Author: Redactor

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Today

The Revolution Begins

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began when the “shot heard around the world” was fired between the 700 British troops and the 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the Lexington town green.

The British troops were on a mission to capture Patriot leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock and to seize a Patriot arsenal.

The Battle of Lexington ended with eight Americans killed and ten wounded, along with one wounded British soldier.

In Concord, a couple of hours later, British troops were encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. The British commander ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans, but on the 16-mile journey they were constantly attacked by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. By the time the British reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties.

On April 19, 1782, John Adams secured the Dutch Republic’s recognition of the United States as an independent government.

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budgets & spending cuts subsidy

Don’t Blame DOGE

Rocky Mountain Institute

Sometime during the Trump administration’s fast and furious spending cuts and cancellations, the Rocky Mountain Institute lost millions in Biden-era federal climate-nonsense grants — cut not by DOGE but by the Department of Energy under Secretary Chris Wright.

Tears have been shed, garments rent: $5.3 million would have been used to retrofit a building to make it more green; $1.5 million would have funded research on the practicality of “electric vehicle carshare programs” and the “resilience” and “equity” of U.S. business models.

These initiatives are just the tip of the spear. RMI is also a good buddy of the Chinese government. RMI even has an office in Beijing.

As James Roth puts it over at our sister publication StoptheCCP.org, “Yes, RMI works with the communist government and proudly. It’s all over their website. It’s their specialty.”

Hold on, Roth. We must all try to understand that this is the kind of thing we must do if we wish to pretend to effectuate real global change in order to pretend to finetune world climate. If we let reality infect our thinking, what happens to mankind’s noble dream of instituting a globe-girdling weather-control machine while fatuously enabling the policies, conduct, and lies of tyrants? It would evaporate in the morning sun.

We’d be stuck with facts. 

We’d be stuck treating RMI as responsible for its actions, as U.S. Senator Ted Cruz did in a letter to the institute’s CEO in 2023, asking “whether RMI has ever received any funding from any entity or individual associated with the Chinese government. Please answer with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. . . .”

There’s at least one such funder. RMI has gotten money from Energy Foundation China, which has CCP ties and is “run by former Chinese Communist Party officials.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Herman Melville

What though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.

Herman Melville, the complete epigram titled “A Reasonable Constitution” in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Howard P. Vincent Ed. (Chicago 1947).
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Today

The Mueller Report

On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of the Mueller Report was released to the United States Congress and the public. President Donald Trump claimed that it exonerated him. “It was called, ‘No collusion. No obstruction.’ I’m having a good day. There never was [collusion], by the way, and there never will be. . . . This should never happen to another president again, this hoax.”

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international affairs political economy

Out of Poverty

China, farmers, agriculture, communism, government, freedom

“So, who brought who out of poverty?” asks Frank Dikötter about China’s economic rise.

The Dutch historian and author of four excellent books on Chinese history — Mao’s Great Famine; The Tragedy of Liberation; The Cultural Revolution; and China After Mao — Dikötter recently spoke at length with Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” podcast.

Calling it “conventional wisdom,” Robinson offers that “the number that I found over and over again was eight to 900 million people lifted out of poverty since Deng Xiaoping announce[d] his reforms in ’78.”

“That’s all propaganda,” declares Dr. Dikötter. “The people in the countryside have lifted themselves out of poverty.”

Even before Mao’s death in 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended and the “army, which was deployed in every farm, every factory, every office from 1968 onwards, that army goes back to the barracks and is purged in turn,” he explains. “People in the countryside realize there’s nobody there to supervise them. There’s nobody there to tell them, go and work in the collective fields.”

Mr. Robinson chimes in: “The boot is off their neck.”

“So,” Dikötter expounds “they start operating underground factories; they open black markets; they trade among themselves.”

Deng “merely [put] the stamp of approval on something that escapes them altogether, namely the drive of ordinary villagers to claim back the freedoms they had before 1949.

“Allow ordinary people to get on with it,” he says, “they will!

“But this is not a party,” concludes Dikötter, “that will allow ordinary people to get on with it.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Anthony Trollope

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams (1859), Ch. 27.
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Today

54° 40’N

On April 17 1824, Russia abandoned all North American claims south of 54° 40’N.

The 17th of April (other years):

1907 — The Ellis Island immigration center processed 11,747 immigrants, more than on any other day.

1942 — French prisoner of war General Henri Giraud escaped from his castle prison in Königstein Fortress.

1969 – Communist Party of Czechoslovakia chairman Alexander Dubček was deposed.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Excellence in Success

space, freedom, NASA, SpaceX, DEI, quota

The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has “parted ways with” — I’m guessing fired, despite the glowing words that attended the parting — DEI officer Neela Rajendra.

The Free Beacon reports that NASA seems to have been nudged in this direction by a Beacon report that despite the anti-DEI policies of the new U.S. administration, the Jet Propulsion lab had tried to retain Rajendra by changing her title. She still had many of the same responsibilities, including managing “affinity groups” like the Black Excellence Strategic Team.

The propulsion lab is now replacing its DEI department with a new one called “Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success.” 

Even assuming that race and gender consciousness are now no more — probably not a safe assumption — we may wonder why such a department, solely devoted to “excellence and success,” is necessary.

If it is, how did the NASA of the 1960s, including Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, ever manage to reach and land on the moon? Surely this kind of accomplishment must have required pervasive excellence. Maybe, back then, commitment to excellence was one of the requirements for getting and keeping NASA jobs to begin with?

Among Rajendra’s own excellences: hostility to deadlines and criticism of SpaceX for being “fast-paced” and failing to promote DEI, as she complained in 2022. 

A few years later, it was a SpaceX capsule that enabled the rescue of NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. 

Now that’s “team excellence”!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Herman Melville

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in Putnam’s Magazine (November and December 1853 ); revised to final form in The Piazza Tales (1856).
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Today

From Birmingham Jail

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting segregation, on April 16, 1963.