The heroes of the books I read, The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series, always felt a duty to save the world.
Elon Musk, quoted in Tad Friend’s feature in The New Yorker, “Plugged In” (August 17, 2009).
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Sir Robert Peel
On February 5, 1788, Robert Peel was born. He would become one of the United Kingdom’s most important prime ministers, ushering in some reforms that led to the liberalization of England in the 19th century.
Peel is also regarded as the father of the modern British police — the popular term “bobbies” refers to “Bob” Peel — and as one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party.
Robert Peel died in 1850.
On September 11, 2001, the nominee for secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, took his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten; which, he told the Senate, “is why I am with you today.”
The detour made him late for work at the company of which he is CEO, Cantor Fitzgerald, a leading financial service firm then located on top floors of the World Trade Center.
His brother Gary “and 657 of my other friends and colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald” lost their lives that day.
Lutnick asked the surviving employees, about a thousand people, to help him rebuild the company and help the 658 families who had lost a loved one. Over the next five years, they all donated 25 percent of their salaries to those families, about $180 million. These acts of generosity “stitched my soul back together,” he said.
“My employees never expected to get paid back, but I had other ideas. In 2008, we took a division of our company public and each employee received double what they had given.”
Lutnick does seem like “just a good dude,” as J.D. Vance describes him.
I don’t know whether he will do a good job as Secretary of Commerce. Leading a major government agency isn’t the same as leading a major business. I guess part of the answer depends on whether we, like Lutnick, support President Trump’s trade policies.
I do suspect he’ll be a better head of that department than the last one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Simone Weil
The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.
Simone Weil, “The Power of Words” (1937), published in Selected Essays 1934-1943 (1957).
On February 4, 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected as the first President of the United States, under the new Constitution, by the U.S. Electoral College.
On the same date five years later, the French legislature abolished slavery throughout all territories of the French Republic.
As January closed, the CIA changed its story on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
But was it big news?
Most people had given up any hope of finding a natural origin, and evidence favoring the virus’s creation in Wuhan, China — partly funded by U.S. taxpayers courtesy of Big Pharma bureaucrat Dr. Antony Fauci — has been clear for a very long time.
So the CIA saying it now “believes” that COVID-19 was leaked from the Chinese lab looks, suspiciously, like a convenient change of opinion upon the beginning of the 47th presidency.
New beliefs for a new president!
Note that the CIA certainly offers plenty of reasons to make light of the turn.
- The agency expresses “low confidence” in the new opinion.
- The spokesman admits that no new evidence was behind the shift.
- The spooks say they continue “to assess” both theories of coronavirus origination.
Very political.
The change of mind looks like this: the CIA had pushed the natural origination story because it had an agenda, and Americans have largely given up on that agenda. Left pushing a wet noodle, the CIA now tries to recover some of its cachet — or prevent further erosion of public opinion in the institution — by siding with the once-derided belief.
And the “low confidence” warning is there to allow mainstream news media to downplay the story. The whole thing smacks of propagandistic manipulation rather than honestly informing the president, Congress, the Pentagon, or the American people.
Oh, and what of that agenda?
Let’s just say that the agency always seeks to keep us ill-informed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jean Sibelius
If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.
Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, as quoted in Henry Thomas and Dana Lee Thomas, Living Biographies of Great Composers (Garden City (NY): Blue Ribbon, [1940] 1946) p. 309.
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Spain & Bagehot
On February 3, 1783, Spain recognized the independence from Britain of the United States of America.
Walter Bagehot (pronounced “badge-it”), famed editor of The Economist and author of Lombard Street, was born on this date in 1826.
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Morton Feldman
The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical.
Avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, in Darmstadt, Germany, as quoted by Alex Ross in “Sibelius: Apparition from the Woods” (The New Yorker, July 9, 2007). After quoting Feldman’s statement at the 1984 Summer Courses for New Music, Ross adds that Feldman “began to hum the Sibelius Fifth.”
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Shadows Seen
On February 2, 1887, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, celebrated the first Groundhog Day. On the same day in 1976, the Groundhog Day gale hit the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada.
In 2009, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe officially devalued the Zimbabwean dollar for the third and final time, making Z$1 trillion now only Z$1 of the new currency, equivalent to Z$10 septillion before the first