I should probably explain...
They presented this to me just for showing a guy from Moldova how to mass produce chocolate bars.
Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Friday, August 7, 2026
THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS
I should probably explain...
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Dead Woman’s Sentence Is Commuted to Life in Prison
A Dead Woman’s Sentence Is Commuted to Life in Prison. Justice or Farce?
Posted in: Courts and Procedure
On July 8, England’s Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, David Lammy, informed his colleagues in the House of Commons that King Charles had granted a conditional pardon to a woman who was executed on July 13, 1955. The beneficiary of the King’s posthumous mercy was Ruth Ellis, who, as a report in the Guardian notes, “was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom.”
Ellis had been convicted and sentenced to death when she was twenty-eight years old for murdering her lover, David Blakely, whom she met while working in a nightclub. During her trial, Ellis, who had been married before and who was the mother of two children, stated, “It was obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him.”
Not surprisingly, Ellis’s trial attracted massive press interest. As Monash University’s Sue Tweg explained in an article about the trial, “The press provided sensationalized accounts of what night-club life was like, for the benefit of the vast majority of Britons in an exhausted, impoverished, and repressed postwar society who hadn’t much idea about night-clubs anyway.… Undeterred by facts, and anticipating plenty of copy from the lengthy trial which failed to materialize, journalists established and spiced up the morality play angle of Ellis’s story.”
But, Tweg notes, there was another side to the story.
Ellis “allowed herself to be arrested without resistance, confessed at once, and appeared hardly aware of what was happening. She tried to keep up appearances at her trial, but fatally misjudged how her freshly peroxided hair and painted nails would be interpreted by a conservative middle-class jury at the Old Bailey, clearly alienated by such a show of vulgarity.”
Tweg adds that “Having exploited the sordid side of Ruth Ellis’s image during her trial, some newspapers played up her end as romantic melodrama, constructing her death as ‘death wish.’ Such a reading was supported by the ‘chin-up’ heroic tone of Ellis’s last letters to friends from prison, in which she claimed she was satisfied to be dying for her lover.”
However, only later did it become clear that Ellis had suffered serious abuse by Blakely. As the Guardian reports, “According to accounts from Ellis, her friends, doctors and witnesses, she was assaulted in public, pushed down stairs, struck so hard on the ear she was briefly rendered deaf, caused to miscarry after being punched in the stomach, left bruised, and threatened with murder.”
Still, a posthumous exercise of the Royal Prerogative is an extraordinary and rare occurrence. And a commutation leaving a sentence of life in prison for an already dead person seems absurd, even if motivated by a desire to redress an historical wrong.
The passage of seven decades might have merited more mercy than that.
Still, it is important to recognize that only a few other people have received posthumous clemency from the British Monarch, with a couple receiving full pardons.
In 1966, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned Timothy Evans sixteen years after he was hanged for murdering his daughter, a crime he did not commit. Here clemency was really an act of justice, setting an innocent man free from the shame that he did not rightly deserve.
In 2003, the British Home Office went one better, compensating the Evans family financially for the miscarriage of justice in his case.
The Queen issued another posthumous clemency in 2013, this time to Alan Turing, a World War II hero who was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 for homosexual activity. According to the BBC, Turing “had been arrested after having an affair with a 19-year-old Manchester man. The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that had proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.”
Justice Secretary Chris Grayling described what happened to Turing this way: “[W]e would now consider [his conviction and punishment] unjust and discriminatory…. Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man.”
Following the Queen’s posthumous pardon of Turing, the British Parliament passed legislation purging posthumously the criminal records of thousands of men who had been convicted of homosexual acts that were, in 2017, no longer criminalized. At the time, Sam Gyimah, then Justice Minister, called what the Parliament did “truly momentous.”
He added, “We can never undo the hurt caused, but we have apologised and taken action to right these wrongs. I am immensely proud that ‘Turing’s law’ has become a reality under this government.”
