Thursday roundup

 My informal assessment of the ad featuring both the Republican and Democratic candidates for Utah governor calling for civility is that there's a consensus across the spectrum the it's a refreshing alternative to the societal brittleness that worsens every day. Well, maybe not complete consensus. It turns out that, even though Democrats are coming to see that Amy Coney Barrett is a jurist of impeccable integrity and a fine human being, the hardcore Left is throbbing with rage over her inevitable confirmation. And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has strongly hinted that he has told Juciary Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein he's none too happy with her role in fostering civility during ACB's hearings. Not everyone is feeling the unicorns and rainbows. 

At Desiring God, Jon Piper has an excellent piece entitled "Politics, Persons and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election."

A couple of tastes:

This article is probably as close as you will get to an answer on how I will vote in the upcoming presidential election. 

Probably? 

Right. Only God knows what may happen in the next days. 

Nothing I say here is intended to dictate how anyone else should vote, but rather to point to a perspective that seems to be neglected. Yes, this perspective sways my vote. But you need not be sinning if you weigh matters differently.

Actually, this is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.

And:

May I suggest to pastors that in the quietness of your study you do this? Imagine that America collapses. First anarchy, then tyranny — from the right or the left. Imagine that religious freedom is gone. What remains for Christians is fines, prison, exile, and martyrdom. Then ask yourself this: Has my preaching been developing real, radical Christians? Christians who can sing on the scaffold, 

Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still;
His kingdom is forever.

Christians who will act like the believers in Hebrews 10:34: “You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.” Christians who will face hate and reviling and exclusion for Christ’s sake and yet “rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, [their] reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6:22–23). 

Have you been cultivating real Christians who see the beauty and the worth of the Son of God? Have you faithfully unfolded and heralded “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8)? Are you raising up generations of those who say with Paul, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8)? 

Have you shown them that they are “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11), and that their “citizenship is in heaven,” from which they “await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20)? Do they feel in their bones that “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21)?

Or have you neglected these greatest of all realities and repeatedly diverted their attention onto the strategies of politics? Have you inadvertently created the mindset that the greatest issue in life is saving America and its earthly benefits? Or have you shown your people that the greatest issue is exalting Christ with or without America? Have you shown them that the people who do the most good for the greatest number for the longest time (including America!) are people who have the aroma of another world with another King?

Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute shows us the dark side of America First:

The 2016 election was hardly the first time that the U.S. political system alarmed many of the United States’ partners broad. After the election of 1832, the British complained that the United States was governed by “demagogues and non-entities,” and versions of that grievance have been repeated regularly by allied leaders since. Yet this time is different. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States’ friends have, for the first time, begun to hedge their bets in clear and consequential ways. A second term for Trump would accelerate such moves, with the result of transforming the international order for good.

Even before the start of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, support for the United States had plummeted to historic lows. Over the past six months, Washington has shown both indifference to the magnitude of suffering among its own citizens and sharp-elbowed selfishness in its approach to global cooperation on vaccines, medical supplies, and more—decimating support for both U.S. leadership of a mutually beneficial international order and global aspiration to the American way of life.

If Trump is reelected, his “America first” foreign policy will have been validated, and the result will be an America snarling into decline. The admiration for the United States that reduces the cost of everything it tries to achieve in the world will evaporate, and other countries will move on, shaping a new order to protect themselves from a self-seeking, often hostile United States. Washington will find that it has squandered an international order that was built to enhance its security and sustain its prosperity and instead faces a world without the institutions, alliances, and goodwill that have long bolstered U.S. interests. The president and the Republican leaders who support him will have to take responsibility for what they have wrought: a new order that excludes the United States.

So the Very Stable Genius is not such a great choice. How about the other choice? It's starting to look like we should not be dismissive about the new round of Joe-Biden-Hunter-Biden-China-deals allegations:

Wait until Scranton hears about this.

One of Joe Biden’s ways of contrasting himself with President Trump has been to declare the election a battle of Park Avenue values vs. Scranton, Pa., values.

Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China.

The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with drama and intrigue.

The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski, who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.

He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago. That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy.”

Sources have said the “big guy” was Joe Biden. In a matter-of-fact manner, Bobulinski states that the “email is genuine” and that the former vice president and the man leading in the 2020 race is indeed “the big guy.”

That claim alone rips out the heart of nearly everything Joe Biden has ever said about Hunter’s many businesses and Joe’s knowledge of them. His repeated insistence that the two never spoke of the son’s global sources of money didn’t pass the laugh test.

After all, they traveled together to China on Air Force Two, where Hunter landed a $1.5 billion commitment from a government-controlled Chinese bank. Then there was Hunter’s $83,000-a-month gig on the board of a Ukrainian energy company — despite his lack of experience in Ukraine or knowledge of energy.

It was no coincidence that the vice president was the Obama administration’s point man in both countries. Wherever Joe went, Hunter went along, not to do good, but to do well. Very well.

Current national security advisor Robert O'Brien reminds us that, for all its trappings of modernity and urbanity, China is in its essence what it has been since 1949: a Marxist-Leninist state. Marxist-Leninists tend to be a fiercely determined lot, and that is playing itself out in China's machinations on the world stage:

Chinese-owned TikTok deletes accounts criticizing CCP policies. Since August 2019, Twitter has removed more than 170,000 CCP-linked accounts for spreading “manipulative and coordinated” propaganda. It is no coincidence that China has expelled so many Western reporters in recent months—Beijing wants the world to get its news about China, and especially about the origins of the novel coronavirus, from its own propaganda organs.

In addition to influencing the information Americans receive regarding China, the CCP is increasingly using its leverage to control American speech. When the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team tweeted his support for peaceful protesters in Hong Kong, the CCP announced that Rockets games would not be shown on Chinese TV and pressed others associated with the league, including star players, to criticize the tweet. Under pressure from the CCP, American, Delta, and United Airlines removed references to Taiwan from their websites and in-flight magazines. Mercedes Benz apologized for posting an inspirational quote from the Dalai Lama. MGM digitally changed the nationality of an invading military from Chinese to North Korean in a remake of the movie Red Dawn. In the credits for its 2020 remake of Mulan, Disney thanked public security and propaganda bureaus in Xinjiang, where the CCP has locked up millions of minorities in concentration camps.

The CCP is also gathering leverage over individuals by collecting Americans’ data—their words, purchases, whereabouts, health records, posts, texts, and social networks. This data is collected through security flaws and backdoors in hardware, software, telecommunications, and genetics products (many operated by CCP-subsidized businesses such as Huawei and ZTE) as well as by theft. Beijing hacked Anthem Health Insurance in 2014; the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which holds security clearance information on millions of government employees, in 2015; Equifax in 2017; and Marriot Hotels in 2019. In these instances alone, the CCP gathered key information on at least half of all living Americans, including their names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, credit scores, health records, and passport numbers. The CCP will use this data the same way it uses data within China’s borders: to target, influence, harass, and even blackmail Americans to say and do things that serve the CCP’s interests. 

In what we know of Ghislaine Maxwell's deposition so far, she recalls the heyday of Jeffrey Epstein's sybaritic empire quite differently from Virginia Giuffre. She also waffles when pressed on whether Epstein and Bill Clinton could be characterized as friends.