March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.
On the same date in 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful and the threatened coup d’état never took place.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876.
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, Chapter XI: “Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them” (1901).
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, placing United States currency on the gold standard.
Friday’s events may cast a shadow upon the rest of the race — or serve as a spark to ignite a fiery finish of this campaign year. Click on over to Townhall, for Paul Jacob’s Common Sense perspective. Other links? Well, there are stories everywhere. But for the GOP also-rans complaining about the front runner, click over to the Washington Post.
And scroll on back to yesterday’s video.
The image, above, is of one of the protestors getting his flag up onto CNN’s cameras. The CNN commentariat did not see fit to mention it. I guess it would have broken the rhythm of most of the talking heads excoriating Trump for all the violence. I am sure they think Trump was responsible for protestors blocking ambulances, too.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
So this happened:
I love a good protest. But a bad protest is where the protestors mob the event and shout down speech. That isn’t good protest. It is anti-free speech. It is bullying.
Things look like they are getting ugly this election year. The result could be chaos. But backlashes happen, and the protestors may have ensured that the man they say they oppose actually gets elected. We will see.
(The video was almost selected at random. Consider this a place filler. A historic marker.)
On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring. The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.
Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).