There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker, interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
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Dorothy Parker
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The Count Tracy
Born on July 20, 1754, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, French philosopher and economist. Perhaps best remembered for coining the term “ideology,” he didn’t mean by that term what scornful Napoleon and communist Karl Marx later turned it into — for Destutt de Tracy ideology meant “the science of ideas,” a unified approach to all knowledge, from epistemology to social theory.
Though his family had been enobled twice, he renounced the title and entered the 1789 Estates General conference as a member of the Third Estate. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, and would have been executed had not Robespierre been pushed to the scaffold ahead of him.
Two of his books became popular in early 19th century America, his commentaries on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and his Traité de la volonté, which Thomas Jefferson, the editor of the American edition, retitled A Treatise on Political Economy. Tracy’s economics was of a deductivist stripe, familiar to readers of later economists such as Nassau Senior and Ludwig von Mises.
Destutt de Tracy’s political philosophy was republican, and his preferred economic policy was laissez-faire.
NASA’s Apollo 11 landed two humans on the Moon — Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin — on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC.
“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” M.L.R. Smith tells Epoch Times.
According to Smith and David Jones, authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), the conduct of the America’s radical Left resembles that of the Red Guards and others during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in China.
The authors got the idea for their study from the riots that swept the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. These rage-filled protests-turned-riots made them think of Maoism:
- Defacing and toppling of monuments, reminders of the pesky past.
- Shouting down and “cancelling” speakers. (Sometimes physically as well as verbally assaulting them.)
- Abject kneeling and self-criticism in response to alleged wrongdoing, including “‘white guilt’ genuflection.”
The parallels are real, even though the scale of the humiliations and destruction that we have seen is nowhere near that of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were tortured and murdered.
Jones says Maoism was bred in China and hothoused in Paris but “achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States,” where it is manifest in thinking about race and gender.
The authors explore the nature of rage as a motivating force and strategy, “an energy to be harnessed as a mode of power.” This is the fuel of many a revolution, where mob action serves as a kind of open terrorism. Histories and treatises are filled with it.
America’s Founding Fathers feared such rage, hence in their revolution they stated principles in elegant but clear sentences. They expected argument and readily engaged.
But now?You can’t reason with rage.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture (1970).
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Seneca Falls
On July 19, 1848, a two-day Women’s Rights Convention opened in Seneca Falls, New York.
It is hard to find the words.
Having just finished wringing out a soaked handkerchief, soggy with tears of gratitude for your recent act of high nobility and raw courage in defying the worst aspects of current U.S. policy and your own dismal and dismaying track record of silly pronouncements as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, an actual title I might add, I wanted to take a moment to say Thank You.
Thank you, sir, thanks for declining to again deploy your eloquence, charisma, and illogic in the service of the same old dreary nonsense.
For when asked during a recent congressional hearing whether the United States would be contributing to a fund to pay “climate reparations” to countries harmed by extreme manifestations of weather, aka “climate-driven” natural disasters, you said, flatly, “No, under no circumstances.”
Wha . . . ? Was this the same man who likened the fight against “climate change” to the fight against the Nazis in World War II?
I mean, I’ll believe it when I don’t see it, but for now I just want to say: Wow!
Especially since last year’s Conference of the Parties, COP27, billed as “a defining moment in the fight against climate change,” where the United States did express support for such payments.
So the U.S. will not, after all, be using taxpayer money to appease other countries for also experiencing weather. Great news. For every minute it lasts, I really appreciate it.
I am veritably dripping with . . . gratitude.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Tillotson
Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.
John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), as quoted in John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
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A Day of Loco Foco Glory
Echoes of political events past:
Second Declaration of Independence, Or Grand Loco Foco Federal Glorification! To Come Off at the Court House, in the Village of Syracuse, on Saturday, the 18th Day of July, A.D. 1840.
A “Loco Foco” event in New York, five years after an advertisement for a new form of matchstick, the “Loco Foco” (see image above).
Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?
Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.
But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?
She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.
While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious.
She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.
For the show.
Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.
We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies?
They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.
That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special.
For them, the elites, austerity is just a show.
To set us up to suffer — for real.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Adams
Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
This passage was used as an epigraph by John Abramson in his book Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It (2022).