On July 1, 1766, François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, was tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France.
Scilicet et fluvius qui visus maximus ei,
Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura, Book VI.
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit.
“A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a mighty stream; and so with other things — a tree, a man — anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater.”
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book VI (quoted in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. W. C. Hazlitt)
Millions more Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than are considered “confirmed cases,”* at rates ranging from 6/1 (Connecticut, early May) to 24/1 (Missouri, late April), making the fatality rate of COVID-19 much lower than feared.
Unfortunately, we cannot trust our news sources to be forthright about this.
The “death count” had been the pandemic’s repeated headline for months, Dr. Ron Paul noted yesterday, “all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about ‘cases’ and has always been all about ‘cases.’ Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant.”
There’s a reason for this re-focus. Since peaking in April, deaths, you see, “had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.”
And the case number increases do look ominous, despite being almost innocuous: “This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more ‘cases’ you discover.”
And that is not the only change of spin regarding the pandemic, as Jeffrey Tucker dramatized on Twitter:
“Flatten the curve!”
“What does that do?”
“Pushes infections to the future”
3 months later
“There are new infections!”
“What should we do?”
“Flatten the curve!”
At Mr. Tucker’s stomping grounds, the American Institute for Economic Research, Gregory van Kipnis wrote last month that the “most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death.”
We have something to fear from the virus and its attack upon the respiratory system, but we have more to fear from fear itself.
That staple of propagandistic media.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* A confirmed case is of a patient who has seen a doctor for symptoms of the disease and has tested positive with the diagnosis seconded and logged by scientists associated with a national health agency.
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The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
On June 30, 1801, Frédéric Bastiat was born. Bastiat became one of the most important French Liberal School economists, following Condilliac and Jean-Baptiste Say, best known for his books Economic Harmonies and Economic Sophisms and two monographs, “The Seen and the Unseen,” and “The Law.” He was a brilliant stylist and perceptive critic of state-managed trade. His influence on conservative, libertarian and “limited-government thought” has been vast.
The emergency number of “999” was introduced in London, June 30, 1937, the first of its kind — arguably the best innovation in better government service in modern times.
“I was born without representation, but I swear,” Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser vowed last week, “I will not die without representation.”
She has a point: 700,000 D.C. residents lack a voting representative in Congress.
On Friday, the U.S. House passed legislation — 232 to 180 with 19 members hiding in the cloakroom and refusing to vote — to make the nation’s capital city the 51st state. Not merely garnering a U.S. Representative, but also a lifetime guarantee of two U.S. Senators.
“D.C. will never be a state,” counters President Trump, explaining that Senate Republicans would be “very, very stupid” to allow two new U.S. Senators who are nearly certain to be Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly announced the Senate would not take up the bill.
But Republicans are not the only ones blocking representation.
As Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) pointed out, Maryland had originally ceded some of the land to create the federal District of Columbia, and could now take back the residential areas. Those citizens would add their own House rep for Maryland and be represented by Maryland’s two U.S. Senators.
Democrats refuse. Why? Because it is not about representation. The city must be turned into a state so that two new Democratic U.S. Senators can be pulled out of a hat.
There is yet another path to representation. Make a bi-partisan deal to add two states. In addition to the State of Columbia (51), add the State of Jefferson (52) — comprised of 21 northern counties trying to secede from the rest of California.
Better representation. No partisan advantage. Problem solved.
If anyone were interested in that.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965), Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1943; 1948).
On June 29, 1914, the day after the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austrian interrogations confirmed that the Serbian government was behind the assassination. Serbia denied involvement.
Thus continued the series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”
To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
From The Analects of Master Kong (Kong Fu Zi, or “Confucius”), Chapter II.