Democratic populists seek to copy Trump's success but not to win back the same populist voters who flipped margins by 32 points from 2012 to 2016 in places like Ashtabula, Ohio, or 18 points in Erie, Pennsylvania, both of which we profiled in "The Great Revolt." Democrats such as Warren and Sanders have given up on winning those places--and those Obama voters.
Instead, Sanders and Warren hope to emulate Trump's success with their party's version of the voters we called Perotistas, those whose participation in elections is irregular, even elliptical, and who pass into voting booths every decade or so like comets crashing into an otherwise orderly solar system, only to disappear just as abruptly.
Rather than combining living, dining and kitchen in one open space, Beckford’s more traditional floor plans have created a new amenity, in addition to the development’s rooftop terrace, yoga rooms and private piano bar and lounge—the discrete kitchen.
“People like that you’re not looking at your kitchens from other rooms,” Ms. Russo said. “So many of these open kitchens, I think people are tiring of them and they are going back to the old school, the old architecture.”It goes along with another hot trend we saw developing a few years back: "away rooms" for people who originally thought they needed unobstructed sightlines from one end of the house to the other, so that their young children could be under constant surveillance. One of the few things I'd do differently if I were building this house again is pay more attention to the need for soundproofing at least one room. Either that or I need to develop some control over my dogs' barking when I'm trying to talk on the phone.
I don’t remember what specific combo of frustration and busyness led me to wear leggings to the office one day recently, but I do remember it felt magical. With nothing but a stretchy band and Nulu(™) fabric holding me in, I felt freer, like I was dancing through my duties, rather than trudging through them encased in polyester and wool. My computer seemed to run more quickly; my sources were more responsive; the PR people were less angry....Why not? It's appropriately gender-neutral, right?
Most everyone at my office is nicely dressed, from the occasional TV-ready suit-wearer to our fashion-conscious female editors. Occasionally, some mayor or other VIP stops by. Leggings are not part of this world. In fact, when I told my colleagues I was working on this article, several of them came to my desk, in their traditional slacks, and registered their complaints. “Tights are not pants,” people told me....
The other place where leggings are deemed unacceptable today: church.
“It might not happen,” Fricker said. “But if there’s a chance that it could happen, then shouldn’t you involve that in your planning? If you’re hosting a picnic and it might rain, you don’t necessarily move the whole event, but you probably do make a Plan B. If you’re planning a city … you might as well keep this in the back of your mind.”OK. I'll pencil in a contingency plan for massive sea-level rise, like moving to a mountaintop in western North Carolina.
A witness told CBS 11 News the gunman walked up to a server during communion with a shotgun and then opened fire. According to the witness, another church member shot the suspect....It is better, all the way around, for a religious community to be able to defend itself from these attacks. The attacks may not stop; hatred for the religion or simply for the religious may be too broad and too deep in our culture today. This is not new. Raymond Lull wrote about it in the Middle Ages.
During the incident, two men died from their injuries and another man was critically injured. Authorities believe the gunman is among the three but it’s unknown if he was killed or is injured.
Then if a knight use not his office, he is contrary to his order and to the beginning of chivalry. *** The office of a knight is to maintain and defend the holy catholic faith by which God the Father sent his Son into the world to take human flesh in the glorious Virgin, our Lady Saint Mary; and for to honor and multiply the faith, suffered in this world many travails, despites, and anguishous death. Then in like wise as our Lord God hath chosen the clerks for to maintain the holy catholic faith with scripture and reasons against the miscreaunts and unbelievers, in like wise God of glory hath chosen knights because that by force of arms they vanquish the miscreaunts, which daily labor for to destroy holy church, and such knights God holdeth them for his friends honored in the world and in that other when they keep and maintain the faith by the which we intend to be saved....There are some for whom such service is the most meaningful and proper way of expressing their faith. To deny them the right to do it is to deny them the expression of faith for which they are best fit, and which their soul finds its deepest and most worthy calling. Both the first and the second amendments should apply to the defenders of the faith, then; no government should stand between them and their sacred duty.
The historical writing in Flateyarbók spans the period from when Harald Fairhair was Norway's first king in the early 900s and almost until the Black Death struck Norway around the year 1350.The English translation is just getting underway, I gather.
But 17-year-old King Olav IV Haakonsson never received the book. The boy died in what many believed to be a mysterious manner.
Now the entire book has finally been translated and published in Norwegian by a small publishing house in Stavanger.
