Jeffrey Lord, one of the most reliably drool-besotted leg-humpers in the cult of the Very Stable Genius, thought he had himself a real gotcha situation on his hands in his piece yesterday for The American Spectator. Yes, indeed, he was full of ha-ha and ho-ho and hee-hee as he thought he had what it took to debunk the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
Both papers had recently published editorials saying that enough was now known about Trump's behavior on January 6, 2021, and indeed from the preceding November 3, to disqualify him from ever being allowed to participate in the nation's political life again:
Particularly startling is the WSJ saying Trump sat watching the chaos and was “refusing to send help.” It also says:
Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help.
What?????
Amazingly not noted in either piece is what Trump did in the run-up to January 6, specifically to protect the Capitol and the crowd of protestors.
Here is the headline from ace investigative reporter John Solomon’s Just the News:
Trump Pentagon first offered National Guard to Capitol four days before Jan. 6 riots, memo shows
Official Capitol Police timeline validates Trump administration’s account, shows Democrats’ fateful rejections of offers. “Seems absolutely illogical,” one official wrote about security posture hours before riot began.
Solomon reports this:
The Pentagon first raised the possibility of sending National Guard troops to the U.S. Capitol four days before the Jan. 6 riots,setting in motion a series of rejections by Capitol Police and Democrats that left Congress vulnerable as threats of violence were rising, according to government memos that validate Trump administration officials’ long-held claims.
Over at Townhall, columnist Deroy Murdock asks this:
Likewise, if Donald J. Trump (DJT) wanted his supporters to storm Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, and disrupt that day’s congressional certification of Electoral College votes, would he — two days earlier (sic) — have approved 10,000 to 20,000 Washington, D.C. National Guard (DCNG) soldiers to stymie his own seditious plans?
You read that right. Before January 6 — four days before according to the official Capitol Policetimeline — the president authorized the use of 10,000 to 20,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol and did so in front of Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, Miller’s chief of staff Kash Patel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. All of this is confirmed by Fox’s Sean Hannity. Yet the Post said:
What matters more — and has become crystal clear in recent days — is that Trump didn’t lift a finger to stop the violence that followed.
Say what? Say again, anticipating a problem four days before January 6 according to the Capitol Police timeline proves exactly that Trump authorized the deployment of 10,000 to 20,000 National Guard troops quite specifically in case there was violence. There it is in black and white. It is, to borrow from the Post, “crystal clear” that Trump authorized thousands of troops to stop any violence.
Former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller told the House select committee investigating the Capitol Hill insurrection that former President Donald Trump never gave him a formal order to have 10,000 troops ready to be deployed to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to new video of Miller’s deposition released by the committee.
“I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Miller said in the video.
Miller later said in the video definitively, “There was no direct, there was no order from the President.”
“We obviously had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning,” Miller added. “There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature.”
Trump has previously said that he requested National Guard troops be ready for January 6. He released a statement on June 9 that he “suggested & offered” up to 20,000 National Guard troops be deployed to Washington, DC, ahead of January 6 claiming it was because he felt “that the crowd was going to be very large.”
The committee released Miller’s testimony after already revealing that Trump did not make calls to military personnel or law enforcement to intervene as the Capitol attack was unfolding. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee that he never received a call from Trump as the attack as unfolding.
Milley testified to the committee that he spoke to former Vice President Mike Pence “two or three” times on January 6. Keith Kellogg, former national security adviser to Pence, also told the committee that Trump never asked for a law enforcement response.
It's astounding to me, but at this late date there are still those who want to put lipstick on this pig.
Millions of our fellow citizen to whom, if you posed the question, "If Trump is the GOP nominee in 2024, will you vote for him?" would answer, "Oh, hell, yes, in a heartbeat."
The president apparently hopes to take advantage of the ongoing record-setting European heat wave and string of wildfires, and an ongoing heat wave in the U.S. Midwest.
While it certainly is very hot in Europe and the Midwest, it is relatively cool elsewhere. The unfortunate reality for Biden’s planned exploitation is that today’s average global temperature per the University of Maine is a mere 0.2C warmer than the average from 1979-2000. It’s called “global warming,” and yet there’s really not much of that occurring.
