It is wrong to speak of coming into being and passing away, for nothing comes into being or passes away, but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.
Anaxagoras (c. 500 – c. 428 B.C.), pre-Socratic philosopher.
On November 20, 1789, the state of New Jersey led the way to establishing the Bill of Rights by being the first U.S. state to ratify the document.
Actually, the state ratified on that date Article One of the original twelve, which has yet to be fully ratified as a constitutional amendment, and Articles Three through Twelve, which became the ten articles of the Bill of Rights. On May 7, 1992, the state ratified Article Two, which became the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution.
But you wouldn’t know it for the news coverage.
Throughout 2023 and 2024, we worked to place constitutional amendments on the ballot in eight states, which, if passed, would specifically ban noncitizens from voting in state and local elections. Then, this November, every one of the measures swept to victory. By roughly a 2-1 margin in Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, and Wisconsin; 3-1 in Iowa and North Carolina; 4-1 in Oklahoma; and by a whopping 6-1 margin in South Carolina.
Of course, don’t be shocked if folks dispute my claims of victory. Especially if they read The Hill, which published two articles the day after the election declaring that Citizen Only Voting Amendments were defeated — in South Carolina and in Wisconsin.
“Voters in Wisconsin have rejected a ballot measure amending the state’s constitution to explicitly prohibit foreign nationals from voting in any election in the state,” The Hill informed its audience.
Even though 71 percent of Badger State voters actually pulled the lever for the constitutional amendment, not against it.
“South Carolina defeats noncitizen voting ban,” boasted the headline on another Hill article. Since an incredible 86 percent of Palmetto State voters said yes to the amendment, how did The Hill manage to report that the referendum failed? The very opposite of the truth.
Oh, The Hill was kind enough to take down their false news stories once alerted to them. But the paper refused to do what I asked: place a note on the corrected story acknowledging their mistake.
Readers who had seen the erroneous articles should be notified that they had been misinformed — and not left thinking they had been hallucinating.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1794: The United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain signed Jay’s Treaty, which attempts to resolve some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.
1808: The Convention of Olkijoki in Raahe ended hostilities in Finland.
1863: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Man is a universe in little.
Democritus (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC), pre-Socratic philosopher. Image of the Andromeda galaxy, NASA.
Even the most profligate taxers and spenders sometimes talk about making our federal government “more efficient” or about “cutting waste.” Commissions are set up, reports issued, and then — we still see the same runaway trajectory.
This time, former President and President-Elect Donald Trump has announced that two heavy hitters, entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will be heading up a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to do the job. They’re already planning and hiring.
Trump says that DOGE is determined to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
The project of cutting wasteful expenditures is the same going-nowhere notion that we have seen before. If we get actual demolition of merely destructive agencies — which would require congressional cooperation, I believe — this would be great.
I can provide a list. But that would make me a part-timer in this endeavor, and “We don’t need more part-time idea generators,” DOGE says.
“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Let us see what happens. Trump would have to push this forcefully and continually, getting his supporters to forcefully and continually pressure Congress, to get enough done fast enough to actually reduce Leviathan. And he’ll have a lot of other stuff to cope with.
But . . . boy, do we need it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics.
November 18, 1493, Columbus caught first sight of the island now known as Puerto Rico.
The re-election of an out-of-office president, for the second time, brings to mind an oddity of the convention of the ordinal numbering of the United States Presidents — those under the Constitution.
George Washington was the first; John Adams the second, and so on the list runs until we get to the curious case of one man, Stephen Grover Cleveland, who is regarded as both the 22nd & 24th presidents. All because the 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison, served between his two presidencies.
Now it is happening to Donald John Trump. He is listed as the 45th president of the United States, having served from 2017 through January of 2021. Now, re-elected after an “interregnum” of the 46th president, Joe Biden, Trump is slated to serve as the 47th president.
It is apparent that, according to this convention, what is being ordered with numbers is the presidencies, not the presidents as such. And it is assumed that a second (or third, or fourth) term in office is the same presidency as the first term of a president, unless broken in sequence by the term of another president.
An odd convention.
ἔστιν ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ὡρισμένῃ λόγῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν. μεσότης δὲ δύο κακιῶν, τῆς μὲν καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν τῆς δὲ κατ᾽ ἔλλειψιν:
Virtue then is a settled disposition of the mind as regards the choice of actions and feelings, consisting essentially in the observance of the mean relative to us, this being determined by principle, that is, as the prudent man would determine it. And it is a mean state between two vices, one of excess and one of defect.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, translated by Harris Rackham. The illustration of the philosopher is a line engraving by P. Fidanza after Raphael Sanzio.