On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.
On the same date in 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.
One such is burying the latest assault on liberty in legislation about an unrelated matter in hopes that nobody will notice.
In Canada, a controversial effort to sabotage online privacy has wormed its way into a bill supposedly about strengthening border security: the Strong Border Act (Bill C-2).
It’s not exactly new, since, as Reclaim the Net reports, it’s something “law enforcement agencies have been pursuing since the late 1990s.”
As with populations south of the border, the people themselves hate such interference. “Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by public opposition, parliamentary committees, and Canada’s highest court,” observes Ken Macon, “the drive to erode digital privacy protections continues.”
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians have a right to expect that their subscriber information will be kept private. In 2023, the courts affirmed that users’ IP addresses were also entitled to protection. Investigators couldn’t simply rummage through a Canadian’s subscription details and surfing history without a warrant.
But the new legislation would entitle authorities to make warrantless “information demands” on service providers.
If this legislation ostensibly about the border is enacted, service providers would, on demand, have to identify particular users and whether the provider possesses his transmission data. The actual data itself would not have to be handed over, but Macon stresses that permitting such indirect searches would “effectively sidestep the very privacy protections the courts have upheld.”
Vigilance, indeed, knowing our governments’ lust for omniscience about us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).
Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977. It was typographically styled as the “Apple ][” and the series continued long after the specific II model was superseded by the Apple II Plus and was discontinued in 1981. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.
Born on this day (June 10th): historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nathan Irving Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).
Hentoff wrote several works on the history and nature of free speech in America, including The First Freedom (1980). Sendak is most famous for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Wilson’s many books include Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).
Sendak died in 2012, Hentoff in 2017, while Wilson died on December 26, 2021.
“Ultimately, a strong, resolute, and capable network of allies and partners is our key strategic advantage,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently informed the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. “China envies what we have together. And it sees what we can collectively bring to bear on defense.”
Hegseth was speaking directly to Indo-Pacific allies, whom he reminded: “it’s up to all of us to ensure that we live up to that potential by investing” to “quickly upgrade [our] own defenses.”
Our alliances of free nations in Europe and Asia constitute a huge edge against a bullying, totalitarian China.
My entire life, these past six decades, Big Daddy America was by far the biggest, best military on the block. Still is the best. But it’s no longer the biggest: China now has a bigger navy, much greater shipbuilding capacity, and many more soldiers in uniform. Technological and other strategic advantages have been diminished as well.
The defense secretary acknowledged that — after “a lot of ongoing conversations with our military leadership in the Indo-Pacific” — “there is something to be said for the fact that China calculates the possibility and does not appreciate the presence of other countries . . . as part of the dynamics or decision-making process, and, if that is reflected in their calculus, then that’s useful.”
We cannot afford to squander our “ally advantage.” We need each other.
This is Comon Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).
In A.D. 68, on the Ninth of June, Roman emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus quoted the Aeneid (by Publius Vergilius Maro, known as Virgil), and then committed suicide (with the help of his secretary, Epaphroditus). With this act, Nero ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty and started the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors, which concluded under the rule of Vespasian.
While there was nothing unexpected about Elon Musk leaving DOGE and going back into the ersatz private sector of corporations receiving government contracts, and X (that is, ex-Twitter), the manner of the disemployment is a bit startling.
Paul Jacob covered the first hints of the schism in late May. It was something Elon Musk said in an interview, here reproduced as one of this site’s Thoughts of the day:
But then things got weird. As summarized by The New York Times, the schism played out first at the White House, as “Mr. Trump said that Mr. Musk, the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX, was ‘upset’ that the pending legislation would roll back subsidies for electric vehicles. Then he got in a particularly sharp jab, asserting he would have won the 2024 election without the millions of dollars Mr. Musk spent to support him.” Then it went mostly to social media (X and Truth Social):
But Trump “also maintained that Mr. Musk knew ‘every aspect of the bill,’ saying that the tech executive did not have a problem with the measure until he left his government post.”
Then Elon pulled out all the stops:
Responses to the schism have been all over the map. Here are two dissimilar takes, from comedians Steven Crowder and Dave Smith:
Why conclude with comedians? It could be that comedians tend to be much clearer than other commentators.
Or it could be that this is all really funny.
You really don’t understand. We don’t worry about individuals. What counts is that many millions of people have the knowledge that they can go to a weapon shop if they want to protect themselves and their families. And, even more important, the forces that would normally try to& enslave them are restrained by the conviction that it is dangerous to press people too far. And so a great balance has been struck between those who govern and those who are governed.
Lucy Rail, a character in A. E. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951).
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.