On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops of the Seventh Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp.
Author: Redactor
“Americans are watching with outrage the stunning news that Trump’s FBI has arrested a sitting judge in Milwaukee for alleged obstruction of an immigration arrest,” declared U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
Arresting judges?
“This is a drastic escalation and dangerous new front in Trump’s authoritarian campaign of trying to bully, intimidate, and impeach judges who won’t follow his dictates,” Raskin explained. “We must do whatever we can to defend the independent judiciary in America.”
Oh, my goodness, what is Mr. Trump doing now? was admittedly my first thought. But then I looked at the two cases raised.
The first features Joel Cano, a former magistrate judge in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and his wife, Nancy, both charged with evidence tampering, as reportedly “jail records show.” Cano resigned back in March, after the Department of Homeland Security raided his home, on information that “an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela whom authorities suspect of being a Tren de Aragua member, and others were staying on the Canos’ property.”
Last Friday, the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan on obstruction of justice charges, “alleging,” NBC News reported, “that she obstructed federal authorities who were seeking to detain an undocumented immigrant by escorting the man and his defense attorney though a nonpublic jury door.”
That man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, in court on a new domestic violence charge, was successfully apprehended by ICE, nonetheless. But what to make of a judge aiding and abetting a criminal’s escape?
Yes, we want an independent judiciary. But independent from politics — not independent from the law.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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John Cleese
I’m struck by how laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
John Cleese, From The Human Face, BBC Television (2001).
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Maryland Makes Seven
On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.
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London Loses the Very Wealthy
“London, which now has 215,700 millionaires, is one of only two cities in the top 50 — the other being the heavily sanctioned capital of Russia, Moscow — that has fewer rich individuals than a decade ago,” states The Epoch Times.
Changing demographics is a subject taking some popular notice, as populations worldwide get older and are replaced (so to speak) by immigrants as well as the young.
The city famed for its bridges and Big Ben, and for surrounding the peculiar financial center, the “City of London,” has recently “dropped out of the top 5 cities for millionaires around the world, with New York, the Bay Area, Tokyo, Singapore, and Los Angeles all ranking higher, according to a report commissioned by Henley and Partners, a United Kingdom-based investment migration consultancy,” explains The Epoch Times.
The article by Guy Birchall mentions a couple of causes, including high taxes and rising crime rates. What it does not mention is the changing demographics of the city. That is, the cultural and racial make-up of London. Actor and comedian “John Cleese has been called out for suggesting the number of immigrants in London means it ‘is not really an English city anymore,’” a Huffington Post UK article explained a few years ago. Cleese was merely noting the big change in the kind of people who live in London. “‘I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King’s Road and say, “Where are all the English people?”’”
It is not absurd to think that a rise in numbers of one group could effect a decline in another.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.
The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 6.43.
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Wollstonecraft & Spencer
On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft wrote several important political treatises, including her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and her valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”
Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher and bookseller William Godwin; the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Mary Wollstonecraft died on September 10, 1797.
Spencer never married, dying on December 8, 1903.
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China’s Hidden Decline
Apropos of yesterday’s subject, population decline, China’s population collapse was a focus but not the focus. On YouTube, however, many “content creators” are focusing more acutely on China’s version of the problem. The ‘This Thread’ podcast claims, for instance, that China’s situation is much worse than compared to that of the U.S.:
A number of YouTubers are concentrating on a much bolder claim: that the CCP has been lying about its population for years, and that the total population is a tiny fraction of what officials claim. This presenter argues, for instance, that the country’s population is probably less than half a billion:
Look around on YouTube, and you’ll find video after video portraying China’s biggest cities as seemingly empty! Where did they all go? That’s their question. These YouTubers also suggest that Chinese pandemic deaths have been extraordinarily high, persistent, and consistently covered up.
Caution: most outside observers consider this YouTube trend a species of folk fiction, something like the dreaded “conspiracy theory”: false, hyperbolic, crazy — not to put too fine a point on it. But we do know that governments lie; we know that communists lie with more alacrity and out of greater necessity — so maybe there is something to the notion that 1.4 billion people is not just a small statistical fib, but the grandest example of the Big Lie.
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Felix Mendelssohn
A prophet such as we could use again today, strong, zealous, angry and gloomy in opposition to the leaders, the masses, indeed the whole world.
Felix Mendelssohn, referring to Elijah (from the Book of Kings), to his pastor Julius Schubring, 1846, regarding the composer’s Elijah published that year.
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Sybil’s Ride
On April 26, 1777, Sybil Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.
Sybil’s story first appeared in Martha J. Lamb’s History of the City of New York (1880), based on Ludington family oral history, twenty years after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow commemorated Revere in “Paul Revere’s Ride,” a once-popular and quite famous poem. Sybil was commemorated on an 8-cent U.S. Postage Stamp in 1975.
Actual evidence for Miss Ludington’s adventure is slim to none, however.