You may have heard of the Stamp Acts, one of the key precipitating overreaches of the British Parliament into the American Colonies. What you may not have heard of is that that body “gave jurisdiction over Stamp Act offenses to the admiralty courts, which followed civil-law rather than common-law procedures.” Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 47 (2004). Thus, offenses against the revenue laws (including but not limited to the earlier Sugar Act) were tried by courts “routinely [taking] testimony by deposition or private judicial examination.” Id. at 48. As John Adams himself once argued, “Interrogatories are unknown at common Law, and Englishmen and common Lawyers have an aversion to them if not an Abhorrence of them.” John Adams, Draft of His Argument in Sewell v. Hancock (Oct. 1768–Mar. 1769), in 2 Legal Papers of John Adams 194, 207 (L. Kinvin Wroth & Hiller B. Zobel eds., 1965)).

Wherever there are interrogatories, there be the ghastly silhouette of the British courts of admiralty.

Hark: https://ia800909.us.archive.org/26/items/practiceandjuri00clergoog/practiceandjuri00clergoog.pdf

Aspiring writers get the advice to build their own internet presence, but that of course is a lot of work by itself. I like the concept of a book bomb where a group of like-minded authors do a push of a new novel.

As they say, don’t give up the day job.

Equally I can go to a library or bookshop, and while there tens of thousands of books available, I know I don’t want to read 99.99 per cent of them, no matter how much the publishers might promote them. Certainly a book by Britney Spears is of no interest to me, and I would avoid the Obamas’ output entirely.

As I have a bible, I have no need of another one, and I gave away my kids’ copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar once they got too old for it.

I recall years ago a novelist getting very angry that his debut novel — no doubt crafted with love — had only sold about a 100 copies. His rage seems odd in the light of the industry’s own figures: it sounds like he was one of the more successful ones in the business.

Your comment is obviously true, and yet the religion of those Ellis Islanders has managed to intellectually persevere, and indeed dominate, in intellectually rigorous fields, and in particular at the most intellectually rarified branch of the government (SCOTUS is 6 Catholics, 2 Protestants, 1 Jew). It is an odd paradox. I suspect we’re seeing a selection process take place where the less intelligent, curious, and literate Catholics are ending up non-Catholic, while the more intelligent, curious and literate remain.

Conversely, whereas the less intelligent, curious and literate Protestants are ending up Evangelical (which has effectively eaten the Mainline Churches), and the more intelligent, curious and literate are going non-religious and then dead ending without the guide rails of tradition to guide their thinking.

Some selection pressure is obviously taking place.

Though upon consideration (and a bit of quick research), it appears that among the Catholics there are:
1 Black
1 Italian
1 Hispanic
3 Irish (Barret is 1/2 French and Roberts is 1/2 Central Euro)

I wonder how much of that is carry-over from Catholic political cliques that are no longer consciously Catholic, but still operate for these families and ethnicities in national politics. Most of the Ellis Islander Americans have family connections to power in their history…

The whole thing is interesting to me.

Nor has the displacement of Americans by the descendants of Ellis Islanders helped much.

There are books of great importance that practically no one has had access to for dozens or hundreds of years now available for free on the Internet Archive, and they have been “viewed” only a handful of times, let alone read.

It would be comical were it not so tragic.

Also, I wonder how much more effectively books could be marketed by people outside the publishing establishment.

Just ask Aleksandr Dugin, Harold Saltzman, or Jean Raspail.

Odd.