Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.
John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), as quoted in John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
Categories
John Tillotson
Categories
A Day of Loco Foco Glory
Echoes of political events past:
Second Declaration of Independence, Or Grand Loco Foco Federal Glorification! To Come Off at the Court House, in the Village of Syracuse, on Saturday, the 18th Day of July, A.D. 1840.
A “Loco Foco” event in New York, five years after an advertisement for a new form of matchstick, the “Loco Foco” (see image above).
Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?
Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.
But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?
She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.
While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious.
She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.
For the show.
Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.
We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies?
They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.
That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special.
For them, the elites, austerity is just a show.
To set us up to suffer — for real.
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
John Adams
Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
This passage was used as an epigraph by John Abramson in his book Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It (2022).
It is a beleaguered world. And this was a podcast fraught with technical problems, yet it turned out pretty good. So maybe there is, generally, hope?
Categories
Thomas Jefferson
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).
On July 16, 1931, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haille Selassie I signed a new Constitution. Not exactly a model of limited government, the new document proved that the emperor was in keeping with the time, which was a period of weakening constitutional limits in America, Europe, and Britain. A flavor of the document can be gained by its most “rights-oriented” measures:
Art. 22. Within the limits laid down by the law, Ethiopian subjects have the right to pass freely from one place to the other.
Art. 23. No Ethiopian subject may be arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned except in pursuance of the law.
Art. 24. No Ethiopian subject may, against his will, be deprived of his right to be tried by a legally established court.
Art. 25. Except in cases provided for by law, no domiciliary searches may be made.
Art. 26. Except in cases provided by the law, no one shall have the right to violate the secrecy of the correspondence of Ethiopian subjects.
Art. 27. Except in cases of public necessity determined by the law, no one shall have the right to deprive an Ethiopian subject of any movable or landed property which he owns.
Art. 28. All Ethiopian subjects have the right to present to the Government petitions in legal form.
Art. 29. The provisions of the present chapter shall in no way limit the measures which the Emperor, by virtue of his supreme power, may take in the event of war or public misfortunes menacing the interests of the nation.
Paul Jacob explores the chilling rationale for why the Chinazis handled COVID in the malign way they did — and our politicians, pundits, and journalists don’t come out looking much better:
Categories
Josiah Warren
It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 105.
On July 15, 1976, Jimmy Carter accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the presidency.
Three years later, as president, he gave his infamous “malaise” speech, in which he focused on energy but did not mention the one thing that actually helped turn the 1970s’ energy crisis around: the phased deregulation of oil prices that had started three months earlier, under his own directive. Instead of touting this deregulatory effort, Carter did the politic thing, promising a number of new government programs while extensively grinding a “crisis of confidence” message and vaguely speaking of a spiritual challenge.
The deregulation was startlingly effective, in the long run — though the immediate effect was a rocketing of prices. These high prices presented profit opportunities, and (lo and behold!) domestic production greatly increased, allowing for many, many years of lower prices. Those high prices would have worked better as market signals had not Carter and Congress also established “windfall profits” taxes, to take away those temporary gains to existing business.
Had Carter deregulated prices earlier, he would probably have been re-elected president. Had he emphasized deregulation, he probably would have beat back Ronald Reagan’s free market rhetoric — with actual action.
The price controls had been put in place earlier in the decade by the Republican president at the time, Richard M. Nixon, with the great help of his aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.