Flateyjarbók (its Icelandic name) is three times as extensive as Snorre Sturlason's collection of sagas about Swedish and Norwegian kings, Heimskringla.
The Fenris wolf swallows the sun. The climate disaster that began the year 536 was surely the most dramatic cooling of the Earth that humans, animals and plants have experienced in the last two thousand years. It was likely due to two large volcanic explosions, which every few years sent huge amounts of fine dust high into the atmosphere. There was dust for several years. The sun disappeared.... probably half of the populations of Norway and Sweden died.A lot is known about the event now. It seems to have passed into myth as a cyclical warning of Ragnarok. Volcanoes do pose a real risk of sudden global cooling, and there are other similar risks that are massive. Solar EMPs, asteroid strikes, these things are real problems that will come up sooner or later.
China will rewrite the Bible and Quran to 'reflect socialist values' amid crackdown on the country's religious groups, a report has revealed.Like every paragraph violates the beliefs of the Communist Party, which belief system is called "scientific atheism." There was a formal school for training people in it at the university we lived at while living in China.
New editions must not contain any content that goes against the beliefs of the Communist Party, according to a top party official. Paragraphs deemed wrong by the censors will be amended or re-translated.
Article I. Bill of RightsThere is quite a bit of scholarship on this particular clause. Even before the adoption of the Virginia constitution, colonial-era laws had mandated that each home keep arms and a stock of ammunition at all times. At the time of the adoption of the Federal constitution, the exact meaning of the term 'militia' was described by George Mason and Federalist 46. Patrick Henry said that "the great object is that every man be armed."
Section 13. Militia; standing armies; military subordinate to civil power
That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES
To Pollianus and Eurydice with Plutarch's best wishes.
. . . When people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was because the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of persuasion, and not by contention and strife.
Havel, who died in 2011, preached what he called “antipolitical politics,” the essence of which he described as “living in truth.” His most famous and thorough statement of this was a long 1978 essay titled “The Power of the Powerless,” which electrified the Eastern European resistance movements when it first appeared. It is a remarkable document, one that bears careful study and reflection by orthodox Christians in the West today.
Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under Communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power—and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs. Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity.
Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth”— and it’s going to cost him plenty.
He will lose his job and his position in society. His kids may not be allowed to go to the college they want to, or to any college at all. People will bully him or ostracize him. But by bearing witness to the truth, he has accomplished something potentially powerful:
He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.
Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system—but he has preserved his humanity.
It happened first in relation to religion, and second, more recently, in relation to culture and the humanities. We all understand what religious secularization has been — the process by which religion, and especially Christianity, has been marginalized, so that today in the West, as Charles Taylor has famously put it, religion has become just one option among a smorgasbord of faith/no-faith choices available to individuals.What's strange about this analysis is that the author locates the source of damage in "globalization intertwined with both feminism and decoloniality," which are all hard-left projects (at least for the sort of feminism under discussion, i.e. the sort that undermines the canon precisely because mostly men wrote it), but the author then goes on to conclude that defending the Humanities is itself to be done for hard-left reasons.
A similar process is underway in the humanities. Faith has been lost across two different zones: first, religion; then, high culture. The process that we associate with thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, in which culture was consecrated in religion’s place, and that in more modest forms survived until quite recently, has finally been undone.
They are to be preserved because they are compelled to push back on the capitalist apparatuses that are dismantling them. In that pushback, what remains of them is aligned with green and radically left anti-capitalist movements.Sounds like someone has a religion after all! The king is dead; long live the king.
Were they playing fast and loose because they were investigating a presidential candidate and then the sitting president? Or was rule breaking so routine that they didn’t even think about it?That's the real choice underlying the determination of "bias" or "no bias."
Why are human beings due a basic dignity at all? ... [One answer according to] Immanuel Kant, is that human beings have dignity because they are free. Kant did not mean politically free. He meant that, unlike a stick or a stone, you can reason for yourself and decide how you will behave. Your ability to think for yourself and come to your own decisions thus sets you above sticks, or stones, or most other objects in the universe. It is why you have dignity.Likewise, the right to defend your beliefs in public is an essential feature of democratic society.
What does it mean to have dignity? It means that you are due a certain respect that is not due to sticks or stones. For example, a person is due the respect of not being harmed without good reason. Not everything has that dignity. Anyone can pick a stick up off the ground and break it without it being thought to violate the stick’s dignity. No one may similarly grab another person and break their arm without having committed an affront.
