It is doubtful whether our soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a “public.”
Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), writing as George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
In this, the first part of the weekend podcast, Paul covers the biggest story of the week:
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.
We are not idiots.
We can see where a political program is heading before it is actually unveiled, right?
I know, you know: we are supposed to wait for the first actual piece of legislation to see the light of day before we criticize the agenda.
But that puts us at a disadvantage. Insiders can spend a lot of time working up new mandates before they reach a critique-able form. And during that incubation period, the ideas are out there, developing, gaining momentum. Festering.
What am I talking about?
Well, this: our rulers wriggle in delight, contemplating shooting us all with the vaccine being cooked up for SARS-CoV-2. Mandatory vaccination! We repeatedly hear, from the respected elected, that we cannot fully “re-open society” until the vaccine.
I cannot help having doubts: folks with badges and guns may soon demand that we be prevented from traveling, going into restaurants, buying food at supermarkets, or going to a movie theater or baseball game or church (!) until we get vaccinated . . . these “folks” . . . the Nancy Pelosis and Donald Trumps and Anthony Faucis . . . they are part of a system that has been spending tax money and borrowing to spend more and more and in this cause have already racked up trillions and trillions in public debt.
They didn’t bother protecting us from that.
The obvious itch to shoot hurriedly concocted biological agents into all our bloodstreams will definitely be pitched as “for our own good.”
But the pitchers who itch have no standing. Until they clean up their past messes, why would we trust them to accurately measure future consequences?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
The next day, September 11, “some people did something,” in the immortal words of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),* and nearly everybody forgot about Rumsfeld’s alarm. The terrorist attacks on 9/11, in New York and at the Pentagon itself, along with a citizen-led resistance on United Flight 93, resulted in 2,977 fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-term health consequences.
The unaccounted-for spending and receipts of the Pentagon and the Department of Housing and Urban Development increased ten-fold in the next 19 years.
Rep. Omar said these words on March 23, 2019. They were not a hit.
The state of Georgia and the country of China differ. The policies of one are much worse than those of the other.
Thus, the Walt Disney Company seriously mulled refusing to do business in Georgia but was eager to film in China, near internment camps used to imprison Uyghur Muslims.
Last year, Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger threatened to suspend Disney’s film work in Georgia if the state’s new restriction on abortion went into effect. The law would have prohibited abortion when a heartbeat could be detected in the fetus. Before the law was struck down, Iger said that Disney would likely leave Georgia if it survived challenge, because “many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes….”
Journalists and others have been excluded from the Xinjiang region. But satellite images and the accounts of victims and witnesses provide evidence that perhaps two million Uyghurs and others have been imprisoned in the camps there, where many have died. Others have been forcibly sterilized.
In addition to getting permission to film in Xinjiang for its new movie “Mulan,” a few years back Disney got the go-ahead to open a Disneyland in Shanghai.
In the film, Disney expressly thanks a propaganda arm of the CCP, the “publicity department of CPC Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee.”
Disney’s conduct seems reprehensible.
But let’s remember: the government of China is not exactly the government of Georgia.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
N.B. In previous episodes of Common Sense with Paul Jacob, the people here identified as “Uyghur” — following the spelling used by Disney — were spelled as “Uighur.”
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September 10, 1918, is the estimated date of birth for Rin Tin Tin, one of a litter of shell-shocked puppies found by an American serviceman in a bombed-out kennel in Lorraine, less than two months before the end of World War I. The dog went on to become the lead actor in a number of very popular films, and one of the great celebrities of his age.
[I]f two countries are placed under unequal conditions of production, it is that one of the two that is least favored by nature that has most to gain by free trade.
Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, “To Equalize the Conditions of Production.”