Author: Redactor

Greg Gutfeld

It pisses me off that nearly every major talking head advocates gun control, arrogant in their belief that most Americans can’t be trusted to arm and protect themselves without hurting others. Meanwhile, it’s these same talking heads who never have to worry about being shot at by a crazed lunatic, because the lunatic and the talking head are separate from each other by five layers of security.

Greg Gutfeld, “Katie Couric’s Life Is More Important Than the Average College Freshman’s (Even If She Looks Remarkably Like an Elf),” The Bible of Unspeakable Truths (2010), p. 4. Photographs, above, depict: journalist Juan Williams, who has nothing to do with this snippet of Gutfeldiana; a sidearm, which does; and Greg Gutfeld himself. Gutfeld is the one that is not black. Or gun-metal gray.

Today

Vargas and Vaughn

On March 28, 1936, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born. This recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ran, in 1990, for the presidency of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. His novels include La casa verde (The Green House), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was filmed as Tune in Tomorrow.

On the same date in 1970, Vince Vaughn, American actor, producer, and screenwriter, was born.

Vaughn is one of a small minority of non-left-leaning Hollywood stars; his ideas on politics and economic policy were greatly influenced by Ron Paul.

Thought

Aristotle

The law is reason unaffected by desire.

Today

Typhoid Mary

On March 27, 1915, Mary Mallon, popularly and scandalously known as “Typhoid Mary,” was put in quarantine, where she would remain for the rest of her life, over 23 years incarcerated.

Ms. Mallon was the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States. As an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, she was a puzzle to science, and, once discovered, an apparent threat to those around her, with at least three deaths attributable to her presence. She did not co-operate with officials, and preferred to work as a cook, which paid higher wages than less dangerous-to-the-public occupations. She had been quarantined once before her final permanent quarantine in a hospital.

The civil liberties aspect to her incarceration loom large, and it is obvious that health officials of her time were not exactly any more respectful of her rights than she was with those of her clients and neighbors. The case was an obvious turning point in American legal practice, and can be categorized along with eugenics and “social hygiene” — along with prohibition regarding alcohol and recreational drugs — in the increasing illiberality of legal practice in America in the early part of the 20th century.

That being the case, Typhoid Mary was the very opposite of a heroine.

Thought

Arthur Latham Perry

“The Greek writer, Aristotle, quoted some centuries before Christ from ‘the African,’ probably some Carthaginian writer on agriculture, the now familiar saying, ‘the best manure for the land is the foot of the owner.’ This homely word long attributed to Dr. Franklin, who stole it for his ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’ more than a century ago, is based on the sound principle, that personal supervision to be most effective must be limited in its sphere, and that the best agricultural skill becomes weak when it attempts to exhibit itself on too broad a surface. Because a man can cultivate 100 acres better than any of his neighbors, it does not prove that he will cultivate 50 acres additional to them better than a neighbor of inferior skill, who is the owner of these 50 and no more.”

Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891).

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