That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance” in Collected Essays (1959).
On August 1, 1834, Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 took force, freeing slaves throughout much of the British empire.
William Wilberforce, one of the country’s main anti-slavery politicians, had lived long enough in July 1833 to hear that the bill would pass, dying on the 29th, with the bill receiving royal assent a month later.
August 1 births include Francis Scott Key (1779), composer of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner”; American authors Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815) and Herman Melville (1819); and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (1972), historian and popularizer of Austrian economics, podcaster of the Tom Woods Show.
The “Ottawa truck convoy” is what they are calling the big anti-totalitarian protests made by truckers in Canada during the late pandemic scare.
“Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber,” we learn, and if you raise your eyebrows over such stiff sentences — for “mischief” cases! — you’re not alone. Chris Barber’s lawyer called the prosecutor’s demanded punishment, “cruel and unusual.”
The exact charges against the two convoy leaders are “mischief and counselling others to disobey a court order” (Barber) and “mischief alone” (Lich). The prosecutor argued that these people did a lot of damage.
But it wasn’t property damage, or burning buildings, or even littering. The convoys stalled traffic around government buildings and made a lot of noise — and Barber is acknowledged by the prosecutor to have worked with police to move trucks out of residential areas.
Barber and Lich wanted a clean and pointed protest.
Barber’s lawyer noted that the organizers and hooligans of the “Black Bloc” protesters at Toronto’s 2010 G20 summit “caused extensive property damage, including upending police cars and smashing storefronts, but received comparatively light sentences of under two years.”
And remember, even the CBC article used the word “unprecedented.”
Traditionally, however, a specific kind of government does indeed prosecute its opponents in this manner, no matter how peaceful.
Tyrannical governments.
So we now know how to categorize the Canadian government.
Very precedented.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Christ wanted love to be called his single commandment. This we owe to all men. Nobody is excepted.
Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians (1548), p. 39, as translated by Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press: 1992).
On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe — who would later become famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe and other literary works — was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel. The sedition pertained to a satirical pamphlet he had published, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” The mob pelted him with flowers.
On the same date in 1912, Milton Friedman was born. Friedman became one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, and one of the most effective advocates of free markets, as well. His books include Capitalism and Freedom and two famous collaborations, A Monetary History of the United States (with Anna Schwartz) and Free to Choose (with his wife, Rose Director Friedman).
“No, the government’s not taking your stove,” CNET said in January 2024.
What were we all worried about?
Tightening regulations, that’s what.
Absent a Trump administration, we would have witnessed a long series of ever-stricter regulations — always ratcheting up — to save us from the horrors of gas stoves.
Though we have been reprieved from many anti-energy Biden administration initiatives, a gas-stove ban may yet be coming to a state near you.
Do you live in New York State? Well, your anti-gas-stove politicians want to ban installation of new gas connections. You need a connection to the gas to get the gas into the stove.
It’s being litigated right now. An Empire State regulation forbidding new gas infrastructure will take effect next January unless a court challenge succeeds. Even though it’s all just a conspiracy theory. . . .
Judge Glenn Suddaby is giving plaintiffs, who argue that the impending regulation imposes arbitrary hardships, time to submit new arguments. Then, if he’s not persuaded, he’ll dismiss their challenge.
Unfortunately, the facts being promoted in New York State aren’t enough by themselves to motivate this judge to make a rational ruling.
No, government isn’t going to take your stove. But politicians and activists do seek to force you to give up your stove in the future. For want of fuel. Or because they’ve added sin taxes on the fuel or the stoves. Or both.
Or something else.
That’s how the progressive regulatory agenda works.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Do you guys know that saying, ‘Don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach’? Because you end up buying too much. That’s the same for us except it’s — it goes a little different, the saying — ‘Don’t go to the bulk food store if you’ve ever had a communist dictator.’” Because you buy too much.
Andrea Jin, stand-up comic, complaining about her grandparents’ apparent need for “34 bags of rice at home,” from her special “Grandma’s Girl.”
July 30, 1419, the First Defenestration of Prague: Jan Želivský, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the New Town Hall, on Charles Square. While they were marching, a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall. The mob, enraged, stormed the hall. Once inside, the group threw the judge, the burgomaster, and some thirteen members of the town council out of the window and into the street, where they were killed by the fall or dispatched by the mob.
King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, upon hearing this news, was so stunned, the legend goes, that he died soon after.
On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia. On the same date in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.
On this date in 1863, representatives of the United States and tribal leaders (including the Shoshone’s Chief Pocatello) signed the Treaty of Box Elder.
July 30 birthdays include Henry Ford (1863), Gen. Smedley Butler (1881), C. Northcote Parkinson (1909), and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947).
Vanuatuans celebrate Independence Day on July 30.
The U.S. State Department revoked their visa privileges, preventing them from entering the United States. The general policy had been introduced May 28, when Secretary of State Rubio announced that it would apply to “foreign officials and [other] persons . . . complicit in censoring Americans.”
By then a UK police commissioner, Mark Rowley, had threatened to “come after” Americans who violate UK “hate speech” laws.
The Trump administration “will hold accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” Rubio says.
“Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.”
Bolsonaro, a former president of Brazil, is on trial for allegedly seeking to overturn the country’s 2022 presidential election. He has been prohibited from posting on social media or communicating with others under investigation.
One on this no-contact order is his own son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, currently living in the U.S.
Having ordered social media platforms Rumble and X(-Twitter) to censor opposition figures, Justice Moraes acted to block both services from operating in Brazil when the platforms disobeyed him.
“Free speech,” said X’s Elon Musk, “is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”
It’s a wonderful thing to have our government once again defending democratic free speech — from its enemies foreign and domestic.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Aldous Huxley, “Religion and Time,” Vedanta for the Western World (1945), Christopher Isherwood, editor.