Paul begins with Jon Stewart’s recent problems with Apple and China, and with, then, THE PROBLEM WITH JON STEWART! And he concludes with a discussion of Israel and Palestine.
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Warren Harding
In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, in his address to the 1916 Republican convention.
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Harding Spoke Out
On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.
Major candidates for the presidency are usually granted security details. The Biden Administration has so far balked at providing anything like that for Democrat-turned-independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Why?
In an October 16th letter, Senator Ted Cruz (R.-Tex.) challenged Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for 88 days of “failing to respond” to the candidate’s formal request, as well as for ignoring “follow-ups by his campaign.”
The senator writes that this “represents a stark departure from the standard fourteen-day turnaround for this type of request.”
Cruz also cites an apparent attempt on Kennedy’s life, a man dressed up as a U.S. Marshal caught at one of his Los Angeles campaign events.
“On Sept. 29, two weeks after the Los Angeles incident,” explains The Epoch Times, “government accountability organization Judicial Watch received 11 pages of Secret Service records that detailed its denial of Mr. Kennedy’s protection request.” The Secret Service acknowledges “that Mr. Kennedy received several threats from ‘known subjects’ and that he is at a higher ‘risk for adverse attention.’”
The report was no doubt placed in the “No Duh” file.
The history of the Kennedys being what it is, one is almost tempted to hazard a guess as to why The Biden has so little interest in protecting the political competition.
Hasn’t it crossed every American’s mind that this son and nephew of two assassinated political figures might be targeted . . . maybe by the same group of assassins? Which many have wondered might have hailed from within the government.
Wait — is The Biden trying to say . . . no protection necessary . . . don’t worry . . . they have no such plans?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Yves Guyot
All laws having for their object the protection of working men, the substitution of authoritative arrangements for private contracts, the prohibition of some, the sanctioning of others, are born of the spirit of privilege.
Yves Guyot, “Nature of ‘Labour Laws,’” The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), p. 152.
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American boundaries
On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.
Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length.
Tonight, the undefeated Dukes of James Madison University will travel to play the Thundering Herd of Marshall University in a Sun Belt Conference college football game. My youngest graduated from JMU, so I feel heavily invested in the team.
Duuuuukes!
One might think this sport and spectacle a welcome relief from politics — and surely it is — but not entirely. Because, of course, these great college football programs are attached to public universities financed by us, by our tax dollars.
The problem? As The Athletic put it recently: “For the second consecutive year, James Madison looks like one of the best teams in the Group of 5. And for the second consecutive year, the Dukes are ineligible for the postseason.”
The Group of 5 are the five best football-playing conferences after the best five conferences known as the Power-5. That’s pretty impressive — especially considering this is only the second year since James Madison made the jump from the second division into the first division of football-playing schools of higher yearning and earning.
JMU is in the big leagues; it can now play for the national championship. Well, not now. Again, this year, like last year, JMU’s football team is banned from playing in a bowl game or being declared the champion of the conference . . . even though last year they did win the conference . . . except for the rule that says they cannot win the conference.
This year, the Dukes are 6-0 and could perhaps go undefeated. What if College Football’s Magic Computers pick them as among the best? They would still be denied a chance to compete.
Why? Well, those are the rules the colleges and conferences have agreed on. The rationales don’t hold much water. It seems like a hazing ritual holdover to me.
But, of course, the universities can do whatever they want.
And suffering the harsh two-year punishment is not so terrible for the coach who will possibly have a decade-long career, or the university that will play on in perpetuity.
All the unfairness is placed on the shoulders of the student athletes. Denied the conference honors and the post-season play they deserve, these unpaid players who’ve earned millions for their schools have at least learned a lesson. When it comes to sports and money, the kids come last.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Lysander Spooner
The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: ‘To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.’
Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882).
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Cornwallis Surrenders
On October 19, 1781, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’s sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, at Yorktown, Virginia. The Revolutionary War (or War for Independence, or Colonial Rebellion, or whatever you wish to call it) was over.
In 1918 on this date, conservative writer Russell Kirk was born.
The latest plan from one of the world’s most annoying billionaires is to cut down trees and bury them.
It’s part of the “thinning” controversy.
The subject? Forest management.
In the old days, human beings cleared forests or kept forests and harvested from them (for firewood, fungi, and fauna) on an ongoing basis. And, periodically, nature would swing around and forests would burn — a story as old as the hills, forest fires being part of the natural cycle.
But when humans use forests for all sorts of things, but most especially harvesting building material (lumber), we have to take some control of the natural cycles. Forest thinning — cutting and removing some trees and leaving the rest — is a key silvicultural practice.
Some environmentalists have objected to this practice on the grounds that Nature Is Good and Sacred, with silviculturalists generally arguing that without thinning, forests become tinder-boxes, ripe for runaway fires in which forests are destroyed, value is lost, and people die.
A recent article in The Epoch Times covers some of this. I am not qualified to adjudicate the ecological disagreements. But Bill Gates pushing the thinning of forests not as a means of harvesting lumber or as a means of reducing forest fires, but as a way of sequestering carbon, seems loopy: “Through his foundation Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mr. Gates is a part of the $6.6 million seed investor pool backing Kodama Systems in its proposal to remove trees in California’s fire-challenged woodlands and bury them in Nevada to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2).”
I would prefer sequestering that carbon in housing, which we need more of, not less.
But Gates has his eyes on atmospheric CO2 levels, not helping the poor in America.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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