1794: The United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain signed Jay’s Treaty, which attempts to resolve some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.
1808: The Convention of Olkijoki in Raahe ended hostilities in Finland.
1863: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Man is a universe in little.
Democritus (c. 460 BC — c. 370 BC), pre-Socratic philosopher. Image of the Andromeda galaxy, NASA.
Even the most profligate taxers and spenders sometimes talk about making our federal government “more efficient” or about “cutting waste.” Commissions are set up, reports issued, and then — we still see the same runaway trajectory.
This time, former President and President-Elect Donald Trump has announced that two heavy hitters, entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will be heading up a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to do the job. They’re already planning and hiring.
Trump says that DOGE is determined to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
The project of cutting wasteful expenditures is the same going-nowhere notion that we have seen before. If we get actual demolition of merely destructive agencies — which would require congressional cooperation, I believe — this would be great.
I can provide a list. But that would make me a part-timer in this endeavor, and “We don’t need more part-time idea generators,” DOGE says.
“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Let us see what happens. Trump would have to push this forcefully and continually, getting his supporters to forcefully and continually pressure Congress, to get enough done fast enough to actually reduce Leviathan. And he’ll have a lot of other stuff to cope with.
But … boy, do we need it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics.
November 18, 1493, Columbus caught first sight of the island now known as Puerto Rico.
The re-election of an out-of-office president, for the second time, brings to mind an oddity of the convention of the ordinal numbering of the United States Presidents — those under the Constitution.
George Washington was the first; John Adams the second, and so on the list runs until we get to the curious case of one man, Stephen Grover Cleveland, who is regarded as both the 22nd & 24th presidents. All because the 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison, served between his two presidencies.
Now it is happening to Donald John Trump. He is listed as the 45th president of the United States, having served from 2017 through January of 2021. Now, re-elected after an “interregnum” of the 46th president, Joe Biden, Trump is slated to serve as the 47th president.
It is apparent that, according to this convention, what is being ordered with numbers is the presidencies, not the presidents as such. And it is assumed that a second (or third, or fourth) term in office is the same presidency as the first term of a president, unless broken in sequence by the term of another president.
An odd convention.