Botswanans celebrate their independence from Great Britain with an official day on September 30.
Also, September 30 has served as Blasphemy Rights Day since 2009, when it was initiated by the Center for Inquiry.
We can only hope that their efforts will bear fruit — or, if we’re Elon Musk, we can also provide protesters with Internet service via Starlink satellite, now that the Iranian government has blocked the Internet in much of the country.
The immediate spark was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
On September 13, Mahsa was arrested by Iran’s morality police for incorrectly wearing the hijab, the traditional head covering mandatory for Iranian women since 1979. Some of her hair showed.
According to witnesses, the police beat Mahsa in the police van; the police deny it.
Within hours of being detained, Mahsa was hospitalized and in a coma. She soon died. The police not very plausibly claimed that she had a heart attack. All a terrible coincidence. The family says that Mahsa had no health problems before being detained.
The immoral morality police were obeying the country’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, who on August 15 decreed that the nation’s dress code be more strictly enforced.
The protests — in which women have been burning their hijabs, cutting their hair, and shouting “Death to the oppressor!” — are ongoing and nationwide, and have spread to other countries.
At least thirty protesters have been killed.
In the words of the New Yorker’s Robin Wright, Mahsa’s death “lit the fuse of long-smoldering dissent in Iran,” and its people have taken to the streets before.
Godspeed this time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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People now have more information, and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.
Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), p. 226.
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
Well, surely there have been times when politicians generally tried to pretend harder.
A story in the Washington Post epitomizes current attitudes.
“The nation’s most prestigious scientific body said Tuesday that it has barred a key White House official focused on climate change, Jane Lubchenco, from participating in its publications and activities for five years,” wrote Maxine Joselow six weeks ago. It turns out that the National Academy of Sciences took this uncommon course for good reason. “While serving as an editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lubchenco accepted an article for publication that was later retracted because it relied on outdated data, and because she has a personal relationship with one of the authors, who is her brother-in-law.”
Now, Dr. Lubchenco has admitted her “error of judgment” and her “regret.”
But she’s not just any White House official: “Despite this disciplinary action from one of the most prestigious science organizations in the world,” explained M. Anthony Mills and Ian R. Banks in The Wall Street Journal this weekend, “and her own admission of fault — Ms. Lubchenco continues to lead the White House’s Scientific Integrity Task Force.”
The Biden Administration — called “The Biden” here on Tuesday, as a tip of the hat to the commonsense conjecture that Joe Biden isn’t really in charge — hasn’t removed Lubchenco from her position. She still co-chairs the Scientific Integrity Task Force.
And her being barred from publication and participation in a number of scientific venues? It doesn’t mean that much, when she’s in government. That’s about money and propaganda, and power. Not science.
Or integrity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Only the strong know there is but one cause of war. All the other multitudinous reasons recorded in the history books were not real reasons at all. They were nothing but plausible pretexts. There was but one root-cause that persisted right back to the dim days of the jungle. When two monkeys want the same banana, that is war.
Eric Frank Russell, ”I Am Nothing,” Astounding Science Fiction (July 1952).
On September 28, 2008, SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first private spacecraft to go into orbit around planet Earth.
John Hinderaker of Powerline notes a few recent tip-of-the-iceberg actions by the Biden or its political allies.
The Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams was suddenly dropped from 80 newspapers after the strip began mocking certain modish pieties about diversity. We’ve learned that ostensibly private censorship is often done at the behest of government or politicians eager to muzzle somebody.
The Biden issued a slew of subpoenas to persons associated with the Trump administration for documents about efforts to challenge the 2020 election results. Nearly all these pertain “to activities that are plainly lawful,” observes Hinderaker.
The Biden seized the cell phone of Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and infamous skeptic of the 2020 election results. He’s accused of identity theft and damaging a computer related to an alleged breach of Colorado voting machines, accusations that Hinderaker regards as implausible on their face. “This all has to do with his opposition to the regime.”
Although the Biden may provide rationales for the targeting, these tend to be paper-thin. Why? Probably because the Biden wants you to know exactly why all this banana-republic stuff is happening. You are expected to take the micro-thin excuses as a hint — so that you will adopt a paranoid stance.
And to avoid saying or doing anything that may get you, too, targeted by the Biden.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Man’s society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.
Philip K. Dick, “The Variable Man” (1952), The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, v.1: The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (1987).
Lancaster, Pennsylvania — home to James Buchanan, Jr., the 15th president of the United States, and to congressman, abolitionist and “Radical Republican” Thaddeus Stevens — served, during the American Revolution, as the capital of the United States for one day, on September 27, 1777.
This occurred after the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia, which had been captured by the British. The revolutionary government then moved still further away, to York.