On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
This birthday marks the Thoreauvian Bicentennial. The occasion is especially important to environmentalists and libertarians, both of which Thoreau was.
Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weekawken, N. J., was a ledge 11 paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, sitting third Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The featured image is a promissory note from the Second National Bank in the amount of $1000.
[N]o one, no government agency, has jurisdiction over the truth.
FBI Agent Fox Mulder, played by actor David Duchovny, in The X-Files, “Fallen Angel,” November 19, 1993; writing for this episode is credited to Howard Gordon and Alex Gans.
A politician lied. Not exactly news? Well, the story is how he lied, and about what. And “why”!
Click on over to Townhall. Then come back here for more info.
On July 9, 1896, William Jennings Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech advocating bi-metallist inflationism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, a triumph of rhetoric over reason that solidified the takeover of the Democratic Party by reformers utterly ignorant of basic economics.
When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the Hicks brothers law office, the trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I had printed in the Nation, a week or so before, an article arguing that the anti-evolution law, whatever its unwisdom, was at least constitutional — that policing school teachers was certainly not putting down free speech. The old boy professed to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders to understand that I was a talented publicist. In turn I admired the curious shirt he wore — sleeveless and with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two Spanish ambassadors.
But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the court-room, standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.
H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925
The congressman with two first names also has two faces. In today’s video, Congressman Markwayne Mullin and his wife, Christie, announce that he will break his promise to step down from Congress after three terms, which he repeatedly made to voters in order to win the seat in 2012.
The message of the video, a fake news interview produced by Congressman Mullin, seems to be that Markwayne’s pledge to serve only six years was because he might not like the gig. If he now feels like staying in the congressional job, then his past promise to leave doesn’t count. After all, he says he’s “grown.”
“The last thing we want is to make people think we’re going back on our word,” a reality-resistant Mullin told the Tulsa World. “At the time, we were sincere. But where we’re at today is a different situation.”
See these past episodes of Common Sense: