Author Topic: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces  (Read 839656 times)

Crafty_Dog

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DougMacG

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Re: Conrad Black: The Problem with Peggy
« Reply #2002 on: August 04, 2021, 09:01:43 AM »
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/02/the-problem-with-peggy/

This is a great article, written with respect, context and accuracy.  It is quite a compliment that he indicates he has read nearly all her published work.  Rarely does a critical piece do that.  She deserves credit and benefit of the doubt for how right she has been all the good she has done in the past.  But what matters now is whether she is right now and is she doing good or harm for the country with these writings.

Even Thomas Sowell (2016) said a man with the personality of Trump should not be President.  Pushed further he indicated he would likely vote for him anyway based on the worse choices likely to be on the ballot.

What does Peggy Noonan not understand about worse choices?  Trump's policies were great for this country.  What did he do personally or politically that was so much worse than all his predecessors?  Ask for votes to be counted and fraud investigated?  Good grief.

What did Peggy Noonan write on this scale about IRS targeting under Obama Biden, worse than Nixon?  In fact, she wrote enough about it to show she knew it was as serious as I say it was:
https://peggynoonan.com/stay-shocked/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323475304578501581991103070
https://peggynoonan.com/cover-the-irs-dont-cover-for-it/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324448104578614220949743916

She pronounced it the "worst scandal in history", then she helped the people who did it get back into power.  So much for commitment to stopping people who lack integrity.

On my scorecard I see Democrats rigged the system (cheated, stole) on two of their last two Presidential election wins.  Add the 2018 congressional election to that, held under the cloud of the 'Mueller Investigation', (Trump might be a Russian spy and Republicans won't do anything about it, oops he wasn't, it was a media/Democrat setup).  That makes three cheats in their last three victories.  Anyone else notice a pattern?  Some think we shouldn't even try to win more votes in this system they have corrupted.  Where does THAT lead?  To things much worse than "1/6", I'm afraid.

What we should do, as Conrad Black concludes, is "restore integrity to the electoral process", so people would have confidence in the results.

The problem isn't Trump.  He was elected to address what went wrong in Washington.  The solution to moving beyond Trump in our constitutional system, if that's what you believe needs to be done, isn't to have the most powerful people in Washington remove him from eligibility on the ballot, which was exactly what the after-he-left-office impeachment trial Peggy Noonan supported tried to do.  The answer to defeat Trump, if you are his opposition, is to govern better when in power and put better alternatives on the ballot.  All the Dem election tampering indicates they don't believe they did that, and now we know.  The alternative to Trump was worse - in SO many ways.

Noonan hated Trump before any of this happened, just ask her, and she lets that cloud her judgment.  To ignore all evidence of election fraud and misconduct because of that hate makes her writings, at least on this topic, worthless.  Too bad.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2021, 09:11:52 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

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Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
« Reply #2003 on: August 04, 2021, 10:08:39 AM »
"Noonan hated Trump before any of this happened, just ask her, and she lets that cloud her judgment."

Agree with Conrad though I need to keep a dictionary nearby to translate his sophisticated use of the English Language

as for Noonan
  she is too stuffy and "inside the beltway for me."

they are so full of themselves

rest assured she will still get the cocktail party invites

decorum is important but not more then outcome

her refusal to recognize that like all the pompous never Trumper's
  is only ok because I have the freedom to ignore her and them


Crafty_Dog

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George Soros?!?
« Reply #2004 on: August 14, 2021, 04:32:00 PM »


Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State
In his quest for personal power, he’s rejected Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform path and turned the Communist Party into an assemblage of yes-men.


By
George Soros
Aug. 13, 2021 5:12 pm ET


811

Chinese President Xi Jinping at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding in Beijing, July 1.
PHOTO: JU PENG/XINHUA VIA ZUMA PRESS

Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, suffers from several internal inconsistencies which greatly reduce the cohesion and effectiveness of his leadership. There is a conflict between his beliefs and his actions and between his public declarations of wanting to make China a superpower and his behavior as a domestic ruler. These internal contradictions have revealed themselves in the context of the growing conflict between the U.S. and China.
At the heart of this conflict is the reality that the two nations represent systems of governance that are diametrically opposed. The U.S. stands for a democratic, open society in which the role of the government is to protect the freedom of the individual. Mr. Xi believes Mao Zedong invented a superior form of organization, which he is carrying on: a totalitarian closed society in which the individual is subordinated to the one-party state. It is superior, in this view, because it is more disciplined, stronger and therefore bound to prevail in a contest.

Relations between China and the U.S. are rapidly deteriorating and may lead to war. Mr. Xi has made clear that he intends to take possession of Taiwan within the next decade, and he is increasing China’s military capacity accordingly.

He also faces an important domestic hurdle in 2022, when he intends to break the established system of succession to remain president for life. He feels that he needs at least another decade to concentrate the power of the one-party state and its military in his own hands. He knows that his plan has many enemies, and he wants to make sure they won’t have the ability to resist him.

It is against this background that the current turmoil in the financial markets is unfolding, catching many people unaware and leaving them confused. The confusion has compounded the turmoil.

Although I am no longer engaged in the financial markets, I used to be an active participant. I have also been actively engaged in China since 1984, when I introduced Communist Party reformers in China to their counterparts in my native Hungary. They learned a lot from each other, and I followed up by setting up foundations in both countries. That was the beginning of my career in what I call political philanthropy. My foundation in China was unique in being granted near-total independence. I closed it in 1989, after I learned it had come under the control of the Chinese government and just before the Tiananmen Square massacre. I resumed my active involvement in China in 2013 when Mr. Xi became the ruler, but this time as an outspoken opponent of what has since become a totalitarian regime.

I consider Mr. Xi the most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world. The Chinese people as a whole are among his victims, but domestic political opponents and religious and ethnic minorities suffer from his persecution much more. I find it particularly disturbing that so many Chinese people seem to find his social-credit surveillance system not only tolerable but attractive. It provides them social services free of charge and tells them how to stay out of trouble by not saying anything critical of Mr. Xi or his regime. If he could perfect the social-credit system and assure a steadily rising standard of living, his regime would become much more secure. But he is bound to run into difficulties on both counts.
To understand why, some historical background is necessary. Mr. Xi came to power in 2013, but he was the beneficiary of the bold reform agenda of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping, who had a very different concept of China’s place in the world. Deng realized that the West was much more developed and China had much to learn from it. Far from being diametrically opposed to the Western-dominated global system, Deng wanted China to rise within it. His approach worked wonders. China was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 with the privileges that come with the status of a less-developed country. China embarked on a period of unprecedented growth. It even dealt with the global financial crisis of 2007-08 better than the developed world.

Mr. Xi failed to understand how Deng achieved his success. He took it as a given and exploited it, but he harbored an intense personal resentment against Deng. He held Deng Xiaoping responsible for not honoring his father, Xi Zhongxun, and for removing the elder Xi from the Politburo in 1962. As a result, Xi Jinping grew up in the countryside in very difficult circumstances. He didn’t receive a proper education, never went abroad, and never learned a foreign language.

Xi Jinping devoted his life to undoing Deng’s influence on the development of China. His personal animosity toward Deng has played a large part in this, but other factors are equally important. He is intensely nationalistic and he wants China to become the dominant power in the world. He is also convinced that the Chinese Communist Party needs to be a Leninist party, willing to use its political and military power to impose its will. Xi Jinping strongly felt this was necessary to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party will be strong enough to impose the sacrifices needed to achieve his goal.

