On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”
Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.
Or, in the U.S., two: the House and the Senate.
“Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced a new pirate site blocking bill, titled the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act,” we read at Torrent Freak, which goes on to tell us that, in late July, “a similar proposal was introduced by Senators Tillis, Coons, Blackburn, and Schiff. The bipartisan bill, titled Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors (Block BEARD), aims to introduce a legal mechanism for rightsholders to request site blocking orders.”
Ostensibly, the Block BEARD Act targets websites accused of harboring pirated materials.
But Reclaim the Net observes that the legislation would establish “a formal, court-approved process that could be used to make entire websites vanish from the American internet.” ISPs would have to obey orders to take down websites.
Once government has this new means of torpedoing websites, what counts as prohibition-worthy content could easily expand. The bill doesn’t require transparency, so the public would not have to be told what sites are being blocked.
Or why.
Or for how long.
Reclaim the Net points to how easily the “takedown notice” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been weaponized to censor content in the name of protecting copyright. Everyone from artists to political activists have had content scrubbed because of DMCA notices for work “that clearly falls under fair use, commentary, or criticism.”
Platforms eager to avoid liability delete content even when a DMCA claim is clearly illegitimate. Then publishers must engage in a time-consuming legal process to maybe obtain permission to restore the censored material.
If the Block BEARD Act is enacted, suddenly whole websites, not just individual pages, could be unjustly disappeared so skittish ISPs can avoid liability. Can we trust the U.S. government — and various disgruntled people — to possess that power?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Whoever voluntarily undertakes the necessary office of rearing and educating, obtains the parental power without generation.
Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Book III, Ch. II, § II.
On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain, a little less than two years and three months before Kamala Harris, the most famous Jamaican-American, was born.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
Well, 51 Democratic state legislators have run past the border, all to prevent a redistricting scheme. They constitute a minority in the House, but without them a quorum cannot be reached.
Think of it as a form of filibuster.
Or “voting with their feet.”
“Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows announced that a quorum had not been met after roll call,” an Epoch Times article tells us, going on to say that “House members then approved a motion for the speaker to sign warrants ‘for the civil arrest’ of the members who said they would not be there.”
Since the fleeing pols are in other states, I don’t see how that can work out.
Meanwhile, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has taken her fellow Democrats’ side and said that she would re-district New York in favor of Democrats. “We’re not going to tolerate our democracy being stolen in a modern-day stagecoach heist,” she said, using a colorful metaphor.
Other Democratic states have fallen in line, upgrading the gerrymandering crisis from heist to feud.
Twenty-five years ago I wrote that “courts have struck down districts drawn to get a certain racial outcome, but have turned a blind eye to districts that arbitrarily favor one party over another. The solution to incumbents monopolizing our elections is term limits. But another key factor in promoting democracy is to stop the politicians from drawing rigged districts that squelch competition.”
Term limits sure would help, by de-stabilizing the “property rights” the two parties feel in their favored districts with old hands firmly tied to their estates.
It’s the wild, wild worst out there.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.
Alfred Hitchcock, as quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1985) by François Truffaut, p. 109.
On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.
The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
Let’s have more of that, less of telling victims of totalitarian dictatorship to shut up for their own good.
The UK police wanted expatriate Hongkonger Carmen Lau, a pro-democracy activist and former Hong Kong politician who has been living in Britain since 2021, to stay out of trouble with China. So in March, London bobbies asked her to sign a “memorandum of understanding” obliging her to avoid public gatherings and “cease any activity likely to put you at risk.”
What activity?
Not hang gliding.
The sickening effort to muzzle Lau came after neighbors got letters “offering a £100,000 bounty (US$131,947) for information on her movements” leading to her arrest by Hong Kong’s Chinese Communist Party authorities.
Hong Kong denies sending the letters. But in 2024, it placed bounties on the heads of six pro-democracy activists, including Lau, who had fled overseas in the wake of China’s repressive national security law of 2020, which targeted Hong Kong liberties.
Lau felt constrained to submit to the police request when they came to her door but has continued to speak out. “A truly democratic response should center on protecting the rights of those targeted, not advising them to retreat from public life,” she says.
Responding to the revelations, Thames Valley police say that they’d never “confirm or deny safeguarding tactics that we may or may not use. . . .”
Is this the free world? Not if under China’s thumb.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ideas are more important than battles.
The Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner, as quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen.
On August 4, 1701, the Great Peace of Montreal was signed. The dispute was between the French and their native allies, on the one side, and the Iroquois Confederacy on the other. Well over a thousand representatives of forty nations from the Great Lakes to the Maritimes and from southern Illinois to James Bay gathered to meet the French at Montreal. Month-long ceremonies concluded with the signing of the treaty, putting an end to the Iroquois Wars.