts sign the petition to send a question to ballot. Gratuitously onerous, but at least possible to comply with.
That possibility was a big problem for opponents of citizen initiative rights, however. Hence the new law, requiring signatures from 6 percent of registered voters in each of 35 districts.
Reclaim Idaho challenged the law. The Idaho Supreme Court is currently hearing the case.
According to Reclaim Idaho co-founder Luke Mayville: “If you claim that the people ought to have a right to put something on the ballot [but] make it impossible to exercise that right, it’s not really much of a right at all.”
Do justice, justices.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821).
On June 30, 1801, Frédéric Bastiat was born. Bastiat became one of the most important French Liberal School economists, following Condilliac and Jean-Baptiste Say, best known for his books Economic Harmonies and Economic Sophisms and two monographs, “The Seen and the Unseen,” and “The Law.” He was a brilliant stylist and perceptive critic of state-managed trade. His influence on conservative, libertarian and “limited-government thought” has been vast.
The emergency number of “999” was introduced in London, June 30, 1937, the first of its kind — arguably the best innovation in better government service in modern times.
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
On June 29, 1914, the day after the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austrian interrogations confirmed that the Serbian government was behind the assassination. Serbia denied involvement.
Thus continued the series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”
Modern UFO lore begins in World War II with the foo fighters, continues with Kenneth Arnold’s infamous June 24, 1947, Mount Rainier flying saucer report, the July 8 “crash” near Roswell, New Mexico (very near where the Enola Gay was deployed), and the “flying saucers over the capital” coverage a little over five years later.
In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was created, and 1952 gave us the National Security Agency. Coincidence?
President Harry S. Truman was regularly briefed about UFOs, and at the end of that era his successor warned us of the growth of a “military-industrial complex” completely outside of republican oversight or any democratic check to balance secret power and privilege.
The two issues are linked, UFOs and the Deep State. Many people deny the existence of both, and I understand the former denial — to those who have never seen anything inexplicable and weird in the skies? I’m with you. But the phenomena keep getting reported. And as for the Deep State, whatever its ontic status, its compartmentalized secrecy and not-quite-on-the-books budgeting were established by Congress. What evidence do you need to say it exists?
Public information?
The kind, ahem, now prevented by non-disclosure agreements and the layers upon layers of military security?
Last week, the Pentagon gave to Congress its report about UFOs.
Did it amount to anything?
Yes.
Was it the UFO Apocalypse so many had waited for?
No. The military confirmed these sightings are not optical illusions but “physical objects.”*
It is probably what you would expect from a secretive military’s congressional report. Some new admissions, sure, but mainly it was . . . a request for more funding.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Or, as Air Force General Nathan F. Twining put it in September of 1947, “The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.”
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