We also know that heat waves are not associated with carbon dioxide emissions. The frequency and intensity of heat waves has dramatically declined in the U.S. over the past 100 years despite ever-rising emissions, per the National Climate Assessment conducted by the Obama-Biden administration.
It's important that I don'r frame this in some kind of boneheaded hot-take way.
A quick conclusion would be easy to draw, and it wouldn't be entirely off the mark.
But let's be thorough about this. If our ultimate goal is a society with more heart, a culture that's not myopic, we need to consider every aspect of this.
I'm speaking of the role of guns in our assurance - as individuals, as families, as communities - that there is sufficient public order for us to feel basically safe.
Four recent news items:
Sunday evening, at a large shopping mall in Greenwood, Indiana, a contiguous suburb on the south side of Indianapolis, a shooter armed with a rifle and many rounds of ammunition fired into the food court, killing three and wounding several others. He was then shot by a young man who was carrying a concealed handgun, which is perfectly legal under Indiana law. The awkward element in this scenario is that the mall has a clearly stated no-weapons policy. But what was mall management supposed to say in response to what transpired? The obvious had to bee acknowledged:
A spokesperson with the mall issued a statement Monday morning. In part of the statement, they said they were grateful for the “heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”
We grieve for the victims of yesterday’s horrific tragedy in Greenwood. Violence has no place in this or any other community. We are grateful for the strong response of the first responders, including the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.
In Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter got an earful from a woman who, along with her kids, had come under fire from a shooter who was taken down by police snipers:
Did police abuse their power? Black Lives Matter organizers think so and organized a demonstration outside of the apartment building yesterday. They got a counter-demonstration in response — from the woman whose children came under Sundberg’s fire:
What started as a rally for a man shot and killed by Minneapolis Police quickly took a turn after the mother of two nearly hit by bullets while inside her apartment showed up to share her story on Saturday afternoon.
Arabella Yarbrough was cooking food for her children Wednesday night when she says Tekle Sundberg fired bullets into their home, nearly hitting them. Police responded and helped Yarbrough escape when according to police, Sundberg also fired at officers. That led to a six-hour standoff outside the building that lasted until MPD snipers killed the 20-year-old early the next morning.
“I literally had five minutes to live while he had six hours to choose life or death. The police stated they did not want to kill him,” Yarbrough told Fox 9.
She confronted activists at a protest for Sundberg and against police violence on Saturday. A Fox 9 news crew was at the scene.
Yarborough took offense at the protest, andmade sure everyone knew it. “This is not a George Floyd situation” she declared, telling protesters to go home. “This is not OK!”
Good question. Does BLM routinely protest intracommunity violence, or only law enforcement-related violence? I think we know the answer to that — and Yarbrough certainly knows it herself. That was an entirely rhetorical question.
And we know this by some of the responses Yarborough got that are clearly heard in this videos. Instead of acknowledging that Sundberg was a real and active threat to her and the other residents in the building, they scoffed at her protest. “You’re alive!” shouted one, while another shouted, “Shut up!” Yet another one scolded Yarbrough that “this is not the time or the place,” which is rather ironic considering the circumstances.
That last response - "this is not the time of place" - is particularly rich.
Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to mass shooting that left 21 people dead at a Uvalde elementary school but "systemic failures" created a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed, according to a report from investigators released Sunday.
The nearly 80-page report, obtained by multiple media outlets, was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom .
The report — the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre at at Robb Elementary School — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives and released to family members Sunday.
According to the Texas Tribune, which reviewed the report ahead of its scheduled release to the public later in the day, the overwhelming majority of responders at the school were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials, according to the Tribune.
Does the glaring point that a massive failure to establish security need to be elaborated on? It's screamingly obvious, is it not?
The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.
The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.
The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops— in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.
And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.
The slowdown amounts to a pullback by police officers as the city has experienced its most violent years in decades, a rise also seen in other major U.S. cities during the coronavirus pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
Rank-and-file police who patrol the streets and even top brass say officers are doing less.
Even just the suggestion that this was the case was once controversial. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel caused a minor scandal in 2014 when he told a gathering of big city police chiefs and Justice Department officials that cops had “gone fetal” in response to growing public scrutiny.
