[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chap.IX: “The Primitive and the Technical.”
On May 7, 1992, the State of Michigan ratified a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby fulfilling the terms of amending the document, adding it as 27th Amendment.
The amendment had been written by James Madison. He had presented it as part of the original twelve amendments that became the ten making up the Bill of Rights.
It bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a pay raise until after the next election, so that voters have a chance to decide whether those voting for the raise would remain in Congress to receive it.
True enough, but, Mr. Boehm goes on, “pointing at the charts and regurgitating economic figures doesn’t seem to be as convincing as the president might hope.”
You’ve seen the left-of-center memes mocking Americans for thinking the economy is bad when it is, instead, g-gr-great!
But prices for food and gasoline, after the big bulge caused by all those COVID checks and subsidies, did not go back down to previous levels. And rising wages after the “Great Suppression” of the lockdowns seem at best a verypartial return to better times.
Boehm offers some context. “It makes sense that the recent run of inflation would leave a psychological scar. After all, the peak inflation rate of 9.1 percent in June 2022 was not only the highest annualized rate seen in more than four decades, it was also more than twice as high as the average inflation rate in any year since 1991. . . .” And inflation has not stopped. “In March, the annual inflation rate was 3.5 percent. Yes, that’s 60 percent lower than the peak rate in June 2022, but that’s still higher than the average annual rate in every single year between 1991 and 2021, except for 2008.”
And then there’s the higher interest rates, which, Boehm plausibly asserts, compounds our perceptions that “inflation is a major problem.”
This is a huge issue for Biden. Boehm cites the political lore: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” and notes that, “unfortunately for Biden, his task in the run-up to November’s presidential election is explaining to people that they shouldn’t feel like inflation is still a problem.”
Who you gonna believe: Your cash register receipts or a feeble, corrupt, multi-millionaire lifelong politician?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Chapter 4.
It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
On May 6, 1862, American author, philosopher and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau died, after many years of tuberculosis.
Aware he was dying, Thoreau’s last words were “Now comes good sailing,” followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian.” Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau’s works, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral.
His remains, as well as those of members of his immediate family, were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.
His most famous works are An Essay on Civil Disobedience (1849) and Walden (1854).
As Covid becomes normalized as a disease . . .
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), Part V.
In 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza stopped a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico — an event leading to the popular “Cinco de Mayo” celebration.
No cause for celebration, however, is the anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth on May 5, 1818.
“The Chinese government has repeatedly denied any mismanagement in response to the accusations of illegal and unregulated fishing,” explains an article on DW News. Indeed, a “2023 government white paper on the development of distant-water fisheries said China holds a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude towards illegal fishing. . . .”
But can we believe China? The China run by the Chinese Communist Party?
The article is titled “Chinese fishing fleets in Indian Ocean accused of abuses” and is written by Yuchen Li and Chia-Chun Yeh, both from Taipei. The accusations are familiar — and not just for readers of this website, or of StoptheChinazis.org. Accusations against Chinese poaching are decades old.
“As a leading fishing nation, China’s distant water fishing (DWF) industry is the world’s largest in both catch volume and fleet size. And according to the Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing Index, China ranks as the worst offender among 152 countries worldwide,” explain Li and Yeh. They quote a senior researcher from the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), who says “This isn’t a handful of bad actors or captains. What we’re seeing is a fleet-wide issue on the Chinese distant-water fleet.”
One of the more gruesome practices is the harvesting of shark fins: the fins are cut off and the rest of the shark carcasses are disposed of immediately, back into the ocean. And this is not just the South China Sea or the Pacific Ocean. This includes the Indian Ocean, says a new report from the EJF.
The report charges that China’s poaching is “systematic.”
A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason.