On January 3, 1848, Joseph Jenkins Roberts was sworn in as the first president of the African state of Liberia. Born as a free black in Norfolk, Virginia, he was an American merchant who emigrated to Liberia in 1829, where he became a politician. He served as the first (1848–1856) and seventh (1872–1876) president of Liberia.
In December, the city council passed legislation that had been hanging fire for several years, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), to further limit New Yorkers’ right to use and dispose of their own stuff.
COPA would give “give certain nonprofits . . . an early shot to bid on certain residential properties that go up for sale, before they hit the wider market.” The law pertains to buildings “with poor conditions or where an affordability provision is expiring.”
COPA’s advocates contend, as if this were a response to the objection about how the new law violates property rights, that it gives nonprofits an advantage in the housing market.
What happens if quite wealthy nonprofits with enough political pull make an offer that a property owner declines? Will the property owner have the right to say “I pass” and then make the property available for anybody to bid on?
If COPA is not dead on arrival, it will depress market prices as the city strongarms owners into making deals at lower-than-market prices. And I doubt that a Mamdani administration will simply playact at eroding and destroying property rights.
Mayor Mamdani took office yesterday, on January 1, 2026, dedicated to the idea of replacing “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” It doesn’t portend to be a very good year for New Yorkers opposed to the heat of the looters’ madness.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.
Economist Kenneth Boulding, as quoted in Liberal education (1955). Vol. 41, p. 430.
On January 2, 1921, in a theater in Hradec Králové, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. received its world premiere. The initials stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a fictional company that created a line of intelligent workers, and from which the word “robot” was coined.
In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs were once required to perform on their masters’ lands; it is derived from rab, meaning “slave.”
We made it.
Endured.
What must we bear in 2026?
Most of us, I think, would prefer “more of the same” to something entirely new. Especially if the “something new” can be interpreted as reaping all the consequences of bad choices all at once.
So what was 2025? Going by stats on this website, here’s what I’ve covered:
Grok did the analysis, and added another category, “Historical Reflections,” at 10% of content — but this likely reflects the “Today” feature on the website, highlighting the most important event(s) concerning human liberty occurring on each date.
I do like to think that I have a sense of history, which informs what I do here. In 2023, a meme spread around the Internet, where women asked the men they knew how often they thought about the Roman Empire. “The results will surprise you,” for men tend to think about the past generally, and the classical Romans in particular, a great deal indeed. The meme played out as a “gender” issue, with women finding men’s apparent fixation inexplicable.
Truth is, for me, I think a lot more about the Revolutionary War. I suppose it’s possible to identify people’s ideologies by which historical war they think about most. This last year and earlier — really since the 2019 protests in Hong Kong — I’ve developed this strong suspicion that we are already in a war and just don’t quite know it.
Wishing you the best in 2026. And girding for what comes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Signe de décadence: humanitaires, mièvre sensiblerie;
rend incapable défendre positions. Toute élite qui n’est
pas prête à livrer bataille pour défendre ses positions
est condamnée à disparaître, et il y a une élite
nouvelle qui monte et qui pousse l’ancienne.
Sign of decadence: humanitarians, mawkish sentimentality; makes one incapable of defending positions. Any elite that is not ready to do battle to defend its positions is condemned to disappear, and there is a new elite that rises and pushes out the old.
Vilfredo Pareto, Les systèmes socialistes (1902-1903), Vol. I, p. 37-38, David M. Hart, translator.
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
This was not a ban on the slave trade as such, of course, but of the buying of slaves from sources overseas.
Take “Learing.” If you haven’t seen Nick Shirley’s YouTube video blowing the lid off what has quickly become the biggest fraud story of our time, you may not get the joke.
Some 30 days ago, my “Red-Flagged Welfare Fraud” decried “the more than $1 billion in fraud” conducted mostly by Somalis in Minnesota, taking taxpayer money and siphoning it off for personal and perhaps even terrorist benefit. Two weeks later, a weekend update — “Walz Waltzes, Spins” — discussed the Governor of Minnesota’s lame attempts to seem “in charge.”
Now, the fraud total is estimated to be over nine billion!
A new element of the story is young Mr. Shirley’s reporting. He went to “day care centers” all over Minneapolis, confronting “workers” and noticing there were no children actually being fed or taught. These were sham programs.
In a partly funny moment, he appeared in front of one alleged day care that had misspelled its own name on the building’s sign: “Quality Learing Center.”
A whole lot of folks on X — but not on BlueSky — thought this was funny-haha.
The rest of us shake our heads. It may not even be funny-peculiar, as inquiries into more states have begun, with Washington and Ohio receiving the most attention so far.
We’ll need more Nick Shirleys to cover it all, for the mainstream press has shown . . . some reluctance to put in much elbow grease.
Meanwhile, there is a silver lining, expressed last night on Hannity by Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project: “It actually kind of makes me relieved that there were no children in these obviously corrupt and probably dangerous daycare facilities.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something . . . in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem . . . seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned.
Kenneth Arnold, 30 years after first seeing nine mysterious flying objects over Mount Rainier, while attending the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, curated by Fate to mark the 30th anniversary of the “birth” of the modern UFO age, “Pilot Kenneth Arnold 1977 still angry about disbelief,” on YouTube.
On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”