Paul Jacob summarizes the week’s most important stories:
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Frank Knight
Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
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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.
Politicians and bureaucrats like some protests, fear others.
You can tell a lot about a protest movement and its actual agenda by how a government reacts. You can tell a lot about a government by how it instructs police to respond to different protests.
So we should probably take a careful look at anti-lockdown protests around the world, especially in Europe.
And how police are handling them.
Nils Melzer, Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow and the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has “requested more information on an incident in which a female anti-lockdown protester in Berlin was grabbed by the throat and brutally thrown to the ground by riot police,” reports Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News.
The response to Melzer’s request was “overwhelming, with over a hundred reports of violence flooding in,” Watson summarizes, citing a report in Berliner Zeitung.
While examples of police brutality are viewable on Twitter, YouTube, and other social media, reportage in America seems muted, perhaps thanks to our lockstep pro-lockdown corporate media.
“Something fundamental is going wrong,” Melzer says. “In all regions of the world, the authorities are apparently increasingly viewing their own people as an enemy.”
There is no mystery. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and mandatory vaccinations amount to quite a holistic assault on personal liberty.
While protests that demand more power for the state, or that would increase the security of the ruling faction, get treated with kid gloves, protests directed against state power, or against a sitting regime — and especially against such a power grab — get cracked down upon.
It’s stands to reason, but not justice.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jorge Luis Borges
Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Juan Muraña,” in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998).
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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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Say My Name
The term “Shanghaied” dates back to the 1850s, referring to Americans being kidnapped, sneaked onto ships, and transported across the Pacific Ocean, often to Shanghai, China.
Doesn’t happen so much anymore.
Unless you’re Taiwanese.
The subject came up on a just released Common Sense podcast featuring Joseph [last name withheld for his own protection], a sharp young Taiwanese lawyer working in Norway. He expressed concern that one day he might be repatriated to China, rather than returned to his home country of Taiwan.
Mighty big difference.
The totalitarians running China regularly threaten and bully free and democratic Taiwan, and its citizens. The Chinazis claim Taiwan, just like they claimed Tibet. And just like Tibetans and Hong Kongers and Uighurs, the Taiwanese know well the ruthlessness of the Butchers of Beijing.
Nobody wants to be sent there.
But in recent years, Taiwanese nationals have been taken to China from Spain and the Czech Republic, despite fierce protestations from Taiwan.
“I’m afraid of being targeted by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Joseph explained, because “I’m registered as a Chinese citizen here in Norway” and “because we initiated this [legal] case.”
Months back, I wrote about Joseph’s lawsuit to stop Norway from declaring him “Chinese” on official documents. Denied by a Norwegian court, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
Last week, the European Court of Human Rights rejected his appeal. Norway and other European countries can continue to misidentify him and others to please Chinese totalitarians.
Still, I strongly sense we have not heard the last of Joseph, and certainly not the name “Taiwan.” You can’t keep a good man down.
Or a free and prosperous people.
Not even the powerful Chinazis can do that. Not even with help from Western wimps.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ernest Bramah
When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.
Ernest Bramah, “The Transmutation of Ling,” in The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900).
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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.
“We thought that the White House was in charge,” explained Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), after the Democratic majority had failed to act on a key pandemic subsidy.
“Action is needed,” implored a panicky Speaker Pelosi in a statement also signed by the Democratic House leadership, “and it must come from the Administration.”
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-imposed moratorium [on home evictions] lapsed Sunday — five weeks after the Biden administration said it would extend the measure ‘one final month’ to July 31 and four weeks after the Supreme Court let the ban stand but signaled any new extensions would require Congress to act,” The Washington Post explained.
“But Congress didn’t act.”
Then, yesterday, President Biden responded to exhortations from his party’s left flank by announcing the CDC would extend the federal moratorium regardless of the unmet constitutional requirement.
“The bulk of the constitutional scholarship,” the president acknowledged, “says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to conclude that this sort of thing is wholly Pelosi’s bailiwick. But forget the Constitution, spending is the supreme law.
Also forgotten are the landlords devastated by the moratorium. They likewise have bills to pay.
“Congress set aside nearly $50 billion to help families . . . pay the back rent they owe and avoid eviction,” National Public Radio reported. “But that money flowed to states and counties, which . . . have managed to get just a small fraction of the money to the people who need it.”
While the political “need” for bailouts directly resulted from government action — the pandemic lockdowns — blame for the current unconstitutional mess lies squarely with the Democratic Congress.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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