On June 16, 1961, dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union.
The great Scottish moral philosopher, political economy pioneer, and Enlightenment intelectual Adam Smith (1723-1790), best known for authoring the 1776 masterwork The Wealth of Nations, was born on June 16.
On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois.
On this date in 1963, the Soviet Space Program achieved a first with the Vostok 6 mission, placing Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova into orbit as the first woman in space.
June 16th is Bloomsday, a celebration of the life and work of Irish expatriate author James Joyce (1882-1941). The date was selected because June 16, 1904, was the date in which Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses was set. The ceremonial day is named after the character Leopold Bloom.
Three-and-a-half years late, the U.S. Government is admitting and publicizing the first victims of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China — who just so happen to be scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In a Substackarticle by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, we get something close to actual evidence strengthening “the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).”
The “patient zero” is not one but three, namely:
Ben Hu
Yu Ping
Yan Zhu
The Substack authors quote Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19, who identifies Ben Hu as the “star pupil” of “the bat woman of China,” who, with Yu Ping, co-authored a paper on the coronavirus strain in question with said “bat woman.”
David Asher, who led a State Department inquiry on the virus’s origin during the Trump Administration, toldThe Daily Mail: “I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in the hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus.”
Much of the talk from officials in the U.S. and in China has stretched our credulity — but they were obviously trying to cover their foolhardy and borderline illegal gain-of-function research program.
Unfortunately, a great deal remains unclear, like “who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.”
In 2020, in Seattle, Washington, “anarchists” took over a section of the Capitol Hill district and set up their own ersatz government, first called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and then, confusingly, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). At the crime scene, which went on for weeks during what Seattle’s mayor called “The Summer of Love,” the anarchistic element was always a bit hard to figure, but the Black Lives Matter (BLM) presence stuck in memory.
Now it’s routinely considered a BLM event.
What it accomplished was a lot of violence and property loss. So Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, a shop in the center of the 10-block CHAZ/CHOP territory, is suing.
Not Black Lives Matter.
Which the owner, Molly Moon Neitzel, takes pains to say she still supports: “At Molly Moon’s we hold race equity at the top of our list of our priorities for how we want to make the world better. Black Lives Matter. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday, June 7 is not meant to undermine that important message,” Ms. Neitzel explained.
She’s also not suing the individuals who organized and engaged in the insurrection/conquest, especially the 30 or so “protesters” eventually arrested.
The target? The City of Seattle.
Molly Moon demands compensation for revenue losses, of course, and the “team morale impacts we experienced during and for many months after CHOP caused by the City of Seattle’s decision to affirmatively create and assist the CHOP occupation of Capitol Hill, to abandon the police precinct and to stop responding to public safety needs in our beloved Capitol Hill community.”
In short: Blame the government for not protecting you from the criminals you support!
One might laugh were it not for all the violence that this very attitude excuses.
The “trillion dollar coin” solution to the federal debt reared its absurd head, again, during the recent “debt ceiling” brouhaha.
I wrote about it over ten years ago, when Big Talkin’ Republicans were challenging Big Spendin’ Democrats over raising the debt ceiling at that time.
The idea is bold trickery, allowing the President to inflate the currency by leveraging Treasury’s Congress-given ability to coin platinum coins at any face dollar value.
Typically, such collector coins sport on the reverse a value far below the metal’s value.* The trillion dollar coin would invert that, fixing the face value far, far above the metal value. The freshly minted coin would be sent to the Federal Reserve, covering the books that way.
It’s inherently deceptive and obviously ridiculous.
Thus it symbolizes contemporary politics quite aptly.
After the recent budget compromise that forestalled any real work of marshaling the federal government’s scarce (if astoundingly awesome) financial resources, however,the trillion dollar coin has been shelved.
For now.
Indeed, Democrats are tiring of the debt ceiling brinksmanship game. And it is mostly posturing. “Democrats have introduced a bicameral proposal to overhaul the debt ceiling process, leaning heavily into the recent default scare to push a bill that would essentially let Treasury ignore the debt cap and continue writing cheques with no limit,” explainsThe Epoch Times.
Would this any be better than the fake coin?
Perhaps more honest.
But, once again, it would be Congress giving away its authority.
And until Congress can restrain its spending habits, we, the people, will always come up tails.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* On the day I checked, the spot price for an ounce of platinum was just over $1000, and the face value on the American Platinum Eagle remained $100, the ratio being a tenth of metal value.
Very soon, maybe, the Chinese government will be able to peruse secret military and other electronic missives being transmitted “throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic,” according to a Wall Street Journalstory.
Under an until-now secret agreement between China and Cuba, Cuba will charge China a mere several billion dollars for Cuba’s permission to build the eavesdropping station on Cuban territory.
If cited intelligence is accurate, the planned station would enable China to spy on emails, phone calls, satellite transmissions, and other communications. The data thus scooped up would probably facilitate China-sponsored cyberwarfare and other sabotage, as well as its pursuit of overseas Chinese nationals that the Chinese government wants to keep trapped in China.
Craig Singleton, an analyst for the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says that moving to establish the spy facility “signals a new, escalatory phase in China’s broader defense strategy. The selection of Cuba is also intentionally provocative.”
Perhaps the publicity about the spy station will help to stop it from happening.
John Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, told the Journal that its story is “inaccurate” without spelling out the inaccuracies. He also said that the U.S. is taking steps to counter Chinese development of such spy infrastructure. “We remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region.”
