RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/13/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking/

“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought. 

Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.

Bismarck’s observation cautions reticence about certain matters; it implies that about some things it is better not to inquire too closely. What Walter Bagehot said about the British monarchy—“We must not let in daylight upon magic”—has, from this point of view, a more general application. The legend “Here be monsters” that one sees on certain antique maps applies also to certain precincts of the map of our moral universe. Enlightened man, by contrast, is above all a creature who looks into things: he wants to “get to the bottom” of controversies, to dispel mysteries, to see what makes things “tick,” to understand the mechanics of everything from law to sausages, from love to society. Who has the better advice, Bismarck or Kant?

Of course, it is not a simple choice. For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative “Dare to Know!” was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this . . . what to call it? (This admission? Boast? Concession?) Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s “critical philosophy” is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the “critical attitude” as in the “Copernican revolution” he sought to bring about in philosophy.

Today, we can hardly go to the toilet without being urged to cultivate “critical thinking.” Which does not mean, I hasten to add, that we are a society of Kantians. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with here is an educational watchword, not to say a cliché, that has roots in some of the Enlightenment values that Kant espoused. It’s a voracious, quick-growing hybrid. A Google search for the phrase “critical thinking” brings up 102 million results in 0.62 seconds. One of the first matches, God help us, is to something called “The Critical Thinking Community,” whose goal is “to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking.” (Why is it, I wonder, that the conjunction of the phrase “critical thinking” with the word “community” is so reliably productive of nausea?)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/13/appeals-court-reaffirms-its-decision-to-stay-vaccine-mandate-n1532531

Saying that Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans reaffirmed its original decision made on Nov. 6 to block OSHA from taking any steps to enforce the mandate.

The three-judge panel will probably not have the last word on the mandate. A judicial lottery will be held next week to determine in what circuit the several challenges to the mandate will be heard. The New Orleans-based circuit court that ruled last night is one of the most conservative in the nation.

The judges didn’t mince any words in stating how they felt about the mandate.

Washington Post:

“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” they wrote.

They said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.

“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road,” they wrote.

It’s important to note that the legal landscape is now decidedly tilted against the mandate. The administration is now going to have to prove that there is a “grave danger” to workers and that the danger is “immediate.” That’s a difficult standard to meet.

https://freebeacon.com/policy/swiss-billionaire-bankrolling-dark-money-group-pushing-for-biden-climate-initiative/

A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House’s climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn’t actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss’s foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.

Wyss has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Fund for a Better Future and other progressive dark money groups and has been the subject of controversy since his opaque web of donations was detailed by the New York Times last spring. The connection between the Wyss-funded Fund for a Better Future and Climate Power has not been reported until now.

The link raises questions about foreign influence on the climate debate and the prominence of dark money groups in the Biden administration’s public advocacy campaign for the Build Back Better legislation. While foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns, lawmakers and watchdogs have raised concerns about foreign donations to nonprofit political advocacy organizations—so-called dark money groups—which could be used as a legal loophole to influence elections.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/11/us-inflation-more-horrible-than-washington-admits/

The US Consumer Inflation Report for October was horrible, showing a 12% annualized rate of price change. But it’s even worse than it looks. The shelter component of the index lags the more reliable private gauges of rent inflation. That means worse is to come.

Three US companies publish national rent indexes – CoreLogic, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com – and their readings of year-on-year rent inflation range from 9% to 16%. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a year-on-year rise in the rents of just 3.4%. Shelter represents a third of household expenditures according to the Consumer Price Index.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the private indices and the government measure of rent inflation moved in lockstep, albeit with lags in the latter reflecting the fact that not everyone’s lease expired at the same time. Given past lags, the rent increases should have shown up in CPI by now. So I really can’t explain the discrepancy.

Led by used vehicle prices, durable goods prices rose 12% over the twelve months through October, according to the official data. That can be blamed on the chip shortage, which constrained auto production and left consumers and car dealers in bidding wars for everything on four wheels. But the price of nondurable goods also jumped 10% over the past year. That’s simple demand-pull inflation: the combination of a $6 trillion giveaway to US consumers and enhanced jobless benefits that kept 2 million Americans out of the workforce left too much money to chase too few goods.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/ships-keep-coming-pushing-u-s-port-logjam-and-waits-to-records

The logjam of container ships outside the California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach swelled to another record as stepped-up efforts to clear cargo off the docks failed to prevent the average wait for vessels from reaching nearly 17 days. The queue, both at anchor and in a holding zone, rose to 83 ships as of late Friday, four more than Wednesday and topping the previous high of 81 set earlier in the week, according to officials who monitor marine traffic in San Pedro Bay. The average wait increased to 16.9 days, double the level from two months ago, according to L.A.’s Wabtec Port Optimizer.

Strained supply chains have become an economic drag on the world’s largest economy and a political risk for President Joe Biden as the disruptions put upward pressure on inflation while highlighting shortages of workers, including truck drivers and warehouse staff. Consumer sentiment is deteriorating amid a spike in the cost of living.

“Every sector of the supply chain has reached capacity,” Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero said in a statement this week announcing that its terminals had their second-busiest October on record.
“We are trying to add capacity by searching for vacant land to store containers, expanding the hours of operation at terminals, and implementing a fee that will incentivize ocean carriers to pull their containers out of the port as soon as possible.”

The White House earlier this week touted incremental progress at L.A.-Long Beach– a 20% decline in the number of containers sitting for more than nine days days in the week to Nov. 8. The adjoining gateways for 40% of the nation’s containerized imports have handled 17% more volume this year, while their land-side storage capacity remained unchanged.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-12-do-you-have-any-doubt-that-the-fbi-is-fundamentally-a-criminal-organization

Over the years, mostly in connection with the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, I have had many occasions to cover what I have considered to be wrongful — indeed clearly criminal — conduct by the FBI. To give just a few examples, there was the 2016 application for a FISA warrant against Carter Page (three times renewed) based on knowingly false information; the 2017 set-up of Michael Flynn; and then-Director Comey’s blatant lies to President Trump in early 2017 about what the FBI was up to. Or go to this link for a long litany of wrongful FBI and DOJ conduct.

The problem with all of this, of course, is that the FBI completely undermines its own mission when it engages in such conduct. As I wrote at that last link in December 2017:

[Y]ou would be out of your mind ever to cooperate in any way with these guys. And so would everybody else in this country. And thus, the FBI and Justice are totally undermining their own effectiveness as law enforcement institutions.

So with all that has now come out about the FBI’s sordid and criminal role in the Trump/Russia matter, do you think that the people at the Bureau would be at least a little chastened? Don’t be ridiculous. Indeed, they have every reason to have learned the opposite lesson. With more than five years having passed since the launch of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation (i.e., spying on the Trump presidential campaign), most statutes of limitations have expired without any of the main perpetrators getting charged. The sole FBI guy who has taken a plea (lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, for altering an email submitted as part of one of the later FISA applications) was sentenced in January 2021 to mere probation (that is, no jail time). The New York Times quotes the sentencing judge, James Boasberg, as follows:

“Anybody who has watched what Mr. Clinesmith has suffered is not someone who will readily act in that fashion,” Judge Boasberg said. “Weighing all of these factors together — both in terms of the damages he caused and what he has suffered and the positives in his own life — I believe a probationary sentence is appropriate here and will therefore impose it.”