It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one’s time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea shops.
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Ernest Bramah
Author: Editor
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Thank You, Anonymous Leaper
I hope that the still-anonymous North Korean refugee who jumped a three-meter high, barbed-wire fence a few weeks ago — details are just now emerging — has paused to thank himself for his daring and initiative.
Now is a good time to do it. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, but we’re happy to let others around the world borrow it for their own thanks-giving purposes.
On November 3, a former 110-pound, North Korean gymnast leapt over a ten-foot fence in the demilitarized zone to reach South Korea.
The man has confirmed his story to the extent of proving his ability to leap tall barriers in a single bound in front of South Korean officials. He says he wants to defect.
I wish we knew more about him. But until I hear different, I’m going to assume that he is not a double agent. Just a guy who dislikes being oppressed and who wants a better life.
Every time a person leaps from totalitarianism to freedom, we should all be thankful. Here is someone who made it! This, despite pandemic-incited lockdowns that have made it even harder to escape North Korea. His feat shows others stuck behind country-wide prison walls that escape is still possible, even if few can do it the same way.
It also inspires those of us already on this side of the fence to keep working to preserve and expand the freedom, so often jeopardized, that we still enjoy.
Thank you, sir.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Lily Tomlin
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
John Hay, Castilian Days (1871; 1899), p. 28.
We Americans want to have our say, speak our piece — we do not wish to be gagged. No mystery to that. No puzzle. No strange, arcane, unexpected turn of our temper.
But that’s how it must seem to Nathan Bomey, author of “Parler, MeWe, Gab gain momentum as conservative social media alternatives in post-Trump age,” gracing the pages of USA Today.
“America’s crisis of political segregation — we increasingly don’t live alongside, associate with or even marry people who think differently from us — is increasingly leading conservatives to congregate together on social media outlets designed specifically for people who think like them.”
This is a passage of surpassing dumbness.
To pick one fundamental ideological divide at random: capitalist twitterers have never had any problem with posting tweets “alongside” socialist twitterers. The problem is the growing censorship of tweets that officials and employees at tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Google happened to dislike or disagree with for any reason.
This censorship was revved up during the recent election.
Bomey does mention claims of censorship by the persons being censored, but treats these as the ravings of “the extremist crowd.” He adds: “Experts on political polarization say [the rise of alternative social media] is a natural outgrowth of our divided culture. . . .”
Again: a major reason the alternatives to Twitter etc. are gaining such traction is the censorship. People are leaving the Big-Tech-sponsored discourse because they are being censored.
You don’t kick people out of the room and then scratch your head in wonderment, asking, “Gee willikers, why are you guys going away?”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
N.B. I have Minds and Gab accounts, but do not use them. Should I start again? I just set up a MeWe account. What alternative social media apps do you use?
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Citizens Advancing Science
On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.
Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.
In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.
November 13 is World Kindness Day, which has been celebrated in various countries since 1998. It is not an official celebratory day of the U.S.A., or of the United Nations. But individuals are free to be kind this day . . . or any day, for that matter.
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Josiah Warren
To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation — a madness which would be only equaled by requiring all men to possess the same countenance, the same voice or the same stature.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1852).
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Monarchy or Republic
On November 12, 1905, Norwegians established, by referendum, a monarchy — not a republic. Exactly 14 years later, to the day, Austria became a republic.
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Not Above the Law
Should government officials be free to violate the rights of others so long as they are doing their job at the time?
With impunity?
That’s the question that the Institute for Justice is arguing before the Supreme Court in Brownback v. King.
The case concerns James King, whom officers of the law mistook for a fugitive. When they grabbed his wallet and demanded to know his name, King ran, thinking he was being mugged. The officers pursued him and and then viciously assaulted him — nearly killing him.
Later, the government concocted bogus charges to try to force King to accept a plea bargain. The idea was to prevent him from suing the government for the way he had been treated.
King did not cooperate.
The problem? Many government officials in many circumstances have a get-out-of-prosecution-free card. The doctrine that confers this card is called “qualified immunity.”
In the 1982 case Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court opined that this immunity is warranted by “the need to protect officials who are required to exercise discretion” and “can be penetrated only when they have violated clearly established statutory or constitutional rights.”
In practice, however, the immunity being granted often seems more unqualified than qualified.
IJ’s premise is simple. “Government officials are not above the law,” says IJ President Scott Bullock. “Those who are charged with enforcing our nation’s laws should be more — not less — accountable for their unconstitutional acts.”
In a free society, police cannot brutally beat innocent people and get away with it. Can they?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Close Call
On November 9, 1979, NORAD computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland, detected an apparent massive Soviet nuclear strike. After reviewing the raw data from satellites and checking the early-warning radars, the alert was cancelled.