On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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Video: Today’s Authoritarian Moment
Nick Gillepsie, Matt Welch and George F. Will define the politics of our age, and what the shuffling of Republican and Democratic candidates for the presidency really means:
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House of Lords
On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”
This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.
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Denis Diderot
People stop thinking when they cease to read.
Has the War on Drugs actually, finally, made some progress?
Well, yes . . . but, really, no.
“Legal marijuana may be doing at least one thing that a decades-long drug war couldn’t,” explains Christopher Ingraham in The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, “taking a bite out of Mexican drug cartels’ profits.”
Certainly “legal marijuana” is not the drug war. It’s that war’s antithesis.
Let’s recall, too, that legalization didn’t come about after five decades of drug war failure because politicians came to their senses, admitted their mistakes and advocated a different approach.
Instead, frustrated citizen leaders teamed up with successful entrepreneurs to launch ballot initiatives, allowing voters to directly decide the issue.
Domestic production isn’t driven merely by Colorado, Oregon, Washington State and the other Washington, the nation’s capital, where voters fully legalized possession. Marijuana for medical use is legal in 23 states, including California, where most domestic marijuana is grown. In these states, pot is widely prescribed.
Thus, a quasi-legal domestic marijuana industry was created. Lo and behold, now pot produced in the good old USA is outperforming pot grown south of the border.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) acknowledges that U.S. marijuana is being illegally smuggled into Mexico. (Maybe the smugglers will pay for the wall.)
On the other hand, what does it matter that the Mexican drug cartels are losing market share to non-violent American businesses?
Well, those cartels have waged a war with the Mexican government killing more than 164,000 citizens between 2007 and 2014. Less profit to fuel the Mexican drug lords in that bloody war is more for our peace and security.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, Chapter XVI: Europe.
No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left without proper reward.
On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.
The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.
We have just learned something interesting about the nastiest presidential election in American history.
No, not this year’s. It’s not the nastiest . . . yet.
It is about the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson beat back the Federalist Party and its Alien and Sedition Acts.
The Federalists made much of fears that the freethinking Jefferson would suppress Christianity. Some folks are said to have buried Bibles in their backyards, for safe keeping.
Overkill, sure. Jefferson was quite earnest in his support for religious freedom, as he famously wrote to the Danbury Baptists. (Jefferson garnered overwhelming Baptist support.) But he was a freethinker.
So much so that, in the year leading up to the big race, Jefferson translated all but the last chapters of C.-F. Volney’s The Ruins of Empires. This secret was uncovered recently by Thomas Christian Williams, who found in the Boston archives of the Massachussetts Historical Society many chapters of The Ruins, in English, in Jefferson’s hand. Williams wrote up his discovery in the March 2016 issue of The Skeptic, Michael Shermer’s journal.
The Ruins — once infamous, now almost forgotten — is mostly devoted to advancing a very deep view of the importance of limited government. Only the last few chapters, which Jefferson left to somebody else to translate, engage in a skeptical account of religion.
But note: Jefferson thought enough of Volney’s book to translate it himself, putting his political career at risk.
Oh, it also turns out that the Comte de Volney’s very presence in 1790s’ America served to spark the widespread panic about French spying . . . and thus President John Adams’s Alien Friends and Alien Enemies Acts!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Mary Ann Evans
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
George Eliot, Letter to Charles Bray (November 15, 1857).
Give ’em an inch, they will take . . . a continent.
When Edward Snowden broke the secrecy of the NSA’s illegal surveillance on innocent Americans, many folks (especially those in government) said the snooping was OK, because
- it is necessary for our security, and, besides,
- the collected data would only be used against terrorists, as supervised by the FISA courts.
Well, it is now known that, whatever “a.” may be, “b.” is a dead letter, swept away by broken promises and a new information practice.
Yes, the National Security Agency now shares its (unconstitutionally obtained) information with various and sundry government agencies, for a wide variety of purposes.
Last week, Radley Balko noted in the Washington Post that “the ‘sneak-and-peek’ provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.”
That didn’t take long, eh?
Many of us have opposed the NSA’s data collection on American citizens because we believed the data would not continue to be used just for the alleged purpose they were collected.
It is not a “slippery slope” argument so much as an “inch-mile” one. Government tends to grow, in size and especially in scope.
And usually at the expense of our freedoms.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
