On July 19, 1848, a two-day Women’s Rights Convention opened in Seneca Falls, New York.
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Seneca Falls
Author: Redactor
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Watch: A Choir of Crickets
Paul Jacob talks about what the mainstream media won’t.
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Frédéric Bastiat
If the greatest philosophers have been able to deceive themselves as to the iniquity of slavery, how much easier is it for farmers and manufacturers to deceive themselves as to the nature and effects of the protective system.
Frédéric Bastiat on protective tariffs, in Economic Sophisms: Second Series (1848), The Natural History of Spoliation.”
But media minds want to squelch your inquisitiveness.
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Antonin Scalia
It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members’ personal view of what would make a “more perfect Union” (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a “more perfect world”) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.
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Fear & Its Peddlers
“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” President Joe Biden hyperbolically orated on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
“That’s not hyperbole,” he insisted, repeating, for emphasis, “Since the Civil War.”
Referring to state legislation passed or proposed by Republicans regarding various election procedures, Mr. Biden must remember the Jim Crow Era with its “literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters,” since he also smeared these current Republican polices as a “21st-century Jim Crow assault.”*
President Joe painted a picture of “unprecedented voter suppression” and “raw and sustained election subversion” and more.
Somehow, the media chorus line just repeats this nonsense.
Ignore the years of prominent Democrats’ straight-faced berating of Republican support for voter ID laws as nothing more than a purposely racist suppression tactic . . . immediately followed the Democrats’ recent about-face claim that they had always supported voter ID.
Even as they continue to push federal legislation that would effectively obliterate such ID laws in 35 states.**
Then contrast the bill passed in Georgia or being considered in Texas with the process in Biden’s home state of Delaware, which “doesn’t allow 24-hour or no-excuse drive-through voting,” as Karl Rove explains in The Wall Street Journal.
“It won’t begin early voting until 2022 and then for . . . fewer days than Texas,” which has had early voting for more than three decades.
Somehow, Mr. Biden has never denigrated Delaware for Jim Crow-ism.
Yet he may be right that “bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country.”
Peddler of lies, know thyself.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Not to mention that a certain “Biden crime bill” passed decades ago may have led to more disenfranchisement of voters — especially voters of color — than any single piece of legislation since . . . the Civil War.
** This HR1 would also allow partisan control of the Federal Election Commission, for the first time ever — the most potentially speech-suppressing provision of any state or federal legislation.
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Pythagoras
It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually.
Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.
Pythagoras, as quoted Florilegium of Stobaeus, Thomas Taylor, translator (1818).
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Pythagoras
We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.
Pythagoras, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers,
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The Bastille and Beyond
On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille.
On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act prohibited the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.
The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson [above] as its leader and figurehead.
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The Division of Adventure
On Sunday, billionaire Richard Branson became the first person to ascend into space in his own spacecraft — assuming that myth, old rumors and sci-fi stories of god-kings and mad scientists going to the Moon or Mars remain just that, myth and rumor and fi.
“The launch with Branson marked the 22nd test flight of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity space plane,” writes Alex Veiga for MSN. “The company has planned at least two more space test flights this year.”
Thus Branson beat Jeff Bezos into space — depending how you figure. Later in the month Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft is set to launch Amazon’s less-than-beloved billionaire even higher above the planet.*
The billionaire space race is on, with the next level to be reached when regularly scheduled flights become the norm, ticket sales and all.
This is really “just” thrill-ride fare we are talking about here — and likely when commercial space travel first becomes normalized. Neither man is aiming to rocket into orbital space.
Yet.
Which is not to say this is not of great significance.
Of course, the fledgling industry receives criticism. Why go to space now, some say, when we have so many problems on Earth?
Well, explorers and adventurers did not wait till Europe’s problems were solved to explore and settle the Americas. They pushed forward.
Just as there is a division of labor in society, there is a division of ambition, of venture.
I will likely never go into space. But I am happy Richard Branson got there.
And I’ll applaud if you, too, jaunt upwards.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Branson and Bezos publicly squabble about what “space” is. Virgin Galactic went above the American standard of about 50 miles, while Bezos aims for the worldwide “accepted” standard of 62 miles.
Jeff Bezos| Elon Musk | Richard Branson
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