John Catanzara, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, even says officers aren’t as active as they once were.
Contributing factors include:
The pandemic.
Dramatic shifts in strategy from the top.
Increased scrutiny of the police.
Cops saying they increasingly feel that making an arrest isn’t worth risking their lives, their jobs or becoming a viral news villain.
There also was a plunge in the number of arrests are for so-called index crimes, which include homicide, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated battery.
Officers made arrests in fewer than 6% of those crime categories that were reported last year, the lowest level since at least 2001, the Sun-Times analysis of Chicago police data found. The trend has continued this year, according to figures through early June.
For the early years covered by the data, arrest rates are higher for killings, shootings and sexual assaults because detectives have had more time to solve those cases.
Still, arrests typically are made in the month or year that a crime was committed, law enforcement officials say. The data analyzed by the Sun-Times doesn’t show when an arrest took place — whether it was in the year a crime was committed or later on.
Cops admit pulling back
In 2019, as the overall arrest rate continued to fall,City Hall agreed to a federal consent decreeaimed at overhauling the police department following the killing by a police officer of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 on the Southwest Side.
The department has since made reforms aimed at changing how officers do their jobs, including a stricter vehicle pursuit policy and a new foot pursuit policy.
Also, cops have been told to stop enforcing some low-level offenses, including the possession of small amounts of marijuana, which was legalized in Illinois as of the start of 2020.
But the number of arrests for possessing harder drugs, like heroin, also has fallen significantly. Those arrests peaked at 7,753 in 2001 but dropped last year to 929.
Current and former police officers — who agreed to speak on the condition they not be identified — say cops have been pulling back for other reasons.
A former commander says officers who regularly have had days off canceled are avoiding making some arrests because they don’t want to wind up in court during their time off.
A beat cop who patrols downtown says prosecutors’ high threshold for approving felony charges has made officers second-guess whether to engage “criminals with guns” — a sentiment the former commander echoes.
The beat cop says high-profile attacks on officers such as last August’s shooting in West Englewood that left Ella French dead and her partner Carlos Yanez critically wounded — “make us take a step back and think: Who really cares about us at that point?
“We can only support each other at the lowest ranks,” the officer says. “And if that means going out there and not doing anything, then that means going out there and not doing anything.”
Rank-and-file officers, sergeants and detectives also say they feel they have a target on their backs. They point to the consent decree, which requires the city to reform its policing policies after the Justice Department found officers engaged in civil rights violations.
Veteran cops say they used to go out of their way to make arrests when they saw suspicious activity but that they’re less likely to now for fear of getting into trouble and being fired or even arrested.
“In the past, I might see a guy with a gun in his waistband, and I’d jump out and chase him,” one decorated officer says. “No way I’d do that now.”
As I said at the outset, the obvious conclusion is that if we had more Elisjsha Dickens (the civilian at the Greenwood mall who took down the shooter there), we'd be safer, given the reality of the demoralized scaredy-cats we pay to protect us failing to do so.
But is that really a tidy package in which we can wrap this all up and move on to other topics?
I suggest that we need to look at the acceleration of the whole cycle of phenomenon-and-backlash that characterizes pretty much everything in our society anymore.
It's certainly been the case regarding gun rights, the defense of which in some quarters has turned into an ostentatious fetish.
And there's also the sociological reality that pretty much every case of either mass shootings in public spaces or gang warfare, with its all-too-frequent collateral casualties, has as a common element the rootlessness - often meaning fatherlessness - in which those inflicting death and injury have come of age.
A lot of people are dismissive of a causal connection between the products of popular culture - video games, music, movies - and the formation of rootless young men's characters and worldviews. Come on. Is it really possible that output so raw, so vulgar, so devoid of anything that seventy years ago was recognized as art, has no effect on those who steadily consume it?
To tie all this together, a lot of young males in our society have not signed onto that. Of course, neither have they become men, if we're going define that as a male person who understands what responsible stewardship of this powerful face that is his masculinity entails. We used to call those who did understand it gentlemen.
