WATCH IT HERE
Friday, February 26, 2010
Loss Of Liberty
Monday, February 22, 2010
Sen. John McCain: I was misled on bailout
No, he just didn’t care to read it! McCain is a sellout that is backpedalling because of pressure from Libertarians and Conservative Republicans.
But McCain stopped short of calling the TARP a mistake.
“Something had to be done because the world’s financial system was on the verge of collapse,” he said. “Any economist, liberal or conservative, would agree with that. The action they took, I don’t agree with.”
Read the article at: http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/azelections/articles/2010/02/22/20100222mccain-tarp0222.html
Lower Merion PA School District spys on children with computer webcam
The Lower Merion School District, in response to a suit filed by a student, has acknowledged that webcams were remotely activated 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing, lost or stolen laptops – which the district noted would include “a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus.”
“Despite some reports to the contrary, be assured that the security-tracking software has been completely disabled,” Superintendent Christopher W. McGinley said in a statement on the district’s Web site late Friday. Officials vowed a comprehensive review that McGinley said should result in stronger privacy policies.
Harriton High School student Blake Robbins and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Tuesday against the district, its board of directors and McGinley. They accused the school of turning on the webcam in his computer while it was inside their Penn Valley home, which they allege violated wiretap laws and his right to privacy.
The suit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that Harriton vice principal Lindy Matsko on Nov. 11 cited a laptop photo in telling Blake that the school thought he was engaging in improper behavior. He and his family have told reporters that an official mistook a piece of candy for a pill and thought he was selling drugs.
Read full article at: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100220/D9E04NVG0.html
Friday, February 19, 2010
Violence is not the answer
CNN: Austin Plane Crash was deliberate, officials say
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
(CNN) — An Austin, Texas, resident with an apparent grudge against the Internal Revenue Service set his house on fire Thursday and then crashed a small plane into a building housing an IRS office with nearly 200 employees, federal officials said.
Federal authorities identified the pilot of the Piper Cherokee PA-28 as Andrew Joseph Stack III, 53.
“This appears to be an intentional act by a sole individual,” Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a news conference.
Two people were critically injured in the crash and one person remained unaccounted for late Thursday afternoon, Acevedo said. Eleven others were treated for minor injuries.
A body was recovered from the wreckage Thursday night, but authorities did not immediately identify the person as either the pilot or the missing person.
A fire created by the crash had been put out, save for some small areas, officials said. Fire crews were expected to continue to work through the night.
The suicide letter: stack.letter
Friday, February 12, 2010
Mumps outbreak spreads among people who got vaccinated against mumps
Mike Adams
Natural News
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
To hear the vaccine pushers say it, all the recent outbreaks of mumps and measles are caused by too few people seeking out vaccinations. It’s all those “non-vaccinated people” who are a danger to society, they say, because they can spread disease.
Reality tells a different story, however: It is the vaccinated people who are causing these outbreaks and spreading disease!
Just this week, an outbreak of mumps among more than 1,000 people in New Jersey and New York has raised alarm among infectious disease authorities. The outbreak itself is not unusual, though. What’s unusual is that the health authorities slipped up and admitted that most of the people infected with mumps had already been vaccinated against mumps.
In Ocean County, New Jersey, county spokeswoman Leslie Terjesen told CNN that 77 percent of those who caught mumps had already been vaccinated against mumps.
77 of those infected had been vaccinatedUsually this information is censored out of the press. The vaccine industry wants the public to believe that vaccines are effective at preventing infection. So the media typically refrains from reporting what percentage of the infected people were already vaccinated against the infectious disease.
But in this case, the 77 percent figure slipped out. And now intelligent observers are increasingly seeing the truth about these vaccines:
* Infectious disease vaccines simply don’t work. If they did, then why did all these children who were already vaccinated still get mumps?
* Vaccines may actually increase your risk of disease. Notice that far more vaccinated children were stricken with mumps than non-vaccinated children?
* The people who administer vaccines never tell you that their vaccines don’t really work. They tell you that you’ll be “protected” with the vaccine, implying a near-100% level of protection (which is blatantly false).
* Even if you’re vaccinated against a disease, you may still catch that disease anyway! So what’s the point of the vaccine?
The lies of the CDCThe CDC claims the mumps vaccine is 76 to 95 percent effective, but they offer no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that claim. To date, there has never been a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study published on the mumps vaccine in humans. The so-called “scientific” evidence supporting these vaccines is purely imaginary.
I still have a $10,000 reward offered for anyone who can provide a single scientific study proving the safety and effectiveness of any H1N1 vaccine (http://www.naturalnews.com/027985_H…). To date, not a single person has stepped forward to claim that $10,000. I might as well raise the reward to a million dollars, because I’ll never have to pay it: There is no scientific evidence proving the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines!
Does being vaccinated raise your risk of infection?The CDC also says that 2009 was a bad year for mumps outbreaks. They blame all the people who refuse to be vaccinated for causing these outbreaks. Their theory, of course, is based on the imaginary idea that mumps vaccines halt mumps infections. But once again, it’s all imaginary! As we saw this week in New Jersey, most of the people who get infected in these outbreaks are the very people who were vaccinated!
If mumps vaccines actually worked, then what you should see instead is the mumps infection spreading among those who refused the vaccines, right? It’s only logical.
In fact, if vaccines really work, then why should the vaccinated people be bothered at all by those who don’t get vaccinated? After all, if their vaccines protect themselves from disease, then non-vaccinated people are no threat to them, right? So why are vaccinated people so pushy about forcing non-vaccinated people to get vaccinated?
The shocking truth about infectious disease and vaccines, however, is very different from what you’re told by the drug companies (and the health authorities who pander to their interests): Some vaccines may actually promote the very diseases they claim to prevent!
That may be why 77% of those who recently got mumps in New Jersey were, in fact, the very people who were vaccinated against mumps. The vaccine may, in fact, weaken your immune system against future infections, causing you to become more susceptible to future outbreaks.
Many thousands of Americans who died from H1N1 swine flu were the very people who got vaccinated against H1N1 (http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H…).
The great vaccine hoax exposedTake a look at nearly every outbreak of infectious disease in recent years and you’ll find the same pattern. You’ll either see that most of those who got infected were already vaccinated, or you’ll see those statistics completely stripped out of all media reports.
It’s all part of the grand vaccine cover-up. Vaccines simply do not work as promised. Vaccines do not offer the level of protection against infectious disease that they promise. In fact, vaccines are far less effective than vitamin D in preventing infections!
Instead of shooting up our children with over 100 different vaccines (which is now standard practice, by the way), what we should be doing is boosting their immune function with vitamin D, zinc and immune-boosting nutrients from medicinal plants. That would protect them from all common infectious diseases at the same time, and it doesn’t require needles or the use of dangerous chemical preservatives like thimerosal, which is linked to autism.
Don’t believe the recent attacks on Dr. Wakefield. This was an organized smear campaign designed to discredit Dr. Wakefield before he could publish the results of his “14 monkeys” study that shows severe neurological harm caused by vaccines given to young primates (http://www.naturalnews.com/028109_A…).
There is a way to protect people from infectious disease: Give them the immune-boosting nutrients their immune systems need to defend themselves against disease. Outbreaks of infectious disease would plummet along with seasonal flu deaths.
Of course, so would sales of vaccines. And that’s the whole reason you never hear health authorities recommending vitamin D even though it’s far more effective than any vaccine at preventing infectious disease (http://www.naturalnews.com/027385_V…). The CDC, we now know, is little more than the marketing branch of Big Pharma’s vaccine operations. That’s why the former head of the CDC, Dr. Julie Gerberding, is now suddenly the president of Merck’s worldwide vaccine division (http://www.naturalnews.com/027789_D…).
Vaccines make lots of money, but they don’t make people immune to disease. The fact that so many vaccinated people are being stricken with the very diseases they were vaccinated against is proof that vaccines fail to deliver what they promise.
Hen parties
David Davis
I agree with Celia Walden on this one. The prevailing popular culture of course, under ZanuToryLieBorg, has forced ordinary people without much will-power, and of either sex, to have such events. They are invariably depressing, expensive and humiliating for the Principals.
My first wife and I, in 1973, decided to host a small dinner at a rather new and soul-less hotel in Winchester, for our parents and closest friends. (The hotel’s soullessness was not its fault.)
Thirty years later, my present wife and I decided to host a small dinner, a couple of days beforehand, at our flat in Battersea, for our closest friends, such as those who would be officiating closely on the Saturday, such as “witnessing”, or cooking the grub in the kitchen for everybody, and buttling, after we all shambled back from the Church round the corner. Most of our parents were then either dead, or geographically inaccessible such as my old-fella, who was birdwatching on the marshes round Antwerp, and thought that was more pressing.)
Liberal Classical education will destroy the need for these sad public-humiliation-events.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem--"Fear the Boom and Bust"
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Monday, February 8, 2010
Let the Restoration Begin
by Dahni
© Copyright 2/08/10
all rights reserved
HOW can WE the People regain control of OUR right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” WE have been delving into what won’t work in order to find what will work.
Last time I asked for your help (the 8 Re’s from the last post). The title of the list “redux” and every item on the list used the same two letters, ‘R’ & ‘E’ or ‘Re’. Restoration uses the same first two letters, also. ‘Re’ is an important prefix and quite simply means to do again. Like the word – ‘rejoice,’ for example. In order to rejoice, WE first needed to have joy. The point here is that these things are available and we just want to re-do or re-peat these over and over. WE want to re-store.
Today: Let the Restoration Begin!
WE the People must know and understand what a restoration is and what WE are restoring. This is not a construction, or a re-construction. It is not building, re-building or re-modeling . It is a re-storing or a restoration of the original. It is something WE already had and WE already have!
In previous posts in this blog, I have taken great lengths to try and uncover, what has been hidden from most of US for well over 100 years (specifically since 1861). The words ‘Legal Fiction,’ were introduced. WE have looked at various metaphors and ideas to try and fix an image in our minds, as to what legal fiction is. Concepts from the series of movies known as ‘The Matrix’ were used as was the ‘rabbit hole,’ in the fantasy world of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ Plainly and legally, legal fiction is as follows.
Legal Fiction
In the common law tradition, legal fictions are suppositions of fact taken to be true by the courts of law, but which are not necessarily true. They typically are used to evade archaic rules of procedure or to extend the jurisdiction of the courts in ways that were considered useful, but not strictly authorized by the old rule.
Legal fictions were used by courts prior to the existence of handling offences. In a situation where A sells stolen property to B, B can then be accused of handling stolen property. Legal fiction has been used to declare that: as A did not have the power to sell the property to B, B was considered to have also stolen the property, and was therefore guilty of theft.
The term “legal fiction” is not usually used in a pejorative way in spite of the negative connotation of the phrase, and has been characterized as scaffolding around a building under construction.
Note: Research the history of ‘Legal fiction’ and Law dictionaries, specifically ‘Black’s.
What does ‘Legal Fiction’ have to do with restoration? What the following image endeavors to illustrate is that legal fiction is not real. It is a fake or a façade. It does not exist. It is fantasy. Take a look at the image below.
The image is a model of OUR U.S. Capitol. For OUR purposes here, this represents our Republic; OUR Constitution; OUR government; OUR rule of Law.
With the lighting, the image and black background, it is accepted as being at night. Night represents secrecy or the cover of darkness.
If you look closely, scaffolding can be seen in the picture. It is hard to tell exactly where the scaffolding is. Is it in front of, in the center (sandwiched between two) or behind the building? But once WE see it, WE know it is there. Remember, scaffolding is used as an analogy for a building under construction. So what it appears to be that what WE are looking at is OUR republic, under construction. This can be understood as amendments to our Constitution; other purported laws of the land and states or as a work in progress.
What WE think and believe is OUR Republic, is actually a façade. It is like a whole town built for a western movie set. From the front it looks real, but it actually has no sides, innards or back.
Look closely. Can you see a faint image of the capitol’s rotunda just behind and to the left of the one lit and in the foreground? What WE are actually looking at is a building which appears to be an exact replica of the one in front. Darkness and the scaffolding make this difficult to see, but this is what is there. And what is this dark, unseen and almost unknown replica? It is our Republic! It is not a replica. The replica is the one in front; the one that looks all pretty and lit up. It’s the one WE think and believe is our republic. It is not an exact replica! It is a fake and it has been altered!
The scaffolding (legal fiction), was used to construct this façade or fake government. The real capitol is behind the fake one.
Look at the center of the lit capitol rotunda in the foreground. Can you make out the colors of blue and gold and the form of a chair? It is a throne and representative of a monarchy, or a dictatorship. Call this usurpation, treason or tyranny.
This is not to blame a person, persons or party. It is not another conspiracy theory. Whether by original intent, present knowledge with intent, or ignorance, these are the facts. This is a system, a corrupt, corruptible and corruptible system THAT MUST BE TORN DOWN AND TORN OUT!
