RUTHFULLY YOURS

The monumental life of Benjamin Rush, medical pioneer and one of our most provocative and unsung Founding Fathers
 
By the time he was thirty, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment. As the new republic coalesced, he became a visionary writer and reformer; a medical pioneer whose insights and reforms revolutionized the treatment of mental illness; an opponent of slavery and prejudice by race, religion, or gender; an adviser to, and often the physician of, America’s first leaders; and “the American Hippocrates.” Rush reveals his singular life and towering legacy, installing him in the pantheon of our wisest and boldest Founding Fathers.
 
Praise for Rush
 
“Entertaining . . . Benjamin Rush has been undeservedly forgotten. In medicine . . . [and] as a political thinker, he was brilliant.”—The New Yorker
 
“Superb . . . reminds us eloquently, abundantly, what a brilliant, original man Benjamin Rush was, and how his contributions to . . . the United States continue to bless us all.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Perceptive . . . [a] readable reassessment of Rush’s remarkable career.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“An amazing life and a fascinating book.”—CBS This Morning

“Fried makes the case, in this comprehensive and fascinating biography, that renaissance man Benjamin Rush merits more attention. . . . Fried portrays Rush as a complex, flawed person and not just a list of accomplishments; . . . a testament to the authorial thoroughness and insight that will keep readers engaged until the last page.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[An] extraordinary and underappreciated man is reinstated to his rightful place in the canon of civilizational advancement in Rush. . . . Had I read Fried’s Rush before the year’s end, it would have crowned my favorite books of 2018 . . . [a] superb biography.”—Brain Pickings

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-most-dangerous-president-in-american-history/

Prior to Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House in early 2021, it would have been difficult for many American patriots to believe that a worse president than Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama could sit in the Oval Office. Then Biden wasted no time proving those patriots wrong. From Day One he has been such an unmitigated disaster for the country that only 19% of Americans said in a poll last Sunday that they want Biden to run again in 2024. A July poll revealed that only 13% of Americans believe the country is on the right track. Apparently few believe that Biden is building back better, much less making America great again.

His incompetence (or conversely, his competence in carrying out a destructive agenda) has done more than just bring the country to the brink of a failed state after only half a term, though; it also has endangered Americans in many ways, and its legacy will continue to do so for generations. Indeed, bestselling author Nick Adams, in his new book from Post Hill Press, labels Joe Biden The Most Dangerous President in History.

https://quillette.com/2022/12/08/how-do-they-know-this/

“If you take one point away from Bad Data it should be that the vast majority of statistics are estimates, some of them are very rough estimates, and statisticians are constrained by limited resources and bounded knowledge. It is not a crisis. Outright fraud is rare, but when confronted with an impressive statistic, especially when it seems surprising, it is worth asking, “How do they know this?” Very often the answer will be that they don’t really know it at all.”

A review of Bad Data by Georgina Sturge, 288 pages, The Bridge Street Press (November 2022)

H.G. Wells once predicted that “statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.” It was a slight exaggeration, but in an age of big data in which governments pride themselves on being “evidence-based” and “guided by the science,” an understanding of where facts and figures come from is important if you want to think clearly.

Georgina Sturge works in the House of Commons Library where she furnishes UK MPs with statistics. If Bad Data is any guide, she also provides them with caveats and other words of caution, which are ignored. This informative, reasoned, and apolitical book offers a string of examples to show that statistics are not always what they seem. Some statistics are rigged for political reasons. Others are inherently flawed. Some are close to guesswork. Even crucial variables such as Gross National Income and life expectancy are shrouded in more uncertainty than you might think. We don’t really know how many people live in Britain legally, let alone illegally. The number of people who are living in poverty varies enormously depending on how you measure it.

Crime and unemployment are hugely important to voters and therefore susceptible to manipulation by the authorities. England and Wales have data on recorded crime stretching back to 1857, but most crimes are not reported to the police and even when they are reported they are not necessarily recorded by police officers. Setting the police targets to reduce crime creates incentives for the police to allow possible crimes to go unrecorded. This has happened so much in Britain since the 1990s that the UK Statistics Agency stripped the recorded crime figures of their “national statistics” status in 2014.

https://www.jns.org/theodor-herzl-diaries-republished-in-ambitious-new-undertaking/

“Today, Theodor Herzl is best known for his beard, not his books,” laments Gil Troy, editor of “The Zionist Writings of Theodor Herzl,” in his introductory essay to a new edition of Herzl’s diaries.

Troy, a professor of history at Canada’s McGill University now living in Israel, wants to make Zionism’s founders come alive for the next generation. His latest effort is a three-volume collection of Herzl’s writings.

The brainchild behind the series is Matthew Miller, owner of Koren Publishers, a Jerusalem publishing house producing mainly religious texts. Drawing inspiration from the Library of America, a publisher of notable American classics and historical works, Miller decided to create a Library of the Jewish People to bring together the best writings from Jewish history in the fields of religion, the arts and politics.

“The Zionist Writings” are the first titles in that ambitious effort. They include a fairly comprehensive collection of Herzl’s diaries and other works, including his play “The New Ghetto” (1894), of which Herzl biographer Alex Bein said, “Herzl completed his inner return to his people”; Herzl’s 1896 manifesto “The Jewish State“; and important essays, like “The Menorah“ (1897), showing how, through Zionism, Herzl reconnected with his Judaism.

The series uses translations from the original German made by historian Harry Zohn in the 1960s. Other works, like “The New Ghetto,” are newly translated by Uri Bollag.

“Not since Ian Fleming and John le Carré has a spy writer so captivated readers.”—The Hollywood Reporter

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.

But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs.

Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/vaclav-havel-on-defying-a-system-of-lies/
“The Soviet bloc fell apart rapidly and unexpectedly, in large measure collapsing under the weight of its own dysfunction. Any system built on lies will eventually collapse, but it will cause great harm before this collapse and what replaces it may not be any better. Throughout, decent people will need to protect their own humanness by developing virtue and bravely living in truth.”

Written fifty years ago, Czech writer—later Czech president—Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless reads as if it was published yesterday to caution Australia today. I read and then re-read it during the Covid lockdowns when pervasive surveillance via QR codes, restrictions on association and movement, and—in most states—intolerance of even peaceful protests against official policies gave an alarming taste of the punishing control that government plus technology plus coercive policing and propaganda can achieve. Even without the Covid experience, it’s evident the social policies of state and federal governments—for example on gender equality, gay rights, the environment, indigenous matters and abortion—are broadly shared by domineering corporations, leading to a new type of societal levelling and mass-formation.

Fortunately for those who want to maintain some semblance of independent thought and some commitment to truth, Havel’s valuable book is compact (154 pages) and easy to read. It’s shrewd in its examination of politics and any society unfortunately soaked—and darkly stained—by stubborn, heavily-bureaucratised politics.

Havel, a poet and playwright, wrote The Power of the Powerless after the Soviet-instigated repression of the 1968 Prague Spring—an attempt to form a native Czechoslovakian socialism that worked for people rather than against them. A leader of Charter 77—a group associated with this gentler aspiration—Havel was harassed for years afterwards by the communists: his Prague apartment bugged, his movements followed, his plays banned. To survive, he worked in a brewery. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/ron-desantis-signals-2024-bid-with-new-book

Following a well-worn path into presidential politics, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signaled his bid Wednesday by announcing the publication of his autobiography and political blueprint.

HarperCollins Publishers said its imprint, Broadside, will publish The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival in late February.

“In The Courage to Be Free, Governor Ron DeSantis chronicles the most consequential decisions of his life and public service, including turning the Sunshine State into the promised land for millions of Americans. He has become one of America’s most closely watched officeholders, having delivered a historic, record-setting 2022 gubernatorial victory, winning by nearly 20 points and more than 1.5 million votes,” said the publishing giant.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/28/stand-a-little-less-between-me-and-the-sun/

“Henry Hazlitt recognized liberty as the only moral system and economic liberty, or capitalism, as the only means of organizing society that can benefit all. And he defended that position powerfully against many attacks. As Ludwig von Mises described him, “in this age of great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you … are the economic conscience of our country.” During his life, Hazlitt saw America taking the opposite course, with ever more resources forcibly taken from some for whatever and whoever the government decides. Now, much farther down that path, his understanding is even more important.”

Today marks the 1894 birth of one of American history’s most prolific public intellectuals – Henry Hazlitt. According to Lew Rockwell, he “was familiar with the work of every important thinker in nearly every field,” and “wrote in every important public forum of his day.” His published work as a journalist, literary critic, philosopher and economist ran to roughly 10 million words before his death in 1993, including perhaps the most popular economics book ever written – “Economics in One Lesson” (though looking back on that book later, he concluded that “So far as the politicians are concerned … the lesson … does not seem to have been learned anywhere”). 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/29/american-injustice-the-shockingly-true-story-of-the-hunter-laptop-coverup/

The other day, I received the newly published “American Injustice” by J. P. MacIsaac. He is the computer repairman who received a laptop from an intoxicated crackhead scumbag that turned out to be Hunter Biden and who later neglected to pick it up. The book details what transpired after that.

As is my usual habit with the unending line of books I order, I read a few pages just to get a taste of it, intending to put it down and read it days, weeks, months, or years later.

You’ve heard the hackneyed phrase, “I couldn’t put it down.” I’m sorry, but I couldn’t put it down, even though I had a long list of chores to do that weekend.

Well, actually, I did put it down. That is, for five minutes to start one of the tasks only to go back and pick up reading where I left off.

I had seen the awful movie “My Son Hunter” (why can’t conservatives make decent movies?) and although the movie had a bad screenplay, on viewing it I learned a few things regarding Hunter’s crimes.

Anyway, MacIsaac relates how, on repairing the laptop he uncovered a tremendous amount of selfie videos of pornography, using drugs and, more importantly, a treasure trove of illegal activities that Biden’s son took part in. the latter included documents of multimillion dollar embezzlements and bribes received by the Bidens, as well as evidence of collusion with Ukrainian and Chinese thuggish oligarchs.