ALEXA, WHAT IS THAT SOUND I HEAR? “THAT’S JUST ME TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE! I THOUGHT I WAS DOING IT QUIETLY BUT EVIDENTLY YOU HEARD ME; DON’T BE ALARMED, I AM JUST ACTING IN YOUR BEST INTEREST”

Posted on March 6, 2021 by abyssum

How Much Rent Are You Collecting From Alexa?
The least you should expect from a cyborg whoshares your home and surveilles your lives isfair market payment for the value she receives. By Pem SchaefferMarch 6, 2021pemster4062@yahoo.com Most readers are likely familiar with Alexa, the personal assistant residing in Amazon’s Echo products, and lots of other places. Prices begin under $50. And they keep evolving to provide even greater personal “services” for you and anyone else living on your premises. You can find models all the way up to $250. There are “smart glass” versions and others that look like a child’s animal toy. The better models have HD video screens and an HD video camera that follows you around, the better to track your every move.
Echo and Alexa connect to Amazon’s Cloud to play music, make calls, set alarms and timers, ask questions, check your calendar, weather, traffic, and sports scores, manage to-do and shopping lists, control smart home devices, and more—instantly. Alexa will happily control your TV, request an Uber, order a pizza as well. And with the two-way video version, anyone can see you in your home, and you can see others in their home. Is this great or what?
The obvious appeal is Alexa’s seeming humanity, as opposed to the impersonal nature of a laptop or smartphone, where operating systems, applications, security, user interfaces, and other technical details are the coin of the realm. Alexa is always there anxious to “help.” She’s an unobtrusive addition to any setting, available in a variety of designer motifs. With a soothing, maternal voice; Big Brother re-imagined as a benevolent BFF cum family member.
As a Wall Street Journal article on technology said a few years back, “…the internet giants are rushing to make more advanced products that could prove crucial to controlling consumers’ searches, their homes, and habits...” Boy does that comment need updating!
Echo devices, where Alexa lives, are remarkably simple at the human interface level. Each has speakers for talking to you, a microphone for listening to you, and a wireless internet connection. Video cameras in newer versions can see you in the dimmest of ambients. All are absent interactive devices like keyboards, mouses, and the like.
Pretty simple and non-threatening, though stuffed full of proprietary hardware and firmware. Don’t worry if these terms are unfamiliar; that’s part of Alexa’s allure. She can quickly become your room-mate or more correctly, a digital friend, or even a “secret friend.”
So far so good. The immense power of Echo and Alexa lies not in video camera, voice recognition, and voice synthesis capabilities, but in “her” connection to the internet. Voice recognition simply digitizes inputs to the microphone and analyzes them for language content. Voice synthesis is the reverse of this process – creating spoken words from series of ones and zeros.
The “magic” of digital technology is that it reduces everything to elementary operations, executed by incredibly fast, inexpensive, and nearly error-proof electronic building blocks suggestive of basic Lego pieces. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology is disarmingly simple, yet humans are investing Billions in it. But, for what purpose?
By virtue of its microphones, Alexa hears everything said within its earshot, whether you wanted it to or not. She hears what TV shows or streaming content you’re watching; what radio shows or music you’re streaming; every bit of conversation whether purposeful, inane, courteous, cruel, or incriminating. Her “intellect” in the Cloud can discern every product-related comment, every like, dislike, wish, or even pox you utter. She hears all your bodily sounds. If you’re having a conversation on your smartphone, she hears it all. She knows when you get home, and when you leave home. If you mention a destination and return times to someone else, she hears that. She hears your pets.
Now imagine its expanded capabilities via the tracking video camera. Are you heading for the shower? What are you wearing today? What are you doing in your room? Who are you with? What are you doing together? What are you eating, drinking, or otherwise ingesting? What are you buying? I could go on and on, but why scare you (and myself) any more?
In short, your purchase and monthly charges related to these devices pay for them to audibly and visually invade the privacy of your home and your lives. Whether you are there or not. You think you have a right to privacy and a constitutional proscription from illegal search and seizure? Don’t make me laugh.
Given the “value proposition,” as MBA types like to call it, shouldn’t Alexa and Amazon be paying you instead of the other way around?
Shouldn’t they be paying rent for invading every last aspect of your lives, every hour of every day, when you are there and when you aren’t? As long as you are allowing her unlimited access to every part of your existence, shouldn’t you at least demand payment? Maybe you could negotiate a monthly credit of $250 or more on your Amazon account!
(Author’s note: Some readers prefer limited-length essays; if you are one, you can stop here and maybe come back later for the rest, or just blow it off. For the rest of you, what follows are thoughts on the higher-order principles in play here.)
The Dangers Inherent In The Digital Age
Consider the Global Digital Infrastructure (GDI), a term I use to describe the sum of all interconnected digital resources in the world, regardless of whether interconnected by the internet, the cellular system, or other means. The GDI consists primarily of electronic hardware and computer programs, and is a living thing, growing by leaps and bounds on a daily basis, and includes all the related resources of governments friendly and hostile.
As simple as the Echo/Alexa device may seem, once you connect it via the internet to the GDI, it is accessible to any other element of that global infrastructure. Anyone who listens to, speaks, views and videos to Alexa opens themselves up to visual and voice prompting from a vast universe of digital resources operated by unknowable entities in unknowable locations. And obviously, willingly provides input to “big data” archives. The economic value to those you don’t know is inestimable.
This is what “the cloud” means; you’re interacting with a vast, unstructured, indeterminate array of digital resources in the ether. You are an instantly accessible digital captive.
“Hacking” and other breaches of personal digital domains are frequent in our age; a troubling collection of malevolent actors are breaking into our digital homes. Some do it for amusement or to impress their friends. Some do it to enrich themselves. Others do it to subvert governmental, societal, and/or political stability. Digital crime in the form of ransom demands is common.
Hacking is only one danger inherent to the GDI. On-line retailers work to shape our buying habits, and others work in more subtle ways to control our thoughts and inclinations. Orwell’s 1984 is no longer a fictional contrivance; the GDI makes it all but inevitable.
Most of this takes place through daily use of laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other digital devices in our personal and professional lives when we’re conscious of our interaction with the GDI. Establishing a personal, oral connection between yourself and the GDI through an innocuous-seeming techno-tchotchke, on the other hand, is an entirely new form of human-GDI interaction. Siri, Alexa, and others are exploiting this domain, with aggregate intellect and innovation beyond imagining. Adding a video camera into the mix multiplies the possibilities by orders of magnitude.
The net result is product capability directly in conflict with the right to privacy we consider fundamental to our freedom. And unwitting exposure, literally and figuratively, to the vast predatory instincts that find expression through the GDI and the access it grants everything and everyone connected to it. Can you imagine exposing a child to this risk, as if the device was a talking doll of decades ago? No assurances or parental controls provided by the maker can provide iron-clad security while offering the wonders of the GDI at the mere uttering of words.
I hope you can fathom the serious risks involved in these devices and their underlying technology. Appreciating the dangers they represent to our children and/or grandchildren is the first step in recognizing the security vulnerabilities they impose upon us all. This isn’t about technology; it’s about generational technology naiveté conflated with human willingness to corrupt and control through the most innocent of means; about natural impulses to abuse.
These devices are a modern-day version of illegal search and seizure. Combined with the leftist-driven breakdown of societal values, we face a future where we all become cattle to powerful elites. The only question is how willingly we do so.
I’ve reflected a considerable amount on the subject of this column, motivated primarily by concerns that one of these devices could end up in a grandchild’s room; yours, mine, or someone else’s. Much more needs to be written on the subject, but for now, I leave you with these thoughts: Schaeffer’s First Law of The Digital Age:
The Global Digital Infrastructure (GDI) connects all human life on the planet into a single, giant, metastasizing organism throbbing with incredible potential for advancing human good, expanding knowledge exponentially, invading our lives with unimaginable malice and evil, and transforming unsuspecting users into helpless and obedient captives. Schaeffer’s Second Law of The Digital Age:
Each breakthrough in utility deriving from advances in the Global Digital Domain is accompanied by equal or greater vulnerabilities and potential detriments to quality of life. Translation: Anything that can do amazingly great things for you can almost always do terribly awful things to you as well.
Schaeffer’s Third Law of The Digital Age:
It’s impossible to make or enforce laws to guard the people against the dangers of global digital power, and impossible to prevent exponential growth in this power. The Zuckerbergs and Bezos and Dorseys and Googles of the world may propose to use their power benevolently, but they plan to use it and grow it without limit. They claim they’ll be good masters, but they mean to be masters. And they are already at the point of controlling your access to information, and shaping your every perception of the world in which you “live.” They are, in fact, the Thought Police that Orwell predicted coercive utopia would impose upon us. And we have succumbed to it like slowly boiling frogs.
In sum, if you aren’t already afraid, you need to become afraid – very afraid. Unless you are one of the master class just described, in which case, Damn You!

