On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.
In 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.
We will share with you the most up-to-date information daily. You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust the Director-General of Health and the Ministry of Health for their information. Do feel free to visit it anytime to clarify any rumor you may hear. COVID19.govt.nz. Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, March 19, 2020, see “Did New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern Once Say, ‘Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth’?”, Snopes.com.
Born on this day: historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nathan Irving Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).
Hentoff wrote several works on the history and nature of free speech in America, including The First Freedom (1980). Sendak is most famous for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Wilson’s many books include Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).
Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977. It was typographically styled as the “Apple ][” and the series continued long after the specific II model was superseded by the Apple II Plus and was discontinued in 1981. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.
Sendak died in 2012, Hentoff in 2017, while Wilson died on December 26, 2021.
On this question, the agency has stacked the deck in its favor by commissioning an “independent” review by a left-wing think tank, New America, already on record in support of giving IRS officials authority to do this.
Basically, the IRS handed $15 million (of taxpayer money) to New America to say “Yes, based on our very independent review, we agree with you and ourselves about thus expanding your power over taxpayers.”
Under the proposed IRS Direct File program — already being tested in a pilot program — taxpayers would use government software to let IRS crunch the tax numbers.
Mark Tapscott’s report for Epoch Times cites many objections to the scheme.
Among the most pertinent is voiced by David Williams, president of Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He notes that when individuals and private tax preparers fill out tax forms, they’re typically trying to keep the tax take to a minimum. But the IRS won’t have the same incentive to maximize deductions and refunds.
Moreover, “There is no reason to trust the IRS with even more sensitive financial information. . . .”
Participation in the IRS Direct File program would not be mandatory, at least not initially.
Once established, though, the program would make it easier to mandate participation for at least some categories of tax returns.
And let us not pretend that such a development would be surprising. Governments tend to use precedents of newly granted power to expand that power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.
Karl Kraus, as quoted in Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms (1976) as translated by Harry Zohn.
Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide on this day in June, 68 AD, ending Rome’s Julio-Claudian Dynasty, later written about with verve by Suetonius and Robert Graves. Assisting in his suicide was his secretary, Epaphroditus, whom Domitian had executed over 20 years later — for failure to prevent the suicide of the emperor.
Also on June 9, James Oglethorpe received a charter from the British crown to start the Georgia colony (1732); William Jennings Bryan resigned his position as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, disgusted over the handling of the sinking of the Lusitania (1915); philosopher John Hospers (pictured) — who would go on to run as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972 — was born in 1918.
Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.
“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-worldly remains in order to build more technologically-advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”
Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”
He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.
What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.
Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.
While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.
Gore Vidal, Julian (1964).
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
Mosher is a student of China who, according to the bio at his Population Research Institute website, pop.org, “has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. . . .”
In 1979, the Chinese government let him pursue research in a village where he observed many instances of compulsory abortions under the country’s one-child policy. Some of the women were in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.
Perhaps the Chinese government expected Mosher to produce rosy-eyed, footnoted rationalizations of what he saw. When he published his unvarnished findings in a Taiwanese magazine, officials complained to the U.S. Embassy and to Stanford University.
Stanford appeased China by denying Mosher his PhD. I note the university’s injustice in part because Mosher tends to omit this detail. But it should not be forgotten.
Back then, he said he “did what was right to do. I told the truth.”
He opposes population control because, in his view, people are a good thing, not a bad thing.
This viewpoint is beautifully conveyed in a video on the pop.org home page, in which Mosher says that people “are the ultimate resource, the one resource that you cannot do without.” The Institute works to expose “the myth of overpopulation” and the violations of human rights that occur in the name of population control.
The prolific scholar argues that people “can become the agents of their own development without having to sacrifice their children in the process.”
My wife and I glad to hear it. We’ll let the kids know.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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