Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
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Wollstonecraft & Spencer
On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Wollstonecraft herself wrote several important political treatises, including her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and her valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”
Talking to Joe Rogan about the JFK assassination,Tucker Carlson argued that Trump’s and Biden’s withholding of information runs counter to American law. “There’s clearly something worth protecting,” he says, and he doesn’t mean the people involved — they’re all dead.
What’s being protected are, presumably, institutions.
According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, Trump told him that “if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.” According to Roger Stone, Trump explained that what he saw was “so horrible you wouldn’t believe it” . . . and thus Trump withheld 20 percent of the documents that had been scheduled to be released.
So horrible? Many of us can imagine quite a lot of horror coming from the dark corridors of the federal Leviathan.
But there’s another generational secret that Trump and Biden share, and Tucker mentioned it too: UFOs.
Indeed, he and Rogan started out the podcast in a freewheeling discussion of what our government now calls “the UAP issue,” for “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” But Tucker focused on a “dark” and “spiritual” element to the story, giving little evidence except for the scientist’s name who had contacted him about the study of UFO injuries of
Tucker also mentioned strangely behaving objects that traverse the oceans as if water were no matter. A few days earlier, a Yahoo News “Futurism” article explained that “Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and former Naval rear admiral who served as the author of a March white paper about so-called ‘unidentified submerged objects’ or USOs, told Fox News this week that he considers it both ‘scientifically valid’ and critical to national security to study these phenomena.”
A lot of effort has been made in the recent disclosure talk to frame UAPs as potential threats. But what kind of threat? A “spiritual” one — “so horrible”?
All we really know is that regarding assassinations and mysterious airborne and oceanic objects, the government would prefer to keep us guessing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Immanuel Kant
Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition).
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Sybil’s Ride
On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.
On the same day in 1805, United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, an important event in the First Barbary War.
In April 26, 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia, shooting him to death. There was no interrogation.
This April, a Nashville homeowner shot an intruder intent on burglary.
Also this month, a St. Louis apartment dweller shot an intruder who threatened to kill his family.
A Newport Beach homeowner recently shot an intruder as well.
Aside from the obvious, what do such incidents, often in newspapers, have in common? The government is hiding research about them.
In December 2022, Fox News reported that to appease gun control activists, the Centers for Disease Control had deleted reference to a study on how often guns are used in self-defense from its
The CDC-commissioned study by Gary Kleck showed that “instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times” annually. But in 2021, after being lobbied by the gun control activists, the CDC pretended that Kleck’s study didn’t exist.
Kleck said: “CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-control advocacy groups. . . . ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”
CDC’s conduct was not new. In 2018, Capital Research had asked why the agency was “Hiding Its Defensive Gun Use Statistics.”
For decades, we’ve had abundant data on how gun owners defend themselves from violent bad guys. CDC, which investigates something or other related to this subject, won’t share all that it knows.
We can’t legally require the media to stop hiding critical information. But we should be able to require our government to stop doing so.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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