In between Queen Elizabeth’s two full, posthumous pardons, she issued a conditional pardon to Derek Bentley, who was put to death in 1953 for his involvement in a murder. As the BBC tells it, “In 1952 Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old…was caught burgling a warehouse in London with a friend, Chris Craig. Craig was carrying a gun and Bentley carried a sheath knife and knuckleduster. When the police arrived to arrest both men, Bentley shouted ‘Let him have it, Chris’ and Craig fired the gun” killing a police officer.
“Bentley and Craig,” it continues, “were both charged with murder under a charge of joint enterprise. Bentley faced the death penalty if found guilty, but Craig did not because he was under the age of 18.” But, as in the Ellis case, there was more to the story.
At the time of his crime, Bentley had epilepsy, was cognitively impaired, and was illiterate. And almost immediately after his conviction, Bentley’s family began to try to clear his name. And a 1991 film, Let Him Have It, kept his case in the public eye.
All that set the stage for the posthumous clemency that set aside Bentley’s death sentence. And five years later, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the trial judge had given erroneous jury instructions.
Like Evans and Turing, Bentley was not required “to serve” a lesser sentence from the grave. That is the fate that presently awaits Ruth Ellis.
As the Ministry of Justice explained on Wednesday, “The application for a pardon was brought by four of Ruth Ellis’s grandchildren. The application presented that her responsibility was profoundly shaped by domestic abuse, trauma and circumstances that were never properly recognised at her trial.”
“Lingering questions about her criminal actions, the handling of her trial, and her execution,” it went on, “helped to bring about the greatest change in criminal law the British judicial system had hitherto countenanced—the abolition of the mandatory death penalty for murder.”
Echoing what Gyimah said in 2017, on Wednesday, David Lammy told his parliamentary colleagues: “We cannot change what happened 70 years ago. But we can recognise that this was an exceptional case. Today’s conditional pardon is an act of mercy. We hope it brings some measure of peace to Ruth’s family.”
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| by Storm'n Norm'n |
However, it seems less about mercy than about justice. Ruth Ellis certainly deserved to have had the injustice of her sentence recognized, as the King did.
But mercy properly understood asks for something more, a reckoning that gives to those who receive it more than they deserve. And while I applaud what the King did in Ellis’s case, he did not give her that something more.
Yes, Zohran Mamdani is pretty obviously a communist, but what is the difference supposed to be between him, “The Squad,” Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna? There’s not two dimes worth of difference between all of them put together. (Note: There are no videos posted here; just screen shots.)
The Complete Insanity of the Democratic Socialist Agenda
John Hawkins
Aug 01, 2026
After years of defending, encouraging, and catering to the most radical people in their base, it has been interesting to see some of the more old-school liberals getting worried about the craziest members of their party starting to acquire some real power.
For example, here’s James Carville, who has sounded increasingly crazy himself in recent years, fretting over lunatic members of the Democratic Socialists taking over their party:
Similarly, Bill Maher has increasingly moved from a radical to something closer to a voice of reason on the Left over the last couple of years:
Other liberals like Rahm Emanuel and Mark Kelly have criticized Democratic Socialists because they think they’re too radical for voters, which is sort of like a Muslim condemning 9/11 not because it was wrong, but because it made Muslims less popular in the West.
The truth of the matter is that liberals have been enthusiastically building this Frankenstein for a long time, and it’s hard to do anything other than roll your eyes when they’re now warning everyone about the monster they created.
Liberals have openly embraced increasingly radical positions for a long time now. Shouting down conservative speakers at universities, supporting threatening anti-Jewish riots on college campuses, and millions of them publicly celebrating a left-winger murdering Charlie Kirk while he spoke to students are just a few examples.
Yes, Zohran Mamdani is pretty obviously a communist, but what is the difference supposed to be between him, “The Squad,” Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna? There’s not two dimes worth of difference between all of them put together.
Kamala Harris and other leading Democrats are publicly promoting the idea of getting rid of the filibuster for legislation, stacking the Supreme Court, and essentially ending America’s time as a Republic in an attempt to create a permanent one-party state like China. Popular left-wing streamers like Hasan Piker and Destiny have openly called for the murder of conservatives. Refusing to deport illegal alien sex offenders, opening the border, getting rid of ICE, calling for violence against Republicans, and declaring that people who disagree with them are literal Nazis are all mainstream liberal positions.
