Sunday roundup

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

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

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

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

The tech industry is experiencing a midlife crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How's this for a stark verdict?

 Modern man is a spiritual failure.

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

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

1. Repeal Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Tax   7

2. EndBiden’sOilandGasLeasingMoratorium/
   Return Power to States   7

3. Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline   9

4. Block Biden’s ESG Regulations   9

5. Repeal the California Waiver   10

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

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

8. Automatic Approvals for LNG Export Terminals   13

9. Overturn Massachusetts v. EPA   14

10.Stop Biden’s War on Coal   15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Thursday roundup

How stupid is "Modern Monetary Theory"? This stupid. Seriously, how has anybody anywhere ever embraced the notion that governments can just spend till the cows come home, deficits be damned?

Tweet of the week, from US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, in response to South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg's remark that "it chills a lot of us, especially in the LGBT community, to see that somebody like that can be in that kind of position of power":

For those of us in the LGBT community who deal in facts, we are chilled by recklessly repeated gossip. Mike Pence is a humble Christian who loves God, and all His creation. I know him. You obviously don’t.

From the the-UN-is-a-sewer-and-we-should-get-out-of-it-yet-this-afternoon file: Iran has been named to its "Women's Rights Commission":

Aside from the fact that it’s Iran, who already has an awful history of women’s rights abuses, this is an especially disgusting day for the UN to do this. Why? Because Iran just sentenced a female human rights lawyer to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

Iran has faced international condemnation after one of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers, detained for eight months, said she had been sentenced to a total of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, according to her husband.

Security agents arrested the lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, at her home in June last year. The government offered no explanation, but at the time Ms. Sotoudeh was defending women who had been arrested after removing their hijabs, or head scarves, in public protests.

What was her grave crime? She had the audacity to support women who are exercising their God given freedom to not cover their heads. Sotoudeh is just one of many who have been thrown in jail simply for fighting for their basic rights. Protests rocked the country last year on this issue before the Iranian authorities put a stop to them with their typical brutality. Ironically, the UN managed to pass a resolution in 2018 specifically condemning the actions of Iran’s government in regards to human rights, including a individual mention of their mistreatment of women.

If the UN weren’t more concerned with appeasing dictators and trashing Israel full-time, they might have taken note of their own vote pointing out Iran’s abuses against women. Instead they elevated them to the “Women’s Rights Committee,” where Iran will now sit in direct judgement of other country’s actions toward women. If the UN hadn’t released an official press release, no one would be blamed for assuming this was all a joke.

Here are some things Iran will “judge” as a member of the committee.

Iran is guilty of all of those. Literally, every single one. Now, as a member of the committee, they will be in a position to overlook such abuses to protect themselves. It’s unconscionable.

Rider University won't allow a Chick-fil-A franchise on campus, and for no real reason:

Does Chick-fil-A not serve gay people chicken sandwiches?  No, they serve everyone.

Does Chick-fil-A not allow gay people to work for them?  No, there are certainly gay people employed at their over 2,200 locations.

Now, Chick-fil-A does have a male and female sign on their respective restrooms, but so does McDonalds, so that theory is out.

What this actually refers to is the furor from comments Dan Cathy (COO) made in a 2012 interview that identified him as a Christian who holds to God’s design for human sexuality.  And that’s it.  That’s what prompted Rider’s decision.

But there is one inspiring figure in Rider's administration. Or, at least, she used to be in Rider's administration:

The whole thing was so ridiculous that it prompted Cynthia Newman, the aforementioned dean of the school’s college of business, to tender her resignation.  She wrote in her announcement:

“I endeavor every day to do exactly what Chick-fil-A puts forward as its overarching corporate value: to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to me and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with me.”

And that’s just it.  From Cathy’s statements in 2012 to the company’s current business practices, it has been consistent: treat people with respect, serve others, love people as Jesus loved them.  And that is what Rider University pompously announced was not consistent with their own “values.” 

Newman will be fine, will land on her feet, will be provided for by the God she loves, and will end up much better off than she was before.  But what an utter embarrassment for the school and everyone who has been and willfully remains associated with it. 

It would behoove US tech firms to address China's aggressive pursuit of 5G broadband.

