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A view of the future. Robots versus man:
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Don’t Bail Out Putin
His Ukraine gambit is ultimately about enlisting the West in a scheme to prop up his rule.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Good things come to strong, successful nations. Neighbors crave closer ties. Allies don’t object to being part of a “sphere of influence.” Vladimir Putin has given his neighboring peoples only reasons to run away from him. They wouldn’t clamor for NATO membership if not for the kind of regime Mr. Putin operates.
All nations have geographical vulnerabilities on paper, including the U.S. with its long land border with Mexico and Canada. But they worry about these vulnerabilities only when they need to. If it were in Mr. Putin’s interest, he would be first to emphasize that Ukraine is incapable of posing a military threat to Russia, that no aggressive enemy—and certainly not NATO—has the means or will to use Ukraine to attack Russia. Ukraine has no desire to put itself in such a position.
Mr. Putin is playing a weak hand not cleverly but noisily. Strong leaders don’t make continual spectacles out of themselves. Mr. Putin is forcing the Biden administration to play his game over Ukraine because he needs the U.S. to deliver him something of importance to his regime—bluntly, to prop it up. He wants the U.S. to acquiesce in a Russian “sphere of influence” not for Russia’s military security, but to make Mr. Putin seem powerful and inevitable to Russians at home.
He has created an awkward situation for himself in Ukraine twice over. Ukraine’s rapidly consolidating military power could roll up the Russian separatists in the country’s east, administering a defeat Mr. Putin might find it hard to survive. But even dragged down by the sterile wasteland of a separatist enclave, Ukraine still is muddling toward liberalization and integration with the West, with living standards looking up, a development that also threatens Mr. Putin’s survival.
To this self-created crisis in the west, now add instability in Kazakhstan. Mr. Putin will continue to face such challenges along the ex-Soviet periphery, from citizens who tire of repression and stagnation, which Mr. Putin will try to control with cyber threats, energy threats, corruption of foreign elites (such as former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder ) and by recurrently threatening to embroil NATO in his problems.
And so a moment of realism arrives. As economist and Russian oppositionist Vladimir Milov told a Hudson Institute podcast, “This idea that we can somehow make a deal with Putin and avoid costs, no. Costs will be only greater if you [in the outside world] miss the action right now”—i.e., fail to understand the game Mr. Putin is playing
It would be better if Mr. Putin had not heard messages that the West always prefers Putinesque stability to short-term risk. For once the Munich lesson holds: There’s no stable solution to Mr. Putin’s problems that Western appeasement can provide. His regime is on course only for deeper repression and more military adverturism. Yes, with enough ceremonial atmospherics, the U.S. might reach a token agreement that Mr. Putin could use to claim victory for now, but he will need more such victories. He will need Ukraine to remain a failing state. He will ratchet up tensions with the U.S. superpower to keep his people accepting of a society run for oligarch billionaires while the population shrinks and drinks itself to one of the shortest life expectancies in the developed world.
Though appeasement might seem preferable to the Biden administration, not to mention the Germans, the U.S. needs to think about its long-term health in a world where despots see brandishing nuclear weapons and cyber threats as a way to extort forms of payola from outsiders to sustain themselves in power against their own people. Mr. Putin is not different from Kim Jong Un in this regard or the mullahs in Iran. Mr. Putin is right about one thing only: Russia has natural attributes that should make it an influential power, a magnet in its region. These pieces would quickly fall into place if not for the nature of Mr. Putin’s rule.
Nothing here guarantees that, without some U.S.-bestowed victory, Mr. Putin won’t launch a fresh invasion of Ukraine. This would be a tragedy for Ukrainians and also the least good option for Mr. Putin. The benefits would be short-lived, possibly nonexistent. It suits Mr. Putin to pretend that he’s living in the 1940s, that globalization is optional, military geography isn’t. But his regime is nothing without its considerable degree of integration with the global economy, which he knows he puts in danger every time he tries to solve his domestic problems at the expense of straining relations with the U.S.-led global community.
The U.S. and its allies have always had the strong hand, in the unlikely event they were willing to play it. If Russian tanks in Ukrainian streets are seen on Western TV screens, there’s no telling what the mood shift might allow.
