RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/tyranny_by_any_other_name_still_stinks.html

Tyranny takes hold when good people are lulled into inaction.  Those of us who mind our own business and prefer government to leave us alone are particularly prone to falling into this trap.  Because we have no use for government, we hope government will have no use for us.  So we are silent while evil grows far from our homes.  We tend to our basic comforts and ignore evil as it nears.  And, eventually, we even collaborate with evil in order to avoid making a public scene.  In an effort to “get by” without causing too many waves, tyranny’s waves grow bigger and stronger until they crash upon our homes.  By then, it is too late to batten down the hatches.  Evil has already broken through our doors.

I had hoped that we would have more time.  That must be the common sentiment shared by every generation grappling with what comes next.  I had hoped that the sheer destruction of the twentieth century would be enough to buy us many more decades of relative peace.  Regrettably, two world wars and a nuclear-tipped Cold War did nothing to temper governments’ lust for power or their financial backers’ lust for wealth.  WWI’s clash of empires should have discouraged the growth of trigger-happy alliances and endless conquest.  The evil unleashed by WWII’s totalitarian regimes should have discouraged the growth of centralized institutions and vast, unaccountable, “just following orders” bureaucracies.  Instead, military alliances, central banks, international governing bodies, administrative Leviathans, and trade organizations have accumulated more power today than at any other time in history.  The twenty-first century is the century of empire-building and totalitarianism, and unless ordinary people rein in the excesses of their own governments, the mass destruction that follows will make the first two world wars look like measly hors d’oeuvres.

Can it be done?  Can global bloodshed be averted?  Can Western nations be saved before they devolve into hotbeds of revolution and civil war?  Or do the mounting conflicts all around us signify that we are already too late?  The answers to those questions depend, in part, on whether regular citizens sufficiently resist being used as cannon fodder in the years ahead and whether global leaders sufficiently fear losing everything they now have.  Had the great monarchies of Europe understood that WWI would facilitate their demise, perhaps they would have been more hesitant to allow a tangled web of military alliances to decide their fate.  Chasing honor and glory led European nobles straight to their graves.  Had Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo known that they would die shamefully, perhaps their thirst for empire could have been quenched.  Lord Acton’s famous observation deserves a corollary: those who seek absolute power must be destroyed absolutely.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/25/joe-biden-angry-warrior/

Last weekend, President Biden spoke at the graduation ceremony at Morehouse College, an all-male, historically black college, aggressively attacking his Republican opponents and decrying what he sees as pervasive, overt, and violent ongoing racism in American society. “What,” Biden asked rhetorically, “is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” Finally, he intoned, “And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

The speech has been the subject of much discussion, particularly among Republicans, most of whom have bemoaned the President’s purposeful victimization of young black men for political purposes. Rather than tell them the truth, rather than encourage them to be great and to dedicate their lives to fixing the problems that exist in the nation, he encouraged them to wallow in their misery and to blame others for their problems.

Certainly, there is considerable truth in this criticism. And certainly, Biden should be chided for playing into an ideology that thrives on resentment and jealousy. Still, the substance of the President’s comments is quite probably less important in the grand scheme of things than the tenor in which they were delivered.

A week before his speech at Morehouse, President Biden and his campaign team released a video addressing the Trump campaign’s demand for head-to-head debates. “Make my day, pal,” Biden challenges Trump as he declares that he beat the former president twice in their previous campaign and will gladly do so this time too.

Here again, critics rightly noted that the substance of the video was questionable at best. “6 jump cuts in 11 seconds,” conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller noted. Biden is so bad at this that he can’t even read his cue cards in a studio. How is he going to do an entire debate, much less two? He’s not up to his actual job, much less to running a grueling campaign in addition.

This is another fair point, to be sure, but one that still misses the bigger picture—Biden’s tone.

Joe Biden—or at least the Joe Biden the public is allowed to see these days—is angry. He sounds like he wants to fight Trump. He yells at the young men at Morehouse on one of the most joyful and special days of their lives. He’s rough and gruff and thoroughly displeased with everyone and everything. And if he’s not careful, it’s going to cost him the election.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/wheres-the-jury-charge/

It is now Friday evening at the start of the long Memorial Day weekend, so it’s getting safer to assume that we will not be getting the jury charge — i.e., the legal instructions that Judge Juan Merchan will give the jury prior to deliberations — in former president Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial.

Interesting thing about that. It’s obvious that Judge Merchan does not want to give the commentariat an opportunity to pore over and publicly dissect what he plans to say. But that raises the question of why Merchan sent the jurors home after both sides rested on Tuesday, giving them a full week to marinate in the intense out-of-court publicity and feel pressure from family, friends, and acquaintances. (The jurors are anonymous as far as the public record is concerned, but it would be naïve to believe their identities are unknown to many people.)

Why didn’t the judge proceed with closing statements, the jury charge, and deliberations until a verdict was reached, as is customary in criminal trials? Presumably, he did not want to risk the wrath and potential defections if the jury were forced to deliberate during a holiday weekend. (If any commitments were made to the jury at the start of the trial about not working over this weekend, I have not seen that reported.) I believe the judge has been putting his thumb on the scale in favor of the prosecution, and experience teaches that when juries are inconvenienced, they tend to blame the government and the court; they may sometimes blame the defendant if it seems his lawyers are stalling, but they generally grasp that the defendant is not a voluntary participant in the trial and has the least control over its scheduling.

I want to make another point, though. If the judge does not want to make the jury charge public because of the intense media coverage, that can only be because of fear that the jurors might be exposed to that media coverage. Otherwise, there would be no downside to making public what ought to be, and routinely is, made public. If the big concern is intense media coverage, however, then why would Merchan send the jury home for a week outside the courtroom, where they’re apt to be bludgeoned by media coverage and other outside pressures? Why not have kept them in the courtroom working and shielded them from publicity and outside pressures until a verdict is reached?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In The Forgotten Founding Father Joshua Kendall wrote: “Recognizing [Noah] Webster’s knack for getting Americans to think of themselves as Americans, [George] Washington relied time and time again on his trusted policy advisor.” We tend to think of colonial Americans as being solely of British heritage, and certainly they dominated. But languages spoken in the American colonies in 1775 included German, Dutch, French, Swedish, Polish and Hebrew, along with numerous dialects and myriad languages of indigenous Americans. From its beginning America was diverse, unlike the more homogenous countries from which immigrants had come. The Founding Fathers wanted the people to become a melting pot.

Noah Webster[1] understood the value of developing the unique character of an American. His spelling books were designed to help people read, write and speak a common language. In the June 29, 2019 issue of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Richard Lederer noted that Webster’s dictionaries had “an array of shiny new American words, among them bullfrog, chowder, handy, hickory, succotash, tomahawk…” Today, in this English-speaking country, those not fluent are disadvantaged, yet not all are encouraged to learn English.

Integration, in this nation of immigrants, was slow, as could be seen in many New York City neighborhoods that remained distinctive into the 20th Century: Little Italy; China Town; Yorkville (for Germans); Spanish Harlem; Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Manhattan’s Harlem, home for black Americans, and Lapskaus Boulevard in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where many Norwegians settled. But assimilation became increasingly common in the first and second halves of the 20th Century, first through inter-ethnic marriages and later through interracial marriages.