Richard Grenell added,

Another kind of fallout from the disappearance of our unifying civic institutions: the diminishing role of political parties

Great Jonah Goldberg piece at NRO this morning. He invites us to take a look at the effect technological and cultural developments have had on our politics at various stages of our history, including the present:

Outside groups — the National Rifle Association, Planned Parenthood, unions, etc. — often do more to effectively organize voters around single issues or personalities than the parties do. The Kochs, Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Sheldon Adelson serve as party bosses, only outside the parties.

Technology is another, less obvious force siphoning power from the parties. For instance, as political historian Michael Barone has noted, the telephone dealt a grievous blow to political conventions, where insiders have outsize power.

Until the 1960s, the national convention was a communications medium,” Barone writes. “Political leaders in the various states seldom met each other, outside of sessions of Congress, during the four years between presidential elections.”

The telephone eliminated the need for the face-to-face negotiations. Today, political conventions are little more than infomercials for presidential candidates.
The Internet and cable TV have accelerated the eclipsing of parties. Opinion websites and TV and radio hosts now do more to shape issues and select candidates than the parties do. It’s a bit like comic books. Readership of comics has been in steady decline, but movie studios and toy manufacturers still feed off the brands created generations ago.

The weird thing is that the American people didn’t seem to notice. The largest voting bloc in America today call themselves independents, but most of them tend to be as partisan as everybody else, while “pure independents” are less likely to vote at all.

And yet, Americans keep talking about partisan politics as if the parties are in charge, and base voters on the left and the right keep railing against the party establishments like mobs unaware that they’re kicking dead horses. 

Factor in the fact that we now bowl alone and we can see that we're asking way more of politics than it can deliver:

Among the many problems with the rotting out of the parties is that the rot spreads. The parties are supposed to be where politics happens. McConnell’s point about money in politics is analogous to the larger trend. When you take political power out of the parties, other actors seize it.

When wielded by people who aren’t supposed to be in the politics business, that power corrupts. This is why every Academy Awards ceremony is peppered with asinine political jeremiads, and why late-night-comedy hosts serve as de facto Democratic-party organizers.

It’s why people such as Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, act like social-gospel ward heelers. It’s why the cable-news networks spend so much of their time rallying voters in one direction or another. And it’s why countless pundits and allegedly objective reporters serve as unofficial political consultants.

It’s also why Donald Trump could leverage his celebrity to seize the GOP nomination, and why someone like Oprah Winfrey could be next.

There are other, larger forces at work. The decline of strong independent institutions — religious, civic, and familial — has people searching for other outlets to find a sense of meaning and belonging. Identity politics, populism, and nationalism are filling that void.

Unless there's a mass turning to God, it's not going to get better.

Thursday roundup

Check out Elizabeth Warren's lame attempt to spin her doubling-down on having a Native American ancestry.

David French at NRO says that mass shootings don't lend themselves to macro-level, governmental remedies:

The United States is facing a puzzling paradox. Even as gun crime has plunged precipitously from the terrible highs of the early 1990s, mass shootings have increased. Consider this: 15 of the 20 worst mass shootings in U.S. history have occurred since the Columbine school shooting in 1999. The five worst have all occurred since 2007, and three of those five were in 2016 and 2017.

It’s horrifying, and governmental solutions are hard to find. Twitter’s fondest wishes to the contrary, the unique characteristics of mass shootings mean that they often escape the reach of public policy. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler (hardly an NRA apologist) famously fact-checked Marco Rubio’s assertion that new gun laws wouldn’t have prevented any recent mass shootings and declared it true. Time and again, existing laws failed, or no proposed new gun-control law would have prevented the purchase.

Seth Lipsky at the New York Post says that one level in the Netanyahu-investigation situation that must be taken into consideration is the relentless investigation of any and every Israeli prime minister going back years:

 The recommendation of Israeli police that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be indicted for graftlooks to me like an acute case of a malady that is itself a threat to the Jewish state.

I call it the American disease. This is the itch to criminalize policy differences, an infection America came down with in the 1980s and has been suffering from, on and off, ever since.

Just ask President Trump. He is being pursued by such a gaggle of Democrats dressed up as special prosecutors that it’s a wonder he finds time to do the job the voters hired him to do.

