Odoacer, a German “barbarian,” ousted Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, thus ending that empire on September 4, 476 A.D.
Many common people did not notice a change.
Categories
California’s Electoral Saboteurs
Thou shalt not check the ID of a person showing up to vote.
California lawmakers — apparently eager to help noncitizens vote — have banned local voter ID laws like that of Huntington Beach.
Attorney General Rob Bonta says that requiring ID to vote “flies in the face” of the principle that “the right to cast your vote is the foundation of our democracy.”
But Huntington Beach didn’t impair “the right to cast your vote.”
Opponents of ID requirements say that the problem is the terrible hardship of presenting a valid ID or perhaps of obtaining one. These may be chores, but they’re hardly ventures into the unknown. If you’re a citizen, you can get ID showing you are. And almost everyone is capable of pulling an ID out of a pocket and displaying it.
Here’s a tell: “An amendment to Senate Bill 1174 that would have explicitly banned illegal migrants from voting was rejected.”
Is there evidence of fraud in American elections?
Is it major — not a marginal issue having to do with one or two wayward ballots per decade?
Could lawmakers like California State Senator Dave Min, who asserts that “voter ID laws only subvert voter turnout,” be wrong?
Yes.
The evidence can be found in John Fund’s books, such as Our Broken Elections, Stealing Elections, and Who’s Counting? A more recent report of attempts to undermine the vote and prevent the same is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “The 2024 Cheat and What’s Being Done About It.”
Voter IDs don’t subvert voter turnout, they subvert fraudulent voter turnout.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
Categories
F. A. Hayek
The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind.
Friedrich August von Hayek, as quoted in Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001).
Categories
Dixy Lee Ray
On September 3, 1914, Dixy Lee Ray was born.
Her stint as governor of the State of Washington was a controversial one, as she economized in startling ways, and proved largely unsympathetic to environmentalist politics. Indeed, she later wrote Trashing the Planet, which took on trendy “solutions” to environmental problems, based in no small part on her own experience and perspective as a scientist. She was an early critic of the developing “global warming” pseudo-“consensus.”
Ray died on January 2, 1994.
Twitter is being banned in Brazil by a “Supreme Court justice” who seems to be the de facto ruler of the country. Who is also threatening Brazilians with massive fines, $8,900 USD daily, if they try to reach Twitter through a VPN.
A VPN or virtual private network hides your IP address and encrypts your web traffic. VPNs protect privacy and let you visit sites otherwise inaccessible. Sites that purvey “disinformation,” i.e., criticism of the government, and other verboten content. VPNs combat censorship and surveillance.
The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, issued an edict to ban Twitter after Twitter owner Elon Musk refused to obey censorship orders.
Twitter had told users that it expected to be shut down by Justice de Moraes “because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
Now Musk declares that an “unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying [free speech] for political purposes.”
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino adds that according to Brazil’s own constitution, “censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden.… Until there is change in Brazil, X [Twitter] will be shut down.”
Dictatorships often issue “illegal orders” in the sense that these contradict constitutional provisions whose force has faded … or that were never intended to do anything but fool people to begin with. Such political systems are not truly constitutional.
Nor would the situation be any better were the “constitution” more honest, simply announcing that whatever the dictator says goes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
Categories
Mervyn Peake
To live at all is miracle enough.
Mervyn Peake, title of a poem as well as his epitaph.