It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation. . . .
Reason in Society, Chapter IV (The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906)
American author, art critic, and commentator Camille Paglia was born April 2, 1947.
Lucy Flores was standing in front of the twice-elected Vice President of these United States at a 2014 campaign rally when, “unexpectedly and out of nowhere,” she recounts, she felt “Joe Biden put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.
“You don’t expect that kind of intimacy from someone so powerful,” she said yesterday — or to be publicly fondled by “someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever.”
Flores is not alleging sexual assault, and certainly no ongoing harassment. But the former Nevada State Assemblywoman certainly does object to Biden’s “completely inappropriate” behavior. And she believes it “should” be considered in judging a presidential candidate.
“In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life,” responded Biden in a statement, “I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once — never — did I believe I acted inappropriately.”
Not buying this at all, Flores links (in her article for The Cut) to numerous “stories that were written” of “creepy” behavior by Biden, noting she came forward in large part because that evidence had been “dismissed by the media and not taken seriously.”
“It’s apparently a Senate rite of passage,” comedian Jon Stewart explained in a 2015 Daily Show segment entitled, The Audacity of Grope, “you’re not actually sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family.”
As the chortling subsides, the Biden presidential bid may be over before it begins.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The first Degree of Folly, is to conceit one’s self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1744)
On April Fools’ Day, 1957, the BBC offered for viewers of the current affairs program “Panorama” the infamous spaghetti harvest report hoax.
By sheer coincidence, one definition of “noodle” is “fool.”
This weekend at Townhall: real help as more meaningful than political posturing. Click on over, to read Paul’s Sunday column, if you haven’t already. But make sure to come back here, to donate (see below)!
And speaking of real help: you can give, too. Do not let the President’s caving to political bullying dissuade you from contributing to a good cause. Special Olympics is mostly funded voluntarily, by people like me and you.
Picture credit: ‘One of my all-time favorite drawings. It is a cherished gift from artist Reginald Coates. I met him doing my “community service” with mentally disabled adults at Arkansas Easter Seals.’ — Paul Jacob
Punish the one who commits the crime;
Ea to Enlil, as related by Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sîn-leqi-unninnī version by John Gardner and John Maier (1984), Tablet XI, Column iv.
Punish the evildoer alone.
Pictured above: Babylonian Gilgamesh Tablet, British Museum
On March 31, 1717, a sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ,” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.
The sermon’s text was John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced — supposedly at the request of King George I himself, who was present in the assembly — that there was no Biblical justification for any church government. Hoadly identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven, noting that Christ had not delegated His authority to any representative.
King George’s preference for the Whig Party, and for latitudinarianism in ecclesiastical policy, is widely thought to have been a strategic maneuver to degrade church power in political government.
A paradigmatic Tweet gets a thorough examination.
On March 30, 1864, German sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer was born. This sociologist is most famous for his 1908 book The State, in which he elaborated some consequences of two means for acquiring wealth, the “economic means,” by which he meant private production or by trade, and the “political means,” by which he meant forcible extraction from one group or person by another person or group. Oppenheimer taught in Palestine in the mid-1930s, and fled the Nazis to the United States, via Japan in 1938. In 1941 he became a founder of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and died two years later.