Mr. Xi realized that he needs to remain the undisputed ruler to accomplish what he considers his life’s mission. He doesn’t know how the financial markets operate, but he has a clear idea of what he has to do in 2022 to stay in power. He intends to overstep the term limits established by Deng, which governed the succession of Mr. Xi’s two predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. Because many of the political class and business elite are liable to oppose Mr. Xi, he must prevent them from uniting against him. Thus, his first task is to bring to heel anyone who is rich enough to exercise independent power.

That process has been unfolding in the past year and reached a crescendo in recent weeks. It started with the sudden cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant Group in November 2020 and the temporary disappearance of its former executive chairman, Jack Ma. Then came the disciplinary measures taken against Didi Chuxing after it floated an issue in New York in June 2021. It culminated with the banishment of three U.S.-financed tutoring companies, which had a much greater effect on international markets than Mr. Xi expected. Chinese financial authorities have tried to reassure markets but with little success.

Mr. Xi is engaged in a systematic campaign to remove or neutralize people who have amassed a fortune. His latest victim is Sun Dawu, a billionaire pig farmer. Mr. Sun has been sentenced to 18 years in prison and persuaded to “donate” the bulk of his wealth to charity.

This campaign threatens to destroy the geese that lay the golden eggs. Mr. Xi is determined to bring the creators of wealth under the control of the one-party state. He has reintroduced a dual-management structure into large privately owned companies that had largely lapsed during the reform era of Deng. Now private and state-owned companies are being run not only by their management but also a party representative who ranks higher than the company president. This creates a perverse incentive not to innovate but to await instructions from higher authorities.

China’s largest, highly leveraged real-estate company, Evergrande, has recently run into difficulties servicing its debt. The real-estate market, which has been a driver of the economic recovery, is in disarray. The authorities have always been flexible enough to deal with any crisis, but they are losing their flexibility. To illustrate, a state-owned company produced a Covid-19 vaccine, Sinopharm, which has been widely exported all over the world, but its performance is inferior to all other widely marketed vaccines. Sinopharm won’t win any friends for China.

To prevail in 2022, Mr. Xi has turned himself into a dictator. Instead of allowing the party to tell him what policies to adopt, he dictates the policies he wants it to follow. State media is now broadcasting a stunning scene in which Mr. Xi leads the Standing Committee of the Politburo in slavishly repeating after him an oath of loyalty to the party and to him personally. This must be a humiliating experience, and it is liable to turn against Mr. Xi even those who had previously accepted him.

In other words, he has turned them into his own yes-men, abolishing the legacy of Deng’s consensual rule. With Mr. Xi there is little room for checks and balances. He will find it difficult to adjust his policies to a changing reality, because he rules by intimidation. His underlings are afraid to tell him how reality has changed for fear of triggering his anger. This dynamic endangers the future of China’s one-party state.

Mr. Soros is founder of the Open Society Foundations.

Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
« Reply #2007 on: August 21, 2021, 08:20:20 AM »
Tucker yesterday was asking

the question :

Why is MSM turning on Biden now?

he had guest on who proposed some sort of theory about the DC military complex were "lied" to
etc and now they are mad

I am thinking it is more they are mad that he is such an obvious dismal failure for everyone to see, undeniably , that they fear their whole progressive agenda just got put in peril.

They covered for him and as Tucker points out, got him elected, and he screwed this up so bad
they may not get their agenda passed now
and they are looking at disaster in '22 and '24.

Pelosi is bailing ahead of time.  Maybe more are jumping off the Titanic soon.

That said :

Republicans better NOT screw this up
Never let a disaster go to waste.........



Crafty_Dog

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VDH: Science they said
« Reply #2011 on: September 16, 2021, 02:01:26 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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DougMacG

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Michael Shellenberger, Why I am not a progressive
« Reply #2013 on: September 20, 2021, 05:38:33 PM »
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-progressive

For all of my adult life I have identified as a progressive. To me, being a progressive meant that I believed in empowerment. In 2002, when I co-founded a labor-environmental coalition to advocate for renewable energy, the symbol we chose to represent us was of Rosie the Riveter, an image of a woman factory worker during World War II flexing her muscle beneath the words, “We Can Do It!”. When President Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, it seemed fitting to me that he chose the slogan, “Yes we can!”

But now, on all the major issues of the day, the message from progressives is “No, you can’t.” No: poor nations like Bangladesh can’t adapt to climate change by becoming rich, insist progressives; rather, rich nations must become poor. No: we can’t prevent the staggering rise of drug deaths in the U.S., from 17,000 in 2000 to 93,000 in 2020, by helping people free themselves from addiction; rather, we must instead provide Safe Injection Sites and Safe Sleeping Sites, in downtown neighborhoods, where homeless addicts can use fentanyl, heroin, and meth safely.

Progressives insist they are offering hope. Many scientists and activists yesterday said that, while we have gone past the point of no return, when it comes to climate change, and that “No one is safe,” we can make the situation less bad by using solar panels, windmills, and electric cars, albeit at a very high cost to the economy. And in California, progressive leaders say that we just need to stick with the progressive agenda of Safe Injection Sites and Safe Sleeping Sites until we can build enough single unit apartments for the state’s 116,000 unsheltered homeless, most of whom are either addicted to hard drugs, suffering from untreated mental illness, or both.

But progressives are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Yesterday I debated a British climate scientist named Richard Betts on television. After I pointed out that he and his colleagues had contributed to one out of four British children having nightmares about climate change he insisted that he was all for optimism and that he agreed with me about nuclear power. But just hours earlier he had told the Guardian that we were “hopelessly unprepared” for extreme weather events, even though deaths from natural disasters are at an all time low and that, objectively speaking, humankind has never been more prepared than we are today.

And on the drug deaths crisis, the consensus view among Democrats in Sacramento is that “the problem is fundamentally unsolvable,” according to one of the Capitol’s leading lobbyists. Facing a recall that is growing in popularity, Governor Gavin Newsom yesterday tried to demonstrate that he believes he can solve the problem. He came to Berkeley California and cleaned up garbage created by an open air drug scene (“homeless encampment”) underneath a freeway underpass. A reporter for Politico posted a picture of Newsom who he said was “looking tired, sweaty and dirty.” But a commenter noted that the video was shot at 12:12 pm and by 12:25 pm Newsom was holding a press conference. The governor hadn’t even bothered changing out of his Hush Puppies into work boots. People close to the governor say that it is Newsom himself who believes homelessness is a problem that cannot be solved.

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment. This isn’t really that new. Since the 1960s, the New Left has argued that we can’t solve any of our major problems until we overthrow our racist, sexist, and capitalistic system. But for most of my life, up through the election of Obama, there was still a New Deal, “Yes we can!,” and “We can do it!” optimism that sat side-by-side with the New Left’s fundamentally disempowering critique of the system.

That’s all gone. On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system. Those of us in Generation X who were raised to believe that racism was something we could overcome have been told in no uncertain terms that we were wrong. Racism is baked into our cultural DNA. Even apparently positive progressive proposals are aimed at fundamentally dismantling institutions. The Democrats’ $1 trillion infrastructure bill, supported by many Republicans, and their $3.5 trillion budget proposal, contain measures that would finance the continuing degradation of our electrical grids by increasing reliance on unreliable, weather-dependent renewables, and establish racial incentives for industries including trucking, where there is already a shortage of drivers in large measure because not enough of them can pass drug tests. And does anyone really believe that, if those bills pass, progressives will abandon their dark vision of the future and return to Rosie the Riveter? 