Rather, these young males, in their starvation for basic appreciation, decide that they're gonna go out and gets guns and make a statement, by God. The the-world-won't-soon-forget-me mindset does not motivate them to contributions to society's betterment, but rather desperado last stands that serve as nothing but testaments to their nihilism.
She's one of those - like Ronald Reagan - who shifted from left to right as she considered which side of the spectrum best aligned with her core values:
Truss, who grew up in Leeds, northern England, worked for 10 years in the energy and telecommunications sectors before entering politics.
She is married to an accountant and has two daughters.
Her political journey began at the prestigious University of Oxford, where she graduated in politics, philosophy and economics.
But at Oxford, she was an active member of the Liberal Democrat party.
By her own admission, her switch to the Conservatives shocked her left-wing maths professor father and nuclear disarmament campaigner mother, whom she accompanied to demonstrations as a child.
"One of his colleagues sent an email when he found out saying: 'I see your daughter's become a T***' (Tory)," Truss told The Guardian of her father.
Truss, though, saw the Tories as a better fit for her minimalist state beliefs and quickly became earmarked for success within the party.
Two quotes from her are really helping make the sale for me:
". . .liberating people to start and grow businesses without burdensome red tape is the key to our economic future".
And
"Whether it's 'affirmative action', forced training on 'unconscious bias' or lectures on 'lived experience', the Left are in thrall to ideas that undermine equality at every turn."
Strongly supports Ukraine.
I haven't seen a lot on the other contenders, but I like what I see here.
I'm heading out later this morning to be part of a jail-ministry team for the weekend, so I'm putting together your reading recommendations nice and early. Have a safe, fun and edifying couple of days.
I was twenty-one when I learned this lesson, a senior in college and hopelessly undecided about my future. My worried dithering with regards to this fact often fell upon the ears of a long-suffering political science professor. One fall afternoon, I sat in his office, perched on the edge of the well-worn chair across from his desk, one foot tapping, expressing for the hundredth time that semester my anxiety about the future. My professor often just listened, knowing as only teachers and parents do that young people sometimes just need to be heard. “I don’t know what I want to be,” I sighed. “I just want to be happy!”
My professor tilted his head and squinted at me in a familiar way that told me I’d gotten something wrong. He was silent for a moment, measuring his words in his mind. I had known this professor long enough to value his careful consideration. His next words would mean something. I waited. He leaned forward and said plainly, “you can be so many better things than happy.”
You can be so many better things than happy, he said. I remember feeling confused and disappointed. It was unfathomable to me what he could have meant by that, and moreover, to the extent that I could understand him at all, I thought he must be wrong. I had grown up in an age of self-help, in which happiness was considered the ultimate good. Happiness was the end that could justify any means. It was a viable reason to quit your job, move cross country, leave your marriage. It meant eating, praying, and loving. It meant safety from doubt and regret.
Alternatively, an unhappy life could be no life at all. And so, I wanted to be happy. How or why, or at what cost, I could not say. But it was surely the best and most important thing I could imagine being. Everything else, I presumed, must be secondary. But my professor was a worldly, faithful, intelligent, and very dear friend. I could not ignore his words, even if accepting them would mean challenging the organizational principle with which I had been attempting to build my future. It was the first time anyone had ever given me reason to reconsider the central role that the pursuit of happiness had held in my heart. That day, my professor set in motion a shift in my perception of the world, one that I could not understand at that instant, but I would come to know in time.
About a year after my professor told me I could be better things than happy, I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As I did, I could not help but remember his words. Aristotle writes of happiness as eudaimonia, but “happiness” is a poor substitute for the richness described by this term. Eudaimonia refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection; perfect happiness.
But what do I mean by “fun”? I’m not quite sure. I don’t mean “pleasure” in the old sense, which usually is associated with eroticism or sensuality, and I don’t mean “play,” which tends to refer to structured games. But fun, as such, is not competitive. No one wins at it. Nor is fun the ‘leisure” of the ancients, which one is supposed to spend in contemplation or civic engagement or other worthy pursuits. I mean something bouncier, simpler, more mundane, a feeling of antic stimulation, the opposite of seriousness. Often there is risk involved in fun. Manageable, perhaps simulated risk. You round a tight curve in a sports car that can handle it. You careen down a snowy hill in a red saucer sled. Sometimes you take a tumble or scrape a knee. Sometimes you scream—a laughing sort of scream.
