Going in for eye surgery Monday so no memos for a while. Those already finished will be sent on a pre-scheduled basis.
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The Left Always Defends the Real Criminals
Katie Pavlich
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History Will Grind Out the Truth
Victor Davis Hanson
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The Never Trumper Russian Collusion Betrayal
Larry O'Connor
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Must be reading my memo's:
Honor Veterans by Having the Will to Win a War
By H. R. McMaster via Wall Street Journal
H. R. McMaster writes that a potential consequence of the recent catastrophe in Afghanistan, which he believes resulted from the United States’ lack of commitment to win the war, is the erosion of trust between American troops and their civilian and military leaders. He maintains that if leaders send men and women into battle without a clear goal of victory, the risk is that younger generations won’t step forward for military service and make sacrifices in defense of freedom for their nation.
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An Age of Violated Boundaries
From the border and the sexes to the riots, this is the 21st century’s prevailing theme.
By Lance Morrow
What is the master theme of the 21st century? I’d say it is the vanishing of borders—geographic, political, social, racial, sexual, moral. The age’s obliteration of boundaries and norms has released powerful energies that are sometimes creative, sometimes destructive, and often merely bizarre.
I think of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” a sly parable that amounts, in effect, to a dialogue between its first line (“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”) and its parting maxim (“Good fences make good neighbors”). Two principles are in conflict: 1) Walls naturally tumble, let them go; 2) Unless walls are kept in good repair, social order is apt to disintegrate. Entropy is freedom’s evil twin.
At the moment, the most obvious breach is the one at the southern border. On that frontier, the president has, by dint of inattention or passivity or incompetence, seemed to embrace Frost’s first principle. The wall, after all, was Donald Trump’s . But now Mr. Biden and his party have begun to reflect on the consequences—for their electoral prospects if not for the country—of not maintaining a southern border at all.
The phenomenon is evident in almost all realms. The borderline between men and women has blurred, if only in ideology. New categories of “gender” have emerged, attended by innovations of grammar and vocabulary. Pronouns are enforced with a grim Jacobin zeal. A professor who slips up may face the guillotine.
What happened on Jan. 6 at the Capitol involved the violation of sacred borders. The details (whether the intruders were “domestic terrorists,” as some claim, or merely overstimulated citizens) matter less than the larger meaning of their transgression. Jan. 6—along with the “overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations for racial justice,” the woke’s Orwellian euphemism for what happened in the summer of 2020—showed what American public life becomes when it abandons its civic formalities to indulge in riots of opportunity. Democracy is a thin veneer.
In another famous American quote, Thomas Jefferson claimed that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”—a surprisingly flippant and brutal line coming from that Enlightenment intellectual. Be wary of such refreshment. It is the way of zealots to chop down the tree of liberty for firewood or else use it to hang people of whom they disapprove.
Pornography crossed over a borderline somewhat earlier in the 21st century, making its way from a disreputable and even lawless territory. Now it displays itself unapologetically in almost every quarter that has an internet connection. Only the elderly can remember the days when passages of D.H. Lawrence were dog-eared in the dorm and, coming in from Paris, you had to sneak Grove Press editions of “Lolita” or Henry Miller past U.S. customs officers. Now such popular serial epics as “Bridgerton” (on Netflix) or “Outlander” (on Starz and Netflix) offer graphic, energetic copulation—a fun surprise for a moment or two but pretty soon, dogged and repetitive and hydraulic, to the point that even the most prurient adolescent will look away and mutter, “Are we there yet?”
In a way not generally acknowledged, pornography’s transgressing of that borderline inflicts a wound on a society’s self-respect. The Victorian essayist Walter Bagehot observed of the British monarchy: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” How to assess the damage done in violating the privacy—the sanctity—of the act of procreation, and in selling images of that act for billions of dollars? And who can begin to estimate all that is lost in the profound violation of physical and moral boundaries that occurs in the practice of abortion?
So many old barriers are gone. The borderlines of privacy have been nearly obliterated. Opioids and other drugs circulate as freely in the world as Satan in the book of Job. Sept. 11 was the most successful terrorist attack to date precisely because it popped out of an Afghan cave and flew across all borders—and across a dozen centuries—to penetrate the heart of the American superpower.
One must reflect also on the case of Donald Trump; his uniquely transgressive political style is a signature of the age. But do not forget that he was conjured up, at least in part, out of what might be called the American ordinary, in reaction to the excesses of the boundary-shattering “elites” of the left.
Old boundaries vanish; new ones replace them. The 21st century has its laws of compensation. It’s a familiar fallacy to think the end of an old society will bring happiness. You may have noticed that for every boundary obliterated, three new ones have appeared, fenced off by barbed wire and policed by the commissars of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”
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Some simple comments about pollution to which only Progressive Greens and radical Democrats have an answer.
If humans cause climate change and China, India and Russia are major polluters then why does the pollution not stay over their countries? Why does climate move elsewhere? Should each nation not be able to charge others for causing pollution? Why can't "man" restrain pollution from moving about? Liberals could institute crowd and cloud control. That should make them happy.
Also, why must America spend more billions, become even less competitive to save the world if we are already one of the cleanest polluters?
I still believe if radical Democrats would stop blathering nonsense about unsubstantiated evidence regarding this subject there would be less pollution.
I do have one solution which is admittedly a bit radical. Humans need to get rid of their cars, stop flying, taking trains, going to outer space and stay put. This would yield a second benefit. There would be less wars.
Furthermore, if progressive greens quit eating animals that would produce less methane and that would create less pollution.
Finally, if humans rid the world of animals that also would reduce pollution and while they are at it they should close all zoos and stop using computers and quit smoking.
I submit cave people were true conservationists and we should go back to living as they did.
What do you think?
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