Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, aka, George Sand, Letter to Armand Barbès, (May 12, 1867), published in Georges Lubin (ed.) Correspondance (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1964-95) vol. 20, p. 412; Bruce Kajewski Traveling with Hermes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) p. 32.
On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”
This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.
Self-defense often starts with your communication devices, the kind of things that Big Brother and Big Corporate Overlords tend to target. Reclaim the Net has put together a fairly comprehensive overview and explanation of ways to reduce your risk.
For example:
● Use a strong passkey.
● Turn off fingerprint unlock and face unlock.
● Be alert to phishing attempts.
● Delete unused apps and data.
● Delete photo metadata before sending or posting photos.
● Disable location services.
● Use airplane mode when preventing access to you is more important than having access yourself.
● Usea VPN to evade censorship and tracking.
● Be careful what kind of information about yourself you make public.
● Take steps to recover a confiscated or stolen device, or at least to make its data unrecoverable.
● Use anonymous accounts.
● Use encrypted text messengers.
● Switch to more privacy-conscious browsers, search engines, and ISPs.
Depending on your circumstances, some of these tips will be more relevant than others, of course. But it’s worth perusing the whole list.
Of course, to go to all this trouble, you’d have to believe that big governments and mega-corporations are trying to surveil you. As if we lived in one of those dystopian futures they talk about in scary science fiction stories.
And who could ever believe that?
Well . . .
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another.
Ilana Mercer, reported in “Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go Poof,” WorldNetDaily.com, January 3, 2014.
March 18 marks the 8th anniversary of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, wherein students occupied the Taiwanese legislature to block a trade agreement between Taiwan and China, which the public came to believe gave too much economic leverage to China, a power that regularly threatens to invade the free and democratic island nation.
The event awakened a deep concern about China’s dangerous encroachment as well as further impressing a “Taiwanese identity.” The protest also is believed to have influenced the 2014 Umbrella movement in Hong Kong as well as leading to electoral victories in Taiwan for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in 2016 and again in 2020. This website salutes the Sunflower Student Movement and hopes this date may be long remembered as the day the modern world first stood up and said “No” to totalitarian China.
On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.
The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.
I can quote experts who argue that Daylight Saving Time doesn’t save much, and causes no small amount of harm, while others could quote experts saying the opposite.
It really comes down to holding to respectable standards. The reason to oppose Daylight Saving Time is that our time zones should have a touch of truth about them.
Before railroads stretched across America, words like “noon” and “midnight” and “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem” possessed clear meanings in every locality. The morning ended when the Sun was directly overhead (solar noon), and the afternoon began just after.
The hours of the day corresponded to this.
But with railroads, traveling quickly west or east engendered chaos as engineers’ pocket watches provided no real manageable time to schedule trains and keep them to schedule. So time zones were invented, grouping longitudinal neighbors together to make it easy to know when to adjust moving clockwork mechanisms. Still, there was a connection between clocks’ noontime and true noon somewhere in each time zone.
Anyway, Daylight Saving Time (which I’ve written about before) was invented to nudge us to get to work earlier, allowing us more leisure time at day’s end.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to extend Daylight Saving Time the whole year around. No more “Spring forward/Fall back” nonsense.
But also: no more true noon anywhere in America, ever again. Well, considering how gerrymandered the time zones are: far fewer true, solar noon locations.
Another chasm between Man and Nature, courtesy of Government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Our Taiwan road is “a road of democracy, a road of freedom, a road of human rights, and a road of peace for Taiwan.” Taiwan is our country. Our country should not be bullied, dwarfed, marginalized, and localized.
Speech (August 5, 2002), by Chen Shui-bian, former president of Taiwan (2000-2008).
On March 17, 1780, General George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”
On March 17, 1941, the U.S. Selective Service held its first lottery for the draft, in preparation for World War II. (Image, above, from the Morning Oregonian, from that year.)
Seattle, Washington, which in recent years has become increasingly “progressive” with job-killing minimum wage rate hikes, openly socialist city council members, and a whole mess of bizarre pro-crime policies, is of course driving businesses (along with decent citizens) out of the city limits.
Amazon, the giant, uber-successful Internet business announced, last week, that it will “relocate office staff in downtown Seattle due to a sustained uptick in violent crime,” wrote Thomas Kika for Newsweek. And “other businesses in the area” are continuing coronavirus lockdown policies by sticking “with remote work for the same reason.”
Government’s first job is law and order. There’s a case to be made that all other state tasks are decidedly optional, and those other jobs that muck up the first job should be chopped.
Progressives don’t get that.
But speaking of “chopped” — remember CHOP and CHAZ? These were the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone insurrections of the city’s infamous 2020 “summer of love,” where for weeks on end “protesters” took over the streets and kept out the police and generally behaved like anarchist revolutionaries. It was all very disorderly, yet city officials apologized to-and-for the movement for the longest time — presumably because the “protesters” sounded so righteous in standard leftist manner: apparently lacking any arguments against this kind of thing.
The occupied, autonomous, dangerous inanity was finally stopped, but the rise in vagrancy and crime continues.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Men who have gained a high official position in universities and academies are often actuated by a jealousy very similar to that which we have traced among ecclesiastics. They establish a certain scientific orthodoxy, based often to a great extent on mere conjecture and assertion, and seek to frown down and to silence the unknown outsider who calls in question one of their dogmas, or who discovers a truth which they have overlooked. That any region of research should be officially tabooed is a humiliating circumstance. The dread of truth, the jealousy of discovery, is not confined to the Holy Inquisition, and no disestablishment of churches, no secularization of schools and colleges, not even the suppression of every religion — were such a step possible — would put an end to its action.
J.W. Slater, “The Martyrdom of Science,” Popular Science Monthly (Vol. XVII, May 1880).