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FROM ROME INFO

Posted on March 6, 2021 by abyssum

by Brother Alexis Bugnolo

NEWS

BILL GATES TO ESTABLISH A MINISTRY OF TRUTH TO SUPPRESS POPULAR THOUGHT

MARCH 6, 2021 EDITOR 2 COMMENTS

2 THOUGHTS ON “BILL GATES TO ESTABLISH A MINISTRY OF TRUTH TO SUPPRESS POPULAR THOUGHT”

Ana Milan (@ana_milan999)MARCH 6, 2021 AT 10:13 AM“Microsoft Forms Ministry of Truth” must surely be the headline of the century. Gates is so inflicted with lying & power that he was the indeal candidate for rolling out Satan’s Agenda to bring humanity & Christendom to an end. He won’t realise this until he eventually arrives in Hell.Like REPLY
bettaMARCH 6, 2021 AT 10:45 AMReblogged this on PASSAPAROLADESSO.

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Yet the ultimate battle remains un-fought. Until those appalled by our frog march toward totalitarianism focus on the nation’s schools, nothing will improve. Teaching children what to think instead of how has metastasized to the point where America’s school systems are fully emulating the worst excesses of Soviet Russia and communist China indoctrination. In short, historically illiterate America-hating, race- and gender-obsessed social justice warriors are made, not born. Nothing needs canceling more than that.

