A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”
Emperor and Pontifex Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, Book XIII, § 50
Schools must apply some discipline. Otherwise, chaos would ensue. Talking out of turn, pulling pigtails, passing notes . . . and, not least, an epidemic of expressing benign thoughts inconsistent with the poisonous race-conscious ideology that some schools seek to inculcate.
In March 2021, a little girl known as “B.B.” in court documents got into trouble for drawing a group of classmates of different races. She added the words “Black Lives Matter” and, below that, “any life.” She gave the drawing to a black classmate to try to comfort him, as she later explained.
Had B.B. been more attuned to the racial controversies of the day — does she not follow The New York Times and CNN? — she might have realized what treacherous waters she had dived into.
As it was, she was surprised when the school forced her to apologize to her classmate and forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school and from attending recess for two weeks.
The parents sued. A district court ruled in favor of the school, but the parents, helped by Pacific Legal Foundation, are appealing.
The district judge says that whether First Amendment protections of free speech apply here depends on whether such speech, however innocent, would “significantly interfere with the discipline needed for the school to function.”
The drawing could hardly have thus interfered unless part of the school’s “function” is to impose race-conscious orthodoxy.
And suppress even the slightest peep of unwary dissent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is foolish to be outraged by a fact of nature.
Jack Vance, The Brave Free Men (1972; 1973).
Mr. Biden warned that former President Trump constitutes the greatest evil in the solar system, calling this “threat to democracy” an “ally” of the Ku Klux Klan.
“The most important thing . . . we must defeat Trump,” explained Biden. That’s why he let Nancy Pelosi and former President Obama (and insistent Democratic Party mega-donors) push him out of the race.
To save the Republic . . . by not losing to Donald Trump.
Asked if he was confident of a peaceful transfer of power should Trump be defeated, Joe said, “No, I’m not confident.”*
“He means what he says,” our nominal president offered about Mr. Trump. “All this stuff about if we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, we have these stolen elections.”
Of course, “all the stuff about” Trump threatening a “bloodbath” has been conjured up in the noggin of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief.
Trump made the “bloodbath” comment at a rally in Michigan. Speaking about the U.S. auto industry, he told the crowd that we had lost “34 percent of the automobile manufacturing business” to Mexico and promised to slap a 100 percent tariff on cars built by China in Mexico — to enthusiastic audience applause.
“If I get elected,” conditioned Trump. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it — it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”
It’s all on tape.We can decide for ourselves whether it was a threat of post-election violence or straight talk about the car business.
And, too, what it says that such dishonesty is welcome at the highest levels of government. And media.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* All this talk about the transfer of power ignores a critical element: It will be Biden leaving office and either handing the keys to Kamala Harris, should she defeat Trump, or handing them to Trump, should he win. In this latter instance, I don’t see any quarrel coming from Trump. In the former, even the evilest version of Trump would still need an army to intervene.
Note: We can’t be too surprised, however, as four years ago Biden made a similar purposely “malevolent misinterpretation” of Trump’s comments about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia
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There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.
Governor Timothy James Walz (D.-Minn.) to Marie Teresa Kumar, MSNBC host (December 29, 2022).
On August 14, 1765, Sam Adams led the first rebel mob against enforcers of the Stamp Act in Britain’s American colonies.
On this day in 1980, Lech Wałęsa led strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland, shipyards.
On August 13, 1831, Nat Turner witnessed a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. Eight days later he and 70 other slaves killed approximately 55 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.
On August 12, 1944, French forces under General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque liberated Alençon from Nazi rule — the first city in World War II France to be rescued by the French themselves.
A multi-province illegal trade in cadavers has been uncovered in China. “Between 2015 and 2021, Li Zhiqiang, a doctor at The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, allegedly sold around 10 cadavers to Shanxi Osteorad, with the price ranging between 10,000 yuan ($1,395) and 22,000 yuan ($3,070),” The Epoch Times tells us.
“This is something very strange,” explains U.S.-based China commentator Tang Jingyuan, quoted in the article. “In theory, even if the cadavers were from organ donors, Li doesn’t have the right to decide what to do with them, they belong to the families. . . .
“What’s more, Li dismembered the bodies, froze body parts, and sold them illegally and in secret. Both the bodies and their death were suspicious. How did they die? Why there were no families to claim the bodies?”
But this appears to be not a story of just one culprit: “Between January 2015 and July 2023, Shanxi Osteorad Biomaterial Co., previously a state-owned company, and an affiliated firm, allegedly acquired more than 4,300 human cadavers from several funeral homes, a transplant center, and a medical university, to make bone grafting materials.”
Life may be cheap in China. But death apparently pays — third parties?
Note: Image, above, from Robert Wise’s 1945 motion picture, The Body Snatcher, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
And for one thing, don’t ever shy away from our progressive values: one person’s socialism is another’s neighborliness.
Minnesota Governor Timothy James Walz on a group fundraising chat dubbed “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” (July 29, 2024). Gov. Walz is the recently-selected running mate of current Vice President Kamala Harris, who usurped the re-election campaign of President Joe Biden. All three belong to the Democratic Party and both candidates on the current slate appear to be socialists of some sort.