It is a beleaguered world. And this was a podcast fraught with technical problems, yet it turned out pretty good. So maybe there is, generally, hope?
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Thomas Jefferson
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).
On July 16, 1931, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haille Selassie I signed a new Constitution. Not exactly a model of limited government, the new document proved that the emperor was in keeping with the time, which was a period of weakening constitutional limits in America, Europe, and Britain. A flavor of the document can be gained by its most “rights-oriented” measures:
Art. 22. Within the limits laid down by the law, Ethiopian subjects have the right to pass freely from one place to the other.
Art. 23. No Ethiopian subject may be arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned except in pursuance of the law.
Art. 24. No Ethiopian subject may, against his will, be deprived of his right to be tried by a legally established court.
Art. 25. Except in cases provided for by law, no domiciliary searches may be made.
Art. 26. Except in cases provided by the law, no one shall have the right to violate the secrecy of the correspondence of Ethiopian subjects.
Art. 27. Except in cases of public necessity determined by the law, no one shall have the right to deprive an Ethiopian subject of any movable or landed property which he owns.
Art. 28. All Ethiopian subjects have the right to present to the Government petitions in legal form.
Art. 29. The provisions of the present chapter shall in no way limit the measures which the Emperor, by virtue of his supreme power, may take in the event of war or public misfortunes menacing the interests of the nation.
Paul Jacob explores the chilling rationale for why the Chinazis handled COVID in the malign way they did — and our politicians, pundits, and journalists don’t come out looking much better:
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Josiah Warren
It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 105.
On July 15, 1976, Jimmy Carter accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the presidency.
Three years later, as president, he gave his infamous “malaise” speech, in which he focused on energy but did not mention the one thing that actually helped turn the 1970s’ energy crisis around: the phased deregulation of oil prices that had started three months earlier, under his own directive. Instead of touting this deregulatory effort, Carter did the politic thing, promising a number of new government programs while extensively grinding a “crisis of confidence” message and vaguely speaking of a spiritual challenge.
The deregulation was startlingly effective, in the long run — though the immediate effect was a rocketing of prices. These high prices presented profit opportunities, and (lo and behold!) domestic production greatly increased, allowing for many, many years of lower prices. Those high prices would have worked better as market signals had not Carter and Congress also established “windfall profits” taxes, to take away those temporary gains to existing business.
Had Carter deregulated prices earlier, he would probably have been re-elected president. Had he emphasized deregulation, he probably would have beat back Ronald Reagan’s free market rhetoric — with actual action.
The price controls had been put in place earlier in the decade by the Republican president at the time, Richard M. Nixon, with the great help of his aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
In 2020, circumstantial evidence suggested that the COVID-19 virus had originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Let’s say that the available data, limited by Chinese uncooperativeness, couldn’t exclude the possibility of a natural origin. Nevertheless, the evidence certainly sufficed to prevent the escape-from-lab explanation from being reasonably deemed an implausible “conspiracy theory.”
Years later, U.S. officials who probably also knew better three years ago have acknowledged that, yes, escape from the lab is likely how the pandemic began.
We’re also learning from communications that have come to light that the authors of an influential 2020 paper published in Nature “proving” that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct” fudged their reasoning for fear of China.
Co-author Andrew Rambaut, to co-authors: “Given the shitshow that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”
Co-author Kristian Andersen: “Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”
The paper itself asserted that the authors’ analyses “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct . . .” (emphases added). And: no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
This paper was then used to rationalize censorship of persons proposing the Wuhan lab as the site of origin. It was completely political; the scientists were acting as politicians and not scientists when they authored it. Better to blame bats than the dreaded Chinazis.
Funded by the U.S. Government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Morley
John Morley, Voltaire (London: Macmillan and Company, 1885; 1897), p. 80.
Political liberty . . . has not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties.
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The Bastille Stormed
On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille.
The word “storm” in its various forms is almost invariably paired with “Bastille” in discussions of the event. It is one of the great clichés of history.
On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act was signed into law, prohibiting the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.
The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson as its leader and figurehead.
Zack De Piero, who taught English at Pennsylvania State University for several years, was pushed out of his job in 2022 for opposing race-based grading and opposing “diversity” training that tells white people that they are inherently racist. De Piero is white.
With the help of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, he is suing the school for racial discrimination, specifically for being “singled out for ridicule and humiliation because of the color of his skin.”
According to the lawsuit, various of the defendants told De Piero that “outcomes alone — regardless of the legitimacy of methods of evaluation, mastery of subject matter, or intentions — demonstrate whether a faculty member’s actions are racist or not. . . . The logic of Defendants’ demands required that De Piero also penalize students academically on the basis of race.”
The filing details a litany of such conduct.
De Piero told Fox News: “I think there is almost a religious, cult-like environment where you had this original sin. In this case, I’m white. I need to repent for that sin. . . . I think they were waging a psychological war campaign and they’re trying to break people. And they almost broke me. But they didn’t.”
The U.S. Supreme Court took fifty years to rule against discriminatory, race-based university admissions. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another fifty years to rule against the travesties of racist grading, racist “diversity training,” and allied diversity-equity-inclusion racist policies doublespeakingly designed to mandate racism in the name of antiracism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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