In one of the most consequential sieges in western history, Titus Caesar Vespasianus and his Roman legions breached the Second Wall of Jerusalem on May 30 of A.D. 70. Jewish defenders retreated to the First Wall, but were overcome before summer’s end. Titus’s armies crucified thousands and destroyed the historic Second Temple.
This notice, entitled “Triumphant 2025 Shen Yun Season Concludes,” may look like the usual glowing corporate self-congratulatory exercise in unwarranted hype. But it isn’t. “Shen Yun’s eight touring groups and hundreds of performers overcame tornadoes and fires as well as sabotage attempts from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies. And yet, not a single performance was missed.”
That is an accomplishment, indeed, for the theater troupe did face back-room political pressure from that great foe of freedom, the CCP.
I had seen several news reports of their troubles. It took a court order, for example, to enforce a venue contract with South Korea’s Kangwon National University. University officials had “greenlit the New York classical Chinese dance company’s application to perform at its Baekryeong Art Center on April 1,” explains The Epoch Times, “only to walk back on the agreement after the Chinese embassy voiced a complaint.”
The university “stated that its decision to cancel the show had to do with the public interests of the school,” of course. But while“escalating the matter into a ‘diplomatic issue’” obviously loomed large, the center also mentioned the danger from “the roughly 500 Chinese-national students studying at the center who it claimed could stage protests, potentially leading to clashes, should the performance go on as scheduled.”
The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization is made up of many artists who have fled communist China. The communists in China do not like defectors, and their reach is alarming.
Thankfully, in this case, the CCP failed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.
Theodore Roethke, Poetry and Craft (1965).
Rhode Island became the last of North America’s revolutionary thirteen colonies to ratify the United States Constitution, on May 29, 1790.
Congress’s action means that California may no longer ban sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
With presidential prospects in mind, Governor Gavin Newsom has recently been trying to position himself as one of the less-unhinged Democrats; he has a podcast and talks (!) to conservatives. To keep up this act, he would have had to accept defeat of his autocratic attempt to circumvent markets and outlaw consumer choice in the auto industry.
Instead, Newsom is suing to overturn Congress’s good deed, which he says is all about “making America smoggy again.”
“This is not about electric vehicles,” he says. “This is about polluters being able to pollute more.” More than what? Gas cars aren’t a new thing. And electric cars, for all their novelty and appeal, come with a host of trade-offs from high price to extra weight to battery-charging problems — and EV pollution.
Slogans don’t change that.
The tradeoffs hardly make electric cars automatically preferable to consumers free to make up their own minds what kind of car to buy.
When electric cars sell and develop in competition with gas vehicles, fine; no problem. But when government makes gas vehicles disappear by fiat? The salutary incentives provided by direct competition will also disappear. And our roads become filled with ill-fit technology.
The most fundamental issue here is not electric vehicles. And it’s not pollution.
It’s freedom.
To which Governor Newsom, sad to say, remains staunchly opposed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The best way out is always through.
Robert Frost, “A Servant of Servants,” North of Boston (1914).
After two months of vigorous revolutionary acts — from “social democratic” reforms to public executions — the Paris Commune fell on May 28, 1871.
The Court did not address her right to speak on legislation. So, while Libby is now being allowed to vote, she’s still not being allowed to speak on legislative questions.
Maine’s Democratic lawmakers had stripped Libby of her right to speak on and vote on legislation because they objected to a social media post in which Libby expressed disapproval of letting a boy participate in a girls’ track competition.
The boy’s name was already public knowledge, as I explained when I covered the story earlier this month. But the fact that Libby referred to him by name (first name) in her post was the hook on which her colleagues sought to hang her.
The dissent of one of the two dissenting Supreme Court justices, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, seems partly motivated by her view that “the case isn’t an emergency in need of Supreme Court intervention since there are no significant upcoming votes where Libby’s participation could change the outcome.”
An astonishing sentiment.
We don’t know for sure what questions might come up in the last weeks of Maine’s legislature session. In any case, the purported significance of legislative matters has no bearing on the question of the justice of simply annulling, over a political disagreement, the voters’ decision about who should represent them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones.
Theodore Roethke, Poetry and Craft (1965).
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously declared key portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional, in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), on May 27, 1935.