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What's going on with Noonan?
Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point
He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him.
By Peggy Noonan
It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.
The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.
By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.
He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.
In the speech Mr. Biden claimed he stands against “the forces in America that value power over principle.” Last year Georgia elected two Democratic senators. “And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia? Choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.” They want to “suppress the right to vote.” They want to “subvert the election.”
This is “Jim Crow 2.0,” it’s “insidious,” it’s “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”
The problem is greater than Georgia. “The United States Senate . . . has been rendered a shell of its former self.” Its rules must be changed. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.” Senators will now “declare where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.”
Most wince-inducing: “Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
If a speech can be full of itself this speech was.
From the floor of the Senate the next day came Mr. McConnell’s rebuke. It was stinging, indignant to the point of seething. He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights. The plainness of his language was ferocious.
Mr. Biden’s speech was “profoundly unpresidential,” “deliberately divisive” and “designed to pull our country further apart.” “I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.” Mr. Biden had entered office calling on Americans to stop the shouting and lower the temperature. “Yesterday, he called millions of Americans his domestic ‘enemies.’ ” That, a week after he “gave a January 6th lecture about not stoking political violence.”
“Twelve months ago, this president said that ‘disagreement must not lead to disunion.’ But yesterday, he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors.”
“Twelve months ago, the president said that ‘politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.’ . . . Yesterday he poured a giant can of gasoline on that fire.”
“In less than a year, ‘restoring the soul of America’ has become: Agree with me, or you’re a bigot.”
“This inflammatory rhetoric was not an attempt to persuade skeptical Democratic or Republican senators. In fact, you could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery.”
American voters, said Mr. McConnell, “did not give President Biden a mandate for very much.” They didn’t give him big majorities in Congress. But they did arguably give him a mandate to bridge a divided country. “It is the one job citizens actually hired him to do.” He has failed to do it.
Then Mr. McConnell looked at Mr. Biden’s specific claims regarding state voting laws. “The sitting president of the United States of America compared American states to ‘totalitarian states.’ He said our country will be an ‘autocracy’ if he does not get his way.” The world has now seen an American president “propagandize against his own country to a degree that would have made Pravda blush.”
“He trampled through some of the most sensitive and sacred parts of our nation’s past. He invoked times when activists bled, and when soldiers died. All to demagogue voting laws that are more expansive than what Democrats have in his own home state.”
“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power.”
What Mr. Biden was really doing was attempting to “delegitimize the next election in case they lose it.”
Now, he said, “It is the Senate’s responsibility to protect the country.”
That sounded very much like a vow. It won’t be good for Joe Biden.
When national Democrats talk to the country they always seem to be talking to themselves. They are of the left, as is their constituency, which wins the popular vote in presidential elections; the mainstream media through which they send their messages is of the left; the academics, historians and professionals they consult are of the left. They get in the habit of talking to themselves, in their language, in a single, looped conversation. They have no idea how they sound to the non-left, so they have no idea when they are damaging themselves. But this week in Georgia Mr. Biden damaged himself. And strengthened, and may even have taken a step in unifying, the non-Democrats who are among their countrymen, and who are in fact the majority of them.
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Many of my memo readers live in the same gated community I do. The Landings is changing because, with home prices escalating, many of our more senior members are selling and many of the buyers are coming from coastal and northern cities. They are escaping from the lunacy gripping these, mostly Democrat bastions.
Therefore, our own community is changing. We have had an influx of younger people who are able to work from home and they have young children. Our many dining facilities have become crowded and tennis, pickle ball courts and golf courses usage has multiplied and we have increased staffing. In addition we have built new recreational facilities for our children and it is great to see our community is in good health.
With positives come a few negatives and the attached indicates, perhaps, those who are fleeing their former homes are bringing their lunacy and hatred with them.
Whomever wrote this nonsense, this bigotry disguised as protecting our community, should move back to where they came from or go to work for CNN or the NYT's.
