On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.
James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.
To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
Master Kong, The Analects, second chapter.
March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.
On the same date in 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful and the threatened coup d’état never took place.
Neither as judges allotting praise and blame nor as avengers seeking out the guilty should we face the past. We seek truth, not guilt; we want to know how things came about to understand them, not to issue condemnations. Whoever approaches history the way a prosecutor approaches the documents of a criminal case — to find material for indictments — had better stay away from it. It is not the task of history to gratify the needs of the masses for heroes and scapegoats.
Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, Leland B. Yeager, trans. (1919, 1983).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter 4.
Men . . . submit every where to oppression, when they have only to lift up their heads to throw off the yoke; yet, instead of asserting their birthright, they quietly lick the dust and say, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Women, I argue from analogy, are degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment; and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, ending the long practice of bimetallism by placing the United States Treasury — and banking and currency — on the gold standard.
Man is a divine creature, because he is the final product of the creation, because Nature has formed nothing more intelligent and more capable of improvement than he. Each of us enters at birth into the heritage of a sovereignty which renders his person inviolable. In principle, if not in fact, we are all equal, because we all share the same august character. We are all free-born in this sense, that no one has a title to subject another to his will by force.
Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., translated from the final French edition, 1873), p. 3.
On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
We like to think we have the facts on our side. When we are confused, or do not know what to do, we seek facts. The Fourth Estate says that it is ideally situated to find those facts for us, and disseminate them.
But, as we all know now, “Fake News” is a real problem. Sometimes untruths are deliberately spread. Other times it is the result of error. But, whether a factoid be true or not, it remains a “meme,” replicable in our many heads often regardless of truth value.
But if you wonder if you are paranoid for thinking that the media’s established fact-checkers are pointing at your head and shooting … memes … well, you aren’t paranoid enough: the government shoots too.
Click over to Townhall. Then come back here. For memes about memes about memes:
On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring. The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.