In Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, approximately 3,000 students from 13 Beijing universities gathered on May 4, 1919, to protest the Treaty of Versailles, which transferred Chinese territory to Japan.
Artemis II astronauts saw meteors — micrometeoroids, specifically — hitting the far side of the moon during their eclipse-event view. This remains one of the more surprising findings of the mission.
On April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II mission, the Orion spacecraft flew over the Moon’s far side, allowing the crew to experience a unique “total solar eclipse” from their perspective (the Sun passing behind the Moon). In the resulting darkness, they observed six distinct flashes of light on the lunar surface, which NASA scientists confirmed were micrometeoroid impacts.
This was the first time humans traveling beyond Low Earth Orbit have directly witnessed micrometeoroid strikes on the Moon in real-time.
Paul Jacob wrote about Artemis’s extensive use of corporate technology, contracting, and the bid-purchase system on April 22, 2026. NASA estimates that the Artemis program engages over 3,800 businesses across the United States. This includes small machine shops, software developers, material suppliers, and research institutions. But here is a list of the major corporate contractors responsible for the core systems of the Artemis program:
It is enough to ask somebody for his weapons without saying ‘I want to kill you with them,’ because when you have his weapons in hand, you can satisfy your desire.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (A.D. 1517), Book 1, Ch 44 (as translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella).
A marketing representative for the Digital Equipment Corporation sent the world’s first spam message (unsolicited commercial email) on May 3, 1978, to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.
The Virginia redistricting story got a new wrinkle on April 22: “Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) introduced legislation to repeal the 1840s retrocession that delivered the other side of the Potomac River to the Commonwealth of Virginia,” according to The Epoch Times.
“Influential conservatives who back the idea now include Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, and Mike Howell, president of The Oversight Project, a government watchdog group.” The report quotes Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon, who “has repeatedly testified to Congress on the issue of D.C. statehood, agreed with activists that Congress never had the authority to retrocede the Virginia portion of the district in the first place.
Rather than Congress doing this, an executive order from the president sure seems . . . easier. “Pilon sees Trump as the likeliest president to force the issue, despite the political risks of stripping thousands of Virginians of political power.” Since the move to re-incorporate very populated parts of Virginia would in effect disenfranchise its inhabitants, Pilon is not alone to question the “optics,” as The Epoch Times phrased it.
Paul Jacob last published on the Virginia redistricting brouhaha on April 23.
Apparently, “conspiracy stuff” is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
Gore Vidal, “The Enemy Within,” The Observer (October 27, 2002).
On May 2, 1989, the Hungarian government began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.
“In 1889, an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions designated May 1 as pro-workers day,” informs the Wikidates.org website, “on the anniversary of the Haymarket Riots in Chicago (1886).”
Five years later, clearly opposed to cavorting with socialists, the U.S. established Labor Day on September 1, an alternative date to honor workers.
Today, political rallies and protests are expected in major cities across the country. “On May 1, 2026, workers, students, and families rally, march, and take action across the country to demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires, with many refusing business as usual through No School. No Work. No Shopping,” says May Day Strong, the umbrella group organizing events.
These are the revolutionary slogans of a General Strike, intended to shut down society. Or perhaps, since the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are big supporters, just provide teachers a day off.
And considering Cato Institute’s graph of student performance in public education charted against tax outlays to the cause, any teachers’ union suggestion of skinflintery on the part of Mr. Moneybags The Taxpayer is obscene.
“Workers over billionaires” is the sort of un-American class-warfare slogan that is not only divisive but also badly misguided: billionaires create jobs, without which being a worker really loses its luster. Plus, it’s ineffective: Demonizing the rich never made a society any richer.
Apter for the day? The international distress call: Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Grok Imagine
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop (1919).
The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, written by philosopher Benedetto Croce in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals by Giovanni Gentile, declared the unreconcilable split between the philosopher and the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, to which he had previously given a vote of confidence on October 31, 1922.
The manifesto was published by Il Mondo on May 1, 1925, which was Workers’ Day, symbolically responding to the publication of the Fascist manifesto on the Natale di Roma, the founding of Rome (traditionally celebrated on April 21). The Fascist press claimed that Croce’s manifesto was “more authoritarian” than its Fascist counterpart — a typical leftist dismissal of what used to be called “liberalism.”