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Today

Judiciary Act

John Jay, First Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court

On September 24, 1789, the United States Congress passed the Judiciary Act, creating the office of the United States Attorney General and the federal judiciary system, and ordered the composition of the Supreme Court of the United States.

On the same day that President George Washington signed the bill into law, he officially nominated John Jay to the new position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Jay (pictured in his official portrait, above) served in that position until 1795, when he resigned to take up his elected position as second governor of the State of New York. The Supreme Court heard only four cases during Jay’s Chief Justiceship; Jay refused to consult, officially, on legislation written by Alexander Hamilton, establishing the precedent that the Supreme Court has followed to this day: the Court would only rule on cases tried before it.

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ideological culture media and media people

DEI Box Office Drubbing

Matt Walsh, racism, DEI

It “came out of nowhere,” declared The Hollywood Reporter, and as “one major Hollywood studio exec” put it off the record: “The picture has clearly hit a nerve.”

This is the second hit by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and director-​producer Justin Folk: they made the movie What Is a Woman? in 2022, and now Am I Racist? is at No. 4 on the movie charts having “gross[ed] $4.5 million in its nationwide box office debut,” THR reports, “a huge sum for a nonfiction feature.”

In the film, Matt Walsh sits down with “some of the biggest people in the anti-​racism movement,” including Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, founders of Race2Dinner, and Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

For $5,000, Rao and Jackson will come over for dinner to make as many as eight white women confront their inherent racism. Who would know better? Rao and Jackson actually wrote the book, White Women.

“This country is not worth saving,” Rao declares at one dinner. “This country’s a piece of sh*t.”

It cost $15,000 to get the meeting to film DiAngelo for the documentary. Well, only $14,970 if you consider the $30 in reparations that DiAngelo was shamed into giving a black member of Walsh’s documentary crew.

“The mind-​blowing part,” explains Savannah Edwards of Savvy Film Reviews “is that he was able to get them to say what they said on camera.” She adds, “The fact of the matter is all Matt Walsh does in this movie is let these people talk.”

Go see the movie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

H. Beam Piper

Keep a government poor and weak and it’s your servant; when it is rich and powerful it becomes your master.

The character Colonel Andrew Jackson Hickock in H. Beam Piper‘s Lone Star Planet (1958). This short novel has been published as A Planet for Texans, too, and its story idea was suggested by an infamous H. L. Mencken squib.

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Today

Sweden minus Norway

On September 23, 1905, Norway and Sweden signed the “Karlstad treaty,” peacefully dissolving the union between the two countries.

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Update

Sugar Sugar

As the COVID pandemic experience is teaching us, there is something deeply wrong with medicine in America — if we did not know already. But we are ill, as Paul Jacob indicated on September 5, “Stay Puft America,” for other reasons, too. Like food.

There are now many resources online, however, that may help us understand just how far off the mark our doctors and nutritionists have become. Comedian Jimmy Dore recently explained, to the best of his abilities, a case against using statins. The problem is not cholesterol, he says, but sugar.

The danger of sugar, and not just refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup, has been warned against for ages. A famous book in the 1970s made a big hit, but the Big Gov/​Big Agribiz complex fought back with the Low Fat story, and we have been arguing about this ever since. 

None of this can possibly be adjudicated on this site. What is true? What should you eat? What should and shouldn’t you do to prevent strokes and heart attacks and diabetes? These are questions to answer somewhere else than on ThisIsCommonSense​.org.

But still, it may be worth listening to the latest guest on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Jessie Inchauspé:

What is wrong with our diets and our doctors? Increasing numbers of scientists and doctors have joined a legion of food faddists to blame sugar. But is it really a molecule that is to blame? Or is it … government? Could it be that the Big Gov/​Big Biz paradigm has poisoned us? Is poisoning us?

It sure looks like this malign entity has worked mightily to make billions off the bad habits that regulators, subsidizers, and lobbyists have — behind the scenes of advertising and product placement — enticed us into.

Categories
Thought

Alfred Bester

Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival.

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, Chapter 16. The novel was first published under its author’s preferred title, Tiger! Tiger! (1956), in Britain.