If your dignity arises from your capability of thinking for yourself, respecting your dignity requires respecting your thoughts. “Respecting your thoughts” does not mean “agreeing with your thoughts,” for requiring agreement would itself be disrespectful of everyone else’s ability to have their own thoughts. It does, however, mean respecting your right to think things through for yourself. Your free thoughts cannot be prohibited without violating your dignity as a human being – indeed, if Kant is right, such a prohibition is a violation of the most basic source of your dignity as a human being.
If I may not prohibit your thoughts, though, might I prohibit your words? Speech is only thinking out loud.
To tell someone that they cannot speak in public about what they take their interests to be is to tell them that they cannot organize politically in defense of those interests. This is another basic affront to the dignity of an individual. It is incompatible with any form of government by the people.The court cannot be right, no matter what she said or what she believes. This holds for the worst ideas anyone has or could in principle have.
Yet you might think that some ideas are so bad that anyone who adopts them is themselves a bad person. In that case, it might seem as if preventing them from political organizing is a desirable end. After all, if bad people can organize politically they are likely to gain political power. As political philosophers since Plato have argued, it is dangerous for political power to fall into the hands of people who lack the proper virtues. For people who have instead adopted a wicked character, it is surely even worse. Thus it might seem as if speech prohibitions were a good thing.
The most pragmatic counter-argument against this practice is that allowing those in power to impose speech controls during times when good people are in office will also allow bad people to impose speech controls should they gain office. Sometimes surprising situations can cause even disorganized campaigns to win a victory. Any power that one would not trust to one’s opponents is not wisely invested in a government that the opponents will sometimes control.
But it is also the case that self-government is itself a way of building virtue. To whatever degree people are excluded from self-government, they will not develop the qualities they need to do it well. This is because virtue is a matter of practice, as Aristotle argues. The way you gain the virtue of courage is to do things that are dangerous and frightening. Soldiers in training practice climbing across ropes stretched high over water. Then they may rappel from tall towers. Some may then go on to learn to jump from airplanes. Even if their military service never needs them to do any of these things in combat, the practice of learning to do things in spite of being scared makes them brave. In time, when they need to take actions in the face of fear, they are able to do so.
All virtues work this way. John Stuart Mill argued that the whole reason for representative government was that it encouraged people to become virtuous. Just as Aristotle spoke of the best life as the one that most completely develops the capacity to act virtuously,[1] and Kant derived a universal (if imperfect) duty to develop one’s capacities,[2] Mill also has an argument that attaining one’s capacities roots the human good. This is found in his Considerations on Representative Government, in which he offers an account of why he believes republican government is the best possible form. An early argument he fields is against what he calls a common opinion – it dates at least to Aristotle’s Politics – that a benign despot is the best possible form of government. “What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen?” he asks. “What developments can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?… Wherever the sphere of action of human beings is artificially circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed and dwarfed in the same proportion.”[3]
The concern that people are not good enough for self-government is not then a reason to deny them the ability to speak their minds. If they are to become better people, they need to be allowed to speak their minds.
“They had created the most successful Black-owned business district in the country,” Brown tells TIME. “Booker T. Washington, when he visited initially referred to it as the ‘Negro Wall Street of America,’ and it later took on the moniker ‘Black Wall Street.'”
There were several hundred businesses in Greenwood — hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, “everything you can think of,” Brown adds. “There was a sense of self-sufficiency.”
But Greenwood wasn’t immune to the racial violence that plagued much of the era. More than two dozen race riots had broken out throughout the country In 1919 — which meant mobs of white people attacking black neighborhoods, according to Ellsworth. Oklahoma was starting to see a rise in membership to the KKK.
Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black shoe shiner, used an elevator to go up to a segregated bathroom on May 30, 1921. In the elevator was Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white woman and elevator operator. Whether or not the two knew each other is uncertain, but it is believed that Rowland tripped entering the elevator and caught himself on Page’s arm, and she let out a scream. An onlooker who heard the scream summoned the police, believing Page had been the victim of an attempted sexual assault. No record exists that Page said anything about a sexual assault to the police, according to Ellsworth’s report, but Rowland was arrested the next day.
An angry crowd of white people began to gather in front of the court house holding Rowland, calling for him to be turned over to them. The sheriff set up a row of armed guards to protect the building. Then a group of about 25 armed black veterans of World War I showed up, ready to protect Rowland. The mob of white people had grown to an estimated thousand by that evening. Some attempted to break into a local armory for weapons.
