On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”
South Pittsburg council members are tired of criticism.
So they’ve outlawed it.
Officials in the “tidiest town in Tennessee” say that the negativity hampers their work.
According to Ryan Lewis’s report in Times Free Press, the policy, passed in December, forbids city employees, contractors, vendors and “anyone associated with the town in an official capacity who uses social networks” from publishing criticism “about the city, its employees or other associates” on such networks.
Only one council member, Paul King, voted No. The new law is “telling me what I can say at night. I call that freedom of speech. I can’t understand that.”
City officials like Mayor Jane Dawkins (pictured) seem to conflate criticism as such, including merely untrue criticism, with “out-and-out lies,” and to regard censoring all criticism as an okay means of preventing alleged lies. But their blanket action goes way beyond any reasonable resort to defamation laws, which require more than mere putative falsehood, let alone putative negativity, to prove an actionable civil wrong.
Even if affected parties were assenting explicitly to the new policy, no agreement to forfeit one’s basic rights — whether freedom of speech or association, trial by jury, or any other — is properly enforceable.
The proper function of government is to protect these rights.
Not to violate them — even if officials are terribly annoyed by their exercise.
Every South Pittsburg council member who voted for this edict should be tossed out of office in the next election. If not sooner.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The destiny of the colored American . . . is the destiny of America.
Scientologists celebrate December 30 as Freedom Day.
As the year unrolls, maybe we should take some time to celebrate the little things in life that matter so much.
For reasons I am sure we can all understand, we don’t talk about toilet tissue much. But it is, nevertheless, one of the great products of our civilization.
Can you imagine living without it?
Well, for many poor people, and certainly for the vast throngs of unemployed in our ever-lengthening depression, sometimes it’s hard to afford even a little nicety/necessity like that.
Danny Westneat, writing in the Seattle Times, tells us of Leon Delong, who for the last 15 years has been collecting unused, “stub” rolls of toilet tissue from the janitors of the Evergreen City’s toniest skyscrapers, and giving them to food banks and pantries. For charity.
The ritzier places dare not risk a toilet roll running out. So the janitorial staff at these office buildings replace rolls every night. And were left with half-used/three-quarters-used tissue rolls.
Perfectly usable. But not suitable for those businesses that feared leaving any single restroom customer in an uncomfortably tissue-less condition. First rule: Avoid panic-inducing situations.
So, after retiring, Delong collected these stub rolls and made it his vocation to deliver them to the charities — where they went like “T-bone steaks.”
He’s now retiring from this charitable work, for health reasons, but can take pride in his moniker, “The Toilet Paper Guy.”
Others plan to fill his role.
It goes to show: There are many opportunities out there to do good. Some quite unexpected.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.
On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.
If at first you don’t succeed . . .
Persistence. That’s the lesson of an animal rescue shown in a video of unknown provenance, most likely recorded in Southeast Asia, that appeared on the Internet toward the end of 2014.
As the video opens, we see that a small tawny-haired, yelping dog had somehow fallen into a well. Rescuers are lowering a rope into the water. The pooch has only one way to escape — by grabbing the rope with her teeth. Which she does.
Nine out of ten times, though, she can’t hold on long enough for a rescuer to grab her and pull her out. She keeps dropping back into the water.
Discouraging.
But the tenth time proves the charm. Some combination of dog-learning and human-learning results at last in a successful retrieval. The dog has done the only thing it could do to save itself, and kept doing it until it worked.
The advice to “keep trying” is regularly balanced with the advice to know when to “cut your losses.” But, often, it’s neither possible nor advisable to cut our losses no matter how tough things get. Switch strategies, maybe. But not give up.
We can’t conclude, for example, that “this U.S. government thing is not working out, let’s cut our losses.” We just have to keep working to reform its institutions and policies no matter how often we get flung back into the well. It’s the only way we win.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On January 23, 1783, novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name Stendhal, was born. Stendahl was an avid student of the French liberal philosophical tradition, a follower of Destutt de Tracy and an attendant at the count’s salons. His most famous works include the novel “The Red and the Black” and a treatise on romantic love.
On January 23, 1860, the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty was signed between France and Great Britain. The treaty was named after the two main proponents of the agreement, Richard Cobden (in England) and economist Michel Chevalier (in France). The treaty had been suggested the year earlier, in British Parliament, by Cobden’s colleague John Bright, who saw the measure as a peace measure, and an alternate to a military build-up.
On December 28, 1832, John C. Calhoun resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first to do so.