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Paul Sperry@paulsperry_
·Obama is behind those 30 executive orders. Biden is just the pen. #Jobama
https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/01/27/civic_virtues_as_moral_facts_recovering_the_other_half_of_our_founding_656930.html
This essay is part of RealClearPublicAffairs’s 1776 Series, which explains the major themes that define the American mind.
Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
Few [Americans] would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could – and did – abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the “honorable determination” of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all “values” are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human “moral sense” without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/27/biden-supreme-court-reform-463126
The Biden administration is moving forward with the creation of a bipartisan commission to study reforms to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.
The commission will be housed under the purview of the White House Counsel’s office and filled out with the behind-the-scenes help of the Biden campaign’s lawyer Bob Bauer, who will co-chair the commission. Its specific mandate is still being decided. But, in a signal that the commission is indeed moving ahead, some members have already been selected, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
Among those who will be on the commission are Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Department of Justice, who will join Bauer as co-chair. Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former assistant attorney general in the Bush Department of Justice, will also serve on the commission, those familiar with discussions said.
Fredrickson has hinted that she is intellectually supportive of ideas like court expansion. In 2019, she said in an interview with Eric Lesh, the executive director of the LGBT Bar Association and Foundation of Greater New York: “I often point out to people who aren’t lawyers that the Supreme Court is not defined as ‘nine person body’ in the Constitution, and it has changed size many times.”
https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/27/donald-trump-fought-for-us-now-its-our-turn/
Back in the early days of the Donald Trump phenomenon, whenever he supposedly got out of line a recurring joke about him was, “But he fights.” The pundits laughed. The poor rubes suckered by Trump were supposedly taken in by some canard that he was a fighter. But the fact is he was, he won a lot of those fights, and his voters are better off for those wins.
When the spurious allegations of long past sexual misconduct from now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh emerged, conventional wisdom said his nomination was over. Pre-Trump, that would have been exactly right. He would have been thrown under the bus in the time it took a Sandy Koufax fastball to reach the plate. It was the smart play. But instead Trump fought.
Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, as U.S. presidents have promised for, well nigh my whole life and never delivered on, was accomplished. This was supposedly going to retard the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Instead, Trump achieved the historic normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states. That happened because he fought.
Since the late 1980s we have assumed that opening trade to communist China would liberate the repressive state there. We did that even after Tiananmen Square. It didn’t work. We now have a China even more committed to repressing its people. Our workers lost out over those decades of acquiescence to China. Trump started a trade war. He fought.
The pro-transgender movement has now convinced the left there is no difference between a biological man and a biological woman. Joe Biden signed an executive order making sure that girls have to compete against boys in sports. Trump ordered the exact opposite of this, compelling the federal government to respect the scientific idea of biological sex. He fought.
Against all odds, Trump reduced American troop levels overseas, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. He protected our soldiers. He proved something that seemed almost impossible: the idea that a sitting president doesn’t have to start new wars. In less than a week, Biden is increasing troop levels overseas. Trump fought.
https://spectator.us/topic/oligarchy-america-rome-athens-jeff-bezos/
The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning.
Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties. The cult of the founding fathers and the cult of entertainment. The elites divided by violent factionalism and united by naked venality. The decay of republican virtues. The widening of the wealth gap and the rise of the populares, the members of the ruling class who rebel in the name of values already overthrown. And then, when all seems lost, Oligarchy in America the rise of the imperial oligarchy that offers to restore law and order, but installs a different law and a new order.
Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor. The Russian oligarchy is a post-communist, sub-czarist parody of democracy whose winners, the looters of the energy sector and the graduates of the spy services, first returned ‘oligarch’ to modern use in the Nineties. The European states were creating their oligarchy too in that decade, in the unaccountable imperial technocracy that is the European Union. The Nineties were not the decade of the triumph of liberal democracy. They were the decade when oligarchy, illiberal, liberal or semi-liberal, conquered the globe.
http://stupidfrogs.org/articles/lawyer_up_and_get_out.html
John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer shop owner who unwittingly came into possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, says an FBI agent initially gave a stern warning to his family when first offered a copy of the explosive evidence about Joe Biden’s son: “You better lawyer up and get out of my office.”
In a wide-ranging interview Monday with Just the News, Isaac described what concerned him most about the contents on the laptop, his extensive efforts to get authorities in law enforcement and Congress to pay attention to it and his anger at the news media, Democrats and even security officials who initially accused him of carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign or trying to make money off the discovery.
U.S. intelligence has determined the laptop contents — now in the hands of the FBI and Congress and part of a criminal tax case — were not Russian disinformation. Isaac said he never took a dime for providing the materials to the FBI, Congress and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, not even when offered reimbursement for the hard drive equipment he used to make copies.
“Well, for somebody who’s not very political, I assume what happened to me was the quintessential political hit job, to have that many people come out, without even talking to me, or having a conversation without doing a single background check,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast.
“I still feel a little bit upset about that,” he added. “I have people that I’ve known for a long time, they’re convinced that I’m a tool, or I’ve been a pawn or I got huge payout. And it’s completely decimated my business. I had to leave town.”
https://www.newsweek.com/china-winning-artificial-intelligence-race-opinion-1564169
Not only is China growing faster than any other big economy; it’s poised to take the lead in artificial intelligence applications to manufacturing, health care and transportation, leapfrogging the West in key new technologies. President Joe Biden’s chief Asia advisor Kurt Campbell says the U.S. should “balance between cooperation and competition” with China. We’re already far behind on the competition for leadership in a wide range of AI applications—an issue with urgent implications for American policy.
