Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
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Erich Fromm
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African Slavery In America…
On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine is believed to be the author. The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.
Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Ironically, Johnson was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro” and the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally-recognized as a lifelong slave in England’s North American colonies.
Free-speech advocate and historian Natt Hentoff talks about anonymous speech.
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First bicameral legislature
On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies. One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces close the port of Boston to all commerce.
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Yves Guyot
“Government is naturally prodigal, for it spends other people’s money.”
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An Argument in Favor of Term Limits
“As a lobbyist, I was completely against term limits, and I know a lot of people are against term limits, and I was one of the leaders, because why? As a lobbyist, once you buy a congressional office, you don’t have to re-buy that office in six years, right?”
—JACK ABRAMOFF, Former Lobbyist and Convicted Felon
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In what sort of place are children taken from their parents, or parents investigated by the authorities with that in mind, because they allowed their 10- and 6-year-olds to walk to a park to play?
Not a forced 20-mile march across Death Valley, mind you, but a Saturday stroll of less than a mile under normal earth conditions.
What sort of place? These United States — Silver Spring, Maryland, to be specific.
That’s where Danielle and Alexander Meitiv’s two kids, Rafi and Dvora, were picked up by police, on their way home from a neighborhood park.
A two-month Montgomery County Child Protective Services (MCCPS) investigation followed. Now, there’s no law against youngsters walking in public by themselves. Local public schools don’t provide bus service for kids within a mile of the school, deeming that close enough to walk. Nevertheless, this week, authorities announced that the Meitivs were “found responsible” for “unsubstantiated child neglect.”
The good news is that the neglect charge is completely “unsubstantiated.” The bad news is that official “Free State” busybodies seem to have not one clue as to what that word means.
MCCPS will keep a file on the suspicious family for five years. “We don’t know if we will get caught in this Kafkaesque loop again,” says Mrs. Meitiv, noting that the agency left unanswered the question of what might happen if they ever again dare allow their kids to walk outside the house without adult supervision.
The family is appealing the nonsensical MCCPS “finding.” In the meantime, the Meitiv children will continue to walk in public as if it’s a free country.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Erich Fromm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
On March 6, 1967, Joseph Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defected to the United States.
| The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan.
| On this day in 1820, 1820, the Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, brought Maine into the Union as a free state, and made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.
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Contemptible Court
Judge Tim Grendell missed his calling. Given his dictatorial impulses, he should have been a Soviet commissar or ancient Egyptian vizier. O, but for time, and place, and the mismatches of metempsychosis!
Grendell has lashed out punitively at Nancy McArthur, chairman of the Geauga County (Ohio) Republican Party, for seeking to undermine his authority with “vile” criticism. What happened? Did she interrupt courtroom proceedings with her aspersion-casting? Shout obloquy as he sought to instruct a jury?
Nothing like that. McArthur was never in Grendell’s court.
She did badmouth the judge, however . . . in private conversation.
The person McArthur was talking to is involved in a case presided over by Grendell, and, in a private email, reported on McArthur’s comments. Grendell, somehow, got hold of that email.
His response? Slap a subpoena on McArthur, demanding that she show cause why she should not “be held in Contempt of Court for making vile, contemptuous, slanderous, and insulting language directed at the Judge which reflects negatively on the integrity of the Court and impedes the Court in the administration of justice. . . .”
Yikes. McArthur was actually threatened with incarceration for speaking of this judge as if he were the type to do the sort of thing he did. Fortunately, his attempt to hold her in contempt has been blocked by an appellate court.
This isn’t the first time Grendell’s judicial reach has exceeded his ethical and constitutional grasp. Guilty of outrageous malpractice, he deserves a boot — to his rear, ejecting him from the bench.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.