Finally, there's my latest at Ordinary Times, "Five Quintessentially American Recordings for Cranking Up on Independence Day." It was obviously written specifically for the recently-transpired holiday, but they're worth considering in the context of their quintessential American-ness. Plus, they're all great party tunes, and summer's here and the time is right. It won't be too much of a spoiler to name them here, since the point of each, if I do say so myself, is my commentary on them. I also provide the links, so you can listen right away. They are "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, "Hey Good Lookin'' by Hank Williams, "One O'Clock Jump" by the Count Basie Orchestra, "Mystery Train" boy Elvis Presley, and "Dancing in the Street" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.
“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.
Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration. Warren does not seem to have considered who might do this job in a future Republican administration.
This advances two of the dearest aspects of the progressive vision.
Obviously, it puts on full display the Left's dark, nihilistic vision of the value of human life. To have women considering options other than ending their children's lives is anathema to those who harbor rage against the universe's inherent and divinely designed architecture.
But it also furthers progressives' belief that an administrative state - that is, an executive branch of the federal government bloated with bureaucratic "experts" supplanting law with regulation - is necessary for effective governance in modern times.
The murkiness surrounding the tern "misleading" in this case is of a piece with the problematic nature of the use of the term "reasonable" as applied to gasoline prices by the likes of Joe Biden and others who speak of "price gouging."
It also gets at the heart of what the Supreme Court struck down in West Virginia v EPA: an executive-branch agency telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs without being authorized to do so by Congress.
That this gets an airing as a reasonable public-policy position is just the latest example of how shattered, bitter and in need of prayer this society is.
What happened? In their trilateral June 28 memorandum—which NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and the Biden administration had no small part in bringing about—the three countries agree that “as prospective NATO Allies, Finland and Sweden extend their full support to Turkiye against threats to its national security. To that effect, Finland and Sweden will not provide support to YPG/PYD [Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units and the associated Democratic Union Party], and the organisation described as FETO in Turkiye.” It went on: “Finland and Sweden unambiguously condemn all terrorist organisations perpetrating attacks against Turkiye, and express their deepest solidarity with Turkiye and the families of the victims.”
There was one particular Swedish legislator who was driving a lot of the support for the Kurdish groups:
This was a victory for Turkey. Last November, Sweden’s governing Social Democrats had promised to deepen their cooperation with PYD, a left-wing Syrian Kurdish party that is also an affiliate of Turkey’s PKK. Why would the Social Democrats promise to deepen their cooperation with this unlikely partner? Because they were trying to find a parliamentary majority for their minority government, and to reach the already-precarious position of a one-vote parliamentary majority, they had to assuage Amineh Kakabaveh, a member of parliament who had been sacked from the Left Party and was sitting as an independent. And Kakabaveh, a former Peshmerga fighter, made maximum use of the leverage by demanding support for Kurdish causes. In fact, she seemed to take delight in her sudden power.
But time was not on Kakabaveh's side:
But in late June, the Swedish parliament completed its term; it will resume after the country’s parliamentary elections in September. Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson no longer owed anything to Kakabaveh, who can’t be reelected, and could sign the memorandum with Turkey. So, of course, could Finland, which was never really a concern of Turkey’s in the first place.
The bargain finally struck certainly has a lot of benefits for Turkey:
Although the devil of every intergovernmental agreement is in the implementation, the Swedish-Finnish-Turkish memorandum was a certainly a victory for Turkey. In addition to denouncing support for the PYD, Sweden and Finland promised to lift their suspension of arms exports to Turkey and to “address Turkey's pending deportation or extradition requests of terror suspects expeditiously and thoroughly, taking into account information, evidence and intelligence provided by Turkey.”
What that means was explained by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkish media: Sweden will have to extradite 73 suspected terrorists to Turkey, he announced. Washington, meanwhile, signaled that it’s willing to sell Ankara new F-16 fighter jets and modernization kits for its existing F-16s.
