A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”
Anthony the Great, as quoted in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward, trans.
On December 14, 1918, Friedrich Karl von Hessen, a German prince elected by the Parliament of Finland to become King Väinö I, renounced the Finnish throne.
In 1939, on this date, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland and starting the Winter War.
On December 14, 1819, Alabama became the 22nd state of these United States.
That is eleven years so far. “We’re going to get him home,” insisted Trump.
Mr. Ulbricht, a libertarian cause célèbre, was sentenced in 2013 to double life terms, without parole, plus 40 years.
So, who did he kill?
At 26 years of age, Ulbricht created the Silk Road online platform, “an anonymous e-commerce website.” Used by some folks, certainly, to trade in drugs and other illegalities.
On a Change.org petition urging presidential clemency (which I’ve signed), his mother explains: “Ross is a first-time offender” and “an Eagle Scout, scientist and peaceful entrepreneur,” who faced only “non-violent charges at trial. He was never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.”
That’s why she and many of us simply cannot stand the idea that now 40-year-old “Ross is condemned to die in prison.”
Dudley Do-Right — no. Trump to the rescue!
Indeed, it was a very smart political move, courting the Libertarian vote both by showing up and, specifically, by pledging to free Ross Ulbricht. Libertarians suddenly had a tangible reason to support Trump.
Will Trump keep his word? “I do think he’s going to free Ross Ulbricht,” Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle told Robby Soave on his “Rising” program.
I think so, too. I sure hope so. It would be refreshing to see the awesome power our Constitution gives the president to pardon crimes and commute sentences used for someone deserving of mercy.
Rather than someone escaping justice.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter 23.
Out-of-place lights dot the skies of New Jersey and other east-coast states, and have for several weeks. Yet there is no panic that The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming!
Speculation as to what they actually are — and whose — is rampant.
And the government hasn’t helped.
The first congressperson I heard on the subject said there had been no briefing on the subject from the Pentagon. The second claimed to have confidential information that these were Chinese-made drones deployed by Iran. The Pentagon has denied this.
Governor Philip Dunton Murphy of New Jersey says there’s “no threat,” but how on earth would he know, since he seems to know nothing of consequence?
“Dozens of drones have been reported hovering over the state since before Thanksgiving mostly in northern areas about Route 78. The Democrat said he held a briefing Wednesday with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, senior officials from federal and state homeland security and State Police,” reports New Jersey 101.5. “‘We are actively monitoring the situation and in close coordination with our federal and law enforcement partners on this matter,’ Murphy said Thursday in a statement on his X account.”
So we are in the dark.
Or, very spotty light.
We don’t even know they are drones — as in the recent hovering/flying technology allowed by improved battery and computing technology, but relying on propellers, not anything as outré as Zero Point energy.
Considering that the rise of drone tech was something we could all see coming, however, why is government so incoherent on the subject?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman’s poetry and God’s mercy to man.
Laughter, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable.
Liberty, n. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.
Three entries from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).
On December 12, 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
On the same date in 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first former slave elected to serve in the United States House of Representatives. His father had emancipated him as a child, and he had worked as a barber before the Civil War.
How different is what woke Democrats have been doing to business today, here in America, using multiple agencies of the United States federal government’s regulatory apparatus?
Marc Andreessen, investor, innovator, business genius, and early Internet pioneer, explained how in a discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, last month.
Start with debanking, which the regulators can tell banks to do to “politically exposed persons.” Mr. Andreessen told Joe about a friend who was debanked, apparently because his job title was involved in the business use of crypto-currency.
And debanking is exactly what you think it is: de-platformed from the financial system.
Don’t worry, statist: you are not “politically exposed.” This only applies to critics of our quasi-fascist system.
This commercial censorship is run pretty much like censorship on the social media companies after 2016, by soft pressure . . . the “raw power” of a “privatized sanctions regime.” Government functionaries notify a bank that a person or business is “politically exposed,” and the bank — fearing getting on the bad side of regulators — kicks the customer off the rolls.
Politicians can haughtily state that it was the bank that did it. Banks, after all, are not obliged to serve everyone! They can pick and choose their customers.
Besides, there is no First Amendment right to have a bank account.
This is how woke bureaucrats can rule like Nazis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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En général, l’art du gouvernement consiste à prendre le plus d’argent qu’on peut à une grande partie des citoyens, pour le donner à une autre partie.
In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778), known by the nom de plume “Voltaire,” Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, “Money” (1770).
The Apollo 17 Lunar Module and its crew of astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, landed at Taurus–Littrow, a lunar valley, on December 11, 1972, becoming the sixth and final Apollo mission to land on the Moon. Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans orbited above, never to land on the lunar surface. Evans died in 1990; Cernan in 2017; Schmitt, a former U.S. senator (N.M.), survives at age 89.