Tensions increased through the night and the white mob continued to grow. At about 10 p.m. a group of armed black men made their way to the court house, offering help to authorities. Then one white man approached a black World War I veteran and tried to take away his gun. When the gun went off, the race riot began.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) proposed legislation on Tuesday that would close what he called a “loophole” in rape law.Formally this retains equality under the law, because it says “someone” rather than “a woman.” Pragmatically it establishes an unequal standard both because it intends to affect women differently from men, but also because alcohol itself affects women differently from men. Women get drunk on less, faster, and suffer more physically (including long term effects like liver damage).
Cuomo claimed that prosecutors cannot bring rape charges against an accused person if an accuser voluntarily consumes alcohol. Cuomo’s proposal would change the state’s definition of those who cannot legally consent to sexual activity to include someone who is conscious but allegedly too drunk to consent. Keen observers will notice how vague the idea of being “too drunk to consent” may be.
I could not in good conscience vote for impeachment because removal of a sitting President must not be the culmination of a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country.
Vox Media is laying off hundreds of freelance writers and editors due to a new California law that was sold as a way to protect the state's contingent workforce. That law, AB5, was adopted in September. To comply, New York-based Vox Media would have had to reclassify many of the freelancers it uses for sports platform SB Nation as full-time staff.
Instead, the company decided to cancel the contracts of some 200 or so freelancers....
Vox Media's flagship publication, Vox, previously called the California legislation "a victory for workers everywhere."
Propaganda played a crucial role during World War II, with the O.S.S. leading efforts to demoralize the enemy and encourage resistance in Axis-controlled countries. They created a stamp bearing the face of Hitler rendered as a skull, produced radio broadcasts in German, spread pamphlets announcing a German general’s resignation and made films for new military recruits, such as the Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s circa 1943 “Organization of the Army,” which was commissioned by General George C. Marshall. Through its manipulation of the art of information, the agency helped shape the look and philosophy of American imperialism. In doing so, the O.S.S. assembled a concentration of acumen and talent that rivaled those of the iconic schools and institutes that propagated design in the 20th century. It was the Bauhaus, but for war....Utopian it may have been, but the Bauhaus school fostered the ugliest sort of design anyone ever invented. I'd hope the OSS merited a better comparison than that.
...the utopian ideas swirling around the Bauhaus in 1920s Germany positing that design should reflect a society at its most efficient and egalitarian — modern industrial design had a revolutionary mission. Design was art in everyday life. It could have universal applications.
The accompanying photo ... um, won't scar you too much.
LOS ANGELES, CA—Classic historical drama film Braveheart is receiving a reboot by Paramount Pictures next year, this time with an all-female cast.
Lena Dunham will play the starring role of Willow Wallace, a "fierce Scottish she-warrior who don't need no man."
Co-stars include Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, and Beyonce ...
Just this past Tuesday, on December 10th, the Board of Supervisors from Tazewell County passed two different resolutions in light of controversy circling those who are pro-gun. The first resolution declared the county to be a second amendment sanctuary. This is not at all surprising to see, as 76 out of 95 counties, 9 out of 38 independent cities, and 13 towns have adopted second amendment sanctuary resolutions.
The second item on the agenda was the proposition of establishing a militia in the county. When both of the resolutions passed, the crowd cheered loudly in support of the decisions. Also, the resolutions didn’t exactly pass by a small margin; the votes were unanimous, with more than 200 citizens standing by in support.The militia will serve as a law enforcement and public safety body if the state legislature figures out a way to defund the sheriff’s department. Ironically the destruction of effective systems of governance in Virginia may improve civic health. What could be better than an engaged community stepping up to provide volunteers to look out for the common good, in defiance of tyranny and defense of their rights? I would much prefer that to an effective state.
"He's right, I was wrong," Comey said about how the FBI used the FISA process, adding, "I was overconfident as director in our procedures," and that what happened "was not acceptable."The Ace commenters are having a field day with the "I was overconfident in our procedures" defense, applying it to General Custer, the captain of the Titanic, the director of the Metropolitan Correction Center, General Pickett. I'm left wondering whether there's a witness out there who can demonstrate that Comey might just possibly have insisted on a little investigation into the most momentous warrant of his career before signing it (even if, as the Ace guys say, he didn't "sign"-sign it), and who might be considering singing like a bird sometime soon.