This system, this scaffolding, this legal fiction, this United States, Inc., this façade, has been under construction for well over 100 years!
This system has systematically tried to rewrite history, OUR Constitution and OUR unalienable rights that among these are, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
This system has tried to replace the United States FOR America with the United States OF America. This system has tried to replace OUR Republic (rule by law) with a democracy (rule by majority). This system has tried to replace OUR unalienable (rights which cannot be surrendered or taken) with inalienable rights (freedoms – privileges which can be surrendered and taken). This system has tried to take the sovereignty of the several states and replace them with districts under the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia, Inc. This system has tried to replace OUR citizenship in the state where WE reside and replace it with Citizenship of (under the jurisdiction of) the United States (the District of Columbia, Inc.). This system has tried to take OUR Liberties (unalienable rights) and replace it with freedoms (inalienable privileges).
This system has tried to bind US under legal contract in replacing bearer bonds, legal tender, money backed by gold or silver as instruments for services rendered, acquisitions acquired and for payments of all debts public and private, with Federal Reserve Notes. This system has tried to bind us under contract in our acceptance of this counterfeit money and illegal bearer bonds. But no contact is valid unless all parties knowingly agree to the terms and have all signed the contract. No representative may sign on behalf of any other. No power of attorney is valid unless for the cause of a non-adult prohibited from entering into any such binding agreement or it has been proven that physical or mental incapacitation, can show cause that the party is unable to sign the contract for herself or himself.
This system has tried to systematically tear down the government OF the People, By the People and FOR the People and replace it with a master relationship (even if benevolent), for whom we serve as its servants; its slaves for our very existence.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is OUR Republic that WE the People are to restore. Nothing has changed! OUR Republic has not changed! OUR sovereignty has not changed nor has the sovereignty of the several states. OUR Liberty has not and cannot be forfeited, surrendered or taken from US! Our Constitution has not changed!
WE the People are living inside and outside of a lie, a façade, and a fake legal fiction fantasy called, the United States, Inc.; seated in the District of Columbia, Inc!
WE the people must tear down the scaffolding and this legal fiction façade and rip it out to reveal and to restore, OUR Republic which still stands!
WE the People know now, what has to be restored (OUR Republic). Now WE the People need to know, HOW to restore it!
I have promised and will keep my promise. I promise you that what WE can do about all of this and HOW to do it is coming! It is really quite simple. It will not take forever or even a lifetime. It will only take a small amount of time and the participation of each 1 of WE the people. It may be difficult, but WE can do it IF, WE the People so will to do it. Do WE so will?
What may seem as insurmountable odds in regaining control of our liberties may appear hopeless, but there is an answer! Stay tuned here as we continue.
Next Time: The Most Powerful Person in the U.S.A.
Check out the other blogs listed to the right. Come often. Bring others. Get involved. Do something. Even if it is just leaving a comment, that’s doing something. But don’t bother in telling me how stupid I am, this won’t work or that you hate my guts and things like that. Been there, done that and heard that all before and then some. Be original. Be different.
Ask not what your country can do for you
or what you can do for your country,
but what can WE the People do, for each other!”
1 of WE,
Dahni An Amer-I-Can eagleNext Post – The Most Powerful Person in the U.S.A. COMING SOON
Previous Post – I am Asking for Your Help!
Front Page - Welcome & Introduction
Friday, February 5, 2010
Is Paul Dennis The Hero Of ClimateGate?
The UK Guardian is reporting that Dennis, whose ice-core temperature studies are at odds which the Church of Carbon Come, has been questioned several times about leaking the emails and data files from the CRU at East Anglia.
Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because “science isn’t done by consensus”.
University sources say the head of department, Professor Jacquie Burgess, received a letter from Dennis at the height of the email uproar, calling for more open release of data. He appears to have disapproved of the way Jones resisted FoI requests.
Russian hackers? A conspiracy of denialist flat-earthers? Not so much. Bwuhahahaha
If Dennis is the leaker, he deserves a ticker-tape parade and all the rock-star accoutrements he can get. Great work, Paul–you may have saved science.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
John Adams & Thomas Jefferson: From Friendship to Antagonism to Reconciliation
Introduction
I was tempted to title this piece “The DNA of the United States of America, Part 3.”
