Month: July 2021

Authored by Kurt Schlichter, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Everybody wrap something around your face again even though they said you wouldn’t need to if you got vaxxed! But they didn’t lie – no, apparently a bunch of people – and not just those evil white nationalist-Christian-gun-Jesus-flag people – are refusing to get the vaccine, and the reason is that they are moral defectives somehow in thrall to Tucker Carlson’s Svengali-like powers of persuasion.

You see, the people who won’t get it are stupid people who hate science because they refuse to trust the people who have spent the last year-and-a-half lying to them.

I don’t blame those folks a bit. 

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine our ruling class was not as utterly corrupt, dishonest, incompetent and downright stupid as it manifestly is. I know that’s hard, but go with me.

This weird new virus appears and starts spreading. Instead of leveraging it to take down Trump, the Democrats appear with the Republican president and GOP leadership to announce they are working together to solve the problem. Imagine that instead of shaming people, first about wearing masks, then about not wearing masks, then about not wearing two masks, then no masks, then masks again, they went with transparency. 

“We are not sure how much, if at all, masks work. We’re running test trials to see and we’ll tell you what we find as soon as we have the data. In the meantime, let’s all wear them just in case.” And then, when they ran the studies, they would tell us the answer. 

Have you seen any studies about masks? We get a lot of that fascist gnome and others telling us to wear masks (after initially telling us they were useless – remember that memory-holed narrative?) but where’s the actual science?

See, you have to believe the science, and believe them when they tell you what it is yet won’t show you. Obey!

But trust is earned, and these people act like it is their right to have our trust, that we owe them to take it on faith that whatever these people say is the Gospel. Except they are wrong all the time, and instead of owning up to it, they treat you like some sort of idiot for noticing. When you don’t trust people who are perpetually wrong, that’s not denying science. That is science – you are making observations, and drawing reasonable conclusions. In this case, the observation is that our establishment sucks, and that it can’t be trusted.

How far would a little humility gone? Very far. Imagine, and this will be hard, these masterminds getting up and saying,

“America, we were wrong about something. We thought it was right, but we tested it and we found we were not right. Here is the data, and now that we have better information, we are changing our recommendation.”

What would we say?

“Oh, okay. They were doing the best they can and being straight with us. People make mistakes. We need to learn from them. After all, it’s been a century since the last pandemic so we have a lot of lessons to re-learn. Let’s move forward.”

But no. No, there’s no humility. They make a mistake and they don’t stand up and admit it. Instead, they just change the narrative and act as if the narrative du jour was always the narrative. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. But we’re not blind or stupid for noticing.

They tell us the vaccine is going to make us immune from COVID. Then it turns out you can still get it, just not as bad. Yet when people notice this 180-degree spin, the smart set shrieks like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Just imagine if they had been honest and forthright. But that was not in the cards. The ruling caste’s conceit is that we are idiots, unable and unworthy to make simple decisions for ourselves. We must be guided, nudged, or intimidated, if necessary, into making the right choice. And we do not deserve explanations, because the last thing our elite wants is accountability. 

Instead, they want unlimited power. Look at their arbitrary emergency rules and regulations. You could go to a strip club but not a church. Huh? And the courts, again, let us down initially by not enforcing the Constitution. It was an emergency, after all, and as we all know, in an emergency you need to rule by decree, say our betters. So, we got to watch idiots walking around in the sunshine with mouth thongs on while cops busted mommies for letting little Billy play on the slide. At no time did most of the establishment reconsider or change. No, it doubled down on failure. Yet we’re supposed to trust it?

And then there are the revelations about where it came from. They first blamed the innocent pangolin. But it looks like it was our elite’s buddies the Chi Coms, except when people raised that notion earlier, they got banned by social media. Our establishment limited our ability to speak about something true. Think about that. And they want to do it again.

And that’s where the vaccine hesitancy comes in. The smart set squanders its trust then is shocked to find that its trust has been squandered. People are seeing side effects from the vaccine. Those were always going to happen. But our elite is unwilling to level with people about them and let individuals manage their own risks. Instead, our garbage elite dismisses people with questions as “anti-vaxxers” instead of engaging with them and earning their trust. See, we peasants are unworthy of engagement. How dare we seek to choose for ourselves? The nerve of us serfs!

I got the vaccine. I also had the disease. I talked to conservative doctors I trusted about my unique situation and made my decision. You should do the same – you know your situation, and you should balance the risks. I don’t tell other people what to do because it’s not my business and I don’t know their story. I’ve had people get on me for mine, and they need to back off – they don’t know my situation and it’s none of their business. Similarly, theirs is none of mine.

The establishment has squandered its credibility, which is why its demand that everyone take the shot is getting shriller and the attempts to force people more punitive. Imagine if they had been honest from the beginning. Imagine if they had been held accountable. But to do that, you have to imagine having a ruling class that doesn’t suck. And that’s more imagination than anyone can muster.

Governors of seven Western US states met with President Biden Friday and urgently requested federal funds to combat dozens of large wildfires that raged across the region, according to CNN. 

On a virtual call, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Jay Inslee of Washington, Kate Brown of Oregon, Geg Gianforte of Montana, Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Mark Gordon of Wyoming.

Montana Gov. Gianforte said, “I can take you 10 miles west of the state capitol in Helena and show you a forest where 90% of the trees are standing dead.” He added that extreme drought conditions had transformed forests into “tinderboxes.” 

Washington Gov. Inslee said his state needs “additional aerial assets” to surveil the burning fires. The largest fire in the state, or possibly the country, is dubbed the “Bootleg Fire,” has burnt more than 400,000 acres in the southern part of the state. 

Inslee also said infrastructure is key to preventing wildfires. He said, “the fact of the matter is there is nothing in human intervention against these fires if climate change continues to ravage our forests.“

“There is only one way to save these forests from the ravages of climate,” Inslee added. “We won’t recognize these forests as forests anymore unless we realize your vision.”

Biden replied to the governors and said, “we can’t ignore how the overlapping and intertwined factors — extreme heat, prolonged drought and supercharged wildfire conditions — are affecting the country. And so this is a challenge that demands our urgent, urgent action.” 

Biden: “We can’t ignore how the intertwined factors (of climate change)—extreme heat, prolonged drought and supercharged wildfire conditions—are affecting the country” pic.twitter.com/hrtwLEYNxE

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) July 30, 2021

“We’re in a for a long fight yet this year and the only way we’re going to meet those challenges is by working together. Wildfires are a problem for all of us and we have to stay closely coordinated in doing everything we can for our people,” the president said.

Congressional Democrats have been pushing to fund the Civilian Climate Corps in the infrastructure bill that would hire young adults to work on projects to mitigate future wildfires. The president said, “the truth is it’s not fundamentally different in the help it could provide than the civilian corps put together in the Depression.”

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there are currently 83 large fires that have burned 1,741,281 acres in 13 states. Exceptional drought conditions and heat waves turned the Western half of the US into a tinder box that is likely to see more wildfires as the fire season progresses. 

Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues its downward spiral into terminal corruption. Sadly, the scandals, criminality and ethical abuses of the organization are largely ignored by the American public and by the institutions of government charged with oversight and correction. Outrage after outrage is reported, hearings are held, Inspector General reports are issued — but the systemic corruption is never really tackled and dirty cops skate away virtually unscathed.

This situation is constitutionally unacceptable, corrosive to public trust in law enforcement, and a threat to the survival of the republic.

In the past few days alone, we have learned that the October 2020 Michigan governor kidnap plot was largely a creation of the FBI; a “senior FBI official” was on the take from media organizations; and another assistant director was in a “romantic relationship with a subordinate” and involved in “other misconduct.”

The leadership failures documented by the Office of the Inspector General are now almost standard and part of a tiresome media drip-torture for the public to endure.

Meanwhile, the FBI had the audacity to issue a Stasi-like tweet urging “monitoring of ‘family members and peers’ for extremism.”

Remember: what we learn about the FBI in the press are only the stories that are SO outrageous that the FBI cannot keep a lid on them and is forced to make disclosures via a toothless Inspector General report — but never anything that results in a criminal indictment. Imagine what the ordinary day-to-day misconduct in FBI offices across the country could be. And these scandals don’t just amount to “bad press” – in several of these, federal courts scourge the FBI for lawbreaking. Additionally, Inspector General report after report details FBI abuses such as whistleblowers being retaliated against and ignoring “high-risk” employees who fail polygraph tests.

There are still apologists for the FBI. Some seek to defend the organization with the rationalization that “it’s always been that way.” That sort of thinking is a cynical effort to inoculate and immunize real criminality as something normal and regular. “Get used to it kid, that’s the way of the world,” they offer with a shrug and a grin. Others, like Sean Hannity, cling to the “just a few bad apples” excuse. That sort of FBI cheerleading flies in the face of a litany of systemic abuses and pervasive abusers. The FBI ran a coup against President Trump. It failed. The following got away: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith, Pientka, Brower, Baker, et al. Any real consequences for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States? No.

In May 2018, veteran reporter Eric Lichtblau of Time magazine wrote an article titled, “The FBI Is in Crisis. It’s Worse Than You Think,” wherein he detailed:

“The bureau, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump … internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers, looking past the partisan haze, see a troubling picture: something really is wrong at the FBI… other painful, more public failures as well: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fla., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material.”

Four years later and the situation has not improved.

Let us go back to the Michigan governor “kidnap plot” for a moment. The entire operation was an anti-Trump political smear job — and was called into question for being exactly that back when the story broke in October 2020. Now we find out that the FBI was running at least a dozen paid “confidential informants” in the plot. It was a plot they dreamed up. It was actually a rehash of an Obama-era 2010 FBI plot by the so-called “Hutarees” that fell apart in court.

The FBI worries about “entrapment” in these cases because the FBI must demonstrate that there is reasonable suspicion that the subject in a case is about to be or is engaging in criminal activity. The government then allows the criminal/terrorist the opportunity to commit the act. In these cases, the FBI has good reason to worry.

More disturbingly, this is nothing new. Look at the “Herald Square Bomber” case as another instance in which the FBI identifies, recruits, trains, dispatches and then arrests the very informant they recruited in the first place. The FBI appears to have fabricated plots and terrorists to advance their own agenda and statistics. It looks, walks, and talks like “entrapment.” Are there really no other bad guys out there for the FBI to go after? They need to focus on this modus operandi?

Questions are now being raised as to whether the FBI had a role in the Capitol Hill protests of January 6, 2021. When one examines the FBI’s involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses; standing by idly while in possession of Hunter Biden’s Ukraine and Burisma-laden laptops, while President Trump endured a second phony impeachment; and the frame-up of Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn – it is not too difficult to imagine. And that is just the problem: It is not difficult to imagine. It should be an “impossibility.”

The FBI needs to go away. It should happen in an orderly and thoughtful process, over a period of months. Congress should authorize and create an investigative division in the U.S. Marshals Service and open applications for law enforcement officer seeking to be rigorously screened, vetted and then accessed into the new organization. Similar action was taken before in the very creation of the FBI. It is now time to clean house and restore the public’s trust in the “premier investigative agency” of federal law enforcement.

Race fans are in for a spectacle this fall as artificial intelligence-powered race cars are headed for Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) to compete. 

University teams and companies worldwide are set to compete in the physical Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) race in October 2021. The difference in this race is that there’s no driver, instead a highly specialized AI computer will navigate the race car around the track. 

Each of the teams competing in the race will receive the same Dallara-produced AV-21 race car that has been retrofitted with radar, cameras, ultrasonic and infrared sensors, along with LiDAR. Dallara has produced race cars for the Indy series for the last two decades. 

IAC showed off one of the autonomous race cars that are capable of high speeds.  

IAC was organized by IMS and Energy Systems Network (ESN), an Indianapolis-based nonprofit. The race seeks to advance the safety and speed of autonomous vehicles.

The winning team will receive $1.5 million. The speedway is the ideal track to showcase autonomous racing for millions of Americans. 

“It could wake up the average motorsports fan and the average citizen,” Mitchell said during his remarks at the block party. “They’ll say, ‘Gee, if these cars can go 180 or 200 miles-per-hour without a driver, then maybe [an autonomous] car on the highway is something I can feel comfortable with and safe using.”

We’ve noted before the next generation of motorsports is upon us as high-performance flying cars are also set to race later this year.

Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience.com,

After a grueling sports match or a brutal workout, there’s often nothing more refreshing than a nice cold beer…

But what about the drink’s intoxicating effects?

When the human body requires recovery after strenuous exercise, will downing a beer actually backfire?

Patrick B. Wilson, an assistant professor in exercise science at Old Dominion University, and Jaison Wynne, a PhD student in the Department of Human Movement Sciences at Old Dominion explored this, and a variety of other questions in the first systematic review of beer’s effects on exercise performance, recovery, and adaptation. Here are four key takeaways:

1. Athletes are much more likely than non-athletes to drink beer. Numerous surveys suggest that athletes from the collegiate level to the elite level are more likely to drink beer than non-athletes. This seems counterintuitive, as one might think that people who need their bodies to operate at peak performance would drink less. Not so.

2. Beer isn’t great for hydration after exercise. Wynne and Wilson found two studies where the researchers asked subjects to strenuously exercise, then drink beer. The exercise prompted the participants to profusely sweat, leading to an average 2% reduction in body mass from water loss. Afterwards, the researchers gave subjects water, nonalcoholic beer, ~5% alcohol beer, or a sports drink to replace all the fluids they lost. Subjects given beer retained fewer fluids, urinated more, and had worsened fluid balance a couple hours after exercise. These differences disappeared after a few more hours, however.

3. Moderate drinking the night before a competition likely won’t impair performance. A study that had athletes consume between zero and six beers the night before a test of muscle strength and endurance found that drinking two beers or less did not impact performance. However, drinking four or more was detrimental.

4. Regular drinking doesn’t seem to hinder athletic gains over many weeks of exercise. In one study, subjects were prescribed ten weeks of high-intensity interval training along with drinking either vodka, water, or beer after their workouts. There was no difference in physical outcomes between any of the groups – they all got fitter to the same degree. In another study, participants took part in a vigorous aerobic exercise program while drinking six 750-mL bottles per week of either 0.9% or 5.0% beer. Both groups’ cardiorespiratory fitness increased by the same amount, although the low-alcohol beer group enjoyed other metabolic benefits that the high-alcohol group did not, such as lower blood pressure and lower blood lipid levels.

Overall, Wilson and Wynne found that moderate beer consumption after exercise was generally harmless.

“Chronic changes in body composition, as well as muscle performance, adaptation, and recovery, seem largely unaffected by moderate beer consumption,” they wrote.

Here’s proof…

By now the narrative has gotten so absurdly grotesque and stupid, it’s as if a platoon of monkeys or, worse, woke SNL writers put it on the back of a shampoo bottle.

Today, when we discussed how US consumers have already burned through almost all of their savings from Biden’s fiscal firehose… 

… just as the next burst of inflation is about to come and unleash a stagflationary recession or worse, we said that “there is just one event that could short circuit what appears to be a near-certain recession heading into 2022 and mid-term elections which would be devastating for Democrats faced with an imploding economy: another multi-trillion stimulus, just enough to kick the can by another 4-6 months. But for that to happen, the US economy needs to be shut down again which will only happen only once there is enough covid Delta-variant fearmongering. Which should also explain everything that’s happening right now.”

Well, guess what: after the CDC’s legendary flipflop which has sent the credibility of “science” to an all time low, and concurrent narrative whiplash it has made even the head of ultra-left liberals spin, today the president who earlier needed an aide to tell him he has “something” stuck to his chin, laid out the endgame when he said that the US will, “in all probability,” see more guidelines and restrictions amid rising coronavirus cases…

🚨‼️ Did Biden just signal another LOCKDOWN???

“IN ALL PROBABILITY” more restrictions are on the way, says Biden ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ZMbldhJjdJ

— Chad Gilmartin (@ChadGilmartinCA) July 30, 2021

… even if actual deaths – the reason why the CDC is supposedly so terrified of covid – have not budged.

Coming from a president who needs a teleprompter to be reminded what day it is, it wasn’t exactly surprising that Biden refuted the official White House position set just hours earlier on Friday, when White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “the way we see this is that we have the tools in our tool belt to fight this, this, this variant,” adding, “we are not going to head towards a lockdown.” She added that “our goal is to make sure that we are not headed towards that — that is not going to be the direction that we take, because we have the tools to prevent that,” Jean-Pierre said, unaware that her boss would make a mockery of her words just minutes later.

The administration’s conflicting comments come as a new study, leaked Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that the variant produces similar amounts of virus in vaccinated and unvaccinated people if they get infected, in effect also making a mockery of the entire previous “get vaccinated and be safe” narrative. But there was no choice: the finding “was a pivotal discovery leading to CDC’s updated mask recommendation,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said Friday.

What she meant is that to have all the narrative pieces that the media needs to persuade America that another lockdown is in its own favor in order to release another $1-2 trillion in stimmies in a time when the admin is openly paying vaccine holdouts hundreds (and soon thousands) of dollars to get a jab, some sacrifices in terms of script continuity had to be made. As for the rest – well, that’s what a propaganda media is for.

Seeking to further demonize the unvaccinated, yet terrified of signing an executive order demanding everyone gets a jab with an experiment vaccine that still hasn’t gotten official FDA approval, the president has been instead demanding that corporations do his dirty work for him and demand that all employees get vaccinated. The wokest of them are already complying. Biden also announced a number of new steps his administration will take to try to get more Americans vaccinated, including requiring that all federal employees must attest to being vaccinated against Covid-19 or face strict protocols. And just to ensure that social animosity and hatred hits a new record, Biden slammed those unvaccinated Americans who believe they should have the final say over what goes into their bodies, be it a Chinese-created virus, or an experimental drug meant to enrich Pfizer shareholders: “You present a problem to yourself, to your family and to those with whom you work.”

And then there were the bribes: like any self-respecting liberal, Biden decided that the best way to incentivize tens of millions is to just give them free money, and this week the administration called on states, territories and local governments to do more to incentivize vaccination, including offering $100 to Americans for getting vaccinated, paid for with American Rescue Plan funding. Of course, since not everyone is an idiot, the unvaccinated now have an even greater reason to hold out, waiting for the bribe to hit $200, $400, $800 and so on. Which in a country where printing and handing out money is the only business model left, may well be the true motive.

The administration chickened out short of pursuing a vaccination requirement for the entire country, however. Biden said Thursday that he didn’t know yet whether the federal government had the power to require vaccines, and White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the administration is not considering a nationwide requirement.

“That’s not an authority that we’re exploring at all,” Zients said; so instead of doing what Biden believes in – or at least pretends to – he will pass the potato and force corporations to do Biden’s dirty work for him and fire all those who refuse to get jabbed. At least they have many more years of stimmies to look forward to: after all, we are only on the Delta variant – by the time we get to Omega, the Fed will be printing a few hundred quadrillion every day…

The delta variant has finally taken hold in China.

China, the original home of the coronavirus which first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, has reported its biggest outbreak of the delta variant yet after an outbreak centered around the city of Nanjing has spread across the country. As of Friday, Chinese officials have counted 206 new cases since July 20, with most of them occurring around Nanjing, although they have spread to 13 cities in at least 5 difference provinces.

Authorities say they have traced the outbreak back to a crew of airport workers who were cleaning a plane that had just arrived from Russia.

State media reported that a couple of the workers tested positive after failing to follow rigorous hygiene guidelines. So far, 7 people infected in the latest outbreak are in critical condition, not surprising considering that delta is believed to be more virulent and infectious, causing more severe infections in younger patients.

It’s the first outbreak in China since last month’s outbreak in Dongguan. Officials responded to that outbreak in the usual way – by locking down part of the city and ordering mandatory testing.

Beijing has a set strategy for handling COVID cases in keeping with the “zero tolerance” approach, something China’s public health authorities share with Australia, which is struggling with the economic fallout from its latest round of lockdowns. It typically involves new lockdown measures (or at least some kind of temporary restrictions on movement) while millions in the area are tested. Officials reportedly plan to test all of the 9MM+ people in Nanjing.

Nanjing is situated in China’s Jiangsu province, where thousands are currently locked down. Sichuan and Liaoning provinces have also reported cases.

The latest outbreak is also raising more questions about the efficacy of China’s Sinovac vaccine, which is facing criticism for its low efficacy. Several Asian countries have opted to ditch the Sinovac jab despite its favorable price.

And now that delta has finally taken hold in China, the variant will put these vaccines to the test, just like it did in the UK, Continental Europe, India and – of course, – the US.

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

“The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so,” wrote Andrew Sullivan earlier this month in “What Happened to You: The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism.” Sullivan is correct that the left has turned sharply against freedom in recent years. And he vivisects the illiberal ideology about race and justice espoused by many schools, private corporations, and government agencies. However, in dating the origins of the larger tempest, Sullivan is off — depending on how you count — by about 50 years, 100 years, or perhaps 250 years.

Many Americans associate the recent round of the culture wars to the Yale University Halloween costume imbroglio of 2015. That autumn, a university official sparked outrage among undergraduates by suggesting that they should manage their own Halloween parties. Erika Christakis — at the time a lecturer in Yale’s Child Study Center and associate master at Silliman College — advised students that they were capable, without the aid of university authorities, of using their own good judgment when choosing a Halloween costume and letting classmates know if they crossed the line of good taste or failed to respect the feelings of others.

Some students vehemently disagreed. A vocal group demanded that the university oversee their parties and punish those whose holiday garb offended other students’ sensibilities.

Yale’s faculty said little. But university President Peter Salovey concluded that the controversy somehow confirmed — despite many years of effort and the expenditure of considerable sums of money to increase minority representation on campus —the persistence of deep-seated racism at the university. He announced the allocation of tens of millions of additional dollars to support racial-sensitivity training for administration, faculty, and staff, and the hiring of a decidedly more diverse — that is, racially diverse — faculty.

Student authoritarians — the same should be said of faculty and administration authoritarians — of this generation are the spiritual descendants of the student rebels of the 1960s. Students’ importuning universities to curb campus freedom today may seem like the opposite of students a half-century earlier who rebelled against university-imposed restrictions on freedom of expression, not least student attire. But the former carry forward the work of the latter. In the 1960s, students fought for free speech but as a means to give voice to their cutting-edge progressive sensibility, which included contempt for the logic and achievements of existing institutions and for the wisdom contained in old books and ideas. Today’s students, sustained by a campus culture in which that progressive sensibility prevails, wish to impose it on everybody — in part, by stifling free speech.

However, it was not university students — either today’s or those of the 1960s — who first introduced the idea that progressive moral and political ideas were objectively true, beyond reproach, and should be affirmed by all. That conceit we owe to the founders of the progressive era.

For example, in a 1912 essay, “The New Meaning of Government,” then-governor of New Jersey and soon-to-be president of the United States Woodrow Wilson worked out some implications of the progressive convictions that he had been articulating for decades both as a political scientist and president of Princeton University. Government, he argued, should be “an instrument of civilization and of humanity” managed by a new professional class of highly trained and scientifically adept technocrats. By virtue of their education and impartiality, they would rise above the mere “consent of the governed” in which the nation’s founders grounded the legitimate exercise of political power. They would discern “genuine public opinion” — that is, not the preferences people expressed through voting and the choices they made in all the other areas of their lives but the policies that the experts determined would promote the people’s better selves and best interests. Through efficient, rational, central administration, the experts would implement public policy that was unlimited by any consideration — including citizens’ expressed preferences — other than the experts’ authoritative reconstruction of “the purpose of the people of the country.”

On what grounds did progressives suppose that power must be shifted to experts because the people cannot be trusted to identify their own interests, much less the public policies that would advance them? “The Social Contract,” a 1762 treatise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, gave classic expression to the idea that the will of the people was something other than what the people said they wanted or for which they voted. His point of departure in search of “some sure and legitimate rule of administration” was the proposition that “[m]an is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau had in mind the chains of custom and tradition which, he believed, corrupt minds and hearts. A properly organized government, he argued, must see to it that each citizen “shall be forced to be free” of inherited beliefs, practices, and associations. Such coercion, Rousseau emphasized, must only be undertaken by those capable of accurately discerning the “General Will,” which reflects the people’s true interests and is “constant, unalterable, and pure.”

In line with Rousseau’s thinking, his intellectual and political minions through the centuries have believed that imposing on people what they ought to want reflects the highest expression of freedom and the purest form of democracy. However, these closet — and often not-so-closet — authoritarians tend to overlook Rousseau’s stern insistence that identifying and executing the General Will require exceedingly rare intelligence and character.

In “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals” — a short, perceptive essay to which Andrew Sullivan refers in his analysis of the left’s intensifying illiberalism — progressive Kevin Drum provides evidence that his colleagues on the left would do well to take Rousseau’s stern insistence to heart. “It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle,” writes Drum. “It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise: Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do” [emphasis in the original]. Left-liberals, however, are a peculiar sort of aggressor. While, as Drum observes, “Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years” on issues such as crime, immigration, and race, they also have been demanding greater and greater submission on the part of the public to progressive moral judgments and policy prescriptions. In other words, the left has adopted the quasi-Rousseauian view that the public is not merely mistaken but must be emancipated from their errors — in the contemporary case through the regulation of speech and the redistribution of privileges and punishments based on race, sex, and gender properly understood.

Drum suggests that many on the left err in seeing conservatives as the “culture-war mongers” owing to a distortion explained by behavioral economics. Since the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of gaining a good of similar value, conservatives have reacted more intensely to “‘losing’ the customs and hierarchies that they’ve long lived with” than have progressives to their victories — for example, in the Supreme Court’s recognition of the  constitutional right to same-sex marriage; in spread of the idea of gender fluidity; and in the imposition of narrative control in the mainstream media, on giant social media platforms, and within universities. “This,” according to Drum, “produces more outrageous behavior from conservatives even though liberals are actually the ur-source of polarization.”

Drum’s principal concern is electoral. He believes that the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch, especially “the whole woke movement in general,” is in danger of driving away enough “moderate Black and Hispanic voters” to give Republicans the edge. He is right that tempering its positions while exercising “empathy and tact” would go a long way to enabling the left to reach out “to the vast middle of the country.” But he fails to appreciate that the casual disdain for those who depart from the progressive party line has been assiduously cultivated by elite institutions since at least the late 1960s. And that the squall through which he wants to help the left maneuver to safety is part of a tempest that has been swirling for 250 years.

To contain the culture wars, it is necessary to counter the left’s intolerant doctrine that the job of government is to force people to be free. Schools can do their part by teaching students the alternative set forth four years after the publication of “The Social Contract” in the Declaration of Independence. By helping students to understand how a government assigned the limited task of securing rights shared equally by all enables a diverse people to prosper, schools not only transmit crucial facts about American history but also foster the toleration on which free societies depend.

The Vessel at Hudson Yards in Manhattan has been closed again after a 14-year-old boy jumped off the elaborate honeycomb-like structure that rises 16 stories Thursday afternoon. The teen’s death is the fourth suicide in 18 months since installation. The billionaire property developer behind the public sculpture is contemplating a permanent closure. 

The New York City Police Department confirmed a 14-year-old boy jumped off the 150-foot set of spiraling staircases Thursday afternoon, just before 1300 local time, according to NBC News. 

The public sculpture reopened in May after new rules and a ticket fee. It was closed in January after the third suicide was seen in less than one year. All of the victims are ages between 14 and 24. 

Stephen Ross, the property developer who constructed the Hudson Yards complex, told NBC News, “It’s hard to really fathom how something like that could happen.”

“But I feel terrible for the family,” Ross said. “I want to explore every feasible possibility we can, but for now the Vessel is closed.”

He told The Daily Beast he was discussing permanently closing the Vessel.

Hudson Yards spokeswoman Kimberly Winston said, “we’re heartbroken by this tragedy and our thoughts are with the family of the young person who lost their life. We are conducting a full investigation. The Vessel is currently closed.” 

The Vessel opened to the public in 2019, offering anyone who wants to climb 154 flights of stairs magnificent views of the western part of Manhattan and the Hudson River.