Meanwhile, at the state and local level, progressive governments faced with worsening racial disparities in education and crime, are attempting to “solve” the problem by eliminating academic standards altogether, and advocating selective enforcement of laws based on who is committing them. Such measures are profoundly cynical. Progressives are effectively giving up on addressing racial disparities by ignoring them. But such is the logical outcome of victim ideology, which holds that we can divide the world into victims and oppressors, that victims are morally superior and even spiritual, and no change is possible until the system that produces victims and oppressors is overthrown.

To some extent none of this is new. After World War II, it was progressives, not conservatives, who led the charge to replace mental hospitals with community-based care. After the community-based care system fell apart, and severely mentally ill people ended up living on the street, addicted to drugs and alcohol, progressives blamed Reagan and Republicans for cutting the budget. But progressive California today spends more than any other state, per capita, on mental health, and yet the number of homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and suffering addiction, increased by 31% in California since 2010 even as they declined by 18 percent in the rest of the US.

Also after World War II, it was progressives, not conservatives, who insisted that the world was coming to an end because too many babies were being born, and because of nuclear energy. The “population bomb” meant that too many people would result in resource scarcity which would result in international conflicts and eventually nuclear war. We were helpless to prevent the situation through technological change and instead had to prevent people from having children and rid the world of nuclear weapons and energy. It took the end of the Cold War, and the overwhelming evidence that parents in poor nations chose to have fewer children, as parents in rich nations had before them, where they no longer needed them to work on the farm, for the discourse to finally fade.

But the will-to-apocalypse only grew stronger. After it became clear that the planet was warming, not cooling, as many scientists had previously feared, opportunistic New Left progressives insisted that climate change would be world-ending. There was never much reason to believe this. A major report by the National Academies of Science in 1982 concluded that abundant natural gas, along with nuclear power, would substitute for coal, and prevent temperatures from rising high enough to threaten civilization. But progressives responded by demonizing the authors of the study and insisting that anybody who disagreed that climate change was apocalyptic was secretly on the take from the fossil fuel industry.

Where there have been relatively straightforward fixes to societal problems, progressives have opposed them. Progressives have opposed the expanded use of natural gas and nuclear energy since the 1970s even though it was those two technologies that caused emissions to peak and decline in Germany, Britain and France during that decade. Progressive climate activists over the last 15 years hotly opposed fracking even though it was the main reason emissions in the US declined 22 percent between 2005 and 2020, which is 5 percentage points more than President Obama proposed to reduce them as part of America’s Paris climate agreement.

The same was the case when it came to drug deaths, addiction, and homelessness. People are shocked when I explain to them that the reason California still lacks enough homeless shelters is because progressives have opposed building them. Indeed, it was Governor Newsom, when he was Mayor of San Francisco, who led the charge opposing the construction of sufficient homeless shelters in favor of instead building single unit apartments for anybody who said they wanted one. While there are financial motivations for such a policy, the main motivation was ideological. Newsom and other progressives believe that simply sheltering people is immoral. The good is the enemy of the perfect.

As a result, progressives have created the apocalypse they feared. In California, there are “homeless encampments,” open drug scenes, in the parks, along the highways, and on the sidewalks. But the problem is no longer limited to San Francisco. A few days ago somebody posted a video and photo on Twitter of people in Philadelphia, high on some drug, looking exactly like Hollywood zombies. The obvious solution is to provide people with shelter, require them to use it, and mandate drug and psychiatric treatment, for people who break laws against camping, public drug use, public defecation, and other laws. But progressives insist the better solution is Safe Sleeping Sites and Safe Injection Sites.

Should we be surprised that an ideology that believes American civilization is fundamentally evil has resulted in the breakdown of that civilization? Most American progressives don’t hold such an extreme ideology. Most progressives want police for their neighborhoods. Most progressives want their own children, when suffering mental illness and addiction, to be mandated care. And most progressives want reliable electrical and water management systems for their neighborhoods.

But most progressives are also voting for candidates who are cutting the number of police for poor neighborhoods, insisting that psychiatric and drug treatment be optional, and that trillions be spent making electricity more expensive so we can harmonize with nature through solar panels made by enslaved Muslims in China, and through industrial wind projects built in the habitat of critically endangered whale species.

Does pointing all of this out make me a conservative? There are certainly things I support that many progressives view as conservative, including nuclear power, a ban on public camping, and mandating drug and psychiatric treatment for people who break the law. But other things I support might be fairly viewed as rather liberal, or even progressive, including universal psychiatric care, shelter-for-all, and the reform of police departments with the aims of reducing homicides, police violence, and improving the treatment of people with behavioral health disorders, whether from addiction or mental illness.

And there is a kind of victim ideology on the Right just as there is on the Left. It says that America is too weak and poor, and that our resources are too scarce, to take on our big challenges. On climate change it suggests that nothing of consequence can be done and that all energy sources, from coal to nuclear to solar panels, are of equal or comparable value. On drug deaths and homelessness it argues that parents must simply do a better job raising their children to not be drug addicts, and that we should lock up people, even the mentally ill, for long sentences in prisons and hospitals, with little regard for rehabilitation. 

The two grassroots movements I have helped to create around energy and homelessness reject the dystopian victim ideologies of Right and Left. There are progressive and conservative members in both coalitions. But what unites us is our commitment to practical policies that are proven to work in the real world. We advocate for the maintenance and construction of nuclear plants that actually exist, or could soon exist, not futuristic reactors that likely never will. We advocate for Shelter First and Housing Earned, universal psychiatric care, and banning the open dealing of deadly drugs because those are the policies that have worked across the U.S. and around the world, and can be implemented right away.

If I had to find a word to describe the politics I am proposing it would be “heroic,” not liberal, conservative, or even moderate. We need a politics of heroism not a politics of victimhood. Yes, Bangladesh can develop and save itself from sea level rise, just as rich nations have; they are not doomed to hurricanes and flooding. Yes, people addicted to fentanyl and meth can recover from their addictions, with our help, and go on to live fulfilling and rewarding lives; they are not doomed to live in tents for the rest of their shortened lives. And yes, we can create an America where people who disagree on many things can nonetheless find common ground on the very issues that most seem to polarize us, including energy, the environment, crime, and drugs. 

On October 12 HarperCollins will publish my second book in two years, San Fransicko, focused on drugs, crime, and homelessnes. It and Apocalypse Never will constitute a comprehensive proposal for saving our civilization from those who would destroy it. What both books have in common is the theme of empowerment. We are not doomed to an apocalyptic future, whether from climate change or homelessness. We can achieve nature, peace, and prosperity for all people because humans are amazing. Our civilization is sacred; we must defend and extend it.

San Fransicko was inspired, in part, by the work of the late psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, who was made famous by a book where he described how he survived the Nazi concentration camps by fixating on a positive vision for his future. During the darkest moments of Covid last year I was struck by how much my mood had improved simply by listening to his 1960s lectures on YouTube. Why, I wondered, had progressives embraced Frankl’s empowering therapy in their personal lives but demonized it in their political lives? Why had progressives, who had done so much to popularize human potential and self-help, claimed that promoting self-help in policies and politics were a form of “blaming the victim?”

Few of my conclusions will surprise anyone, though the agenda, and philosophy, that I am proposing might. It truly is a mix of values, policies, and institutions that one might consider progressive and conservative, not because I set out to make it that way, but because it was that combination that has worked so often in the past. But beyond the policies and values I propose there is a spirit of overcoming, not succumbing; of empowerment, not disempowerment; and of heroism, not victimhood. That spirit comes before, and goes beyond, political ideology and partisan identity. It says, against those who believe that America, and perhaps Western Civilization itself, are doomed: no they’re not. And to those who think we can’t solve big challenges like climate change, drug deaths, and homelessness, it says yes we can.

