RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our first President was actually born on February 22, 1732 but he is celebrated today along with tributes to our great Presidents- Jefferson and Lincoln.

Read Ron Chernow’s outstanding biography….
Product DetailsWashington: A Life
This is his letter of August 21, 1790 to The Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:

Gentlemen:

While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

What can a Victorian-era novel depicting provincial English society teach us about modern politics? For starters, the more politics change, the more they stay the same.
George Eliot’s opus “Middlemarch” (1872), set in a small English town in the early 1830s, isn’t on most high school or college core reading lists. It should be. The novel’s vexing political questions foreshadow the debates taking place today.

“Middlemarch” unfolds against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and a rising middle class. At the time, only the landed aristocracy could vote. Due to urban migration—there was no redistricting to account for population shifts—cities were underrepresented. Meanwhile, the gentry controlled sparsely populated “rotten” boroughs whose voters were under their thumb.

In the novel, political agitators recruit the wealthy landlord Arthur Brooke to run for Parliament on a program of democratic reform. Eliot portrays Mr. Brooke as a frontman for the populist movement and observes that “the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment.”

Democratic activists choose him because he’s an empty vessel: “Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.” He’s flawed in other ways: Mr. Brooke’s opponents disparage him as “a damned bad landlord” who is “currying favor with a low set.” They make hay out of his poor treatment of tenants.

Mr. Brooke buys a newspaper, the Pioneer, and installs Will Ladislaw, a political activist, as editor to promote his campaign. Eliot describes the Pioneer as a “valuable property which did not pay.” Newspaper readership in those days was also segregated politically: “It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they only pick the more holes in his coat in the [competing rag] ‘Trumpet,’ ” Tertius Lydgate tells his friend. Mr. Ladislaw retorts: “No matter; those who read the ‘Pioneer’ don’t read the ‘Trumpet’ . . . Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?”

Dr. Lydgate is a young physician who aims to revolutionize the practice of medicine, which “chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs.” Doctors made their money by writing prescriptions, especially for opiates. Dr. Lydgate favors a holistic treatment-and-payment model over physicians “making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.”

However, the doctor doubts whether laws promulgated by self-interested politicians will accomplish anything in the way of reform. “That is the way with you political writers,” Dr. Lydgate tells his friend, “crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing. . . . You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”

This book provides compelling insight into ISIS on the basis of interviews with the group’s defectors, but ultimately fails to substantiate its thesis that ISIS lacks Islamic legitimacy.

“Islam according to ISIS has no basis in the actual scriptures” of Islam. So wrote the authors of the new book ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. While the many interviews with Islamic State defectors – including their brutal eyewitness accounts of the group’s atrocities – do provide compelling reading, this volume often suggests a more agnostic assessment of the militant group’s Islamic legitimacy than the authors may have intended.

Terrorism researcher Anne Speckhard and former Turkish police detective Ahmet S. Yayla wrote the book while leading the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, an “action-based, interdisciplinary research center working on psychosocial, cultural, political, economic, ideological and technological topics impacting global peace and security.” The book’s translator-assisted interviews demonstrated the authors’ belief that “disillusioned ISIS defectors who tell their authentic stories about life inside the Islamic State are the most influential tool to counter ISIS’ robust propaganda.” Deserters – who spoke to Yayla in southeastern Turkey and to Speckhard from Istanbul and Washington, D.C. via Skype – said that ISIS (or Ad-Dawlah, which in Arabic means “the state”) “does not represent Islam. Ad-Dawlah are kafirs [unbelievers].”

According to the book’s authors, their view of the Islamic State’s “perfect young candidate” as a naïve, believing Muslim who is unfamiliar with his or her religion, is contradicted by what they are often told about the ISIS fighter sharia indoctrination. Yayla said that he was surprised to find that a certain well-educated law school student’s critical thinking and training did not keep him from admiring his ISIS mentor, a Jordanian sheikh and former university English professor. That student and his fellow ISIS recruits actually admired the militant who taught them. “Ad-Dawlah chooses very high-level teachers who are well educated in shariah,” Yayla said, adding that those in the militant group are often looked at as having “very good characters.”

Similar admiration came from a former high school teacher and senior Islamic State commander in Raqqa, Syria the de facto capital of the group’s caliphate. Commenting on the group’s foreign fighters, he said, “I looked at the mujahideen and saw them as heroes – like the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. [They] always talk about Allah, Prophet Muhammad and jihad … the life hereafter and more divine things, [while] alcohol, gambling – vices were all banned.”