Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop, Fables, “The Wolf and the Lamb.” Illustration: Aesop, with a fox, from the central medallion of a kylix, c. 470 BC; in the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Vatican City.
Author: Redactor
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FDR Was Not Pleased
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously declared key portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional, in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), on May 27, 1935.
And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not pleased in the slightest.
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Driving VPNs South
Public Safety Canada, an agency responsible for safety, security, emergency preparedness and this kind of thing, recently urged Canadians to protect themselves when using public Wi-Fi by also using a VPN.
“Using a VPN protects your data,” the agency said.
True.
Unless — unless others in the government succeed in requiring VPN companies to uniformly sabotage the privacy of their customers.
The mechanism for crippling VPN’s? That would be the pending legislation to force VPN providers to retain personal data which users expect them not to retain, in this way killing these companies’ very reason for being as well as Canadian Internet users’ reasons to employ these companies.
We netizens want some security. A VPN required to track and store information on customers seeking security is, ipso facto, insecure.
Bill C-22, or the Lawful Access Act, introduced by the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in March, would require customers’ data to be retained for a year. Everybody’s data, mind you, not just the data of persons suspected of a crime.
“Oh this is just rich,” says Windscribe, a VPN provider based in Toronto. “Bill C-22 is driving VPN businesses like ours out of Canada because of the required user logging. And in the same breath you tell people to secure their data with VPNs.”
If things go on like this, Ottawa’s impulse to destroy or try to destroy online privacy will override any contrary impulse to help people preserve online privacy. Thereby obliging Canadians who do value it to figure out a way to override the override.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Henry Adams
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
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Market Milestones
Capitalism’s 26th of May milestones:
- On May 26, 1896, Charles Dow publishes the first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
- The last Model T rolled off of Ford Motor Company’s assembly line on May 26th of 1927, after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles.
- The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on the 26th of May, 1967.
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Joanna Russ
Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.
Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).
On May 25, 1878, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore opened at the Opera Comique in London.
Image is a detail from an 1879 theater poster.
In America and in most of the world, Gilbert and Sullivan’s works are considered operettas, but in Britain they are usually referred to as “Savoy operas” or “comic operas.” Another term is “light opera.”
On the 25th of May in 1895, playwright, poet and novelist Oscar Wilde was convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” and sentenced to serve two years in prison — becoming history’s most famous prosecutions for homosexual activity. It is perhaps worth noting that had Wilde not himself sued the Marquess of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, for criminal libel, and had not the Marquess demonstrated the truth of his offensive-to-Wilde statement, the prosecution would never have even commenced, and he would never have been sent to Reading Gaol.
The statement in question was Douglas’s note on a calling card: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].”
Five years after Wilde’s death in 1900, his Salomé was adapted as an opera, music composed by Richard Strauss. It was most definitely not any form of light opera.
In 1895 on May 25, the Republic of Formosa was formed, with Tang Jingsong as its president. It lasted less than half a year, dissolving upon conquest by Japan.
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Massie Lost
Paul Jacob’s assessment of Donald Trump’s success, last Tuesday — “King and Kingslayer” — was kept a tad open-ended, considering the Trumpian juggernaut’s biggest challenge was in Kentucky’s Representative District No. 4, where incumbent Thomas Massie was meeting Trump’s man in electoral battle. Massie lost. Here is the start of WLWT5’s report:
Reactions to the race have been . . . mixed. Or, divided.
On one side, we can witness Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire assessing the situation in . . . uh, what kind of terms are these? What’s the right adjective for this?
Thomas Massie versus President Donald Trump. Online versus reality. Woke right versus traditional Trump right.
And Trump won. Reality won.
It turns out the future still belongs to the rational Right.
It belongs to President Trump.
Reality? From that fabulist fibber, Trump?
Others are astounded at how someone who barely campaigned at all (except with TV ads) — this Ed “No Debater” Gallrein — increased voter turnout so astoundingly:
And is this yielding positive results for the mid-terms? And how about Trump’s approval ratings? Here are the latest results on that, from Friday’s aggregations:
- New York Times: 38% approve, 58% disapprove
- Silver Bulletin: 38.4% approve, 58.5% disapprove
- RealClearPolitics Poll Average: 39.8% approve, 58.2% disapprove
But remember, Thomas Massie is still in office, and he is still on X:
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Henry Adams
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
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Toleration
On May 24, 1689, the English Parliament passed the Act of Toleration, protecting dissenting Protestants.
Pointedly, Roman Catholics were excluded from this official tolerance.