Crafty_Dog

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Thomas Sowell
« Reply #2014 on: October 06, 2021, 03:41:21 PM »

DougMacG

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Re: Thomas Sowell
« Reply #2015 on: October 07, 2021, 03:21:32 AM »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxEeYSusehc&t=286s

Smartest person currently living on Earth, on these issues, in my opinion.

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VDH: The Dying Citizen
« Reply #2016 on: October 08, 2021, 01:54:08 AM »
By Victor Davis Hanson

October 6, 2021
Only a little more than half of the current world’s 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments.

That lucky 50 percent alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become “Westernized.”

Migrants, regardless of their race, religion, or gender, almost always head for a Western nation. And most often their destination remains the United States. The more it is now fashionable for Americans to take for granted or even to ridicule the idea of their own country, the more the non-American global poor risk their lives to crash America’s borders.

Constitutional systems easily perish because they ask a lot of their citizens—to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues, and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious, and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.

American citizens are clearly also not the custom of the past. Unlike history’s more common peasants, citizens are not under the control of the rich who, in turn, seek undue influence in government through controlling them.

Instead, viable citizenship has always hinged on a broad, autonomous middle class. Those Americans in between lack both the dependence of the poor, and the insider influences of the elite. Suffocate the middle and we know that a binary feudalism will soon replace it. We are seeing just that medievalization in contemporary California.

Nor are American citizens mere migratory residents who drift across nonexistent borders in expectation of receiving more rights than meeting responsibilities. Forfeit a sacred national space, a place where common customs, language, and traditions can shelter and thrive, and a unique America disappears into a pre-civilizational migratory void like the fluid vastness of late imperial Rome.


Americans are quite different from tribal peoples, whose first loyalties are determined by mere appearance or innate blood ties. Take this nation back to pre-civilizational tribalism, and our future as the next Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq is assured.

Americans are not, then, premodern peasants, mere residents, and squabbling tribes—at least not quite yet.

But citizens also are equally suspicious and rightfully distrustful of the top-down subversion of citizenship by postmodern elites and the privileged. The latter often expect Americans to give up their ancient freedoms to a vast, unelected, and unaudited permanent administrative state, to be run by credentialed functionaries and sanctioned “experts.” That technocratic regimentation may now be the Chinese model, but it was never the vision of our founders.

Citizens object to “evolving” a 245-year-old republic into a radical socialist ochlocracy without checks and balances. That rebooting would mean scrapping ancient laws, long-held customs, and hallowed traditions—from the Electoral College and a nine-person Supreme Court to the Senate filibuster and 50-state union. Consensual societies usually implode when desperate factions resort to subverting hallowed rules for short-term partisan gain.

Some elites believe the founders’ Constitution is in dire need of radical deletions and alterations to fit their own utopian visions. So, they imagine an evolving Constitution to synchronize with supposedly a fluid, mutable—and always progressing—human nature. They are ignorant that the core of the Constitution does not change because our own natural, core sense of right and wrong does not either.


Nor do citizens hand over their first allegiances to an abstract worldwide commonwealth—as if half of its membership are not illiberal theocracies, autocracies, and monarchies. Such a tired “citizens of the world” dream dates to Socratic utopianism.

Yet neither the defunct League of Nations nor the United Nations has ever offered any credible blueprint for viable transnational governance. Today’s globalists at Davos may snicker at nationalist democracies like the United States and Israel, but in cowardly fashion they usually appease a totalitarian and brutal Communist China that allows no dissent.

Given our privileges, affluent and leisured Americans must always ask ourselves whether as citizens we have earned what those who died at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach bequeathed at such costs.

Refusing to stand during the national anthem is not and should not be illegal. But such blanket rejection of American customs is admittedly now a collective narcissistic tic—and hardly sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating customs and traditions as by breaking laws.

Instead, freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good—and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.

The present article summarizes arguments in Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Dying Citizen that appears this week from Basic Books.


About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.


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George Friedman: Beyond Bed, Bath, and Beyond
« Reply #2017 on: October 08, 2021, 04:31:15 AM »
second post

   
Beyond Bed, Bath & Beyond’s Supply Chains
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

Last week, Bed, Bath & Beyond stock was at $24 per share. It closed on Wednesday at $14. As an expert in markets, I know that this is bad. But before we consider why this happened, we need to consider why this retail chain has not only survived but flourished. I know of Bed, Bath & Beyond because when one of its coupons comes in the mail my wife’s eyes light up. Occasionally, this ends in a trip to a store, where I huddle by the registers with a small group of glum men who periodically dart into the aisles to intercept their wives, speaking firmly to them, then return to the forlorn group by the registers waiting for an uncertain future. We do not speak, shamed by our weakness to get the results we want.

This is Bed, Bath & Beyond’s business model: Sell things that are irresistible to women and unfathomable to men, and take advantage of female power and male submission. Still, I have trouble understanding how it has survived. Take pillows. The store has tons of them. When was the last time anyone bought a pillow? I still have one that has its origins in antiquity. I like that pillow. I won’t buy a new one, and it’s one thing my wife cannot take from me. It has comforted me through poker losses and drinking binges. Who among us has ever said, “I need a new pillow” unless an embarrassing accident had occurred? Basically, we all have pillows, and the number who replace them has to be less that 1 percent a year. Pillows are a mystery, but so are duvets, comforters with strange fabrics that cover the unknown. Even so, Bed, Bath & Beyond has flourished, holding on to a huge part of American society. So while part of me wants to applaud the shellacking it got last week, another part of me knows it will be back, and so will I. But more to the point, even Bed, Bath & Beyond, selling common objects of some utility, is trapped in the reality of our time: shortages of all things large and small.

Put simply, the reason its stock tanked is that it has not been able to get its goods delivered to it. In a phrase that has become common in our time, its supply chain broke. “Supply chains” began as concepts within corporations. One was just-in-time delivery, the idea that maximum efficiency in the delivery of components of a product would increase cost-effectiveness. The second was global sourcing for components and finished products. The ability to take advantage of price and wage differences around the globe, rather than being tied to local sources, increased the competitiveness of the final product. Agility in identifying sources globally and moving them through the production and sales process allowed for market dominance.

Over time, the competition for sources of production and precision transportation created a complex system that had to be managed on a quality and time basis. The supply chain feeding a company like Walmart is staggering. Thousands of products are being managed, including those of other companies such as Apple, so that the supply chain is a pyramid of supply chains the company does not own or control, which have to be integrated into a “just-in-time” system. Bed, Bath & Beyond, a large retail chain with a comparatively homogenized group of products, is dependent on its own supply chain and the supply chains of intermediate suppliers. Thus, when a map is drawn showing the global supply chain, it is always vastly incomplete. Globalization and ultra-efficiency have created a system of production that cannot be coherently mapped as a whole but has worked mostly as expected by merchant and customer, both of whom have no idea of the origins of the product. It’s far more complex than the “Made in …” marking would suggest.

The system is sensitive to cost and time, and the two are interchangeable. Therefore, the chain must be built to resist interruption and with redundancy. Both are expensive and neither can be perfect. Early in the pandemic, there were disruptions in supermarkets that were handled with some effort. This summer, episodic failures began to become commonplace, and the commonplace threatens to force a massive redefinition of the economic structure.

