On November 10, 1821, the First Cry of Independence in the small, interior town of Villa de los Santos, occurred in Panama. The November 10 date has since become Panama’s “Cry of Independence Day” in the country. November is a month of independence celebrations in Panama, but the November 10 celebration marks the first signs of the struggle for separation from Spain.
“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”
H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major (1916)
Our constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U. S. Senators. There ought to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators.
Will Rogers, Daily Telegram number 2678 (March 6, 1935).
On November 9, 1998, the death penalty was abolished on all crimes other than murder in the United Kingdom. Murder had already been disallowed from a capital punishment since 1965, and no executions in Great Britain had occurred since that time. But the new law formalized the anti-capital punishment stance.
The idea of reinstating capital punishment has been tried numerous times in England since then, but revelations of false convictions for murder since 1965 have helped put the kibosh on such plans.
The change in China’s one-child rule policy demanded a Townhall.com. So click on over, and then come back here, for more reading.
And tell your friends and . . . enemies!
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Virginia Woolf, The Leaning Tower
(May 1940)
George F. Will has been a major defender of free speech against the campaigns for “campaign finance reform” for a long time. Here he makes his case concisely, with animation from PragerU:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken, Women as Outlaws,
The Smart Set (December 1921)
“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)
“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”
Will Rogers, “The World Tomorrow,” The Illiterate Digest, 1924