I have already written of the rivalry between Adams and Jefferson for the Presidency of the USA in the year 1800, and on the autobiography of Jefferson.
What stimulated my writing of this current article was the arrival of a book I ordered, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, which contains letters between the men, and between Abigail Adams and Jefferson, from 1777 until the deaths of the two men in 1826.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third Presidents of the United States (Source)
I was recently reminded of these letters while viewing the HBO television series, John Adams on Swedish TV. I also subsequently ordered and viewed a videotape of the musical play 1776, which I had seen several decades ago. The play was centered on John Adams and his relentless efforts to get the Second Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain.
I find this period in our country’s history endlessly fascinating. I return often to the biographies and histories of the most well-known figures and, now, some of the lesser known but no less important, such as Dr. Benjamin Rush who was the instrument through which Adams and Jefferson resumed their friendship after many years of bitter enmity, at least on the part of Adams who was the more emotional of the two men.
So, I bravely wrote the first draft of this article, focusing on the implications of the frequency and of the time line the letters occupy, and forwarded it to a friend for criticism. (He, coincidentally, is currently in the process of viewing the same six-part HBO series on John Adams). His remarks are so cogent and pithy I asked to use them here, and he consented.
I learned from the video that Jefferson was a bit of a libertarian radical for his time, and Adams a bit of a buttoned-down conservative. One aspect of all this is that it took the magic of George Washington’s leadership to keep them all together for the sake of the country, and that may be an…important lesson for today — that we lack a real leader like Washington.
I don’t see these protagonists’ philosophical differences as akin to the political warfare we have today. In Jefferson and Adams’ day, no matter the philosophical differences, each person knew the stakes were unimaginably high. We were a small and fragile nation, always vulnerable to attack from within or without. There was no guarantee we would prevail or even survive, and the Founding Fathers faced up to this reality with courage and discipline, as well as a keen sense of reality.
Today our politicians live in a Never Never Land where America is transcendent, there is no real perceived risk to us or our way of life, and debates are based on academic philosophies that have not been vetted in the real world. Today’s politicians lack the seriousness of people who know they are playing for life-and-death stakes.
Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
With my friend’s remarks as preface, I now offer some detail, derived from the Letters, to reveal some of the personal dynamics between these two men, without whom we would not be enjoying the liberties our independence from Great Britain afforded us, to whatever degree these liberties remains.
The Declaration of Independence
In June of 1776 Adams and Jefferson were appointed by the Second Continental Congress, along with Benjamin Franklin and two others, to write a declaration of independence from Great Britain. Here is Adams’s account of how Jefferson became the writer of the initial draft:
The subcommittee met. Jefferson proposed to me to make the draft. I said, ‘I will not,’ ‘You should do it.’ ‘Oh! no.’ ‘Why will you not? You ought to do it.’ ‘I will not.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Reasons enough.’ ‘What can be your reasons?’ ‘Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.’ ‘Well,’ said Jefferson, ‘if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.’ ‘Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.’ (Source).
The friendships between the Adamses and Jefferson resulted in a total of 380 letters written from one to the other, between 1777 until the death of the two men on July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after they had signed the Declaration of Independence (along with 54 others).
After Independence and before the Constitution
It should be remembered that although we became independent of Great Britain by declaration in 1776, we did not have a governmental constitution until 1789. During this period the decisions of Continental Congress and then, by adoption in 1781, the Articles of Confederation, provided the framework for governance of the combined states. There were 14 presidents of the Continental Congress (two served twice) until George Washington was inaugurated as the first U.S. president, on April 30, 1789 under the new Constitution, with John Adams as his Vice President.
Washington as first President and the formation of political parties around differing views of the role of the Federal Government
Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart
Although there were not organized political parties until the election of 1896, there were those who called themselves Federalists and those who identified themselves as Democratic-Republicans. These groups, and later parties, had importantly differing views on the proper role of the new federal government. Simply put, the Federalists wanted more power centralized in the federal government, and the Democratic-Republicans wanted the minimum necessary accruing to the central government for the purposes laid out in the Constitution. Adams was for the Federalists and Jefferson was for the Democratic-Republicans. As they became political rivals, these differences put a cloud over their friendship which was not cleared until well after both had been out of power.
The 380 Letters
A mentioned above, the letters began in 1777, but were few in number until year 1785 when there were 69 letters between them, plus eight each between Abigail Adams and Jefferson. In the following two years there were 42 and 43 letters, respectively. In 1788 there were 12 letters.