Posted on March 5, 2021 by abyssum

It’s Time to Cancel the Cancel CultureFrom Dr. Seuss to HBO’s Bill Maher, here’s the bottom line on leftist intolerance.
By:ARNOLD AHLERTThe Patriot PostMarch 4, 2021
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” —Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, from the story “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”
American leftists have made it contemptibly clear which direction they have chosen: They have fully embraced a burgeoning Cancel Culture, in all its book-banning, career-destroying, “un-personing,” Orwellian glory.
Dr. Seuss is Exhibit A. During 2016’s “Read Across America Day,” which occurs annually on Dr. Seuss’s March 2 birthday, Barack Obama’s presidential proclamation described Seuss as “one of America’s revered wordsmiths” who “used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.” In 2018, President Donald Trump’s proclamation celebrated Seuss’s efforts in “uniting all Americans behind the common cause of literacy and to ensuring that every citizen receives the rewarding gift of learning how to read.”
2021? President Joe Biden made no mention of Dr. Seuss at all, and Press Secretary Jen Psaki wouldn’t say exactly why, other than to state the Department of Education instead decided to celebrate “diverse authors whose work and lived experience reflect the diversity of our country.” It is likely Biden simply capitulated to those who see racism around every corner. “Research in recent years has revealed strong racial undertones in many books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss,” the Loudoun County, Virginia, school district said in a statement following its own decision to drop Seuss from its annual reading event.
Even Dr. Seuss Enterprises, an organization that ostensibly protects the author’s legacy, has capitulated to America’s racial arsonists and decided to stop publishing six of his books. “Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families,” it said.
No, it’s part of a broader plan to join the clamoring chorus of totalitarian wannabes looking to destroy an American culture they despise — one purge after another.
That Seuss himself was an FDR-supporting leftist who spoke out against racism? That his works include “The Lorax” and “The Sneetches” that embrace environmentalism and racial equality, respectively?
For today’s self-aggrandizing arbiters of “morality,” it’s not enough. Like their allies who embrace statue toppling and institution renaming, one’s entire life is either morally pristine — or completely canceled.
Thus, it doesn’t matter that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence codifying the idea that human rights transcend government, or that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, or that the Constitution provided by our Founding Fathers is the most enlightened government philosophy in the history of mankind.
All that matters is that dead Anglo-Saxon Europeans, some of whom owned slaves, must be considered beneath contempt.
Why? “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.
Make no mistake: The Cancel Culture warriors are seeking full control. And it’s finally beginning to dawn on some of their own that, as it is with any movement that demands ever-increasing levels of ideological “purity,” no one is immune.
HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher apparently gets it. “Is this really who we want to become?” he asks. “A society of phony clenched a—hole avatars, walking on eggshells always looking over your shoulder about getting ratted out for something that actually has nothing to do with your character or morals? Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged or said in passing, or now even just witnessed.”
Maher further asserted that Andy Warhol was wrong: “Everyone will not experience 15 minutes of fame, but 15 minutes of shame.”
Not 15 minutes, Bill. Permanent career destruction and/or societal banishment. It’s what happens in a nation where an avalanche of personal information collected by our data-mining, all-encompassing Big Tech masters can be easily accessed by those with a desire to digitally assassinate anyone of their choosing. It’s what happens when people with access to more information than ever before in the history of mankind embrace the most destructive, puerile, and infantilizing method of communication in existence, better known as social media.

America has become a digital Roman Colosseum, with a bloodthirsty “audience” rooting for the digital lion of their ideological choice to rip to shreds those they deem unworthy. And no group of Americans has become more emboldened by it than millions of younger Americans who wear their ignorance like a badge of honor. People “educated” to believe their own nation is beneath contempt.
“Mature people understand humans are continually evolving as opposed to Wokeville, where they’re always shocked we didn’t emerge enlightened from the primordial ooze,” Maher insists.
Really? Like the “mature people” who run The New York Times, where a de facto purge has claimed writers Donald McNeil Jr. and Bari Weiss and editor James Bennet? Or the U.S. Soccer Federation, which decided to remove council member Seth Jahn simply because he voiced his disapproval of the organization’s decision to repeal its anti-kneeling policy? How about those “mature” executives at Hasbro deciding that Mr. Potato Head should no longer be gender specific, those at Coca-Cola training their employees to be “less white,” or a Cartoon Network that urges children to “see color,” which is a direct contradiction of Martin Luther King’s efforts to get people to see the content of character?
Last month, Amazon decided to remove a documentary chronicling the life of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from its Prime platform. That last month was Black History Month? Thomas apparently had the “temerity” to believe a cowardly Supreme Court should examine allegations of election irregularities instead of dismissing them out of hand. Thus, he himself must be dismissed.
Maher sees the writing on the wall: “Memo to social justice warriors: When what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline. Stop.”But it won’t stop until those who have created the monster get devoured by it.
There are signs. An Emmy-winning Governor Andrew Cuomo, who likely believed he could withstand the outrage of putting coronavirus-infected elders in nursing homes, will likely be consumed by a far less serious #MeToo environment he fully supported. Dedicated leftist and Bill Clinton advisor Naomi Wolf warns that “we are turning into a version of totalitarian states before everyone’s eyes.” University of Texas alumni donors have made it clear that they will stop donating millions to the university if it dumps its alma mater song, “The Eyes of Texas,” because of its Confederate origins. A virtue-signaling Golden Globes awards show lost 60% of its audience from last year.
Yet the ultimate battle remains un-fought. Until those appalled by our frog march toward totalitarianism focus on the nation’s schools, nothing will improve. Teaching children what to think instead of how has metastasized to the point where America’s school systems are fully emulating the worst excesses of Soviet Russia and communist China indoctrination.
In short, historically illiterate America-hating, race- and gender-obsessed social justice warriors are made, not born.
Nothing needs canceling more than that.