Gasoline has become scarce. Workers have become scarce. The fact that Bed, Bath & Beyond lost a large chunk of market value gives an indication of how common it is and how no product class is immune. We have not yet reached the stage of economic failure at which the basic needs of society become scarce or unattainable, and we might not ever. But we are reaching a point where the assumption of availability is a discarded concept among consumers.

The reason for this failure fathers many theories. There are not enough truck drivers. COVID-19 has created demands that make energy scarce. Coal in China is scarce because the financial system has weakened. All of these are likely partly true. But no one can account for all the failures, and no theory explains the simultaneity of failures in multiple supply chains.

The first-order explanation is that over time we have created a vast global supply chain that is so efficient that it breaks under moderate stress. There are plenty of instances of severe stress, such as war, in which failures also arise. It is incorrect to think of the pandemic as a war, since the physical plants aren’t destroyed. But it had enough weight to press on the supply chain and create failures, and then, as the system came back on line, it suffered more failures from ruptures that are just now emerging.

For now, this seems to me the most likely explanation. If I’m right, then the system was not constructed to withstand the stress that it encountered, and simply recreating the old system will cost money now and later. The concept of time as a cost to be avoided created a fragility – as a poorly built fan with a broom stuck in it might shatter. (I did that once.) A supply chain is a notional concept, not a real one. It needs to be treated as what it is: a series of producers providing products to assemblers and products delivered to stores. Mitigating friction between these is not enough. There has to be redundancy, which costs money and is likely only one of the things being considered now by businesses. The supply chain is something each business operates, and centralizing it would make it more vulnerable. Bed, Bath & Beyond will reconstruct its supply chain based on its unique knowledge of the industry.

It is frightening to hear that a random if experienced business selling non-critical products had its supply chain fail. It is the randomness of the failure and the likelihood of ad hoc solutions that are of concern. I was always concerned with what would come after COVID-19. But I am not sure that COVID-19 did more than give the first push.



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Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
« Reply #2020 on: October 23, 2021, 05:28:22 PM »
Do We Have Freedom of Speech, Really?
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
October 23, 2021 6:30 AM

Attorney General Merrick Garland departs after speaking during an event at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., June 15, 2021. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Garland’s memo serves a pernicious progressive crusade to render these rights little more than a parchment promise.


The Soviet constitution of 1936, Joseph Stalin’s constitution, explicitly guaranteed freedom of speech to all citizens of the USSR — in Article 125, which also vouchsafed the closely related freedoms of the press, of assembly, of mass meetings, and of street demonstrations. When Moscow revised the constitution in 1977, pains were again taken (in Article 50) to ensure — at least on paper — that “citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.”

Were they in a position to do so, the tens of millions of men, women, and children immiserated, imprisoned, enslaved, and killed by the same totalitarian communist regime would have begged to differ.

“Rights” are not rights by virtue of being written down. They are not self-enforcing. Written “rights” are, instead, a reflection of what a body politic perceives to be fundamental. They are not an assurance that this perception will be actualized. Whether freedom of speech truly exists is a cultural question, not a legal one. It hinges on the society’s commitment to liberty as something that is lived, not merely spoken of.

To rely on the legal system to enforce a “right” that the culture, when it gets down to brass tacks, does not support, is to not have a vibrant guarantee. It is to have a parchment promise that is effectively worthless.

Increasingly, the latter is the state of play in the United States, and there are two reasons for this.

First, progressives, who call the tune in the bipartisan political establishment, do not believe in free speech. They may, like the Bolsheviks, nod to it as the tribute stealthy vice must pay to public virtue. But to the limited extent they are ideologically principled rather than just power-hungry, progressives believe that the good is arrived at through scientific study, by experts who, of course, are rigorously apolitical. In this way of thinking, it is not enough to dismiss robust discourse as folly; progressives see free speech as antithetical to human flourishing, an appeal to the passions and prejudices of the masses who are too benighted to sort matters out on their own. With due respect to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. there is no marketplace of ideas; there are the progressive establishment’s ideas, versus the remaining dangerous ideas.


Second, progressives do believe, deeply, in process. While we are in the midst of a period of radicalism, progressive strategy is generally (and in its most effective form) Fabian. Process is the way ascendant progressives advance their own ideas while eroding those of the bourgeois culture. It is the way dominant progressives strangle any emerging competition in the cradle.

The rule of law is a cultural phenomenon. Law enforcement, by contrast, is a process — one that can, perversely, abrade the rule of law it purports to undergird.

Case in point: Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland’s memo directing federal investigations against dissenters — in the main, parents — who object to progressive indoctrination by school administrators.


As a short-term political objective, the Garland memo cynically paints these recalcitrant parents with the same brush that tars conservatives as “domestic terrorists,” on the rationale that Trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol self-identify as the patriotic political right and profess to share some conservative ideas. (Of course the rioters — whether they realized it or not — were undermining the very constitutional system that is essential to the conservative conception of liberty and thus were anti-conservative, but that is a story for another day.)

As for the long term, Garland’s memo serves the progressive crusade against free speech.

You may read our Constitution as a guarantee of free expression and open political debate. But it cannot be such a guarantee unless the government, which is privileged to use force to maintain order, regards order as necessarily including free expression and open political debate. Government’s incumbent ruling class will always prize stability over conflict. Consequently, for free speech to be meaningful, the dominant culture must be committed to free speech – even speech it finds repellent, as long as it does not intentionally incite violence — and the government must truly be accountable to that dominant culture. Otherwise, our written First Amendment assurance of free speech is nearly as worthless as was the Soviet guarantee.

Put more concretely, the Justice Department may acknowledge, as Garland’s memo grudgingly does, that the Constitution protects debate and dissent. But if the DOJ simultaneously warns, as Garland’s memo indignantly does, that the FBI is going to be investigating those who engage in debate and dissent against the progressive government’s favored class — school administrators who are executing the indoctrination mission — then in what authentic sense do we have free speech?

Sure, the outcome of the FBI’s investigative process is likely to be that no federal charges are filed. After all, if the Justice Department were foolish enough to go to the extreme of actually indicting dissenters, it would expose the fatal flaws that a) the First Amendment prevents courts from allowing speech to be the subject of a criminal conviction and b) the federal government lacks statutory jurisdiction to bring an incitement case unless the resulting violent acts would violate federal law (which is rare — threats of violence, when they occur, are overwhelmingly concerns of state and local law).

But it will never come to actual in-court prosecution. The abuse will be confined to the investigative process. Coupled with Garland’s saber-rattling, that is more than enough to suppress dissent. The citizen is warned that he is being scrutinized by the federal government in all its comparative might. For exercising his supposed right to protest, the citizen will be harmed in a hundred different ways by the fact of an FBI probe — the anxiety of potential prosecution, the often prohibitive expense of retaining counsel, the loss of business opportunities because of the specter of prosecution, the loss of social ties as friends and associates abandon the citizen lest Leviathan sees them as fellow conspirators.

If a putative safeguard were actually a right, one would need neither endure an investigative process nor go to court to vindicate the right. These processes are punitive; a right worthy of the name would protect us from them just as it protects us from criminal conviction. If the culture loses the will to compel an accountable government to presume the right — to respect it a priori — then there is no right.

What there is tends to be rationalization. The Soviet constitution said that free speech was guaranteed “in order to strengthen the socialist system.” While it paid lip service to freedom, the tyrannical regime implicitly empowered itself to suppress any speech it decided could weaken the socialist system.