While Adams was Vice President in the eight years 1789 through 1796, when Adams was elected President to succeed Washington, they averaged slightly over three per year between them.
Because of the odd method of choosing vice presidents (since improved) Jefferson was Adams’s Vice President from 1796-1800. There were no letters between them during this period.
Jefferson was elected President over Adams in 1800, and they returned to an intermittent and scanty correspondence in 1801 and 1804.
Jefferson was reelected, again over Adams and others, in 1804. The two men did not correspond again for eight years until January, 1812 when Madison was elected to his second term as fourth President of the USA.
Portrait of Dr. Benjamin Rush by Charles Willson Peale
The cause of their renewed correspondence and, concomitantly, their even deeper friendship was by the agency of their mutual friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Here is some background to this initiative from commentary in the book (excerpted and edited):
One of the more bitter aspects of the retirement of John Adams from the presidency in 1800 was the fact that several of those with whom he had early co-labored during the Revolution had become his fervent adversaries. This was especially true in the case of Thomas Jefferson who, although serving closely with Adams during the Revolution, had become one of his chief enemies during President Washington’s administration. This feud not only deeply embittered Adams emotionally but it also troubled Dr. Rush, who was still a close friend of both Adams and Jefferson.
In his concern over the relationship between these two, one night several months after Jefferson’s retirement from the Presidency in 1809, Dr. Rush had a dream about the two which he felt was important. On October 17, 1809, he wrote down an account of that dream and sent it to John Adams.
At the time this letter was written, Jefferson and Adams were still vehement opponents. Adams received the dream from his dear friend with an open heart. Shortly after this letter, Rush, who was also a dear friend of Jefferson, initiated a correspondence with Jefferson on the same topic, attempting to reconcile the two. Jefferson, too, listened to Rush with an open heart, and tentatively reached out to Adams with a gracious letter. Adams, as he had promised, did “not fail to acknowledge and answer the letter,” and thus began a cordial renewing of a warm and sincere friendship between the two. Source
Adams took the first step by writing a brief letter to Jefferson on New Year’s Day, 1812, the subject being a “Packett containing two Pieces of Homespun” which Adams sent under separate cover to Jefferson. Jefferson responded on January 21 and they exchanged 13 letters in this year.
Year 1813 saw an explosion of pent-up expression from Adams who wrote 29 letters to Jefferson; the latter, as was his habit, wrote fewer but longer letters, only 6. Abigail and Jefferson also exchanged one letter between them this year.
They continued a regular, but less frequent correspondence until their deaths in 1826. Abigail and Jefferson also exchanged, typically, one letter per year until her death in 1818.
I offer, in closing, two excerpts from the book of letters, chapter 9, headed: “Whether you or I were right posterity must judge:”
Even in retirement Adams could not view the political scene… with the detachment that Jefferson achieved. Charges of corruption against the Republican Presidents Adams treated with contempt, even though he told Jefferson, “in the Measures of Administration I have neither agreed with you or Madison.” As for non-importation, non-intercourse (with other nations) embargoes, the structure of the judiciary, or neglect of the Navy, “whether you or I were right Posterity must judge (May, 1912)…
“By the summer of 1813 their accord was re-established, despite a few old wounds exposed and irritated. But their mutual friend who had brought about the rapprochement died on April 19. As Adams and Jefferson mourned Rush’s death, they took count of the surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence. Beside themselves, only six (of the 58) were alive.
I think there is a lesson here for our present-day representatives, in the two branches of government where the people directly choose: there can be strong and completely opposing points of view, hard fought in public and privately, but public benefit can be maintained through disciplined argument, and through the respect such argument can engender among men of good will.
I am again reminded to honor and revere the memory and the contributions of these two men, of disparate background and disposition, to our nation and to our freedom from tyranny.
But, as my friend points out, strong and purposeful leadership, mindful of the endless dangers in the world, is the key ingredient in maintaining our liberties.
(Read my essay on Liberty and Freedom here)
Monday, February 1, 2010
How can the United States become a loser in a competitive world?
With its clearly laid out plan that says one thing that seems a step in the right direction only to advocate guidelines that will achieve its opposite, this is a timely and important document to turn a great state into a laughing stock, a proud state into a righteously pious theocracy, an able state to alter intelligent and capable children into idiots.
Well done, Texas!