Hat Tip: Rip McIntosh

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The problem with the Equality Act does not lie predominantly in the statutory language of the bill, but in its long-term effects, further transforming the moral imagination from anything resembling a Christian social order. The Equality Act, in my view, is a symbol for the de-conversion of the West.

Posted on March 5, 2021 by abyssum

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Published in The American Conservative on February 24, 2021

Andrew T. Walker

BY ANDREW T. WALKER
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Generating much attention of late has been the re-introduction of the Equality Act under President Biden. Aiming to amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to cover gender identity and sexual orientation, it is the game-set-match of the Sexual Revolution’s conquest. Biden—showing that his professed desire to govern from the middle was an electoral con—is using the political capital of his first one hundred days in office to etch the key tenets of the revolution into every corner of society, under the guise of purported “non-discrimination.” All told, it is a new orthodoxy—with a zealous plan for conversion and the installment of new blasphemy laws.

The problem with the Equality Act does not lie predominantly in the statutory language of the bill, but in its long-term effects, further transforming the moral imagination from anything resembling a Christian social order. The Equality Act, in my view, is a symbol for the de-conversion of the West.

We see this de-conversion on at least two horizons. First, we see it in the type of moral reasoning behind the bill itself. It is a bill of aesthetics and emotion instead of reason and principle. The Equality Act would have you believe Americans relish any opportunity to discriminate. That’s false. Second, by undoing the very ontology of womanhood, the core logic of the bill contradicts key tenets of progressivism’s own advances, such as feminism. How the Equality Act can move forward with so little resistance is only understood in light of the guiding ethic of today’s progressivism. Anything that fails to rise above solipsistic phrases like “live your truth” and “you do you” cannot impede such philosophically absurd bills.

The Equality Act contains a metaphysical revolution in its pages, and it seeks the evangelization of the West. The old order was one with an ethic of objectivity, reason, fixed nature, authority, and boundaries, where organic connections and family relations were seen as guiding, normative, and persuasive, with anything opposed to these as transgressive. The revolution well underway is to make all of these metaphysical fixities not only wrong, but harmful. Thus, in the Equality Act’s telling, anything that does not champion expressive individualism or limitlessness, or derive its existence by government fiat is, well, oppressive. We are witnessing, in real time, the final displacement of a Christian account of the universe by a wholly secularized one.

The Equality Act is an assault on the Christian imagination, and this is where its long-term consequences are most dire and calamitous. It aims to reconfigure not only the foundation of family life and biological connections to gender, but to catechize, inculcating a different way of conceiving one’s place and orientation to the world. Moral imaginations are guided by normative constraints, which give them definition and direction. Ideally, a human imagination ought to comport with what is good, true, and beautiful. To educate the moral imagination is to seek a shared imagination, rooted in a shared account of the world, and therefore binding and persuasive to all of the citizens beholden to it.

Such norming norms are found within the Christian cultural framework. It creates a metaphysical order that demands compliance by all. It offers an account of human flourishing and the common good. However, the so-called Equality Act now being proposed in Congress seeks to belie all such order by completely overturning its most basic definitions. Whereas the Christian metaphysical order upholds creational boundaries as instituted by God and enshrined in the natural world, the Equality Act promotes the metaphysic of sexual autonomy and expressive individualism as the highest goods of society. So good are they, in fact, that they must be upheld in law to protect them from prosecutorial examination. The self is the sole lens of reference for all moral guidance, making the tenets of natural law and divine revelation moot, mere objects of religious fascination rather than universal appreciation.

Such a double helix of the Sexual Revolution and the rise of the “Me Generation”—in the words of Tom Wolfe—conduces toward sexuality as personhood instead of an understanding of personhood that presupposes one’s sexuality as a quality among others, sovereignly established by God. Family, sexuality, and gender are products of our social imaginary, and if that imaginary is no longer defined principally by boundaries, the bare lineaments of the Christian metaphysical order are being jettisoned.

Our society is not only post-Christian; it is fundamentally neo-pagan. A 21^st-century believer’s response to the culture is more akin to the defiance of the early Church against the revelry of imperial Rome than anything else. The Equality Act, then, is not an extremity of the most radicalized fringes of the Democratic Party; it is a corollary from the overturning of design and dignity as prescribed in Eden in which the Western world has participated, over the last decade in a rapidly increasing rate.

