Categories
Common Sense defense & war

In Memory of the Fallen

Today is Memorial Day. It grew out of Decoration Day, which developed into a reconciliation memorial in the late 19th century to honor the fallen soldiers in the Civil War. 

Decoration Day started in the South as Confederate Heroes Day and Confederate Decoration Day, but it almost immediately caught on in the North — one can hardly get more Yankee than the Danbury, Connecticut, avant-garde composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), whoseDecoration Day (1915-1920) tone poem (he later placed it in his Holidays Symphony as the second movement) is one of the great American orchestral classics (or so I’m told).

By 1890, every Union state had adopted a Memorial Day of some kind, under different names, not always celebrated on the date first promoted in the North, May 30. The two world wars shifted the emphasis even further to a national commemoration, and, in 1968, Congress changed the day of its observance to the last Monday in May; in 1971, Congress standardized the name as “Memorial Day.”

In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop and remember at 3:00 pm. According to Statista, there have been 1,304,705 military fatalities in America’s wars. These ultimate sacrifices warrant a special day of remembrance dedicated solely to them.

Don’t we owe them our freedom? I certainly believe we owe it to the fallen to keep that freedom alive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with ChatGPT

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Common Sense general freedom national politics & policies

President Veto Remembered

This week, here at Common Sense, we did not celebrate the birthday of Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), whom some of my friends regard as the last great president of these United States. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tuesday’s Today feature.

Is there any reason to devote a column to him? 

Sure:

  • He was the only president, prior to Trump, to serve two non-consecutive terms, designated as the 22nd and 24th president in the history books.
  • Like Trump, and like presidents Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was born in New York; like Van Buren and the Roosevelts, he had, before his presidency, served as governor of that state.
  • Also like Trump, he weathered a major sex scandal. Accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, he admitted to it. And still got elected.
  • Grover Cleveland also made history by being the first president to get married in the White House. He married his former ward — itself something of a scandal — in the Blue Room during his first administration.*

The main truth about Grover Cleveland, though, was that he was a great believer and practitioner of honesty in government, and was the last real limited government man in the office — though, like all presidents, he was hardly consistent on this issue. He supported sound money, and opposed (but could not stop) the imperialist move of annexing Hawaii. He could be called President Veto, for his 584 vetoes held the record until the first four-term president stretched out enough years in office to beat it. 

He also knew his place: “Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.”

He was the only Democrat President in the half-century following the Civil War, when the Republican Party dominated, and was — consequently — super-corrupt.

Today we have a Democrat-turned-Republican fighting an ultra-corrupt Democrat-dominated federal government. 

Donald Trump could learn a lot from Grover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* This made his bride, Frances Folsom, the youngest First Lady in history — at the age of 21. There was a 27-year difference between them.

PDF for printing

Illlustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Common Sense

Henry Adams

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Vol. XII, “Eccentricity.”

Categories
Common Sense regulation

Cooking with Gas

If you’ve been wanting to buy a gas stove but have been worried about the federal government’s determination under Biden to outlaw selling them and other nice things, relax. You’re now going to be cooking with gas.

I’m looking at a paragraph of one of the many executive orders issued by President Trump to get the government off our necks.

I refer, of course, to provision (f) of Section 2 of “Unleashing American Energy.”

To wit: “It is the policy of the United States . . . to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries. . . .”

Water heaters . . . toilets and shower heads . . . and gas stoves?

It shouldn’t be such a big deal to be able to keep buying this or that modern convenience. We’ve already invented and can mass-produce, mass-distribute these things. We have a functioning market economy. And most of us don’t want to be Amish.

But if you’ve got successive administrations hell-bent on returning us all to the Stone Age in order to control global weather and spare Mother Earth further inconvenience — well, adamant interruption of this trend is indeed a very big deal.

It seems that certain insanities will be stopped cold at least for the next four years. Maybe even beyond.

Industrial civilization: a good thing. Let’s keep it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Common Sense general freedom

Happy New Year — 2025

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

—Thomas Paine

Categories
Common Sense video

A Truce

This commentary, Common Sense with Paul Jacob, usually deals with man’s inhumanity to man — man’s insanity to man, oftentimes. But on this Christmas Eve, let’s for just a moment focus squarely on some beautiful days of sanity and humanity that somewhat magically broke out of the ugliness of “total war” back eleven decades ago: World War I, “The Great War.”

Let’s remember the good times.

The Christmas Truce
History Channel
A Sign Of Friendship In The Midst Of War I
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE 1914
The Great War
Christmas Truce of World War I 
Joyeux Noel / 2005 film (video, 13:35)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Merry Christmas!

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Common Sense

Thanksgiving 2024

Links to the past:

2009: “Paul Jacob says ‘Thank You.’
2011: “Plymouth’s Great Reform
2012: “A Rafter of Turkeys
2013: “Give Thanks for First World Problems
2016: “Thanksgivings, 1623 A.D.
2017: “Ingrates of the Fourth Estate
2018: “My thanksgiving is perpetual.” 
2020: “The Saddest Thanksgiving
2023: “One by One

Categories
Common Sense

The African

The best manure for the land is the foot of the owner.

Quoted by Aristotle, who cites this saying to “The African,” whose words were cribbed by Benjamin Franklin — all explained by Arthur Latham Perry in Principles of Political Economy (1891).
Categories
Common Sense

Cackling Into the Future

In September 2019, Paul Jacob offered “Chortling Evil,” in which he checked in on a would-be President Kamala Harris in full campaign mode. Now that she is back in that full-chortle mode, let us review:

On her campaign website, Harris assures us that should Congress fail “to send comprehensive gun safety legislation” to her “desk within her first 100 days as president”  she would “take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe.”

Included in such a demanded “comprehensive” bill is “universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer and dealer immunity bill.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, on last Thursday’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate stage, challenged the notion of executive orders to ban assault weapons. At issue? Constitutionality. She smiled wide, all teeth and bright eyes, with “Hey, Joe, instead of saying, ‘No, we can’t,’ let’s say, ‘Yes, we can.’”

And she laughed and laughed.

But aside from mocking the idea of abiding within the limits of the Constitution, what else has Kamala Harris supported?

Well, for one she has supported the Democrats’ lashing out at the gig economy, and at freelancers and contract workers in general. She was on the list of opponents of California’s measure to strike down AB5, the Democratic-dominated Assembly law to do just that:

[A]ll the listed opponents of this measure were politicians, including our current Vice President (then Senator) Kamala Harris as well as socialist Bernie Sanders. . . .

Paul Jacob, “The Ultimate Legislature,” September 7, 2021.

Of course, it is not policy that takes center stage any longer, but politics and wild maneuvering. It is not just now, after the June 27th debate debacle and the July 13th assassination on presidential contender Donald Trump. The strange proceedings against Trump in case after case has been called “lawfare” — political warfare under cover of law — and former prosecutor Kamala has boasted that she would be likely to prosecute Trump after she is elected! The vendetta is strong. And the ugliness. Here is a sample from the recent past:

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is … well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false

They object … because … what he says makes them look bad.

Paul Jacob, “Richly Revealing,” March 28, 2024.

Kamala Harris looks and sounds bad in general, and the substance of her badness will only get more obvious as we approach the Democratic Convention. Will she stay as the Democratic candidate to “beat Trump?” Comedian Dave Smith and outré historian Joseph Farrell are among the many voices that predict she will not be chosen at the convention.

What do you think?

Categories
Common Sense

All a-Twitter About Kamala

The Obamas just gave Kamala Harris their endorsement. But before you rush to the Babylon Bee to get the taste of it out of your mouth, take a look at when Paul Jacob noticed a past connection between the pols: “Sen. Kamala Harris successfully bears aloft the banner of Barack Obama.” But by “banner” Paul meant “lie”! See “The 79¢ Lie,” October 8, 2019. See also “Why Lie?” May 22, 2019.

While the press does a full-court praisefest for the Vice President, we all  pretty much remember that she was originally picked for the rôle not because anyone liked her but because she fit the intersectional boxes as a woman of color. Paul asked the multi-million-dollar question, though: “How important is the color of a person’s skin or their ancestry or the skin color of their spouse to that person’s fitness to be president?” Find out his answer in  “Birth of a Twitterstorm,” July 2, 2019.

Speaking of Twitter (now known as X), Kamala Harris once demanded that Donald Trump be thrown off the platform. See “Twitter Abuse,” October 4, 2019. Update: Trump was thrown off Twitter, following the events of January 6, 2021. He is now back on X. 

In “Into and Out of the Muck,” August 2, 2019, Paul Jacob wrote of the humiliating takedown of Senator Harris by Representative Tulsi Gabbard. How times have changed, however, now that Democratic Party insiders and the corporate media have anointed Harris as their party’s standard-bearer for the presidency in the general elections next November.

Oh, and don’t forget The Babylon Bee on Barack Obama’s endorsement!