It’s not my purpose to suggest that Israel’s attorney general, who will decide on whether to pursue the charges the police have recommended, drop the case. No one is above the law.

The issue that worries me is larger than Netanyahu.

“Nearly every recent Israeli prime minister has been under constant investigation,” one of Israel’s greatest legal sages, Eugene Kontorovich, tells me. (Yitzhak Rabin resigned his first term for keeping a foreign bank account. Ehud Barak was investigated for illegal campaign cash, Ariel Sharon was investigated but not charged. Ehud Olmert went to jail.)

While no one ought to be above the law, neither ought elected leaders be put further below it, so to speak, than other citizens. That presents its own kind of injustice.

Which may be why two newly reported polls show that most Israelis want Netanyahu to resign — but his party would still come in first were a vote held now.

John Stonestreet at The Stream  has an interesting perspective on Valentine's Day coinciding with Ash Wednesday:

Now don’t get me wrong: romantic love, what C.S. Lewis called “Eros,” is not wrong. In fact it’s a gift from God. As Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, when rightly ordered, eros causes us to toss “personal happiness aside as a triviality and [plant] the interests of another in the center of our being.”

Romantic love can be, as Lewis put it, “a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.”

And that’s the proper place of eros … not as an end in and of itself, but as a means — something that points beyond itself — and points our hearts beyond ourselves to a higher love, agape, a love that only comes from God Himself.

Lent turns our focus to that total self-giving love of God, that love that caused God to become man and live and die as one of us, for our sakes, despite our sin and rebellion.

The sexual revolution has, in so many ways, disordered eros, treating it as an end, not a means. But twisted eros is no longer selfless and life-giving. It becomes a sort of mutant sensuality, that creates the selfish and damaging brokenness our culture is being forced to reckon with this year.

Today, Ash Wednesday, reminds us that there’s more … more to life than sensual pleasures, more to love than the shriveled-up version that has captivated our Western imaginations.

So today, ask yourself, “how am I responding to so great an expression of love as what God has shown us?” Valentinus’s response was to give up his own life.

For us too, a kind of “death” is required — a death to self, a death to the desires that our culture treats as ultimate.

Now of course guys, none of this lets you off the hook with your wives. So don’t forget the flowers.

Bookworm takes on this silly notion that there's something racist about talking about an Anglo-American legal tradition:

I am sure you have heard about this.  A few days ago, CNN breathlessly highlighted in a report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a speech to the National Sheriff’s Association, said

Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process. The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.

Our neo-Marxist proggies went nuts.  Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii wrote:  “Do you know anyone who says “Anglo-American heritage” in a sentence? What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other? . . .”  Others followed suit, the most obscene being California’s current Lt. Gov. and likely its next governor, Gavin Newsom.  He wrote:  “Reminder that our Attorney General is an outright racist who wants us all to acknowledge our ‘Anglo-American’ heritage.”

Referring to our “Anglo-American” heritage in respect to government and the law is not merely common, it is the norm.  It is one of the fundamental truths of our nation.  And while truth may sometimes be uncomfortable, it can never racist.

For the Freedom-Haters to complete their agenda of a completely regulated state populated by cattle-masses and ruled by pointy-headed bureaucrats, they have to keep our youth penned up in their sewers of indoctrination, where they will assuredly remain ignorant of Constitutional principles:

  Their claims will only resonate with those people — most likely products of a K-grad school social justice education — who do not understand the basics of the Constitution or its genesis, nor any sort of world history over the past two millennia.  These are people who do not understand the importance of their rights or the protections of checks and balances to their freedom, and thus will not fight, let alone fight to the death, to protect them as they are stripped away.  Moreover, the neo-Marxist proggies, sounding their outrage in terms of moral superiority, rightly expect that the sheeple  they have so carefully nurtured in their ignorance through public education will then join  the progs to excoriate the evil, racist wingnuts with the gall to call to mention our “Anglo Saxon heritage.”  It is a gamble, though, as for everyone else, they will see the dishonesty and likely be repelled.  Or as the saying goes, “you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump.”

