Toutes les fois que je donne une place
vacante, je fais cent mécontents et un ingrat.
Every time that I fill a high office, I create a hundred discontented men and an ingrate.
Louis XIV, as quoted in Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), ch.26.
On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.
Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon, a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discoverers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.
When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.
The ratio in sizes between Charon and Pluto make the pair, effectively, a “double dwarf planet.”
Over the last several years, one has put one’s YouTube speech at risk by addressing such verboten or intermittently suppressed topics as pandemic policy, vaccine efficacy, origin of the COVID-19 virus, “climate change” (are winter, summer, and all natural disasters really caused by carbon footprints? inquiring minds want to know!), 2020 election fraud, and whatever else inspires post-Enlightenment institutional censors to clatter into action.
Because of the emails and other documents that have come to light in various lawsuits, we now know for sure that social-media companies have not been censoring independently.
They’ve been in cahoots with government agencies — agencies eager to find corporate workarounds to the First Amendment.
A recent target of Google’s YouTube? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Running for president as a Democrat in competition with the alleged incumbent, Joe Biden, this son of assassinated 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy is disturbing the serene pools of so-called thought that constitute Acceptable Opinion and Settled Science.
I often disagree with Kennedy. But I feel that he isn’t just feeding me B.S.; he actually believes stuff.
He may be mostly wrong, but I prefer that to mostly crooked.
Google has just deleted another Kennedy video, one in which he converses with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson about climate change, COVID-19, and a possible link between exposure to chemicals and sexual dysphoria.
This last musing seems dubious. But, whatever, let the guy talk. Except — hold on — isn’t RFK Jr. causing Joe Biden a lot of political trouble?
Can’t have that.
Or, anyway, Google can’t have that.
Or whichever Biden administration officials are directing Google (or vice versa) can’t have that.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Glenn Greenwald
“Neocons” is really just a polite euphemism for “bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers.”
Glenn Greenwald, System Update, June 19, 2023.
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Grandfather clauses
On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.
The question posed in boffo episode four of Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show is whether Joe Biden is a wannabe dictator, as asserted by a chyron that Fox News displayed for 27 seconds on the day his administration arrested Donald Trump: “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.” (Fox News hastened to apologize to the world and to fire the producer who so incontinently chyronized.)
Carlson spends a couple of minutes discussing absurd reactions to the brief-lived caption. But most of his satirical 13-minute monologue is about whether President Biden qualifies for dictator-hood.
Carlson suggests that you have to do much more than jail political rivals to qualify.
Dictators enrich themselves and their families, taking bribes or kickbacks from businesses or other dictators.
In a dictatorship, it’s no longer possible to fight the injustice of the system. If people “gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator, they’ll be arrested by state security services even years after the fact.”
In a dictatorship, you can’t even complain from your home; unauthorized opinions on the Internet must be censored.
In a dictatorship, major mental or physical lapses by the Dear Leader would be routinely covered up by a compliant media.
A dictator would say your kids belong to him. But Joe Biden says your kids belong to all of us; we have joint custody.
It’s a litany that could be extended, and Tucker Carlson does so.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Christopher Hitchens
If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings, I say, ‘I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.’ In this country I’ve been told, ‘That’s offensive,’ as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment. Not to me they don’t.
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“National” Nixed
On the 20th of June in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Oliver Ellsworth moved to confine legislative powers to two distinct branches, and to strike the word “national” from the document. Edmund Randolph of Virginia had previously moved successfully to call the government the National Government of United States. Ellsworth moved that the government should continue to be called the United States of America.
The final wording eventually became “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
And, yes, the word “national” does not occur anywhere in the Constitution as ratified by the original set of states, or as amended.
John F. Kennedy authored the Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on Ellsworth. This was Kennedy’s only contribution to the encyclopedia.
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Freedom Festival
“Should white people celebrate Juneteenth?” National Public Radio’s Destinee Adams asked last year at this time, before advising, “Just don’t interrupt Black folks who are just trying to have a great time.”
I like to see folks have a good time.
“Each year,” offers The Wayside Youth & Family Support Network in Massachusetts, “Juneteenth is a day for Black people to celebrate freedom.”
The article sports the headline, “10 Things We Want White People to Do to Celebrate Juneteenth.”
Sounds like there’s a test.
In “The Caucasians’ Guide to Celebrating Juneteenth,” The Root claims, “we created a CRT-free educational curriculum to help colonizer Americans resist the urge to gentrify this celebration.”
“Hold up, white people,” urges The Root’s Michael Harriot. “Before hopping on the Juneteenth bandwagon, you first need to realize that you have no say in driving the narrative about this special day.”
Thank goodness I have my own commentary program.
Juneteenth celebrates enslaved people in Texas being freed on June 19, 1865 — the very last in our country to be held in bondage. Now that’s cause for jubilation for every man and woman who breathes free . . . of every race.
How was that “peculiar,” perniciously evil institution of slavery stopped? To put slavery in its grave, more than 360,000 American men “gave the last full measure of devotion,” as Abe Lincoln put it, to the “cause.”
These men, mostly white but of both races, deserve a moment on Juneteenth.
So do the abolitionists from Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison to John Brown and Harriett Tubman . . . and all those (white and black) who risked so much to run the Underground Railroad. And eternal thanks to the white juries who voted to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act, refusing to send slaves back.
Slavery is forever deserving of condemnation, certainly. But Juneteenth isn’t about slavery; it’s about emancipation, the triumph of freedom.
At my shindig, anyway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Auberon Herbert
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. Force is the very weakest and most treacherous of all human implements. The history of force is the history of the continuous crumbling away of every institution that has rested upon it.
Auberon Herbert, The Ethics of Dynamite (1894).