For most clueless Americans, the State is now their God and the US dollar is their faith proposition. Modern Americans have never lived under the limited government spelled out in the Constitution.
Bill Sardi, “Did You Make a Conscious Choice To Be a Liberal, Conservative or Libertarian? Probably Not Where Are You in The Spectrum Of Political Thought?” LewRockwell.com (May 27, 2021).
On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last of North America’s original Thirteen Colonies to ratify the Constitution, becoming one of the United States.
On the same in 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring received its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a riot.
It’s the feel-good story of the year — or at least the year’s first five months.
In South Carolina, a man named Jovan Collazo, carrying an Army-issued rifle, hijacked a school bus. (This isn’t the feel-good part.)
Collazo wanted to go home. It’s unclear why he didn’t just thumb a ride or take a bus the old-fashioned way. But, whatever; criminals are not always the most rational actors.
Bus driver Kenneth Corbin says that 18 students, some in kindergarten, were scattered throughout the vehicle when the hijacker got on board. Captor Collazo decided that the best thing would be to group everybody toward the front so that he could keep a better eye on them.
Big mistake.
The regrouping laid the groundwork for what the UK Independent calls “incessant kindergarten questions” about Collazo’s background, motives, and intentions.
Rattled by the interrogation, he soon brought the bus to a halt, ordered everybody off, and tried to drive the bus himself. Not long after, he was arrested.
According to Corbin, Collazo “sensed more questions coming and I guess something clicked in his mind and he said, ‘enough is enough already.’”
That’s one way to escape a kidnapper. The strategy may not always work, obviously, but we can be glad it worked in this case.
Parents, the next time your toddlers pummel you with metaphysical queries about the universe, try to indulge the budding philosophers.
Their expertise in the Socratic method may come in real handy one day.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Today we have ruling dynasties as well as fallen ones; princes wearing a crown and others who certainly would not mind a chance of wearing one. Each has his party, and each party is primarily interested in putting spokes in the wheels of the coach of the State, until they have tipped it up, thus gaining the chance of climbing into it themselves, risking the same fate in turn. It is the charming game of seesaw, which people pay the price for and yet never seem to tire of. . . .
Paul-Emile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (1860).
On May 28, 1952, the women of Greece gained the right to vote.
Aren’t Norwegians the good guys?
Yet, somehow, this bastion of human rights (and “best democracy in the world”) has, since 2010, “forcibly registered the nationality of Taiwanese residing in Norway as ‘Chinese’”?
“The action is considered an act of appeasement,” The News Lens paraphrases Joseph Liu, a Taiwanese lawyer based in Norway, “after the Norwegian Nobel Committee angered Beijing by awarding the peace prize to the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo the same year.”
Norway’s promotion of human rights upset the genocidal Chinese government, which had imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, and which then moved to “suspend trade talks with Norway and restrict exports of important commodities.” It took six years of placating the Chinazis before normal diplomatic and economic relations were restored.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese students living in The Land of the Midnight Sun are demanding their right simply to be Taiwanese. Joseph Liu formed a group, “Taiwan: My Name, My Right,” to lobby Norway’s government and is now legally challenging the policy. After Norway’s supreme court rejected their lawsuit last year, they have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
“The Applicants are Taiwanese,” argues Professor Jill Marshall of the University of London, “failing to state this on their official documentation and instead ascribing them with an incorrect nationality misidentifies them and violates their right to personal identity.”
Even as Norway denies Taiwanese identity, its own identity takes the biggest hit. Prime Minister Erna Solberg explained her 2014 snubbing of the Dalai Lama as “a necessary sacrifice in order to show China that it’s important for us to have a dialogue with them.”
Sacrificing what’s right and just for trade deals with totalitarians is no way to be Norway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.
Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Machiavelli” (March 1827), a review of Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL (J. V. Perier: 1825), in Critical and Historical Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans: 1843).
On May 27, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi began his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian unification.
In 1927 on this date in May, the Ford Motor Company ceased manufacture of the Ford Model T (pictured above), the last of this model coming off the line the day previous. Over 16 million Model T Fords had been sold; it was a world-transformative product. On the 27th, the company began to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.
Exactly 70 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office.
In 2015 on the 27th of May, the commercial space company SpaceX was approved as a contractor to the U.S. military for satellite launches; SpaceX has since led the world in its use of
In just weeks, the Pentagon will report to Congress on the matter of UFOs.
Though the subject appears vast, beginning before World War II’s “foo fighters” and extending right up to Colorado’s ongoing (?) “drone” mystery, the impetus for much of the recent interest comes from one source: a declassified set of telemetry data and FLIR footage from an alleged UFO encounter off the coast of California on November 10, 2004.
Brought to the fore by former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, and backed up by the testimony of Navy fighter pilots who took the footage, Commander David Fravor, preeminently, these videos had been hacking around the Internet for years, and repeatedly “debunked.” 60 Minutes did a segment on the subject, recently, but ignored the debunkers. So a popular junk science debunker on YouTube, an engineer known as Thunderf00t, demonstrated how the technology used by pilot Fravor produces images of normal flying objects that can look . . . alien . . . to novices.
The problem with this debunking, as with previous ones, is that it deprecates the context. Specifically, the testimony. Thunderf00t dismisses the pilots as “UFO nuts.”
But he does not directly deal with the testimony. “This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it’s gone,” Commander Fravor explains — “we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers.” He also asserts that the “things” blocked radar and behaved as if they could read minds or instantaneously crack secure Navy communications.
If the debunkers are correct about the footage being grossly misinterpreted, the surrounding testimony amounts to lies. We novices might be fooled by FLIR, but not trained fighter jet personnel. And if they are lying, then the Pentagon should know and say.
For decades, the military has been telling us, publicly, that UFOs aren’t a thing. Now it appears they are telling us they are.
Am I the only one who is curious?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On May 26, 451, the Sassanid Empire defeated the Armenians at the battle of
On May 26, 1328, scholastic philosopher and Franciscan friar William of Ockham and other Franciscan leaders secretly exited Avignon, fearing a death sentence from Pope John XXII. On the same day in 1538, the city of Geneva expelled John Calvin and his followers, who headed to exile in Strasbourg.