On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.
Henry David Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” The Dial (1842).
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, New Jersey, was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
Hamilton died the next day of complications from a bullet wound at less than 50 years of age; Burr died on September 14, 32 years later at age 80.
Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
Paul doesn’t stop celebrating on July Fourth.
Or stop thinking.
Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
William S. Burroughs, “My Own Business,” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1985), p. 16.
On July 9, 1896, William Jennings Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech advocating bi-metallist inflationism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, a triumph of rhetoric over reason that solidified the takeover of the Democratic Party by reformers utterly ignorant of basic economics.
Has the line been crossed in Fairfax County, Virginia?
Their school board now prohibits teachers from telling parents when children “change gender” or pretend to change gender. Such decisions may be evidenced by a student’s changing his name or by identifying as a member of the opposite sex or as “nonbinary” on a school’s learning portal.
The district is not inviting teachers to exercise discretion about whether to inform parents. One can imagine cases in which a teacher knows parents to be physically abusive and likely to come down on a kid like a ton of bricks if alerted to such an event.
Rather, the policy stipulates that parents needn’t ever be told about such matters. To the extent teachers obey, parents won’t know unless informed by the children themselves.
If you live in Fairfax County, you could protest.
And you could do other things, such as
Or you could just get your kids the heck out of the public schools.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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