Author: Redactor

Today

Indexed!

On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun.

The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.

| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.

| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.

| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday.

education and schooling

It wasn’t good enough. In the words of The College Fix, this super-smart kid was “perfect on paper but rejected due to his ethnicity” — by 16 out of the 18 colleges to which he had applied, including five University of California schools.

By then, Stanley had already proved his mettle as a programmer by designing an alternative to DocuSign called RabbitSign. According to Amazon’s Well-Architected Review, RabbitSign was “one of the most efficient and secure accounts” that it had ever seen. Amazon highlighted Stanley’s work in a case study.

After Google engineers assessed his skills, the company gave Stanley a job offer in 2023 — beating Amazon to the punch. He had just turned 18.

This kind of recognition of Mr. Zhong’s abilities probably made it a little easier to cope with the flood of rejections of his college applications. He obviously does not need a college degree to succeed. But he’s not just putting all that nonsense behind him. He and his dad, Nan Zhong, are suing the University of California for their racially discriminatory — and illegal — admissions policies.

The fight is for Stanley but not just Stanley, says his father, who reports on the case at the SWORD website. SWORD stands for Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination.

“What we’re trying to get out of this is a fair treatment of Asian applicants. Including my other kids and my future grandkids.”

And ours.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Katie Hopkins

The thing about a lie is that if you’ve been gullible, if you’ve fallen for the lie, you need to stay within the lie or otherwise you feel like you’re stupid, you feel like you’ve been made a fool of. It’s how lockdowns worked, and how vaccines worked — even now, with what we know, what’s coming out every single day, those who fell for the lie don’t want to leave the lie because to leave the lie means they have to face the reality that they were idiots.
Katie Hopkins, “Zelensky just got kicked out the WHITE HOUSE” (March 1, 2025).

Today

FDR Praised in Italy

On March 4, 1933, newly inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his customary address. The speech “brought a decidedly favorable reaction in the Italian press, especially his declaration that he will seek extraordinary powers to deal with the situation if necessary,” wrote The New York Times the next day. The Times went on to quote “Premier Mussolini’s Milan newspaper, Popolo d’Italia,” which stated that “The American people place their hope in decisive action by the new President and his speech truly satisfied public opinion.”

The Italian newspaper “said the bank moratorium in New York contributed perhaps more than any other factor in convincing even the most reluctant of the urgent necessity for the whole nation to rally around Mr. Roosevelt.” A Turin paper succinctly stated its appreciation for FDR: “Mr. Roosevelt is following the great principles established by the Fascist revolution and the genius of Il Duce.”

On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.

Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.

In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.

regulation too much government

How to Kill a Bureau

First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.

Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Law reported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”

So far, so good.

Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.

Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?

The mission is bad.

This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, and, accordingly, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts, giving itself permission to do so with a quaint doctrine of “dormant authority.”

Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.

RedState expressed hope the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.

Yes, end it, as critics have long argued.

Existing only to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise, it is one of many federal agencies that must be put out of our misery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

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Thought

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” second essay from Essays (1847 edition).

Today

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

On March 3, 1924, the 407-year-old Islamic caliphate collapsed when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate was deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gave way to the reformer Kemal Atatürk.

Update

Space X Protest

Protesters, caught up in the cause of continuing government waste, fraud and abuse, protest outside the Space X facility in Hawthorne, California. Cuz Elon Musk. Musk denies that DOGE is in any way radical. It is, he says, “common sense.”

“Trump has said the nation, facing $36 trillion in debt, must cut federal spending,” explains the Los Angeles Daily News today.

DOGE protests are also taking place at Tesla dealerships across the country.

“Cuts to the Department of Education are hitting the highly valued Nation’s Report Card,” writes Lexi Lonas Cochran, today, “even as sirens blare on student test scores.”

The 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was recently canceled, and the top official in charge of it was put on leave, leading advocates to doubt a promise from the Department of Education that NAEP would not be affected by the cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Educational experts like the testing system, but admit that in both reading and math, “the gaps between the lowest-performing and highest-performing students are still growing.”

Obviously government schooling is failing, bureaucrats are most concerned about testing, and DOGE’s cuts alarm them.

Meanwhile, CNBC has probably found an effective way to spread unease, maybe even panic: “Social Security has never missed a payment. DOGE actions threaten ‘interruption of benefits,’ ex-agency head says.” Or so says the headline.

Thought

Thomas Jefferson

Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known & seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper & sufficient antagonist to error.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson : 1816–1826(1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 2, p. 102.

Today

The Thing You Know

As the Democratic machine was consolidating its support around Joe Biden on March 2, 2020, in his (ultimately successful) bid for the presidency, the man himself was showing his level of eloquence with a speech in which he demonstrated some trouble regurgitating the most memorable words from the Declaration of Independence:

It’s time for America to get back up on its feet and once again fight for the proposition that “We hold these truths to be self-evident”! Sounds corny; not a joke: think about it. We hold these truths to be self[la]-evident. All men and women created, by the, go, you know, you know the thing! You know how we talk about it.
Joe Biden, in Houston, Texas, March 2, 2020.