Virginia

New York City Mayor Eric Adams reportedly carried 293 "special assistants" on the over-burdened city payroll during his first fiscal year in office, the New York Post reported. The aides, who were listed under vague titles, made up about one-third of the Mayor's Office, costing taxpayers $24.3 million, according to payroll records reviewed by the newspaper.

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According to Anthony de Jasay the word “fair” (and its derivatives) exists only in English “and has not even remote foreign equivalents.” In de Jasay’s view, “fair” is an empty and chameleonic word that means “nice” and has served mainly to corrupt “justice” into “social justice.” In a classical liberal perspective and in de Jasay’s anarchism, justice lies in voluntary contracts and interactions.

Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

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So many things are easy to say. "Justice now." "End war now!"

“To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can’t do that.” --Biden

So, how will that nonviolent pacification be done? How will the cat be belled?

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From the First Things First Department:

A group of House lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest made public a court-approved confidential mediation between the Biden administration and environmental groups pushing to remove four hydroelectric dams in Washington to protect salmon. Salmon.

The document, which has yet to be made public, was drafted on Nov. 2 as part of an agreement in which activist groups agreed to pause their litigation against the federal government. The groups have argued in favor of breaching the four federally managed dams amid declining salmon populations in the lower Snake River, which winds through Idaho and Washington before feeding into the Columbia River and then into the Pacific Ocean.

I wonder what they were promised.

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Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."