George Santos's fraudulence - initial thoughts

 Doesn't sound like remorse is among the top drivers of his current decision-making, does it?

The calls are intensifying for Congressman-elect George Santos to step down after he admitted to lying on his résumé.

The Long Island Republican turned the blue district red.

And in the face of questions about campaign fraud and deception, on Tuesday afternoon his campaign told CBS2 he still has every intention of being sworn in next week.

Santos said he's sorry he "embellished" his résumé, but he believes he still deserves to serve the voters of Long Island and northeast Queens who elected him.

Last week, the New York Times reported that the 34-year-old Republican falsely claimed he graduated from Baruch College, that he is the descendant of a Holocaust survivor, and that had worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

"If I was trying to defraud the people like everyone is saying, I could have listed bigger names," Santos said.

In a Fox News interview Tuesday night, he said he is "not a fraud" and "not fake."

"I made a mistake, and I think humans are flawed and we all make mistakes," he said. "In order to move past this and move forward and be an effective member of Congress, I have to face my mistakes."

But when the interviewer, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, asked Santos if he had no shame, he quickly tried to deflect.

"I can say the same thing about the Democrats and the party. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden's been lying to the American people," he said.

Now, no one has ever been quite so flagrant about riding to election on a bundle of fabrication, but what this episode really points up is how easy it is to distract voters from glaring questions about a candidate's past. 

Republicans, of course, see him as crucial to their razor-thin House majority having any effectiveness. So, once again, they're practicing the art of the gloss-over:

Joseph Cairo Jr., the chair of the Nassau County Republican Committee, expressed disappointment, including the Holocaust claim, but is standing with Santos, saying, in part, "I expected more than just a blanket apology. Residents want him to deliver tax relief and pass laws that will make our neighborhoods and nation safer. What's more, George Santos will have to continually prove that he has learned his lesson."

Peter King does make a valid point here - namely, that this sets a precedent whereby no election result is ever certain in the public's mind, because there may have been some fudging of the truth in a candidate's campaign pronouncements:

So what disciplinary action could Santos face by the House or law enforcement, and what does one of Long Island's most powerful Republicans, former Rep. Peter King, have to say?

When asked if Santos should resign, King said by phone, "No, he was elected and, again, it's a bad precedent to set to resign. Then you'd have every election to be re-examined 'Was this accurate? Was that inaccurate?.'"

"Now, obviously, he went beyond almost anything anyone has done before, but it's not a crime. You should be sworn in, but after that there should be an immediate investigation," King added.

But the operative phrase there is "beyond almost anything anyone has done before." The horse is now out of the barn. If you can drag your election numbers over the finish line, it matters not how badly you insulted the voters' intelligence.

Bad behavior swept under the rug is not a new phenomenon in American politics. But indulge me in a theory I'm considering: We're moving out of a window during which a general consensus among the public about standards for such traits as truthfulness and servant leadership provided the goodwill that enabled such rascals as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to comport themselves with the bearing of perfectly respectable men. Before the window opened, politicians had the advantage of a by-modern-standards primitive news-dissemination technology. Then the technology came along, but those vying for or holding office had the good sense to act like responsible grownups when in the public eye. One could keep rumors of mistresses and mob ties at bay, simply by filling one's time with statesmanlike activities.

Then technology took another leap forward, to the extent that confusion reigns about what constitutes an accurate source of facts. That has made possible the rise of a wave of the most shallow political figures in our history. 

Our two major political parties have responded by adopting a whatever-it-takes-for-our-brand-to-prevail mentality. That's how we got, of course, Donald Trump, former bartender Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antisemite nutritionist-with-a-shady-marital-and-parenting background Ilhan Omar, fluffbrain-riding-his-family's-political-coattails-even-as-sex-trafficking-charges-beathe-down-his-neck Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who boinked not one but two fitness trainers while married. 

It's how Kari Lake got her fifteen minutes in the national spotlight. No journalist seemed curious enough about her rather abrupt transition from being a left-leaning news anchor to rabid Trumpist to get to the bottom of it. That's quite a shift. Surely she had conversations with someone she was close to as the shift was underway.

It's why Barack Obama can bask in beloved-elder-statesman status. No one, in either the 2008 or 2016 campaigns, really went into his hardcore leftist background: his mentors, those who gave him a political leg up. Frank Marshall Davis. Rashid Khalidi, Jeremiah Wright. Bill Ayers, Heather Booth. Greg Galluzzo. 

We've jettisoned even the flimsiest gesture of fealty to the great human virtues. The parties actually don't mind a little controversy surrounding their candidates. It means they're getting noticed, which might translate to a legislative seat and the deciding vote on tough-to-arrive-at bills. 

