On December 13, 1623, Plymouth colonists established the system of trial by twelve jurors.
Meandering through social media, a popular meme with several variants runs something like this:
“Hey, this guy says the government believes in UFOs!
“See, nobody cares. Now show us the Epstein client list.”
The gist: the Jeffrey Epstein story is a bigger, more important story than the on 70-plus years of government control of the UFO story.
Well, we now know precisely why we cannot have either: a few specific politicians are blocking disclosure, one Democrat on the Epstein story and a handful of Republicans on the UFO story.
Hillary Vaughn of Fox News asked Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) why he — the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — won’t subpoena Epstein’s flight logs to and from his private Caribbean island wherein sex trafficking with under-age females and males went on. His response? “I don’t know anything about his flight logs” and “This has never been raised by anyone.”
This is untrue.
UFO/UAP transparency, on the other hand, has gone much further than the Epstein — probably because there are fewer politicians implicated in crimes. Yet two major disclosure elements in a recent defense bill have been nixed by Mike Turner (R-Oh.) and Mike Rogers (R-Ala.). Journalist Ross Coulthart, who has covered this story best, ascribes this pair’s opposition to disclosure to their respective military-industrial complex constituencies. And Coulthart adds that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also had a hand in disclosure suppression.
Both the Epstein and the UFO story reveal a lot about our government, which wants us to know the truth about neither.
And as for the notion that these issues must be played off each other, the proper memed response would be “Why can’t we have both?”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Destutt de Tracy
M. Destutt Tracy, Traité de la volonté, English translation titled A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan; W. A. Rind & Co. Printers, 1817).
Government is a very great consumer, living not on its profits but on its revenues.
On December 12, 1939, Finnish forces defeated those of the Soviet Union in the first major victory of what became known as the Winter War, in the Battle of Tolvajärvi.
December 12th birthdays include:
- Erasmus Darwin (1731) — English physician, slave trade abolitionist, inventor and poet
- John Jay (1745) — First Chief Justice of the United States
- William Lloyd Garrison (1805) — American abolitionist, editor of The Liberator
“You are witnessing the rise of an American demagogue,” said Van Jones.
He was not referring to himself.
The CNN talking head was reacting to something Vivek Ramaswamy said during the last Republican presidential candidates’ forum — another one lacking the main candidate, the overwhelming favorite Donald Trump.
Van Jones, who is African-American, called Vivek, who is Indian-American, “a very, very despicable person.”
At issue is something the Republican candidate discussed: “Great Replacement Theory,” which is the notion that politicians and other insiders are using a variety of means to discourage white people from having babies while encouraging brown people to have
The theory is plenty controversial, in no small part because a few racists have listed it as an excuse to “justify” mass shootings.
But also controversial? It looks like it is more than a theory, it is a plan.
Vivek pointed this out in a tweet. He produced a video from two years ago in which Van Jones himself outlined the “theory” as a strategy: “The request from the racial justice left: we want the white majority to go from being a majority to being a minority and like it. That’s a tough request, and change is hard.”
Yet Jones regards this “request” as something it would be demagogic — even racist — to refuse.
Jones’s leftism does not look like “racial justice” so much as a racial vendetta.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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G. K. Chesterton
Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, “The New Priests” (1901).
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Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918. Solzhenitsyn became a novelist, philosopher, historian, and dissident who helped bring down the totalitarian Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s novels include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and Cancer Ward (1966). His behemoth history of Soviet prison camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was a major event in the cultural eclipse of far left ideology in the West, when it was published in 1973.
Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008.
In the last few years, variants of an aphorism about Soviet life has been making the rounds on the Internet, misattributed to him.
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Murray Leinster
The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels.
Murray Leinster, “Exploration Team” (1956), as it appeared in Isaac Asimov, editor, The Hugo Winners, Vol. 1, p. 115.
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Huck, Passy & Dunant
On December 10, 1884, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published. This novel, narrated in the first person by the title character, is a dark comedy of the antebellum South and slavery, and has been considered by many American critics and writers to qualify as the “Great American Novel.”
On this date in 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded — to economist Frédéric Passy (pictured above), co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; and to Henry Dunant the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Passy was an admirer of Richard Cobden and an active member in the French Liberal School of Political Economy that developed in the tradition of J.B. Say, Destutt de Tracy, and Frédéric Bastiat. His published works include Leçons d’économie politique (1860-61); La Démocratie et l’Instruction (1864); L’Histoire du Travail (1873); Malthus et sa Doctrine (1868); and La Solidarité du Travail et du Capital (1875).
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Octavia E. Butler
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 10.