Civility

On this day:

37
The Roman Senate annuls Tiberius’s will and proclaims Caligula emperor.
235
Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother Julia Mamaea are murdered by legionaries near Moguntiacum (modern Mainz). The Severan dynasty ends.
1229
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor declares himself King of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade.
1241
Mongols overwhelm Polish armies in Kraków in the Battle of Chmielnik and plunder the city.
1314
Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake.
1834
Six farm labourers from Tolpuddle, Dorset, England are sentenced to be transported to Australia for forming a trade union.
1871
Declaration of the Paris Commune; President of the French Republic, Adolphe Thiers, orders evacuation of Paris.
1915
World War I: Massive naval attack in Battle of Gallipoli. Three battleships are sunk during a failed British and French naval attack on the Dardanelles.
1922
In India, Mohandas Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience. He would serve only 2 years.

1942
The War Relocation Authority is established in the United States to take Japanese Americans into custody.
1962
The Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War of Independence, which began in 1954.
1965
Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space.
1968
Gold standard: The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.
1990
In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings, collectively worth around $300 million, are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

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What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.--Sowell

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We are asked to suffer at TSA by politicians for a greater cause they cannot articulate. When will they ask us for the sacrifices necessary to offset the problems of the national debt they created?

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This is an ad for AI DJs. If this is true, it is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reR71FQExxo

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Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday. He wrote about his wife in his resignation letter. She was an NSA linguist killed in Syria.

On Jan. 16, 2019, Chief Kent was meeting with a source at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, when a suicide bomber killed her and three other Americans.

Chief Kent was posthumously promoted to senior chief.

“She should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there,” Mr. Kent said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. “And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts.”

In his resignation letter, Mr. Kent cited what he said was Israel’s influence over the Trump administration’s policies.

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From an article on Cesar Chavez:
"Insiders hinted the explosive allegations — the details of which have yet to be released — had been been a long time coming."

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Your government at work.

On this day in 1937, a massive explosion caused the steel-framed school building in New London, in Rusk County, to collapse, killing a reported 298 people. It was the worst school disaster in United States history.
Of the 500 students in the building, only about 130 escaped serious injury. The explosion, which was heard four miles away, occurred when a manual-arts teacher turned on a sanding machine and inadvertently ignited a mixture of gas and air.
Three days after the explosion, inquiries were held to determine the cause of the disaster. Investigators learned that in January 1937, to save gas expenses of $300 a month, the school board and superintendent had authorized plumbers to tap a residue gas line of H. L. Hunt's Parade Gasoline Company. Apparently, gas had escaped from a faulty connection and accumulated beneath the building.


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Civility

Imagine you patronize a local grocery where you notice the butcher regularly puts a finger on the scale. He distorts your purchase. And your relationship.

Trade is more than an exchange of goods. It goes beyond social conviviality. It creates — and is the result of — trust. It makes fair exchange possible, which ordinarily entails the risk of loss. That trust is built and reinforced over time, trade after trade, so that basic principles of fairness under mutually agreed-upon rules become assumed and expected. They don't have to be negotiated and renegotiated in an atmosphere of suspicion. A good relationship has developed through predictable honesty, and the trade is mutually beneficial. The trade is shared. And that fairness spreads.

Trade is not just civilized, it is civilizing.

Now, apply these observations to tariffs.....