On October 6, 1683, immigrant families found Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the first major immigration of German people to America. More Americans, today, consider themselves as deriving from German ethnic stock than from any other ethnicity.
“If you’re in our hemisphere, if you’re in the Caribbean, if you’re north of Venezuela and you want to traffic drugs to the United States, you are a legitimate target of the United States military,” in an interview with Fox News’s The Sunday Briefing.
“We have every authorization needed. These are designated as foreign terrorist organizations,” Hegseth insisted. Two days ago another boat of “narco-terrorists” was bombed in the Caribbean under Hegseth’s direction.
This is all comes under the rubric of “fighting terrorism” as authorized after 9/11.
This is how the Trump Administration is ramping up the War on Drugs, a preoccupation of both major political parties and the federal government in the 20th century.
The previous Tuesday, Hegseth had made waves denying to women any easier physical qualification standard to get in the military, demanding a return to pre-2015 qualification standards. And advised his audience of big brass that just as rank-and-file military personnel should be fit, so too should U.S. generals and admirals not be fat.
At least that, we can hazard, is a constitutionally fit and proper — fully authorized — judgment of the Secretary of, er, Defense.
On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared.
Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.
William Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, Lecture 7 (1852).
The Democrats pushed the government into shutdown because they insisted that Obamacare be re-upped, and that the medical expenses of immigrants, legal and illegal, be paid from federal government coffers. This was the upshot of Paul Jacob’s Thursday and Friday commentaries.
But Democrats do not want to admit the latter part of top agenda item (in Maxine Waters’ words). Here is NBC trying to make the Democrats’ case:
The argument can be broken down into multiple pieces, but take just the first minute, describing why Democrats insist that the Obamacare re-up be dealt with now, not after the CR. They say it must happen now, because people are making their plans on it. Republicans are not negotiating in good faith, Democrats complain. (Sound familiar?) But by scuttling the CR, now the Obamacare re-up issue is postponed further.
And Democrats knew that going in.
They aren’t dummies. Are they?
So it is really about something else. Not the American people and their medical insurance. Something else. . . .
Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.
Roger Bacon, as cited by Peter Nicholls The Encyclopedia of science fiction: an illustrated A to Z (1979), p. 376.
On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning for Mojave Aerospace Ventures the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.
This was most clearly demonstrated in 2019, during one of those huge panels of presidential hopefuls on the Democratic side, all raising their hands on whether they supported giving tax-funded medical assistance to illegal aliens.
Yesterday I quoted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on how Democrats want to “save people.”
What I didn’t quote was the question she was asked — “Do Democrats want to prioritize the healthcare for illegal aliens over a government shutdown?” — or how she initially responded: “Excuse me; stop it right there. We’re not prioritizing; what we’re doing is saying, simply, we wanna keep the government open and we wanna work with the Republicans and have a bipartisan agreement to keep this government open and healthcare is at the top of our agenda.”
Whew. While denying she’s prioritizing what’s at “the top” of her “agenda” — what prioritization means — her desire for a “bipartisan agreement” is just as fake, for what she and her fellow Democrats demand is that the Republicans completely agree with their most extreme agendum: subsidized medical assistance for all comers.
That’s not “bipartisan.” There’s no compromise. It’s a tactic of intransigence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this in terms of an “intransigent minority rule,” positing that in complex systems — such as societies, markets, or Congress — a small, highly committed minority (as little as 3-4 percent) can impose its preferences on a flexible majority due to an asymmetry of choice.
Meaning that the opponents of “limitless” subsidies (socialism) must become intransigent themselves to win.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The tone in which an Englishman expresses anger would, in Italy, be only a mark of surprise.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, as quoted in David Booth, The principles of English composition (1831), p. 8.
On October 3, 1789, George Washington proclaimed Thursday November 26, 1789, a Thanksgiving Day. On the same date in 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.