China is well on its way to building a planned 10 million 5G mobile base stations by 2024, wiring virtually the whole country for game-changing technologies. It has already deployed some of them in its response to COVID-19. Sensors connected to smartphones and linked to centralized databases monitor the vital signs of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens and visitors in real time. Three-dimensional facial imaging allows these systems to monitor the mobility of people and contact with others. Artificial intelligence algorithms extract information from these data to identify potential viral hotspots and guide forensic testing and preventive quarantines. China’s effective control over the virus—despite some localized outbreaks—provides further impetus to speed up the adoption of digital heath technology.
The 3D facial recognition component of China’s public health initiatives have drawn international concern. U.S. commentators focus on its implications for social control, but the technology has already been incorporated into a wide range of remote services. With 3D facial recognition, people in China can board trains, buy produce and obtain medical services without physical contact. The majority of the Chinese population is willing to accept the possibility of invasions of privacy provided the benefits are clear.
https://spectator.org/trump-impeachment-democrats/
Nancy Pelosi delivered her annual impeachment to the Senate, and the result was exactly as I had predicted in The American Spectator two full weeks ago on January 13: dead on arrival.
There are not two-thirds of the Senate to convict. There never were going to be two-thirds of the Senate to convict. Rather, it all is a sham and a fraud on the American public, who, frankly, are getting exactly what the fools who voted for this House of Representatives and Senate deserve. With people dying of COVID, vaccinations running way behind schedule, shortages in vaccine supplies, a befuddled Joe Biden now telling his voters that his plan to combat COVID basically is the same as Donald Trump’s plan, the focus in Washington is on … an impeachment that is dead on arrival.
Congressional representatives and U.S. senators are paid to do the people’s business. They are paid very well. Taxpayers also pay for the Democrat women in Congress to all buy new white dresses for the State of the Union. Taxpayers pay for their meals, their platinum health care, their air travel around the country and around the world. In return, taxpayers would expect that the people’s needs would be front and center. The current crop of American voters have no one to blame but themselves for the Congress they have — a myopic assemblage of mediocrities driven only by pure hate: hate for conservatives, hate for White people, contempt for the intelligence of Black people, hate for the only cable television station that has a modicum of conservative semblance, hate for talk radio. Just hate.
We saw this Congress’s inaction in action when Pelosi took the gavel from Paul Ryan two years ago. It became a House of cards, that is a House of low-caliber characters. A bunch of jokers in a deck that, to call a spade a spade, has few hearts, fewer diamonds, just insiders in private clubs who consume billions and trillions of tax dollars on nonsense, waste, and silliness. It all is about wasting the day every day, spending other people’s money without fear of an accounting, and making speeches and television appearances for egotistical self-aggrandizement until one day they finally are defeated at the polls and instantly are forgotten.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/dismounting-the-covid-tiger/
Riding fear of COVID-19, our oligarchs persuaded millions of Americans to join in masked pantomime, to deliver themselves to something like house arrest, and to blame Donald Trump for their troubles. But as much as the oligarchs enjoyed COVID powers and dreamt of segueing them into a “new normal,” they knew that America could not be locked down forever.
They especially knew, were they to unseat Trump and become responsible for the country, their charges that he had failed to stop the pandemic would come back to haunt them. “Why can’t you stop it?” would be the natural question they would have to face as the virus did what airborne viruses do: spread. Hence, after January 20, dismounting the COVID tiger, albeit gingerly, became the order of the day.
And so it happened, on January 22, Joe Biden spoke the truth: nothing that anyone could do can alter the trajectory of the virus’ spread.
A few grumbles notwithstanding, there was silence from very same media and “experts” who had accused Trump of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths because he had not implemented a nationwide test-trace-and-quarantine system. The futility of such measures in preventing an infectious disease from running its course once it has entered a population was as obvious in 2020 as in 2021. But then, denying it served the oligarchy’s prosecution. Affirming it now serves its defense.
Already on January 16, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his state could not wait to reopen until herd immunity had been reached naturally or through a vaccine, because “If we wait, there will be nothing left to open.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/global_warming_facts_vs_media_misrepresentation.html
With Joe Biden ramping up the greenie ideology, the history of global warming is worth another look.
All you need to know to understand that the conspiracy is false is to see that the Earth had a substantial, lengthy cooling period from 1945 to 1975.
On the first Earth Day in 1970, after 25 years of cooling, people were scared to death about dire forecasts by “experts,” without any scientific data supporting their predictions, that billions would soon freeze and die of starvation because of a new ice age. The media participated in scaring the public. The predictions were 100% wrong because a little warming resumed as it always does. .
By 1970, there had been around 100 years of exponential growth in oil and coal consumption, the population had risen by several hundred percent and CO2 content had increased substantially. Cars, trucks, planes, combines, tractors, TVs, air conditioners, furnaces and computers had been invented. Most houses now had electricity.
Yet the Earth was cooling so much that billions would die because of cooling despite all these inventions that supposedly cause warming. A child could understand that if a significant period of cooling occurred that oil and humans did not cause warming. But the cultists don’t care about facts or science when they are pushing their radical leftist agenda to destroy jobs and America.