So let’s take a moment to look briefly at our Constitution and the Anglo-Saxon history behind it.  Let’s begin with my favorite quote from William Pitt, the United Kingdom’s first Prime Minister.  He was speaking in 1763 before Britain’s Parliament upon the Castle Doctrine — enshrined today in our Fourth Amendment.

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter,—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.

Pitt’s speech came a little over a year after James Otis Jr., an American lawyer, spent six hours in a Boston court room arguing the same point, that the English right to be free from search and seizure except for probable cause was an Anglo-Saxon tradition that predated even the Magna Carta of 1215 by centuries.  It was a right the English had fought wars over.  And in a little over a decade, they would fight another war over this and other Anglo-Saxon rights — the Rights of Englishmen — on American shores.

The fact is our entire system of government and virtually all of our governing traditions are not merely adopted from Anglo-Saxon law, they are in many cases the truest continuation of them — far more so than in modern Britain.  Our Constitution is, with but a few critical tweaks, nothing more than the laws, rights and governing systems of the United Kingdom as they existed in 1776.

Be very thankful it is so.  Britain was then unique.  Its system of individual rights and systems of governance gave critical protections to the individual — and not because of benign decisions from English monarchs, but because the individuals of England had, over the centuries, demanded those systems and rights.  At various times, they fought and died for every single one of them.  There are no rights in the Bill of Rights nor any protections guaranteed in our governing system with its exquisitely crafted system of checks and balances, that do not float on a historic lake of Anglo-Saxon blood (not to mention the disembodied head of at least one English King).

Peter Thiel is de-teching:

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is relocating his home and personal investment firms to Los Angeles from San Francisco and scaling back his involvement in the tech industry, people familiar with his thinking said, marking a rupture between Silicon Valley and its most prominent conservative.

Mr. Thiel has also discussed with people close to him the possibility of resigning from the board of Facebook Inc., FB -0.78% the people familiar with his thinking said. His relationship with the social-networking company—where he has been a director since 2005, the year after its founding—came under strain after a dispute with a fellow director over Mr. Thiel’s support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and a related confrontation over boardroom leaks with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg last summer, the people said.​

Byron York at the Washington Examiner asks why everybody but the American public has had a chance to see the Comey memos.

Then there's the impact of Big Tech on postmodern life

I've run across two pieces in the last two days that, taken together, raise some unprecedented questions.

One is a deep dive at Wired by Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein about how Mark Zuckerberg has been changed by the crucible of events swirling around Facebook. It's full of vignettes that make clear the nature of that crucible.

The first is about an employee who took screenshots of some social-activism and anti-Trump messages taht went out internally, sent them to an old friend at a tech-news site and was confronted about it by Facebook's head of investigations. (Can you imagine, say, the woodworking shop in your town, or the metal-plating shop down the block needing an "investigations" department?) Needless to say, the guy was fired.


There are interesting accounts of Rupert Murdoch hinting to Zuckerberg, at a pow-wow of media bigwigs in Sun Valley, Idaho, that an antitrust investigation might be in the offing, as well as some eye-opening examples of how false-information scammers use trending memes and other indicators of who supports what to stir up trouble.

Another one that tells us much about the political and cultural state of modern America is a meeting Facebook arranged with an array of right-of-center thought leaders. Ostensibly - and, no doubt, to some extent, among the actual motivations for convening it - it was an expression of concern that a big swath of the public perceived a left-tilting bias at Facebook. But they wanted the makeup of the attendees diverse, because the plan was to get them into a spat:

Facebook decided, too, that it had to extend an olive branch to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company’s supposed perfidy. And so, just over a week after the story ran, Facebook scrambled to invite a group of 17 prominent Republicans out to Menlo Park. The list included television hosts, radio stars, think tankers, and an adviser to the Trump campaign. The point was partly to get feedback. But more than that, the company wanted to make a show of apologizing for its sins, lifting up the back of its shirt, and asking for the lash.

According to a Facebook employee involved in planning the meeting, part of the goal was to bring in a group of conservatives who were certain to fight with one another. They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would. Another goal, according to the employee, was to make sure the attendees were “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Zuckerberg and Sandberg had addressed the group.

