It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
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Albert Camus
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Sartre Doesn’t Take the Prize
On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.
Only one other recipient of the award has turned it down voluntarily, namely Henry Kissinger’s co-winner in 1973, Le Duc Tho. Four other recipients were coerced by their governments from accepting the prize’s monetary award: Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt and Gerhard Domagk, by the Nazi government, and Boris Pasternak, by the Soviet Union.
Don’t help people after a hurricane!
Not if you live in another state and there’s no time to lose but . . . you’re licensed only in that other state.
Now, before you declare Houston-based Terence Duque an innocent victim because he was arrested for not being Florida-licensed, let’s take a cold hard look at the facts. Duque is licensed in Texas, has operated a successful roofing business since 2008, is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau, is called a “preferred contractor” by Owens Corning.
Sounds okay, right?
But hold on. After Hurricane Ian smashed Florida a few weeks ago, what did this scurvy knave do?
Shamelessly and with constructive purposes aforethought, Duque offered his services to residents of hard-hit Charlotte County, Florida!!!! No, seriously. Simply because homeowners had had their roofs ripped up, Duque offered to repair them!!!!! Yet this man calls himself a roofer!!!!!!!!!
Arrested by the Charlotte County sheriff, who says “I will not allow unlicensed contractors to further victimize [sic]” hurricane victims, Duque is charged with “conducting business in Charlotte County without a Florida license.” He faces one to five years in jail.
He says he thought he’d been allowed to help Floridians because licensing regulations had been loosened due to the emergency.
No.
Justin Pearson, an attorney with Institute for Justice, says Duque was punished for “doing the right thing.”
The right thing??? The man was honestly trying to help people recover from a terrible personal setback and fully qualified to do so!!!!!!! Look at the facts!!!!!!!!!
Throw away the key?
This is, er, Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Albert Jay Nock
Get up in one of our industrial centres today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in. Then what choice have you, save to degenerate either into a fool or into a hypocrite? And who wants to live in a land of fools and hypocrites?
Albert Jay Nock, “Free Speech and Plain Language,” The Atlantic Monthly (January 1936).
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Harding Spoke Out
On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.
“EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak should not be getting a dime of taxpayer funds,” declared Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), “until they are completely transparent. Period.”
Nevertheless, “despite losing a previous award for failing to provide records essential to an investigation into that origin,” Daszak’s group is now slated to receive $600,000, The Intercept informs us.
While regular readers are well aware of what Rep. Rodgers calls “madness,” at Unherd.com’s The Post, Ashley Rindsberg refreshes our memories:
- “EcoHealth Alliance is . . . responsible for funneling . . . US government grants to the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, considered by many to be the likely source of the pandemic.”
- Still, “[Daszak] was the go-to source for the American media as they sought to ‘prove’ that the lab leak theory was little more than a Right-wing conspiracy. He also surreptitiously organised a letter in The Lancet, attempting to shut down the debate by labelling this potential origin as a ‘conspiracy theory.’”
- “Most alarmingly,” Daszak “submitted a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that called for scientists to insert a furin cleavage site — a key distinguishing and extremely rare feature of SARS-Cov-2 — into SARS-like viruses. In other words: a blueprint for making SARS-2 in a lab.”
Instead of throwing money at EcoHealth Alliance (which would merely funnel it to a Chinese lab), invest in a thorough congressional investigation into how Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, and co-conspirator Dr. Anthony Fauci purposely obstructed the inquiry into the origin of a pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans and nearly seven million worldwide.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Arthur Miller
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
Arthur Miller, “The Year it Came Apart,” New York magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 (December 30, 1974 – January 6, 1975), p. 30.
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American boundaries
On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.
Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length.
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Partisan Police State Tactics
We must take the initiative to change things if we don’t like the way things are. If you’re a congressman, this means — sometimes, at least — investigating horrific conduct.
The September 23rd raid of anti-abortion activist Mark Houck’s home should evoke bipartisan dismay. But only Republicans seem to be looking into the FBI’s recent arrest of Houck and the ludicrously heavy-handed tactics used to apprehend him.
In 2021, Houck had pushed a pro-abortion activist away from his son, whom the activist had been harassing, in front of a clinic. Houck’s action was allegedly a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The alleged victim sued.
Last summer, the case was dismissed on a local level. But that determination was blithely ignored by our ideologically compromised FBI, which sent dozens of agents to swoop down on Houck and terrorize his family.
U.S. Representatives Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson, both Republicans, sent a letter asking for documents related to the raid and arrest.
According to the letter: “Several recent actions by the department reinforce the conclusion that the Justice Department is using its federal law-enforcement authority as a weapon against the administration’s political opponents….
“We write to conduct oversight of your authorization of a dawn raid of the home of a pro-life leader, in front of his wife and seven children, when he had offered to voluntarily cooperate with authorities.”
Such a letter requesting accountability is only a bare beginning, however. If we want to prevent a partisan police state, there is much more to be done.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Cornwallis Surrenders
On October 19, 1781, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’s sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, at Yorktown, Virginia. The Revolutionary War (or War for Independence, or Colonial Rebellion, or whatever you wish to call it) was over.
In 1918 on this date, conservative writer Russell Kirk was born.