The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Bobok : From Somebody’s Diary,” as translated by Constance Garnett in Short Stories (1900).
On May 12, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered.
“The Treasury Department said Friday it would likely run out of cash to pay the nation’s bills by August,” Politico tells us, “setting a new, firmer deadline for Congress to act to avoid a catastrophic default on the United States’ more-than $36 trillion debt.”
“Because there is significant uncertainty in projecting cash flows months into the future,” Secretary of Treasury Scott K.H. Bessent wrote Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, on Friday, “it is impossible to identify precisely how long cash and extraordinary measures will last.” Bessent went on to surmise that funds “will be exhausted in August while Congress is scheuled to be in recess.”
The Secretary urged “Congress to increase or suspend the debt limit by mid-July,” to prevent another scurrying chaos about government operations, like we’re used to, and “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Not doing so, the Secretary informed the Speaker, “would wreak havoc on our financial system and diminish America’s security and global leadership position.”
Michael Stratford and Jennifer Scholtes at Politico draw the obvious extrapolation: “If congressional Republicans don’t get their party-line bill to President Donald Trump’s desk before Treasury exhausts its borrowing power, GOP leaders will likely be forced to seek votes from Democrats to head off the fiscal cliff — an exercise that would likely require making major policy concessions to the minority party and risk alienating fiscal hawks.”
“GOP Lawmakers are hashing out the details of what will be in the sweeping package,” explains USA Today, “which is expected to boost funding for border security and defense while cutting taxes and possibly cutting social programs such as Medicaid.”
What are the odds that Republicans will work together to reduce government in their promised megabill before this new “deadline”?
Odds are that they will only increase spending. No?
Paul Jacob writes about the budgeting process, debt crises, and allied subjects with some regularity. “The Continuing Crisis,” from March, gives a good idea of his general tenor.
When told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: “Naturally.” He then added: “And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?”
Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (2006).
On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. State.
Nine years later, to the day, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s independence and neutrality were affirmed in the Second Treaty of London.
In case there was any mystery left to the Democrats’ relay race to losing the 2024 presidential election, Joe Biden has explained it all.
Did he, asked the BBC’s Nick Robinson, just perhaps . . . drop out too late?
“What happened was,” replied the old pol, “what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do, and [had] become so successful in our agenda that [it] was hard to say ‘now I’m gonna stop now.’”
Well, he said something like that. If you want to talk about hard-to-do things, try transcribing 2025-year Biden.
“I meant what I said when I started,” Biden goes on, and after a word-stumble salad, goes on further, “‘I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation.’ The transition government. But . . . it . . . moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.
“It was a hard decision.”
Regrets then?
“No, I think it was the right decision.”
Well, that clears it all up.
Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead (1915), as translated by Constance Garnett, p. 16.
On May 10, 1768, riots broke out in London after John Wilkes was imprisoned for writing an article for The North Briton severely criticizing King George III.
Makes sense to California Governor Gavin Newsom, apparently. This March he sent nearly $200,000 — on top of earlier grants — to the Islamic Center of San Diego. It’s part of a program to help religious institutions fight terrorism.
The Center is led by an imam who rationalized Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians; no atrocity gave him pause. The Washington Free Beacon also reports on links between this mosque and the 9/11 hijackers.
Newsom has awarded similar “antiterrorism” grants to other mosques demanding the demise of Jews and Israel.
Daily reports of Islam-rationalized outrages and atrocities are aggregated by Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. They aren’t rare.
Some regard “Islamophobia” — which, defined reasonably, means something like irrational hostility to Islam or to peaceful Muslims — as a worse threat than use of Islam to rationalize intimidation, repression, kidnapping, rape, murder. We do have reason to oppose the latter . . . and it is not any kind of “phobic,” contrary to the assertions of those who seek to blur important distinctions, because it is not irrational.*
People are responsible for their own actions, not the actions of others who belong to the same ethnic or religious group.
But people are responsible for their own actions.
It should go without saying that applauding the most vicious treatment of other human beings is not the kind of thing an American government should be encouraging.
By words.
Or cash.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Remember that the modern use of “phobia” hails from abnormal psychology, which is especially focused on needless fears.
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Benedetto Croce, preface to Pagine sulla guerre (1928), as quoted in As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, by Maurizio Viroli, (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Liberty is not the function of the bourgeoisie or any other economy but rather the human soul and its deep needs; it possesses qualities and origins that are not economic but instead moral and religious. . . .