On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
Give yourself extra points if you can make heads or tails of the title:
Americans pass a law against liquor and go right on drinking; they frown, publicly and openly upon the relationship of mistress and lover, and go right on having such relationships under cover. They draw up huge categories of business ethics, and American business is rotten to the core. It’s America’s fetich: this, ‘Save the Surface and You Save All,’ theory.
The character Nausicaa Bradford in Jack Woodford’s novel Unmoral, 1934.
On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.
The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
We got used to the term in the early days of woke political correctness, but maybe the most egregious snowflakes are the elites in government and Big Pharma.
They melt when anything is said challenging their narratives about disease and cures and public health measures.
An article on online censorship in The Epoch Times, by Naveen Athrappully, discussed recent revelations that Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) calls “the Facebook Files” — all about COVID-19, and the official Government Narrative surrounding it.
In July 2021, “President Biden accused Facebook of ‘killing people’ by not censoring COVID-19 content that the administration perceived to be ‘misinformation,” Mr. Athrapully explains. “The White House wanted Facebook to remove humorous or satirical content that it thought suggested the COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t safe. The Biden administration even wanted to remove honest information about the vaccines.” [Emphasis added.]
I mean, wouldn’t you add the emphasis? Forbidding even honest and true information that might give an inconvenient take surely goes too far. Facebook’s communications documents say that the Surgeon General wanted the social media giant “to remove true information about the side effects if the user does not provide complete information about whether the side effect is rare and treatable.” Astounding!
This level of touchiness, this obsession for control, shows a remarkably fragile bearing on the part of bureaucrats. The winds of doctrine and the gales of opinion? Mustn’t let that whirl around!
It’s the fainting couch set who most desire to control speech.
These government officials should be fired on principle.
Every. Last. Snowflake.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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War, the last argument of kings and people, war, in which they put forth their strength with pride, is not, however, the greatest exhibition of human power. A field of battle may excite terror or a feverish enthusiasm, pity or horror; but human strength applied to create is more imposing, than human strength employed in slaughter and destruction.
Michel Chevalier, Society, manners and politics in the United States; being a series of letters on North America (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company, 1839), p. 133-134.
On August 4, 2010, in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage that had passed two years earlier by the state’s voters.
“I’m not saying now’s the time to double down” on fossil fuels, pleads Lanny Nickel, chief operating officer of Southwest Power Pool, which helps provide electricity to 14 states. “I’m just saying now’s the time to slow down on the removal of [those] assets from our footprint.”
The assets Nickel means are oil, gas, coal.
Like others in the business of keeping the lights on, Nickel knows that if and when the percentage of fossil fuels in the utility industry “footprint” is coercively reduced to point oh one percent or whatever, wind and sunshine will not be taking up the slack.
We’ll suffer, instead, from lots more brownouts and blackouts.
Nickel understands this.
But begging regulators and politicians to go slower won’t discourage them. They’ll just gloat about how they’re making the utility executives sweat.
We should in fact be doubling down on fossil fuels, because these are the only always-reliable sources of electricity.
Should solar and other sources of electricity become cheaper and more reliable, people won’t have to be compelled to increasingly turn to them. The transition would happen naturally, in the normal course of progress.
And the notion that government will be able to fine-tune global weather if only we are forcibly deprived of our means of coping with the ups and downs of the weather is a willful delusion.
Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly, sure. But more importantly, the government should not be destroying them — and us — in the name of the religion of Climate Change at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Christian Davies (1741).
Seeking a westward route to the Indies, Christopher Columbus on this day in 1492 set sail on his first transatlantic voyage, departing from Palos, Spain, with three small ships — the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María.
On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 90.
Solzhenitsyn’s novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, explored life under totalitarian Communism, and remain classics of modern literature. His huge survey of Soviet concentration camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was an important contribution to the demise of Communism as a popular ideology, showing just how horrifying the repression in the Soviet Union had become.