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http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
The words “Know thyself” were, according to legend, engraved above the forecourt in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on Mount Parnassus in central Greece. A search for self-knowledge is common, and its importance has been lauded by many, from Benjamin Franklin to Lao Tzu to Pythagoras. To fatalist Greeks the saying meant that one should accept the role nature assigned one. But for those of us today who believe we are also nurtured by our environment. self-examination should be an ongoing process.
There are those who dismiss the concept, because we change. Andre Gide wrote in Autumn Leaves: “A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.” But a search for self-understanding is not seeking perfection in the here and now; it seeks to understand; it recognizes that change is given: We have new experiences; we meet different people, and we read. Life does not stand still and neither do we. What if Gide’s caterpillar wanted to become a butterfly? Some conflate self-knowledge with hubris – that in claiming to know ourselves we admit to knowing what we do not know. That, to borrow one of Joe Biden’s favorite expressions, is malarkey. It’s an argument used by woke philosophy professors to confuse young, impressionable minds. It is impossible to know what we do not know.
Self-understanding is important in an ever-changing world. In a recent interview in The Wall Street Journal, American tennis player Danielle Collins spoke “of how to use your strengths and how to work around your weaknesses” to win matches. She understands that her weaknesses will improve with practice, and that her strengths can be harbored and utilized. It was Heraclitus (c.535BC-c.475BC) who is credited with the saying: “Change is the only constant in life.” Knowing oneself is acknowledging that truth.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/05/former-feds-give-justice-department-a-bad-name/
Andrew Weissmann is one weird dude, to say the least.
Weissmann, an author, law professor, and MSNBC legal analyst, is a prolific user of social media—but rather than post a head shot on his Twitter bio page, Weissmann has a photo of a dog staring down a doll resembling Donald Trump lying face-up on the floor. It’s unclear if the dog is supposed to represent Weissmann, described as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “pit bull” during the Russia election collusion investigation, or it’s just another indication of Weissmann’s insatiable obsession with the 45th president of the United States.
Instead of posting freakish pictures of Trump, Weissmann should send Trump a thank you letter every day for the rest of his life. Without Trump, Weissman—best known for having the Supreme Court unanimously overturn his criminal prosecution of Arthur Andersen in 2005 and his failure to uncover any evidence that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 election—wouldn’t be the media’s go-to source for explaining why this time the Bad Orange Man is really going down.
He is the de facto head of a cottage industry populated by former federal prosecutors paid to give “expert” legal assessments on the Trump scandal du jour. On any given day, Weissmann and his onetime co-workers can be found on cable news shows or in the pages of the Washington Post ranting about Trump’s alleged disregard for the “rule of law” and reminding their equally-rabid followers that “no one is above the law.”
And the FBI’s pillage of Mar-a-Lago on August 8 put this cabal into overdrive. Despite the amusing shift in talking points about what federal investigators took from Trump’s residence that day—hysteria over secret nuclear codes quickly morphed into hysteria over empty folders after a list of seized “evidence” revealed 99 percent of the contraband included personal items such as news clippings and books—the former feds are convinced the trove is proof of Trump’s guilt.
Weissmann recently asked a Democratic congressman why the House Intelligence Committee isn’t investigating Trump on this matter, too. “There’s been no explanation from Donald Trump whatsoever as to why he took these, why he didn’t return them, why are the folders now empty,” Weissmann said to Representative Peter Welch (D-Vt.) on MSNBC last week. “So one question I have is whether some part of Congress . . . shouldn’t be asking the private citizen who was a public servant to come and testify to explain what happened. He is a citizen, all of us would have to respond to a congressional subpoena.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/judge-orders-special-master-review-materials-joseph-klein/
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon granted former President Donald Trump’s request for a special master to be appointed to review materials that the FBI seized during its raid of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence several weeks ago. The special master would not be affiliated with the government and thus would presumably provide an objective third-party assessment of potential attorney-client and executive privilege claims by the former president. The Department of Justice was directed to halt any further use of the materials seized from Mar-a-Lago for investigative purposes “pending completion of the special master’s review or further Court order.” However, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence could continue conducting its own separate classification review and intelligence assessments.
In issuing this order, Judge Cannon upheld the fundamental constitutional principle of due process while balancing national security concerns. While recognizing that “restraints on criminal prosecutions are disfavored,” she concluded nevertheless “that these unprecedented circumstances call for a brief pause to allow for neutral, third-party review to ensure a just process with adequate safeguards.”
Judge Cannon added: “To appoint a special master to make privilege determinations while simultaneously allowing the Government, in the interim, to continue using potentially privileged material for investigative purposes would be to ignore the pressing concerns and hope for the best.”