In a society that has lost the ability to be embarrassed, shamed or remorseful, but has simultaneously become attracted to the most outrageous flouting of norms embraced by humankind for thousands of years, empty-suit celebrities will rise to the fore. 

Never mind what should be. We are only concerned with what is now.

That means that we're going to get more George Santoses. The guardrails are gone. We're rolling around in a bounce-house sea of shiny objects. And we're the less human for it.

 

 

 

Neo-Trumpism's disgusting take on the Zelensky visit

 First, I think it's time for this term to enter into common usage. The figure who spawned Trumpism may or may not continue to be a major player in American politics. He's up to his eyeballs in legal troubles, his picks in various kinds of races in the just-concluded midterms were duds, and various other Republicans of varying degrees of sanity are consuming some of the oxygen he used to have all to himself.

But even if he fades from here on out, he's created space not only for a new generation of deranged showboaters in public office, but has conferred legitimacy on some of the most shameful stances staked out by pundits in at least modern history.

President Zelensky's visit to Washington was pitch-perfect. He met with everyone he needed to meet with and delivered a ringing defense of human freedom to a joint session of Congress. It went far to strengthen the notion that Ukraine, being tempered by fire as it is, is demonstrating that it is indeed a Western nation.

So a hearty LITD hurrah for the delivery of the Patriot anti-missile system. I just wish M-1 Abrams tanks didn't require so much training to operate and maintain.

But those who are going to continue to carry the banner of incoherent nationalism regardless of whether their cult leader maintains his prominence displayed the most vomit-inducing lack of basic humanity imaginable in response to Zelensky's courageous decision to come here. Donald Trump, Jr. called Zelensky an "entitled welfare queen." Commentator Benny Johnson called him an "ungrateful piece of s---." Tucker Carlson used the monologue of his television show to remark that Zelensky's choice of attire for his visit made him look like a strip club manager.  He called the visit "the most humiliating scenario . . imaginable."

These are views emanating from an entirely different moral universe than most of us inhabit.

And let me repeat a point I make with some frequency, because it's that important: the Neo-Trumpist infection has made it increasingly difficult for actual conservatism to engage the present scene. There are a number of matters that ought to be addressed by responsible conservatives: climate alarmism, identity politics militancy and wealth redistribution, and the avenues by which progressivism is imposing them, such as DEI, ESG and larded-up spending bills. 

But if unhinged yay-hoos are taking the lead in talking about them, the public at large will have no idea that there is no other basis for objecting to the leftist agenda than the kind of foul grandstanding that leads to the reaction we've seen to this visit by one of the giant of our age.

I suppose, like all else, Western civilization has to have a shelf life

 You've surely noticed that I don't use LITD to weigh in on every last instance of gender insanity severing the last strand of the gossamer and hopelessly frayed thread by which civilization hangs. Not only are instances that get news coverage daily occurrences now, it's in our faces in our daily lives. I've had students in my community college courses for several semesters now who put pronouns in their profiles. Got a business email a few weeks ago, and the person with whom I was corresponding did the pronoun thing. 

But occasionally, a development must be remarked on. The Cambridge Dictionary's "update" of the definition of a woman qualifies:

Cambridge Dictionary has updated its definition of “woman” to include anyone who “identifies as female” regardless of their sex at birth. 

The online dictionary recently added a supplementary definition of a “woman” which includes transgender people. 

It now states that as well as definitions including an “adult female human being”, a woman can also be “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. 

It gives the examples: “She was the first trans woman elected to a national office” and “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth”.

The Dictionary’s editors made the changes after studying patterns of how the word “woman” was being used across society, and concluded that the new definition is one that English learners “should be aware of”.

This pretty much makes it official that use of the term "woman" in this second portion of the definition is commonly accepted usage of this formerly commonly agreed-upon English-language word.

This is utter madness. 

Twenty damn years ago, the notion that we'd be here was laughable.  

We have taken two of the most basic elements of what it means to be human - sexuality and language - and completely obliterated them.

Just as the momentum of our material advancement as a species has accelerated over the past three centuries, so has that of our spiritual sickness. The amount of time it took for the West to go from Rousseau to the Romantics to Marx has been shrunk to the blink of an eye in which we've gone from Obergefell v Hodges to this move. 

I don't know what to say beyond what I've said here. I'm not here to exhort you to join some activist group that thinks it has the magic formula for reversing this. If any one of them was effective, we wouldn't be at this grim juncture. 

Pray, I guess.

That's always a good idea. 

And don't acquiesce. There will come a day, if it hasn't arrived, when you will have to decide whether to use the term "they" in reference to an individual person in some situation in which you're leaving a permanent record. What will you do?

What's happening is as historically profound as anything I've experienced in my life, and I was there for the rash of assassinations in the 1960s and the moon landing. We're shredding our birthright by the minute.

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.

- Acts 7:51 

I'd like to know what Drezner's baseline is for his speculation that we might be returning to normalcy

 Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has an essay at his Substack that he clearly intends readers to take as a note of cheer. It's entitled "Is the Country Getting . . . Better?"

Now, Drezner has a track record that appeals to me. He was a registered Republican who supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. He publicly expressed his misgivings about Donald Trump by being a signatory to a letter from several national-security specialists in 2016, and left the GOP. a year later. My kind of guy in a very important sense.

And I appreciate his guarded optimism in this piece. He begins by spelling out how gloomy things have looked for the past several years:

The last six years or so have felt like one of those video boxing games in which the announcer yells “body blow” on repeat, but for the entire country. The United States has been through a lot, from the chaos of the Trump administration to the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic to the disruptions of the George Floyd protests to the violence of January 6th to the uncertainties of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m eliding a lot in that last sentence but you get the point. These have been interesting times to live through, which is a polite way of saying they have been exhausting. 

Along with the big shocks came a host of smaller tells suggesting that America had lost its damn mind. Data points like the rise in “air rage” and “road rage” incidents suggested a country in which the social fabric was being torn asunder. The midterm elections, featuring a whole host of truly oddball candidates, seemed to be another sign that bad things were coming down the pike. Some of my political science colleagues were gaming out how a second Civil War could emerge. 

I'm not sure that the balm he applies to the current juncture has much depth to it, however:

Then something unexpected happened: by albeit razor-thin margins, normalcy seemed to make a comeback. The midterm elections proved to be infertile soil for nutjob candidates in swing states; Raphael Warnock’s defeat of werewolf-loving Herschel Walker in Georgia was the cherry on top of this delicious normalcy sundae. As Axios’ Jim VandeHei put it: “The past few months prove that for all the hyperventilating and self-loathing, normal America is prevailing over the loudmouths on the left and the right who dominate our screens…. Yes, politics remains alarmingly polarized and Twitter, a hot mess. At the same time, most of America is busy being more nuanced and normal than what you often see on the screen.”

Now, when one juxtaposes Warnock as a foil to Walker, one can say we did indeed dodge a bullet.  But Warnock is no centrist. He's tried to play the race card to whitewash his brother's drug conviction. He claims that he's on solid ground as a Christian pastor in his position that abortion is fine even up to moments before birth. His shoddy behavior as a father is at odds with his advocacy for women and children. And he wanted to see a federal election law enacted to head Georgia's law off at the pass, even though that law did not hamper voter turnout.

But back to Drezner's piece. He cites statistics concerning social ill such as road rage to bolster his case:

Is there evidence for Hayes’ supposition? There’s some! A glance at the Federal Aviation Administration’s data shows that the number of air rage incidents per flight has declined considerably during 2022, which is impressive given the number of flight delays and cancellations that occurred earlier this year. The decline appears to be due to a combination of the FAA pursuing a “no tolerance” policy combined with the end of the mask mandate on flights. Road rage data is a little harder to come by, but the number of motor-vehicle fatalities is trending ever-so-slightly downward compared to 2021. The murder rate also appears to have declined compared to 2021. Some economic stresses, like inflation or supply chain disruptions, appear to be easing as well.

But what I want to know is this: Has he established a baseline from which he's able to form a metric?

 Because the Overton window has been dramatically shifting for many years. Consider that Barack Obama came into office as president proclaiming his stance that marriage was between one man and one woman. Some years later, when Obergefell v Hodges was decided, he had the White House lit up in rainbow colors. Now we have a transgender Health and Human Services secretary. DEI is pervasive throughout government at all levels. 

In a piece I wrote at my own Substack earlier this year, I made the case that the window shift goes back decades. In the course of making my point, I cited some statistics that don't paint a pretty picture at all:

Some very basic aspects of American life that were taken as givens in my childhood have undergone profound changes in ensuing decades. The marriage rate, in steady decline for years, fell to an all-time low in 2018. As of 2019, the US had the highest number of children living in a single-parent household in the world. 

Three in ten Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.

The number of Americans identifying as something other than heterosexual has doubled in the last decade.

Drug-overdose deaths in the US reached another record high this year.

As we all know, the spree-killing trend, which got underway in 1966, when Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas campus tower in Austin and shot 16 people, has made our present year a grim succession of carnage scenes of near-daily occurrence.

So I'd say Drezner's search for a ray of sunlight depends on accepting that we ease into the way things are at the expense of having a conversation about how they should be. 

But, then, it might be awfully late in the day for me to hope for something like that.

 

 

Georgia, Arizona and the still-dim prospects for the GOP recovering its sanity

 Raphael Warnock's Senate-seat victory over Hershel Walker has its roots in the Republican Party's indulgence of the Very Stable Genius's big-baby reality denial in late 2020 and early 2021. His allies urged rural Georgia voters to boycott the January 5 runoff election pitting Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue against Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Trump himself kept his drool-besotted cult followers agitated with his hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger ("The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.")

Georgia had been a pretty reliably red state for some time. It still is, to a considerable degree. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger handily won re-election last month. And Warnock is an extreme leftist. But the state's voters wisely backed away from the Trumpist Kool-Aid. I don't envy their options at all. 

So the Senate is now 51-49. It didn't have to be this way, but it's what you get when Trump still looms so large in the national psyche. 

In Arizona, Kari Lake has taken that page out of the Trumpist playbook. She is still calling her defeat a sham even as all counties in the state have certified the election results. She looks poised to do what she can to burn down any vestige of political good will, just as the VSG is determined to do to the national Republican Party if it dares to veer even slightly from kowtowing to him. 

The party is definitely still less than hospitable to actual conservatives - you know, the ones who saw that embracing Trump and what he was unleashing from the summer of 2015 onward. Those who aren't nuts or sycophants never pass up a chance to show that they are cowards. 

I'm not impressed by this Forward Party, and my early enthusiasm for Principles First has atrophied a bit.

So I remain politically homeless. But I remain vexed by this question: How hard can it be to articulate the convincing message of real conservatism and keep the batshit nuttery out of it?

Well, then, say his name

 There's pushback, doncha know, among the Pubs:

A handful of prominent Republicans . .  were pressed to weigh in on Sunday programs.

Rep.-elect Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said "Well, obviously, I don’t support that" in an interview on CNN’s "State of the Union."

"The Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American. And so I certainly don’t endorse that language or that sentiment. I think the question for everyone is how we move forward," Lawler said, adding that he thinks Americans are “tired of discussing the grievances of prior elections” and that Trump would be “well-advised to focus on the future, if he is going to run for president again.”

Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, lamented that Trump’s remarks have become a “consistent trend,” pointing out that the former president had demanded that Pence put the Constitution aside to overturn the election results after he lost reelection to Joe Biden.

"The president’s remarks, the company he’s keeping, I think is way beyond the fold,” Short said during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, similarly dismissed Trump’s call for the termination of the Constitution in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He said, “It’s certainly not consistent with the oath we all take."

But Turner sidestepped when asked whether the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 2024 election should make such a statement. While he said he “vehemently disagrees” with the former president’s statement, Turner did not directly answer the question, even after host Margaret Brennan pressed repeatedly.

“There is a political process that has to go forward before anyone is a frontrunner or anybody is even a candidate for the party,” Turner said. “And I believe, answering your question, that people certainly are going to take into consideration a statement like this as they evaluate a candidate.”

Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, also appeared reluctant to condemn Trump’s remarks during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week.” 

Joyce said he was unaware of what the former president posted and that “people were not interested in looking backwards” when asked to respond to Trump’s statement.

Pressed on whether he can support a candidate in 2024 who wants to suspend the Constitution, Joyce said that he will choose “whoever the Republican nominee is” because he expects Trump to have many challengers in 2024. He also said the former president lacks the authority to carry out his “fantasy” of suspending the Constitution.

The big dawgs are so far mum:

As of Sunday morning, Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as well as the Republican National Committee had not publicly commented on Trump’s post. NBC News reached out to spokespeople for McConnell, McCarthy and the RNC for comment Saturday but did not receive any response.

This is why I no longer consider myself a Republican. No one in the leadership echelons is willing to speak the entire truth of the matter. In fact, they are all hedging their bets, doing what they can not to jeopardize their political options, given the current still-the-case claim the Very Stable Genius has on the GOP. 

Sorry, can't sign up for that. 

 

 

 

 

The bill averting a rail workers' strike - initial thoughts

 Some interesting fault lines appearing in this one.

As of this writing - Friday afternoon - the president has signed it. It does not expand the paid leave to seven days. Congress seems to be taking its cue from the fact that eight four railway-related unions with the majority of he industry's workers support an agreement that included a number of other favorable features from labor's standpoint, but not the paid sick leave. Four didn't support it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in hot water with the Democratic Socialists of America for voting for the bill in the form Biden signed. Most other Squad members also voted in the affirmative.

This also, rather interestingly, puts her position in resonance with that of Marco Rubio: 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Thursday that she and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., had found common ground in the potential rail worker strike that has concerned many across the nation.

“A rarity,” she said in reference to a tweet from the Florida Republican earlier this week in which he said he would object to a deal that does not reflect the wishes of the workers.

“The railways and workers should go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept,” he said in a post Tuesday. “I will not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.”

Ocasio-Cortez retweeted the message and said, “Glad we are on the same page [regarding] railworkers’ paid sick days.”

“The House just sent over what you asked for: the full TA deal w/ sick days as supported and demanded by our railworkers. Can they count on your YES vote for the amendment?” she questioned.

Rubio seems to have found an opportunity for his common-good-conservatism rubber to hit the actual-legislation road. 

And he may have found solid ground to do so. Morale in railway jobs seems to be in the pits:

Even if paid sick leave is secured, rail workers have years of bad feelings around their employers. Jason Doering, who has worked at Union Pacific for 18 years, told me in July that even a good contract would not solve “rock-bottom” morale issues. 

“Everybody goes to work and there’s nothing positive to talk about,” said Doering, who is also the Nevada legislative director for SMART Transportation Division, a labor union of train, airline and other transportation workers. “There are no positive things going on within the industry. You are forced to choose between your career and your life.” 

Doering previously said workdays lasting up to 19 hours, consisting of 12-hour shifts and hours of waiting around for transportation or relief crews, have become the norm. So too has spending more time in motels waiting for one’s next gig than at one’s actual home. 

The other side of this matter, though, is the human-agency factor. Nobody's forcing these people to be in these jobs. Let us not lose sight of the element of choice. Yes, they have built lives on the basis of the financial planning they're able to do, but at some point doesn't one become miserable enough to investigate alternative ways to make a living?

Industry consolidation has permitted the remaining firms to say to shippers, "Face it, we're the only games in town." That's not healthy for a railway industry that works for everyone:

Decades of consolidation have left the U.S. with only seven Class I railroad companies. Four of those companies collectively control more than 83 percent of the freight market. And the vast majority of train stations in the U.S. are served by exactly one railroad.

Thus, most shippers can’t credibly threaten to take their business elsewhere. At the margin, rail customers could shift their transport needs toward trucking, but most are reliant on the inherent scale and efficiency of rail transport. So when freight carriers reduce their operating costs, they’re less inclined to pass on those savings in the form of improved customer service or lower rates than to simply shower their shareholders in dividends.

Last year, the seven dominant North American railways had a combined net income of $27 billion, nearly twice their margin a decade ago. In the interim, the railways have collectively doled out $146 billion in dividends and stock buybacks while investing only $116 billion into their businesses.

This, of course, isn't the first time government has intervened in a standoff between two private-sector entities (a union and a management consortium). The rational given generally seems to Article 1, Section 8 of he Constitution, which addresses interstate commerce, as well as the 1926 Railway Labor Act. 

Sometimes government has gotten quite brazen, as was the case in in 1952: 

During the Korean War the government imposed controls on raw materials, production, shipping, credit, wages, and prices. When the wage-price controls created a collective-bargaining impasse in the steel industry, threatening a nationwide strike, President Harry S. Truman ordered the secretary of commerce on April 8, 1952, to seize and operate most of the country’s steel mills for the ostensible purpose of maintaining production of critical munitions.

Owners of the seized properties obtained a court injunction against the seizure, and an appeal of that injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court gave rise to one of the “great cases” in constitutional law, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer.1 Although the Court found the President’s actions to be unconstitutional, its decision did not signify a triumph of private rights or a significant check on the government’s exercise of de facto emergency powers.

By 1952 Truman had become an unpopular president, even among Democrats, and his attempted seizure evinced a power struggle with a hostile Congress. He had alternative ways to proceed. Although no current statute authorized him to nationalize the steel industry, he had authority under the Taft-Hartley Act to order an 80-day “cooling- off period,” during which the union- management dispute might have been settled without a strike. The pro-union President chose not to issue such an order, however, because he opposed the Taft-Hartley Act, which Congress had passed over his veto in 1947. He did not ask Congress to authorize his seizure of the steel industry.

Instead, Truman rested his seizure order on legally vague national-emergency grounds, citing his inherent powers as president and as commander in chief of the armed forces.2 Afterward, he and his official spokesman sought clumsily “to transform the steel crisis from a particular labor dispute into a broader battle against ‘big business,’” a rendering that had little resonance.3

You see, he had, in the parlance of a more recent decade, a pen and a phone.

