On October 24, 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
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Thirty Years’ End
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Jeffrey Tucker
People are raging on the streets of Rome, Paris, Melbourne, London, and many other major cities around the world, even while the national press ignores them for fear of spreading discontent. In the US, the protests are taking the form of quiet seething, illustrated in part by a president who is ramping up the controls by the day, even as his approval ratings are underwater by double digit numbers. Crowds chanting “#uck Joe Biden” are re-rendered by the press as “Let’s go Brandon,” as if that is going to fool anyone.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “How Close Is Total Social and Economic Collapse?” Brownstone Institute, October 15, 2021.
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Uprising(s)
On October 23, 1850, the first National Women’s Rights Convention began in Worcester, Massachusetts.
On the same October date 106 years later, thousands of Hungarians rose up against Soviet rule.
One of the things that made 2019 a decent year was the robotics team at Farmington High School in Minnesota.
A former student at the school, Tyler Jackson, contacted the team to ask if they could help his son, two-year-old Cillian, become more mobile. He had been born with a condition resembling cerebral palsy that makes it hard to move around.
The Jackson family couldn’t afford the kind of power wheelchair Cillian needed.
The Farmington kids were eager to help. They replaced the electrical innards of a Fisher Price riding toy, added a bicycle seat, and used a 3D printer to design a joystick and other components.
The team applied skills gained by building robots for competitions, and they also got technical help from the University of Delaware, which had a program for designing mobility devices for disabled kids.
A local broadcast story about the wheelchair shows Cillian in action.
He isn’t the only child who has benefitted from the team’s tech prowess.
Early in 2021, the Rogue Robotics team at Farmington posted an appeal on their Facebook page after learning that Fisher Price had “discontinued the Power Wheels model Wild Thing we convert into wheelchairs for little kids” who either don’t fit into standard powered wheelchairs or can’t afford them.
They asked that anyone who happens to have a Wild Thing model in good condition consider donating it.
This kind of innovation can now be rolled out — pun intended? — broadly, not so much as mass production but as home and community and fix-it shop projects, with 3D printing tech aiding in the revolution.
Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Heinrich Heine
Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.
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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.
Is it good news?
LinkedIn recently announced that it’s ending the current form of its service in China, citing the “challenging” environment.
“While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs . . . we have not found [the same] success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed. We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment . . .”
Part of the problem has been China’s unremitting censorship. Which was not openly discussed in the LinkedIn post, of course.
Another part has been the Microsoft-owned firm’s willingness, as the price of doing business in China, to do the Chinazi government’s bidding in censoring dictatorship-disfavored posts. Also not openly discussed.
So now LinkedIn will replace the full LinkedIn experience with an app for China-based users that is a “standalone jobs application.”
Whether this means that LinkedIn will no longer censor Chinese LinkedIn users remains to be seen. For example, China is likely to demand censorship of a user if it sees a disapproved organization mentioned in a job posting.
At that point, will LinkedIn leave China entirely?
Given the Chinese government’s history, why wait?
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to operate in China and to censor results at the behest of the Chinese government.
That public opinion has swayed Microsoft and LinkedIn to the extent that they will no longer abet China’s censorship of social media is good. But still doing business with CCP-controlled China is fraught with danger. Why? Because China is fraught with tyranny.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Peter Gabriel
Creativity comes from the freedom to fail. And freedom to fail comes from experimentation, and that’s what gives something its individuality.
Peter Gabriel, as quoted in The Kate Bush Story (2012).
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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.