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/06/with-biden-loan-bailout-federal-college-aid-could-top-270-billion-a-year/
In case you haven’t heard, the price tag for President Joe Biden’s student loan bailout is likely to total $1 trillion over the next decade. This is on top of the massive amounts of money taxpayers already fork over each year to subsidize college education. It’s time to ask whether any of this is worth it.
The $1 trillion figure comes from a study by the Wharton School of the student loan forgiveness plan Biden plans to implement. As part of the plan, he’d cancel $10,000 in student debt for millions of students, which will cost upward of $519 billion. But that’s only part of Biden’s college loan bailout plan.
The president is also extending the “emergency” pause on loan payments first enacted in March 2020 during the COVID lockdowns. It was originally supposed to last only a couple months but has been repeatedly extended. The latest plan is to keep this “temporary” suspension in place until the end of this year. That will cost $16 billion, according to Wharton.
Biden also plans to make the “income-driven repayment” program far more generous. This subsidy, started under President Bill Clinton, has been repeatedly sweetened since.
As it stands, anyone who enrolls in the IDR program can cap student loan payments at 10% of their income. Whatever’s left of the loan balance after 20 years gets wiped off the books.
Biden’s plan is to cap payments at 5% of income, nearly double the amount excluded from income calculations, and cancel any remaining debt after just 10 years. Assuming that most students will jump at this opportunity, this will cost taxpayers another $450 billion over the next decade, Wharton calculates.
Add it all up and the 10-year cost of Biden’s student loan bailout hits $1 trillion, according to Wharton.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/covid_authoritarianism_paved_the_way_for_bidens_socialist_tyranny.html
It has become commonplace to hear Dementia Joe and his communist cohorts divide the world between “democratic nations” and “authoritarian regimes.” In his recent prime-time address declaring war on MAGA Americans, Pretend President Biden extolled “democracy” thirty-one times. It seems as if the more Biden assumes the role of a dictator, the more inclined he is to proclaim himself democracy’s “savior.” This kind of Napoleon complex is hardly unusual with Marxists. Socialist regimes always arrive under the pretense of protecting the people, yet, as Lord Acton persistently warned, socialism remains “the worst enemy freedom has ever had to encounter.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said explicitly this last week that not agreeing with the majority “is an extreme way of thinking,” while simultaneously accusing Trump-supporters of representing an “extremist threat to our democracy.” Anyone who doubts that majorities can be just as vicious as brutal dictators need only survey the aftermath of a torch and pitchfork mob. Mob rule is democracy at its simplest and no friend to human liberty. It is worth noting that after the elections of both President Donald Trump in 2016 and Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019, socialists, Antifa domestic terrorists, anti-Brexiteers, and other leftists took to the streets in huge mobs, clashing with police and chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.” Protest mobs have no illusions about what democracy means.
The antipode of authoritarianism is not democracy, but rather inviolable individual rights. America’s Founding Fathers, who were at the forefront of the Enlightenment’s revolutionary advance toward the protection of human liberty, fully grasped this distinction. It is why the U.S. Constitution, as short as it is, doesn’t just say, “Whoever gets the most popular votes shall decide the law.” Power is divided between the states and the national government. The national government is further divided into three separate, coequal branches. The national government’s legitimate powers are explicitly delineated, and all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are vested with the individual states or their citizens. An Electoral College protecting each state’s respective voice elects the president and vice president. And the Bill of Rights reaffirms Americans’ natural liberties by stating clearly certain individual rights that no government may infringe — whether or not that government is expressing the wishes of the American majority. This diffuse arrangement of ultimate authority, where power is divided among the federal branches, the states, and even the people themselves, is the heart of the American system’s guarantee against authoritarianism.
https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26436/freedom-is-an-adult-enterprise
goudsmit.pundicity.com : lindagoudsmit.com
As I look back over the last few years, it is clear to me that Fauci’s COVID19 political medicine protocols, and the Biden regime’s lawlessness are both orchestrated parts of the globalist war on America. Both utilize the tactical methodology of fear-based psychological regression. Why regression? Because freedom is an adult enterprise. A nation of children and chronological adults regressed to childish psychological functioning, cannot sustain itself. It does not possess the critical thinking skills required to protect itself. Why fear-based? Because fear is arguably the most mobilizing human emotion. If you frighten people enough, you can get them to do almost anything.
I wrote about the psychodynamics of regression and fear in a philosophy book I wrote years ago, but didn’t recognize its political implications or applications at the time. Now I do. America is experiencing psychological warfare, and globalism’s attempt at silent coup d’ état. I will explain.
