Calumnies are answered best with silence.
Ben Jonson, Volpone (1606), Act II, scene ii.
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Ben Jonson
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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.
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Watch: Shot Heard
Paul celebrates a great day in world history.
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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).
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One Protest (Among Many) in ’68
On April 23, 1968, students at New York City’s Columbia University held a demonstration to protest military research and the condemnation of part of the neighboring Morningside Heights section of Harlem to make way for a new student gymnasium. The protest escalated into a week-long occupation of five campus buildings before police moved in. Some 712 students were arrested, and over 100 injured during the forcible eviction. After the university-ordered police response, a student strike shut down the campus for the rest of the semester.
Paul celebrates; Paul excoriates:
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David Ricardo
The demand for money is regulated entirely by its value, and its value by its quantity.
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Immanuel Kant
On April 22, 1724, philosopher Immanuel Kant was born.
Aside from being the pre-eminent modern philosopher and originator of transcendental idealism, Kant was also a major figure of Enlightenment thought, a classical liberal, and the originator of the notion of the Categorial Imperative. He was an early and important astronomical theorist in his early career, but produced his greatest works towards the end of his life, including The Critique of Pure Reason and The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. He was also author of the 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.”
Arthur Schopenhauer is widely known as an admiring and astute critic of Kant’s thought, while philosophical opponents include Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. Kant’s approach to ethics continues to excite interest today, with some of the revival a result of the work of John Rawls.
Kant died on February 12, 1804, in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where he had lived the bulk of his life.
Nashville’s Metro Council? I’m no fan. But I do like the people of Nashville.
That’s where I differ from Tennessee’s Republican-dominated state legislature.
My beef with the Metro Council (discussed in this Wall Street Journal op-ed) is the fact that, after term limits were passed back in 1994, the council has forced voters to say “No” to five different ballot measures referred by the council (1996, 1998, 2002, 2015, 2018) to weaken or abolish their own limits.
“No” is a tough concept for them to grasp.
One of those failed council-sponsored measures even offered to reduce the size of the council from 40 to 27 in hopes voters might see that provision as positive — “give the public something,” said one pol — to divert from the council’s self-servingly unpopular attack on term limits.
The GOP-controlled state legislature, on the other hand, is very angry at Nashville’s liberal Democratic politicians for blocking the Republican National Convention from being held next year in Music City. It sure seems a vindictively partisan move, costing people who own Nashville restaurants and hotels a sizeable bit of income.
So, back in March, the Tennessee Legislature passed a new law cutting Nashville’s council from 40 to 20 members.
That’ll teach ’em, eh?
Were only the tender feelings of Nashville’s dishonorable honorables in jeopardy, I wouldn’t complain. But the ratio of us citizens to our elected representatives is critical.
As Citizens Rising head Stephen Erickson aptly put it, “The state government of Tennessee recently decided that the people of Nashville should be less well represented.”
For the moment, thankfully, a three-judge panel in Tennessee has paused the legislature’s anti-representation scheme pending the outcome of a legal challenge.
But our representatives should be working to improve representation, not hobble it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Murray Rothbard
Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Egalitarianism and the Elites,” The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 8, No. 2 (Summer 1995).