Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.
Karl Kraus, as quoted in Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1976) as translated by Harry Zohn.
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Karl Kraus
Author: Redactor
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Death, Charter, Resignation, Birth
Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide on this day in June, 68 AD, ending Rome’s Julio-Claudian Dynasty, later written about with verve by Suetonius and Robert Graves. Assisting in his suicide was his secretary, Epaphroditus, whom Domitian had executed over 20 years later — for failure to prevent the suicide of the emperor.
Also on June 9, James Oglethorpe received a charter from the British crown to start the Georgia colony (1732); William Jennings Bryan resigned his position as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, disgusted over the handling of the sinking of the Lusitania (1915); philosopher John Hospers (pictured) — who would go on to run as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972 — was born in 1918.
The current UFO story is not a Big Nothing, but neither is it a Big Something.
Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.
“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-worldly remains in order to build more technologically-advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”
Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”
He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.
What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.
Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.
While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Gore Vidal
The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.
Gore Vidal, Julian (1964).
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
Steven Mosher loves people.
Mosher is a student of China who, according to the bio at his Population Research Institute website, pop.org, “has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. . . .”
In 1979, the Chinese government let him pursue research in a village where he observed many instances of compulsory abortions under the country’s one-child policy. Some of the women were in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.
Perhaps the Chinese government expected Mosher to produce rosy-eyed, footnoted rationalizations of what he saw. When he published his unvarnished findings in a Taiwanese magazine, officials complained to the U.S. Embassy and to Stanford University.
Stanford appeased China by denying Mosher his PhD. I note the university’s injustice in part because Mosher tends to omit this detail. But it should not be forgotten.
Back then, he said he “did what was right to do. I told the truth.”
He opposes population control because, in his view, people are a good thing, not a bad thing.
This viewpoint is beautifully conveyed in a video on the pop.org home page, in which Mosher says that people “are the ultimate resource, the one resource that you cannot do without.” The Institute works to expose “the myth of overpopulation” and the violations of human rights that occur in the name of population control.
The prolific scholar argues that people “can become the agents of their own development without having to sacrifice their children in the process.”
My wife and I glad to hear it. We’ll let the kids know.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Karl Kraus
It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
Karl Kraus, as quoted in Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1976) as translated by Harry Zohn.
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Founders, Fathers
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.
During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on as a eulogistic way to refer to figures such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.
Humpty Dumpty was a good egg.
Well, that’s what we tend to think, but the original nursery rhyme doesn’t specify an eggman (goo goo g’joob) at all. And says nothing about his character.
All the rhyme says? He had a great fall, and the king’s forces — masculine and equine — couldn’t make him whole.
This was brought to mind with yet another pratfall by President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., along with yet another stream of journalistic puffery trying to make the octogenarian seem like a good egg — and the falls insignificant.
That was the general tenor of Adele Suliman’s Washington Post article, “Biden isn’t the only politician to fall: Why we can’t look away,” last Friday. Ms. Suliman provides a history of stumbling pols, which she relates to Biden’s most recent tumble, at the Air Force Academy after his commencement speech.
But it’s the New York Times that went all out, with four authors explaining our shared Biden moment: “The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world.”
Yet, also, Biden’s “a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”
The article has been roundly ridiculed, but the problem is, if anything, underplayed.
Now is not the time to be worrying about an eggman president.
It’s our eggshell republic that should be on our minds.
Goo goo g’joob.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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H. L. Mencken
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
H. L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936), p. 279.