On July 3, 1775, George Washington took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1952 on July 3, Puerto Rico’s Constitution was approved by the Congress of the United States.
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July Third
Author: Redactor
While we were going about our business, and maybe even soaking in some summer sunshine, the “US National Debt,” as the federal government’s explicit financial obligation is called, passed the $37 trillion mark.
As if to mark the occasion, the Chinese government unloaded a whopping eight billion, two hundred million dollars worth of U.S. Treasuries onto the market.
It’s a lot of money.
It’s a lot of debt.
And now China no longer holds it.
Thus they are not quite as invested in our future.
Is that scary?
Well, everything about our federal debt load should scare us. If we are placid and unperturbed now, how many extra billions and trillions would it take to shake us?
If you are especially concerned about world stability, it might make sense to comfort you with this . . . interesting . . . piece of information: China still holds over $750 billion in United States debt.
A more important piece of information might be what the Chinese central bank has been replacing the U.S. debt with: gold.
Lots of gold.
About 200,000 kilograms of gold!
Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, insists that “a single asset has overtaken the US dollar’s position as the world’s de facto reserve currency.” That asset is gold.
We aren’t on the gold standard, but it looks like we may be falling backwards into something like one.
It makes me wonder if there is still gold in Fort Knox . . . and just how much.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, XI, 14 (c. 397).
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Secession & Abolition
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress un-tabled the Lee Resolution and voted to sever ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain.
One year later, to the day, Vermont became the first American territory to abolish slavery.
The civil war between sane New Yorkers and the other kind has reached its next phase.
The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary has some high-profile Democrats, like Sen. John Fetterman, expressing chagrin over the success of this openly commie slash-and-burn, soak-the-(white)-rich, pro-Hamas guy. Others, like former President Bill Clinton, who once posed as a moderate, are cheering him on.
Mamdani is also anti-policing. He has said: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD . . . NO to fake cuts — defund the police.”
Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and former and current GOP nominee for NYC mayor, says that Mamdani “has a weird notion of how policing is, as if it should be people like Mahatma Gandhi walking around, you know, functioning as a social worker. That does not work.”
Some police officers say they’ll quit if someone so openly hostile to law and order — not to abuse of police power, but to reasonable policing when it’s obviously necessary — also wins the general election and becomes the next mayor.
Top brass fear an exodus.
But would only police officers quit? Everyone in NYC who prefers civilization to annihilation should then quit.
And it would be natural for many of the more successful New Yorkers to leave if Mamdani gets in on the strength of the NYC’s apparently huge and growing ressentiment vote and starts robbing and pillaging in earnest.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William of Ockham
Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.
It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer.
William of Ockham (c. 1287 – 1347) — he of “Occam’s Razor,” one of its expressions here presented — in Summa Totius Logicae, i. 12.
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Natural Selection
On July 1, 1858, a joint reading at the Linnean Society of London of papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace debuted a new explanation of speciation and biological evolution.
Linnean Society records record that eminent scientists Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker “communicated” the papers of the two breakthrough theorists:
- An extract from Darwin’s unpublished manuscript (written in 1844, part of his Essay).
- An abstract of Darwin’s 1857 letter to Asa Gray, outlining his theory.
- Wallace’s essay, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” (written in 1858).
Though attended by about 30 prominent intellectuals and scientists of the day, conspicuously not in attendance were either Wallace (who was in the East Indies) or Darwin (whose son Charles Waring Darwin had died two days earlier).
The event proved to be one of the more significant scientific presentations in the history of western civilization.
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Socialist Intifada
“Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?” Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Zohran Mamdani, the likely winner of last week’s still undecided Democratic Party mayoral primary in New York City.
“I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” was the democratic socialist’s reply.
So, his answer to whether they have a “right to exist” was . . . NO!
“Because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality,” continued Mamdani, “and ultimately what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.”
Even equality at lower levels of wealth. By design and decree.
But don’t worry your pretty little billionaire heads about being pilloried, prohibited, prevented from existing, because Mamdani generously offered: “I look forward to work with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fairer for all of us.”
Ah, the rest of us . . . what does it all mean for us? Hmmm, could politicians aiming to tax, exploit, and totally end any such thing as “the rich” ever miss the mark and wind up hitting us of lesser wealth? And what if billionaires’ success is intimately tied to ours?
Still, New York City’s undesirables do not end with billionaires. Zohran Mamdani sees white people. (They’re everywhere.)
Welker confronted the Democrat state rep with a racially charged statement on his website: “Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.”
Why bring up skin color?
The democratic socialist assured his policy is “not driven by race,” adding, “It is not to work backwards from a racial assessment of neighborhoods or our city.”
Of course, that “racial assessment” appears to be precisely what he’s working from.
Mamdani was also questioned about the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which he declined to condemn. It looks like his intifada will be against billionaires and white people.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Nullum malum bona intentione factum excusatur.
No evil can be excused because it is done with a good intention.
Thomas Aquinas, On the Ten Commandments (c. 1273).
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An Assassin Hanged
Charles Julius Guiteau met his death on June 30, 1882, at the end of a rope (as was commonly said at the time), three days shy of a year after shooting newly elected President James A. Garfield.
Guiteau was a member of the “Stalwart” faction of the Republican Party, devoted to the continuation of the kind of job-seeking corruption that Garfield, the reformer, opposed on principle. Despite being on the opposite team, so to speak, Guiteau was an ardent supporter of Garfield in the election campaign, and expected a diplomatic position in return. Failing to gain such a position in the new administration, Guiteau decided upon a sort of mad revenge as the apt response to Garfield’s “betrayal.”
While it took a year to finalize Guiteau’s execution, it took much less time — if itself an excruciatingly long time — for Garfield to die of the wound and the subsequent doctoring, on September 19th, 1881.