On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the ceremonial dedication of the military cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, appropriating an old phraseology for republican government — “of the people, by the people, for the people” — and giving it its most memorable usage.
On the same date in 1955, National Review published its first issue.
New Mexico, along with many other states, is going into lockdown.
“The rate of spread and the emergency within our state hospitals are clear indicators that we cannot sustain the current situation without significant interventions to modify individual behavior,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is quoted in her office’s press release.
“The public health data make clear,” the governor asserts, that “more aggressive restrictions are not only warranted but essential if we are to prevent mass casualties. Without the compliance and cooperation of New Mexicans statewide, we do not need to imagine the bleak public health calamity we will face — the images from El Paso the last few weeks, from New York City earlier this year, and from Europe at the outset of the pandemic will be our fate in New Mexico.”
The report from The Hill did not interrogate the claims, just repeated the planned massive intervention and accepted the statements as fact.
Contrary to all this assertion, the evidence that lockdowns help remains worse than murky. European states that locked down tightly early in the year are experiencing this second or third “wave” worse than those that did not go full-on “mitigation.” The classic case is Sweden, which infamously resisted lockdown mania. Using the best test of success, “excess mortality,” Sweden is doing remarkably well.
Sweden’s a problem for lockdowners, who avoid fair comparisons and . . . are devoted to spin. On the same day, Business Insider and Reuters covered the same story, with these headlines:
Meanwhile, a controlled study of lockdown mitigations using obedient Marines found: quarantines don’t control the spread of the disease.
Nevertheless, politicians seem hellbent on lockdowns, something they know how to do . . . whether it helps or not.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On November 18, 1307, legend has it, William Tell shot a crossbow bolt to pierce an apple, toppling it off his son’s head. He was forced to do this by the local Austrian authority, whose hat hung on a pole in the Altdorf town square Tell had refused to bow to when entering the village. Tell endures as a Swiss folk hero, and provides the subject of a famous opera by Rossini — the music of which is associated with, in many ears, Bugs Bunny and the Lone Ranger.
In 1926, on this date, George Bernard Shaw formally refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize for Literature, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
Nobody performs her or his duties. Governments do not, because they do not know, they are not able or they do not wish, or because they are not permitted by those who effectively govern the world: The multinational and pluricontinental companies whose power — absolutely non-democratic — reduce to next to nothing what is left of the ideal of democracy. We citizens are not fulfilling our duties either. Let us think that no human rights will exist without symmetry of the duties that correspond to them. It is not to be expected that governments in the next 50 years will do it. Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.
José Saramago, Nobel banquet speech (December 10, 1998).
“They’re really showing their hand now, aren’t they?”
That is how one blogger puts it. And the “They” are the leftward tech giants that provide platforms on which all of us can (in theory) have our say.
“They” — Google, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress — have provided these platforms in a country where freedom of speech is protected, if imperfectly, by the First Amendment and allied ideas, institutions, habits, and sensibilities.
But the First Amendment cannot, by itself, protect speakers of speech from having the rug yanked out from under them by these service providers. With increasing frequency and brazenness, the tech giants are de-platforming speakers they disagree with despite past assurances of being open to all comers (not using speech to do anything illegal).
In this case, “they” means WordPress, which has notified a popular political blog, The Conservative Treehouse, that its days are numbered. Because “your site’s content and our terms” are incompatible, “you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2.”
It took many years and, apparently, the (apparent) election of Joe Biden for WordPress to discover this “incompatibility.”
Says the Treehouse: “After ten years of brutally honest discussion, opinion, deep research and crowdsourcing work” by the site, WordPress can cite no violation of any term of service “because CTH has never violated one.”
So, what’s the upshot? At a minimum, if you’re using a big-tech platform but aren’t toeing the big-tech ideological line, seek alternatives. Pronto.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On November 17, 1777, the Articles of Confederation were submitted to the states for ratification.
On that date in 1800, the United States Congress held its first session in Washington, D.C.
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
John Hay, Castilian Days (1871; 1899), p. 28.
Georgia, oh Georgia
No, no, no, no, no peace I find . . .
So opens James Brown’s famous song — also an iconic hit for Ray Charles.*
As the rest of the country quiets down, post-election, that crooned-about lack of peace continues to echo in the Peach State as if in a deep, vast cavern. Two U.S. Senate seats now go to a January 5th runoff election, which will decide partisan control of Congress’s upper chamber.
Democrats control the House and — barring some Hail Mary effort likely to require Mary’s own participation — they will take the White House as well. In the Senate, Republicans currently hold a 50-48 lead, but if Democrats win both of these razor-close races in a state won narrowly by Democrat Biden, the Senate majority, too, will be theirs . . . by virtue of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.
Whether held by Republicans or Democrats, unitary one-party control of the federal leviathan could prove extraordinarily consequential . . . in a frightening sort of way.
“[T]he federal government works better when divided, not unified,” argues the Cato Institute’s Steve H. Hanke, citing divided government as less likely to go to war, more likely to pass sustainable reforms and noting that “federal spending tends to be lower with divided governments.”**
Other reasons include existential threats to our little experiment with citizen-controlled government.
Having threatened to completely abolish the Senate filibuster rule, Democrats with a slim majority could then pack the Supreme Court — adding new justices to gain a majority, using one election to nullify elections going back decades. And forever partisanizing and politicizing our independent judiciary.
Just an old sweet song — and the future of America — Keeps Georgia on my mind.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* We made a terrible mistake. Hoagy Carmichael is the author of “Georgia on My Mind,” not James Brown. Here is a version of the song performed by Carmichael. PJ
** For these reasons, to keep divided government, third-place finishing Libertarian candidate Shane Hazel should endorse Republican David Perdue against Democrat Jon Osskoff. Hazel garnered 2.3 percent of the vote, while Perdue fell only 0.3% short of winning a majority and precluding the runoff.
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If you attempt by legislation to give any direction to trade or industry, it is a thousand to one that you are doing wrong; and if you happen to be right, it is work of supererogation, for the parties for whom you legislate would go right without you, and better than with you.
Richard Cobden, Speech in the House of Commons (February 27, 1846).
On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his men captured Inca Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca.
In 1811 on this date, John Bright (pictured above), English academic and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was born. Bright (d. 1889), famously worked with Richard Cobden against the Corn Laws (repealed in 1846) as well as for the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty of 1860, which ushered in freer trade and closer interdependence between Britain and France.