On August 17, 1807, Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat left New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
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Steamboat One
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Redistricting (he says) “For the People”
Note to comedians: there’s a rich vein here.
As Paul Jacob discussed on August 5th, Texas’s bold redistricting plan is causing a furor among Democrats. The latest is especially funny, but we’ll let you supply the jokes:
On Aug. 14, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for his state to hold a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional maps, marking an escalation in the ongoing, nationwide districting battles between Republicans and Democrats.
“We’re putting the maps on the ballot, and we’re giving the power to the people,” Newsom announced at an event in Los Angeles, saying that the vote would be held on Nov. 4.
The referendum would be a vote to approve a map to more heavily favor Democrats in California. Given Democrats’ political dominance in the Golden State, it’s likely to pass.
Joseph Lord, “Newsom Calls Special Election to Redistrict California Congress Seats—What to Know,” The Epoch Times (August 15, 2025).
For a historical perspective, consult Brion McClanahan:
This historian understands the comic element here.
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John Tyler
Nature governs man by no principle more fixed than that which leads him to pursue his interest.
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Against Central Banking
On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-establish the Second Bank of the United States. This made him deeply unpopular with his former supporters in the Whig Party — which was the party of “internal improvements” as well as an anti-Jacksonian party, and Andrew Jackson had previously set himself against central banking. It is apparent that Tyler did this because he had come to believe a central bank was unconstitutional.
We have a central bank, now, of course. It is called the Federal Reserve.
A recent executive order that President Trump issued to stop regulators from abetting and even compelling the “debanking” of bank customers for their political views is clear and on-target.
On-target as far as debanking by banks goes.
But Reclaim the Net notes a glaring omission. The order’s identifies financial institutions willing to blacklist customers for possessing the “wrong” political opinions or missions. (“Wrong” here means not too pro-criminal or pro-terrorist but too constitutionalist, too much in favor of individual rights of the First or Second Amendment variety.)
The problem is that the order says nothing about major payment processors like Visa and PayPal.
Now, perhaps a penumbra of the new regulatory marching orders would influence the policies of the credit-card companies, whose cards are after all typically issued in cooperation with banks. But this is highly uncertain.
And Reclaim the Net thinks that Visa and Mastercard, “the twin tollbooth operators of the global payments highway,” are, like PayPal and Stripe, untouched by Trump’s order. Yet all of these payment processors have in recent years been blacklisting individuals and organizations that the processors happen to disagree with.
The practice goes back at least to the Obama administration, which instructed regulators that it could regard something called “negative public opinion” as a legitimate risk factor.
This doctrine “quickly turned into a permission slip for politically driven account closures.”
The government shouldn’t be issuing such “permission slips” — or implicit instructions — to banks, payment processors, or anybody.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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Herbert Spencer
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
Herbert Spencer, “On Manners and Fashion,” The Westminster Review (April 1854).
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A Divine Wind?
On August 15, 1281, the Mongolian fleet of Kublai Khan was destroyed by a “divine wind” for the second time in the Battle of Kōan.
The Chinese Embassy in Thailand has pressured the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre to censor an exhibit: to remove works dealing with China’s persecution of groups such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
The exhibit’s curator notes an “irony”: the exhibit being censored is on the theme of censorship. Actually, it’s about more than that. Titled Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity, it’s an ambitious project, attempting “to reveal power in its entanglements, and to insist that art remains one of the last ungovernable territories of resistance.”
But the exhibit is held in the Kingdom of Thailand, not exactly known as a bastion of freedom and democracy. So it shocked no one when the gallery’s operators felt that they had no choice but to submit to China’s demand — in no small part because a financial sponsor and the Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had both accepted the diktat.
What happened is no isolated example of bad behavior — by China or by unresisting victims. Increasingly, we live in a world where the Chinese Communist Party tells us what can be said, what can be shown, what can be done.
Several years ago, a Marriott worker in Nebraska was fired after he or a colleague “liked” a pro-Tibet tweet using the Mariott social media account. The CCP exploded. Marriott has hotels in China. Marriott groveled.
Marco Rubio, then a U.S. Senator, said at the time that every week it seemed that another major company was shamelessly apologizing to the PRC for “some sort of ‘misstep’ related to Tibet . . . and other sensitive issues.”
It’s not just “art” that must learn to resist the governance of China . . . before it’s too late.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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George Santayana
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, Vol. 2 (1906), Ch. III: “Industry, Government.”
On August 14, 1765, Sam Adams led the first rebel mob against enforcers of the Stamp Act in Britain’s American colonies.
On this day in 1980, Lech Wałęsa led strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland, shipyards.