You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842). The same passage in D. J. Hogarth’s translation: “ As things are now, the world has grown stupid to a degree that passes belief.”
Categories
“Give Me Liberty”
On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
On this date in 1992, economist and social philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek died. He remains best known for his 1944 political tract The Road to Serfdom.
The most important lesson of “Fifteen days to flatten the curve!” occurred on the 16th, when governors kept lockdown measures going.
No state limited its lockdown measures to
The public rationale for the lockdowns had been to save hospitals from being swamped with COVID patients — though the Army Corps of Engineers had built emergency COVID care centers near pandemic hot spots around the country, which were unceremoniously dismantled, without having been used, even as governors continued their hysterics.
And tyrannies.
Out west in Washington, for example, Governor Inslee shut down the whole state with a March 24, 2020, order, and, on April 3, unilaterally extended it to May 4, despite the fact that most of the state had hardly experienced the virus yet. On May 29, the stay-at-home order was still in effect, with the governor dictating a county-by-county re-opening order that he fiddled with incoherently for the next year.
Across the country, most hospitals suffered
John Stossel just “celebrated” the four-year anniversary of the lockdowns with an article titled “‘15 Days To Slow the Spread’: On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again.” Mr. Stossel provides a concise litany of the idiocy of that brief, if far too long, epoch of . . . . what he calls
But does incompetence exhaust the fault?
At the beginning I had expressed caution, even suggesting a little lenience for our leaders. Then came the enormity of the mass liberticide.
It was President Trump who put out the “guidelines” for shutting down the country; it was Trump who stuck to his guns on the efficacy of the lockdown “mitigations.” Trump did so because he was mesmerized, perhaps, by Drs. Fauci and Birx — whom he had promoted into
Little did Trump know, however, that Fauci had funded the very disease he was allegedly fighting, and that Birx, privately, had pushed lockdowns not in good faith for reasons stated, but with every intention of pushing “longer and more aggressive interventions.”
Trump? Played, yes; incompetent, sure.
But Birx and Fauci? Malevolent. Evil. Pick the word.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
John Adams
“Go and see with how little wisdom this world is governed.”
John Adams, in a letter to John Quincy Adams (received June 3, 1794), advising of a diplomatic position opening up. See Phyllis Lee Levin, The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams (2015), first page.
On March 22, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. Exactly eight years later, the colony expelled Anne Hutchinson for her religious dissent.
In 1812 on this date, Stephen Pearl Andrews was born. Andrews would go on to become an important American abolitionist, free love advocate, and theorist of “individual sovereignty,” promulgating the reforms of Josiah Warren.
The attorneys general of a few states, a few activist groups, and a few congressmen have acted to bring to light a mass of eyewitness and documentary evidence that the federal government has been working hard, behind the scenes, to censor our speech.
The guilty parties have been caught red-handed.
Now that the matter is before the U.S. Supreme Court, reports on oral arguments suggest that not every justice is as acquainted with the point of the Bill of Rights as we’d like.
Its function is to stop government from doing various rights-violating things at will. But Justice Ketanji says: “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in most important
Justice Kagan, chiming in: “I’m really worried
Tyrants worry about having too little flexibility to stomp our speech “in most important time periods,” prevention of which stomping is the very purpose of the First Amendment.
We, for our part, worry about having our
Some of the justices also seem not to grasp that when government officials contact you and ask you to do this and that, no overt threats are necessary for officials to rely on the threat of governmental power.
The bossing is not always subtle, though. Perusing the evidence, Justice Alito says he couldn’t imagine officials “taking that approach to the print media.” The federal speech police treat “Facebook and these other platforms like they’re subordinates.”
Are they?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Edgard Varèse
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varèse, as quoted by Martha Graham, Dance Observer, Volumes 24-27 (1957), p. 5.
Categories
Selma March & Limited Terms
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.
The first section of the amendment reads as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Trying to find justice in the justice system is sometimes like panning for gold in a dry river. But what ho, hey, we’ve found some.
Victoria Taft points us to “a federal judge who believes in justice” . . . or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Recently, California District Court Judge Cormac Carney chastised a purportedly anti-crime department of the Department of Justice for prosecuting two men who “became members of a group characterized as ‘white supremacist’” for alleged violence while carefully ignoring the often worse conduct of Antifa and BAMN members.
Carney dismissed the federal charges against the two men.
He argued that “prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech. . . .
“At the same Trump rallies that form the basis for Defendants’ prosecution, members of Antifa and related far-left groups engaged in organized violence to stifle protected speech.”
There’s something wrong when people who had been holding a peaceful event full of speeches and flag-waving are prosecuted — not just prosecuted, but selectively prosecuted — for defending themselves when violent leftists show up and act violently.
If a speaker commits an actual crime, sure, he should be punished, in a proportionate way and without regard to the ideology of the speaker. Equal justice under the law, that’s all.
How about it, Justice Department? Care to earn your name?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Joseph Henrich
More individualistic countries are also richer, more innovative, and more economically productive.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020).