Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
April 18 marks the 1772 birthday of David Ricardo, English political economist and one of the most influential thinkers in economic theory. An advocate for free trade and the abolition of slavery, Ricardo’s most famous work is his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).
In America in 2022, April 18 is the date income taxes are due to be filed.
The best-known of his heretical tweets says, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
In the months since August 2021, when Twitter expelled him “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules,” such hardly intemperate observations have become less controversial. Vaccine proponents have retreated, typically claiming, at most, that the putative vaccines reduce the risk of severe illness and death.
Berenson first sued Twitter to challenge its ban. The suit succeeded; eleven months after Twitter banned him, it reinstated his account.
But Twitter had not been acting independently; it had succumbed to a lengthy campaign by the Biden administration to censor Berenson. Any such actions by government officials are, of course, unconstitutional.
The defendants in Berenson’s new lawsuit include President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, and former White House official Andrew Slavitt (“at the center of the conspiracy”). Two Pfizer officers are also named: board member Scott Gottlieb and CEO Albert Bourla.
Berenson’s detailed complaint alleges that “after months of public and secret pressure, Defendants succeeded” in getting Twitter to ban him.
The private pressure is attested by internal documents released by Twitter and government documents produced during the course of Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit against censorship by the Biden administration.
In defending his rights, Alex Berenson is helping us all retrieve freedoms we lost in the pandemic panic.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Just War” (1970), as reprinted at LewRockwell.com.
April 17 marks the 1937 birth of Ronald Hamowy, Canadian historian, who first came to international prominence for his writings in the short-lived but influential New Individualist Review. Hamowy died in 2012.
April 17, 1907 — The Ellis Island immigration center processed 11,747 immigrants, more than on any other day.
April 17, 1942 — French prisoner of war General Henri Giraud escaped from his castle prison in Königstein Fortress.
April 17, 1969 – Communist Party of Czechoslovakia chairman Alexander Dubček was deposed.
The pandemic is over, but not everything associated with the pandemic. And we should interrogate what those lingering plans and processes and procedures are.
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (1973), p. 49.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting segregation, on April 16, 1963.
The week’s whole gamut, from China to trans to lagtime fever:
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
John Adams, in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Life of John Adams (1856).