On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Video: Silencing Trump With Mob Noise
So this happened:
I love a good protest. But a bad protest is where the protestors mob the event and shout down speech. That isn’t good protest. It is anti-free speech. It is bullying.
Things look like they are getting ugly this election year. The result could be chaos. But backlashes happen, and the protestors may have ensured that the man they say they oppose actually gets elected. We will see.
(The video was almost selected at random. Consider this a place filler. A historic marker.)
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Two Criminals
On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring. The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.
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Deirdre N. McCloskey
Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).
One lesson from the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is that “Every man’s life touches so many others.”
Every woman’s life does, too.
On Monday, I was stunned and saddened to read in my morning paper that Cornell University President Elizabeth “Beth” Garrett had died, barely a month after being diagnosed with colon cancer, at only 52 years of age.
“Being the first woman president of Cornell, just as I was the first woman provost at U.S.C., puts me in the position of being a role model — not just for young women, but also for men,” she told an interviewer.
While at the University of Southern California, Beth “was the driving force behind the Initiative and Referendum Institute becoming part of USC,” according to my friend, Dane Waters, founder of the Institute.
I met her in the late 1990s. While we certainly were not in full agreement politically, my respect for her intellectual honesty grew and grew. She produced top notch research on the initiative process
And she cared. Years ago, when the Oklahoma Attorney General unsuccessfully sought to persecute myself and two others, Beth Garrett, an Okie native, reached out to lend her moral support.
Reason magazine mourned her passing by calling her “a staunch defender of free speech on campus.”
“There isn’t any idea that ought not to be tested and questioned,” Garrett once told students. “Because that’s how we get closer to the truth. . . . So if you disagree with someone, the answer isn’t to shut them down.”
Beth Garrett lived a wonderful life, leading by example. We’ll miss her.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Mary Ann Evans
The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
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Daily Courant
On March 11, 1702, The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time. It was a one-sheet, concentrated on foreign news, sans commentary. The reverse side sported advertising. It was produced by Elizabeth Mallet (1672–1706), a printer and bookseller who lived, and published the paper, next to the Kings Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge in London.
Edward Snowden, the infamous American whistleblower now exiled in Russia, says the FBI’s claim that it cannot decode the infamous San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone is, and I quote, “Bernie Sanders.”
Oops.
He used another word-set, also sporting the initials B. S.
I got confused because, though the press has been fretting endlessly about the B.S. coming from Donald Trump, the real corkers of late have come from Bernie Sanders, who seems to think that white people cannot be poor or oppressed* and that the successes of free markets elsewhere serve perfectly as excuses for Big Government interference here in America.**
Mr. Snowden, who knows a lot more about encryption and decryption than I do, has given more weight to my suspicion that the whole FBI case against Apple — demanding that Apple create software to decrypt the company’s customers’ iPhones, and supply (on an allegedly case-by-case basis) the decrypted private information to the government — is a sham.
Snowden insists that there are multiple ways to do the job.
“Other technologists have explained how the FBI could have easily accessed the phone’s latest iCloud backup,” a report on Snowden’s judgment elaborated, “if agents working with San Bernardino County had not reset the iCloud password.”
Once again, a government failure leads to another push by government to correct for its failure, burdening citizens.
In this case: folks at Apple.
Interestingly, Apple’s legal defense appears to rest heavily on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees, arguing that the demanded software is value-laden speech, is literally made up of such.
The exact term is “structurally opinionated,” which I nominate for the jargon phrase of the year.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Sanders has recently said, in one of those interminable debates that I can no longer watch in full, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As if “white privilege” amounts to immunity from poverty or oppression.
** Sanders, whose Tweets are as insane as his spoken pronouncements, recently lamented how Romanians in Bucharest have faster Internet speeds than Americans — without realizing they’d achieved these levels of access by wide-open, unrelenting, and wild competition. That is, Laissez Faire capitalism.
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Please consider showing your appreciation by dropping something in our tip jar (this link will take you to the Citizens in Charge donation page… and your contribution will go to the support of the Common Sense website). Maintaining this site takes time and money. Your help in spreading the message of common sense and liberty is very much appreciated!
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The Mahatma
On March 10, 1922, Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.
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Isabel Paterson
An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.