Those who would wish to excite and keep awake your jealousy and distrust are your truest friends; while they who speak peace to you when there is no peace — who would lull you into security, and wish you to repose blind confidence in your future governors — are your most dangerous enemies; jealousy and distrust are the guardian angels who watch over liberty — security and confidence are the forerunners of slavery.
On April 11, 1945, the American Third Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, a camp that would later be judged second only to Auschwitz in the horrors it imposed on its prisoners.
Among those in the camp saved by the American soldiers was Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
Shown in photograph: German citizens ushered to the camp by American soldiers, post-conquest.
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It is our hope that the day may soon come when black people will reject federal funds because they have understood that these programs are geared to pacification rather than to genuine solutions. We hope that the rising level of consciousness may bring a rejection of such doles.
This will strike many readers as fantastic, but they might recall that once in India, Gandhi rejected relief food shipments from England precisely because he saw them as tools of pacification.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation (New York: Random House, 1967).
On April 10, 1998, the Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic agreement, dubbed the Belfast, or Good Friday Agreement. The accord was reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict.
The agreement was approved by voters across the island of Ireland in two referendums held on May 22, 1998. The agreement came into force on December 2, 1999.
A crony anti-infrastructure plan.
That, writes Veronique de Rugy at Reason, is “the best description of the Biden administration’s proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan.”
Democrats are the masters of favoring a select few at the expense of the electorate and calling it the Public Good. Their woke moralism, egalitarianism, and other pieties effectively mask their party’s accomplished crony scheming.
Right now, though, the heady audacity of spending trillions of dollars we do not (yet) possess is all the mask the Democrats appear to need.
Does anyone talk about the Swamp anymore?
Never drained, it is back with a vengeance:
The tax increase in the plan is to eliminate established tax “preferences” for fossil fuel companies. This would be politically popular with Democratic Party supporters, feeding their enviro-lust to lash out at what are commonly perceived as destroyers of the planet. But tax something more, get less. And a huge part of our infrastructure relies upon — indeed, consists in — the fossil fuel industry. So there will be less infrastructure investment in that realm.
But that doesn’t hurt the cronies. It hurts other folks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly fools? How did you find that they are now wise? . . .
Now answer me, an’t please you: I dare not adjure you in stronger terms, reverend sirs, lest I make your pious fatherly worships in the least uneasy. Come, pluck up a good heart; speak the truth and shame the devil, that enemy to paradise, that enemy to truth: be cheery, my lads; and if you are for me, take me off three or five bumpers of the best, while I make an halt at the first part of the sermon; then answer my question.
François Rabelais, Gargantua & Pantagruel (from the “Faithfully Translated” Gustave Doré edition), Book V, author’s prologue. The Doré illustration is of “Messire Oudart.”
Despite being outnumbered 16 to one, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy proved victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels, April 9, 1388.
On this date in 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
The coronavirus vaccination passport idea, in place in New York, attempted elsewhere, in development in Britain, and all the rage among policy pushers like Bill Gates, has been nipped in the bud in Florida and Texas.
On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order prohibiting “government-issued vaccine ‘passports’ statewide.” The order prevents state agencies from establishing any requirement for vaccination on the populace. “The ban also extends to any organizations that receive public funds,” according to The Daily Signal, “forbidding those organizations from requiring Texans to prove they received the vaccine.”
After giving a pro-vaccine statement, Abbott went on to reiterate his basic position, that “these vaccines are always [to be] voluntary and never forced. Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives.”
He also stated that the state will continue to supply vaccines to citizens that want the shot(s).
Abbott followed a similar decree by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by just a few days. At the beginning of the month, Abbott had lifted statewide mask mandates. Florida, as you have no doubt heard, has been a free state (as opposed to a quarantine state) for several months, to a major media pile-on (and a lot of inaccurate reporting, including from 60 Minutes).
The World Health Organization does not support vaccination passports. Now. But WHO is a feather in the wind, like the Vichy-blown government in the movie Casablanca, so strong opposition to the practice by public officers in the United States is most welcome.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. . . . As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures.
James Mill, The Westminster Review, Vol. 6 (1826), p. 13.