The power went out, and the room got uncomfortably hot. But otherwise the meeting went according to plan. The guests did indeed fight, and they failed to unify in a way that was either threatening or coherent. Some wanted the company to set hiring quotas for conservative employees; others thought that idea was nuts. As often happens when outsiders meet with Facebook, people used the time to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.

Afterward, Glenn Beck, one of the invitees, wrote an essay about the meeting, praising Zuckerberg. “I asked him if Facebook, now or in the future, would be an open platform for the sharing of all ideas or a curator of content,” Beck wrote. “Without hesitation, with clarity and boldness, Mark said there is only one Facebook and one path forward: ‘We are an open platform.’” 

As I say, it's lengthy, and there's much more of importance in it, but the last two paragraphs sum up its gist succinctly:

 . . . people who know him say that Zuckerberg has truly been altered in the crucible of the past several months. He has thought deeply; he has reckoned with what happened; and he truly cares that his company fix the problems swirling around it. And he’s also worried. “This whole year has massively changed his personal techno-­optimism,” says an executive at the company. “It has made him much more paranoid about the ways that people could abuse the thing that he built.”

The past year has also altered Facebook’s fundamental understanding about whether it’s a publisher or a platform. The company has always answered that question defiantly—platform, platform, platform—for regulatory, financial, and maybe even emotional reasons. But now, gradually, Facebook has evolved. Of course it’s a platform, and always will be. But the company also realizes now that it bears some of the responsibilities that a publisher does: for the care of its readers, and for the care of the truth. You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart. So what is it: publisher or platform? Facebook seems to have finally recognized that it is quite clearly both.

Then there's Michael Walsh's latest at PJ Media, entitled "Time To Break Up the Big Four." It starts thusly:

Back in July, in this space, I warned about the dangers of the emerging tech monopolies, principally the weaponizing of Amazon via its ownership of the Washington Post.

In the background, but very much part of the conversation, is Amazon's engorgement on the  The Washington Post company, a once-honored (Watergate!) news organization that Amazon boss Jeff Bezos essentially bought for parts -- the main part being the still-influential newspaper in the Imperial City of Washington, D.C. This isn't so much of a financial investment as a form of protection money -- although  Bezos had the chutzpah recently to whine about the deleterious effect of Google and Facebook on print's advertising base, and to make a pitch to the U.S. government for anti-trust protection.

Needless to say, a lot of readers begged to differ, citing the big, big savings and ease of shopping Amazon provides. At the same time, however, Amazon is keeping tabs on you, monitoring your purchases, pushing other products on you and, in the form of the hideous Alexa, listening in on you while you sleep. Throw in the electronic snooping of Facebook, Google and your iPhone, and we're heading for an Orwellian nightmare  . . . 

Walsh minces no words in depicting what he sees as sociocultural havoc being wreaked on an unprecedented scale:

Big Tech has effectively ripped the heart out of the journalism, publishing, music, and entertainment industries but, even worse, it's demolished the ranks of both corporate middle-management and entry-level service jobs, and crushed commercial real estate and retail shopping malls, all for the enrichment of a very few. It's even eliminating  supermarket checkout cashiers. So don't give me the "creative destruction" argument here --do we really want to turn into a Latin American country of caudillos and peasantry? A nation ruled by geeks and government bureaucrats (the only middle-management careers left, apparently)? And you wonder why you have to work three jobs to be able to afford that Prime membership and the latest $800 iPhone.

His argument is that a time has arrived, much as it did at a certain point in the railroad industry's evolution, or when the public realized that Ma Bell was an unchallenged monopoly, to get government involved precisely for the sake of the free market.

There is a host of issues here - who controls the dissemination of information, personal privacy, monopolization of particular economic sectors, to name a few - but the bottom line is that what we are seeing is what happens when a burst of human ingenuity cannot possibly have as a component sufficient foresight of the consequences of acting on that ingenuity to grapple with questions that are going to arise.

This isn't about a clean divide between right and left or good and bad. It's about how society can stay on top of the impact of technological permeation of everything.

I guess left and right do enter into it to some degree. The conservative take is that any such staying on top must be done with a bias against collective action.

But who knows what we'll have to be taking action in response to right around the next corner?