Sanity and common sense left the building a long time ago on the Left, and although Democratic Socialists are arguably even crazier than people like Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett and Tim Walz, there’s really not that much of a difference, and it’s very easy to see all of them working together toward the same goals. In fact, you have to suspect that the Democratic Socialists of America are mostly just saying publicly what liberals have been talking about privately in faculty lounges, congressional staff meetings and think tanks when they think the American public won’t find out about it.
So, what do the Democratic Socialists believe? Well, we could go into quite a bit of detail, but since they’ve gotten some attention lately, they’ve already started sanitizing their agenda for the public and claiming that they don’t believe the things they were saying just a couple of years ago.
That’s why I thought this very current Fox News segment featuring DSA co-Chair Megan Romer talking about what they believe is so useful. It’s someone in a position of authority in the party clearly, unapologetically talking about what they believe. You want to see the agenda of the DSA, which is quickly becoming the agenda of the Democratic Party? Well, here it is:
Let’s take a moment and briefly address these ideas the DSA supports from the segment.
Get rid of the Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court: We’re talking about throwing a Constitution that was put together by men like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington away to create an entirely new system designed by weirdos who’ve never accomplished anything and probably aren’t 100% sure what gender they are today.
Abolish ICE, abolish borders, and give citizenship to anyone in the country illegally: If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. If anybody can just waltz into our country and get the benefits of citizenship, why wouldn’t tens or even hundreds of millions of people exploit the system to get welfare or even control our country via proxy votes for another nation?
Defund the Pentagon: What do you think happens to America without a military? I can tell you – you die, your children die, and you lose your country to a nation with a military.
Abolish prisons: If we don’t put criminals in prison, then the only way to protect ourselves from them is to hunt them down and kill them in the streets. Since you wouldn’t go to prison for doing that in a world where prisons had been abolished, it would make even more sense to do that. Still, gunfights at the O.K. Corral in every city and town to get rid of criminals don’t seem like an improvement over our current system.
Government/public ownership of large corporations: Oh yeah, I’m sure if you take every Elon Musk and Jensen Huang out of the picture in American corporations and replace them with the equivalent of Joy Reid and Elliot Page, our entire economy won’t completely implode. We’d be lucky if we could still feed ourselves after 5-to-10 years of that policy.
If you think Democrats won’t vote for this, I hate to disillusion you, but they already are voting for candidates aligned with the DSA all over the state of New York.
Furthermore, the candidates don’t have to call themselves Democratic Socialists because, as we’ve seen over and over and over again, no matter what liberals claim they believe on the campaign trail, they vote for whatever their base wants when they get into office.
Remember Barack Obama claiming he was against gay marriage until he wasn’t? How about Joe Biden promising to be tough on border security? What about the “pro-life” Democrats who wouldn’t support Obamacare because it funded abortions who then caved when it couldn’t pass without them? If Democratic Socialism is proven to be popular with the Left at the ballot box, you’ll see everyone from ancient Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on down enthusiastically embracing this insanity because ultimately, they don’t care about the consequences. Democratic power brokers will enjoy the fruits of their powerful jobs as long as they can, and if it ultimately destroys the country to such a degree that even their gated communities aren’t safe, they’ll just move overseas. It’s not as if they care about what happens to this country.
These are not smart people, and these are not good ideas, but this is what the Left is moving toward right now.
With that in mind, the big questions are, "Can Democrats reform themselves?" "Are the American people as a whole smart enough to want no part of this?" and "Will the Left drag the rest of us down with them if they get to implement some of their suicidally foolish ideas?"
Time will tell.
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
They say Biden was wrong on foreign policy for fifty years. That makes sense, he learned from Harry Truman
I've had this book for over 35 years. After being at the bottom of the pile it finally made it to the top. ~ N.E.H.
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| Q. Do I read books? A. Not enough |
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