Although Vessel had been initially slated to cost $75 million, projections were later revised to $150 to $200 million. 

The only way to prevent suicides is to extend the height of the railings, but that may block views. 

So what will Ross do with his massive $200 million public art sculpture? 

Authored by Pat Buchanan,

In his final state of the nation speech Monday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte defended his refusal to confront China over Beijing’s seizure and fortification of his country’s islets in the South China Sea.

“It will be a massacre if I go and fight a war now,” said Duterte.

“We are not yet a competent and able enemy of the other side.”

Duterte is a realist.

He will not challenge China to retrieve his lost territories, as his country would be crushed.

But Duterte has a hole card: a U.S. guarantee to fight China, should he stumble into war with China.

Consider. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Manila we would invoke the U.S.-Philippines mutual security pact in the event of Chinese military action against Philippine assets.

“We also reaffirm,” said Blinken, “that an armed attack on Philippine armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the South China Sea would invoke U.S. mutual defense commitments under Article IV of the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.”

Is this an American war guarantee to fight the People’s Republic of China, if the Philippines engage a Chinese warship over one of a disputed half-dozen rocks and reefs in the South China Sea? So it would appear.

Why are we threatening this?

Is who controls Mischief Reef or Scarborough Shoal a matter of such vital U.S. interest as to justify war between us and China?

Tuesday, in Singapore, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reaffirmed the American commitment to go to war on behalf of the Philippines, should Manila attempt, militarily, to retrieve its stolen property.

Said Austin:

“Beijing’s claim to the vast majority of the South China Sea has no basis in international law. … We remain committed to the treaty obligations that we have to Japan in the Senkaku Islands and to the Philippines in the South China Sea.”

Austin went on:

“Beijing’s unwillingness to … respect the rule of law isn’t just occurring on the water. We have also seen aggression against India … destabilizing military activity and other forms of coercion against the people of Taiwan … and genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.”

The Defense secretary is publicly accusing China of crimes against its Uyghur population in Xinjiang comparable to those for which the Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg.

Austin has also informed Beijing, yet again, that the U.S. is obligated by a 70-year-old treaty to go to war to defend Japan’s claims to the Senkakus, half a dozen rocks Tokyo now occupies and Beijing claims historically belong to China.

The secretary also introduced the matter of Taiwan, with which President Jimmy Carter broke relations and let lapse our mutual security treaty in 1979.

There remains, however, ambiguity on what the U.S. is prepared to do if China moves on Taiwan. Would we fight China for Taiwan’s independence, an island President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger said in 1972 was “part of China”?

And if China ignores our protests of its “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” against the Uyghurs, and of its human rights violations in Tibet, and of its crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, what are we prepared to do?

Sanctions? A decoupling of our economies? Confrontation? War?

This is not an argument for threatening war, but for an avoidance of war by providing greater clarity and certitude as to what the U.S. response will be if China ignores our protests and remains on its present course.

Some of us can still recall how President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene when Nikita Khrushchev ordered Russian tanks into Budapest to drown the 1956 Hungarian revolution in blood. Instead, we welcomed Hungarian refugees.

When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, President John F. Kennedy called up the reserves and went to Berlin to make a famous speech, but did nothing.

“Less profile, more courage!” was the response of Cold War hawks.

But Kennedy was saying, as Eisenhower had said by his inaction in Hungary, that America does not go to war with a great nuclear power such as the Soviet Union over the right of East Germans to flee to West Berlin.

Which brings us back to Taiwan.

In the Shanghai Communique signed by Nixon, Taiwan was conceded to be a “part of China.” Are we now going to fight a war to prevent Beijing from bringing the island home to the “embrace of the motherland”?

And if we are prepared to fight, Beijing should not be left in the dark. China ought to know the risks it would be taking.

Cuba is an island, across the Florida Strait, with historic ties to the United States. Taiwan is an island 7,000 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific.

This month, Cubans rose up against the 62-year-old Communist regime fastened upon them by Fidel and Raul Castro.

By what yardstick would we threaten war for the independence of Taiwan but continue to tolerate 60 years of totalitarian repression in Cuba, 90 miles away?