A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. – Bertrand De Jouvenel
George Rebane
Liberal logic juries. Reviewing some of the ‘Russian interference’ comment streams to confirm the kind of logic our leftwing readers accept and present as evidence that Russia did indeed throw the 2016 election to assure Trump’s victory, it occurs to me that many, probably most, of our empaneled juries across the country enjoy a majority of liberals. Their thought processes and ability to think critically are not lost on lawyers. We already have long years of evidence that our judicial system suffers from significant corruption by legal professionals implementing jurisprudence to solicit erroneous verdicts by playing games with both process and evidence. Now I wonder how much of the justice system mess is contributed by juries whose ability to reason and understand evidence is similar to what we often witness in these pages.
Left/Right civility side-by-side in the 5jul18 Union op-ed page. Take a look at the Other Voices ‘Vote Blue in November’ by a Ms Betsy Wobus who simply exudes raw hatred of President Trump as a reason to vote Democrat, and then compare that to the neighboring column ‘A Threat to One Person’s Free Speech is a Threat to All’ by Ms Terry McLaughlin. One contains only baseless vituperation, and the other a reasoned presentation of government’s ideology-based impact on First Amendment rights. A more vivid example of the people on either side of our widening political gulf would be hard to find.
For all the fans of Single Payer (Socialized) Medicine, we have the latest report – ‘Reform the NHS before it kills again’ – about the UK’s much-vaunted National Health Service. Researcher and author Rupert Darwall runs through a toe-curling litany of recent evidence and ongoing investigations of how the NHS has for years conducted a quiet policy of euthanasia on its patients. As we have pointed out here, and Mr Darwall reinforces – for government-run health services, especially the de facto monopolistic kind like the NHS, patients are a cost to be minimized. The obverse is true for private (for-profit) health care services for whom patients are the revenue source to be kept alive, cared for, and cured so that more patients will select the services of such enterprises. (To confirm such a difference here in the US, revisit the evidence about the healthcare that our VA provides veterans.)
Our country’s multiple identity-based cultures are diverging (becoming more “heterogeneous”). Researchers Klaus Desmet and Romain Wacziarg at the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research have completed “a systematic quantitative study of cultural convergence and divergence in the United States over time” to “assess whether cultural values have grown more or less heterogeneous”. Among a lot of other things, in their jun2018 paper ‘Cultural Divide’ they conclude that the cultures of 11 distinct groups, into which they divided the American population, became more homogeneous from 1972 to the late 1990s, and then reversed and started becoming more heterogeneous thereafter. In short, our various identity group cultures have now been diverging for the last 20 years or so. This, of course, does help explain why we are having more difficulty in communicating and accepting each other’s public policy solutions. Whoulda thought?
Earth during last half of June 2018. This YouTube video was sent to me by Russ Steele, RR reader and fellow blogger (here) who closely follows and compares the global warming hysteria to what is actually happening but missing in the lamestream media reports.
[7jul18 update] ‘If America Is Divided, So Is Europe’, so argues Tunku Varadarajan in a revealing WSJ essay. Their divisions are similar to ours, with their Left also working feverishly to bury western civilization by any and all means in order to create the chaotic change, as necessary, from which a new global collective may arise to the carefully managed, compliant, and approving cries of their great unwashed, amply augmented by hordes of Islamic and sub-Saharan migrants.
[8jul18 update] Agenda21 alive and well and advancing. A reader sent me this update on the implementation and progress of A21 that was posted on Anthony Watts’ ubiquitous blog – ‘Whatever happened to Agenda 21 and Climate Change Policy?’ There Dr Tim Ball writes –
It’s alive and well in your backyard. The entire policy of using anthropogenic global warming as a false front to implement global governance and impose how we will all live is working with remarkable success. The plan was set out by Maurice Strong as Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams because the people he arranged to implement it are unaccountable to anyone.
In ‘History’s Bad Ideas are an Inspiration for Progressives’ Victor Davis Hanson describes “the new illiberal ethos” that we witness in our daily round and on these pages. In there he details the Left’s hubristic asymmetry in public life and our nation’s affairs. VDH even explains why “supposed liberals keep revisiting discredited illiberal practices from the nation’s past.”
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