Categories
FYI

Rumors

Every election year rumors fly. Some are shot down.

A recent example? Scuttlebutt had it that presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy had “made a deal” with the Democrats:

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refuted a Washington Post report from earlier this week that said he would drop out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in exchange for a cabinet position if she wins in November.

During an Aug. 15 Latino Town Hall on TikTok, he told the moderators that the story is “fake news.”

“I didn’t ask for a cabinet position,” Kennedy said.

Jeff Louderback, “RFK Jr. Refutes Report That He Approached Harris for a Cabinet Position,” The Epoch Times (August 16, 2024).

This story gets interesting, actually, when we consider what Kennedy goes on to say: that everyone complains about political divisions, but then complains when rivals talk to one another! And who has Kennedy talked to?

“I want to meet with all candidates about dampening down the rhetoric and unifying our country.”

Kennedy said candidates, including former President Donald Trump and Libertarian presidential nominee Chase Oliver, have met with him.

“Kamala Harris said she doesn’t want to [meet],” he said.

Categories
Thought

T. S. Eliot

That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Ch. I, pp. 15 – 16.
Categories
Today

David Crockett

On August 17, 1786, American backwoods hero and politician, David Crockett, was born. Famous as a politician, he brought personal principle and honor and a “common sense” approach in representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He later played a part in the Texas Revolution, dying at the Battle of the Alamo.

Crockett grew up in East Tennessee, where he gained a reputation for hunting and storytelling, which helped make him a legend in his own time. After being made a colonel in the militia of Lawrence County, Tennessee, he was elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1821.

In 1825, Crockett was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he vehemently opposed many of the policies of President Andrew Jackson, most notably the Indian Removal Act.

Crockett wrote a number of books, including a biography of Martin Van Buren.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture international affairs

Elon Musk’s Right Answer

Elon Musk, censorship, EU, free speech, democracy

“By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.”

These words are from a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which beleaguered industrialist Hank Rearden rejects “this court’s right to try me” and refuses to put on a defense. Thereby giving the best defense of all.

Elon Musk didn’t give a speech.

Instead, when an EU muck-​a-​muck, Thierry Breton, sent him a letter on the eve of Musk’s Twitter interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump, a letter babbling about dire consequences for Twitter if it were to “amplify potentially harmful content [i.e., any deviation from current government dogma] in connection with events with major audience around the world,” Musk responded with a quote and a clip from the movie Tropic Thunder.

Other EU officials are now rushing to disavow Breton’s letter, widely castigated as an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election.

I can’t repeat the line Musk quoted, because we don’t use cuss words here. If you don’t like to hear such words, don’t click into the video clip. Just don’t go there.

Mega-​magnate Elon Musk is often badly wrong about China. But when he’s right, he’s right. Even super right. 

And we need a million more CEOs to be thus willing to stand up to regulators foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

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Categories
Thought

Marcus Aurelius

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”

Emperor and Pontifex Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, Book XIII, § 50

Categories
Today

Against Central Banking

On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-​establish the Second Bank of the United States. This made him deeply unpopular with his former supporters in the Whig Party — which was the party of “internal improvements” as well as an anti-​Jacksonian party, and Andrew Jackson had previously set himself against central banking. It is apparent that Tyler did this because he had come to believe a central bank was unconstitutional.

We have a central bank, now, of course. It is called the Federal Reserve.