When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
W.H. Auden, from Epigraph on a Tyrant (1939).
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
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W.H. Auden
Author: Redactor
On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.
This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun.
The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.
| Composer Sergei Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin, but it took a while for anyone to take notice, so big was the news of the demise of the dictator. Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies, two violin and five piano concerti, nine piano sonatas and many other works, including operas, ballets, and film scores.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday.
The U.S. is at war — a war that Trump had warned against; and UFOs/drones are again seen over New Jersey. But Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) has something else on his mind, something a little closer to home: regulating grocery store pricing and marketing.
He has co-sponsored S. 3892, dubbed the “Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026.”
What is price gouging? Selling or offering items at a “grossly excessive price,” which the Federal Trade Commission is tasked with defining. But Luján’s real focus seems to be his distrust of surveillance in stores, which he fears will be used to adjust prices individually.
He somehow doesn’t mention why stores have increased surveillance of customers.
One word: thievery.
But Lujan isn’t alone, fecklessly fighting the food-market market. In Washington State and elsewhere, socialists and other politicians are trying to force grocers to stay open, even if their corporate owners have good reason to shut down a specific store. Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, says Seattle must not “allow giant grocery chains to stomp all over our communities, close stores at will, and leave behind food deserts.”
A south Tacoma neighborhood Safeway closed, so a state senator cooked up a bill to “give communities time to respond to grocery store closures.”
Truth is, of course, that grocery stores operate on slim margins. The more regulations piled on, and the more criminals you throw at them, the fewer groceries your community will have.
And the “liberals” who vote for such nonsense? They will not like the Mamdani stores they are left with — the subsidized product deserts that only now look good . . .
In socialist dreams.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ogden Nash
O Duty,
Ogden Nash, beginning of “Kind of an Ode to Duty” (1935), collected in I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938).
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of conscientious organizing spinster
That the minute you see her you are aginster?
Why glitter thy spectables so ominously?
Why are thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?
Why art thou fifty per cent. martyr
And fifty-one per cent. Tartar?
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FDR Praised in Italy
On March 4, 1933, newly inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his customary address. The speech “brought a decidedly favorable reaction in the Italian press, especially his declaration that he will seek extraordinary powers to deal with the situation if necessary,” wrote The New York Times the next day. The Times went on to quote “Premier Mussolini’s Milan newspaper, Popolo d’Italia,” which stated that “The American people place their hope in decisive action by the new President and his speech truly satisfied public opinion.”
The Italian newspaper “said the bank moratorium in New York contributed perhaps more than any other factor in convincing even the most reluctant of the urgent necessity for the whole nation to rally around Mr. Roosevelt.” A Turin paper succinctly stated its appreciation for FDR: “Mr. Roosevelt is following the great principles established by the Fascist revolution and the genius of Il Duce.”
On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.
Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.
The always-wrong California legislature has unanimously passed — and the state’s always-wrong governor has signed — legislation to compel makers of computer operating systems to verify the owner’s age. The information from Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android would then be transmitted to the software (“apps”) running on each respective platform.
Reclaim the Net observes that in a “different timeline, wiring an age-surveillance layer into the boot sequence of every computing device in California is an idea that would have died in committee.”
AB1043 doesn’t require any upload of government ID or facial scan, just that the user report age when setting up the OS. I am not relieved.
All the shmexperts eager to erode our privacy say that requiring web surfers to type a number into a box to report age is insufficient. If California’s new law is allowed to stand, perhaps in part because it seems fairly innocuous — any plucky 12-year-old could type “89” when ordered to report age — would the politicians stop there?
Some kind of ID verification would be mandated sooner or later. Then use of fake IDs would lead to calls for biometric confirmation. Etc.
Reclaim the Net explains that Linux distributions don’t even have a way to comply with the silly California law. Decentralized Linux exists for people who don’t want to be surveilled when doing their computing, and “there’s no entity to mandate, no account system to modify, no API to build.”
These and many more objections appear to me to be just common sense — now illegal in California.
I’m Paul Jacob.
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On Marxism
Marxism never changes. You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.
Anonymous, in Sales Management (Chicago: Dartnell Corp., 1918-75), vol. 70 (Survey of Buying Power, 1953), p. 80.
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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
On March 3, 1924, the 407-year-old Islamic caliphate collapsed when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate was deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gave way to the reformer Kemal Atatürk.
As the U.S. Debt Clock ticks towards $39 trillion, a predictable but horrible beast slouches towards us, ready to knock on the door. Or, rather, burst through.
The federal debt hit $38.8 trillion this weekend: it’s $38,830,051,666,666 as I type these words on Sunday.
But that’s not the beast.
This year’s annual deficit is $1.9 trillion.
But that’s still not the beast.
The Congressional Budget Office warns that the debt-to-GDP hits 120% by 2036 — above post-WWII peak.
That isn’t the beast either.
The beast is the interest on the debt, and the service charge the government must regularly make merely to keep the borrowing going.
Net interest payments will be over one trillion smackeroos this fiscal year. That rivals or exceeds spending on defense/veterans in many breakdowns — those payments are projected to double to over two trillion per year by 2036.
It’s the fastest-growing line item.
It’s non-discretionary.
And it compounds; the beast only gets bigger.
And with it any hope for tax relief goes out the window. Just last week the president, reacting to the Supreme Court decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, floated what amounts to a revenue-directed tariff, and under normal circumstances voters could not unreasonably demand, say, an offsetting 15 percent reduction in income taxes, across the board.
Nothing like that is in the offing. Not because tax cuts wouldn’t be a big win for the tariffer-in-chief, but because any extra revenue might be more cost-effectively thrown as debt service at the American holders of $31 trillion in federal debt.
This is as bipartisan an issue — and failure — as anything can be, yet the bipartisan response?
Crickets.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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W.B. Yeats
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
William Butler Yeats, letter to Ellen O’Leary (February 3, 1889).