Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law.
Calvin Coolidge, speech to the Massachusetts State Senate (January 7, 1914).
On February 22, 1632, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, received the first printed copy of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo). The Grand Duke was the dedicatee.
Galileo’s Dialogo is a witty and entertaining defense of the Copernican system, where the Sun is at the center of “the universe.” This was opposed to the traditional view — held by Aristotle and Ptolemy — of an Earth-centered system, as represented by an armillary sphere.
Only two systems appear in the Dialogo; Galileo pitting what we now call the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican, nowhere mentioning the Tychonic system then favored by most astronomers, one in which the Sun and Moon and stars revolve around Earth, but the planets revolve around the Sun.
Once published, Pope Urban VIII gave orders for the Dialogo to be recalled and summoned Galileo to Rome for trial.
On Brian Tyler Cohen’s “No Lie” podcast, released around February 14, 2026, in a Q&A segment towards the end, Barack Obama fielded a question about “aliens.” Are they real?
They’re real, but I haven’t seen them. And they’re not being kept in . . . what is it? Area 51.
While Area 51 has become the default punchline in media (thanks to movies, memes, and the 2019 “Storm Area 51” viral event), serious UFO researchers and whistleblower claims (from Bob Lazar’s talks with Nevada newsman George Knapp to David Grusch’s 2023 congressional testimony) almost always point elsewhere for alleged crash retrievals and “biologics.”
Main target?
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — specifically the “Hangar 18” myth, popularized in the 1970s by figures like Robert Spencer Carr. The site is also tied to Roswell debris allegedly being shipped there post-1947, with reverse-engineering and body storage rumors persisting in books and eyewitness accounts. Other locations pop up variably (Dugway, Los Alamos, etc.), but Wright-Pat edges out Area 51 in many traditional narratives for the “bodies” angle.
And, according to lore, comedian Jackie Gleason (a known UFO enthusiast) reportedly told his then-wife Beverly McKittrick that President Richard Nixon, a golfing buddy, drove him late one night in February 1973 to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. There, Gleason allegedly viewed embalmed alien bodies (small, about two feet long, with big heads/ears) in a secure building — possibly recovered from a crash or retrieval. The tale surfaced publicly via Beverly after their divorce. It’s often retold. And it adds a Florida candidate for an inventory of “dead aliens,” not the infamous Nevada site.
This all sounds far-fetched, and Obama tried immediately to throw water on the flame:
There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.
Of course, the military has scads of underground facilities, so the “enormous conspiracy” caveat seems almost designed to fan the flames, not quench them. How many more votes just switched to Enormous Conspiracy?
Later, Obama tried to walk it further back:
He followed up with statistical reasoning about the vast universe making life probable, emphasizing no evidence of contact or hidden bodies during his presidency (and later clarified on social media that he saw “no evidence” of extraterrestrials making contact).
But the story did not stop with the former president.
Fox White House Correspondent Peter Doocy: Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to Earth?
President Donald J. Trump: Well, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that, you know.
Doocy: So, aliens are real.
Trump: Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made — He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don’t — I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. Do you believe it, Peter?
Doocy: Well, the president can declassify anything that he wants to. So . . .
Trump: . . . I may get him out of trouble by declassify[ing].
Q&A at the steps of Air Force One, February 19, 2026.
What an odd way to respond.
But the oddities aren’t decreasing:
What will Trump do, though — and what is he up against?
The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. . . . If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
Malcolm X, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (December 13, 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93.
On Feb. 21, 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.
On Feb. 21, 1916, the Battle of Verdun began with German bombardment of the city of Verdun, France. For ten months, the longest single engagement of the First World War, German forces attacked the French along a 20-kilometer front crossing the Meuse River. When the battle ended, with no change in the strategic position of either army, the combined death toll was over 300,000 (out of over 700,000 casualties).
On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York City.
He’s not wrong, the disaster began January 19th but we’ve heard little about it. On his podcast, No. 1736; Mr. Walsh goes all into a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” explanation.
According to The Daily Wire’s most socially conservative host, the responsible agencies are filled with hires based not on qualifications or competence or conscientiousness, but based on their color.
He highlights, specifically, two individuals in the current muck: one, DC Water CEO David L. Gadis, partly responsible for the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and the other, the current head of DC Water Board of Directors, Dr. Unique N. Morris-Hughes, a doctor in philosophy. Walsh regales us with her inanities and her over-spending on departmental entertainment junkets.
While there may be a detectable odor to Walsh’s relentless critique of hiring blacks, specifically, under DEI, the odor from the Potomac, right now, is much less metaphorical.
In between retches, ask the question: Why would there be a general incompetence rising in public utilities now?
Is it race as such? Of course not.
Is it DEI putting race over competence? Maybe in part.
But the general trend for a long time has been to put more and more domains of everyday life under direct government control. There’s a principle lost on the Mamdanis of this world: the more tasks set for government to govern, the less capable it becomes to manage even its core tasks. And, as that capacity declines, so goes even the will to bother trying.
Besides, if there is any apter metaphor for Washington, DC, than hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage sloshing into the Potomac . . . I can’t think of it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results in systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs — if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.
Charles W. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs,” in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 1, No. 2; Reprinted 1971.
On February 20, 1991, in the Albanian capital Tirana, a gigantic statue of Albania’s long-time leader, Enver Hoxha, was brought down by mobs of angry protesters.
The boss of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Work Protection is Sam Levine, who during his tenure at the Federal Trade Commission was a follower of anti-business FTC chair Lina Khan.
The “Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice,” one Julie Su, was Acting Secretary of Labor under Biden. She has warned delivery apps — the apps that make it easier for gig workers to get jobs and get paid — that they had better “comply with worker protections.”
Su is suing delivery service Motoclick for “ignoring the minimum pay rate.” Also at issue are other sins that amount to contracting with independent contractors who, of course, use Motoclick’s app voluntarily and can stop whenever they find the terms not in their interest. She wants (a) millions in damages for the workers and (b) “to shut the company down completely.”
The Mamdani administration has also “settled with” such gig enablers as UberEats, Fantuan, and Hungry Panda for millions of dollars for not treating independent contractors as hourly workers.
Reason points out that Mamdani’s war on freelancers will be costly not only for gig workers and the companies that help them function but also for customers. “Just recently Instacart instituted a $5.99 regulatory response fee due to a recent extension of NYC’s minimum wage law to grocery deliverers.”
Who will be next to be pummeled by commie Mamdani?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?
George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (1996); character Tyrion Lannister to Lord Varys, Master of Whisperers.