Today’s progressives say you have free speech . . . as long as it is not incitement. But then they redefine incitement to entail not just violence the speaker intends but violence to which hypersensitive progressives are “triggered,” even if violence was the last thing the speaker wanted. They reduce “free speech” to a protection only against criminal conviction, not against the intimidating law-enforcement process. And as they marginalize dissent, they excuse, even lionize, the mob.

Free speech is still inscribed in America’s Constitution. That does not mean it is still quintessentially American. We need it to be.


ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
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G M

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Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
« Reply #2021 on: October 23, 2021, 06:14:58 PM »
Thanks. We already have political prisoners in custody for first amendment activities, courtesy of Deep State Andy’s friends at the DOJ.


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The demolition of dissent
« Reply #2024 on: October 27, 2021, 09:44:50 AM »
Haven't watched more than a few random minutes yet, but it comes well recommended and seems very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rbl8PGUxow&t=2000s

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Re: VDH: Who really won the Cold War?
« Reply #2026 on: November 01, 2021, 07:50:52 AM »
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/who-eventually-won-the-cold-war/

We "resemble our old Cold War enemies—to the delight of our current enemies".

"America is now seeking to emulate the crude modalities of the old Soviet Union and Maoist China"

Reminds me of a warning I tried to make 30 years ago that no one saw.

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George Friedman: This is the United States
« Reply #2027 on: November 05, 2021, 02:47:54 PM »
ovember 5, 2021
View On Website
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The Election and My Book – Where We Stand
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

I wrote a book, “The Storm Before the Calm,” a point I have beaten to death. The book is about the social, political and economic instability that will dominate America in the 2020s. This is happening and will happen in phases. The first phase was Donald Trump running for the presidency. The second phase began with the impeachment of Trump and matured with his election defeat. This past Tuesday marked the opening of the third phase: a series of elections that raised questions about whether the Biden administration could function, and whether the social principles of the progressives would be blocked and the Democratic Party caught in permanent gridlock.

The model I laid out was not a political model, in the sense that it was indifferent to personalities and political parties, as it was indifferent to issues. What it predicted was that there would be deep social divisions and constant instability, with unsustainable governments. This week’s elections were the signal of a counterattack being launched at the progressives. This has left the Biden period featuring a ruling party that has the thinnest congressional majority and is internally split. It is not clear that President Joe Biden will have the power to govern later in his term.

This is what would be expected in a transition between two cycles. The current one began with the Reagan presidency, which followed the chaos of the late 1960s and 1970s and led to the 1980s. That transition included race riots and airborne troops suppressing them; a president forced from office, whose supporters claimed that he had been forced out by a conspiracy built around the liberal media; and massive economic dysfunction, including double-digit interest rates, double-digit inflation and significant unemployment. It also included war and the Arab oil embargos. I point this out to provide a sense of the similarity of the structure of transitional periods such as the one we are in now. Race, presidential crises and economic dysfunction forced an obsolete era – one ushered in by President Franklin Roosevelt – to transit to the one ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. These presidents did not personally usher them in, but they happened to preside over them.

While the chaos of the 1970s was about issues, the real debate was between social classes, from the confrontation between the urban working class and the suburban professionals, as well as between what was called Middle America and the counterculture, and Blacks versus whites. The intensity of these divisions no longer needs to be imagined. That era had the bitter division over President Richard Nixon, and our era the division over Trump.

Transitions are marked by extreme anger and distrust between factions, and the relatively even division within factions. This week’s election focused on a Republican winning Virginia’s race for governor. More interesting is the incredibly narrow division in both Virginia and New Jersey. Analysis of how a candidate performed relative to prior elections is not the key. The key is that the election showed that the United States is in gridlock, with factions locked in mutual rage and contempt. So it was in the prior era when the radicals looked at Middle America with withering contempt and were treated in kind.

It was not a matter of which faction won. The gridlock was such that the battle continued regardless of elections. And it didn’t matter who was president – he would be hated by half of the country. And all this takes place amid a backdrop of intense economic crisis. This election may or may not have painted Biden’s future, and it might or might not have been a defeat for progressives. In either case, the war will continue until it becomes irrelevant. We are now in the third act, and historical precedent is that there will be about two additional phases after Biden leaves. Who takes over matters little. The next president will be trapped by the social reality he faces.

How will we know the transition is over? In a way, we won’t. A new president will have to solve the problem, and he will not appear to be much to look at. Before he was elected president, Roosevelt was evaluated by Walter Lippmann, the most distinguished columnist of the time: “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Reagan was commonly referred to as “an untalented actor” and someone “too dumb to understand what he hears.”

The time will come when this cycle changes and a president will emerge who will preside over it. We will know him by the contempt with which leading figures of the prior era see him. His virtue will be that he is not locked into the prior era, and he will appear a lightweight. But his coming is not here yet. History will have to grind through another eight years or so, and several presidents, before the cycle ends.

None of this has anything to do with the virtues or vices of leaders. It has to do with the passion with which we praise and hate them, and the extent to which American society mobilizes itself. The crisis comes from division and mutual contempt, and those arise from a changing America.

At the same time as the next act emerges socially and politically, I forecast a profound crisis and change in the way the federal government works. The current system emerged out of World War II and was based on the idea that experts should be responsible for, and to a great extent run, the federal government. It worked in World War II, and to a great extent, it has since worked for decades. But the solution of expert-based government poses two problems that have become unmanageable. One is that the government has become so complex that citizens have lost democratic control of the government. Their participation is seen as a disruption of expert-based decisions.

The second problem is that the experts know very limited areas superbly, and their limited view shapes their worldview. There are various areas of government, each with its own experts, each indifferent to what the others or nongovernmental experts said. The federal government, run by experts, has become self-enclosed and at the same time fragmented.

The experience of COVID-19 drove this home. The coronavirus was a medical problem, and therefore the medical experts in the medical bureaucracy had to be allowed to chart the course. Of course, the disease and subsequent medical decisions affected many dimensions of life. For the medical bureaucracy, limiting the extent of the virus and resulting deaths was the overarching concern, and as more was learned, the methods shifted. The expectation was that the public would accept the science as it was put. This has been the core concept of the federal government since World War II.

The problem with this system derived from the fact that the medical profession was indifferent in principle to the non-medical consequences. There were many, but we can see the problem with the massive economic disruption caused by COVID-19 and the medical solution. Closing down parts of society, imposing social distancing, attempting to impose a single medical order on a diverse society – all of this led to disruptions, the most dangerous of which are the massive, global economic shortages. There are shortages of workers, shortages in transport and a massive supply chain breakdown. Just as COVID-19 is complex in cause and effect, so is the economy. Some (including me) warned that the medical solutions would generate some variety of economic crisis and massive social tension. Many things can cause death and suffering, but the singular focus of the medical bureaucracy caused it to ignore non-medical consequences.

Make no mistake: This was their job and they did it as well as they could. But they were forced by the principles of the post-WWII system of government to focus on the medical problem. Meanwhile, experts in economics and social issues tried to point out the danger, but the power of the medical experts defined the matter. The dangers of a badly damaged economy, and the unwillingness to acknowledge any value in the social resistance to their solutions, created a single, focused solution to an enormously complex and varied problem. This was a medical problem, but it was not only a medical problem. It was not, as many believe, the fault of the medical experts. The federal system made this their singular focus, unable to see the needed trade-offs. “Trust the science” meant trust the scientists and ignore other dimensions of the problem.

The COVID-19 crisis was one I did not anticipate when I wrote my book, but it is the perfect embodiment of the problem that was arising. Government by experts who ignore experts in other fields was the discipline needed to win World War II and the Cold War. It had reached its reductio ad absurdum by 2020.

