On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.
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Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.
Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.
On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.
The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book Two.
How can you tell when people really care?
It is not when they mouth the right platitudes.
Or advance a carefully crafted political agenda.
What counts more? Something practical.
Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer cracked down further with COVID-related health care mitigation efforts this week. One stands out: on Wednesday she “declared racism a public health crisis, ordered implicit bias training for all state employees, and,” reports Paul Egan of the Detroit Free Press, “created a state advisory council to focus on issues affecting Black people in Michigan.”
“We have a lot of work to do to eliminate the systemic racism that Black Americans have experienced for generations,” the governor said.
Whitmer noted that black Michiganders are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white Michiganders — because, well, you probably do not need to read deeply into her communiqués or watch USA Today’s helpful video. The arguments are familiar.
And not completely without merit.
But notice what she did not say.
She did not advise darker-skinned people to take Vitamin D supplements and go outside and soak in more rays than they might, otherwise.
Vitamin D deficiency has been repeatedly linked as a co-factor for the development of severe COVID-19.
Race, not racism, may be what’s most relevant. Or, as the president might say, “it is what it is”: white skin more efficiently absorbs solar radiation to produce Vitamin D than higher-melaninned skin, an adaptation for northern climes where solar radiation is less intense than in the tropics.*
While this is certainly not the only factor in susceptibility to the virus’s worst effects, and it is still unproven — a word to the wise.
From the caring.
Not the politicians.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “According to a CDC study published in 2006,” offered the Arizona Republic, “21% of non-Hispanic white people are at risk of having inadequate levels of vitamin D, versus 73% of Black people and 42% of Hispanic people.”
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Happiness is a good flow of life.
Zeno of Citium, as quoted by Stobaeus, Anthology, ii. 77.
“[George] Floyd’s death changed everything,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson told viewers two nights ago, calling it “a pivot point in American history.”
Given “the significance of the event, it’s striking how little we really know months later about how exactly George Floyd died,” argued Carlson, before playing bits of the 18-minutes of police cam video obtained by Britain’s Daily Mail. “The official storyline . . . couldn’t be clearer. Established news organizations state as a matter of factual certainty that Floyd was . . . murdered by a Minneapolis police officer.”
“But does it reflect what really happened?” Carlson asked.
“Floyd had a number of narcotics in his system, including enough fentanyl to die of an overdose,” the Fox host advised. “One of the best-known symptoms of fentanyl overdose, by the way, is shortness of breath. In the video, Floyd complains that he is having trouble breathing, famously, but says that long before the police officer kneels on his neck.”
Writers at The Wrap and The Huffington Post quickly took Carlson to task for suggesting that the new video evidence in any way altered the media narrative of events, pointing out that two separate autopsies determined Floyd’s death to be a homicide.*
Neither a medical doctor nor a criminologist, Carlson is right about two things:
(1) “The American people should have been allowed to see police body camera footage . . . much sooner than this week.”
(2) “You can decide for yourself what you think of that video.”
The point of police wearing body cameras is to give the public as clear a picture as possible. Had the full video been seen earlier, some of this summer’s violence may have been forestalled.
It should not take someone violating a court order to hit play for the public.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Later in the program, Carlson expressed his opinion that the tape fails to exonerate Officer Derek Chauvin, who held his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes.
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One can hardly say that republicanism has failed, or say a priori that it is bound to fail, so long as it has not been tried under conditions essential to its success.
Albert Jay Nock, Journals.
Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, which debuted on August 6, 1991, as a publicly available service on the Internet.
Facts matter. As do their honest expression. But given the “reporting” in recent months about “mostly peaceful protests,” you may wonder whether reporters agree.
Some do. Here’s the Charleston Post and Courier: “Brooms and dustpans replaced rocks and spray paint Sunday as an army of volunteers descended on Charleston to clean up the demoralizing mess left by an angry mob that smashed, burned and pillaged much of the city’s central business district.”
“Hundreds of New York City Businesses Were Damaged, Looted in Recent Unrest,” according to a Wall Street Journal headline. An article in the Minneapolis StarTribune tells us: “Buildings damaged in Minneapolis, St. Paul after riots.” Riots. There’s a word.
Reporters have reported (i.e., done their jobs) on rioters destroying small businesses around the country, and even killing people.
But too many supposed news-hounds shy away from honest reporting. Recently, U.S. Attorney Bill Williams of Oregon chastised a TV reporter for refusing to name openly criminal behavior . . . in this case, that of Portland rioters trying to destroy a courthouse.
The newsperson sought to blandify the thuggery as “late-night demonstrations” or “late-night activity.” Williams stressed the difference between “lawful, constitutionally protected protest” and criminal conduct. “This is just mindless violence, and anyone who defends the violence is enabling this to continue.”
The reporter wasn’t swayed. “I’m not a police officer, I don’t get to distinguish
The assumption being that such determinations are up
But legal culpability is not at issue.
What is? Facts: a window was broken; a fire started; property vandalized; person assaulted.
If you feel disallowed from imparting evident facts to the public, a profession requiring you to do so all the time isn’t for you.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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