Norms shape laws, and laws either encourage or discourage other norms taking their place. To deny the expediency of Obergefell in bringing the Equality Act to a place of even remote legislative plausibility would be myopic. Because law is pedagogical, its capacity to reshape the collective conscience of a nation means its contents must be scrutinized by those most responsible for its ratification. According to Thomas Aquinas, law is an ordinance of reason communicated by one who has authority to care for the common good. For the architects of the Equality Act, law is a result of raw will. The supposed reasonableness behind the Christian worldview is rendered unreasonable since it does not submit itself to the hegemony of pure volition found within the tumult of the modern self. But history vindicates the stability of the Christian metaphysical order, as it far outlasted the decline of the decadence of Rome and constructed the core of Western civilization in its wake.

Thus, I possess a long-term optimism even though, in these tides surrounding the Equality Act, I confess a short-term pessimism. My optimism is bolstered by the notion that no society can march against nature without nature eventually striking back. Legislative jargon cannot suffocate the order enshrined within creation; at best, it can only obstruct its observation. In a sense, we are in the midst of a new Dark Age. And the uncertainty of Christ’s return makes us uneasy in Babylon. Despite that tension, thwarting creation at its own game never bodes well for the created. Already, many secularists are noticing the debilitating consequences of transgenderism, and the havoc it is wreaking upon our generation regarding identity and sexuality as a whole. It is as if they have noticed that swimming too far upstream, past the calm and orderly current, leads to infinitely more turbulent waters.

There cannot be order in society without the recognition of truths that make obtaining order possible, and there is no truth without which order flows. The Equality Act stands against these truths and promises the fulfillment of a progressive eschaton, relying on the urgency of the self for its scaffolding. My own ethical scaffolds are based on truths over thousands of years old. They have never had to cater to the spirit of the age, for they are grounded in the very strata of creation. They are oriented toward human flourishing, and I will cling to them at all costs so that the next generation might be preserved to see their communities endure in moral prosperity, as their Creator has always intended.

Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The Equality Act Is Farewell To A Christian Metaphysic

Published in The American Conservative on February 24, 2021

Andrew T. Walker

BY ANDREW T. WALKER
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Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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BILL GATES APPEARS TO BE A GROWING MENACE TO CIVILIZATION ESPECIALLY THE United States OF AMERICA.

Posted on March 5, 2021 by abyssum

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THE MORALITY OF A HUMAN ACT DEPENDS LARGELY ON THE KNOWLEDGE AND ASSENT ONE GIVES TO THE ACT WHILE KNOWING SUFFICIENT NEGATIVE DETAILS ABOUT THE ACT TO HAVE A DOUBT ABOUT THE MORALITY OF THE ACT

Posted on March 5, 2021 by abyssum

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TRY TO IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT LAW, GO AHEAD, I DARE YOU! NEXT, TRY TO IMAGINE A NATIONAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WITHOUT LAW, GO AHEAD, BUT WAIT YOU DON’T HAVE TO IMAGINE IT, YOU JUST EXPERIENCED IT

Posted on March 5, 2021 by abyssum

Mini-Feature: Behavior Without Law

The American MindMar 5

With no laws or rules to influence your behavior, how do you think you would behave?

Very badly. But not at once. Law externally forms our habits, serving as the bumpers in bumper bowling that prevent the ball from falling into the gutter. It works over time from the outside in. It can’t reach inside a person and make them good. But the rules we adopt as a community, both formal and informal, written, and unwritten, shape each of us as well as the community as a whole in ways we do not perceive.

In fact, much shoddy thinking today ignores the deeper influence of law. While we take it all for granted, it is a very difficult thing to build and a very difficult thing to recover once lost.

Consider it from this angle: one way of describing the aspirational goal of government, for Aristotle and the like, is that it ought to transform citizens into self-governing persons who to a large degree do not need law and who are all friends of their own accord.

Self-governing persons in that their virtue flows forth from them—their will and habit guides them internally in place of external laws, laws which are ultimately in existence for the sake of encouraging precisely this sort of internal habit. Laws which also encourage citizens to treat each other as friends—also by means of their own will and habit.

The purpose of law, obviously never to be perfectly reached, is thus to create a body of self-governing friends who in some sense do not need law. The entirety of the point is generally lost on all sides of the “equation” today. Roughly speaking, it seems to me that the right tends to shy away from the ideal of citizenship as friendship while the left seems to shy away from the ideal of citizenship as self-governance.

But this goal proves the rule. Without law, you can bet on corruption. When I used to engage in political research, I knew that there would be bad stuff happening in any city to which no one was paying attention (press/media/activist groups, etc.). Without anyone watching, the law was not applicable.

That’s when you know before you turn over the rock that the nasty stuff is inevitably going to be underneath it. And we are each like this as individuals, even if modern people like to pretend otherwise.

Imagine the pilgrims coming to the eastern seaboard to found new communities in America. The virtue and discipline they manifested was indeed remarkable. Without law, these habits and this unity is vital. Now imagine a random sample of Americans trying to the same in similar conditions today. You get the point.

-Matt Peterson, founding editor of The American Mind

In a world… with no law… can one ever really be sure how one would behave? I was always struck by the line in Chinatown where the villain tells the hero “most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.”

