We boil at different degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (1870).
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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James Fenimore Cooper
It is probable a true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823), preface.
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Missing Money
On September 10, 1608, John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.
On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic (1878).
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Leo Tolstoy
On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories such as “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tolstoy died in 1910.
“Around the country, a slew of doctors had board certifications removed and licensure threatened for sharing their COVID-related opinions,” explains The Epoch Times, in an article devoted to one of those persecuted, Dr. John Littell of Florida.
Early in the pandemic, “Dr. Littell, a longtime family physician in Ocala and a medical school professor, began posting videos sharing his thoughts about COVID-19 testing, treatments, and vaccines early in the pandemic,” Natasha Holt’s Epoch Times article narrates. “He was frustrated to find his content often was pulled down from his YouTube channel.”
But the establishment’s efforts didn’t stop there. “[I]n January 2022 and again five months later, he received warning letters from the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), the organization that issued his certification for his medical specialty.”
His videos on YouTube and then the safe, free-speech haven Rumble, spread “medical misinformation,” the board charged, warning that he could lose certification. But these were warnings. The board got a bit more serious and physical when they removed Littell from a public meeting, giving him the bum’s rush.
And then the board de-certified him.
It’s a long story, but appears to have a happy ending, with Littell re-certified and organizing a support group for medical professionals’ free speech rights, and the basic need to practice independent, patient-centered medicine, and to disagree with the gimcrack “consensus” policies that establishment organizations impose.
While there are multiple medical certification boards in America, these are not free-market concerns competing for customers. The government is heavily involved at every level. And the policies and “science” that Dr. Littell and others ran up against were not only political, but wrong — medically and morally.
As we are increasingly discovering.
Which makes medical freedom more important than ever.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Sir Samuel Garth
Ingratitude’s a weed in every clime,
Sir Samuel Garth, Epistle to the Earl of Godolphin, L.27.
It thrives too fast at first, but fades in time.
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Statute of Kalisz
On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.
On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.
How specific do requests for records of unconstitutional activity have to be?
In February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pretended an inability to fulfill America First Legal Foundation’s freedom-of-information request for documents about the FBI’s pre-election efforts to censor Twitter users. The agency declared the request to be “overly broad.”
What’s been “overly broad” is the policy of censorship, disinformation, and more by the Deep State using private partners. Meaning their real problem is doubtless that the requested documents are “overly incriminating,” too unmistakably what AFL wanted.
So the FBI stonewalled.
And AFL has sued, in its complaint concluding that the agency’s “blanket denial of AFL’s FOIA request is contrary to law and should not stand.”
Thanks to evidence brought to light by other litigation and by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Twitter’s internal records, none of us is just guessing that the FBI has acted to censor constitutionally protected discourse. We know that the FBI’s National Election Command Post flagged at least 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation.”
But the only party to the censorship revealing relevant information voluntarily is Twitter itself, thanks to decisions by Twitter’s new management under Elon Musk.
With respect to everybody else colluding to censor social media — the FBI, the DOJ, the White House, Google, Facebook, etc. — looks like it’ll have to be lawsuits every step of the way.
The First Amendment’s stricture upon Congress to “make no law” abridging our “freedom of speech, or of the press,” does not allow the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies to simply subcontract. Nor are they free to mold public opinion.
A government-controlled “press” is not a free press.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Marcus Aurelius
“A cucumber is bitter.” Throw it away. “There are briars in the road.” Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (c. 180 A.D.).