Principles aren’t found, don’t invent themselves; they protect themselves, they spread; and there are few more difficult operations in the world than to maintain the notion — at once clear, yet absorbed within the system — of a universal principle.
Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus: The Crowned Anarchist (1934).
Born on this day: historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nathan Irving Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).
Hentoff wrote a good book on the history of free speech in America, The First Freedom (1980). Sendak is most famous for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Wilson’s many books include Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).
Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977. It was typographically styled as the “Apple ][” and the series continued long after the specific II model was superseded by the Apple II Plus and was discontinued in 1981. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.
Sendak died in 2012, Hentoff in 2017, while Wilson remains alive.
“We have the oldest Senate in American history,” Roxanne Roberts writes in The Washington Post.
Roberts rattles off the five octogenarians — Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), age 88; Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), age 87; Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), age 87; Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), age 86; and Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), age 81 — and tells us that “Twenty-three members of the Senate are in their 70s,” noting that “only one is under 40.”
That fledgling 34-year-old whippersnapper is newly elected Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff. But being 30 years younger than the current Senate average doesn’t make him better, that’s for sure.
Age isn’t the problem. Not exactly.
My issue with octogenarian Senators Feinstein, Grassley, Shelby, Inhofe and Leahy is that they’ve been politicians in Washington for the last 28, 40, 43, 34, and 46 years, respectively.
That’s way too long. They stop being one of us, representing us. And, left, right or in-between, we know it.
“Senior senators often stay for decades,” Roberts argues, “because voters are reluctant to give up the perks of incumbency: Seniority, committee chairmanships and all the money poured into their states.”
Ha! The idea that actual voters are unwilling to “give up the perks of incumbency” is laughable. It’s the incumbents themselves who leverage their votes in Congress to dramatically out-fundraise their challengers.
Voters rarely get much choice.
No wonder, then, that when people got a chance to vote to term-limit their own congressmen — they did so enthusiastically.
President Truman once quipped that legislative term limits would help “cure senility, and seniority — both terrible legislative diseases.” He understood that the Senate’s age problem is not time on the planet. It is the time in office.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Another example was the late Sen. Thad Cochran, who thankfully decided to step down in 2018 — at 80 years of age after 44 years in Congress — none too soon.
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For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him … another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.
Philip K. Dick, VALIS (1981).
Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide on this day in June, 68 AD, ending Rome’s Julio-Claudian Dynasty, later written about with verve by Suetonius and Robert Graves. Assisting in his suicide was his secretary, Epaphroditus, whom Domitian had executed over 20 years later — for failure to prevent the suicide of the emperor.
Also on June 9, James Oglethorpe received a charter from the British crown to start the Georgia colony (1732); William Jennings Bryan resigned his position as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, disgusted over the handling of the sinking of the Lusitania (1915); philosopher John Hospers (pictured) — who would go on to run as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972 — was born in 1918.
Searching for the world’s most compromised scientist? Look past über-bureaucrat Anthony Fauci. Get a load of Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. He’s in the thick of it.
The “it” being the lies peddled by China’s totalitarian state, the World Health Organization (WHO), important parts of the government-funded American science establishment and — last but not least! — the vast majority of U.S. media.
The Lancet printed and the media reported the infamous open letter from scientists declaring a lab-leak origin of the virus to be unlikely, either without saying or without knowing that the scientist leading the effort to gather the 27 scientists’ signatures was the bag-man taking U.S. taxpayer money and re-gifting it to the actual Wuhan lab in question.
Yes, Dr. Peter Daszak.
The good doctor also managed to secure a spot on the WHO’s much-ballyhooed on-site China probe — as the sole American investigator — to look (fecklessly) for COVID’s origin. Still, Daszak and company enthusiastically declared a lab-leak “unlikely,” which the media mindlessly echoed . . . until even the WHO’s director-general backed away from it.
The problem is not confined merely to one or two rogue papers or cable channels: it’s also endemic to social media. Facebook, which blocked coverage and silenced those of us trying to speak and learn about the origin of COVID-19, turns out to have actually used — you guessed it! — Daszak as its go-to expert to advise them on what info to block.
How did our news hounds miss this trifecta?
Even now — after Dr. Fauci and others agree we need an investigation into the origins of the CCP virus, and as several major articles present additional evidence that the virus may have come from Wuhan gain-of-function “research” — the news-media response to its own obvious failures is to continue to blame . . . Trump.
The idea seems to be that the Sheer Awfulness of Trump somehow provides valid excuse to ignore China’s horrible behavior around the origin of COVID — silencing doctors, destroying important evidence and lying to the world — enabling its subsequent spread to pandemic level.
Is this really all the result of mere incompetence?
If you believe that, I’ve a wet market to sell you.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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In short, insofar as we seek knowledge, we should retain an open mind and thus we should never shield ourselves from abhorrent beliefs. We can avoid being bewitched by abhorrent beliefs (or alluring beliefs) by subjecting all available theories to criticism.
Danny Frederick, “We Should Not Shield Ourselves from Abhorrent Beliefs,” Against the Philosophical Tide: Essays in Popperian Critical Rationalism (2020).
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
Big Tech social media companies that once boasted of providing open forums now routinely ban speech that they disagree with — speech about elections, pandemics, Wuhan labs, or what have you.
How much of this suppression is private and independently initiated? How much is imposed at the behest of government officials who are supposed to respect First Amendment rights?
Government officials not only say that people should not say such-and-such; they also, increasingly, either complain that social media companies don’t do enough to gag people or herald the extent to which they do so.
Earlier this year, Reuters reported that “the White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation. . . .”
Now the American Freedom Law Center is suing Twitter and President Biden so that the question of whether the government is in effect “deputizing” private organizations to assault freedom of speech can be adjudicated.
The Center is filing on behalf of Colleen Huber, a doctor Twitter censored and suspended for saying the wrong thing about COVID-19. Of course, there are many other victims of the same policy, and it the Center seeking class-action status for the lawsuit.
The government has been enlisting social-media moguls as foot soldiers in a propaganda war. Whether this is done openly or behind closed doors, this war on free speech violates the Constitution.
As we must hope the outcome of this legal action affirms.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.
During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on as a eulogistic way to refer to figures such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.