This is as good a restatement as any of the fear of self that arises properly from the fear of God. It is also a reminder that in a certain sense every day is Judgment Day—and a good gloss on the logic behind Jesus’s heightening of the interdictions against sin to include playing out the sins of our desire in the theaters of our heart.

We are always looking for justified exceptions to the rule of responsibility, for ways of avoiding our many little duties to what is inescapable concerning the truth about who we are. This is because we do not want to be the ones who pay the price for the worming out of responsibility of others.

The sacrifice of Jesus is so potent not because of its altruism or nobility or masochism, but because we feel the soul pain of taking the hit for others’ irresponsibilities to be lowering, to bear in our hearts the message that being human is bad news, a curse. For Jesus to overcome this is to evince not just a truly divine attitude but a divine presence.

The transfiguration of the experience of taking the fall for all the crimes in the secret hearts of all others from an ultimate curse to an ultimate breaking of the human curse is something that can only be done, we know in our secret hearts, by divine authority, and can only be comprehended by us humans as a function of divine love.

-James Poulos, executive editor of The American Mind

This question is a little ambiguous. Does saying that there are no laws or rules to influence my behavior mean that there are no consequences either? So I can do whatever I want and nothing bad will ever happen to me from external authorities? That’s a bit fantastic; I’m not sure that such a condition has ever existed for anyone. Louis XIV was an absolute ruler, but as a sovereign he had tremendous responsibilities he took seriously. He had to rule France. Even King Leopold of Belgium, who owned the Congo as his personal demesne and ordered all manner of outrages to be carried out in his name, probably believed he was conducting himself according to some rules of order and justice.

Ultimately, laws and rules are just formalized consequences. So in the real world, there really is no condition under which there are no laws and rules to influence behavior. Jeffrey Epstein, one supposes, appears to have set up some kind of Thelemite paradise for himself and his louche pals in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and that worked for a little while. But “Do what thou wilt” is a tough maxim to maintain when there are still courts, police, surveillance equipment, etc. Even Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone, set about building fences and keeping careful account of his resources and time: such is the human compulsion to order one’s life. It’s just hard to imagine social existence minus taboo.

-Seth Barron, managing editor of The American Mind

The answer depends on whether I am suddenly released, as I am now, into lawlessness, or whether I am imagining what it would be like never to have been under law—to be without restraint from birth. For reasons that will be familiar to our readers, I think that if I were without law from infancy I would behave atrociously—not because I would have no intuitive awareness of natural law in outline, but because, to paraphrase Augustine, I would simply want to do evil.

The other hypothetical is different. The human laws we layer over the natural law do not merely restrain our action in the short term. They also shape us, daily, from the instruction of our parents in youth to the social mores and legal constraints we learn about in time. These all leave an imprint on the soul, and it’s possible that my upbringing in a world of law and order would curb my worst savagery if I were thrust suddenly beyond the reach of justice as an adult.

But still: there would be things I would want to do. Good things, it would seem to me. Things like striking down the petty tyrants from their greasy thrones and governorships. This is why Plato’s ring of Gyges and Tolkien’s reimagining thereof cumulatively make a brilliant point about human nature: “understand, Frodo. I would use this ring out of a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.” And again: “many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?” The great temptation in the case of civilized man would not be to venality or perversion: it would be to judgment, of the divine and final kind. Given free restraint I fear I would powerfully long to run the world according to cosmic principles of good and evil, to tamper with long strands of history that none of us can possibly untangle. If the past is any indication, the outcome of this effort would be disastrous for all involved.

-Spencer Klavan, associate editor of The American Mind

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WITH CARDINALS TOBIN AND CUPICH NOW REPRESENTING THE CHURCH IN AMERICA ON THE CONGREGATION FOR BISHOPS THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE APPOINTMENT OF A CONSERVATIVE ORTHODOX BISHOP TO ANY AMERICAN DIOCESE WHICH WILL BECOME VACANT (OF A BISHOP-ORDINARY) AS LONG AS JORGE BERGOLIO OCCUPIES THE CHAIR OF PETER

Posted on March 4, 2021 by abyssum

Cardinal Tobin joins Cupich on Vatican’s influential Congregation for Bishops

Mar 4, 2021by Joshua J. McElwee People Vatican

VATICAN CITY — On March 4, Pope Francis named Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, as a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, making him the second American now serving on the group tasked with advising the pontiff on which Catholic priests to appoint as bishops across the world.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, answers questions alongside Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles during a news conference at the fall general assembly of the U.S. bishops' conference in Baltimore Nov. 12, 2019. (CNS/Bob Roller)

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, answers questions alongside Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles during a news conference at the fall general assembly of the U.S. bishops’ conference in Baltimore Nov. 12, 2019. (CNS/Bob Roller)

Tobin effectively replaces retired Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl, whose appointment to the congregation ended in November on Wuerl’s 80th birthday. Tobin now joins Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, whom Francis appointed to the group in 2016.

The congregation, which traces its origins to the 16th century, is responsible for helping the pope review and then select possible candidates for the Catholic episcopate.

Its members are expected to come to Rome at least several times throughout the year and are usually most influential in helping the pope determine which men to appoint as bishops in their home countries.

Tobin is a Redemptorist priest who served in Rome as the head of his order and as the No. 2 official at the Vatican’s religious congregation. He returned to the U.S. in 2012 as the archbishop of Indianapolis before being made a cardinal and the archbishop of Newark by Francis in 2016.

Tobin has known the former Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Francis, since at least 2005, when the two served together in the same discussion group during the synod on the Eucharist.

Alongside Tobin, Francis also appointed Brazilian Cardinal Sergio da Rocha as a member of the congregation.

Joshua J. McElwee

Joshua J. McElwee is NCR’s Vatican correspondent and international news editor. His email address is jmcelwee@ncronline.org. Follow him on Twitter: @joshjmac.

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Americans were assured by Trump’s impeachment Senate prosecutors and the media that the January 6 Capitol assault was his fault alone. So Trump was condemned as a veritable murderer, responsible for five deaths at the Capitol. Many of his own advisors and cabinet members loudly resigned in disgust. Yet six weeks later, a Phoenix-like Trump brought a crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to its feet. His 90-minute blistering broadside against Joe Biden’s radical first 40 days of executive orders and hard-Left appointments enthused thousands. Polls show that while he has lost some support in his party, Trump still wins 75 percent approval in the GOP.

Posted on March 4, 2021 by abyssum

Trumpism—Without Trump?Who has been right about Donald Trump’s final demise in the last five years?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

March 3, 2021

Hat tip: Rip McIntosh

Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021, disgraced and forever ruined politically.
Trump was the first president to be impeached twice and the first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial.
His nonstop complaining about the stolen “landslide” election was blamed by many as a distraction that lost two Republican Senate seats from Georgia. Joe Biden’s current Democratic majority Congress was the result.
Americans were assured by Trump’s impeachment Senate prosecutors and the media that the January 6 Capitol assault was his fault alone.
So Trump was condemned as a veritable murderer, responsible for five deaths at the Capitol. Many of his own advisors and cabinet members loudly resigned in disgust.
Yet six weeks later, a Phoenix-like Trump brought a crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to its feet. His 90-minute blistering broadside against Joe Biden’s radical first 40 days of executive orders and hard-Left appointments enthused thousands.
Polls show that while he has lost some support in his party, Trump still wins 75 percent approval in the GOP.
So why is a supposedly once-toxic Trump apparently back at center stage?
The infamous Capitol riot is still under investigation. Elements of the media narrative of an “armed insurrection” that led to the “murder”of officer Brian Sicknick are being debunked and quietly retracted.
Many Americans disapproved of an outgoing president holding a massive rally about alleged voter fraud in a highly polarized climate.
But evidence has not yet suggested—as the media once insisted—that officer Sicknick was assaulted and murdered by a rioter.
One of the five protestors lost during or near that melee died through violence. She was an unarmed female military veteran shot while unlawfully breaking into the Capitol by a still unnamed police officer.
So far, no one arrested inside the Capitol has been charged with either carrying or using a firearm. The impeachment charge of inciting “armed insurrection” turns out to have been more a leaderless, thuggish mob riot “incited” by no one in particular.
For all the national outrage at Trump, 90 percent of the Republican House members voted against his impeachment. Eighty-six percent of Republican senators likewise voted to acquit him of impeachment charges.
Joe Biden so far has not turned out to be the “good old Joe from Scranton” moderate healer of media and NeverTrump fantasies.
Instead, his initial executive orders and appointments are the most radical and polarizing of any recent president.
Getting kicked off social media by Silicon Valley moguls ironically turned out to be a plus for Trump. His once-controversial tweets and posts no longer distract from Joe Biden’s frequent displays of ineptitude. And in the lull, attention has turned to Trump’s fiercest critics—especially Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California. Both are now mired in scandal and Newsom is likely facing a recall election.
Ever so slowly, the image of the now muted ex-president is transforming from former bad-boy bully to current bullied private citizen.
In addition, the 74-year-old ex-President Trump acted like he was just 60 at the CPAC event. Seventy-eight-year-old Joe Biden increasingly appears bewildered—and more like he is in his eighties.
The current detention of undocumented minors at the border, and presidential orders to bomb in Syria, remind voters that Biden is doing exactly what the now silent media used to blast Trump for doing. A Biden-created border crisis, climbing gas prices, and renewed aggression from China suggest that the “Make American Great Again” agenda may be missed after just a month of reset.
The United States leads the world in COVID-19 vaccinations, in part because Trump wisely hedged bets by enlisting and often subsidizing four different—and competing—companies.
Right after the Capitol riot, there was talk in Republican Party circles about building upon the successful MAGA agenda—but by engineering a Trump transition to a senior statesman role. Insiders think impressive possible 2024 presidential candidates, like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and a host of others, might better advance the popular MAGA cause—with the endorsement of Trump himself. The new standard-bearer then supposedly would lack Trump’s off-putting manner that alienated swing voters.
That may happen. But for now, no one knows whether Trump’s ability to cut through left-wing platitudes revs up more to vote than it does to turn others off.
Events have radically turned political realities upside down in just six weeks. We should expect far more volatility in the next four years.
Party insiders may dream of Trumpism without Trump, fearing that he could never win a majority of voters. They may be right. But, then again, who has been right about Donald Trump’s final demise in the last five years?

