If you are being fed by politicians or bureaucrats, you know what to do:
In 1776, on June 12, the Fifth Virginia Convention at Williamsburg, Virginia, unanimously adopted a Declaration of Rights, several weeks prior to the adoption of the state’s constitution. George Mason (pictured above), who drafted the document, stated clearly in the preamble that rights must be “the basis and foundation of Government.”
The first four planks run as follows:
I. That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
II. That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.
III. That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation or community; of all the various modes and forms of government that is best, which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.
IV. That no man, or set of men, are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services; which, not being descendible, neither ought the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge be hereditary.
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Safety . . . or Not?
The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has a formal aim: to make workplaces safer. And, during this part of the pandemic, it has sought to encourage workers to get vaccinated with one of the several mRNA treatments that have been given the green light by the federal government, though not having gone through the many hurdles of the Food and Drug Administration’s normal trials.
Now, safety isn’t just one simple thing. In May, OSHA declared that companies requiring employees to get vaccinated will be held liable for injury and illness caused by those vaccines. Seems reasonable. If your employer requires you to get “the jab,” and you get sick — and all vaccines have secondary effects, making them dangerous for some people — then your employer should be held responsible.
Along with that divvying up of responsibility, OSHA has since May mandated reporting on negative effects of the vaccines on workers in those workplaces that require the inoculations.
But not anymore.
According to The Epoch Times, “to encourage American workers to get vaccines,” OSHA has just “suspended the legal requirement for employers to report work-related injuries resulting from vaccinations aimed at combating the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.”
Why? Well, the OSHA website now states that the administration “does not want to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving” the jab, and is also worried about appearing to “disincentivize” employers.
Yet the basic responsibility remains.
Liberty Counsel, a Christian ministry, speculates that the change in reporting was “politically motivated” and came from the Biden Administration.
A specific treatment is being promoted ostensibly for health reasons, but the agency promoting safety and health now downplays the importance of keeping track of any negative results.
That’s discouraging for safety, health and truth.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Isaiah Berlin
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
Isaiah Berlin, As quoted in Communications and History: Theories of Knowledge, Media and Civilization (1988) by Paul Heyer, p. 125.
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Declarations
On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.
In 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.
So far, the besieged businessmen of the Fells Point area of Baltimore are only threatening to withhold payments of taxes and fees to the city.
If and when they follow through, the plan is to place the withheld funds in escrow. The money would then be turned over to the city government if and only if the city again meets minimal standards of performance.
Tax resistance? Sure. But not in the usual mode.
Fells Point shop owners are rebelling against a “culture of lawlessness” in their streets, streets managed or mismanaged by the city. They want police to do more — be free to do more — about crime.
In a letter to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and other officials submitted not long after several shootings in the area, thirty-seven Fells Point businessmen demand that the city “Pick up the trash. . . . Enforce traffic and parking laws. . . . Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales. . . . Empower police to responsibly do their job. . . . Please do your job so we can get back to doing ours.”
What will happen? I fear that, despite this worthy protest, city officials will continue to turn a blind eye. I fear that they will regard the protest as a PR problem, one that will go away and allow them to go on with the usual business of government — the way they see it. Their evasive initial responses to the letter are not encouraging.
Baltimore businesspeople are not trying to dodge city taxes here. They understand very well that one cannot expect to get something for nothing. They just want to get something.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Antonin Artaud
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.
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Senatorial Senility
“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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Philip K. Dick
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).