Tuesday roundup

The fear that artificial intelligence is going to render human activity obsolete is mostly based on hype:

CEOs dreaming of replacing their whiny, vacation-taking, sick-day-using human employees with a sleek fleet of never-complaining robots powered by artificial intelligence are going to be disappointed to learn AI is far behind the evolution of human development.

“The public thinks we know how to do far more than we do now,” Raymond Perrault, a scientist at SRI International, told the New York Times.

Artificial intelligence may be smart enough to learn the game of chess or fliphamburgers in a fast-food restaurant. But when it comes to common sense and decision-making skills, AI is way below the bar compared to adult human beings.

The “AI Index” released by Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and other research organizations shows artificial intelligence produced in the United States is no smarter than a five-year-old. And Yann LeCun, the head of AI for Facebook, said even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems are no sharper on the uptake than vermin.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO does some exhaustive drilling down on the matter of the Steele "dossier," the conversation between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok in Andrew McCable's office, and the general inclination of the FBI and the Justice Department to pass on looking into the ample evidence of Clinton-campaign misbehavior - the kind detailed in Comey's July 2016 announcement, right before he said he'd decline to recommend indictment - even as it regarded the "dossier" as an "insurance policy" in the event - heaven forfend! - that Madame Bleachbit lose the election and DJT win it.

Iraqi Christians are understandably gleeful about returning to their towns and cities, recently liberated from ISIS, but have new safety concerns, particularly the Shiite militias that have the official backing of the government. There's already some harassment going on. The Christians did have fine Christmas celebrations throughout the country, though. Santa Claus was sighted in Mosul. At the link, check out the photo of the 30-foot Christmas tree in Baghdad.

Beautiful and glorious: Nikki Haley announces a $235 million cut to the US budget for the UN.

From the final-stages-of-higher-education's-rot file:

Terms like ‘boys and girls’ are frowned upon. Why must the left exert control over such simple aspects of life?

Campus Reform reports:

College pronoun FAQ: regularly ask for others’ pronouns

A resource guide at Bard College encourages students, faculty, staff, and visitors, to avoid using “gender binary” language.

The Pronoun FAQ, found on the school’s Office for Gender Equity resource webpage, encourages community members to “avoid using gender binary language such as ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ ‘boys and girls.’” Instead, they are urged to use “‘everybody,’ ‘folks,’ or, ‘all people.”

The guide also states that simply asking another person about gender identity once is insufficient.

“If I ask someone their pronouns once, is that enough?” the guide asks. “No, the best practice is to ask regularly because gender identity is not always fixed and static, and some people may change their pronouns.”

The top of the Pronoun FAQ states that the document is meant “to help community members educate themselves so that we can grow and evolve as a community,” and lists a few common pronouns, including gender-neutral alternatives such as “ze,” “zim,” “zir,” “zirs,” and “zirself.”

The pronoun guide also seeks to educate readers on questions such as, “What are gendered pronouns?” and “what are non-gendered or non-binary pronouns?”

In a section dedicated to “Suggestions for Faculty,” the guide concedes that “[i]n large classes, faculty may be unable to learn every student’s name and pronouns.”

We'll be mining evidence of what a national treasure Antonin Scalia was for some time to come:

Scalia had advice for young Christians—“to learn early and remember long” that [quality] of ‘differentness’; to recognize that what is perfectly lawful, and perfectly permissible, for everyone else—even our very close non-Christian friends—is not necessarily lawful and permissible for us.” Further, “that the ways of Christ and the ways of the world—even the world of Main Street America—are not the same, and we should not expect them to be.” Scalia emphasized that “it is only if one has that sense of differentness ... that one has a chance of being strong enough to obey the teachings of Christ.”

The great justice was well aware of which realm had permanence and which one was merely a passing parade:

Scalia was so bold as to touch on what are called the “two kingdoms” in theological circles. He quoted what Jesus said to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would have fought that I might not be delivered to the Jews. But, as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” This thought, said the justice, pervades the Gospels and is in the early church. He recalled the famous observation of a second century church father writing to one Diognetus:

“Though residents at home in their own countries, their behavior is more like that of transients. They take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a homeland, any homeland is a foreign country.” 

House Republicans re singing a different tune from Senator McConnell's I-foresee-us-moving-on-from-Obamacare-repeal position.