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Today

Selma March

On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.


Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.

The first section of the amendment reads as follows:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Categories
government transparency

De-Classification or Re-Regurgitation?

What do the JFK assassination files and an obscure booklet called “The Adam and Eve Story” have in common?

Both are examples of how the CIA and other Deep State actors keep us guessing and in the dark: by over-classification. 

A “sanitized” copy of Chan Thomas’s immortal classic of seeming ultra-nuttery, the aforementioned “Adam and Eve Story,” was de-classified in 2013. Now on the CIA’s website, it floats a wild theory about human history and life on this planet, complete with repeated global, world-turned-on-end catastrophes. 

Most people had never heard of the work until de-classified and placed on the website. The Wikipedia entry mentions the de-classification of the document but not why it was classified as secret in the first place.

Here’s a theory: to confuse us

The only reason most people ever give the booklet a second glance is because the CIA made it secret.

Now turn to the present, with something circulating today as “evidence” from the recent release of backlogged JFK assassination documents: a summary of passages in the New Left journal Ramparts, June 1967. It reproduces a rumor about one Gary Underhill and his alleged blurting out that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible” for the shooting in Dealey Plaza. 

All the rage online, but this document was merely the re-regurgitation of public information — which is what an awful lot of classified material is.

We take note of this Underhill story not because it proves anything, but because the report was made secret in the first place. 

It’s almost as if they want some people to believe something, and others to scoff at it all. 

But maybe what they are doing is burying us in useless “information.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Thought

Harriet Beecher Stowe

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Cathedral,” The Atlantic Monthly (1846).
Categories
Today

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was published. By the end of the nineteenth century, it became the century’s second best-selling book, after the Bible.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Propaganda by the Deed

“Five Tesla vehicles were damaged when a fire was started at a Tesla Collision Center in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning,” reports Megan Forrester for ABC News, “the latest in a wave of incidents aimed at the electric vehicle company, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”

Described as a “targeted attack” by the police, these acts of outrageous property destruction are not confined to the Silver State. Occurring all over the country, these are obvious political attacks on Elon Musk, who turned against Democrats by supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run, and who has since led the DOGE effort to confront federal government “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“Violence against Tesla dealerships will be labeled domestic terrorism,” Reuters quotes President Trump, “and perpetrators will ‘go through hell.’”

As of last week, Tesla stock had plunged 50 percent since December, but “[s]hares of the automaker closed nearly 4% higher on Tuesday,” continues the Reuters report, “rebounding from the biggest one-day fall in four-and-a half years the previous day, after the president appeared with Musk at the White House to select a new Tesla for his staff to use.”

“House DOGE Subcommittee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.,” USA Today told us last week, “announced that she and her committee colleagues had sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel asking for an investigation into the ‘organized’ attacks against Musk, Tesla and the DOGE effort.”

These spectacular destructions of private property are indeed terroristic. Anarchists used to use a similar approach over a century ago, calling the technique “propaganda by the deed.”

But the tide of public opinion turned against the anarchists, and I suspect it will turn strongly against today’s saboteurs as well. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Josiah Warren

What is liberty? WHO WILL ALLOW ME TO DEFINE IT FOR HIM, AND AGREE BEFOREHAND TO SQUARE HIS LIFE BY MY DEFINITION? Who does not wish to see it first, and sit in judgment on it, and decide for himself as to its propriety? and who does not see that it is his own individualinterpretation of the word that he adopts? And who will agree to square his whole life by any rule, which, although good at present, may not prove applicable to all cases? Who does not wish to preserve his liberty to act according to the peculiarities or INDIVIDUALITIES of future cases, and to sit in judgment on the merits of each, and to change or vary from time to time with new developments and increasing knowledge? Each individual being thus at liberty at all times, would be SOVEREIGN OF HIMSELF. NO GREATER AMOUNT OF LIBERTY CAN BE CONCEIVED—ANY LESS WOULD NOT BE LIBERTY! Liberty defined and limited by others is slavery!

Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1852).
Categories
Today

House of Lords, House of TV

On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”

This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.

On March 19, 1979, the United States House of Representatives began broadcasting its day-to-day business via the cable television network C-SPAN.

Categories
First Amendment rights insider corruption

The Biden’s Four Ways

In response to controversies about pandemics, elections, and whatnot, Congress did not quite pass — nor President Biden quite sign — a new law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. (As far as I know.)

Biden’s government did act, regardless, with the force of law to shut people up. According to the Media Research Center’s new report on Biden censorship — ready to be shared with all who contend that his administration perfectly respected our freedom of speech — the cabal I call The Biden censored Americans using four approaches:

Direct action. For example, ordering a big tech firm or a judge to censor somebody. White house advisors, agency bureaucrats, and others exerted this kind of pressure.

Policy or rulemaking. Examples include the State Department’s agreement with foreign nations “to pressure Tech platforms to censor more” and Homeland Security’s attempt to create a Disinformation Governance Board to police speech.

Partnerships with state and private actors to censor speech. Biden’s National Security Council collaborated with the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit to impose UK censorship on Americans.

Grants to organizations to attack and flag utterance of incorrect speech, which the government could then censor.

These were effectuated, by MRC’s count, with 57 initiatives.

As soon as he began his second term, President Trump issued executive orders to combat such muzzling of debate. Congress must do its part too.

No matter what defenses are put in place, though, we will see further attempts by government goons to gag us. We must be vigilant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Jimmy Dore

That’s the thing about Americans, they’re the most propagandized people in the world and they have no idea. People in China know when they’re being propagandized and people in the old Soviet Union knew . . . but people in America think that — “what? I’m just watching the news!”

Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).

Categories
Today

Sunflower

March 18 marks the eleventh anniversary of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement. Students occupied the Taiwanese legislature to block a trade agreement between Taiwan and China, which the public came to believe gave too much economic leverage to China, a power that regularly threatens to invade the free and democratic island nation.

The event awakened a deep concern about China’s dangerous encroachment as well as further impressing a “Taiwanese identity.” The protest may have influenced the 2014 Umbrella movement in Hong Kong as well as leading to electoral victories in Taiwan for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in 2016 and again in 2020.


On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.

The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.