On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies.
One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
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Author: Redactor
On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States. She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.
The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the reason this site, ThisIsCommonSense.com, exists. (It continues, however, only through the continued support of readers like you.)
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Peak Absurdity
We have gone on beyond nonsense. Theodore Geisel — Dr. Seuss — whimsically drew and rhymed his way into our hearts. But owners of his copyrights and trademarks have announced that they will no longer keep in print a handful of Seussiana, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, and On Beyond Zebra!
“These books portray people,” says a press release from “Seussville,” “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
The objection appears to be that caricatures of Chinese and Africans and others are based on stereotypes and, therefore, “hurtful.”
After retrieving your rolled eyes from deep within their sockets, recognize that cartoons and caricatures rely upon stereotypes. Which is why I still own copies of the first two books on the list and will not hesitate to read them and show the pictures to any child of any race or ethnicity who might be interested.
While the woke guardians of the Seuss brand have every right to cease publication — just as eBay, the trading platform, possesses the right to prohibit sale of used copies — this is historic. The woke social justice crowd have pushed their mania past absurdity.
Not, alas, a funny, Seussian absurdity.
His very liberal voice, favoring individuality, diversity and just being nice, was utterly at odds with the implied calumny from the corporation that bears his pen name.
But I do hear chanting in the background: “boil that dust speck!” (A great line from Horton Hears a Who.) Seuss developed his case against intolerance and mob mania in a number of works, most of them not deprecated by his heirs, thankfully.
Kids who read them possess the tools to understand the whys of woke nonsense.
Pity that the adults in charge do not.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A Banned Book
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.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 64 today, beginning his 65th year of life.
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None of That Happened
A high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland, has only passed three courses in his last four years of “study.”
But here’s the kicker: his 0.1373 Grade Point Average is average at his school. Out of 120 students in his class, the young man ranks 62nd, with 58 others failing to reach his hardly stratospheric GPA.
“Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June,” explained Project Baltimore, the local Fox affiliate’s watchdog effort on education. “But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over.”
The television exposé found that in three years her son had “failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days.”
But for some inexplicable reason, though the unnamed lad was flunking roughly nine out of ten classes, Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts continued to pass him on to higher grades and more advanced classes than those he had just bombed on.
“I’ve seen many transcripts, many report cards, like this particular student,” informed an anonymous (for fear of reprisal) administrator with the City Schools.
“He’s a good kid,” his mother offered. “[H]e’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?”
Baltimore City Schools released a long statement detailing their bureaucratic procedures and protocols to prevent students from falling through the cracks. “France says none of that happened,” reported Project Baltimore.
I was privileged to have two parents who would never have allowed me to be so mis-educated. But when parents struggle, the theory is that public schools are there to help. In actual practice, though, this theory fails.
But gets passed along anyway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Related reading:
- Common Sense: Reading, Writing & Racketeering
- Townhall: The ABCs of Failure
- More Information on “The ABCs of Failure”
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David Hume
It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.
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Nations and National Isms
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 gives way to the reformed ofKemal Atatürk.
On the same day, the Free State of Fiume was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy.
On March 3 of 1931, the United States adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as its national anthem.
Mohandas K. Gandhi began his hunger strike in Bombay to protest at the autocratic rule in British India on this day in 1939.
Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari (pictured above) was born on March 3, 1819. Associated with French laissez-faire economists Frédéric Bastiat and Yves Guyot, he was the longest-serving editor of Guillamin’s Journal des économistes. Today chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his authorship of one article, “The Production of Security” (1849), he was, as Ludwig von Mises described, the most productive economist in his school. Despite this, and his worldwide recognition, only one of his many books was translated from the French into English during his lifetime, The Society of To-morrow (1904), his final book.
In the book he advanced the idea of “the free constitution of nationality.”
Molinari died on January 28, 1912.
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David Hume
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
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Rothbard and Houston
On March 2, 1793, Sam Houston was born.
On March 2, 1926, American economist and political theorist Murray N. Rothbard was born.
As President of the Republic of Texas, Houston (pictured above) cut the size of the Republic’s budget by a whopping amount, including selling the navy for scrap. Rothbard theorized about even more daring — and more permanent — cuts to (and limits upon) government.
On March 2, 1781, the Second Continental Congress convened as the new Congress of the Confederation, under the Articles of Confederation, ratified the day before. The congress elected no new president upon adoption of the Articles. This Confederation Congress oversaw the conclusion of the American Revolution.