On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared.
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A Republic
The American political tradition is not communist. It is anti-totalitarian. So we don’t expect our political leaders to cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
One would never want the mayor of Podunk, let alone New York City, to attend a flag-raising ceremony to celebrate the 74th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.
But that’s just what New York City Mayor Eric Adams did on October 1.
Now, Adams didn’t tell the Chinese Communist Party officials and others attending what a fan he is of the Chinese government’s wide-scale and unrelenting repression and murder, but his very presence implied acceptance of the Chinazi regime: Hey, you made it. Seventy-four years! Good for you guys.
A CCP-PRC ceremony conducted to commemorate the CCP founding of the PRC is not about being nice to Chinese people or celebrating a vague diversity. If you go there in an official capacity to glad hand Chinazi officials and wave the U.S. flag along with the Chinese flag, you are sanctioning the Chinazi regime. You’re telling everybody — everybody too busy to read news or history or investigative reports — that these rulers aren’t so bad.
“That flag is a flag of repression,” says Chinese dissident Zhou Fengsuo. “It’s the CCP flag of China. The day when they killed many of my compatriots on Tiananmen Square . . . that’s the flag they raised there to show their victory over peaceful people.”
Adams has provided another propaganda coup for the CCP, which enjoys racking them up.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Adams
Metaphysicians and politicians may dispute forever, but they will never find any other moral principle or foundation of rule or obedience, than the consent of governors and governed.
John Adams, Novanglus; Or, A History Of The Dispute With America From Its Origin, In 1754, To The Present Time (Spring 1772).
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SpaceShipOne
On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.
It’s a mild form of terrorism . . . perpetrated by a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol, apparently to postpone a vote on a measure that would have kept the federal government operational, as it lurches into another of its periodic debt ceiling crises.
He denies the accusation . . . even as Breitbart News reports that he “ripped down two signs warning a second floor door in the Cannon House Office Building was for emergency use only before pulling the fire alarm and running out through a different door on a different floor.” It’s all “on tape,” requiring no advanced dialectic to determine the truth.
I hazard that no one believes Bowman’s denial, not even his many defenders — for no one is really that stupid, not even in the Imperial City.
The go-to interpretive of the non-left commentariat is to compare it to the January 6 protests and riots.
When those 2020 entrants into the Capitol disrupted the Senate’s ratification of the Electoral College results, they were accused of affronts to democracy, the peaceful handoff of power, and of obstructing the normal operations of government. Rep. Bowman, by misusing a fire alarm, was doing pretty much the same thing. But he is on the side of Big Government and the Democratic insider elite, so he’s probably not in as much jeopardy as those “losers” who found themselves stuck in prison.
But I notice another parallel: the juvenile stunt of pulling the fire alarm is a classic tactic of leftist protesters. Leftwing saboteurs of free speech have pulled many a similar alarm, if usually only to scuttle campus speaking events by the likes of Ben Shapiro, Cathy Young, et al. The saboteurs almost always get away with it.
Bowman probably thought he would, too.
It’s tradition!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Algernon Sidney
Liars ought to have good memories.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1689).
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Buchanan & Vidal
On October 3, 1919, James M. Buchanan was born. Buchanan would develop the theory of “Public Choice,” and receiving the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work. His books include Cost and Choice, The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock), and The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Some of his most interesting research was into the realm of constitutional theory and practice.
He died January 9, 2013.
In 1925, on this date, Gore Vidal was born. Vidal would go on to become one of the leading post-WWII liberal essayists as well as a major novelist and screenwriter. His most famous novels include Burr, 1876, and Lincoln, installments in his American history series; his collection of essays, The United States, was one of his many bestsellers. Vidal was an elitist who expressed sympathy for populism and socialism, but also was a radical civil libertarian, and may occupy the extreme of the “liberal” quadrant in American political ideology: great on personal liberties but quite bad on market/property liberties.
He died on July 31, 2012.
“Metro is dangling from a fiscal cliff,” hollers last Saturday’s Washington Post editorial headline. The “transit system faces a ‘death spiral’ starting next summer,” according to “the usually stolid pages of Metro’s financial projections.”
The Post informs that Metro’s “systemic budget problems have been compounded by pandemic-driven revenue shortfalls, inflation and the upcoming expiration of a federal bailout for transit systems.”
Oh, what a cruel turn of events, Washington’s ill-mannered and unsafe transit system needs a bailout from local politicians . . . because the current financial bailout it receives from federal taxpayers is about to fizzle out.
Life is tough.
Metro has only about 70 percent of the funding it needs, so get ready for blood-curdling cries of “drastic service cuts”— until or “unless the region’s elected officials, along with Congress, devise a fix,” The Post tells us.
Hell of a way to run a railroad — not earning a profit. Constantly failing customers and just as regularly begging for more money from politicians who get that moolah from folks like me . . . who rarely if ever use the mass transit we are told is so essential to us.
There’s a better way.
“Rail company Brightline began operating trains Friday from Miami to Orlando,” reports The Post, “using the fastest American trains outside the Northeast Corridor to become the first privately owned passenger operator to connect two major U.S. metropolitan areas in decades.
“The debut of the 235-mile, 3.5-hour ride completes a $6 billion private investment in Florida.”
With speeds “quicker than Amtrak’s” and fares “comparable to Amtrak’s and competitive with airfare,” Brightline chief executive Michael Reininger talks of “the beginning of a new industry and a blueprint for expanding rail in America.”
Two approaches. One uses my tax dollars and fails. The other uses private investment.
And seems to be expanding.
Rather than complaining. And begging.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Glenn Greenwald
So crucial is the online censorship regime to Western power centers that one thing is certain — any individual or company that even thinks about defying it will be severely attacked and punished, often with weapons we have long been taught to regard as despotic when used by our nation’s enemies.
Glenn Greenwald, System Update, September 25, 2023.
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Stroke of Luck
On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.
On the same date in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion — making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, archly referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”
His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.
The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and a “stroke of luck.”