Author: Redactor

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Thought

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell

I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

Edgar Mitchell, lunar module pilot on NASA’s Apollo 14 mission, as quoted in the July 23, 2008, edition of The Daily Mail UK.
Categories
Today

Huxleyian A.F.

On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.

Today is July 23, A.F. 162. The “A.F.” is not what “af” means in popular online abbreviation, but “in the Year of Our Ford” — “After Ford,” specifically.

Categories
subsidy

Non-Billions for Non-Trains

California, train, high speed rail, waste, fraud, government spending, transportation

The federal government has officially stopped throwing money at California’s long-in-the-non-making “high-speed” railroad. A scheduled-but-unspent $4 billion in federal subsidy has been canceled.

If the nonexistent project continues, money to fund non-laying down of non-tracks must come from other sources.

Non-tracks? Yes. As Victoria Taft notes, “Not one foot of track” of the not-in-progress “high-speed” railroad of the future has been glued into place. 

We were just getting to track-laying phase, California Governor Newsom protests.

The going rate for snail-pace non-completion of nonexistent, not-in-progress railroads is $15 billion (says the Department of Transportation): the estimated amount of federal funding for California’s non-project to date.

The total graft bin may have been even larger than that; who knows how many nickels for the non-project have been collected from widows and orphans? But something like $15 billion is how much the federal government doled out over 16 years to ensure the railroad’s non-construction. Projected total cost of California’s infinite-prep-phase railroad: $135 billion.

Why has it taken so long — six-ish whole months — for the second Trump administration to get around to stoppering this particular gusher of monstrous waste of taxpayer dollars?

Perhaps proceeding as fast as they can, the cost-cutters and fraud-flayers take their mission one thing at a time. In Trump’s place, you might be tempted to chuck the whole five-mile-thick list of federal expenditures, throw it into the pyre and defund everything, re-starting from scratch with the courts and military. But not all temptations play out in Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Destutt de Tracy

It is manifest that, to banish bad sentiments born of oppression and insolence, it is necessary that laws be equal for everyone, and even for everyplace.

Destutt de Tracy, as quoted by Mme. Victor de Tracy, Death Notice on Destutt de Tracy (translated by Iris Hartman, 1852).

Categories
Today

Holding at Nine

On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.

Categories
Voting

Everything’s Dis for Democrats

North Carolina, DNC, voting, democracy

The National Democratic Committee may sue the North Carolina Board of Elections.

The board is asking some 100,000 people to supply identifying information currently missing from voter registration records. Part of the motive is to settle a lawsuit by the Justice Department.

Many of the 100,000 registrants may well have a perfect right to vote but may have omitted necessary information when registering simply because of an unclear registration form. The Associated Press notes that the lack of ID info has “muddled election administration and voter eligibility in North Carolina for over a year.”

Registrants who, despite reminders, fail to update their registration by going to a DMV website, visiting an election board office, or submitting the information in postage-paid envelopes in time for the next election will have to submit provisional ballots when they vote.

These provisional votes may not be counted if the requested information is never provided or proves inaccurate. 

The DNC is threatening to sue, calling the North Carolina effort the product of “collusion” between the state and federal government to violate the voting rights of the 100,000. The Committee seems to regard it as self-evident that none of the 100,000 can provide the missing information.

There are two kinds of disenfranchisement. One is disenfranchisement of persons who have the right to vote. The other is “disenfranchisement” of persons who don’t, perhaps because they are not citizens.

Determining which is which must be done by some means or other. And can be. Quite reasonably.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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J. Allen Hynek

Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and the public should not be taught that it is.

J. Allen Hynek, “Unusual Aerial Phenomena,” Journal of the Optical Society of America XLIII, No. 4 (April 1953).
Categories
Today

Monkeyshine, Moonshine

On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.

Scopes’ biology lessons leaned heavily on a “eugenics” play on Darwinism, at variance both with Darwin and the general thrust of today’s evolutionary thought.

Today is the 56th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s perambulation upon the Moon, on July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis for about two hours and 15 minutes. They spent over 21 hours on the surface, total, most of it inside the Lunar Module, at the site they called Tranquillity Base, before launching to rejoin astronaut Michael Collins in lunar orbit and returning to Earth on the 24th.

Categories
Update

Drugs, Disease & Drug-Pushers

Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci, covid, gain of function

The rule in statism is that everything not prohibited is subsidized. Or, worse yet, mandated. And that has been recent American practice.

You can see it in the nine charts The Epoch Times published Friday.

In 2020 Americans filled 6.4 billion prescriptions, about 19 per person.

By 2023, Americans were consuming more than 210 billion daily doses of medication annually. That’s more than 600 pills, shots, drops, IVs, creams, mists, or suppositories for every person in the country.

“9 Things to Know About Big Pharma, in Charts,” The Epoch Times (July 18, 2025).

And all these drugs have political consequences:

And consequences on federal government spending:

Meanwhile, the federal government’s hand in the creation of SARS-Cov-2 — the coronavirus that induced the pandemic and the panic — is clearer than ever, and the clarity is all about America’s most notorious bureaucrat, Anthony Fauci:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday requesting that the Department of Justice investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci for possible criminal prosecution regarding Fauci’s congressional testimony in May 2021 about gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Rand Paul ‘re-refers’ Fauci to Department of Justice,” The Washington Examiner (July 15, 2025).

In formally requesting the prosecution of Fauci again, Sen. Paul cited the questionable legality of the autopen signatures that preemptively pardoned Fauci, while “Sleepy Joe Biden” was . . . on who-knows-how-many drugs.

The spread of the novel coronavirus led, we all remember, to the roll-out of a number of new novel medications, subsidized by government and, in many cases, required by government.

Categories
Thought

Destutt de Tracy

Politics and morality are not one and the same thing, and laws cannot be good unless made in this spirit.

Destutt de Tracy, as quoted by Mme. Victor de Tracy, Death Notice on Destutt de Tracy (translated by Iris Hartman, 1852).