On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention instructed its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
One reader’s and all the world’s problems: in one episode!
Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.
It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.
Publius Tacitus, Agricola (98 A.D.), Chapter 42.
On May 14, 1787, delegates convened a Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to write a new Constitution for the United States. George Washington presided over the convention.
On the same day a century later, jurist and pamphleteer Lysander Spooner — author of several important treatises, including Trial by Jury, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and an infamous pamphlet entitled “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority” — died.
Paul Jacob provides variations on a theme. The theme was whistled (in the dark?) several times earlier this week. But here it receives its fullest treatment:
Once again, Paul discusses reader mail, from this website. Well: one letter. Listen to see whose!
Force shites upon Reason’s Back.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736).
On May 13, 1888, Brazil abolished slavery with the passage of the Lei Áurea (“Golden Law”).
That is, on May 11, 2023, the “public health emergency” expired, following the termination of the “national emergency” over a month earlier.
Jordan Schachtel, writing at The Dossier on Substack, did the math and noted that this “marks an incredible 1196 Days To Slow The Spread.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Schachtel elaborated. “Almost three and a half years of engaging in peak absurdity in the name of stopping [the] virus. And yet, the ‘experts’ don’t have a single thing to show for it.”
Remember why our leaders wanted to “slow” that “spread”: not to save lives over all. They admitted that the gross numbers of the affected couldn’t be affected by the half-a-month lockdown and mask mandates that Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump pushed. They argued merely that lockdowns might “flatten” the distribution of cases and personal crises over time to alleviate a bottleneck — crowding — for a brief, initial pandemic period in the nation’s hospitals.
That was it.
That was the rationale.
But after the 15 days were over, almost none of the emergency pandemic units set up by the military had been used to take hospital overflow. Either (a) the 15 days had been enough, or (b) it had all been unnecessary. The answer is (b).
Everything else was just politics — the extended lockdowns, mask mandates, suppression of alternative treatments, the massive subsidies and vaccine mandates and passports and much else. What it sure seemed like? A vast jury-rigged scheme to get people to take the experimental “vaccines” then being rushed through the regulatory process.
Indeed, one thing was very clear from Day 16 onward: a “national” policy made no sense, for the pandemic hit regions of the country at different times and to different degrees. New York got hit hard in 2020, but the Pacific Northwest’s hospitals were mostly empty during the pandemic — causing a very different “beds” stressor.
Yet our politicians pushed a national policy of emergencies that lasted, at the very least, 1181 days too long.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I don’t regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.
Orson Welles, in an interview with Bernie Braden in Paris (1960).
On May 12, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered.