Author: Loquitur Veritatem

See https://politicsandprosperity.com/about/.

Justice Thomas Throws Down Another Gauntlet

In connection with the overturning of Roe v. Wade (see this), I noted here Justice Thomas’s

concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., [which] is devastating in its revelations about the racist motives of Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, and of abortion’s “disparate impact” on blacks. For a synopsis of Thomas’s opinion, see “Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Margaret Sanger Walk Into a Segregated Bar…“, by John Zmirak, The Stream, May 29, 2019.

Now, from Fox News, comes this:

In a concurring opinion in a Supreme Court case announced Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a lengthy call for his colleagues to overturn “demonstrably erroneous decisions” even if they have been upheld for decades — prompting legal observers to say Thomas was laying the groundwork to overturn the seminal 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion.

Thomas’ blunt opinion came in Gamble v. United States, a case concerning the so-called “double-jeopardy” doctrine, which generally prohibits an individual from being charged twice for the same crime. But both pro-life and pro-choice advocates quickly noted the implications of his reasoning for a slew of other future cases, including a potential revisiting of Roe.

“When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple: We should not follow it,” Thomas wrote.

Hear, hear.

But will Roberts and Kavanaugh heed Thomas? Roberts is erratic and Kavanaugh may have sold his soul (on abortion) to win the vote and endorsement of Susan Collins.

Beware of Muslim Airline Pilots

Fox News has a story about Maylasia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean. The details are in the story. Here’s the gist of it:

The night the aircraft went missing, control was seized in the cockpit during a 20 minute period between 1:01 a.m. and 1:21 a.m. and radar records show the autopilot was probably switched off, according to [aviation specialist William] Langewiesche….

When the report by a 19-member international team was released last July, Chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said during a media briefing there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress among the two pilots – Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid – that could lead them to hijack the plane.

Langewiesche notes that while the co-pilot had nothing but a bright future ahead and no red flags in his past, Zaharie’s life raised multiple concerns. After his wife moved out, the captain, who was reported to be “lonely and sad,” also “spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms” and obsessed over two young internet models.

Forensic examinations of the pilot’s simulator by the FBI also revealed he experimented with a flight profile that roughly matched what’s believed to have happened to MH370, and that ended in “fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean.” New York Magazine reported in 2016 that the simulated flight was conducted less than a month before the plane vanished.

That’s not all. The story goes on to remind readers of

a similar incident, [in which] EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts in October 1999 on its way from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to Cairo. Audio captured by the co-pilot caught pilot Gameel Al-Batouti say 11 times in Arabic, “I rely on God.”

Two years later, the National Transportation Safety Board determined Al-Batouti had been suicidal and purposely crashed the plane while the first pilot was out of the cockpit.

Yes, there’s also mention of

Germanwings Flight 9525, which crashed into the French Alps in 2015, [and] was also determined to be a case of suicide-by-pilot. Officials determined co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies, flew the airliner into the mountains on purpose.

The case of Lubitz notwithstanding, there’s more to fear from the likes of Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Gameel Al-Batouti — suicide flying as a substitute for suicide bombing. I’m glad that my days of international air travel are long over.

The “Candle Problem” and Its Ilk

Among the many topics that I address in “The Balderdash Chronicles” is the management “science” fad; in particular, as described by Graham Morehead,

[t]he Candle Problem [which] was first presented by Karl Duncker. Published posthumously in 1945, “On problem solving” describes how Duncker provided subjects with a candle, some matches, and a box of tacks. He told each subject to affix the candle to a cork board wall in such a way that when lit, the candle won’t drip wax on the table below (see figure at right). Can you think of the answer?

The only answer that really works is this: 1.Dump the tacks out of the box, 2.Tack the box to the wall, 3.Light the candle and affix it atop the box as if it were a candle-holder. Incidentally, the problem was much easier to solve if the tacks weren’t in the box at the beginning. When the tacks were in the box the participant saw it only as a tack-box, not something they could use to solve the problem. This phenomenon is called “Functional fixedness.”

The implication of which, according to Morehead, is (supposedly) this:

When your employees have to do something straightforward, like pressing a button or manning one stage in an assembly line, financial incentives work. It’s a small effect, but they do work. Simple jobs are like the simple candle problem.

However, if your people must do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives hurt. The In-Box Candle Problem is the stereotypical problem that requires you to think “Out of the Box,” (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?). Whenever people must think out of the box, offering them a monetary carrot will keep them in that box.

A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. When you’re focused you are less able to think laterally. You become dumber. This is not the kind of thing we want if we expect to solve the problems that face us in the 21st century.

My take (in part):

[T]he Candle Problem is unlike any work situation that I can think of. Tasks requiring creativity are not performed under deadlines of a few minutes; tasks requiring creativity are (usually) assigned to persons who have demonstrated a creative flair, not to randomly picked subjects; most work, even in this day, involves the routine application of protocols and tools that were designed to produce a uniform result of acceptable quality; it is the design of protocols and tools that requires creativity, and that kind of work is not done under the kind of artificial constraints found in the Candle Problem.

Now comes James Thompson, with this general conclusion about such exercises:

One important conclusion I draw from this entire paper [by Gerd Gigerenzer, here] is that the logical puzzles enjoyed by Kahneman, Tversky, Stanovich and others are rightly rejected by psychometricians as usually being poor indicators of real ability. They fail because they are designed to lead people up the garden path, and depend on idiosyncratic interpretations.

Told you so.

“Local Control”

I have written before about the hypocrisy of local control:

[T]he ultimate in local control is the freedom to do as one wishes with one’s own property — barring actual criminality, of course. Dictation by … left-wing city council[s] and the[ir] hired hands in … various bureaucracies isn’t that kind of local control — it’s local tyranny.

I omitted to mention that the very left-wingers who cry “local control” to justify local tyranny are also proponents of national control in a long list of matters ranging from retirement and health care to the suppression of the freedoms of religious exercise, association, and speech.

True local control is at the personal and interpersonal level, not in a city hall dominated by tax-gobbling hacks.

Power Is Power

Most libertarians and conservatives have a reflexive — and negative — reaction to proposals for government intervention to “fix” private-sector problems. The attitude is well-founded, in that many serious private-sector problems (e.g., soaring medical costs, dependency on tax-funded subsidies) are the result of government intervention.

But there are times when government intervention –were it politically feasible — could alleviate serious private-sector problems. Consider two such problems: (1) suppression of conservatives and their views on campuses and in public fora owned by private companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter); (2) soaring prescription-drug prices caused by Big Pharmacy (not the drug makers of Big Pharma, but the middlemen like CVS who manage prescription-drug plans for the insurance companies with which they are often entangled).

The academic-information and prescription-drug complexes — to name just two — are already exerting government-like power. In fact, it is far more power than was actually exercised by the “trusts” wrongly targeted for government intervention (“trust-busting”) during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. (They were providing new and invaluable products at low prices, thanks to economies of scale.) Contemporary trusts, unlike the ones of yore, are in fact the products of government interventions on behalf of powerful private interests, which is why it will be hard to bring the academic-information and prescription-drug complexes (and others) to heel.

It won’t be easy, but it is possible. And badly needed.

Friendship and Personality

This post at Neo made me think about friendship. Or, rather, it led me to collect some thoughts that have been wandering loose in my mind for many years.

I have no friends, other than my wife and my son, who has become a friend to me as we have settled into middle and old age. I had many friends over the years, but I stopped having them in the mid-1990s, when I made my final break from “liberalism”. (And it is hard to find anything but a “liberal” in quasi-intellectual stratum of the D.C. area, where I then lived and worked.)

I am a kind of reverse anti-Trumper. I eschew close affiliations with those who are on the left or who sympathize with its duplicitous agenda, and thus enable the enemies of liberty. (I make an exception for my wife, to whom I am deeply attached by a long life together.)

It is easy for me to do without friends. I can’t remember a friend who became such through casual social contact rather than through school or work. My friends, in other words, have been friends of the moment, and I am still in touch with only two of them — but I don’t consider them friends. All the rest — dozens of them — faded from my emotional radar soon after I ceased to have regular contact with them at school or work.

My lack of friends outside my nuclear family simply reveals an innate psychological condition: emotional self-reliance. It is also seen — and not wrongly so — as emotional aloofness or coldness, which is consistent with assessments of my personality.

It takes all kinds … but I have little time for them.

Real Americans

Many years ago, in the early 1960s, when the civil-rights movement was in its heyday, an older woman of my acquaintance objected to the idea that blacks are Americans. Americans, to her, were whites of European origin. Bill Vallicella offers a more nuanced view:

There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things….

No comity without commonality….

… “[O]ne people” should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not  a white nationalism.  America is of course  ‘a proposition nation.’ You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian.  If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I’ll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.

But…

That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups.

My money is on commonality — in language, in culture, in a deep attachment to the view that liberty is incompatible with a government that does more than protect citizens from domestic and foreign predators and leeches.

Thus, as Vallicella puts it:

Do not think of leftists and ‘progressives’ as fellow citizens; they are merely among us as disorderly elements and domestic enemies.  There can be no peace with them because they represent an ‘existential threat.’ Not to our physical existence so  much as to our way of life, which is of course more important than our mere physical existence as animals.

I would add that those who give aid and comfort to the left by consistently and overwhelmingly voting for Democrats are not fellow citizens. In that sense, the vast majority of blacks (but certainly not all of them) must be excluded — not because they are black, as my acquaintance would have it, but because they abet the destruction of liberty. They are far from alone, however, and most of their accomplices are white.

(See also “The British Roots of the Founding, and of Liberty in America“.)

Through a Glass Darkly

In yesterday’s post I touched on epistemology, “the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief”. I have been touching on the subject for a while. (See, for example, “Rationalism, Empiricism, and Scientific Knowledge“, “Further Pretensions of Knowledge“, “The Fragility of Knowledge“, “Deduction, Induction, and Knowledge“, “The Pretence of Knowledge“, and especially “Words Fail Us“.)

The most compelling writer on the subject is Alfred North Whitehead, whose concept of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” I apply in “Diminishing Marginal Utility and the Redistributive Urge“. The fallacy, as described by Wikipedia, is this:

[O]ne commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion, or concept about the way things are for a physical or “concrete” reality.

What, then, is physical reality? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Whitehead sees it thus (citations omitted):

Whitehead was dissatisfied with Hume’s reduction of perception to sense perception because, as Hume discovered, pure sense perception reveals a succession of spatial patterns of impressions of color, sound, smell, etc. (a procession of forms of sense data), but it does not reveal any causal relatedness to interpret it (any form of process to render it intelligible)….

Whitehead rejected Newton’s conception of nature as the succession of instants of spatial distribution of bits of matter for two reasons. First: the concept of a “durationless” instant, “without reference to any other instant”, renders unintelligible the concepts of “velocity at an instant” and “momentum at an instant” as well as the equations of motion involving these concepts. Second: the concept of self-sufficient and isolated bits of matter, having “the property of simple location in space and time”, cannot “give the slightest warrant for the law of gravitation” that Newton postulated….

In Whitehead’s eyes, however, the development of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism constituted an antidote to Newton’s scientific materialism, for it led him to conceive the whole universe as “a field of force—or, in other words, a field of incessant activity”. The theory of electromagnetism served Whitehead to overcome Newton’s “fallacy of simple location”, that is, the conception of nature as a universe of self-sufficient isolated bits of matter. Indeed, we cannot say of an electromagnetic event that it is

here in space, and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time.

….

Whitehead … noticed that, in a sense, physicists are even more reductionist than Hume. In practice they rely on sense data, but in theory they abstract from most of the data of our five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) to focus on the colorless, soundless, odorless, and tasteless mathematical aspects of nature. Consequently, in a worldview inspired not by the actual practices of physicists, but by their theoretical speculations, nature—methodologically stripped from its ‘tertiary’ qualities (esthetical, ethical, and religious values)—is further reduced to the scientific world of ‘primary’ qualities (mathematical quantities and interconnections such as the amplitude, length, and frequency of mathematical waves), and this scientific world is bifurcated from the world of ‘secondary’ qualities (colors, sounds, smells, etc.). Moreover, the former world is supposed, ultimately, to fully explain the latter world (so that, for example, colors end up as being nothing more than electromagnetic wave-frequencies)….

Whitehead’s alternative is fighting “the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”—the “error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete”—because “this fallacy is the occasion of great confusion in philosophy”. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is committed each time abstractions are taken as concrete facts, and “more concrete facts” are expressed “under the guise of very abstract logical constructions”. This fallacy lies at the root of the modern philosophical confusions of scientific materialism and progressive bifurcation of nature. Indeed, the notion of simple location in Newton’s scientific materialism is an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—it mistakes the abstraction of in essence unrelated bits of matter as the most concrete reality from which to explain the relatedness of nature.

Inasmuch as human beings are incapable of knowing the true essence of reality, true knowledge is beyond our ken. We can only see the world through a glass darkly.

Is Race a Social Construct?

Of course it is. Science, generally, is a social construct. Everything that human beings do and “know” is a social construct, in that human behavior and “knowledge” are products of acculturation and the irrepressible urge to name and classify things.

Whence that urge? You might say that it’s genetically based. But our genetic inheritance is inextricably twined with social constructs — preferences for, say, muscular men and curvaceous women, and so on. What we are depends not only on our genes but also on the learned preferences that shape the gene pool. There’s no way to sort them out, despite claims (from the left) that human beings are blank slates and claims (from loony libertarians) that genes count for everything.

All of that, however true it may be (and I believe it to be true), is a recipe for solipsism, nay, for Humean chaos. The only way out of this morass, as I see it, is to admit that human beings (or most of them) possess a life-urge that requires them to make distinctions: friend vs. enemy, workable from non-workable ways of building things, etc.

Race is among those useful distinctions for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has actually observed the behaviors of groups that can be sorted along racial lines instead of condescending to “tolerate” or “celebrate” differences (a luxury that is easily indulged in the safety of ivory towers and gated communities). Those lines may be somewhat arbitrary, for, as many have noted there are more genetic differences within a racial classification than between racial classifications. Which is a fatuous observation, in that there are more genetic differences among, say, the apes than there are between what are called apes and what are called human beings.

In other words, the usual “scientific” objection to the concept of race is based on a false premise, namely, that all genetic differences are equal. If one believes that, one should be just as willing to live among apes as among human beings. But human beings do not choose to live among apes (though a few human beings do choose to observe them at close quarters). Similarly, human beings — for the most part — do not choose to live among people from whom they are racially distinct, and therefore (usually) socially distinct.

Why? Because under the skin we are not all alike. Under the skin there are social (cultural) differences that are causally correlated with genetic differences.

Race may be a social construct, but — like engineering — it is a useful one.

“Catch 22”

There’s a new, six-part, made-for-TV adaptation of Joseph Heller’s overrated “classic”. My wife, who found the novel funny on her second go it, finds the TV version boring. I, who found the novel boring on my first (and only) go at it, find the TV version mildly entertaining because of the production and acting. But, on the whole, I begrudge the $12.95 that I paid for a one-month subscription to Hulu, which is airing the series as a “Hulu Original”. (I opted for no ads, so couldn’t avail myself of a one-month free trial of Hulu.)

So the new version of Catch-22 suggests a variant of Catch 22: Sometimes you have to pay for something in order to learn that you wouldn’t have paid for it.

Idealism Is Dangerous

Leftists and libertarians are deluded idealists. Deluded, because they imagine a world that cannot be, given nature and human nature. And so they promote causes that are doomed to fail, at great cost in treasure and something far more important: mutual trust, respect, and forbearance. Those are the pillars of true liberty, which is peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial coexistence.

Abortion Q & A: Justice Thomas Tells It Like It Is

I have updated the “Abortion Q & A” page with this:

Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., is devastating in its revelations about the racist motives of Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, and of abortion’s “disparate impact” on blacks. For a synopsis of Thomas’s opinion, see “Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Margaret Sanger Walk Into a Segregated Bar…“, by John Zmirak, The Stream, May 29, 2019.

The British Roots of the Founding, and of Liberty in America

A new page at Politics and Prosperity, here.

Why Government Screws Up

Abstraction is the problem. Government officials and their enablers in the academy have a habit of judging voluntary social and economic outcomes by arbitrary standards. From there, they go on to prescribe costly, flawed, and counterproductive social and economic policies.

For example: The “poverty rate” (an artificial construct) is “too high”; therefore, poor people should be given handouts, which only worsen poverty by disincentivizing work. Or “not enough” persons have health insurance; therefore, taxpayers must be penalized for their success by subsidizing the health insurance of low-income persons, whose health outcomes are barely affected by their easier (and costly) access to health care. Or blacks are “discriminated against” because they have lower grades, lower earnings, etc., than whites East Asians, and Ashkenzi Jews; therefore, persons in the latter three categories must be penalized (through adverse selection for jobs, promotions, university admissions), in favor of blacks — despite the fact that the noted disparities are due to differences in intelligence. (There’s more here, here, and here.)

Though much of the private sector has became government-like in its huge, bloated, rent-seeking rigidity, it remains inherently superior in its ability to detect and solve actual problems. Why? Competition and pursuit of profit. When an entrepreneur perceives a need, he perceives a real one — a product or service that fills a gap or improves on an existing product or service. Yes, the entrepreneur doesn’t always get it right, but because there are many, many entrepreneurs all seeking to satisfy needs, they get it right in the aggregate.

Entrepreneurs, unlike government officials and academics, aren’t trying to second-guess markets. Instead, they’re using markets to advance the interests of consumers, in the hope of making profits — which are the reward for advancing consumers’ interests.

Government officials and academics, on the other hand, have no skin in the game. Their “profit” comes from imposing their will on others, however costly, inefficient, and socially and economically counterproductive that may be. And when they fail, they aren’t held accountable, except occasionally on election day. But most government officials and academics are unaffected by that kind of “accountability”, so they aren’t deterred from making the same mistake (more government) again and again. Hope springs eternal failure isn’t penalized.

Government screws up because government officials and their academic enablers have no skin in the game. They are paid regardless of how badly they do, and their prestige depends not on the actual success or failure of their schemes, but on the mere adoption of those schemes.

Thinking about “Modern Music”

Formal musical composition in the tradition of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Dvorak (to mention only a representative selection from a vast array) took a turn for the worse in the early 1900s. “Modern” music as it was then and has remained, consists of the following styles:

Gloomy music for a gloomy day/event/epoch — sometimes vocalized for extra dreariness.

Hyper-caffeinated cacophony for noise addicts.

Ponderous musical platitudes, piled high and at great length.

Random noise and random silence, in various proportions.

Throw in dissonance, atonality, lack of rhythm — and just plain non-musicality — and you’ve got “modern” music.

War on Women or War on Babies?

The index page at Fox News proclaims “Dems Decry War on Women” in the pointer to this story, which includes such profundities as these:

“We are not going to allow them to move our country backward,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota vowed as she spoke to the crowd.

Another White House hopeful, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, called the measures “the beginning of President Trump’s war on women.”

And Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey urged those protesting to “wake up more men to join this fight.”

The country moved backward — with a jolt — 46 years ago when the Supremes legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. You would think that the opponents of capital punishment would be decidedly against the execution of innocents. But that would require a degree of logical consistency that eludes the “liberal” mind. Roe v. Wade wasn’t just a defeat for the unborn, it was also a victory for post-coital birth control — a judicial ratification of irresponsibility.

As for Trump’s nascent “war on women”, hadn’t “liberals’ long ago decided that Trump’s war began when he hit puberty, if not before?

What’s missing from all of this drama is the central fact that the Democrat Party long ago declared war on babies. And the war goes on, more shrilly than ever.

The Fall of America

Victor Davis Hanson, like many others before him (and like) me, sees the unraveling of America portended by Petronius’s The Satyricon (ca. 60 AD):

Certain themes … are timeless and still resonate today.

The abrupt transition from a society of rural homesteaders into metropolitan coastal hubs had created two Romes. One world was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan network of traders, schemers, investors, academics, and deep-state imperial cronies. Their seaside corridors were not so much Roman as Mediterranean. And they saw themselves more as “citizens of the world” than as mere Roman citizens.

In the novel, vast, unprecedented wealth had produced license. On-the-make urbanites suck up and flatter the childless rich in hopes of being given estates rather than earning their own money….

[The] novel’s accepted norms are pornography, gratuitous violence, sexual promiscuity, transgenderism, delayed marriage, childlessness, fear of aging, homelessness, social climbing, ostentatious materialism, prolonged adolescence, and scamming and conning in lieu of working.

The characters are fixated on expensive fashion, exotic foods, and pretentious name-dropping. They are the lucky inheritors of a dynamic Roman infrastructure that had globalized three continents. Rome had incorporated the shores of the Mediterranean under uniform law, science, institutions—all kept in check by Roman bureaucracy and the overwhelming power of the legions, many of them populated by non-Romans.

Never in the history of civilization had a generation become so wealthy and leisured, so eager to gratify every conceivable appetite—and yet so bored and unhappy.

But there was also a second Rome in the shadows. Occasionally the hipster antiheroes of the novel bump into old-fashioned rustics, shopkeepers, and legionaries. They are what we might now call the ridiculed “deplorables” and “clingers.”…

Globalization had enriched and united non-Romans into a world culture. That was an admirable feat. But such homogenization also attenuated the very customs, traditions, and values that had led to such astounding Roman success in the first place….

