America: The Decrepit Empire
America is like an old business family in which the patriarch has gone senile, and the heirs are just plain stupid, competent only at blowing the inheritance. The enterprise is collapsing inexorably.
America is like an old business family in which the patriarch has gone senile, and the heirs are just plain stupid, competent only at blowing the inheritance. The enterprise is collapsing inexorably.
A university friend of mine, Peter Baldwin, whose book on the pandemic I mentioned here some months back, has just come out with another. The title is Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History. Were I a libertarian, it would always sit on my bedside table, next to a tome of Ayn Rand and a sepia print of the Unibomber in a silver frame.
Gilbert was himself, a man of no particular party. He was as suspicious of progressive levelers as he was contemptuous of the conservative defenders of entrenched interests.
I realize the above pun leaves much to be desired, but I was in an exceptionally jolly mood last week. I had come across a ridiculous article in The Atlantic which straightaway I knew would give my next post its subject and meaning, and the headline above it was “Vladimir Putin’s Waning Tolerance for Art.” Gosh, I thought, mentally addressing the author of the article, you say waning tolerance for art like it’s a bad thing.
Only a brave jury stood between Kyle Rittenhouse and Garland Injustice. I’ve written before on Fleming Foundation about AG Merrick Garland’s persecution of the Jan. 6 protesters, Steve Bannon and others.
The gentle reader may recall the series of posts in the spring of last year in which I argued that the pestilence is a biological weapon designed and launched deliberately to destabilize the West, where even a single death is a matter of public concern, by a totalitarian regime prepared to sustain such casualties in the millions especially when its own population is 1.4 billion.
There is nothing wrong with duty, but, under the sinister influence of Immanuel Kant, the public morality of the 19th century was dangerously deontological, that is, duty-bound.
In learning how not to be a Jerk, the hardest part is to listen to criticism from friends and colleagues who may be bigger Jerks than we are.
As I write, in the background on my computer plays YouTube with Judge Bruce Schroeder giving the jury its final instructions in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Wisconsin. If we still had the rule of law in America, the trial never would have occurred and the prosecutors would be in the clink for prosecutorial misconduct.
Every time I look at a newspaper, I feel like the soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the tinder box.