The social and economic crisis is now in the midst of painfully clearing the way to the future, and the experience of COVID-19 and its non-medical consequences will merge into the social and political upheaval of our time. We are not near the end, nor is the shape of the end clear. We have, however, passed through the first act, the Trump presidency, and into the Biden phase, which repudiates what went before. The hint of Biden’s fate, like Gerald Ford’s, was visible well before these elections, just as the value of isolated expertise is visible. But we still have about eight years to go if prior transitional phases – going back to Andrew Jackson – hold true.

I remain confident the republic will come through stronger for the pain, on the principle that what does not kill me makes me stronger. But I continue to believe the next years will remain painful, hostile and confused. This is the United States.


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VDH
« Reply #2029 on: November 08, 2021, 12:10:02 AM »

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George Friedman on Lincoln
« Reply #2031 on: November 19, 2021, 06:40:41 AM »
   
In Praise of Lincoln
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. It was a terrible and great moment – terrible in that Americans had just slaughtered Americans, but great in that the victory promised to create a more just republic through a war whose end could be seen for the first time.

I must begin this by confessing to a shameful moment on my part. I am aware of the movement to redefine our history, stripping it of its greatness. I hesitated to write about this because I try to avoid becoming entangled in such debates. There have been proposals to remove Lincoln’s name from schools, and one from a D.C. task force on commemorative sites that recommended changes to the Lincoln and other memorials. Neither has happened yet, but the fact that this could be even thought of by American citizens – and that I, even if of little importance, remain silent – is horrifying. Truth be known, I dreaded the condemnation that might come from praising Lincoln. Fortunately, my pride overcame the shame. Gettysburg was a great moment in our history. Lincoln’s address was a poem to the dead, the living and those not yet born. It is sacred.

The criticism of Lincoln consists of two parts. The first is that he dispatched troops to the far west and that they committed atrocities. The second is that the Civil War was not about slavery but rather about tariffs, and that Lincoln deserves no honor for it.

That troops committed atrocities is likely true. In war, they almost always do. That Lincoln, many hundreds of miles away at the time, should be answerable to it is to invent a responsibility for the express purpose of denying him the honors heaped upon him.

The argument that the Civil War was waged over tariffs is an older but no less absurd claim. Some 650,000 men died. The thought that they went to their deaths over their passionate belief in the profits of merchants and plantation owners is laughable unless you believe the common man, in blue or gray, was too stupid to understand the real purpose of the war. All wars are multidimensional, but the idea that this war was predicated on tariffs can stand only if you hold the common man in utter contempt. I was raised by common people and have sat with noted scholars. I am confident that my father would not possibly have been conned into dying for someone else’s money.

I use the term “common man” deliberately here. There is a magnificent symphony called “Fanfare for the Common Man” by Aaron Copland. Copland was a leftist, blacklisted by Joe McCarthy. He belonged to a political movement that I opposed and sought to defeat. Copland meant for “Fanfare” to honor the troops who fought tyranny in World War II. It was a time when the left had deep respect for the “ordinary” people who loved America. Listen to his “Appalachian Spring” and you can hear the beauty Copland saw in America. And you might also listen to his “Portrait Lincoln” to share the greatness he saw.

I bring up Copland because he was perhaps the greatest American composer, one who demonstrated a respect for the common man that is lacking today. The left that had once been there would never have treated Lincoln without anything but awe, nor condemn the common man as less enlightened than those who thought well of themselves. I am no leftist, but as Americans, we could disagree and share a drink. I do not recognize those who are assaulting Lincoln’s memory as leftists or rightists. They are a strange mixture of contempt for the common man and the past they created, and a deep sense of their own right to judge even a Lincoln.

There is a claim that Lincoln did not oppose slavery because he said nothing during the 1860 campaign. In 1858 he said, among many things: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” At Gettysburg he closed by saying “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

We must all be judged, but we must be judged on the whole. And we all have to be judged in the context of the time in which we live and the limits that are placed on us. How many of us would want to be judged by the standards of the year 2300? There is no life that isn’t flawed, no moment in that life that we do not regret, but those who focus only on the failures are themselves guilty of at least poor judgment, and at most malicious intent. A life must be judged on the whole, and the discovery of flaws must confirm their humanity, not cause us to want to erase them. What is true for people is also true for nations. There is no nation without flaws and sins.

Lincoln won the war and he freed the slaves. Of that there is no doubt. Maybe he could have done more, but what he did dwarfs our own lives. And he gave the full measure of himself, murdered as he was by a Confederate sympathizer.

There is one last point I’d like to make. During the victory celebration, Lincoln ordered the band to play "Dixie," honoring the enemies he had to crush, and did. For all the South’s indecencies, they were American and as such had to be brought back into the union. And of course the purists who had no responsibility for the nation’s future condemned him for it. Today it would be a reason to tear his name from the entrances and perhaps ban Copland’s praise of him.

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America on the Verge
« Reply #2033 on: November 25, 2021, 10:14:40 AM »

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Re: VDH: Kenosha and Waukesha
« Reply #2035 on: November 30, 2021, 06:12:41 AM »
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/28/a-tale-of-two-cities-kenosha-vs-waukesha/

"In sum, Rittenhouse had no criminal record; all four of his assailants had lengthy arrest records. Three of them were ex-felons. He had no record of the racial hatred of which he was accused. 

In contrast, Brooks was an abject violent racist whom the media sought to shield. And he was a career felon, who both long ago and quite recently should have been kept behind bars so that he would not murder innocents. 

How a Wisconsin ex-felon received a $1,000 bail bond and freedom to mow down innocents, after trying to run down two with his car, while another juvenile without an arrest record, with good grounds to claim self-defense, was required to post a $2 million bond (and so stayed incarcerated pending charges without running water in his cell) is a commentary on the abject implosion of the American justice system. 

Rittenhouse should have never been charged; Brooks should not have been out of jail. The effort to make the former a beneficiary of white supremacy and the latter a victim of it required a level of amoral media deceit that finally was unsustainable even in this bankrupt age. "

ccp

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christmas tree arson released
« Reply #2036 on: December 09, 2021, 06:18:33 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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VDH: Why is the Left worried about the end of democracy?
« Reply #2038 on: December 17, 2021, 05:11:05 AM »
Why Is the Left Suddenly Worried About the End of Democracy?
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
 December 16, 2021 Updated: December 16, 2021 biggersmaller Print
Commentary

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.”

To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.

They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.

They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.

They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.

They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.

They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.

They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.

They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”

They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64 percent of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.

Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.

And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.

What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?

It is quite simple. The Left expects to lose power over the next two years—both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.

After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency—with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment, and professional sports—the Left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.

The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.

Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.

All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.

Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.

Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50 and 57 percent—in Donald Trump’s own former underwater territory.

Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.

In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.

After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the Left gains power and administers it.

If Joe Biden were polling at 70 percent approval, and his policies at 60 percent, the current doomsayers would be reassuring us of the “health of the system.”

They are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.

When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.

That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the Left is not people power at all

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Re: VDH: Why is the Left worried about the end of democracy?
« Reply #2039 on: December 17, 2021, 08:35:48 AM »
Another great column.  I wish people on the other side would read VDH, but they don't.  If they did, they wouldn't be on the 'other side'.

ccp

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VDH
« Reply #2040 on: December 17, 2021, 09:03:02 AM »
yes
great synopsis!

VDH did not hit a home run with this - he hit 4 home runs in one game with this!