Mutual security comes with costs:
. . . as a senior official in a NATO member state told me, “Sweden and Finland have learned their first lesson in collective defense”: some members of the collective may be difficult, obnoxious even, but for the benefit of enhanced security for all you have to work with them.
History provides many examples of nation-states having to hold their noses to pursue bigger-picture objectives. This is one of them. At a time of gruesome behavior and alarming rhetoric on the part of Russia, the West needs to provide the most united front it can muster.
Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, is selling the idea that the world economy must embrace stakeholder capitalism and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. Don’t worry, though, he wants you to know that stakeholder capitalism is just like capitalism because it is “driven by mutually beneficial relationships” that will help firms, customers, suppliers, and the broader community prosper. Fink suggests that stakeholder capitalism is necessary because “a company must create value for and be valued by its full range of stakeholders.”
This gets us pretty far afield from what economic freedom is all about: the reaching of an agreement between two parties - individual buyers and sellers, organizations in a vendor-OEM relationship, employee and employer - as to the value of a good or service the exchange of which they're considering. ESG and "stakeholder capitalism" bring in a bunch of other parties, claiming they have a right to a say-so in the reaching of an agreement.
Bill McKibben, the influential head of the climate pressure group 350.org, explains why the left has so promoted the ESG movement — which judges corporations’ performance based on environmental, social and governance metrics — to force companies to put on the straitjacket of unworkable climate controls.
“Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left,” he writes in The New Yorker.
What McKibben is saying is that because climate extremists aren’t getting their way at the ballot box, they will embrace the ESG approach, which is modeled after a union tactic called a “corporate campaign.” Under it, unions pressure firms to follow the union line or face damage to their company’s reputation and alienation from propagandized employees. Not willing to bear the immediate costs, many companies give in. After seeing Tesla dropped from “approved” lists of ESG companies, Elon Musk sadly concluded that ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors” and is now a “scam.”
You didn't think they were going to fade away quietly, did you?
We have a three-day respite from routine and toil stretched out before us. It's going to be sweltering. You'll no doubt want to be at a pool, or a beach, or at least in an air-conditioned environment. Herewith some reading recommendations to add some enrichment to your state of leisure.
Lee Trepanier has a piece at Public Discourse entitled "An Aristotelian Defense of Ownership in the Age of the Sharing Economy." His premise is that private property - a clear understanding of what is yours and what is mine - hones our character and also better suits us for membership in a community.
Take, for example, the modern attitude toward popular culture, and what it has done to that realm:
Of course, companies like Netflix or Apple are not representatives of the political community since they are private entities. In fact, a good case could be made that the streaming service industry itself is an oligopoly. However, the ability to stream implicitly asks whether private property is necessary for one’s entertainment. Except for the hipsters who collect LPs, many consumers in this new world of streaming would say no. Socrates, I suspect, would be smiling at this, while Aristotle would recoil.
When popular culture is distributed as private property, it creates the possibility for voluntary sharing from one person to another. In Aristotle’s world of private property, when I want to share my experience of watching a television show, I must decide whether I want to give that DVD in the first place; and if so, to whom. This creates the opportunity for me to practice the virtue of generosity. By contrast, in Socrates’ world of common property, I just have to tell the person the name of the show and let him stream it. Since there is no transaction between us, there is no virtue.
As Aristotle correctly observed, the scarcity of something makes it more valuable, leading people to take care of the item and to share it, if they wish. This makes possible the virtues of moderation and generosity, and the maintenance of civil society itself.
At The Daily Beast, Bonnie Kristian invites us to take a view of what Ron DeSantis represents within the Republican Party - namely, per the title of her article, the rise of incoherent folk libertarianism.
At Religion News Service, Karen Swallow Prior deals with a subject about which I've written here at LITD: the report on sexual corruption within the Southern Baptist Conference. She says that any needle-moving response to it is going to require a hefty dose of humility:
Humility is obedience — obedience to the point of death.
Just as true humility is rare, false humility is common. False humility seeks to manipulate and control in service to self rather than others.
With declining numbers not only in the SBC but in the church in America as a whole, with more and more people deconstructing their faith and even deconverting, we who remain must cling to obedience and humble ourselves. In so doing, we get ourselves out of the way in order to fully reveal the mercy and justice of a holy God.