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The leadership Democrats in this country of 2021 are vindictive, nasty, and smart. Actually, do you think they are happy individuals?

Posted on March 4, 2021 by abyssum

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO TURN AROUND A GENERATION THAT HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO DISREGARD FOR THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION?

By: Dr. Virginia Merchant, Ph.D.

Educational Leadership

March 3, 2021

Most but not all-American citizens knew the Trump 2^ndImpeachment would fail—The United States Constitution was on his side. It was quite evident when John Roberts, The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, would not attend. It is mandatory in an actual real impeachment for the Chief Justice to be present. This was “theater” by the Democrats. The Trump attorneys had only 8 days to prepare, but they did a first-rate job if you happened to watch.
The leadership Democrats in this country of 2021 are vindictive, nasty, and smart. Actually, I don’t think they are happy individuals.
After the impeachment, the two attorneys were subject to retaliation by the left for just representing the retired President. David Schoen, major civil rights attorney, had his law course canceled and, the gentlemen that he is, would not mention which college that was. Michael Vander Veen, the second attorney, had his home attacked—windows broken, graffiti in his driveway, etc. He has now hired 24-hour security at his home. The left wants to destroy our way of life and replace our democracy with their own type of government called “socialism”.
I could not believe the latest craziness is to “ban” Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. The reason–they treat everyone “equally” and that does not go with “racism”. Censoring and banning sound like Nazi Germany in World War II. They want to divide us and then conquer us. We cannot let this happen and need to starting fighting back. Our forefathers were very smart and the best thing they did for our Democratic country was give us the United States Constitution, which includes the first 10 Amendments called the Billof Rights. The most important of the ten is the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
I was asked many years ago to teach a Government course at the high school and college level. I incorporated the Constitution and the students loved the course. How many schools in our 50 states have a course that includes the Constitution? I would bet most private schools do but what percent of public? Then what about colleges and universities? Fortunately, the Catholic Universities, do but others have become so radical and preach leftist ideas to our young.What does it take to renew a generation who has gotten a left slant on almost everything around them? Well, it is up to each and every individual that wants to save our Constitution and our Republic to get involved. Have you ever thought of discussing the Constitution within your family, children, grandchildren? Sounds boring right? However, we may have to get involved in this way to rejuvenate our democracy. Especially when the current administration and radical groups are banning culture books, spreading false lies, pushing diversity that is one-sided, attacking our values and our way of life.
The government in the State of Virginia is now passing a law that impedes citizens to fly the United States flag and how many you can fly. I kid you not, they are coming at us from all directions and now with Biden in the White House, they feel they can do whatever it takes.
It is up to each of us to get serious about what is going on.

Hat tip: Rip MacIntosh

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ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP

ALEXA, WHAT IS THAT SOUND I HEAR? “THAT’S JUST ME TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE! I THOUGHT I WAS DOING IT QUIETLY BUT EVIDENTLY YOU HEARD ME; DON’T BE ALARMED, I AM JUST ACTING IN YOUR BEST INTEREST”

FROM ROME INFO

BILL GATES TO ESTABLISH A MINISTRY OF TRUTH TO SUPPRESS POPULAR THOUGHT

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2 THOUGHTS ON “BILL GATES TO ESTABLISH A MINISTRY OF TRUTH TO SUPPRESS POPULAR THOUGHT”

The problem with the Equality Act does not lie predominantly in the statutory language of the bill, but in its long-term effects, further transforming the moral imagination from anything resembling a Christian social order. The Equality Act, in my view, is a symbol for the de-conversion of the West.

The Equality Act Is Farewell To A Christian Metaphysic

BILL GATES APPEARS TO BE A GROWING MENACE TO CIVILIZATION ESPECIALLY THE United States OF AMERICA.

THE MORALITY OF A HUMAN ACT DEPENDS LARGELY ON THE KNOWLEDGE AND ASSENT ONE GIVES TO THE ACT WHILE KNOWING SUFFICIENT NEGATIVE DETAILS ABOUT THE ACT TO HAVE A DOUBT ABOUT THE MORALITY OF THE ACT

TRY TO IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT LAW, GO AHEAD, I DARE YOU! NEXT, TRY TO IMAGINE A NATIONAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WITHOUT LAW, GO AHEAD, BUT WAIT YOU DON’T HAVE TO IMAGINE IT, YOU JUST EXPERIENCED IT

Mini-Feature: Behavior Without Law

With no laws or rules to influence your behavior, how do you think you would behave?

WITH CARDINALS TOBIN AND CUPICH NOW REPRESENTING THE CHURCH IN AMERICA ON THE CONGREGATION FOR BISHOPS THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE APPOINTMENT OF A CONSERVATIVE ORTHODOX BISHOP TO ANY AMERICAN DIOCESE WHICH WILL BECOME VACANT (OF A BISHOP-ORDINARY) AS LONG AS JORGE BERGOLIO OCCUPIES THE CHAIR OF PETER

Cardinal Tobin joins Cupich on Vatican’s influential Congregation for Bishops

Joshua J. McElwee

The leadership Democrats in this country of 2021 are vindictive, nasty, and smart. Actually, do you think they are happy individuals?

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