Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum.
Love the sinner and hate the sin.
Augustine of Hippo, Opera Omnia, Vol II. Col. 962, letter 211.
Author: Redactor
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July Fourth Events
1054 – A supernova was spotted by Chinese, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers. The celestial event occurred near the star Zeta Tauri, remaining, for several months, bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.
1776 — The Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence that had been submitted by committee members Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, thus formalizing its policy of secession from the empire of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1803 — The Louisiana Purchase was announced to the American people.
1804 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American author of The Scarlet Letter, House of Seven Gables, The Blithesdale Romance, and other classics, was born. Hawthorne became part of the Young America literary movement spawned by Loco-Foco political activism in New England.
1826 – Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, died a few hours before John Adams, second president of the United States, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
1826 – Stephen Foster, composer of “Old Black Joe,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and many other classic American songs, was born.
1827 – Slavery was abolished in New York State.
1831 – Samuel Francis Smith wrote “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” for Boston’s July 4th festivities, set to the tune of Great Britain’s national anthem, “God Save the King/Queen.”
2009 – The Statue of Liberty’s crown re-opened to the public after eight years of closure that resulted from security concerns following the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Tired of that rundown shack you live in — for which each month you must cough up the rent money or a mortgage payment? No doubt, you’re chomping at the bit for the chance to move into clean, spectacular, state-of-the-art government housing.
Well, you’re in luck! That is, if you live in New York City.
You see, on Tuesday evening, Sean Hannity informed his Fox News audience that Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ mayoral nominee, has a “plan to slowly eliminate home ownership in New York City.”
“If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full decommodification of housing,” Mamdani declares in a 2021 video for the Gravel Institute. “In other words, moving away from the status quo, in which most people access housing by purchasing it on the market.”
He says, “We’ll have to go beyond the market.”
That “has to be” the solution? Why? Because Mamdani’s socialist/communist dogma dictates that government should be the provider of all shelter? The “decommodification” must be “full” and complete. No private home can be permitted to be bought or sold . . . or lived in anymore.
Surely that would solve our problems.
The democratic socialist suggests that the government “gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership,” urging the city to “fully commit to a new era of social housing . . . using our wealth to build beautiful, high-quality social housing projects that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone.”
Yes, taxpayers, get ready to invest in the sparkling future of public housing. Cabrini-Green here we all come!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Lex naturae … nihil aliud est nisi lumen intellectis insitum nobis a Deo, per quod cognoscimus quid agendum et quid vitandum. Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione.
The law of nature … is nothing other than the light of the intellect planted in us by God, by which we know what should be done and what should be avoided. God gave us this light or law in creation.
Thomas Aquinas, On the Ten Commandments (c. 1273).
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July Third
On July 3, 1775, George Washington took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1952 on July 3, Puerto Rico’s Constitution was approved by the Congress of the United States.
While we were going about our business, and maybe even soaking in some summer sunshine, the “US National Debt,” as the federal government’s explicit financial obligation is called, passed the $37 trillion mark.
As if to mark the occasion, the Chinese government unloaded a whopping eight billion, two hundred million dollars worth of U.S. Treasuries onto the market.
It’s a lot of money.
It’s a lot of debt.
And now China no longer holds it.
Thus they are not quite as invested in our future.
Is that scary?
Well, everything about our federal debt load should scare us. If we are placid and unperturbed now, how many extra billions and trillions would it take to shake us?
If you are especially concerned about world stability, it might make sense to comfort you with this . . . interesting . . . piece of information: China still holds over $750 billion in United States debt.
A more important piece of information might be what the Chinese central bank has been replacing the U.S. debt with: gold.
Lots of gold.
About 200,000 kilograms of gold!
Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, insists that “a single asset has overtaken the US dollar’s position as the world’s de facto reserve currency.” That asset is gold.
We aren’t on the gold standard, but it looks like we may be falling backwards into something like one.
It makes me wonder if there is still gold in Fort Knox . . . and just how much.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, XI, 14 (c. 397).
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Secession & Abolition
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress un-tabled the Lee Resolution and voted to sever ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain.
One year later, to the day, Vermont became the first American territory to abolish slavery.
The civil war between sane New Yorkers and the other kind has reached its next phase.
The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary has some high-profile Democrats, like Sen. John Fetterman, expressing chagrin over the success of this openly commie slash-and-burn, soak-the-(white)-rich, pro-Hamas guy. Others, like former President Bill Clinton, who once posed as a moderate, are cheering him on.
Mamdani is also anti-policing. He has said: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD . . . NO to fake cuts — defund the police.”
Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and former and current GOP nominee for NYC mayor, says that Mamdani “has a weird notion of how policing is, as if it should be people like Mahatma Gandhi walking around, you know, functioning as a social worker. That does not work.”
Some police officers say they’ll quit if someone so openly hostile to law and order — not to abuse of police power, but to reasonable policing when it’s obviously necessary — also wins the general election and becomes the next mayor.
Top brass fear an exodus.
But would only police officers quit? Everyone in NYC who prefers civilization to annihilation should then quit.
And it would be natural for many of the more successful New Yorkers to leave if Mamdani gets in on the strength of the NYC’s apparently huge and growing ressentiment vote and starts robbing and pillaging in earnest.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William of Ockham
Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.
It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer.
William of Ockham (c. 1287 – 1347) — he of “Occam’s Razor,” one of its expressions here presented — in Summa Totius Logicae, i. 12.