Il faut toujours en fait de nouvelles attendre
le sacrement de la confirmation.
When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, Letter to Charles-Augustin Ferriol, comte d’Argental (August, 28, 1760).
On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.
But consult this video.
One interviewee who performs sex-change surgery discusses the “informed consent” of 14-year-olds. This doctor acknowledges that many children who agree to puberty blockers and surgery — changing their bodies irreversibly — end up regretting it.
“We talk about it [with the kids] but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of brain space to really talk about it in a serious way. That’s always bothered me,” he says. “But you know, we still want the kids to be happy. Happier in the moment, right?”
“It’s everything you have been told doesn’t happen,” says my friend David Strom in his report on the Project Veritas investigation (“Undercover video: puberty blockers at 8, surgery as young as 10 in New York”).
“It happens,” David writes. “Watch the doctors who do it explain that they do and that they are eager to do it to even pre-adolescent children. Even admitting that the ‘science isn’t really settled,’ but hey, we’ll do it if you want.”
We don’t let kids do everything that adults may do because we know that it takes time for human beings to mature. Adults, too, may regret having undergone hormone blocking and genital surgery. But adults have the best chance, a real chance, to decide responsibly.
Peer-pressured, doctor-pressured, even legislature-pressured, and perhaps very confused 14-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 10-year-olds . . . and 8-year-olds . . . don’t have the same chance to make an adult decision.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.
Letter to Adlai Stevenson (November 5, 1959), quoted in The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer : A Biography(1984), by Jackson J. Benson, p. 876.
On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Wollstonecraft herself wrote several important political treatises, including her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and her valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”
The Zion, Illinois, government can no longer send officials to barge into rented homes at will to conduct obnoxious inspections.
The inspection regime was instituted in 2015 by a mayor who blamed an excess of renters for the town’s financial troubles. The motive for the searches, then, may have been to make it more uncomfortable to rent in Zion. Seriously. As dumb and thuggish as that.
Robert and Dorice Pierce and their landlord were among the victims of this regime.
When an inspector showed up at the Pierces’ door, they told him to get a warrant. But judges don’t generally accept “important to harass tenants” as a reason for issuing warrants. In any case, any respect for constitutional constraints was incompatible with the very nature of these intrusive practices.
So Zion’s response was to threaten the landlord, Josefina Lozano, with daily and mounting fines until she compelled the Pierces to capitulate. That’s when the trio turned to the Institute for Justice and decided to go to court.
This was familiar territory for IJ, which in the 1990s had successfully fought a similar inspection regime in Park Forest, Illinois.
And now, after three years of judicial proceedings, IJ and its clients have secured a consent decree prohibiting the warrantless inspections and prohibiting the fines.
But those who enacted this outrageous regime deserve a reprimand more stern than merely a loss in court.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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La superstition met le monde entier en flammes;
la philosophie les éteint.
Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.
François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1822), “Superstition.”
On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.
On the same day in 1805, United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, an important event in the First Barbary War.
In April 26, 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia, shooting him to death. There was no interrogation.
But it’s not over yet.
The moratorium will linger on until July 15. Three years is supposedly insufficient time for tenants to gird themselves to again honor the contract with the persons who provide them with shelter.
And then it still won’t be over.
The council’s slow-walk phaseout comes with a permanent new limitation on what landlords can do. This explains the lone dissenting vote, that of Council member Noel Gallo, who says that the rights of landlords are still being insufficiently protected.
As the text of the legislation passed by the council makes clear, its revision of the city’s “just cause” ordinance further violates the property rights of landlords. In part, the new ordinance provides that any failure to pay rent during the last three years which a tenant can plausibly attribute to the pandemic is sufficient to prevent an eviction, even if not relieving the tenant of the obligation to pay that rent.
Will the reprieve be too late and too little for property owners like John Williams? For the last three years, Williams has been stuck with a freeloading tenant who has been financially able to pay rent but who has refused to do so and refused to move.
The tenant, occupying half of the duplex where he also happens to live, owes him $56,000. And Williams is facing . . . foreclosure.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini.