Another great SCOTUS ruling

 The robes - at least the majority - have been knocking it out of the park this week.

This is another one of those that, like the narrative that was ready to go upon issuance of the Dobbs ruling, that "abortion rights" were taken away, when what the Court ruled was that the Constitution does not say that abortion is a right, substantive due process fans notwithstanding, is already getting couched in certain corners as bad old fuddy-duddies standing in the way of what "needs" to happen. It's already getting framed as a setback in the "fight against climate change."  (BTW, I thought this new CNN CEO, Chris Licht, wanted to point the network in a more objective-journalism direction.)

No, what this does is go a long way toward dismantling the century-plus-old progressive vision of unelected pointy-headed bureaucratic "experts" in executive-branch positions making law:

Roberts led a 6-3 decision in West Virginia v EPAthat has significant repercussions for agency jurisdiction. The court ruled that the EPA could not use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions without a more specific grant of that authority from Congress, although Roberts kept the decision as narrow as he could:

The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent, saying that the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

The ruling appeared to curtail the agency’s ability to regulate the energy sector, limiting it to measures like emission controls at individual power plants and, unless Congress acts, ruling out more ambitious approaches like a cap-and-trade system at a time when experts are issuing increasingly dire warnings about the quickening pace of global warming.

The implications of the ruling could extend well beyond environmental policy and further signal that the court’s newly expanded conservative majority is deeply skeptical of the power of administrative agencies to address major issues facing the nation and the planet.

The New York Times notes that this draws a pretty clear line in the sand from this court about agency jurisdiction and authority. It also parallels the CDC eviction-moratoria case, they note, in which the court rebuked the CDC for overstepping its jurisdiction and authority, granted by Congress in its enabling statute. If Congress wanted to expand that authority, then Congress should have acted, Roberts ruled at that time.

Roberts writes today that not only did Congress not specifically authorize the EPA to regulate carbon emissions in the manner they planned in their Clean Power Plan, Congress explicitly rejected such proposals:

The dissent also cites our decision in American Elec. Power Co. v. Connecticut, 564 U. S. 410 (2011). Post, at 20. The question there, however, was whether Congress wanted district court judges to decide, under unwritten federal nuisance law, “whether and how to regulate carbon- dioxide emissions from power plants.” 564 U. S., at 426. We answered no, given the existence of Section 111(d). But we said nothing about the ways in which Congress intended EPA to exercise its power under that provision. And it is doubtful we had in mind that it would claim the authority to require a large shift from coal to natural gas, wind, and solar. After all, EPA had never regulated in that manner, despite having issued many prior rules governing power plants under Section 111. See, e.g., 71 Fed. Reg. 9866 (2006); 70 Fed. Reg. 28616; 44 Fed. Reg. 33580; 36 Fed. Reg. 24875 (1973).

Finally, we cannot ignore that the regulatory writ EPA newly uncovered conveniently enabled it to enact a program that, long after the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions “had become well known, Congress considered and rejected” multiple times. Brown & Williamson, 529 U. S., at 144; see also Alabama Assn., 594 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 2); Bunte Brothers, 312 U. S., at 352 (lack of authority not previously exercised “reinforced by [agency’s] unsuccessful attempt . . . to secure from Congress an express grant of [the challenged] authority”). At bottom, the Clean Power Plan essentially adopted a cap-and-trade scheme, or set of state cap-and-trade schemes, for carbon. See 80 Fed. Reg. 64734 (“Emissions trading is . . . an integral part of our BSER analysis.”). Congress, however, has consistently rejected proposals to amend the Clean Air Act to create such a program. See, e.g., American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, H. R. 2454, 111th Cong., 1st Sess.; Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, S. 1733, 111th Cong., 1st Sess. (2009). It has also declined to enact similar measures, such as a carbon tax. See, e.g., Climate Protection Act of 2013, S. 332, 113th Cong., 1st Sess.; Save our Climate Act of 2011, H. R. 3242, 112th Cong., 1st Sess. “The importance of the issue,” along with the fact that the same basic scheme EPA adopted “has been the subject of an earnest and profound debate across the country, . . . makes the oblique form of the claimed delegation all the more suspect.” Gonzales, 546 U. S., at 267–268 (internal quotation marks omitted).

In this case, it wasn’t just the regulation that crossed the line, but also its arbitrary nature. The EPA attempted to impose caps that didn’t have any relation to the statute nor to a rational and objective standard, Roberts wrote:

First, unlike Section 111, the Acid Rain and NAAQS programs contemplate trading systems as a means of complying with an already established emissions limit, set either directly by Congress (as with Acid Rain, see 42 U. S. C. §7651c) or by reference to the safe concentration of the pollutant in the ambient air (as with the NAAQS). In Section 111, by contrast, it is EPA’s job to come up with the cap itself: the “numerical limit on emissions” that States must apply to each source. 80 Fed. Reg. 64768. We doubt that Congress directed the Agency to set an emissions cap at the level “which reflects the degree of emission limitation achievable through the application of [a cap-and-trade] system,” §7411(a)(1), for that degree is indeterminate. It is one thing for Congress to authorize regulated sources to use trading to comply with a preset cap, or a cap that must be based on some scientific, objective criterion, such as the NAAQS. It is quite another to simply authorize EPA to set the cap itself wherever the Agency sees fit.

Finally, Roberts concludes that any such policy with the magnitudes of impacts that this scheme has needs a specific and explicit act of Congress to authorize. This is the “major question” doctrine at work:

Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible “solution to the crisis of the day.” New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 187 (1992). But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Justice Neil Gorsuch goes farther in rebuking the dissent. First, his concurrence offers a lengthy review and support for the major-questions doctrine as a means to rein in the increasingly expansive bureaucratic state, which he notes presents a threat to constitutional order and self-governance anyway. The doctrine is born of necessity to ensure that unelected officials remain responsive to both Congress and the president, and also that they do not intrude on matters that properly belong to the sovereign states.

Rexford Tugwell is surely rolling in his grave. 

Turkey finally gets on board with Finland and Sweden joining NATO

 This ought to give Putin pause:

Office of the President of the Republic of Finland
Press release 41/2022
28 June 2022

Today in Madrid, before the beginning of the NATO Summit, we had a thorough meeting with President of Türkiye Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister of Sweden Magdalena Andersson, facilitated by Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg.

As a result of that meeting, our foreign ministers signed a trilateral memorandum which confirms that Türkiye will at the Madrid Summit this week support the invitation of Finland and Sweden to become members of NATO. The concrete steps of our accession to NATO will be agreed by the NATO Allies during the next two days, but that decision is now imminent.

Our joint memorandum underscores the commitment of Finland, Sweden and Türkiye to extend their full support against threats to each other’s security. Us becoming NATO Allies will further strengthen this commitment.

I realize that this afternoon's avalanche of big news (Maxwell's 20-year sentence, Cassidy Hutchinson's J6 testimony, the Rasmussen poll showing that half of likely voters approve of SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs) presents us with a dizzying number of claims on our cognitive faculties, but this must not get lost in the shuffle. It shows that a unified front against Russia's barbarism in Ukraine still exists.

 

Why post-America can't have nice things - today's edition

 Well, just dandy. Not 48 hours after the Supreme Court rectifies a mistake it made 49 years ago and asserts, correctly, that no right to abortion can be found in the Constitution, this bonehead - bonehead elected to Congress, no less (what kind of constituents comprise her district?) - has to provide fodder to the enraged mob:

U.S. Rep. Mary Miller immediately drew fierce backlash on social media and elsewhere at a Saturday night rally with former President Donald Trump when she credited him for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade calling it a “victory for white life.”

“I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” Miller said, then raised her arms in an animated clap amid cheers from the crowd, which numbered in the thousands on a sweltering day in West Central Illinois.

Her campaign's attempt at a walk-back strikes me as pretty damn lame:

But Miller’s campaign said Saturday night that the congresswoman misread prepared remarks at a rally that Trump held for her in the village of Mendon.

"You can clearly see she is reading off a piece of paper, she meant to say ‘right to life,'" Miller spokesman Isaiah Wartman said.

Miller, R-Illinois, later tweeted: “I will always defend the RIGHT TO LIFE!”

Now, I'm always willing to cut anybody some slack when it's justified, slack being at a premium in this grace-starved world. But you listen to the video and see if there's any chance she was merely garbling the phrase "right to life."

It doesn't help that back in January, she said Hitler was right about one thing, namely, that a political movement that gets the youth on board will be a success. You don't ascribe correctness of viewpoint to Adolf Hitler, about anything, any time.

So now the venom-hearted hordes have just what they need to portray those who champion the rights of people who aren't born yet as racists. 

Thanks for nothin', bonehead. 

 

 

a few thoughts . . .

 . . . about you-know-what:

1.) News stories are circulating about how Clarence Thomas now wants to revisit Obergefell v Hodges and Griswold v Connecticut. He wishes to, not because he's a repressed, stodgy old fuddy-duddy who desires to oppress various groups of people, but because he's deeply concerned by the concept of substantive due process. Substantive due process uses the Fourteenth Amendment to ascribe to court cases outcomes never envisioned by the amendment's authors. 

2.) This is why John Hart Ely objected to Roe v Wade:

"What is frightening about Roe," noted the eminent constitutional scholar and Yale law professor John Hart Ely (who personally supported legalized abortion), "is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. … It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

3.) I'm seeing a number of memes with the basic message that if opposition to Roe v Wade were really about babies and children, "we'd" have free prenatal care, more generous family leave policies, universal pre-K and such. A number of questions arise. I presume this "we" refers to society at large, but how do "we" accomplish these things? Does it not require bills to be put forth in local and/or state legislatures and/or the federal legislature, voted on and passed? Does that not require getting majorities of candidates favorable to such initiatives elected to these bodies? Perhaps we could go the Rexford Tugwell route and have unelected bureaucrats in executive-branch agencies impose these things, but I would wager that there's a great swath of the public that wouldn't go for that, me included. And wouldn't much of a policy like that require curtailing the free market? There's another aspect of it that I for one would vehemently oppose.

4.) All laws, pretty much by definition, set limits on what a citizen can do with his or her body. You are not allowed to point a gun at someone and exert pressure on the trigger with your finger. You are not allowed to depress the gas pedal of your automobile with your foot beyond the extent needed to drive the posted speed limit. You are not allowed to clutch an item of merchandise in a store, lift it with your arm and walk out without paying for it.

Today's January 6 testimony: heart-wrenching and infuriating

 There's the experience of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman:

The mother and daughter from Fulton County who were thrown into a dizzying harassment campaign by President Donald Trump and his allies in the wake of the 2020 election gave emotional testimony on Tuesday to the Jan. 6 Committee about the life-altering effects of that campaign. 

"Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States to target you?" Ruby Freeman, the mother of now-former Fulton County elections worker Wandrea' "Shaye" Moss said in taped testimony. "The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. but he targeted me, 'Lady Ruby' - a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton County run the election in the middle of the pandemic."

Freeman was a volunteer at State Farm Arena on Election Night 2020, a fateful event that launched them into the crosshairs of the most powerful man in the world as he sought to overturn Georgia's election results and remain in office.

The two were among the small handful of people who stayed late at State Farm Arena counting ballots into the early morning after most workers, observers and media members had left due to a misunderstanding about whether counting was done for the night.

The zombie-eyed Very Stable Genius cult has made a point of trying to ruin Ruby's life:

"I've lost my name, I've lost my reputation, I've lost my sense of security - all because a group of people starting with No. 45 (Trump) and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen," Freeman said.

Her daughter's life is shattered as well:

"I don't go to grocery store, I don't do nothing anymore. I don't wanna go anywhere. I second guess everything that I do," she said. "It's affected my life in a major way, in every way. All because of lies for me doing my job, same thing I've been doing forever."

There's the experience of Rusty Bowers:

• According to Bowers, who said he denied ever calling the election rigged, then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed that 200,000 unauthorized immigrants and "5,000 or 6,000 dead people" had voted in the election.
• He said that after asking "multiple times" for evidence, Trump interrupted and said, "Give the man what he needs, Rudy!" 
• But Giuliani never produced the evidence, he added.
• Giuliani also claimed that Arizona had a "legal theory or a legal ability" by which electors of President Biden could be removed and replaced, Bowers said. 
• When the lawyer pressed Bowers on it, the Arizona House speaker said he told him, "You’re asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath."

He was not somebody who had been opposing Trump prior to running into his controversy: 

Bowers was one of five recipients of this year’s John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, given to public officials who protect U.S. democracy.

“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” Bowers said, according to the awards page. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”

These people came under attack by one of the most toxic and fearsome elements in our very dark society. Trumpism is a force for destruction of everything that has identified America since its founding. What astounds me is that this buffoon, this obvious flaming narcissist, who has never been driven by anything more noble than hedonistic impulses, wealth accumulation and garnering of praise has convinced such a significant swath of the American public, from the yay-hoos whose vehicles are decked out with confederate flags to credentialed lawyers with distinguished pasts such as Rudy Giuliani to formerly respected intellectuals such as Roger Kimball and Conrad Black, to go to these lengths to try to shore up his glorification.

And he'll brook no interruption or lessening of that determination to go to such lengths. He throws his own daughter under the bus.

And even an undyingly devoted leg-humper can become expendable when push comes to shove. Exhibit A: John Eastman.

Anybody who finds anything appealing about this absolute charlatan at this late date has some serious answering to do if he and his movement continue to dominate the Republican Party. You think what Biden and the Left are doing to this country is horrible (and I don't disagree)? Just wait until you see the horrifying transformation Trumpism re-elected will wreak on post-America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Joe Biden can't just snap his fingers and make oil refineries hop to it

 There's a great piece in today's Washington Post by Evan Halper. I don't know Halper's ideological leanings, particularly as they'd pertain to matters of the global climate, but his brief WaPo bio says the beat he's covering for the paper is "the tensions between energy demands and decarbonizing the economy."

He demonstrates those chops admirably in this article. It's balanced, which means he shows that, from a practical standpoint, Biden's demands of oil refineries amount to nothing but empty bluster.

He begins with a look at the repurposing of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery:

Hilco Redevelopment Partners has been hauling out 950 miles of pipe from the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, abandoning the property’s 150-year history of processing crude oil into fuel in this city. The firm is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convert the 1,300-acre site along the Schuylkill River into a green, high-tech campus for e-commerce and life sciences companies.

“I don’t even know how to operate a refinery,” said Roberto Perez, chief executive of Hilco, which bought the property in a bankruptcy auction in 2020, a year after a massive explosion at the refinery rattled the city. “It’s not what we do.”

Halper then broadens his scope and notes that this is a trend around the country.

He then gets into Biden's letter to the nation's major oil companies, and its focus on recent profits, and then the response:

The companies are unmoved. The profits follow years of heavy losses at many facilities after demand plunged during the pandemic. Unpredictable shifts in oil markets had created a challenging business climate before that. Even at this moment of windfall refinery earnings, when the profit margin on each barrel of oil processed has jumped from a dollar or two a year ago to as much as $18 today, investors are hardly jumping at the opportunity to enter the sector. They fear the profits are short lived. The administration’s environmental priorities — as well as rising public and corporate concern about climate change — would make many refineries obsolete in the not-too-distant future.

Building and upgrading the mammoth structures is a messy, expensive undertaking that can drag on longer than a decade, strain the finances of even the biggest fossil fuel giants and run the risk of getting abandoned before that investment is returned.

And why bother, given that the administration's insistence on moving from normal-people energy sources into the play-like forms is going to make the whole undertaking even more costly than it would be otherwise?

“I don’t think you are ever going to see a refinery built again in this country,” Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said in an interview with The Washington Post this month.

“It’s been 50 years since we built a new one,” Wirth said. “In a country where the policy environment is trying to reduce demand for these products, you are not going to find companies to put billions and billions of dollars into this.”

Besides, not all refineries are owned by oil companies:

Some of the nation’s 129 refineries are owned by large oil companies such as Chevron, while others are operated independently. At the facilities, the components of crude oil are separated and processed into fuel for vehicles and planes, as well as industrial petroleum products such as lubricants.

There's also the efficiency factor. Pipelines can move oil much more quickly than rail cars can;

The Philadelphia refinery had already fallen into bankruptcy the year before it was engulfed by fire. New pipelines from the North Dakota Bakken region and the Permian Basin in Texas had begun pumping crude directly to Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries. Those refineries could then afford to sell their products much more cheaply than the Philadelphia facility, which could access the North Dakota and Texas crude only through rail car shipments.

The poor old Philadelphia refinery was also a victim of government telling private businesses what kinds of products they had to make:

The refinery was also not equipped to blend ethanol into its fuels, forcing it to purchase expensive credits on the open market to meet its obligations under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard. The price of those credits had soared by 2017, creating a crushing financial burden.

So Joe Biden can grandstand and spew ill-informed demands all he wants. The free market, meanwhile, will respond to signals as it always does.

UPDATE: Just came across Bjorn Lomborg's New York Post column for today. It makes great follow-up reading while one is still thinking about energy policy.

 

 

 

 

 

"Don't look down" is the advice always given to the precariously positioned

 A frequent theme of my essays over at Precipice is the ever-shrinking sliver of terrain I inhabit as a post-American trying to maneuver through this world guided by a set of consistent principles. A few examples are here, here and here.

While I still consider myself a conservative, I've developed a keen sense for what I know to stay away from. I've become quite attuned to the odor wafting from opinion sites whose posts bear look-what-that-awful-Left-is-up-to-now themes. Let's name names: Townhall, The Federalist, American Greatness, The American Thinker. 

What the awful Left is up to hasn't been the whole story for some time now. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I'm going to say that it's clear that such sites are targeting their appeal to ordinary, well-meaning citizens with jobs and other life obligations that limit the amount of time they have to avail themselves of perspective and analysis on the events of the day. This is the kind of person who concludes that the binary-choice argument regarding elections is the last word, the kind who, when presented with the powerful testimony coming out of the January 6 hearings, respond with something along the lines of "Well, we sure didn't have gas prices this high when Trump was president."

But there's a swath of the nation's populace beyond the above-described type of citizen that doesn't just support Trump in the hope of more desirable economic circumstances, but that lives in a fever swamp where anything remotely resembling tolerance can't be found.

It's the piece of real estate on which events such as the recent Texas Republican Party convention take place, an event that sees John Cornyn get booed for trying to find some kind of bipartisan crafting of gun legislation that's consistent with the Second Amendment yet moves the needle on the proliferation of spree killings, and Dan Crenshaw and his staff get physically assaulted, the assailants shouting "Eyepatch McCain!" It's the piece of real estate from which emanates a handwritten letter to Adam Kinzinger threatening the life of his wife and five-month-old son.

It's the terrain that spawns the new video from Missouri candidate for Senator Eric Greitens, showing him leading a commando raid and saying that there's no bag limit when hunting RINOS.  That would be the same Eric Greitens who, his former hairstylist alleges, blackmailed her into secrecy about their affair with a photo of her nude, and whose second wife's sworn affidavit says that part of the reason she divorced him was abuse "such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table." And it would be the same Eric Greitens who leads the field among his fellow Republican candidates in the runup to Missouri's August primary.

And on the world stage, calls for Ukraine and the West to accept compromise regarding the Russian invasion, from voices up to and including the dean of the "realist" foreign-policy school, Henry Kissinger, increase, even as Putin says a new world order of Russia's building is supplanting Western primacy, and Russia threatens Poland with a nuclear strike. 

But the point that the Left continues to become more monstrous is absolutely valid, the disgusting nature of those most vocal in making it notwithstanding. 

LITD readers are surely familiar with my position on abortion. For those who may be new here, I wrote, in a post about the subject the other day that

You can choose to call a zygote, embryo or fetus a clump of cells, or an unviable tissue mass. Hell, you can call it a 3/16-inch Allen wrench. (There's probably a grown adult out there somewhere identifying as such.) But the fact is, that what ever you call it (actually, him or her), you were one once.

In that post, I include this link to a rundown of recent attacks on, and threats against, Catholic pregnancy care centers. And let us not forget the recent arrest of the man who'd traveled across the country and got arrested outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home, carting on his person

. . .  a firearm, magazines loaded with 10 rounds of ammunition, 17 rounds of ammunition in a plastic bag, and other items authorities believe he intended to use to assassinate the justice. 

Or the more recent demonstration outside SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett's home by pro-abortion activists who had blood-covered baby dolls taped to their crotches. 

And while I mentioned high gas prices above in the context of their being employed as a distraction from the January 6 hearings, inflation is a very real crisis. Americans' increasing reluctance to go anywhere by motor vehicle that they don't have to is having and will have even more broad economic ramifications. 

He continues to try to deflect from the real causes with hackneyed leftist phrases such as "corporate greed" and "price gouging," but he's also floating concrete steps that would not only be ineffective but destructive of the free market such as invoking "emergency powers" or issuing some kind of "gas cards."

The idea of the federal government taking over the refining industry is being discussed by some who share the president's hatred of dense, reliable and readily available energy forms. 

My overall point is that I increasingly have no use for anyone whose main interest is in going after some kind of other side. This is not a call for kumbaya. I understand that our national polarization is extreme, and perhaps even intractable. But we get nowhere in acting on the hope that it isn't if we ignore half or more of the problem.

 

 

Friday roundup

 A good book review, in my estimation, is one that holds up on its own as a great essay and also makes me want to read the book in question. Juliana Geran Pilon has succeeded on both counts with "Athens and Jerusalem Revisited" at Law & Liberty.  It's a review of Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein and Gil Student. They re-examine the ground plowed by Leo Strauss regarding how philosophy (symbolized by Athens) and faith (symbolized by Jerusalem are the two indispensable pillars of the Western outlook:

Modernity is supposed to have elevated reason at the expense of faith; if so, the results are dismal. University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss explained that Jerusalem and Athens—the former rooted in faith, the latter in reason—constitute the twin legacies of our moral civilization. But fully grasping their inseparability takes “going beyond the self-understanding of either,” and asking: “is there a notion, a word that points to the highest that both the Bible and the greatest works of the Greeks claim to convey?” Strauss was convinced that “[t]here is such a word: wisdom. Not only the Greek philosophers but the Greek poets as well were considered to be wise men, and the Torah [first five books of the Bible] is said, in the Torah, to be ‘your wisdom in the eyes of the nations.’”

Conceding that faith could not be scientifically proved, as Baruch Spinoza had contended (1632-1677), Strauss nonetheless rejected the rationalist Jewish thinker’s bold claim to have repudiated the Orthodox belief in God as Creator. In the preface to his celebrated 1930 book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, he argued that Spinoza would have had to provide rational “proof that the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” Without such proof, one “cannot legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.” If knowledge requires reason, revelation can at least justify belief.

It wasn’t much. But it proved sufficient for one University of Chicago philosophy student, Jeffrey Bloom, for whom Strauss “’broke the spell’ of secularism, giving my inner skeptic permission to take the claims of Orthodox Judaism seriously.” He thus decided to reach out to Orthodox Jews to learn how they explained faith to themselves, with help from Jewish scholars Gil Student and Alec Goldstein. The three became co-editors of a remarkable collection of intellectually stimulating, often quite personal, attempts to convey the basis of their own spiritual beliefs. Titled Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai, it is bound to help others, both Jews and non-Jews, in their search for higher meaning in a cynical world.

I like this point of Bloom's and the artful way he makes it:

Dismissing ubiquitous calls for “moral revival” as little more than “paper airplanes launched at the advance of secularism,” Bloom charges that “there is little thinking in the public square about how one could actually move from a secular outlook to a religious one.”

Anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin has a piece at Hedgehog Review entitled "Medical Humanities and the Specialist," in which he argues for doctors' need to immerse themselves in art:

All novelists try to get closer to truth, and they do somehow, but perspective matters, and no one perspective accomplishes everything. It is the same for doctors. Relying solely on the machine perspective would have caused me to miss my patient’s diagnosis of early sepsis. At other times, however, the machine perspective is the correct one. Reading literature has helped to keep my mind nimble and my eyes always to be shifting their angle of view.

Reading literature also reminds doctors to keep their scientific systems of thought at bay. Many medical specialists are tempted to dwell in the world of pure thought, accompanied by their formulas and abstract classification systems. I myself have daydreamed of giving anesthesia remotely from a Caribbean island, applying my algorithms and equations, turning my precise dials and squeezing my syringes, while my patients lie somewhere in the universe, reacting ideally, as science and engineering predict they will, every time. But I know I would injure my patients if I gave anesthesia in this way, and for the same reason that a politician who consults only magazines, statistics, and committees makes lots of mistakes. The medical specialist, like the politician, must remain in constant contact with the living world to achieve anything.

Oliver Traldi, writing at American Compass, gives us three criteria for determining whether to listen to an expert:

The public will never be able to assess the validity of expertise on a case-by-case basis. Trying yields widely varied conclusions and thus eliminates any common starting point from which to conduct public debates—roughly the situation today. Assessing apparent expertise requires knowledge of a field’s inner workings, something almost no one has the time or inclination to learn. From the outside, it is difficult to infer what dogmas might contaminate a discipline’s standard training or what pressures might distort processes of hiring, promotion, and socialization. However, some general heuristics and defaults might provide a basis for at least some agreement.

First, a simple conflict-of-interest standard would make sense. Look at what people gain from giving their views, and from whom they gain it. Someone who stands to gain more personally from one view than from another should not be entitled to deference when offering the former. That does not mean the view is wrong, only that it must be defended on its merits rather than based on the identity of the speaker. A supporter of Joe Biden who declares that an embarrassing trove of Hunter Biden emails is fake may very well be correct and is entitled to make the case, but his listeners are similarly entitled to doubt his cogency or his sincerity. A supporter of Joe Biden who studies poisonous spiders for a living should be deferred to when he warns that the spider on your arm is poisonous.

Second, political stances should be inherently suspect. Experts can offer knowledge useful in evaluating the values-laden tradeoffs of politics and public policy, but that expertise does not make their judgment superior to that of any other citizen, and certainly not the democratic determination of a large group of citizens. This is not to say that no one can be a moral expert, only that technical expertise is not moral expertise. Plenty of people defer to religious leaders, community leaders, and even political leaders when it comes to questions of what to value and how to act. But in doing so, we should be aware that our moral experts will not be our neighbor’s. Identification of moral experts often depends on prior moral and political convictions, and disagreement on who the experts are will tend to mirror disagreement about the underlying issues.

Third, we should be far more skeptical of claims of knowledge-that expertise than of knowledge-how. In the latter case, people’s claims of expertise can be substantiated by their ability to deliver objective results. The surgeon with a track record of successful surgeries is easily distinguishable from the charlatan with none. Knowledge-that experts, by contrast, are laying claim to the truth. Sometimes they have it, and are guiding us as reliably as a pilot. Other times they are simply taking us for a ride.

As a historian, one of my favorite times and places  to learn more about is 1660s London. At Ordinary Times, L.D Burnett makes that the subject of an essay, focusing particularly on John Dryden:

. . . Dryden almost singlehandedly invented criticism—both literary criticism and cultural criticism—as both a genre and a paying job. 

Dryden’s works—his poetry, his plays, and his reflections on them—made the case and argued the case for the writer as cultural critic, responsibly and deftly wielding his pen to tell his age the truth about itself. “Using the epic past and his own poetic imagination to illuminate present realities was Dryden’s special gift,” Winn writes. “It sets him apart not only from the smoothly empty Waler and the pungently specific Marvell of the ‘Painter’ poems, but from the greatest poet of his century as well”—that is, unquestionably, Milton (177). 

While Milton made “glancing references” to recent inventions and current events here and there in Paradise Lost, “Milton’s choice of an epic mode deliberately limits such direct commentary on his own times.” Dryden, by contrast, preferred a “heroic” to an “epic” mode of poetry, “In Annus Mirabilis,” Dryden’s stirring poem about the disastrous year of plague, war, and fire, “he teaches us how to see the events of 1666 as both ‘Epick’ and ‘Historical’; his poem is both effective propaganda for the court and a moving vision of human suffering and triumph.” (177-178)

Throughout his career, Dryden straddled the shifting line between poet and pamphleteer, between aesthete and activist. Writing in conversation with his moment, rather than in an attempt to escape it, invigorated Dryden’s work, as did writing in conflict with other playwrights and poets whose different political commitments showed up in and showed through their own aesthetic choices.

Burnett discusses the fact that Restoration England was a time and place of lots of sexual mischief and interpersonal intrigue, not only in the theater and literature realms, but most of public life. During the pandemic, I reread The Diary of Samuel Pepys, which is basically a chronicle of 1660s London. His depictions of the plague and fire are cinematic in style. He also writes of going out on the town - dinner and a play - and seeing women he happened to know to be mistresses of Charles II. As I say, quite a juicy period.

At the American Enterprise Institute website, Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel J. Abrams warns that intolerance - ironically among those hustling "diversity" - continues to metastasize. 

Kat Rosenfield makes a similar point in her essay "The Paranoia Driving Office Politics" at UnHerd: 

A slip of the tongue? Ha! The only thing that slipped was the mask you’re wearing. That sound could only come out of your mouth if that word, in all its hateful and hideous glory, was already in your head.

