Virginia became the tenth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, on June 25, 1788.
Other events on the 25th of June include Custer dying at the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876); Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird debuting (1910), with the composer becoming an instant celebrity; and Civil War veterans began arriving at the Great Reunion of 1913 at Gettysburg.
The subject? “How milk became the new culture war dividing America,” published on June 22. It’s a “natural” vs. “technological” debate.
“For more than 130 years, Americans have been instructed that drinking milk that comes directly from a cow’s udder can be dangerous,” Tony Diver’s article begins, but how it ends is telling: “‘With respect to the question of food being natural — arsenic is natural,’ Prof Schaffner said.” And so, too, he says, is cyanide.
“Sharks are natural. Those things can all kill you. So just because something is natural does not mean that it’s safe.’”
That sounds like something I’d say.
But is it something to say about raw milk?
Consider the historical context. Raw milk and its products have been produced for human consumption for millennia. Of course there are dangers, and pasteurization has done wonders to curb bacteriological infections and death. Still, a lot of people wonder what we’ve lost in the pasteurization process. Nutrition and immune system health, for example. So for decades — perhaps as long as there have been regulations to make pasteurization mandatory — there’s been a “pro-natural” backlash.
On the Nature side, we note that our populations aren’t as healthy as you’d expect from the benevolent tyranny of politicians, regulators, and, uh, “obese bureaucrats.”
So, last week, “the latest bill to repeal an outright ban on raw milk hit the governor’s desk in Louisiana, after similar efforts in West Virginia, Iowa, Georgia and North Dakota.”
If signed into law, Louisianans will be able to purchase raw milk in stores — “albeit with a warning, in capital letters, that it is ‘not for human consumption.’
“Everyone, including the legislators, knows that instruction will be ignored.”
There’s something sickness-inducing about that.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, and sacrificing hecatombs upon her altars; whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies, and hurled defiance in their faces; whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite with us in establishing the empire of freedom; we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained. Such are the inconsistencies of human nature; such the blindness of those who pluck not the beam out of their own eyes, whilst they can espy a moat, in the eyes of their brother: such that partial system of morality which confines rights and injuries, to particular complexions; such the effect of that selflove which justifies, or condemns, not according to principle, but to the agent.
St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (1796).
John Cabot landed in North America at Newfoundland on June 24, 1497, leading the first European exploration of the region since the Vikings.
In 1535 on this date, the Anabaptist state of Münster was conquered and disbanded.
June 24 birthdays include Henry Ward Beecher, clergyman and reformer (1813); Ambrose Bierce [pictured], author of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and The Devil’s Dictionary — his dark, cynical wit earned him the epithet “Bitter Bierce” (1842); Richard Timberlake, American free-market economist (1922–2020).
The market for organ transplants faces extreme supply problems. One is not allowed to sell one’s own organs, and even if it were legal to do so, the ethical and legal problems are obvious, since most organs are not optional. We have two kidneys and two eyes, for example, and can do with just one each, but others we must have to live. Now most organs come from those who donate their organs for harvesting after death (at which point they are no longer needed). And this makes getting patients replacement organs quite tricky, since organs are not fungible.
But there is one source for ready organs: China. But there the supply problems have a workaround: the government and its clandestine businesses simply take them from prisoners, criminal and dissident and persecuted alike.
Related to this is Delaware’s House Concurrent Resolution No. 143, which seeks to “encourage the Delaware medical community to educate the citizens of Delaware about the forced organ harvesting that occurs in China, in the event they decide to travel to China for an expedited transplant.”
Among the resolution’s many Whereases are:
A report on this resolution appeared in The Epoch Times: “On June 20, the Delaware House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Chinese regime’s lucrative industry of forced organ harvesting. The resolution aims to raise awareness about the risks associated with traveling to China for expedited organ transplants.”
The subject of the Chinese organ harvesting horror has been covered by Paul Jacob previously, including in April.
When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”
Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin — “When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope” — would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?
That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.
Gary Saul Morson, “Suicide of the Liberals,” First Things (October 2020).
Today is Estonia’s Victory Day, which has been celebrated on June 23 every year since 1934. The date recalls the victory in the 1919 Battle of Vonnu of the Estonian military forces (and Latvian North brigade) and their allies over German forces (Baltische Landeswehr) who sought to re-assert Baltic-German control over the region. The battle was part of the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, where the main adversary of the newly independent Estonia was Communist Russia.
Today, Victory Day also marks the contributions of all Estonians in their fight to regain and retain their independence. Estonian celebration of June 23 is ceremonially tied to the following Midsummer Day celebrations on the 24th.
According to Estonian laws, the state flags are not to be lowered during the night between days.
“The blame is on the Chinese regime no matter how COVID-19 arose, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on June 18.” This is the lede from “‘China’s to Blame’ Regardless of How COVID-19 Came About, Senator Says,” by Eva Fu, June 19th in The Epoch Times.
At StoptheChinazis.org, the problem of actually determining the cause was identified: “it’s hard to come up with a ‘definitive’ conclusion regarding these matters when key players are heavily invested in the institutions that funded the Wuhan labs. A general consensus on the lab origin theory would imply guilt on many, many participants, including multi-millionaire government functionaries such as Antony Fauci.”
Nevertheless, taking a step back and coming to a conclusion on what needs to be done isn’t difficult.
Sen. Mitt Romney called for an end to funding gain of function research during a contentious Senate hearing Tuesday on the origins of COVID-19, saying no one will every know with certainty whether the virus responsible for millions of deaths was created in a Chinese lab or emerged from a market selling live animals.
“We know what action we ought to take to protect from either. So why there’s so much passion around it makes me think it’s more political than scientific but maybe I’m wrong,” the Utah Republican said during his questioning of the expert witnesses appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Lisa Riley Roche, “What Utah Sen. Mitt Romney says about the origins of COVID-19‚” Deseret News, June 19, 2024.
Romney’s liberal and forgiving “no matter how” statement is not universally shared. Professor Richard Enbright, of Rutgers University (also a laboratory director) insisted that “[o]nly after there is an acknowledgement that there is a very real possibility — not a remote possibility, but a very real possibility — of a lab origin will there be the political will to impose regulation on this scientific community that has successfully resisted and obstructed regulation for two decades.”
At the conference, Enright had earlier stated that there is “zero evidence” for a zoonotic origin of COVID-19.
Not the equality of men, but the equality of their claims to make the best of themselves within the limits mutually produced, has all along been my principle. . . .
Herbert Spencer, in a letter to W. H. Hudson, a former assistant, rejecting his consent to Hudson dedicating his book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau to him (January 7, 1903). The book went on to be published as Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought (1903), dedicated to Dr. Frederick James Furnivall. Spencer went on to say, in that letter, that the “equality” he had alleged in his first book, Social Statics (1851), “is not among men themselves, but among their claims to equally-limited spheres for the exercise of their faculties: an utterly different proposition. [T. H.] Huxley confused the two and spread the confusion, and I am anxious that it should not be further spread.”
The equality alleged [in Social Statics] is not among men themselves, but among their claims to equally-limited spheres for the exercise of their faculties: an utterly different proposition.
On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.
Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon (pictured above), a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discoverers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.
When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.
The ratio in sizes between Charon and Pluto make the pair, effectively, a “double dwarf planet.”