RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/03/28/man-who-stabbed-rand-paul-senate-aide-in-broad-daylight-had-just-been-released-from-prison-n1682037

A staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was stabbed “in broad daylight” by a man who had just been released from prison the day before. The unidentified staffer is in serious condition in a D.C. hospital.

Washington, D.C., has been growing more unsafe by the day because of local policies that reward criminal acts instead of punishing criminals. And this reality is getting better known because Capitol Hill workers are becoming more frequent victims of the Democrat-run city’s laissez-faire attitude about crime. Indeed, it nearly required a literal act of Congress and a presidential decree to get the woke city council to back off yet another easy-on-crime bright idea to reduce penalties for robberies and carjackings.

The New York Post reported that “the attack occurred on the same street as, and less than a mile away from, Rep. Angie Craig’s (D-Minn.) apartment building, where she was attacked by a crazed suspect with a long rap sheet inside the building’s lobby elevator last month.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3920055-will-the-white-house-dump-fed-chair-jerome-powell/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to oust Jerome Powell. Last week she went after the Federal Reserve chair, saying in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy. One is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both.”

It is hard to disagree with the Massachusetts senator, though Powell is certainly not the only one responsible for bringing us to the brink of recession. Democrats recklessly spent too much, heedless of the overheating economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been AWOL throughout; and bank supervisors did a lousy job preventing problems even as alarm bells rang.

But Powell is in the driver’s seat and is coming under increased scrutiny. Democrats, worried that a recession could hurt them badly in the elections of 2024, need a scapegoat. But it’s not just Democrats who are critical of Powell’s actions.

Ed Hyman, Wall Street’s top economist and a generally optimistic fellow, wrote clients a cryptic message last week titled: “Not Good.” His email alert came the day after Powell announced another rate hike, of 25 basis points. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/employers-need-to-put-the-squeeze-on-woke-intolerance-stanford-law-school-duncan-steinbach-free-speech-13f4ed90?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Stanford Law School’s career services website boasts the kind of professional opportunities the school’s graduates can expect when they venture beyond the safe spaces of the palm-speckled campus.

Ninety-seven of the nation’s top 100 law firms employ Stanford graduates as partners; 92 have Stanford alums as attorneys. For 48 consecutive years Stanford graduates have clerked on the Supreme Court. Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many other top firms have employed a graduate as general counsel.

So my question to the senior partners of law firms, corporate chief executives, judges and others who will employ these privileged people is: Do you stand with Jenny Martinez or do you cower behind Tirien Steinbach? Do you want your institutions to be places where the law is respected as the authority that mediates our disputes is blindfolded or are you going to continue to connive at the transformation of the law into a tool of the new identity-class struggle? Are you going to keep facilitating the degradation of the most basic of our freedoms—speech—or will you begin the long struggle against the controlling zeitgeist of totalitarianism?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-says-that-chance-rules-in-the-affairs-of-men/

Some years ago, while driving into Boston to attend a conference on “Changing and Unchanging Values in the World of the Future,” I noticed a billboard advertising not the latest consumer gadget but a sage observation attributed to Winston Churchill.  “The farther backward you can look,” it said in large black letters, “the farther forward you are likely to see.” 

It seemed more than a coincidence that the conference I was attending was at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.  Had some representative of that institution contrived to place Churchill’s fortifying admonition at the city gates?

I was disappointed to learn that the message had been arranged, not by the Pardee Center, but by some other civic-minded entity or individual. Nevertheless, if Churchill’s observation is not the motto of the Pardee Center, perhaps it should be.

The past does not provide a window overlooking the future, exactly; nothing short of clairvoyance can promise that. Nor is it even quite true, as George Santayana famously remarked, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (I recently had something to say about that in this space.)

History is not a form of prophylaxis. But knowledge of history does acquaint us with the permanent moral and political alternatives that mankind confronts in its journey through time.

It reminds us, for example, how regularly tyranny masquerades as virtue, how inhumanity is apt to cloak itself in the rhetoric of righteousness. (This is not, as St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians reminds us, a new insight: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”)

Above all, perhaps, knowledge of history can serve to temper our presumption. As I reflected on Churchill’s observation and the subject of the conference, I was struck anew by the large quota of optimism that language budgets into our lives.