Paul Jacob covers (on Rumble alone) the games almost no one is watching:
Author: Redactor
Categories
Flavius Josephus
These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man lord.
Flavius Josephus on the Galilean, or “fourth sect of Jewish philosophy,” Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, Chapter One.
Categories
Scharansky Freed
On Feb. 12, 1986, Soviet human rights activist Anatoly Scharansky was released after spending eight years in Soviet prisons and labor camps. The amnesty deal was arranged at a summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. Scharansky had been imprisoned for his campaign to win emigration rights for Russian Jews — who had been forbidden to practice Judaism in the USSR.
On Feb. 12, 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded.
On Feb. 12, 1593, approximately 3,000 Korean defenders led by General Kwon Yul successfully repelled more than 30,000 invading Japanese forces in the Siege of Haengju.
Three young men at Washougal High School in Washington state are leading a common-sense rebellion against mask mandates.
The evidence has been in for a while. Young people aren’t at much risk from COVID-19. And masks with less than N95-level filtering don’t much help in reducing the risk of being infected by COVID-19.
The form of the protest is simple. Walkouts and refusal to mask up. The leaders are Washougal High School seniors Cade Costales, Caleb Bennett, and Harrison Tanner.
They stress that the target of their protest is the state government, which imposed the mandate.
“It’s not the school district, as it is the state that is mandating masks,” Tanner says. “We are trying to get notice up to the state level to get the mask mandate revoked so it’s optional in schools. So we have freedom and liberty.”
Costales urges students to be respectful: “We want this to be a peaceful, respectful movement. We are just trying to gain back our rights as citizens. The teachers in the end are just doing their jobs. It doesn’t come from them. It comes from the state. . . .
“We’re doing this peacefully and respectfully. If a staff member asks you to put a mask on, you say ‘No, thank you’ and keep walking. And if they kick you out, then go home. If people need rides home, then I’m sure some of the seniors can start giving people rides home.”
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says that the time is not yet right to take away indoor mask requirements. Just like Canada’s Justin Trudeau, it’s time he stopped talking and started listening.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
George Santayana
Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside.
George Santayana, ”The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” Winds of Doctrine (1913).
Categories
Mandela Released
On Feb. 11, 1990, after 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was released by South African authorities.
Mandela had joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1944, becoming deputy national president of the group in 1952. Arrested for treason in 1961, he was acquitted — but then arrested again in 1962 for illegally leaving the country. Convicted and sentenced to five years at Robben Island Prison, he was put on trial again in 1964 on charges of sabotage. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison along with several other ANC leaders.
In 1989, F.W. de Klerk became South African president and began dismantling apartheid. De Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC, suspended executions, and in February 1990 ordered the release of Nelson Mandela.
Mandela subsequently led the ANC in negotiating an end to apartheid and the establishment of a multiracial government. In 1993, Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One year later, the ANC won the country’s first free elections, and Mandela was elected South Africa’s president.
“Is there a more beautiful phrase,” Jim Geraghty asks his readers at National Review, “than ‘cataclysmic loss of audience’?”
Geraghty shares Dan Wetzel’s term for the good news that viewership of NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in Beijing hit “a record low for the Opening Ceremony.”
“Through the first four nights of competition,” reports the Associated Press, “NBC is on track for the lowest-rated Winter Games in history.”
What’s going on? Americans are voting with their eyeballs! And TV remotes.
An Axios-Momentive poll shows why: “Seven in 10 survey respondents disapprove of allowing China to host these Olympics.”
“The host country, China,” explains Yahoo columnist Dan Wetzel, “is a serious problem.”
Wetzel called China’s use of a Uyghur athlete to light the Olympic torch “a propaganda prop to cover up a campaign of slavery, torture, forced abortions and internment in reeducation camps.”
“Some Americans want U.S. corporations to take a stand as well,” informs FightThirtyEight, the polling website. “When asked whether they think ‘companies should withdraw their advertisements for the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in response to human rights violations by the Chinese government,’ 54 percent of U.S. adults said probably or definitely yes. . . .”
One sponsor, Coca-Cola, “has dialed back its marketing efforts outside of China.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that “soda aisles in grocery stores are bereft of Olympics-themed displays” and “the main page of Coke’s U.S. consumer website made no mention of the Games.”
“Congratulations to the athletes,” offers a Boston.com reader, “but the pomp and circumstance can’t hide what’s really happening there.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Frédéric Bastiat
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (June 1850; Dean Russell, trans., 1950).
Categories
The Twenty-Fifth
On Feb. 10, 1967, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified by Nevada, the necessary 38th state to do so. The amendment sets the process for presidential succession, and reads:
Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.
Section 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
When the prime minister of Canada told the world that “Building Back Better means” not only helping the “most vulnerable” but also “maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” it might behoove us to look it up.
It’s not a secret.
It’s part of what Davos globalist Klaus Schwab calls “The Great Reset.” And the links between Schwab and Justin Trudeau are not tenuous: “what we’re really proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau,” gushed Schwab weeks ago.
Well, Trudeau really had a chance to prove his Klausian globalist mettle last week.
Trudeau had indeed leveraged the coronavirus pandemic to institute tight statist controls on the Canadian population, right out of Schwab’s playbook.* But his vax mandate for truckers led not merely to supply-chain problems in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the massive convoy protests in Ottawa.
So how did Schwab’s proud privileged prodigy perform?
First, he went into hiding. And then, while the protesters were explicitly directed against the vaccine mandates — notwithstanding the fact that 90 percent “of Canada’s cross-border truckers . . . has had two shots” — Justin Trudeau couldn’t help himself, condemning “the antisemitism, Islamophobia,** anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days,” he proclaimed in a tweet. “Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.”
Well, mandating vaccines is forced inclusion, the ominous part of the Schwab/Trudeau agenda, enforced by exclusion.
No wonder the growing opposition, sporting anti-Klausian signs such as “Mandate Freedom.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The ’book in question being Schwab’s explicit program in Covid-19: The Great Reset.
** Some participants are undoubtedly many of those phobic things, but evidence at the rally? Scant. As Tucker Carlson pointed out in his coverage, the protesters even shoveled snow and picked up trash after themselves.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts