On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.
The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
When Trudeau’s administration announced, last year, a restrictive travel ban on all who refused to get “vaccinated” against COVID, the breathtaking nature of the political move (which was followed by a snap election) — and its sheer illiberality from a Liberal — may have overshadowed how little science was behind it.*
Of course, now that the vaccines have proven to be ineffective at stopping the disease, the medical rationale seems especially shaky. But, as Rupa Subramanya writes at Bari Weiss’s “Common Sense” Substack news page, “Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.”
Among the juicy revelations uncovered?
“No one in the COVID Recovery unit” — which Ms. Subramanya identifies as “the secretive government panel that crafted the mandate” — possessed any medical credentials or had undergone any significant medical training.
The impetus for the travel ban came from above, in Trudeau’s cabinet.
And, juicier yet, “leading up to the implementation of the travel mandate, transportation officials were frantically looking for a rationale for it. They came up short.”
Oddly, the COVID Recovery unit has no website, and is rarely mentioned in official documents.
The plaintiffs in the case that has brought the information to light are Karl Harrison and Shaun Rickard. Lawsuits are expensive, and some of the funds to bring the case forward were raised on GoFundMe. In February, following Trudeau’s crackdown on the Trucker protest, GoFundMe kicked Rickard off the site.
In mid-June, Canada lifted the travel bans. But threatened to re-introduce them as, er, needed.
What we have learned is that the “necessity” was always a political one.
The science was just not there.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Emails released recently by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration show a similar lack-of-science basis for high-level political requirements for dramatic “medical” responses to COVID.
Art assist: craiyon
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Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.
Anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce (1759-1833), closing a speech in House of Commons (1791), as quoted in Once Blind: The Life of John Newton (2008) by Kay Marshall Strom, p. 225.
On August 4, 2010, in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage that had passed two years earlier by the state’s voters.
For political reasons.
May we discuss?
Sure, here in Common Sense. (We’ve yet to censor or flag ourselves.) Big Tech social media is a different story.
Loath to preside over an officially designated recession, the Biden administration suggests that when you look at all the data in just the right light, it’s “unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year — even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter — indicates a recession.”
Others disagree, saying the familiar definition cannot be so summarily dispatched. On Instagram, poster Graham Allen cheekily asked Siri how we know it’s a recession. Her reply: “two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
Not a sacrosanct indicator, but standard.
Enter the Guardians of Discourse.
Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) has flagged Allen’s post as “false information” and in some cases prevented viewers from seeing it.
The “independent” fact checker on duty was Politifact, which warned Web surfers it just ain’t so that “the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession.”
This is where we’re at. Discussion of political motives at the White House has become so hazardous that the People of the Fact Check must rush to repudiate any intimation that any assiduous politics is going on. It’s all just assiduous data comparison.
Well, reality check: “fact checks” can be biased too.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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So is there no kind of life more wicked than that of mercenary Souldiers, who without any respect had to the equity of the Cause, fight only for plunder and pay.
Hugo Grotius, The Most Excellent Hugo Grotius His Three Books Treating of the Rights of War and Peace (W. Evats, B.D., translators) p. 426.
On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 90.
Solzhenitsyn’s novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, explored life under totalitarian Communism, and remain classics of modern literature. His huge survey of Soviet concentration camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was an important contribution to the demise of Communism as a popular ideology, showing just how horrifying the repression in the Soviet Union had become.
This form of harassing property owners is nothing new, but the city had temporarily reduced enforcement during the pandemic.
The policy is unjust in at least two ways.
First, there should be no fines for being hit by graffiti-vandals. It’s the vandals who should be punished, not the victims. Moreover, as Reason magazine points out, “Unlike accumulated trash, noise, or other standard nuisances, graffiti isn’t inherently offensive.”
Rather, it is the city that is being offensive by treating an owner’s property as if it were its own and penalizing owners if their property lacks the appearance that the city ordains.
Second, even granting the legitimacy of requiring property owners to clean up the graffiti, the policy as imposed is abusive. Businesses are being fined repeatedly for graffiti that they don’t magically remove at lightning speed and that the vandals, undiscouraged, simply slap back on anyway.
“I can’t even count,” Michael McNamara, manager of the restaurant Above Ground (now closed), told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. “The paint dries and you deal with another one.” The city had dunned Above Ground with at least three $300 bills for the graffiti.
Rewarding destructive behavior while punishing those whose way of work and life makes civilization possible is no way to run a city — but it is a way of running the good people out of town.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Gene’s whole vision was that minorities weren’t on set because we were minorities, we were on set because in the future our diverse world would all be working together as equals. I understand that everyone needs to see role models that can inspire them and talk to them and represent them, but I believe we need to move to a future that transcends race, gender, or anything else. We’re all people.
Nichelle Nichols, in “Uhura Fest: ‘Star Trek’ legend Nichelle Nichols talks Wizard World Philly and transcending race,” by Jerome Maida, The Philadelphia Enquirer (May 29, 2017). Ms. Nichols, who died on July 30, 2022, played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the Star Trek television show and in the first six Star Trek movies.
The Declaration of Independence was signed by members of the Continental Congress of the United States, on August 2, 1776.