But the new empire also diluted a noble and unique Roman agrarianism. It eroded nationalism and patriotism. The empire’s wealth, size, and lack of cohesion ultimately diminished Roman unity, as well as traditional marriage, child-bearing, and autonomy….

[W]ide reading ensures erudition and sophistication, and helps science supplant superstition. But sometimes education is also ambiguous. Students become idle, pretentious loafers. Professors are no different from loud pedants. Writers are trite and boring. Elite pundits sound like gasbags.

Petronius seems to imply that whatever the Rome of his time was, it was likely not sustainable—but would at least be quite exciting in its splendid decline.

Petronius also argues that with too much rapid material progress comes moral regress. His final warning might be especially troubling for the current generation of Western Europeans and Americans. Even as we brag of globalizing the world and enriching the West materially and culturally, we are losing our soul in the process.

Getting married, raising families, staying in one place, still working with our hands, and postponing gratification may be seen as boring and out of date. But nearly 2,000 years later, all of that is what still keeps civilization alive.

Hanson omits — because Petronious’s prescience was limited — the end game, in which the glory that was Rome was extinguished by internal rot, military failure, and invasion. The first of those — internal rot –is well underway in the United States, “thanks” to the Democrat Party. The second — military failure — has become more or less a habit since the Korean War — a habit that will resume with the eventual return to power of the Democrat Party. The third — invasion — probably will be accomplished in bloodless form by the determination of China’s leadership, when a Democrat administration (having disarmed the country) accedes to military and economic coercion.

And, ironically (but blessedly) that will put paid to the kinds of excesses that Democrats have fostered in their zeal for (evanescent) power: pornography, gratuitous violence, sexual promiscuity, transgenderism, delayed marriage, childlessness, fear of aging, homelessness, social climbing, ostentatious materialism, prolonged adolescence, and scamming and conning in lieu of working.

America’s virtual state of servitude will also put paid to the last vestiges of liberty in the land, though they would have eventually disappeared under Democrat rule.

Anthony Kennedy, Still a Useless Idiot

I quote:

“This award will inspire me in future years to bring again the message of civility and decency and progress to all of those who, like you, revere the law,” retired Justice Anthony Kennedy promised today as he received the Henry J. Friendly Medal at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting.

Two summers ago, “it seemed to me appropriate to re-read Plato and Aristotle,” Kennedy related, remarking that “it always irritated me that they gave a low grade to democracy” in their evaluations of different forms of governance. The philosophers held this view, Kennedy explained, “because they thought that democracy did not have the capacity to mature.”

“It is our destiny to prove them wrong,” Kennedy continued; “at the moment, we are not doing that.”

Nor will “we” ever. Democracy is an inherently corrupt and corrupting institution when its mandate is limitless and it empowers the rabble. (Democracy = demos, the mob + kratos, rule.)

Kennedy lives in a fool’s “paradise”, some of which is of his own making. See, for example, “A Nation of Enemies“, “Judging the Justices: The Thomas Standard“, “The Kennedy-Roberts Court in Retrospect“, “The Kennedy Retirement“, “The Kennedy Retirement: Hope Springs Eternal“, “It’s Official: Kennedy Is Now a Member of the Court’s “Liberal” Wing“, and “Anthony Kennedy: Useless Idiot“.

AOC Does It Again

Commenting on a billionaire’s offer to pay off the student loans of the graduating class of Morehouse College, she says:

It’s important to note that people shouldn’t be in a situation where they depend on a stranger’s enormous act of charity for this kind of liberation to begin with (aka college should be affordable)….

“Aka” (also known as)? The dim-witted AOC means “i.e.” (that is). And the parentheses are excess baggage. She proves, once again, that college and high school were wasted on her.

What AOC really wants is for taxpayers to be forced to throw their money away by subsidizing the education indoctrination of the unfit-for-college masses. (See this and the posts listed at the end.)

But … it would be a drop in the bucket compared with the Green New Deal.

The Fatal Flaw of “Liberalism” …

… is that it rejects high standards and the application of those standards (e.g., profitability, actual accountability, high test scores). “Liberals” purport to have high moral standards, as exemplified in the term “social justice”. But those “standards” are nothing but excuses for abysmal performance, criminality, and other socially and economically destructive acts.