Just think if we had a media that would be this honest  :wink:

but we don't  :-(

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Tucker
« Reply #2042 on: December 21, 2021, 02:35:20 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Candace Owens
« Reply #2043 on: December 24, 2021, 04:16:45 AM »
Knowing how to get down in the rabble rousing muck and come out clean is a valuable and necessary skill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1AUuinwv24


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Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
« Reply #2045 on: December 28, 2021, 03:53:30 PM »
https://patriotpost.us/articles/82026?mailing_id=6387&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6387&utm_campaign=all_subscribers&utm_content=body

It’s done. The internal and external national security risks to your once-proud country have just skyrocketed. It is difficult to describe the stunningly negative position the United States finds itself in following the cataclysmic fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. President Joe Biden’s ill-fated and hapless decision to summarily short-notice withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan will forever be known as the day America’s position in the world order cascaded behind that of China, and for that matter Russia and the European Union as well.

Exactly.

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Caldwell
« Reply #2046 on: January 01, 2022, 09:26:07 AM »


Christopher Caldwell’s cover story, “The Inequality of ‘Equity,’” was and is a must-read on the flaws inherent in what is becoming the guiding policy principle of our day:

If you wanted to be blunt about it, you might call equity a no-excuses imperative to eliminate all collective racial inequalities. There are many such inequalities in our system, and blacks are on the unenviable side of most of them. They possess the fewest financial assets, fare the worst in school, have the hardest time finding work, live the shortest lives, commit the most violent crime, and spend the most time in jail. Equity’s proponents, most of them progressive Democrats, say their aim is to ensure that all races share equally in economic growth and get a fair shake in the justice system. Republicans say that Democrats are abandoning equality of opportunity for equality of result.

Put that way, “equity” sounds like a new name for something that Americans have been arguing about for two or three generations now. Affirmative action, after all, tips the playing field of opportunity in minorities’ favor. “Diversity” is all about managing results. Feminists’ equal-pay-for-equal-work campaigns might be considered a harbinger of these equity debates.

But in two ways the equity movement is radically new.

First is in the categorical simplicity of its diagnosis. It views all inequality across groups as illegitimate on its face — as evidence of white racism, in fact.

Second is in its tools. Equity doesn’t concern itself with more-traditional understandings of inequality — differences, say, between bosses and laborers. It is about equality for blacks, as laid out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and for the various groups, from immigrants to transgender people, that have come under the act’s protection in the decades since. The power of civil-rights law to punish employers and schools, to investigate those suspected of noncompliance, and even to silence detractors has been steadily strengthened by bureaucratic fiat and litigation. Race-conscious rather than race-blind, open to almost any kind of remedial discrimination, equity has brought us to a crossroads. Either our civil-rights laws are being overstretched to the point where they are growing intolerable to much of the country (though people remain frightened of saying so) or they are in the process of becoming the supreme law of the land, overriding even the Constitution. . . .

Perhaps equity is best thought of as diversity or affirmative action taken to its logical conclusion. We can expect it to function in ways similar to affirmative action, steadily entrenching itself as those who administer it forget the goals they began with. At that point, a temporary program turns into a permanent one, and a new goal enters: no longer to undo racism but to duck the arduous work that would have to be done if the problem turns out to be more complicated than that.

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The Zoom Class catches the Coot
« Reply #2047 on: January 03, 2022, 12:20:26 PM »
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
 December 31, 2021 Updated: December 31, 2021biggersmaller Print
Commentary

For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.

The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.

It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population this way, deciding what can open and what cannot, who must work and who must not, what we can and cannot do based on our station in life.

So it now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.

That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they are being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, have not protected against infection.

All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.

A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with Covid, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: yes and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it is time we change our tune.

“Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid. They shouldn’t be ashamed,” headlines the Washington Post.

Feeling ashamed about getting covid-19 isn’t healthy or helpful, experts agree…. Remember: You’re not a failure. “Millions of other people have gotten sick,” (Seema) Varma says. “Unfortunately, you’re not alone. You’re not the only one. You’re not the first one to get covid, and you won’t be the last.” And that positive test, she reiterates, “doesn’t make you an irresponsible person.”

So on the piece goes, with a complete flip of the narrative they have long preached: anyone who gets Covid has failed to comply, disregards of Fauci’s advice, probably lives in a Red state, rejects the science, and otherwise bears the mark of selfishness and the desire to put freedom ahead of public health.

Getting Covid has heretofore been part of a human stain, consistent with the very long history of demonization of the diseased and the attempt to attribute sickness to moral sin. This impulse dates back to the ancient world, revived with a ferocity in 2020.

To be sure, the concept of class has always been less prescient in American history, due to our long history of having eschewed titles and social barriers and in favor of mobility and universal rights. Slavery was unsustainable in this history for this very reason. The American ethos has aspired perhaps not to a classless society but to one in which the concept is so opaque as not to have much cultural or political explanatory power.

That all changed with lockdowns. We were introduced to strict, state-imposed categories that had been previously unthinkable. Sheets were issued by public-health bureaucrats with long lists of institutions that could stay open and must stay open, businesses that must shut because they are “unessential,” and workers who were suddenly entitled to get paid even though they did not show up to their jobs. It became overwhelmingly obvious who was who.

In addition, this strict categorization of people and life conditions affected even sickness. Most governors in the United States overrode the learned experience and knowledge of hospital administration and forcibly reserved medical services only for Covid patients or emergency services. “Elective” surgeries and procedures would just have to wait.

This was true so too for essential and nonessential travel and activities too. As time went on, we gradually found out what was considered nonessential. It was church. It was singing. It was going to the beach, attending parties, holding parties, hanging out in a bar, traveling on vacation. Essentially, anything that would normally be considered fun came to be associated with disease, thus further cementing some kind of cultural relationship between sin and disease.

So powerful was this class demarcation that it overrode people’s normal political instincts. The left, long priding itself on its egalitarianism and universal class aspiration, took to the new class system very quickly and easily, as if the betrayal of all political ideals was just fine given the public health emergency. The demand that everyone go along with the experts was something that decades of American political experience had taught us to be gravely mistaken. But in a few fateful months lasting nearly two years, this demand drove out every other consideration.

The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That is a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean while the virus circulated in season after season.

It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that did not happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.

Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it is suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.

Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people—based on one pathogen—contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.

It’s all very dangerous to the notion of freedom itself. The proper way to demarcate the protected should relate not to class, income, and job but rather vulnerability, which in the case of Covid is mostly related to age. That’s how the 20th century learned to manage seasonal infectious disease and pandemics too.

What they attempted in 2020–21 was without precedent in the modern world. It did not finally work, even to achieve the aim of keeping the professional classes disease free. This is perhaps the moment when it all finally comes to an end, not with repudiation but with resignation, acquiescence, and surrender. You can stigmatize anyone but you go too far when we do that to the ruling class elites themselves.

From the Brownstone Institute

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

ccp

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Abrams playing "I am a moderate" game
« Reply #2048 on: January 04, 2022, 05:52:23 PM »
with an entire propaganda machine readying to push  the fraud :

https://www.conservativereview.com/here-comes-the-stacey-abrams-media-rebrand-2656211670.html

yeah right obam was a. moderate clinton is a moderate blah blah blah

of course they will hold her up to the cortez show and say see , compared to this one she is a moderate - blah blah blah

when short on ideas
call everyone racist etc and attempt to disguise who you really are

and of course the swing voting dupes will fall for it as they always do

you can fool some of the people ALL of the time.

ccp

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Andrew McCarthy
« Reply #2049 on: January 06, 2022, 09:47:24 AM »