Paul starts with Vivek, and moves beyond to the real snakes.
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Watch: Such a [Big] Difference
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Anthony Burgess
What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
The chaplain in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Part Two, Chapter 3.
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Dixy Lee Ray
On September 3, 1914, Dixy Lee Ray was born.
Her stint as governor of the State of Washington was a controversial one, as she economized in startling ways, and proved largely unsympathetic to environmentalist politics. Indeed, she later wrote Trashing the Planet, which took on trendy “solutions” to environmental problems, based in no small part on her own experience and perspective as a scientist. She was an early critic of the developing “global warming” pseudo-“consensus.”
O, the difference a bit of . . . money . . . honesty . . . clarity . . . makes!
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Jean de La Bruyère
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
Jean de La Bruyère, as quoted in Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century-XX Century, with English Translations (1913), pp. 132-133, by James Raymond Solly. Not sourced beyond that, however.
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Henry George
September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George.
George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).
James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle didn’t know that they risked destruction by publishing and selling previously out-of-print books.
Their low-overhead, low-profit-margin Richmond company, Valancourt Books, founded in 2005, prints long unavailable volumes one at a time, as customers request them. To operate, the publishers must first carefully retype the books, often formerly available only in rare editions or even microfiches.
It’s two guys working out of their home doing everything. They profit only by keeping costs low.
By 2018, the Valancourt catalog listed over 400 books. That’s when the federal government came down upon the company like a ton of bricks. Invoking a 1790 copyright law, the U.S. Copyright Office demanded that Valancourt send it one copy each of hundreds of different books. Otherwise, they’d be fined up to $250 per book and further fines for “willfully or repeatedly” failing to comply.
The publishers’ choice was either spend thousands of dollars and lots of time printing and shipping the books — or be penalized out of existence. Instead of giving up, they turned to the Institute for Justice and went to court.
IJ argued that government “cannot simply force you to turn over personal property on pain of ruinous fines, and they cannot punish you for publishing a book without letting them know.”
Now, years later, IJ and Valancourt have won their case.
It’s a win for all small publishers who might otherwise have been ruined by the whims of bureaucrats at the Copyright Office. That it had to be litigated, however, is more evidence that freedom requires constant vigilance.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Chuang Tzu
The wise man looks into space and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big, for he knows that, there is no limit to dimensions.
Master Zhuang, from 莊子/秋水.
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Constitution Day
Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
The Gadsden Flag: “Don’t Tread on Me” — it is many an American’s favorite flag, for it expresses a sentiment, the most American of political sentiments: resistance to tyranny.
Other flags, including the Stars and Stripes, are symbolic without being explicit.
What American could be against it? To oppose the Gadsden Flag is to oppose liberty!
But, these days, there are a lot of people who try to impugn the flag and the concept as being, I kid you not, “white supremacist” and “pro-slavery.”
It’s absurd, of course. Slaves were tread upon. Those who demand not to be tread upon object to their own slavery. And, by extension, others’.
Tell that to the woke mob.
And to public school administrators.
On Monday, a likely lad named Jaiden was removed from his class at Vanguard Elementary in Colorado Springs. He triggered his teacher with a patch on his backpack featuring the Gadsden. When his mother confronted the charter school’s administrator, recording the chat, the administrator defended the action on the usual woke grounds: its alleged “origins with slavery.”
Oddly, not even the school rules gave grounds to remove him for it — even if it were “about slavery.” (To repeat: it’s about slavery’s opposite.)
I smell the stink of partisanship. Many teachers and administrators so object to some people who like the flag that they distort facts to enforce ideological conformity on students.
The story has a happy ending, though. Jaiden was exonerated, walking into school with the patch still visible.
To make the story better, however, the teachers and administrators who thought they could tread upon Jaiden should be severely reprimanded, if not fired outright. For violating his rights.
And for not knowing history.
Flunk ’em!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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