A small leak can sink a great ship.
Ben Franklin, from Poor Richard’s Almanack.
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Benjamin Franklin
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Ships Sail
On September 6, 1492, Christopher Columbus left his final port of call in the Canary Islands before crossing the Atlantic for the first time.
On September 6, 1522, the Victoria returned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition to circumnavigate the world.
In 1620 on the Old Style date of September 6th, the Pilgrims set sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower. Their aim? To settle in North America.
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With an Exclamation Mark!
Last week, rumors echoed that President Donald Trump had died. Some famous people, such as Minnesota Governor (and future presidential hopeful?) Tim Walz, got “in trouble” for saying things that sounded a little too much like wishing Donald Trump dead.
Trump, of course, was alive and making news on Monday.
But for real death rattles in politics we have to go to Germany.
An election is looming and it appears from news reports that more than a handful of politicians standing for election died suddenly. But it’s not a general curse upon politicians. The deaths have happened in one party, the controversial “far right” party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
“Six candidates from Germany’s right-wing AfD Party have died within a 13-day span,” The Daily Wire reports. “As local elections approach, officials say that at least two deaths have been confirmed to be the result of natural causes and that no foul play is currently suspected.”
The two designated natural deaths occurred within the same state, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Two candidate deaths in the same party in the same political region leading up to the same election day has to raise eyebrows. A fluke?
It turns out that the other four suspiciously dead candidates hailed from the same region, and the authorities still suspect nothing.
“Despite the police ruling out suspicious circumstances, retired economist Stefan Homburg claimed in a post on X that the number of candidates’ deaths was ‘statistically almost impossible,’” the U.S. edition of The Independent informs us. “His post was later retweeted by the AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel, while AfD supporter and billionaire Elon Musk responded to the tweet with an exclamation mark.”
Rumors about this won’t die as quickly as the Trump rumors last weekend.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jean de La Bruyère
Le sage quelquefois évite le monde, de peur d’être ennuyé.
Wise men sometimes avoid the world, that they may not be surfeited with it.
Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688), “Of Society and Conversation,” #83.
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First President of Congress
Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.
Civil forfeiture laws allow officers of the law to commit theft. Sometimes they have to return the money they stole. But they don’t get punished.
Under civil forfeiture, authorities can grab cash or other possessions without proving criminal wrongdoing and without making an arrest. Since 2000, though, a federal law has made the federal government liable for reasonable attorney fees when a victim “substantially prevails” in court.
This law enabled Brian Moore, a rap artist, to eventually obtain compensation for thousands in legal costs after he sued to recover the $8,500 taken from him by federal drug agents.
One day in 2021, Moore took this cash, which he had inherited from his grandfather, to the airport. He hoped to fund production of a music video in Los Angeles, his destination. He was thwarted.
Even after a judge ruled that Moore could get his money back, he had to keep fighting, now with the help of Institute for Justice, to be compensated for legal fees. Eventually, he won that battle too.
But he won only after wasting a lot of time and suffering a lot of anxiety because officers of the law, with no evidence of wrongdoing, treated a person carrying cash as guilty of something just for carrying cash.
It was like Mount Everest. The officers took Moore’s stuff because it was there.
And they knew what they were doing. Such conduct should be punishable. If it were, it wouldn’t happen so often.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Frédéric Bastiat
If Exchange saves efforts, it also exacts them. It extends, and spreads, and increases, up to the point at which the effort it exacts becomes equal to the effort which it saves, and it stops there until, by the improvement of the commercial apparatus, or by the circumstance exclusively of the condensation of population, and bringing men together in masses, it again returns to the conditions which are essential to its onward and ascending march. Whence it follows that laws which limit or hamper Exchanges are always either hurtful or superfluous.
Frédéric Bastiat, Harmonies of Political Economy (from the Third French Edition, Patrick James Stirling, trans.).
Governments which persuade themselves that nothing good can be done but through their instrumentality, refuse to acknowledge this harmonic law.
Exchange develops itself NATURALLY until it becomes more onerous than useful, and at that point it NATURALLY stops.
In consequence, we find governments everywhere busying themselves in favouring or restraining trade.
In order to carry it beyond its natural limits, they set to conquering colonies and opening new markets. In order to confine it within its natural bounds, they invent all sorts of restrictions and fetters.
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Odoacer Rex
On September 4, A.D. 476, child emperor Romulus Augustulus (Dominus Noster Romulus Augustus Pius Felix Augustus) was deposed by barbarian soldier (and Arian Christian) Odoacer, who proclaimed himself “King of Italy,” yet represented himself as the client of Zeno, the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople.
September 4, 476, is the traditional end date for the Western Roman Empire.
Once upon a time, I didn’t think “culture war” issues were important. Give me liberty or — at least lower taxes and allow better representation in Washington.
But in recent years, as the left went woke and the right went MAGA, a number of cultural issues became . . . salient. Unavoidable. Key, even.
In “The Corporate Logo That Broke the Internet,” David French — late editor of National Review and now token rightist for The New York Times — defends the Cracker Barrel logo rebranding effort, where the image of an old man (Uncle Herschel, in Cracker Barrel lore) leaning against a barrel,” as French describes it, was removed.
Also removed? The tagline on the old logo: “Old Country Store.” All that was left was “Cracker Barrel” on a yellow field.
O, the uproar! And from the right!
Mr. French thinks it all very stupid. “Right-wing activists did the same thing that they mocked the left for in the [Sydney] Sweeney [American Eagle ad] affair. They looked at a completely normal, innocuous marketing effort, deemed it to be deeply politically coded and then lashed out.”
He contends that the protesting “voices never really explained how a plain logo with the restaurant’s name was woke,” yet the explanation is right before us, staring us in the face everywhere we go.
It was “woke” for corporations to remove beloved commercial icons such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben (now “Ben’s Original”), and “Mia,” the Land O’Lakes Indian maiden. In each of these logos the supposedly “offensive” and “stereotypical” images were removed ostensibly to avoid offending the easily offended. Leaving customers with blank, unoriginal, uninspiring and non-comforting signage.
Exactly what happened when the corporate bigwigs took out the iconography from the Cracker Barrel logo: All nostalgia liquidated.
Cultural erasure used to be a leftist theme, but thanks to today’s enlightened corporations, it has become universal, as the soullessness of modish symbology has become painfully obvious.
Define woke as erasure in the name of non-erasure. Opposing erasure generally is the defense of culture. That’s not a manufactured “outrage,” or a form of “bullying,” as French asserts.
It’s just Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.
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Frank Herbert
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Frank Herbert, “Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual,” from Children of Dune (1976).