I am not at all comfortable with what's going down. 

I understand that a strike would bring the economy to a screaming halt, and that even national security could be imperiled. I also understand the crummy life railway workers have had for several years. 

But when the entity with a monopoly on legitimate use of coercion and force inserts itself into a private-sector disagreement between two parties each striving for a favorable outcome, I bristle. That's the rationale climate alarmists use to take away the choice of energy forms people use. 

The labor-management relationship is really one of producer and consumer. Management would like to consume what labor is producing, provided a compensation package it finds within its budget can be agreed on.

When we erode this basic principle, even for what appear to be compelling reasons, we do freedom no favors. 

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 Daren Jonescu teaches philosophy at a university in Korea. He's not exactly a ray of sunshine, but his insights are often valuable, as is the case with this post at his blog, "Melancholy, Modernity and the Free Soul":

Modernity has largely robbed melancholy of its meaning and cosmic significance, by robbing freedom of its meaning and psychological significance. Modern philosophy, obsessed with practical equality and its thought-diminishing fantasy of universal enlightenment, has redefined freedom as randomness, or rather, stated in political terms, as the right to be random. This is freedom reduced to spiritual chaos and lack of purpose, except for the deflated purpose of protecting and aggrandizing the chaos itself, which purpose we moderns call “self-preservation,” or even, more recently, “self-fulfillment.” 

Having lived so long in the dim light of this degraded notion of freedom, it now seems counterintuitive to us, or even self-contradictory, to see freedom as the ancient thinkers did, namely as a higher (i.e., nobler) form of limitation or restraint — the self-restraint of the civilized individual, who neither requires nor responds to any external coercion to live rationally — which derives its meaning by analogy with the relation of the true governor to his governed domain.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic examines "Why Everything in Tech Seems To e Collapsing All At Once":

The tech industry is experiencing a midlife crisis.

After using its metaphorical youth to experiment with social media and consumer tech through boundless investment and endless optimizations and A/B tests, many tech executives and investors today feel like they’ve essentially solved the most interesting and important problems of basic digitization. This is not just my opinion: Four years ago, the tech analyst Ben Evans observed that software had scaled the mountain of advertising and media and connected the world, and tech was looking to climb new mountains and find new challenges. One chapter was closing, and the most prominent tech executives and investors were looking for the next story.

Executives of the largest tech firms have for years been shifting resources toward new ventures with uncertain returns. Amazon recently employed more than 10,000 people to work on its AI product, Alexa. (Jeff Bezos stepped away from the company he founded to work on rocket ships.) At Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—Reality Labs, the division working to build a metaverse, has about 15,000 employees. Apple reportedly has 3,000 people working on an augmented-reality headset, and thousands more are working on Google’s voice assistant. At the same time, the venture-capital community has been looking for its own moonshot, and many investors have found one (or, at least, have wanted people to believe that they have) in crypto. VCs have reportedly bet dozens of billions of dollars in the space, even though, for all the bluster and investment, it mostly remains a technology in search of a use case beyond betting money on tokens that cash out in dollars. Meanwhile, in what may be a literal midlife crisis, Elon Musk, a car and rocket executive, has installed himself at the helm of a digital delivery mechanism for news outrage with, at best, a chaotic plan for resurrecting its business.

He concludes that most likely "we are in an intermission between technological epochs."

"'Vital Tension' as the Creative Spiritual Energy of History" by Charles Klamut at The Imaginative Conservative  looks at this concept's uses and misuses through the centuries:

“Vital tension” is a phrase used in the writings of Christopher Dawson to describe the unique source of creative spiritual energy which has inspired the great personalities and achievements of Western culture.

Dawson was an intellectual and cultural historian of the 20^th century whose life work was dedicated to studying the relationship between religion and culture. He insisted that behind every culture is a religion, and that behind Western culture is Christianity. While aware of the baggage of Christianity so scorned by secular critics, Dawson demonstrated the overwhelmingly positive creative force Christianity has been overall as the driving religious ideal behind Western culture.

Christianity helped transform the deadly violent tension of tribalism and ideological strife, transferring it inward to a vital moral and spiritual tension played out in the realm of personal responsibility, conscience, conversion, and, ultimately, love. This had very positive and creative implications over the course of Western cultural history. The pattern of accuse others/excuse self was reversed, as followers of the way of Jesus sought to first get the “plank” out of their own eye rather than the “speck” from their neighbor’s eye.

