On November 30, 1782, representatives from the United States and Great Britain signed preliminary peace articles, drafted in Paris, France. These were later formalized as the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
Senator Rand Paul stated an obvious possibility, the other day: soon the U.S. federal government’s official debt will roll over another trillion dollar mark, to $39 trillion.
His Thanksgiving message was not unrelated to the debt:
And there was a follow-up poll:
Speaking of time, the $36 trillion mark was hit a year ago, in late November.
The $37 and $38 trillion marks both hit this year. Will we squeeze a third trillion dollar mark in for 2025? No, if the Congressional Budget Office’s predictions are correct. The CBO expects the debt will rise above $39 trillion in mid-2026, with $40 trillion achieved later in the year.
Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 5 (1755), pp. 635–648A.
As centuries pass by, the mass of works grows endlessly, and one can foresee a time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth subsisting in nature, as lost among an immense number of books; then one would have to undertake, out of necessity, a labor that had been neglected, because the need for it had not been felt.
If we think of the image of literature in times before the invention of printing, we see a small number of men of genius busy creating, and a countless throng of workers busy transcribing. If we anticipate centuries to come, and think of the image of literature once printing, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, we will find it once more split into two classes of men. There will be those who read little and immerse themselves in new research or what they take to be new (for if we already are ignorant of part of what is contained in so many books published in all sorts of languages, we will know still far less about what is in those books increased a hundred-, a thousand-fold); the others, workmen incapable of producing anything, will be busy leafing through those books night and day, and separating out what they deem worthy of being anthologized and preserved. Is this prediction not already being fulfilled?
On November 29, 1963, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson established, with Executive Order 11130, the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He named the following men to head the research panel:
Note that one of these men had been fired by the assassinated president as Director of the CIA, and hated JFK’s guts, while another went on to become the only president of the United States to enter office having received no votes in the Electoral College, or any popular votes on a federal-level ticket.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. No order has been issued requiring Danish farmers to kill their cows. The state is merely requiring that they feed the cows poison.
The purpose of the wonder-additive, Bovaer, produced by a company called Elanco Animal Health, is to limit the methane that cows produce as they digest their food. Then, says Elanco, the amount of methane that the cows emit — by a method too indelicate to mention — will be reduced 30 percent. Elanco must have done some kind of testing to figure this out, I suppose.
What is the point, though? Why does anybody want to accomplish this?
Well, the central planners who mandate such things believe or say they believe that even a smidgen less methane in the air will enable them to fine-tune the global climate thus wise and so and thereby, something something something, a perfect optimization. Well, not perfectly perfect, not until all the bovines everywhere are gobbling Bovaer. Denmark is not the only country pushing the drug though.
Alas, some Danish farmers are being obstreperous, complaining that their cows are getting sick: lethargy, diarrhea, miscarriages, drops in milk production. Etc. Some are even dying as result of the additive.
It is sad. But I’d rather have a few dead cows than a dead planet with nonstop hurricanes and tornadoes. And that’s what’s gonna happen if we don’t find a way to inhibit the cows’ . . . methane emissions.
This is Common Sense!! I’m Paul Jacob.
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Aucun homme n’a recu de la nature le droit de commander aux autres. La liberté est un présent du ciel, et chaque individu de la meme espèce a le droit d’en jouir aussitòt qu’il jouit de la raison.
No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.
Denis Diderot, L’Encyclopédie (1751-1766), Political Authority, Vol. 1, (1751) as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker.
On November 28, 1893, women voted for the first time in New Zealand’s parliamentary election.
Grandis, et ut ita dicam pudica oratio neque maculosa
est neque turgida, sed naturali pulchritudine exsurgit.
A noble, and so to say chaste, style is not tainted or turgid, but is dignified by its natural beauty.
Petronius, Satyricon, 2. The consul and satirist Gaius Petronius Arbiter was portrayed by Leo Genn in the 1951 film Quo Vadis — a still from which the above image of the author is derived.
On November 27, 1896, Also sprach Zarathustra — a tone poem by the great composer Richard Strauss — was first performed. It is a program work referencing a book by Friedrich W. Nietzsche of the same title. It begins with a fanfare that became the musical signature to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
What did these former military and intelligence agency vets-turned-congressmen tell our current soldiers and spooks?
“You can refuse illegal orders.”
While that’s true, and important . . . what orders are they talking about?
Perhaps the continued bombing of ships in the Caribbean and killing of crews, all on accusations by the White House that these are drug smugglers — without any check or real accountability — is such a case.*
Yet, these powerful senators and representatives are not making it.
Instead, they’ve not even identified one breach. And by refusing to identify any of President Trump’s specific orders, their call devolves into second-guessing the chain of command and encouraging dissension in the ranks, dissuading military personnel from always being “at the ready.”
Further, these wielders of legislative power in Washington have taken no serious action to protect the Constitution nor promoted any legislative action to hold executive action accountable.
Instead, they pass the buck to the soldier (or CIA analyst) to determine the legality of orders on the fly.
As Haley Fuller wrote at Military.com last week, “[A]sking individual service members to make on-the-spot legal judgments without guidance can put them at enormous personal risk.”
Was this Democrat video “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” as Trump posted on social media? I don’t think so.
It is, however, tragically emblematic of the complete and total abdication of responsibility by these pretend leaders in Congress.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Reminds me of President Obama’s policy of killing American citizens abroad by drone strikes without, as even he acknowledged, any real process of checks and accountability. Thank goodness for Sen. Rand Paul’s 2013 filibuster raising concerns about this unaccountable power to execute.
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