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.”
Categories
Sybil’s Ride
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.
The city council of Oakland, California just voted 7-1 to end the town’s pandemic-rationalized moratorium on eviction for nonpayment of rent.
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.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
John Steinbeck
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.
Categories
Freedom Day
April 25 is celebrated as Freedom Day in Portugal.
Back in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton informed a Fox News audience that “just a few miles away from that food market [initially proposed as the epicenter of the outbreak] is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
The Senator’s mere suggestion that the fast-spreading virus might have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs — which were (a) known to be sloppy, and (b) doing U.S. funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — was immediately labelled a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” by The Washington Post (which has since corrected its story).
Some scientists and pundits also expressed outrage — erroneously — at Cotton’s “implication” that China had unleashed a bioweapon. In Cotton’s defense, he never said any such thing.
Hmmm?
When the lab leak theory made a comeback — after a year or more of Fauci & Co. colluding to snuff out the very thought — it seemed the one thing “we” somehow “knew” was that it certainly wasn’t a bioweapon.
Yet, unsure of its precise origin, how can we know that?
“It matters little whether it was intentionally leaked from a lab or not,” Brian T. Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, explained at a recent Hillsdale College speech, “what is clear is that they allowed it to spread throughout the world knowing the harm it would cause.”
The Chinese rulers did this both by covering up human transmission for many weeks and by knowingly allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel throughout the world spreading the new virus. That’s why Kennedy calls it “a biowarfare attack against the United States.”
In his book, No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War with the West, Andrew Small writes about a well-placed Chinese friend who told him in January of 2020 that “the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.”
With friends like China . . .
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Ben Jonson
Calumnies are answered best with silence.
Ben Jonson, Volpone (1606), Act II, scene ii.
Categories
Shush: Library
On April 24, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Eight years later to the day, the United States Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress.
Categories
Watch: Shot Heard
Paul celebrates a great day in world history.
Categories
Robert Lynch
The push for a biologically sexless society is an arrogant utopian vision that cuts us off from our evolutionary history, promotes the delusion that humans are not animals, and undercuts respecting each individual for their unique individuality. Sex is neither simply a matter of socialization, nor a personal choice.
Robert Lynch, “From Sex To Gender: The Modern Dismissal of Biology,” Skeptic (April 7, 2023).