On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies.
One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
I’m not quite on board.
As the Internet grew up, with it came all the condemnations of conspiracy theories, run rampant. The Internet, we were told, was problematic in that not only was information readier at hand than ever before, but so was it easier to share and nurture all these goofy conspiracy theories.
You know: JFK was killed by someone other than Oswald, or also by others, in addition to Oswald.
Or . . . UFOs are real, and the government is covering it up.
Or the Rothschilds are behind it all.
You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Ick.
Yet: The government now admits that UFOs are real, implying that it was, ahem, lying in the past.
Further: As we uncover the grotesquerie in the Epstein Files, we learn that he proudly served Rothschild banking interests!
So let’s not get started on the JFK assassination.
One reason conspiracy theories are prominent is that we are uncovering so many conspiracies. Actual conspiracies. Like the Wuhan lab business, or the suppression of information about the mRNA “vaccines,” or . . . must we go on and on?
I don’t like conspiracy theories. I said I’m not on board. We need to work towards a world not built for conspiracies. This means whittling down government, with its current vast powers to take and to “give.” And siphon off wealth at each step. While sidestepping transparency.
Ask yourself: Does our political-legal environment actually discourage conspiracies?
That question almost answers itself.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
William Butler Yeats, speech (June 7, 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Censorship of Films Bill.
On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (February 28, 1926 – November 22, 2011), defected to the United States. She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.
The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the main reason that this site,
Politics can’t always be reduced to this conflict, of course. But it can pretty often — certainly in a country where socialists have been pulverizing the economy.
Now, this knowledge is not kept by Milei as a dark secret, about which he would be embarrassed to be caught mentioning to a select few supporters.
Milei is not coy! That we learned during his campaign for president; and, no matter what his ups and downs in office, he still seems to be just as candid, just as willing to blast his opponents, to their faces, for —
Well: “Listen up, you ignorant fools! ‘Social justice’ is theft. It implies unequal treatment before the law and is preceded by theft. You bunch of thieves! Criminals!”
Also: “The world has only two kinds of people: those who live off what others produce — that is, the parasites, that is, you — and those who produce everything that is possible in modern life.
“The true battle of our time is cultural, philosophical, and moral. It is about choosing the system that lifted millions out of poverty. It is about ceasing to be an immature nation that squanders the future to distribute benefits in the present. . . .”
Probably even better in the original Spanish.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
W.H. Auden, from Epigraph on a Tyrant (1939).
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.
This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun.
The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.
| Composer Sergei Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin, but it took a while for anyone to take notice, so big was the news of the demise of the dictator. Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies, two violin and five piano concerti, nine piano sonatas and many other works, including operas, ballets, and film scores.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday.
He has co-sponsored S. 3892, dubbed the “Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026.”
What is price gouging? Selling or offering items at a “grossly excessive price,” which the Federal Trade Commission is tasked with defining. But Luján’s real focus seems to be his distrust of surveillance in stores, which he fears will be used to adjust prices individually.
He somehow doesn’t mention why stores have increased surveillance of customers.
One word: thievery.
But Lujan isn’t alone, fecklessly fighting the food-market market. In Washington State and elsewhere, socialists and other politicians are trying to force grocers to stay open, even if their corporate owners have good reason to shut down a specific store. Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, says Seattle must not “allow giant grocery chains to stomp all over our communities, close stores at will, and leave behind food deserts.”
A south Tacoma neighborhood Safeway closed, so a state senator cooked up a bill to “give communities time to respond to grocery store closures.”
Truth is, of course, that grocery stores operate on slim margins. The more regulations piled on, and the more criminals you throw at them, the fewer groceries your community will have.
And the “liberals” who vote for such nonsense? They will not like the Mamdani stores they are left with — the subsidized product deserts that only now look good . . .
In socialist dreams.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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O Duty,
Ogden Nash, beginning of “Kind of an Ode to Duty” (1935), collected in I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938).
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of conscientious organizing spinster
That the minute you see her you are aginster?
Why glitter thy spectables so ominously?
Why are thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?
Why art thou fifty per cent. martyr
And fifty-one per cent. Tartar?
On March 4, 1933, newly inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his customary address. The speech “brought a decidedly favorable reaction in the Italian press, especially his declaration that he will seek extraordinary powers to deal with the situation if necessary,” wrote The New York Times the next day. The Times went on to quote “Premier Mussolini’s Milan newspaper, Popolo d’Italia,” which stated that “The American people place their hope in decisive action by the new President and his speech truly satisfied public opinion.”
The Italian newspaper “said the bank moratorium in New York contributed perhaps more than any other factor in convincing even the most reluctant of the urgent necessity for the whole nation to rally around Mr. Roosevelt.” A Turin paper succinctly stated its appreciation for FDR: “Mr. Roosevelt is following the great principles established by the Fascist revolution and the genius of Il Duce.”
On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.
Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.