On October 9, 1635, Protestant theologian Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a religious dissident after he spoke out against punishments for religious offenses and giving away Native American land. He moved south, founding Providence Plantations, where he worked for separation of church and state, the rights of aboriginal Americans, and against slavery.
“We don’t know where the State ends and where we begin.”
If you think you know the story of Rwanda, the terrible genocide followed by healing and reconciliation, you’ll want to listen to what Anjan Sundaram told me last week at the San Francisco Freedom Forum. This video is from his talk on the subject at the Oslo Freedom Forum earlier this year.
This is ominous indeed, a dictatorship down to the rubber slippers.
Bonus footage: This 2014 BBC documentary goes into depth about President Paul Kagame’s role in the 1994 genocide.
https://youtu.be/c0LFbUZcO5I
Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.
John Morley, author of Voltaire and other works.
On October 8, 1793, American merchant and first Governor of Massachusetts, John Hancock (b. 1737), died.
The date October 8, 1582, does not exist in the records of Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, the result of that year’s implementation of the Gregorian calendar.
Fearing a Catholic plot, Protestant countries adopted the more accurate calendar much later. By the time Britain and its colonies got on board in 1752, eleven days had to be “disappeared.” This caused riots in some places, as people suspected some horrible chicanery — and in actual fact the inspiration for the “Give us our eleven days” protest had something to do with taxes, so it might not have been as idiotic as it now seems.
There is no reason why the states shouldn’t handle their own infrastructure. Not only in funding, but in direction and method of production and “distribution.”
But politicians aiming for the presidency tend not to even consider that heresy. And journalists, of course, tend to rah-rah for the nationalist planning notion, too. It’s easier to cover everything from Washington. I remember much talk of “our crumbling infrastructure” back in the 1980s.
Thankfully, Shikha Dalmia has not jumped onto that bandwagon. The Reason writer notes that Trump is trumping Obama’s fling with “shovel-ready jobs,” demanding that the federal government spend up to a trillion in infrastructure “stimulus.”
Forget for the moment the obvious contradiction: pretending to be an outsider, Trump is pushing as “insiderish” a program as imaginable.
I wonder: is Trump playing the cuckoo here, placing an alien idea into his constituents’ nests? Are his supporters about to be “cucked”? (As alt-rightists like to put it.)
Trump looks abroad for models of beautiful roads and bridges and trains and all the rest. If you travel “from Dubai, Qatar, and China,” he bemoans, our biggest cities give off a certain “Third World” vibe.
Dalmia blanches: “the countries Trump is praising as models for a better America are all autocracies that have made a complete hash of things.”
Boy, we do not need to find another way to make a complete hash of things here in the States. And our federal budgets are strained (and pushing us further into debt) as it is.
Besides, it is not written in stone, concrete, or even asphalt, that these United States’ roads and bridges must be made the federal government’s business.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On October 7, 1792, George Mason — “The Father of the Bill of Rights” — died. He had drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, and, at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, had insisted on the addition of articles to solidify state’s and individual rights within the new order.
George Mason has been honored in numerous ways, including by the United States Postal Service with an 18¢ Great Americans series postage stamp; a bas-relief in the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives as one of 23 honoring great lawmakers; and with an annual award named for him presented to a person who has made significant, lasting contribution to the practice of journalism in the Commonwealth, awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists, Virginia Pro Chapter.
On October 7, 2003, California Governor Gray Davis was recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger voted into Davis’s previous gubernatorial spot.
The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble
with women, too.
Joanna Russ, “Existence” (1975).
The story of the Wisconsin John Doe raids against conservatives, covered yesterday and the day before, is a big one. Huge. So I now continue.
The rest of the story? Recently, materials that police seized from the subjects of those dawn raids were leaked, illegally, to the Guardian newspaper — in direct violation of a court order. Yet more lawlessness.
Who leaked this information? Well, it was in the possession of the Milwaukee County prosecutors, and they haven’t alleged a Russian hack.
What’s really going on? Eric O’Keefe stated on Monday that “even though they never brought a charge, the prosecutors did achieve one of their major goals: the unlawful seizure of millions of private communications to create a searchable database of political intelligence spanning Wisconsin and the entire country.”
In short, the abusive investigation was part and parcel of a partisan effort.
State Rep. Dave Craig is urging the creation of a special legislative committee to “take sworn testimony . . . to determine whether those charged with the public trust have acted maliciously by intentionally leaking sealed materials in violation of state policy.”
It’s important that justice be done. To prevent future tyranny.
We don’t want to see a repeat of the IRS abuse of Tea Party groups without anyone being held to account.*
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Speaking of the IRS, it turns out that the head of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (GAB) was a pal of Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division responsible for violating the civil rights of Tea Party groups — before she took the Fifth, refusing to testify before Congress and then retiring with a six-figure pension. Further, there is evidence the GAB may have illegally provided confidential information to the IRS in hopes of getting the Feds to join in harassing these conservative groups.
FOR MORE ON THIS INCREDIBLE STORY
Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries — but it is a force stronger than crime.
Robert A. Heinlein, “This I Believe” (1952)
October 6 is the traditional date commemorating the martyrdom of William Tyndale, in 1536. Tyndale translated the New Testament and much of the Old into the English of his day, and in the process added more new words into the English language than any other single writer, with the possible exception of Shakespeare. He also laid the ground for the later, and more famous, King James (“Authorized”) Edition of the Bible.
Among his memorable coinages and turns of phrase coined as translations from Hebrew and Greek into English include