Perhaps this is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which art and politics and opinions are increasingly seen as indistinguishable from one’s essential self. Matters of taste, or personality, now get swept up under the banner of capital-I-identity; you don’t just laugh at the sexist joke, you are the sexist joke. Even the silliest iterations of this phenomenon, like the obsession of certain young people with niche sexual and gender identities demarcated by bespoke pronouns and colourful flags, speak to a broader cultural impulse to make sense of things — and of other people — by slapping labels on them. Meanwhile, the idea that a person might contain self-contradictory multitudes, or that his taste in comedy, art, cuisine or decor says very little (if anything) about his character, cannot be borne in our present environment. The inscrutable nature of other people’s hearts is not an enticing mystery, but a source of horror: they could be hiding anything in there. The problem with this, of course, is not just that too many good people are saddled with permanent reputations for badness as a result of something as silly as a tweet, but that the cheapening of “badness” as a concept makes the perpetrators of actual evil much harder to identify.

There’s a paradox here: that in a moment where social media gives us unprecedented access to other people’s thoughts, we have become consumed by fear of all the things they might be thinking but not expressing. There’s a pervasive sense, perhaps owing to the inherent performativity of the medium, that signs of virtue cannot be trusted, but hints of vice should be treated with deadly seriousness, investigated, and prosecuted where possible. In the age of oversharing, it is the things we supposedly do not mean to reveal that are the most revealing.

And then there is my recent piece at Precipice entitled "Is Our Headlong Plunge Into Uncharted Territory Really Something To Celebrate?" The subtitle is "There Is Indeed A Basic Architecture To The Universe, And We're Flouting It."

 

 

Recent battle scenes from the war on people who aren't born yet

 The head of the DoJ's civil rights division is one cold person:

The Justice Department official who investigates attacks on reproductive health care facilities has been a staunch critic of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, dozens of which have been vandalized by abortion supporters over the past month. 

Civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke criticized the centers following a Supreme Court decision issued in their favor in 2018. Clarke said the centers, which counsel pregnant women on alternatives to abortion, were "harmful" and "predatory" against women of color. She also referred to them with the hashtag, "ExposeFakeClinics." 

Clarke’s stance on the centers offers a potential explanation for the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate a string of attacks on pro-life centers since the May 2 leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) asked Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to investigate the incidents as acts of domestic terrorism. Garland has yet to open an investigation, even though he said on Sept. 6 he would investigate crimes against "reproductive health center[s]" under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act). 

Clarke oversees investigations of potential FACE Act violations. She charged nine people under the statute in March for blocking the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion provider. 

The attacks on crisis pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations have run rampant since the leak of the Roe v. Wade draft opinion last month. Twenty-four crisis centers have been vandalized or set on fire since the leak, according to a group that tracks the incidents. In the latest assaults, a facility in Buffalo was firebombed on June 7. A center in Gresham, Ore., was hit with an "incendiary device" over the weekend. 

I find it ironic that she'd talk about "prey[ing] on women of color," as if she's some kind of champion of female people who happen to be of the same race she is, given these facts:

Abortion in America has contributed to the greatest decline in black population since the first black slaves arrived in the Americas in the 1600s. According to U.S. census data, there were 18,871,831 black American citizens in 1960. Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, abortion has killed an estimated 20 million black babies — more than the entire black population of 1960.

And this Jane's Revenge outfit is one cold organization:

Like other pregnancy care centers, our facility assists under-resourced pregnant women and families. Our clients are already struggling to make ends meet. Unlike the nearby Planned Parenthood, our center offers real choice. While Planned Parenthood offers exactly one solution for parents in this situation – abortion, and cash up front, please! – our center offers material necessities, parental education, assistance in accessing obstetric care, ultrasounds, and adoption referrals for those who don’t feel they are prepared to parent. All free, of course. And the mothers who nevertheless choose to have an abortion are always welcomed back with open arms for post-abortion grief counseling when and if they need it.

These are the works of mercy that have sparked the ire of hate groups like the one that claimed responsibility for the recent arson at a Wisconsin pregnancy care center.  The vandals scrawl a variant of the same phrase at each site: “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.” The group’s name – Jane’s Revenge – was painted across our facility’s wall. Their communique, as issued via journalist Robert Evans, reads, in part: “We have run thin on patience and mercy…we [shall] adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies.” These are the kinds of words used by ideologues and extremists who are, indeed, ready to use violence to cleanse the world of the people who disagree with them.

It's about time to revisit a basic fact. You can choose to call a zygote, embryo or fetus a clump of cells, or an unviable tissue mass. Hell, you can call it a 3/16-inch Allen wrench. (There's probably a grown adult out there somewhere identifying as such.) But the fact is, that what ever you call it (actually, him or her), you were one once.  

Abortion is a means of exterminating our species. It's ultimately suicidal.