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Today

Statute of Kalisz

On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.

On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.

Categories
Update

Keep Off, Keep On

The political party that demands that every last street person, hobo, convict and illegal alien have it made easy to vote has also worked mightily, behind the scenes, to make sure that at least one candidate not appear on ballots. The maniest-​many should vote, but not more than two should be voted for! “For months, Democratic National Committee-​backed lawsuits were focused on preventing independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on ballots in multiple states,” begins Jeff Louderback’s Saturday article for The Epoch Times.

But the party’s tactics changed “on Aug. 23 when Kennedy announced he would suspend his campaign in battleground states and urge his supporters to vote for former President Donald Trump in those states.”

On August 26, in “RFKj+T,” Paul Jacob had explained why Kennedy had switched to backing Trump. Today Louderback explains the ramifications for the Democratic Party of that switch.

Kennedy’s idea of taking his name off the ballot in ten key, marginal states — voting populations that could go either way — has left the Democratic Party with a new stance: try to keep Kennedy on the ballots they had previously fought to keep him off of.

The new tactic has met with mixed success. “Wisconsin is currently the only state rejecting Kennedy’s withdrawal effort,” Louderback reports. “On Aug. 27, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5 – 1 to keep Kennedy’s name on the state’s ballot. Kennedy filed a lawsuit challenging the ruling on Sept. 3.”

And so “democratic” politics goes on.

Categories
Thought

Eric Weinstein

Right now we have a country with no president, and we’ve moved on. And what’s Taylor Swift doing?

Eric Weinstein speaking to Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast, September 4, 2024.
Categories
Today

Fannie and Freddie

On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 

Both of these had been created, decades before, by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-​market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007 – 2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Say No to Reich-​Harris Reich

Freedom of speech is constantly embattled.

Just one example: government-​instigated stomping on social-​media speech in recent years, proof of which has been revealed thanks to litigation, freedom of information requests, and the purchase of Twitter by a friend of free speech.

But the embarrassing revelations have not caused our censors to retreat.

They’re not trying to censor people, they suggest, just trying to stop lies, hate, misinformation. And now Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, wants to arrest Elon Musk for resisting censorship as Twitter’s new owner.

Reich says: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”

Reich has also said that we must regulate speech to “direct people’s attention … to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.” As Jonathan Turley observes, “the ‘healthy public conversation’ with Robert Reich increasingly appears to be his talking and the rest of us listening.”

Would “regulators around the world” include U.S. regulators? Since the First Amendment has yet to be rescinded, perhaps Reich would prefer other countries to handle imprisoning Elon Musk for letting people speak “too” freely. But I’m guessing Reich would be fine with a U.S. arrest.

Reich would fit right in with a Harris administration, if we get one, led by a woman who calls the First Amendment a “privilege” and has lamented that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.” Which, she declares, “has to stop.”

Something has to stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
Thought

Robert Anton Wilson

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Robert Anton Wilson, The Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (1991).