Advocates for student-debt forgiveness are open about their political motivation. “It is actually delusional to believe Dems can get re-elected without acting on filibuster or student debt,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in December. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said in May: “Democrats win when we deliver, and we have to deliver in ways that are impactful, tangible and transformative, like canceling student debt.” A headline on an April column in the Los Angeles Times read “Elizabeth Warren knows how Democrats can win the midterms. It starts with canceling student loan debt.” The New Republic signaled its agreement: “Biden’s Only Good Pre-Midterm Play: Cancel Student Debt.”
The debate has centered on how debt forgiveness will play politically because no other justification exists. The average student loan borrower leaves college with a debt of $28,400. What do students get for that debt? Over the course of their earning lives, those with only some college gained a lifetime earnings increase relative to someone who only completed high school that is 10 times the average debt incurred. On average a graduate with a bachelor’s degree earns 40 times as much; a graduate with a master’s earns 53 times; and a doctoral graduate earns 80 times as much as the debt. Law and medical degree holders earn almost 100 times as much. Even as the share of the population with a college degree has tripled to 30.7% from 10.5% in 1967, the value of that degree has grown. The wage premium for having a college degree has grown to 96.2% today from 55.9% in 1967.
Brian Gitt, a former advocate for play-like energy forms, details at Real Clear Energyhis growth into an understanding of what is really required for human advancement:
I went to work in construction to build energy-efficient homes, and I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses. I became executive director of an organization that championed green building policies and became CEO of a consulting firm that commercialized clean energy technologies and ran energy-efficiency programs. I then founded a software startup to help promote green home upgrades, and I led business development for a company making wireless power technology.
But by 2008, I started to see cracks in my beliefs. The Obama administration had earmarked billions of dollars in federal funding to create jobs in the energy sector, and my company won multi-year contracts valued at over $60 million. Creating jobs and making buildings more energy-efficient were worthy goals. But the project was an utter failure. It didn’t get anywhere close to achieving the goals that the government had set. But what was really shocking to me was how the government refused to admit the project had failed. All of its public communications about the project boasted about its effectiveness.
I started to realize that I had accepted as true certain claims about energy and our environment. Now I began to see those claims were false. For example:
I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
It’s now clear I was chasing utopian energy. I was using green energy myths as moral camouflage, and I was able to believe those myths as long as I remained ignorant about the real costs and benefits of different energy sources.
. . . if some American families need support — and they do — what is therightway for public leaders to engage on the issue?
The principle of subsidiarity can be of enormous help on this question. It recognizes the family as the cornerstone of society while offering a coherent vision of the duties and authorities of the government and other institutions. This includes the aid that different social bodies owe to one another as well as the limits on such support. From subsidiarity, we can derive six governing rules of thumb that will enable us to appreciate such things as what the New Deal and the Great Society got wrong, why the welfare reforms of 1996 were so valuable, why state family-focused policies that operate through non-profits are sound, and why today's proposals for child allowances and a universal basic income are misguided.
He specifies three ways in which subsidiarity can meet family needs:
Limiting the state doesn't mean that important needs must go unmet, however. Subsidiarity ensures this in three ways. First, it asserts that all entities have non-transferable duties they are obligated to carry out. Individuals, for example, are expected to behave ethically and to participate in family and public life. Such participation — which is "inherent in the dignity of the human person" — begins by "taking charge of the areas for which one assumes personal responsibility." John XXIII observed that the individual is "primarily responsible for his own upkeep and that of his family." By obliging people to work and care for themselves and their families, subsidiarity situates some social responsibilities at the individual level.
Second, subsidiarity requires individuals and other lower-order entities to resist interference by higher-order ones. As Hochschild puts it, lower-order associations have the "burden of responsibility...to keep proper functions from being taken over by higher associations." By limiting the need for state intervention, subsidiarity keeps social arrangements in balance.