The condemnation of “those people” was replaced by the new command of Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations, gathering all into oneness under the headship of Jesus. Self-assertion was replaced with self-emptying. Domination was replaced by service. Revenge was replaced by forgiveness. The first centuries of Christianity saw the church grow through the sacrificial death of the martyrs and the love of its adherents toward one another and even toward their enemies. In imitation of Jesus, the early Christians helped establish the church by shedding their own blood, not that of others.

Dawson sought to demonstrate that history is a dynamic spiritual process whose best fruits are the result of concentrated personal and collective moral and spiritual effort. And, correlatively, its worst fruits are the result of the abandonment of this process.

Dawson drew from the tradition of the Gospels and St Paul, with their teachings on personal repentance and conversion. The spirit and the flesh are two opposing principles of the will (a moral, not a metaphysical distinction), and through the grace of the Holy Spirit comes the real possibility of personal and societal renewal. A careful study of Western culture provides an accumulation of evidence and examples, to which Dawson’s lifetime body of scholarly work testifies.

Dawson especially drew on St Augustine’s development of this tradition and his idea of the two cities: the city of God, characterized by love of God to the contempt of self; and the city of man, characterized by the love of self to the contempt of God. This was a moral, rather than metaphysical, distinction. It occurs beneath the surface of events, beginning in the hidden realm of personal existential choice. The unfolding of history is a playing out of these two opposing moral principles, beginning in the heart of each person.

But that conception of vital tension has fizzled out in our lifetimes:

More recent times, with shrinking notions of the moral and spiritual (though not scientific and technical) possibilities of humanity, have seen a reversion from“vital tension” back to the external tensions played out in the realm of post modern ideologies. From the scandalous wars between religions following the Reformation in the 17^th century, through the revolutions of the 18^th and19^thcentury, through the fascist and communist scourges of the 20^th century, and into the current era of Al Qaeda and the “clash of civilizations,” or the many lesser clashes played out between red state-blue state, 99%-1%, etc. We see the pattern playing out time and again, in more and less bloody forms but nevertheless, charged with acrimony and volatility.

Much of the strife of recent centuries, argues Dawson, can be linked to the abandonment of the Christian ideal of vital tension which was the chief source of creative spiritual energy for so many centuries since the coming of Christ. What we are seeing in its progressive abandonment is a reversion to the blood feud, played out ideologically. The pre-existent psychological pattern of moral dualism, the fruit of Christianity, is abandoned and instead sublimated and transferred outward again into new and more sophisticated forms.

How's this for a stark verdict?

 Modern man is a spiritual failure.

This is the provocation with which Christopher Dawson begins the first chapter of Understanding Europe, written in 1952. It is a theme that runs throughout his works. Why is modern man a spiritual failure? Because he has proven unable to control the new forces he has created. Educated, economically shrewd, technologically advanced, materially successful… none of these have been enough to hold at bay the centrifugal, de-unifying tendencies unleashed by the abandonment of the Christian ideal of personal conversion and a universal spiritual society. Evidence of these tendencies is seen in the trajectory of history for especially the past four or five centuries, up through today’s postmodern era of widespread alienation and division and global volatility, and in the nihilism and despair which stifle and censor serious attempts at higher meaning and authentic human aspiration, at least in the developed, post-industrial Western world.

Power the Future, a consortium of thinkers focused on a sane energy policy, has released an itemized roadmap for achieving one. The top ten solutions it offers are these:

1. Repeal Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Tax   7

2. EndBiden’sOilandGasLeasingMoratorium/
   Return Power to States   7

3. Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline   9

4. Block Biden’s ESG Regulations   9

5. Repeal the California Waiver   10

6. End Activist-led “Sue and Settle” and “Citizen Lawsuits”   11

7. Ban Use of the “Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases”   12

8. Automatic Approvals for LNG Export Terminals   13

9. Overturn Massachusetts v. EPA   14

10.Stop Biden’s War on Coal   15

A lady named Beanie has a Substack focused on the state of education and what might be done about it. An essay there entitled "The Damage of Academic Decline Is Exposed" posits that it's not just the impact of COVID that has brought about such a bleak landscape. We've been headed to our present juncture for decades. What to do?

Will we put a bandaid on the blister and strap on the same shoes that created it in the first place? Or will we decide to implement educational techniques that will allow optimal learning and set students up to truly excel? Just as one shoe doesn’t fit every person exactly right, it is unlikely that one type of learning environment will fit every student just right. We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of American education (and the future of millions of children) right now and have plenty of evidence to support its need. One step is allowing families, not the government, the ability to choose the best learning environment for their children. Another is reviving reading instruction techniques that are proven to put more students on the path to literacy proficiency. 

