Professionalism

 

Our Creative Founders

 

"The Founders of the American Nation were one of the most creative groups in modern history. Some among them, especially in recent years, have been condemned for their failures and weaknesses - for their racism, sexism, compromises, and violations of principle. And indeed moral judgments are as necessary in assessing the lives of these people as of any others. But we are privileged to know and to benefit from the outcome of their efforts, which they could only hopefully imagine, and ignore their main concern: which was the possibility, indeed the probability, that their creative enterprise - not to recast the social order but to transform the political system - would fail; would collapse into chaos or autocracy. Again and again they were warned of the folly of defying the received traditions, the sheer unlikelihood that they, obscure people on the outer borderlands of European civilization, knew better than the established authorities that ruled them; that they could successfully create something freer; ultimately more enduring than what was then known in the centers of metropolitan life."

Sales Pitch from H.M.S. Pinafore

 

Big Decision

SCOTUSblog on the birthright citizenship decision of the Supreme Court.

Track It Down!

 

The official Execupundit Novel of the Year - Pilate's Magician - is at:

• BookShop.org
• Thrift Books

And, of course, Amazon.

We're eagerly awaiting news regarding Barnes & Noble.

[Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi at Unsplash]

The "We Are Unworthy" Crowd

"We are the first civilisation wealthy enough to fund a tenured class whose full-time job is to explain why it should never have existed."

- Michael Shellenberger 

In the Stack

 

Sign of Our Times

 

First Paragraph

 His father was ever a man of few words, even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name and unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgment of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.

- From Land: A Novel by Maggie O'Farrell

Imagine the Conversation on That Fishing Trip

 One June weekend, Washington collected Hamilton and Jefferson, neither yet sufficiently acquainted with the other to regard him as an enemy, and went fishing off Sandy Hook. If they discussed the assumption of state debts or where to locate the nation's capital permanently, it went unrecorded. Instead, the president returned with a large haul of sea bass and warm praise for his "able coadjutors, who harmonize extremely well together."

- From Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation by Richard Norton Smith