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Thought

Hannah Arendt

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

Hannah Arendt, interview with French writer Roger Errera (1974), New York Review of Books.
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Today

A Fine Point of the War

On July 25, 1861, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the war with the seceded states of the Confederacy was being fought to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Truth, Compassion & Forbearance

The Chinese Communist Party’s genocidal ways did not begin with the mass Uyghur incarcerations. Twenty-four years ago the CCP kicked off “its brutal campaign to eradicate Falun Gong in China,” writes John A. Deller in The Epoch Times.

“Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) was introduced to the public in China by Mr. Li Hongzhi in May 1992,” explains Mr. Deller. “It is a spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition based on the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. . . . By 1998, over 70 million people across China had found improved health and morality through Falun Gong.”

In the West, we may not immediately see how dangerous (to tyrants) a religio-philosophical movement like Falun Gong could be. 

Isn’t it innocuous? When D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen Buddhism to the U.S. in the last century, most Americans . . . yawned. 

But the Chinazis did not yawn. They banned Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. And began arresting and imprisoning and torturing and executing its practitioners.

While Deller insists that Falun Gong was not perceived by most of its practitioners to be intrinsically anti-communist, over the course of the antagonism it has dawned on the persecuted that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is indeed at odds with “truth, compassion, and forbearance.”

What really bothers the CCP? Ideas

Of independence . . . forbearance. 

Of truth . . . not propaganda. 

Of compassion . . . the idea that maybe prisoners shouldn’t be killed to facilitate lucrative organ transplants.

The 24-year-old genocide is a memecide, the attempted final solution to these paramount ideas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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J. Robert Oppenheimer

Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita, in the documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), characterizing his thoughts upon the successful detonation of the first atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan’s drama Oppenheimer (2023) is in first-release theatrical competition with the fantasy-comedy Barbie (2023) this month.
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Today

A Liberation Day

On July 24, 1487, citizens in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, went on strike against a ban on foreign beer.

On the same day of 1823’s calendar, slavery was abolished in Chile.

July 24 serves as Pioneer Day in Utah and as Simón Bolívar Day in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.


On this day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court told President Richard Nixon that he lacked constitutional authority to withhold the infamous “Nixon Tapes” from Congress.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Praising John Kerry

The very idea may make you quiver, but Paul Jacob eases you into the idea.

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Grover Cleveland

WHATEVER YOU DO, TELL THE TRUTH.

Presidential candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland’s telegram response to a query as to what the Democratic Party should say about reports that he fathered a child out of wedlock. The issue was scandalous, but he won office and his first term in the presidency of the United States started in 1885.
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Today

Year of Our Ford

On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.

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audio podcast

Listen: In Praise of John Kerry?

Don’t tase me, bro, and don’t whack me with that stick. Yes, and without much apology, a few kind words for . . .

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Jones & Smith

The remnants of slavery and colonialism are ubiquitous. Slavery has been systemically embedded in the deep structure of world history, etched into the human experience since the dawn of civilization.

David Martin Jones & M. L. R. Smith, The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), p. 1.