Author: Redactor

A. E. van Vogt

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).

Today

Nineteen Eighty-Four

On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.

Update

Fauci’s Phone Found & Seized

Post author By Redactor
Post date June 7, 2025
1 Comment on Fauci’s Phone Found & Seized

“FBI Director Kash Patel claimed Friday that there was a recent ‘breakthrough’ in the COVID-19 origins probe,” explains a Daily Mail article, repeating information divulged on a Joe Rogan Experience episode.

Fauci, one of the primary medical leaders during the deadly pandemic, is being investigated as part of the larger inquiry into how COVID started and America’s response.

Patel told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI originally couldn’t locate any of the [cellular telephony] devices Fauci used during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 — but they apparently turned up just days ago.

Though this is good news for advancing some transparency on wayward/malign behavior by the country’s former top-paid bureaucrat, the FBI Director cautions not to “jump to the conclusion [that] everything’s in there. Maybe it’s deleted, maybe it’s not, but at least we found it, and at least now we can tell people that we have been looking because it is of public importance.”

Further, Patel admitted that President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon places additional difficulties upon prosecution.

The Daily Mail article concludes with a background discussion of SARS-CoV-2 origins:

The FBI and the CIA both asserted that COVID likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, which had been conducting different experiments on coronaviruses in the years preceding the disastrous pandemic.

The lab leak theory was previously denounced as a conspiracy theory during the height of the pandemic. Fauci has been accused of suppressing information indicating the veracity of the lab leak, which he denied before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last year.

Paul Jacob has written extensively about this subject, from fairly early on in the pandemic story.

Thought

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield” (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851).

Today

Founders, Fathers

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.

During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on as a eulogistic way to refer to figures such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.

general freedom ideological culture

Chinese Individualism

“You’re not the center of the story — at least not everywhere.”

That’s the tagline of a video featuring the late President Lee Kuan Yew, described as the “founding father of Singapore,” elsewhere affectionately referred to as LKY.

The social media account responsible runs under the moniker Office of the Director of Intelligence & Strategy, which sounds like a propaganda bureau. It’s an excerpt from a 25-year-old hour-long interview with Charlie Rose.

Entitled “Not Every Culture Believes Success Starts with One Person,” the clip goes on to say that LKY “shares his understanding of a key divide between the West and many Asian societies: Where the West centers the individual and leading your own path, many Asian systems prioritize the group — family, obligation, cohesion, survival together.”

The familial and communal aspects of traditional Chinese society are not in doubt. But LKY makes two crucial errors.

“You believe in the individual as the creator of all things,” he says of Americans.

That is not even close to how American individualism views the world. For starters, most Americans continue to believe in a capitalized Creator “of all things,” and it’s not the individual. Furthermore, even the most rugged individualist understands the role of families in raising children and communities in helping humans flourish.

American liberty, as imperfect and diluted as it is, can accommodate family-values traditions and communitarian folkways as well as free radicals. The point of individualism is not that The Individual creates success ex nihilo, but that government must make no exceptions for some individuals over others based on group membership.

Which is why Chinese-Americans do so well: they are helped by their family orientation as well as freedom. They do much better here than in China, but Chinese do even better in Singapore, which sports a lower tax burden.

The kind of tax burden individualists prefer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Auberon Herbert

Of all the miserable, unprofitable, inglorious wars in the world [the worst] is the war against words. Let men say just what they like. Let them propose to cut every throat and burn every house — if they so like it. We have nothing to do with a man’s words or a man’s thoughts, except to put against them better words and better thoughts, and so to win in the great moral and intellectual duel that is always going on, and on which all progress depends.
Auberon Herbert, Westminster Gazette (1893), as quoted in Theodore Schroeder, Free Speech for Radicals: Seven Essays (1912), p. 43.

Today

A Bolide

Post author By Redactor
Post date June 6, 2025
No Comments on A Bolide

On June 6, 2002, a high-energy upper atmosphere explosion over the Mediterranean Sea (c. 34°N 21°E) occurred. Similar in power to a small atomic bomb, the cause of the fireball has been determined to be a small, undetected asteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning out without hitting the surface, though no meteorite fragments were recovered. One of the several meanings of the word “bolide” is this, an atmospheric explosion of a meteor.

General Simon Worden of the U.S. Air Force opined that, had the explosion occurred closer to Pakistan or India — which were at war at the time — it could have sparked a nuclear exchange.*

* “Near-Earth Objects Pose Threat, General Says,” Space Daily (2002-09-17).

media and media people partisanship

Rats A-Jumpin’

When the ship starts sinking, the rats start jumping.

In politics, when a party or movement is soundly demolished at the polls, you can expect to see stalwarts flake off and go the way of the opposition, or “their own way.”

But the honorable time to do that is before the insider position becomes untenable. Not after.

Late timing smacks of opportunism.

Case in point: Karine Jean-Pierre, former Press Secretary to President Joe Biden.

Ms. Jean-Pierre was the African-American woman hired to obfuscate for the Democrat cabal who ran the federal government’s executive wing while the Man Sworn In was out — to lunch.

Now she’s formally left the Democratic Party and is shilling a book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, scheduled for publication this fall. It sports a great cover.

Like CNN’s Jake Tapper, Jean-Pierre focuses on a critical period in Joe Biden’s administration. “She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision,” her publisher blurbles.

Also like Tapper, she has no standing to preach any virtuous sermons on verity or clarity or even non-insularity. She was absolutely in the thick of Democratic insider corruption.

Her spin is in her title: she’s going independent, not switching sides.

“I think we need to stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes,” she posts on Instagram, “and not be so partisan.”

Now that her PR for her president’s party has been repudiated.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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