The Hawaiian flag was lowered from ʻIolani Palace in an elaborate annexation ceremony and replaced with the flag of the United States to signify the transfer of sovereignty from the Republic of Hawaii to the United States.
Author: Redactor
During Donald John Trump’s time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he expressed his displeasure with some documents by tearing them up.
Which is illegal, as CNN takes pains to make clear. His underlings would then scoop up the shreds of paper and tape them together.
Keyword: farcical.
This comedy might be funny to watch in a sequel to, say, In the Loop, the 2009 political satire. But it’s not so funny in the current iteration, with the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.
The search for documents “illegally removed from the White House” has seems an obviously political ploy. Since Trump was legally allowed to de-classify documents, his taking of allegedly still-classified docs seem, well, a rather trivial matter.
Keyword: petty.
Right-leaning media and the left-ensconced media talk about all this very differently, of course, and I confess to finding the former a little more convincing than the latter. Focusing on documentation seems like an excuse to find some petty thing to disqualify Trump from running again in 2024.
While Trump not running again might be the best thing for the GOP, and America, that’s not really relevant: Republicans are stuck with the one champion, with few decent alternatives, and Democrats are in worse shape. Which is why they fret about Trump.
Using the Presidential Records Act of 1978 as a disqualifier for a Grover Clevelandesque re-run of a defeated president is on everybody’s lips. But there’s a problem: how could it possibly pass constitutional muster? The Constitution specifies the qualifications for the job. Congress cannot add or subtract to those qualifications by law.
That was the argument used to disqualify term limits in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton: qualifications for candidates were specified in the Constitution. Neither states nor Congress could change it.
If Democrats seek to breach this principle . . . then let’s look at term limits again.
Keywords: do it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Marcus Aurelius
Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 A.D.), Meditations, Book VII.
On August 11, 1972, the last of American ground combat troops exited South Vietnam.
The Biden Administration wants to make sure that marijuana users do not own guns.
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried, a Democrat, is not with the administration on this matter. Her department oversees concealed carry permits as well as some cannabis regulation, and she “argues that prohibiting all cannabis consumers from owning guns violates the Second Amendment” as well as violating “a congressional spending rider, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, that bars the Justice Department from interfering with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws,” explains Jacob Sullum for Reason magazine. Fried has sued the federal government to allow Florida to grant concealed carry permits to marijuana users — something the federal government disallows.
The Justice Department has now asked the courts to dismiss the case.
This is especially rich, since President Biden himself has been on the liberal side of marijuana regulation — though certainly not with guns, where he’s on the tyrants’ side.
Among many inconsistencies, current law does not prohibit people addicted to legal psychoactive drugs from owning guns, as Sullum notes, nor make a big deal about alcohol, the abuse of which has a well-understood linkage with violence, while marijuana does not.
One could go through all the inanities, here, but we should not assume government makes sense on these issues. The federal government should generally not be in the business of regulating either gun ownership or drug usage.
States that recognize “constitutional carry” show how Florida could advance beyond the current mess of too much government interference in this realm.
It wouldn’t be an issue were Florida to get out of the concealed carry permit racket.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
Political fetichism will continue so long as men remain without scientific discipline — so long as they recognize only proximate causes, and never think of the remoter and more general causes by which their special agencies are set in motion.
Herbert Spencer, “Political Fetichism” in The Reader (June 10, 1865) and in Essays: Scientific, Political & Speculative, Volume III (1891).
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Independence
On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.
Independence was finally achieved in 1822.
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F. Marion Crawford
There is no such consolation to a born coward as a logical reason for not doing what he is afraid to do
Francis Marion Crawford, Marietta: Maid of Venice (1901).
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Gandhi and Yeltsin
On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.
A novelist lost access to the novel she was working on. Though almost finished, she had placed her draft in “the cloud” . . . and her Internet service decided to lock her out.
Suddenly, her million words were no longer hers.
That should be a lesson to us all about cloud storage (keep local, off-line back-ups of precious data!), but it’s especially a lesson about China.
While other governments and companies have already begun to emulate China’s censorship of social media and social credit scores, China’s remains at the cutting edge. Chinese writers are losing access to their work because a cloud-based software, WPS, is censoring at the behest of the Chinazi government.
The first to report the development was the novelist with the pen name of Mitu, mentioned above. Writers are being locked out of their manuscripts because the technology has spied illegal content.
Technology Review observes that the ensuing controversy has “highlighted the tension between Chinese users’ increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies’ obligation to censor on behalf of the government.”
An odd way of putting it. But yes, there’s often tension between persons who want to be free to act and others eager to repress.
Could it happen here?
We’re past the point of regarding any form of Big Tech-enabled censorship on behalf of the American state as unthinkably beyond the pale. When they’re routinely gagging scientists for discussing research inconsistent with government-approved doctrines about COVID-19, that’s a strong clue about how far they’re willing to go.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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