Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford, personal motto, quoted in Marshall Jon Fisher, “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000.
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.”
The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 “Year Zero,” the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money — only work and death.
John Pilger, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979).
On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.
Under the leadership of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the Wisconsin legislature struck a blow against DEI domination of the state’s university system.
The acronym means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Yet, the goal of DEI is to herd all participants in academic life into the same collectivist “antiracist,” anti-individualist straitjacket, no dissent permitted. What DEI really means, Vos says, is “division, exclusion, and indoctrination.”
The Vos-steered budget that passed in the last session eliminated $32 million from funding for the university system. It also hiked the pay of university employees and funded new campus buildings.
Using his line-item veto, the Democratic governor tried to thwart the move. But he couldn’t block the spending cut.
Then, after much negotiating, the university system agreed to freeze hiring of DEI officials, transfer DEI employees to other jobs, and implement race-blind, merit-based admissions policies.
Bullied by lefties, the board of rejects initially rejected the deal by a 9–8 vote. Vos wouldn’t budge. The board met again and accepted the deal.
As National Review’s editors put it, “when push came to shove, it wasn’t worth rejecting pay raises for all employees and putting building projects on hold for the sake of a handful of progressive ideologues.”
Until the whole house of cards collapses and there’s no longer any public funding of higher education, all states assailed by DEI should do the same kind of thing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.
My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.
On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.
On his podcast, Tom Woods asserted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be “a net-negative for the overall cause of human liberty” before asking Solis-Mullen: “So is your position that that’s a very unfortunate thing but there is absolutely no way the United States is going to defeat China over Taiwan, so what’s the point in trying?”
Solis-Mullen answered in the affirmative: “the U.S. would lose an attempt to block China from absorbing Taiwan.”
To illustrate, he noted that “it’s 80 miles off the coast of China,” and said “imagine someone trying to invade Cuba, for example, and the United States was determined not to let them. Of course, they couldn’t.”
An unfortunate formulation, since the U.S. is not threatening to invade Taiwan; China is!
Better to have said, imagine an eastern hemisphere power trying to protect Cuba from an invasion by the U.S. Since to this day you can find American politicians advocating a conquest of Cuba, the analogy is more nearly exact.
And perhaps for similar reasons as to why Cuba remains unconquered, Taiwan is actually defensible — especially with U.S. naval and air support.
While a recent CSIS war game showed massive death and destruction should China surprise Solis-Mullen by launching an amphibious assault, it in turn found China’s navy devastated and the attack repelled. Ian Easton’s look at The Chinese Invasion Threat also concluded that Taiwan can defeat a PLA invasion force.
Today, treaty obligations require the U.S. to come to the military defense of Japan and the Philippines, both under threat from China. The Taiwan Relations Act mandates that we provide Taiwan (which lies between them) with the wherewithal to defend itself and President Biden has repeatedly pledged direct U.S. military assistance should China launch the unprovoked attack the CCP regularly threatens.
Solis-Mullen advocates we abandon these obligations. He seems to recognize it means a complete U.S. withdrawal from Asia and Chinese Communist Party “domination,” but his notion that it “will not impact our prosperity at all” is naïve.
Sitting back to watch another evil empire gobble up free peoples would be, as Tom Woods put it, a huge blow “for the overall cause of human liberty.”
Seems like the wrong armchair position.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues. This may be because vice needs solidarity among those who yield to it in order to be tolerated at all, whereas virtue is its own reward, as the proverb says, and is happily very often its own protection — far more often than not, in our day.
Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 40.
On December 28, 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason, after being tried (and convicted) in absentia on December 26. Prior to moving to France, Paine had been an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense. Paine then moved to Paris to help along the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him. Paine had not earned friends in the Revolution with his vocal opposition to capital punishment.
“During the whole of my imprisonment,” Paine later wrote, “prior to the fall of Robespierre, there was no time when I could think my life worth twenty-four hours, and my mind was made up to meet its fate. The Americans in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim me, but without success.”
Paine’s imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America. Future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.
With the publication of Paine’s secular tract, The Age of Reason — a great part of which he wrote in French prison — the American population turned against him, and he died penniless in New York in 1809.
On this date in 1832, John C. Calhoun resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first to do so.