Paul Jacob looks at the world under threat of totalitarianism, while America “fights its own shadow”:
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Watch: Warned!
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F. Marion Crawford
The lover of romance may lie in the sun, caring not for the time of day and content to watch the butterflies that cross his blue sky on the way from one flower to another. But the historian is an entomologist who must be stirring. He must catch the moths, which are his facts, in the net which is his memory, and he must fasten them upon his paper with sharp pins, which are dates.
Francis Marion Crawford, Don Orsino (1891).
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Purple Heart
On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”
Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.
Paul Jacob on the west in general and Americans in particular needing to get their act together — and not just to face the Chinazi threat.
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Jack Woodford
Constantly writer after writer would come to me in Hollywood to invite me into Communist activities and I would laugh at them and point out the utter inconsistency of a man making fifteen hundred dollars a week or more, doing next to nothing, going for a philosophy which would destroy just that and put them back where they were when the golden cornucopia splayed them.
Jack Woodford (1894–1971) was a successful American pulp novelist and non-fiction writer of the 1930s and 1940s. He had a brief stint in Hollywood, and wrote about his literary adventures in his 1962 autobiography.
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Jamaican independence
On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
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You Could Look It Up
Your constitutional rights have been violated. Now what?
One thing you can do is find out exactly where you stand with respect to what the Institute for Justice calls “clearly established law.” IJ has created a new research tool, the Constitutional GPA, to help lawyers and others identify relevant legal decisions.
The tool is designed to help users make government accountable despite the many confusing barriers to accountability. The “GPA” in the name refers both to “grade point average” and the question that is part of the tool’s graphic design: “Is your Government Preventing Accountability?”
Doctrines of qualified immunity and other special rules often prevent government officials who violate your rights from being held responsible unless courts have ruled otherwise with respect to specific rights-violating actions. Exactly what the law permits or proscribes can vary widely in different jurisdictions.
The interactive tool grades state governments and federal courts of appeal based on how they treat claims of immunity and helps users “identify the clearly established law necessary to defeat qualified immunity.”
IJ gives the example of a government employee’s unjustified search of your car supposing this takes place in Nevada. Answering a few simple questions enables one to search the Constitutional GPA database of hundreds of cases to find about a dozen pertinent legal decisions.
So if you find yourself on the wrongest of wrong ends of the State, watch the Institute’s YouTube video on how to use the new tool and try it out at the ij.org/gpa web page.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Robert LeFevre
All sentient life is concerned with property, either instinctively or rationally. No organism capable of volitional action can escape the demands arising within it for some kind of property relationship. Survival of all beings capable of consciousness is predicated directly upon some kind of property relationship.
Robert LeFevre, The Philosophy of Ownership (1966), first page.
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Flogged, Founded, Fired
On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.
The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
Discovery in a lawsuit brought against the Canadian Government has revealed that “Follow the Science” was a ruse.
When Trudeau’s administration announced, last year, a restrictive travel ban on all who refused to get “vaccinated” against COVID, the breathtaking nature of the political move (which was followed by a snap election) — and its sheer illiberality from a Liberal — may have overshadowed how little science was behind it.*
Of course, now that the vaccines have proven to be ineffective at stopping the disease, the medical rationale seems especially shaky. But, as Rupa Subramanya writes at Bari Weiss’s “Common Sense” Substack news page, “Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.”
Among the juicy revelations uncovered?
“No one in the COVID Recovery unit” — which Ms. Subramanya identifies as “the secretive government panel that crafted the mandate” — possessed any medical credentials or had undergone any significant medical training.
The impetus for the travel ban came from above, in Trudeau’s cabinet.
And, juicier yet, “leading up to the implementation of the travel mandate, transportation officials were frantically looking for a rationale for it. They came up short.”
Oddly, the COVID Recovery unit has no website, and is rarely mentioned in official documents.
The plaintiffs in the case that has brought the information to light are Karl Harrison and Shaun Rickard. Lawsuits are expensive, and some of the funds to bring the case forward were raised on GoFundMe. In February, following Trudeau’s crackdown on the Trucker protest, GoFundMe kicked Rickard off the site.
In mid-June, Canada lifted the travel bans. But threatened to re-introduce them as, er, needed.
What we have learned is that the “necessity” was always a political one.
The science was just not there.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Emails released recently by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration show a similar lack-of-science basis for high-level political requirements for dramatic “medical” responses to COVID.
Art assist: craiyon
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