On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached “the Indies.”
The main islands of the Caribbean (south of the Bahamas) were, for many centuries, known as “the West Indies,” perhaps to both contextualize and commemorate Columbus’s mistake.
Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.-R) explains the budgeting process on X:
He is recirculating an old video. But that is OK: Congress is recirculating old arguments for the budget impasse.
Every Continuing Resolution and government shutdown is an argument for term limits!
So what has been happening this time around?
September 30–October 1: The shutdown began at midnight after Senate Democrats rejected a House-passed “clean” CR (extending funding at current levels through November 21) in a 55-45 vote. Republicans held slim majorities (House: 221-214; Senate: 53-47), but the Senate requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
October 2–6: Senate voted on competing bills, failing five times. Democrats’ alternative (funding through October 31, plus ACA extensions) was rejected 47-53. Republicans blamed Democrats for obstruction; Democrats accused Republicans of ignoring healthcare needs.
October 7–8: Two more failures (sixth and seventh votes). Only three Democrats (Sens. Fetterman, Cortez Masto, and King) crossed the aisle for the GOP bill. Senate adjourned without progress, with Republicans considering standalone funding for key agencies.
October 9–10: Shutdown extended into a second week after the Senate adjourned until October 14. The House GOP bill failed again (54-45), with no additional Democratic support. Speaker Mike Johnson noted “some discussion” of shortening the CR timeline due to delays, but no decisions were made. The Congressional Budget Office reported a $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY 2025, highlighting fiscal pressures.
October 11 (Today): No new votes scheduled over the weekend. Discussions continue amid growing public frustration — polls show 60-67% of Americans blame both parties, with Republicans and President Trump slightly more faulted (10-17 percent gap).
Paul Jacob has been writing about Continuing Resolutions and Congress’s habitual, repeated budget impasses for decades now, most recently on October 3rd, with “Pleistocene Politics.”
There is only one defense against existential death anxiety — denial, which banishes these feelings from consciousness to the deep unconscious.
Robert Langs, as quoted in Ajit Varki & Danny Brower, Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind (2013), p. 123.
October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution, Public Law 94–479, to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.
John J. Pershing (1860 – 1948) is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.
The proposal would let governments monitor all private chat messages, via mandatory back doors, without bothering with such trivialities as warrants, probable cause, evidence.
The European Union centralizes many assaults on liberty that member countries are supposed to supinely accept once enacted. But it can’t ignore individual members as proposals are still en route to becoming law. And the German government, often not exactly a beacon when it comes to free speech, has now made its opposition to this particular mode of surveillance and censorship loud and clear.
As Germany blocked the plan, first announced in 2022, German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said that “unprovoked chat control must be taboo in a constitutional state. . . . Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level.”
Parliamentary leader Jens Spahn of the Christian Democratic Union also uttered some common sense, explaining that warrantless monitoring of chats “would be like opening all letters as a precautionary measure to see if there is anything illegal in them. That is not acceptable, and we will not allow it.”
Although the proposal is not yet quite dead, the German opposition makes it extremely unlikely that EU bosses can go further with it.
Great spirit, German officials. Cheers to now applying this principle consistently — as is required of principles.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
Roger Bacon, in Robert Belle Burke The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2 (2002), p. 583.
On October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand’s dystopian/utopian (quasi-science fiction) novel of ideas, Atlas Shrugged, was published. Written to advance an individualist, freedom/free-market point of view and to show the consequences of statist ideology, it became one of the most influential and literarily successful didactic novels ever written.
Atlas Shrugged appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List for 21 weeks, and continued to sell thereafter, averaging 74,000 copies per year in the 1980s, over 95,000 copies per year in the ’90s, and in 2011 sold 415,000 copies. Atlas Shrugged has also appeared on numerous “best of” lists. In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible. Numbered among the book’s fans have been many artists, politicians, and thinkers, not least of whom was Ludwig von Mises.
Normally, government officials in the Hermit Kingdom strictly enforce all manner of regimentation and self-deprivation, at least for those being ruled. If you’re a happy citizen in North Korea, check the map. You are not in North Korea.
There may be light at the end of the tunnel, though. Kim Jong-un’s administration has put out an all-points edict, also all-areolas, ordering North Koreans to be on the lookout for women with un-socialist breasts.
The precipitant is an “ongoing show trial of two women in their 20s accused of undergoing breast enhancement operations by a backstreet surgeon.”
As you know, every socialist breast is the product of the forces of dialectical materialism, in consequence of which such bosoms, albeit firm and loyal to the supreme leader, are often Marxist-Leninist to a fault. Normally, then, we expect collectivist cleavage to be immune to capitalist leering as well as any other such “rotten capitalist act.”
Now, however, North Korea has turned a corner in its attitude toward mammary glands. Everyone is being ordered to stare at women well below eye level, especially any that might have benefited from augmentation in violation of Das Kapital.
While this new all-eyes alert may sound like a recreational activity for most men, it won’t be fun for the women who get dragged off to hospitals to be medically examined to determine whether their breasts are entirely for real or have been corrupted by “bourgeois customs.”
But North Korea isn’t supposed to be fun.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.
William Whewell, Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, The Equilibrium of Forces on a Point (1819).
On October 9, 1635 — and after many religious and policy disagreements — Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.