Competition is merely the absence of oppression.
Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies (posthumous, 1850), par. 10.4.
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Frédéric Bastiat
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Luther Martin
Died on this date, American founding politician, Luther Martin [pictured], in 1826.
Martin is famed among founding fathers for refusing to sign the U.S. Constitution, seeing the new compact as unduly centralizing and nationalistic.
On July 8, 1839, American industrialist John D. Rockefeller was born. On this same date in 1907, businessman and politician George W. Romney was born.
“[P]arents are fighting with school boards in cities and towns across the country,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid informed her audience, “over curricula that they believe teaches white kids that they are racist.”
Reid asserted that “none of this is actually happening,”
She spoke with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. Crenshaw invented the term “Critical Race Theory” and told Reid that CRT was merely a “boogey-man,” adding: “I think I would know if we were being taught in K-12.”
The “GOP freak-out over Critical Race Theory,” offered Reid, was a “highly manufactured strategy created by seasoned political operatives looking for the perfect wedge issue.”
Reid ignores parents across the country actively encountering this racist anti-racism. Back in April, parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, documented half a million tax dollars going to programs titled “critical race theory.” After being told there was no such thing. It’s happening all across the country.
But fear not: the National Education Association to the rescue!
A few days ago, the nation’s most powerful teachers union cleared it all up by passing New Business Item 39 to defend the use of CRT in K-12 public schools, including by providing “an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.”
The NEA may be on the wrong side, but nevertheless buries the disingenuous psy-op of the left intelligentsia, for whom no lie is too big to push.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Dr. Richard Muller
Some people say we will never know, not until China confesses, or unless there’s a whistle blower — but, well, we have a whistle blower: it was the virus itself. It came here; it came out of China; and it carried [to] us genetic information. . . . Yes, it was a laboratory leak.
Dr. Richard Muller, after discussing how China blacklists scientists who would gather and publish evidence for a laboratory leak hypothesis for origins of the CCP virus, before the GOP House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis hearing, June 29, 2021. “China has managed to interfere, to break, United States’ freedom of expression freedom of investigation, freedom of thought.” He advanced five facts to show the gain-of-function origin of SARS-CoV-2: (1) Lack of pre-pandemic infections; (2) absence of a host animal; (3) unprecedented genetic purity; (4) no known way for the spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory; (5) optimized to attack humans, “again something that had never happened in … natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”
Note: the bracketed word is in place of a sic notice. Dr. Muller misspoke and said “with us” instead of what he obviously intended, “to us” or, perhaps, “with itself.”
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Solomon Islands Independence
July 7 is Independence Day in the Solomon Islands, commemorating the island nation’s political separation in 1978.
The “separation” may be over-stated, however: though self-government was achieved in 1976, and political independence for the islands obtained two years later, Solomon Islands remains a constitutional monarchy with the Queen of Solomon Islands, currently Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, as its head of state. Sir Frank Utu Ofagioro Kabui has been the Governor General since 2009, and Manasseh Damukana Sogavare has served as Prime Minister since late April.
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Good-bye, Google
Is Google working for the Chinese government?
The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.
Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.
On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.
On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.
“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”
LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.
The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Melius est bene mori, quam male vivere . . . qui mortem metuit, amittit gaudia vitae; super omnia vincit veritas, vincit, qui occiditur, quia nulla ei nocet adversitas, si nulla ei dominatur iniquitas.
It is better to die well, than to live wrongly . . . who is afraid of death loses the joy of life; truth prevails all, prevails who is killed, because no adversity can harm him, who is not dominated by injustice.
Jan Hus, Letter to Christian of Prachatice, as quoted in John Huss: His Life, Teachings and Death, After Five Hundred Years (1915) by David Schley Schaff, p. 58. “Super omnia vincit veritas” (Truth Prevails All) was adopted as the motto by Hussite warriors, and centuries later this motto was inscribed on the banner of the Presidents of the Czechoslovakia and now (in Czech translation) is inscribed on the banner of the President of the Czech Republic.
July 6 serves better as a “Today in Tyranny” marker than anything positive, at least when you consider these events:
- 1415 – Jan Hus was burnt at the stake.
- 1535 – Sir Thomas More was executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
- 1887 – David Kalakaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was forced at gunpoint by Americans to sign the Bayonet Constitution giving Americans more power in Hawaii while stripping Hawaiian citizens of their rights.
- 1939 – The Nazi “Third Reich” closed the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany.
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The Other Other
“How would you characterize this moment?” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian (and occasional Biden advisor) Jon Meacham.
“I think you have a dedicated minority of the population — it was the secessionist slave-holding interests in the 1850s,” responded Meacham. “Today, it is this vast swath of people who have found a home in the Republican Party, who are no longer part of a coherent and constructive and good-intentioned conversation about the future of the country.”
Meacham then posited that “a democracy fundamentally depends on our capacity to see each other not as adversaries — or heathen — but as neighbors.”
Wait . . . did the tenured television expert say our whole system relies on not considering those you disagree with politically as “the other,” just mere seconds after comparing a “vast swath” of Republicans to slaveholders and essentially accusing them of being incoherent, destructive, and evil?
While Meacham bemoaned “these” otherwise undefined Republicans, CNN flashed pictures of the January 6th rioters on the screen. Hmmm. Obviously with the best of intentions.
Next, Zakaria sought the input of another Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin . . . also a well-known plagiarist.
“The answer” to seeing folks as this “other,” according to Goodwin? “I believe it’s national service,” she argued. “You get people from the city to the country, country to the city, you begin to create a new generation that has shared values.”
She’s delusional, but serious.*
Notice that her Pulitzer Prize-winning psychopathy would force millions of young (read: less powerful) citizens into government make-work, to be directed and “re-educated” by Washington-based experts . . . like Goodwin (and Meacham).
The other thing? Ironically, the program aired on Independence Day.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Last week, in a New York Times op-ed, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway urged “compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.” He contends forcing young people out of their chosen life paths will “build bridges between people” and “shore up our fragile communities.”
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1973
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