Please close your eyes, and imagine a big yellow school bus. Now imagine the seats filled with passengers on the bus. The question is, “Who’s driving the bus?” Would you let a toddler drive the bus? Would you let a 5 year-old drive the bus? What about an angry teenager? Or would you insist on a rational adult at the wheel? Before you open your eyes, just remember the common goal of political medicine, the Biden regime, and the globalist war on America is to have a toddler at the wheel. Psychological regression is the strategy and fear is the tool.
My philosophy book, Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus?, presents a theory of behavior and universal paradigm to help people understand why they do what they do. I wrote the book because I believe that to solve a problem, one must first understand the problem. The more we each individually understand our own motivations for behavior, the more we are each empowered to control our behavior, improve our lives, and enhance the nature and quality of life in our society.
The human growth process has a physical component and a psychological component. We all grow up physically (if we are lucky) because it takes no effort and is outside our control. Chronological age is an uncontested, biological accomplishment. Psychological growth is another matter entirely. The demands of responsible adults trying to draw us out of our state of infantile self-absorption (narcissism), rage against our regressive desire to remain children. We resist psychological growth.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/how-old-bad-ideas-become-wonderful/
There is no end of history. Instead, civilization is a constant fight to embrace what has worked for the common good through the ages—and to reject what in the past has failed abysmally.
Bad and bankrupt ideas, protocols, and ideologies—like McCarthyism, communism, various cults, or fascism—resurface not because of their intrinsic or lasting value or record of success, but because civilizations become less vigilant and allow human vanities, ignorance, arrogance, and evil to reassert themselves.
Joe McCarthy Is Back
Our Tail Gunner Joe (of semi-truck driving expertise and brilliant legal training fame) in a single week smeared roughly half the country as un-American “semi-fascists.” Then in one of the creepiest speeches and background sets in American political history, Joe Biden railed that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.” Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan in careful, sober, and exacting presidential tones; Joe Biden all but declared war against half his own people like a raving lunatic.
All that was missing from the rant was Biden waving to the crowd a purported list of names of prominent MAGA threats to our collective soul and screaming, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the MAGA Party!”
Yet Biden never quite told us what was subversive about the “MAGA Scare” or wanting to “Make America Great Again.” It was merely a sort of conservative version of George McGovern’s call to “Come home, America.” Both slogans, like Obama’s “hope and change” banality, suggest things were either better before the present or will be better afterwards.
Unable to acknowledge this, a more-than-usual angry, snarling, and nearly incoherent Biden screamed his McCarthyesque attack amid an eerie red-and-black lit background, punctuated by two U.S. Marines on guard in the shadows of the red glow. (Gen. Mark Milley was uncharacteristically silent about the use of military props for executive political agendas). The resulting lurid visual effect was a cross between an outtake from “Triumph of the Will” and a bad version of “Phantom of the Opera.”
Biden barked out all sorts of fantasy enemies of the state, as he lumped 75 million people together as a collective existential threat to the soul of America. Left unsaid but understood is what Biden and the “good” other half are supposed to do with such an existential danger posed by millions of their fellow Americans.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-speech-had-it-all-backward-fascist-democratic-party-trump-ideology-america-jan-6-democracy-11662161065?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
EXCERPT:
The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.
If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.
Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/who-are-you-calling-fascist-mr-president-david-harsanyi/
The other day, President Joe Biden accused voters of the opposition party of turning to “semi-fascism.” This is probably the first time in American history a president has openly attacked the opposing party’s constituents in this way.
Then again, Biden, who once alleged that the chaste Mitt Romney was harboring a desire to bring back chattel slavery, is prone to stupid hyperbole. And it’s true that most people who throw around the word “fascist” fail to do so with much precision. These days, the word “democracy,” like “fascism,” has lost all meaning. According to Democrats, asking someone to show ID before voting is an attack on “democracy,” but so is the Supreme Court’s handing back power to voters on the abortion issue. When you have no limiting principles of governance, anything that inhibits your exertion of power is seen as anti-“democracy.” If students have loans to be paid, “forgive” them. If you can’t pass a bill, the executive branch should do it by fiat. If the court stops it, pack it. Power is only to be limited when the opposition holds it.
A microcosm of this confused thinking can be found in the recent spate of hysterical media pieces about alleged Republican “book banning.” The use of “ban” by the media is more than a category error; it’s an effort to paint parents who use the very same exact democratic powers the left has relied on for decades as book burners. Public school curricula and book selection are political questions decided by school and library boards. Neither have a duty to carry every single volume on racial identitarianism or sexually explicit material simply demanded by some busybody at the American Library Association.
