Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue.
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, Zanoni (1842).
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Bulwer-Lytton
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The Mahatma
On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.
Michigan voters: Beware of a petition by the group Voters for Transparency and Term Limits, a nontransparent group working deceitfully against term limits.
Currently, Michigan state senators are limited to two four-year terms; state representatives to three two-year terms. The VTTL people want to bloat maximum tenure in a legislative seat to twelve years, which they call a “reduction” because the twelve years would nominally cap total service in both chambers.
A now-familiar gambit. The old, stock propaganda against term limits just doesn’t cut it anymore: arguments about how “term limits give lobbyist ginormous power, and, uh, we already have term limits and they’re called elections” are a nonstarter these days. Term limits are too popular and have been too effective.
So enemies of term limits now pretend that they’re the best friends term limits ever had. Indeed, they wish to strengthen term limits . . . we’re just not supposed to notice that by “reducing” the two-chamber overall limit by two years generally politicians will stay longer in office.
With 110 House seats and only 38 Senators, it is merely mathematics that few politicians successfully switch chambers to serve the current 14 year maximum. But, rest assured, this amendment means virtually every politician will stay in the same legislative seat for 12 years.
Greg Schmid, author of the definitive commentary on this hoax, predicts that VTTL will pretend to conduct a petition drive for a while, then invite incumbent politicians in the Michigan legislature to refer the measure to the ballot, skipping the initiative’s expense and hard work.
If you see the petition, don’t sign. If the amendment gets to ballot, vote No.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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F.A. Hayek
Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom: A Condensation from the Book,” Reader’s Digest (April 1945), p. 11.
March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws as well as his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.
In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.
On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”
Is this a news story?
“Electric-car baron Elon Musk calls for increasing U.S. oil and gas [production] to combat Russia.”
It’s news because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and because gas has gotten awfully expensive) and because Musk is a major industrial figure. But a businessman calling for deregulation of an industry — is that also headline-worthy stuff?
Unfortunately, yes, given how businessmen so often want liberty for themselves along with ever-expanding restrictions for competitors (or the same restrictions for everyone as long as competitors end up getting hurt more).
I want a world in which we can make no sense of the word “but” in this opening paragraph:
“Tesla may be the world’s leading seller of plug-in electric vehicles, but CEO Elon Musk wants the U.S. oil-and-gas industry to ramp up production.”
“But”?
Musk’s statement-by-tweet doesn’t help: “Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”
These words are not super-clear about what Elon Musk believes the government’s attitude should be toward markets during non-extraordinary times. War or no war, government policies safeguarding markets should not be resorted to only as emergency measures. No matter how much some may welcome sustained efforts to hobble an industry.
It’s rare that our businessmen clearly enunciate the principles of free enterprise that they are thought themselves to practice. We’re lucky if we get a tendency in that direction.
I guess that’s better, at least, than a fervent statism that seeks to wipe out all economic freedom all the time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Albert Camus
There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.
Albert Camus, The Plague (1947).
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Slavery and Anti-Slavery in America
On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” often described as the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine (pictured) is believed to be the essay’s author.
The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.
Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Johnson himself was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro,” and became the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally recognized as a lifelong slave in England’s North American colonies. In summary: the first official chattel slave in English-speaking North America was of African descent was owned by a man also of African descent.
“Why isn’t this in the newspapers?”
That’s what Dr. John Campbell asked on his YouTube channel yesterday, reviewing several studies of ivermectin as an agent in the fight against COVID-19 — but directly regarding the results of research out of Brazil. It was an impressive large-number study, in which the researchers invited the whole population of Itajaí to participate, with 159,561 included in the analysis: 113,845 regular users of ivermectin and 45,716 non-users.
“Seventy percent reduction in mortality in this study” of those who took a very “tiny dosage of ivermectin every fortnight, acting as a prophylaxis” over those did not. “I mean, this is just huge!”
Dr. Campbell, who has been a voice of calm science during the pandemic, goes on to say that “It’s almost as if information has been deliberately suppressed throughout the pandemic, to be quite honest.” With a wry look, he went on to say “No one’s saying that’s true, of course, but it’s almost like that.”
Droll.
But non-ironically, he insists the evidence is “powerful, present, and overwhelming.”
“Seventy percent,” he marvels, “how do you argue with a number like that? It’s a very, very high number.”
And the decrease in hospitalization was 67 percent.
All in all, the study found less infection, fewer hospitalizations, and an astoundingly lower death rate in the ivermectin group.
Earlier in the video, the doctor considered another study, comparing the cheap anti-parasitic to the far more expensive remdesivir, a Fauci-pushed Gilead Sciences anti-viral, with similar results.
It’s “almost as if” the expert class that spurned ivermectin doesn’t care if people die.
No one’s saying that, but. . . .
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The studies:
Kerr L, Cadegiani F A, Baldi F, et al. (January 15, 2022) “Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching.” Cureus 14(1): e21272. doi:10.7759/cureus.21272.
I. Efimenko, S. Nackeeran, S. Jabori, J.A. Gonzalez Zamora, S. Danker, D.Singh, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database.” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 116 (2022) S1–S130.
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Nick Fuentes
Because of how the federal government operates, they really can do whatever they want to whoever they want and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Nick Fuentes, speaking in “The Total End of a Free Society” (February 23, 2022).