Ian Birrell, writing at UnHerd, looks at how disgraced FTX hustler Sam Bankman-Fried is jus the latest embodiment of a trend Birrell calls "elitist altruism": 

Elizabeth Holmes dressed in the same style every day: black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and black low-slung shoes. This “uniform” underlined her deified status as a busy billionaire dedicated to changing the world, setting her apart from mere mortals with time to choose their clothes. “My mom had me in black turtlenecks when I was, like, eight,” she told one women’s magazine. “I probably have 150 of these. It makes it easy, because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it — one less thing in your life. All my focus is on the work. I take it so seriously; I’m sure that translates into how I dress.”

Yet this story of her image, like the blood-test technology that won her fame and fortune, was fake. One former colleague later revealed how a “frumpy” Holmes had adopted the look to mimic the signature style of Steve Jobs, even tracking down the exact Issey Miyake turtleneck favoured by the Apple founder. Her pose as a cool, black-clad genius worked for a while, fooling some of the best-known financiers and public figures in the United States. Then it had to be ditched in favour of dull suits to appear in court for fraud. And soon will switch to dowdy prison scrubs after her conviction and 11-year sentence.

Silicon Valley superstars love to embrace a simple style. Rich enough to buy anything in the world and puffed up with self-importance, they use clothing to send out the message that they are too important to waste their precious intellect and time on deciding what to wear every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when quizzed about his uniform of grey T-shirts and blue jeans. (This is, lest we forget, the man who set up a website to rank attractive women at university that exploded into one of the planet’s most pernicious companies.)

Sam Bankman-Fried also tapped into this approach: he presented himself as a financial prodigy who disdained societal mores while set on saving the world. He went for the scruffy skateboarder look, a man-child with an unkempt bubble of hair who even wore his T-shirt, shorts and sneakers when sitting on stage next to a former US president and a former British prime minister.

It is no surprise that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair fell for such a phoney. Yet they weren’t the only ones suckered by this high priest of cryptocurrency, who preached of earning billions through his unique financial acumen, promised to pour the money into philanthropy, and then crashed to earth with his fortune evaporating. “SBF” championed a modish millennial approach to philanthropy, that claims to harness data, in tandem with supreme brainpower, moral leadership and relentless logic to improve the cost-efficiency of charity and tackle state failures. But his downfall has exposed the hollowness at the heart of this cult that has become as much part of Silicon Valley’s uniformity as their T-shirts and turtlenecks.

Birrell basically warns us to ask ourselves if we'd really want a savior to bee as arrogant as these people:

Many people yearn for superheroes, visionaries and wunderkinds to offer hope of salvation on a complex, messy planet. But altruism built on avarice is simply a comfort blanket for billionaires. Behind the stylised images, the sci-fi sheen of technology, the bold claims to have remodelled philanthropy, the arrogant insistence some people are so important they should be spared taxes, lies the same hubristic mentality that tarnished the aid industry. It is based on the cynical idea that a small, superior and wealthy elite knows best — and that they should not be thwarted in their drive to earn billions since they are indisputably the good guys. As two new age messiahs stumble and fall, we ought to be more sceptical over billionaire geeks posing as god-like saviours and show a bit more faith in our communal ability to resolve serious problems.

 Matt Labash, one of the best essayists of our time, knocks it out of the park once again with "Enjoy Every Sandwich" at SlackTide, his Substack. Not even gonna try to tease you with excerpts. You need to read the whole thing. It's deeply human and heartfelt, with a leavening touch of his characteristic acerbity. There is and always has been a surfeit of enjoy-life's-blessings-as-they-happen literature. It takes a really fresh approach to stand out in the genre. Trust me, Labash has provided one.

For a long time, I've yearned for someone to pen a really effective takedown of half-baked smartass Robert Reich, who offers vague pieties as economic solutions and peddles "fairness" as the aim of economic policy at the expense of even rudimentarily sound analysis. Paul Roderick Gregory, an economics professor at the University of Houston and Hoover Institution research fellow writing at Forbes, has taken on the task splendidly and systematically. It's gonna leave a mark.

And I've been busy at my Substack, Precipice. My three latest are "Is Versus Should Be," which looks at the fine line between a candid assessment of the lay of the land and being resigned to it, a little something different entitled "The Best to You Each Morning," a look at the colorful figures involved in the development of America's breakfast cereal industry, and "An Unfortunate New Fissure in an Already Narrow Sliver of Terrain," which looks at David French's take on the Respect for Marriage Act and the subsequent fallout from that,