On January 26, 1992, Boris Yeltsin announced that Russia would stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.
Author: Redactor
…and other questions answered on this weekend’s podcast:
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Beaumarchais
As long as I don’t write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
On January 25, 1787, Shays’s Rebellion experienced its largest confrontation, outside the Springfield Armory, with four of the rebels dead, 20 wounded.
The rebellion was a key moment in United States history. Daniel Shays and his followers objected to Massachussetts’s high taxes and rampant cronyism. The revolt, which was completely suppressed, led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and drawing George Washington from his retirement.
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Catching Something
Our civilization depends on our ability to move about and trade.
Which is based, in part, on trust and reciprocity and mind-your-own-business. The basic ‘deal’ is ‘I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.’
But it’s not just manners and morality. When we fear that being around others, especially strangers, could lead to catching a severe or even life-threatening illness, the normal business of commerce breaks down.
Which becomes clear, now that a new disease in China threatens to break out worldwide.
Called the ‘2019 Novel Coronavirus,’ the illness has become widespread there, leading the government to quarantine the city of Wuhan, said to be the epicenter of the contagion.
“The lockdown follows fears that the respiratory disease could become a global epidemic,” writes Isabel van Brugen in The Epoch Times, “and as the United States this week became the fifth country outside of China — and the first outside Asia — to confirm a case of infection.”
“The closures,” said the municipal government, “will continue until further announcement.”
Pestilence and war are the two major reasons for this kind of collapse in normal commerce. But contagion may be less controllable even than war, so learning the lesson Wuhan’s inhabitants are now learning is something we can eagerly import from China right now.*
The lesson?
Have food on hand, in case a pandemic bars you from going to market for days or weeks on end.
Wuhan folk are scrambling for supplies now.
Take it as a cue to shop for staples: stock up on bottled water, beans, sterno cans, and, say — with a tip of the hat to the beset Chinese — rice.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Since my first draft, two more cities have been closed to travel, and six countries outside of China have experienced cases of infection. And questions have been raised about how transparent totalitarian China will be.
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Pope John Paul II
Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.
Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998).
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Beaumarchais
On January 24, 1732, French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American) Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was born. He proved instrumental in securing armaments for the America Revolution, but remains best known for his three “Figaro” plays, Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro and La Mère coupable. The plays remain memorable today chiefly for their operatic settings by Mozart and Rossini.
Beaumarchais died May 18, 1799.
It shocked some, surprised virtually all — save Scott Adams — when mega-branding braggart, businessman, and reality TV star Donald “You’re Fired!” Trump slapped his way to a trifecta, winning in decades-long bastions of blue — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — en route to his “landslide” Electoral College win.
How could a candidate viewed negatively by 61 percent of voters mere days before the election possibly win?
Well, consider the alternative: Hillary Clinton’s negatives were 52 percent in that same poll. Moreover, two-thirds of voters harbored “doubts about her trustworthiness.”
Entering Trump Year IV, the president’s approval rating remains under water, and, following the House impeachment, he’s being tried in absentia in the Senate. Plus, the Democrats get to choose a low-negatives/high-positives candidate to run against him.
What could go wrong?
Everything.
Except for promising to give away free stuff to everyone, it’s all very unsettled. Even The New York Times, “in a break with convention,” if not reality, has endorsed two candidates: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
Klobuchar? She’s stuck in seventh place in New Hampshire.
Four candidates vie for the lead two weeks before Iowa and three weeks before New Hampshire: former Vice-President Joe Biden, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Senators Sanders and Warren. “Sleepy Joe” tops the latest Iowa poll while self-declared socialist Bernie leads in New Hampshire — and pushes ahead of Biden nationally.
And to meet Sanders’ surge?
Mrs. Clinton.
Being lovable.
As always.
Of the current Democratic front-runner, “Nobody likes him,” Hillary sniped, channeling her inner Mean Girl. “Nobody wants to work with him, he’s got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
Cluster-yuck 2020 is Reality TV at its best.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Callahan
It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?
Former Federal Aviation Administration investigator John Callahan, who, as part of an international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials convened at a National Press Club conference, “said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska” [Reuters, Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe,” November 12, 2007].
On January 23, 1783, journalist and novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name Stendhal (pictured above), was born. Stendhal was a follower of Destutt de Tracy and an attendant at the count’s salons. His most famous works include the novel The Red and the Black and a treatise on romantic love.
Stendhal died March 22, 1842.
On January 23, 1860, the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty was signed between France and Great Britain. The treaty was named after the two main proponents of the agreement, Richard Cobden (in England) and economist Michel Chevalier (in France). The treaty had been suggested the year earlier, in British Parliament, by Cobden’s colleague John Bright, who saw the measure as a peace measure, and an alternate to a military build-up.