Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov, published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, Spring 1967.
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Vladimir Nabokov
Author: Redactor
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The Revolution Remembered
October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution Public Law 94–479 to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.
John J. Pershing (1860 – 1948) is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.
Ah, the things one hears at high-dollar Democratic Party fundraisers!
Like declaring Russia’s threat to unleash nuclear weapons against Ukraine as the most serious “prospect of Armageddon in 60 years.”
Last week, Sleepy Joe “startled many Americans” with those remarks at a closed-door meeting of big donors.
Backpedaling on Friday, “U.S. officials stressed . . . that the United States has no reason to change its nuclear posture.” No reason? We’re backing one side in a war in which nukes are on the table!
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, didn’t defend Biden’s “Armageddon” terminology but offered that it was “useful for the president and the administration to be having a conversation with the public about the risk.”
Of course, the president gave this frank evaluation to his party’s top check-writers, not the public. And that’s the second biggest problem with U.S. foreign policy: it’s totally divorced from the people.
The biggest? Headin’ towards Armageddon. If Mr. Biden is serious about slouching towards the End Times, he should do more than make it the subject of political locker-room talk.
Like what? How about:
- Seek to reduce tensions, wherever possible, and help Mr. Putin find an off ramp from his war in Ukraine;
- Double- and triple-down on technologically defending the American people from the threat posed by nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; and
- Speak to the people about these threats and the U.S. response.
While security concerns may dictate that information not be shared publicly, if it’s good enough to share on the rubber-chicken circuit, it good enough for ‘We the People.’
We pay the highest prices; we deserve to hear the sales pitch.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Milton Friedman
It’s nice to elect the right people, but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.
Milton Friedman, c. 1977
On October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand’s dystopian/utopian novel Atlas Shrugged was published. Written to expound and defend an individualist, freedom/free-market point of view, it is one of the most influential and literarily successful didactic novels ever written.
On October 10, 1973, Austrian-born American economist, Ludwig von Mises* (pictured above) died.
Two-hundred fifty-nine years earlier, the French law-maker and Jansenist Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert died.
Both economists were known for their defenses of freer markets: le Pesant for pioneering the critique of mercantilism, arguing that a nation’s wealth consisted in what its people produce and trade; Mises for systematizing economic theory and advancing the critique of both socialism and latter-day mercantilism (what he called “interventionism”).
In January 1958, following the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Mises wrote Ayn Rand a letter of congratulations.
In this weekend’s podcast, Paul Jacob starts off talking about what he has been working on in Michigan. Michigan voters have some No votes to place at the polls! So do Arkansans.
And the lessons from these two states are universal, or nearly so:
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William Graham Sumner
An amibitious Roman used to buy and bribe his way through all the inferior magistracies up to the consulship, counting upon getting a province at last out of whichhe could extort enough to recoup himself, pay all his debts, and have a fortune besides. Modern plutocrats buy their way through elections and legislatures, in the confidence of being able to get powers which will recoup them for all the outlay and yield and an ample surplus besides.
I regard plutocracy, however, as the most sordid and debasing form of political energy known to us. In its motive, its processes, its code, and its sanctions it is infinitely corrupting to all the institutions which ought to preserve and protect society. The time to recognize it for what it is, in its spirit and tendency, is when it is in its germ, not when it is full green.
William Graham Sumner, “Democracy and Plutocracy,” in Earth Hunger and Other Essays (1914), pp. 294–295.
On October 9, 1635, Protestant theologian Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a religious dissident after he spoke out against punishments for religious offenses and giving away Native American land. He moved south, founding Providence Plantations, where he worked for separation of church and state, the rights of aboriginal Americans, and against slavery.
Michiganders? Arkansans? You’ve measures to vote No on. Everybody else? What’s going on in these states is worth paying attention. Paul Jacob explains. And covers the big stories of the week:
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Ernest Bramah
Two resolute men, acting in concord, may transform an Empire, but an ordinary resourceful duck can escape from a dissentient rabble.
Ernest Bramah, as quoted by Lin Carter, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, introduction (Ballantine Books, 1974).