On September 17, 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to the Royal Society describing “animalcules,” later known as protozoa.
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine — most noted, till now, for being the first Timothy to run for the U.S. vice presidency — said something interesting last week.
And that may indeed be a significant first.
Sen. Kaine expressed his shock at something said by Riley Barnes, nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Mr. Barnes had confessed to the belief that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”
Horrifying!
“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator,” said the Virginia senator, aghast, “that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shi’a law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. . . .”
Our First Failed Tim* is trying to advance an argument: the Iranians, believing “that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator” do bad things, so the idea must be wrong.
Presumably, however, Tim Kaine would not argue that Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the famous words “We hold these truths to be self‑evident, that all Men are . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” was hell-bent on persecuting religious minorities. The senator surely knows that Jefferson was a daring proponent of religious freedom.
Generally, the idea of natural rights was used in the West to extend religious freedom.
Kaine must also know that folks like him who hold to legal positivism — thinking that rights only come from governments — include some of the worst persecutors of religious people in human history.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Our Second Failed Tim is of course Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who unsuccessfully ran alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
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John Donne
No man is an island,
John Donne, “No Man Is an Island,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
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Hong Kong Liberation
On September 16, 1945, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong came to an end.
The question is freedom of speech. Many German officials are opposed. Twitter-X, or X, is in favor.
As Reclaim the Net summarizes the case, “German prosecutors are testing whether the reach of their censorship laws can outstrip the guardrails of international treaties.”
These prosecutors have been going after three X managers for alleged “obstruction of justice.” This obstruction consisted of refusing to immediately give prosecutors data on users who utter government-disapproved speech.
The X managers have been adhering to the provisions of a bilateral treaty, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, under which the German requests are to be reviewed in U.S. legal channels before X can be forced to comply. Which increases the chances that X will not be forced to comply.
The prosecutors regard the managers’ refusals as a form of criminal interference. The legal and constitutional issues are now being battled over in German courts.
This is the German government which has been in the news for raiding the homes of people who post sentiments online of which the government disapproves.
That X is not meekly obeying orders to violate the trust of account holders and turn over their private information has upset German advocates of censorship. One MP, Anna Lührmann of the Green Party, says that X’s resistance to censorship is a “scandal” that “goes against fair competition and puts our democracy at risk.”
I don’t think, though, that democracies fail to be robust as they become more like dictatorships. Germany has it all inverted.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Agatha Christie
Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.
Hercule Poirot, the detective in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).
September 15, 1789, the United States “Department of Foreign Affairs,” established by law in July, was renamed the Department of State and assigned a variety of domestic duties. Thomas Jefferson was the the department’s first secretary.
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The Great UFO Trickle
For several years now, Paul Jacob had applied his demand for government transparency to the UFO topic. While for decades there has been a big cultural divide on the subject, between the Sophisticated Scoffers (who think there is absolutely nothing to the UFO issue) and the UFO Nuts (who express a range of opinion, from the suspicion that “there’s something to this” to the belief that “the aliens are here and running the Bilderberg Group”), in the last few years a number of government officials, military leaders, whistleblowers and pencil pushers have affirmed that some Unidentified Flying (and Submersible) Objects are puzzling and disturbing and somehow real, no matter how odd. To protect themselves they’ve re-dubbed the issue as one of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, previously “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”) and have set up official inquiries and congressional investigations.
Some disclosure is ongoing.
And the House Committee run by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.) has made some progress, even in this past week of tumultuous socio-political turmoil. Consider a recent installment of Clayton Morris’s Redacted show:
The new UFO telemetry video is interesting, if not exactly knock-down. Historian Richard Dolan covered the mid-week hearing live:
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Edmund Burke
It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769).
On September 14, 1741, George Frideric Handel completed his oratorio Messiah, one of the most widely beloved masterworks of western music.