Third, subsidiarity recognizes that all entities occasionally need help. But instead of directing them to turn to the state for assistance, subsidiarity obligates these entities to help one another, and explains how this web of support should operate.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, I have been praying over the scriptural mandate to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” The rejoicing here is clear: I can rejoice with everyone who has worked to overturn an unjust law that denied the sanctity of all human life. The weeping is less obvious, but clear enough: most women – and men too – who choose abortion do so in tears, out of a sense of desperation. Hardly anyone delights in abortion. Almost invariably men and women (I include men here because conception, pregnancy, abortion, and birth are not only women’s issues; the illusion that they are is a large part of the catastrophe we are in today) choose abortion in grief, confusion, or dismay. They choose it because they feel alone and ill-equipped; because they cannot imagine juggling a baby and full-time work; because their parents or partners give them an ultimatum.
This is where pro-life activists must begin the difficult work of addressing the root causes of abortion, cultural, moral, or economic. This last may be where we can have the greatest impact in the lives of others, but that will require acknowledging how intractably entangled those roots are with capitalism.
And I always like an essay that steers me to a book I'd been unacquainted with but that now goes on my must-read list. Such is the case with one she mentions in the next paragraph;
I use the word “capitalism” with trepidation, for there are few flags of brighter red than this one, few totems of greater mystic value in the West. When I say “capitalism,” I mean the undergirding ideology of a society that values humans primarily in terms of productivity and consumption. In his 2015 book The Burnout Society philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.” Within such a world, only achievement is valued. And the lower one is in the social hierarchy, the greater the marginalizing effect of “lack of achievement.”
What I mean by that jargony sentence is quite simple: it is harder for a lower-class woman to take time off for maternity leave than for a higher-class woman. The “lost achievement” is greater, and its ripple effect is wider. It is also harder for a woman who already has children and has clawed her way back into a career to step outagain for maternity leave, or even barring leave, for the inevitable mental and physical fatigue that comes with the first eighteen months of caring for a new human. Then there are the expenses of paying for childcare, or the lost earning potential while caring for one’s own children. And there are few financial benefits to having children to compensate for all this – because in an achievement society, children are a detriment.
The voices of the modern world tell us every day that we should “live for our desires,” but they really mean we should live to satisfy our desires, which means to end them or erase them through pleasure and comfort. As much pleasure and comfort as possible, as easily gained as possible. This, they think, will reduce the pain of lack and need, and therefore make us “happy.” (That is the progressive formula which Nietzsche identified as “the last man,” and which Huxley encapsulated, in Brave New World, with his apt descriptive phrase “twenty piddling little fountains.”)
When they say “happy,” they merely mean comfortable, free of the pains and struggles associated with desire and deficiency. But the painful experience of desire and deficiency is life, understood in the sense of one ascending from profound depths — the sense which has been judged antithetical, even offensive, to our age of surfaces without depths. Thus, when modern voices tell us to “live for our desires,” they are really telling us to stop living.
I refuse to stop living. I refuse to be modern in their way. I refuse to mistake satisfaction for meaning. I refuse the easy escape from the pain and need of purposeful living into the pleasure and comfort of insensitive existence. I choose to suffer with the pain and need, struggle with them, dig deep into them to find the beautiful, although it sometimes hurts — or rather because it sometimes hurts, inasmuch as some forms of pain may be the surest signs of life in an incomplete being.
I want to find the ultimately desirable, to observe it, to study all its surprising levels of being, to suffer through struggling to attain it, and (to borrow the great Platonic metaphor) to give birth to ideas and understanding through these labor pains. Thus, everything that helps me find the object I seek, or that reminds me of it, or that keeps me focused on the search, is good. Everything that merely relieves this discomfort, or helps me “forget,” is evil. That is my morality. All proper morality, in the end, is about living without the perfection we seek. The plausible differences between moral frameworks come down to whether, in that definitional phrase, one places one’s emotional emphasis on the word “without” or the word “seek.”
Anyone who would deprive me of my form of spiritual agitation, or try to weaken it, is aligned with evil, in the sense of being harmful to me. Today, the human world taken as a whole contrives and conspires to divest me of my beneficial and enriching pain, “for my own good” as they say in their more progressive moments. This makes the human world, in its current form, a particular existential threat, a nemesis, to be resisted at all costs.
