In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth.
Gordon R. Dickson, No Room for Man (Manor Books, 1974 — from which the image above was taken), originally titled Necromancer and published in 1962.
On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Paul Jacob hates to break it to you, but now is not the time for relaxation and letting the future take its course.
Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Your hoped-for “Golden Years” ain’t here yet, says Paul Jacob:
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.
Consider your origin;
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXVI, lines 118–120.
you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.
On March 11, 1702, The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time. It was a one-sheet, concentrated on foreign news, sans commentary. The reverse side sported advertising. It was produced by Elizabeth Mallet (1672–1706), a printer and bookseller who lived, and published the paper, next to the Kings Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge in London.
But they’re here now.
And they seem hell-bent on destroying farms.
That’s what thousands upon thousands of European farmers are saying, anyhow, and we should listen to them. After all, they provide the food we eat. We need to eat in order to survive. If we don’t survive, we can’t continue living. So, whatever we do, let’s keep the farmers.
But that’s not current policy, at least in Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere, powerful political interests continue their crusade to shut down thousands of farms in the glorious cause of pursuing “climate goals” which, they believe, by being achieved will enable the fine-tuning of the weather and the creation of the best environment.
Or at least to say they gave it the old college try.
“I want to have the possibility to continue my dad’s farm,” Brendt Beyens told the AP. “But right now I feel like the possibility of that happening is slowly shrinking and it’s getting nearly impossible.”
So once again, thousands of tractors are clogging the streets, this time in Brussels, the capital of Belgium (video of the protest is on Twitter). The farmers object to being destroyed. They have a point.
Nor is it just about the livelihoods of sodbusters. With food prices rising worldwide and the threat of serious famine looms in Africa and parts of Asia, it’s also about saving lives.
My advice for today is don’t destroy farmers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
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Charles A. Beard’s response, upon being asked to summarize the lessons of history, saying he could do it in four key points; as quoted in “Condensed History Lesson” by Arthur H. Secord, in Readers’ Digest, Vol. 38, No. 226 (February 1941), p. 20.
On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.