There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston, There Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.
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Zora Neale Hurston
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Switzerland
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland — known by endonyms Schweizerische Eidgenoßenschaft (German), Confédération suisse (French), Confederazione Svizzera (Italian), Confederaziun svizra (Romansh), Confoederatio helvetica (Latin) — became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H. L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.
Lying about data was not uncommon during the late pandemic.
In April of 2020, I noted one way pandemic statistics were muddied: by paying hospitals more to identify a patient, surviving or not, as a COVID patient than as something else. This was especially devastating to death stats, perhaps mildly (or even wildly) over-stating the effect COVID was having.
But understating the death count, or shifting it from one location to another, was also a problem.
“Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo personally edited a government report that undercounted the Covid deaths that resulted from his March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit coronavirus-positive patients, a congressional panel concluded,” explains James Lynch at National Review.
“The New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) issued a report in July 2020 faulting nursing homes for the spread of coronavirus in their facilities at the direction of Cuomo administration officials who ‘heavily edited’ the document, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic said in a memo released Monday.” As I prepare these words, that subcommittee is set to listen to the former governor’s testimony on “the directive and his administration’s apparent coverup of the death total.
“More than 9,000 Covid-positive patients were admitted to nursing homes because of the ‘must-admit’ order,” James Lynch adds.
Remember, Andrew Cuomo was once a star of the pandemic, hailed for “getting tough” on the spread of the virus, as in cracking down on church services — assumed (but never proven) to be the kind of “superspreader” events that “kill grandma.” He was so much a star of the brief, flaming epoch that he was awarded an Emmy for his performance. (It was later rescinded).
I guess lying — falsifying data — is a performance.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Saroyan
A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain.
William Saroyan, Madness in the Family (1988).
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The Eleventh of September
September 11 is the 255th day of 2024. Notable events on this date from previous years include:
- 1390 — The Teutonic Knights began a five-week siege of Vilnius in the Lithuanian Civil War (1389–92).
- 1565 — Ottoman forces retreated from Malta ending the Great Siege of Malta.
- 1649 — Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian troops ended the Siege of Drogheda by taking the town and executing its garrison.
- 1683 — Coalition forces, including the famous winged Hussars, led by Polish King John III Sobieski, lifted the siege laid by Ottoman forces, ending the Battle of Vienna.
- 1714 — Barcelona, capital city of the Principality of Catalonia, surrendered to Spanish and French Bourbon armies in the War of the Spanish Succession, thus ending the Siege of Barcelona.
In non-siege related history:
- 1789 — Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.
- 1830 – The Anti-Masonic Party held its first convention, one of the first American political party conventions. Four years earlier on this date Captain William Morgan, a former freemason, was arrested in Batavia, New York, for debt after declaring that he would publish The Mysteries of Free Masonry, a book against Freemasonry. Soon after he mysteriously disappeared.
- 1851 — Escaped slaves led by William Parker fought off and killed a slave owner who, with a federal marshal and an armed party, had sought to seize three of his former slaves in Christiana, Pennsylvania, thereby creating a cause célèbre between slavery proponents and abolitionists.
- 2001 — On September 11, “some people did something,” in the words of Rep. Ilhan Omar.
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So It’s War, Then?
About the South China Sea situation, what needs to be said?
Not about it, but to the Chinese government.
“We’ve said everything we possibly can say,” Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang told Fox Business News, expounding on what he thinks the United States’ next step should be. “We are done talking with you and we’re now going to start to act. And in the South China Sea, unfortunately that means we need to flood the zone with the U.S. Navy and Air Force to show that we will defend our ally the Philippines.”
This is, he explains, “one of those moments like Czechoslovakia in 1938 or Poland in 1939. It’s that serious.”
Serious, indeed: ominous. I think he’s likely correct, but he’s talking about possible escalation to war.
My Trumpian friends will insist upon raising this niggling little thought: the slide into war in the South China Sea “would never have happened under Trump.”
China’s ramped-up belligerence does seem to have spiked with Biden as president, just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have been far less likely under Trump’s leadership.
Gordon Chang is correct that “the Biden” has “been talking to the Chinese intensively throughout the Biden Administration and things have only gotten worse” — but was this the best that could have been done? Has the Biden’s diplomacy been enough talk of the right kind?
Trump scared China.
He also scared our Deep State.
We may have been safer then.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Taylor Caldwell
It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. No ever, in the long history of the world.
Taylor Caldwell, “Honoria” (1957); republished in The New American, Vol. 19, No. 20 (October 6, 2003).
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Missing Money
On September 10, 1608, John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.
On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
Taxing capital gains is a form of income taxation that Democrats love.
And it’s not just a matter of increasing revenue. Remember that President Obama thought that increasing the capital gains rate was a good idea even if it decreased government revenue. Democrats are playing to a soak-the-rich sentiment among their base, even when the most important supporters are billionaires.
Take Mark Cuban. He’s a billionaire. And he supports Kamala Harris for president.
Weeks ago, the Democrat standard-bearer came out with a wild proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. And Cuban, for all his faults, is not an idiot; he knows just how incredibly corrosive that tax on capital would be.
“It would kill the stock market,” he points out.
In a chat with Fox Business, Cuban explained how he told Democratic insiders that taxing unrealized capital gains (as when stocks you hold gain value, but you haven’t sold them so you have no income from them), would become “the ultimate employment plan for private equity, because companies are not going to go public because you can get whipsawed, right?”
By this he means that a stock owner might have to borrow money to cover taxes, only to have the stocks go down later and enjoy neither rebate from the government nor any income from the investment to cover the debt.
Cuban insists that Democratic insiders are pragmatic and will not push this tax.
Yet, with both members (comrades?) of the presidential ticket spouting Marxist talking points, how do we know that they are stable (corrupt?) enough to save public capitalism from their malign agenda?
How can we be sure they’re just lying?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Since unrealized capital gains aren’t income, I don’t know how taxing them could be constitutional. Perhaps someone can explain this to me.
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Jacques Ellul
Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal — the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962).