“I’m certainly willing to admit the inspector general found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of,” he said to host Chris Wallace. “Had I known of them, Chris, yes I would have called out the FBI at the same time.“Not that I take this protestation of retroactive good faith at face value, but it does lay the ground for serious difficulty as soon as someone can establish that obviously he was on notice of the FISA abuses two years ago. Schiff's reputation for honesty being roughly on a par with his reputation for painstaking avoidance of leaving an incriminating paper trail ("I never met with the whistleblower and don't even know who he is!"), this shouldn't even pose a minor hurdle for the sleuths.
“What judges should keep in mind is that it’s a choice,” Dunn said. “There’s an ability to interpret the law and you have to decide what perspective you’re coming from. A lot of conservative ones think, ‘We’re going to be close to the law.’ I really suggest you think about the effect on social issues.”
Having endured 3 years of this conspiracy theory by the tinfoil-hatted mainstream pundits, I am left with 10 questions.
Why did Putin want to Make America Great Again?
Why did Putin want America to rollback unnecessary regulations?
Why did Putin want Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and 50 new conservative judges on America's appellate courts?
Why did Putin want our personal income and corporate tax rates cut?
Why did Putin want our unemployment rate dropped to 3.5%?
Why did Putin want us to become a net exporter of oil for the first time in 70 years?
Why did Putin want us to replace our broken fences with a 30-foot wall along the Mexican border?
Why did Putin want us to renegotiate trade deals, and to walk away from TPP and the Paris Climate Thingamabob?
Why did Putin want us to move our embassy to Jerusalem?
And lastly, why did Putin want us to impose more economic sanctions on Russia?
I am beginning to think that President Trump is as big a failure at being a puppet as he is a failure at being Hitler.
Senate Democrats are quietly talking about asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to hold articles of impeachment in the House until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agrees to a fair rules package for a Senate trial.Senate Democrats explained that this is their only chance to exert leverage over Mitch McConnell, who has his caucus completely lined up and won't need to get the consent of any intransigent Dems to whatever trial procedure he chooses to jam through on short notice.
WASHINGTON – For the third time U.S. history, the House of Representatives will vote on the impeachment of a president after the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Friday.The committee voted along party lines to approve both impeachment articles following a marathon hearing that went late into Thursday evening.The articles – one on President Donald Trump's alleged abuse of power and the other on obstruction of Congress during the impeachment inquiry -- were both approved in separate votes by a 23-17 margin with Democrats for and Republicans against.
The analyst added that if a big majority over all other parties is realized then Johnson may now have the scope to “ignore the Brexiteers in his party and provide businesses with some certainty by quickly extending the transition period.”I'm sure that's what the surging sterling tells us about what business investors--and voters--want to see: a further extended "transition" period. The whole thing has simply been too rushed and abrupt. On the other hand, from Johnson's victory speech this morning:
"And with this mandate and this majority we will at last be able to do what?" (Crowd shouts "Get Brexit done".)By the way, all 18 Brexit defectors lost their seats. There's a convincing mandate for delay for you.
Consider one example of the misconduct Horowitz identified. An FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, obtained information that Carter Page, the subject of a FISA order, had gathered intelligence about Russia for that agency and was reliable — a fact that would cut against the notion that Page was working for the Russians. Clinesmith doctored the email conveying this information. He inserted the words “not a source,” even though he had been told that Page was a source.
Clinesmith then passed the doctored email on to the FBI agent who was assigned to affirm under oath the FBI’s allegations to the FISA court. That agent had told Clinesmith that he wanted “a definitive answer to whether Page had ever been a source for another U.S. government agency before he signed the final renewal application.” By doctoring the email, Clinesmith definitively gave the agent an answer he knew was wrong.
We know from direct evidence that Clinesmith was aligned with the resistance to Trump. However, even without that direct evidence, one should conclude, absent a satisfactory explanation for the doctoring, that Clinesmith doctored it intentionally and for a bad motive. Even without direct evidence of bias, one should conclude that Clinesmith was out to get Trump.These are good points, highlighting the problem of how to address the shocking failures in the FBI and DOJ in the FISA warrant abuse uncovered in Crossfire Hurricane. Were the failures incompetent, or corrupt? That determination makes a difference in how you might craft reform measures.
Cruz: “A lawyer at the FBI creates fraudulent evidence, alters an email that is in turn used as the basis for a sworn statement to the court that the court relies on. Am I stating that accurately?"That's kind of a problem.
Horowitz: "That's correct. That's what occurred"
The FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's possible collusion with Russia was not politically motivated, but agents involved in the probe made significant and appalling mistakes."Mistakes" is a bit generous, I think. We may see the actions otherwise characterized when the criminal investigation into them comes due.
These mistakes should terrify all Americans....
The IG report is a wakeup call: for Republicans who foolishly claimed the FBI's secretive spying process was necessary and unthreatening, for anti-Trump media pundits who uncritically parroted the talking points of top officials, and for any Americans who still think it is worth trading away their liberties. If government agents were this sloppy during a politically charged investigation that they knew would put their entire apparatus under the spotlight, it's safe to assume their normal conduct is even worse.
"When this war [World War II] comes to an end, more than one out of every two workers will depend directly or indirectly upon military orders. We shall have some 10 million service men to throw on the labor market. We shall have to face a difficult reconversion period during which current goods cannot be produced and layoffs may be great. Nor will the technical necessity for reconversion necessarily generate much investment outlay in the critical period under discussion whatever its later potentialities. The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable--were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties--then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”In fact, after the war, government spending fell 61%, and the result was an economic boom. Economist David Henderson calls Samuelson’s prediction of a post-war depression the single most disastrously wrong economic prediction ever.
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this [Russia hoax] nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
To provide an example of the role that white empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony?As Powerline says, it's hard to see this as anything but an embarrassing excuse for an unsuccessful career.
— Ghost of Xmas Shipwreck (@markthesnark) December 6, 2019
Rather, this points to a current of American thought that, in the years just after the Civil War, blossomed into a formal school of philosophy. This school is called Pragmatism, and it has always been a characteristically American school of thought. Pragmatism is what the American founding showed that the French one did not. Pragmatism holds to the the maxim that all ideas should be tested against their practical consequences. Ideas that do not work out should be abandoned. Ideas that reliably produce bad consequences are bad ideas; in formal applications of the philosophy, they can even be said to be false ideas.I have argued that Aristotle is already pragmatic, in a way that is rarely recognized. In the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out that the lessons of ethics are not certain truths like one finds in the proofs of strict logic. A rich man may be destroyed by his wealth; a brave man may be destroyed just because his courage drives him into places where danger is highest. Nevertheless, for the most part, wealth helps you attain your ends; courage helps you excel in whatever you are trying to do. These things are virtues, in other words, because they work. They work in the world.
This current of thought explains why the American project succeeded while the French one fell into tyranny. Even when dealing with direct challenges to America’s founding principles, American thinkers responded to those challenges with a careful eye to the real-world consequences of their decisions. The American principles were realized, slowly: slavery was in fact banished, its replacements in Jim Crow and lynching eventually defeated. For those who favor a more principled response to evils like slavery, note that this insistence on considering the practical consequence is one of the principles of Pragmatism. The question How can this work? has to be considered, and the consequences weighed.
But what about the rights that come from the Creator? It might seem that Pragmatism is a challenge to religion, as it looks to the world instead of to God for the test of its ideas. It is certainly compatible with secular philosophy, but what about the Declaration of Independence? I would argue that Pragmatism makes room for religion as well: if God made the world, then to learn the rules of the world is to learn something about the world’s maker. (This approach to religion is called ‘natural theology.’) The only sort of religion that is ruled out by Pragmatism is the sort whose dogma reliably leads to practical disasters. The same is true of ideas in politics, economics, or other fields. Americans are characteristically interested in what works.
Neither of these proposed articles satisfy the express constitutional criteria for an impeachment, which are limited to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Neither are high or low crimes or misdemeanors. Neither are mentioned within the Constitution.Ironically, "rule of law" has been one of the biggest talking points by Democrats supporting impeachment. It is correct to say that there is a basic American principle that "no one is above the law." They apparently forget the principle that no one is beneath it, either.
Both are so vague and open ended that they could be applied in partisan fashion by a majority of the House against almost any president from the opposing party. Both are precisely what the Framers had rejected at their Constitutional Convention. Both raise the “greatest danger,” in the words of Alexander Hamilton, that the decision to impeach will be based on the “comparative strength of parties,” rather than on “innocence or guilt.”
That danger is now coming to pass, as House Democrats seek for the first time in American history to impeach a president without having at least some bipartisan support in Congress. Nor can they find any support in the words of the Constitution, or in the history of its adoption....
In doing this, they follow the view of Representative Maxine Waters who infamously declared that, when it comes to impeachment, “there is no law.”