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"Subject: Fwd: Insurrectionist Event at Palmetto Club — Make Your Voice Heard"
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: TLC Community Alerts <landingsclubalerts@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 12:24 PM
Subject: Insurrectionist Event at Palmetto Club — Make Your Voice Heard
To:
Dear fellow member of the TLC community, On December 6th, Palmetto Club hosted an event sponsored by We the People of Chatham, a group actively engaged in efforts to overturn the 2020 election and set conditions for election theft in 2024. This message comes both to alert you to this odious use of your community resources and to invite you to make your voice heard in ensuring the safety, prestige, and civic standing of The Landings Club. For detailed information about the 12/6 event, please scroll down to the end of this email. If you are concerned by the event and wish to support corrective action, you are invited to submit the form below to endorse the following resolutions for formal implementation in TLC rules and bylaws: - That no TLC employee shall be forced to endure treasonous, violent, racist or otherwise threatening rhetoric while servicing an event on Club premises. - That TLC administrators shall carefully consider member safety, TLC prestige, and TLA property values before allowing insurrectionist or other extremist groups to hold events on Club premises. - That insurrectionist or other extremist events on Club premises shall be explicitly announced to all member-owners at least two weeks in advance, and provisions shall be made for any and all member-owners to attend such events at no charge and exercise their First Amendment rights in vocally defending their values and the United States Constitution. - That TLC administrators shall announce and enforce Club rules against firearms at insurrectionist or other extremist events via metal detectors or other appropriate forms of security, and in the absence of such enforcement mechanisms member-owners shall be allowed to exercise their Second Amendment rights by carrying firearms to such events for their own protection.
Your name*
*Optional
Is there anything else you want to say on this topic for TLC consideration?*
*Optional
I support the above resolutions and urge that TLC administrators take appropriate action to ensure the safety, prestige, and civic standing of the Club and its community.
(If the Submit button fails to render in your email client, you can indicate your support by simply replying SUPPORT to this email.)
More about the event:
The 12/6 event featured Seth Keshel, a conspiracy theorist whose fraudulent and oft-debunked “data analysis” of the 2020 election has been employed by prominent insurrectionists Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn in their respective calls for a military coup to unseat the elected government of the United States. The event also doubled as a rally for Kandiss Taylor, an alt-right Georgia gubernatorial candidate who has openly suggested the murder of 2020 election officials.
The event's explicit purpose was to organize a door-to-door search of Chatham County households for evidence of voter fraud—an operation the Department of Justice has deemed illegal. The search itself serves the long-term goal of Keshel, Lindell, and Flynn—explicitly stated during the 12/6 event—to mobilize alt-right voters and elect compliant, conspiracy-minded officials at the state and local level for purposes of stealing the election in 2024.
The event was hosted in the Palmetto ballroom and included a dinner serviced by TLC staff, who—beyond just the odious atmosphere of insurrection—were forced to endure both the explicitly racist characterization of Democratic voters as the “the blacks" and the implicitly racist contention that high Democratic vote totals in "white counties" constitute evidence of fraud.
Despite the history of violent and paranoid rhetoric among the event's headliners, no effort was made to announce or enforce TLC's rules against carrying firearms on Club property, and no fewer than three attendees were observed to be carrying what appeared to be concealed weapons.
This message comes to you after ineffectual appeals to TLC administrators, who have fairly noted that their role is limited to enforcing the bylaws and regulations of the Club. To change those rules requires grassroots action from the ground up: a collective effort of member-owners with a vested interest in protecting their Club and their country regardless of political affiliation. On the subject of politics, this issue should be even more alarming to Republicans than it is to Democrats, as the former have more to lose if their party is hijacked by violent extremists and deluded conspiracy-mongers like the individuals featured at the 12/6 event.
If you would like to stay informed about developments related to any and all of the items above, please reply ALERTS to this email. To exclude yourself from any future communications, you may reply EXCLUDE at any time.
Thank you very much for your time and attention—and most importantly for your commitment to keeping The Landings Club safe, sane, and steadfast in its civic responsibilities during these trying times.
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Our response sent to the Officers who manage our facilities:
Can Politics Get Better When Higher Education Keeps Getting Worse?
Voters have the sense to resist notions like critical race theory. A generation from now, they may not.
By John Ellis
Only a few years ago, several well-established features of the current political landscape were too absurd to be taken seriously. Defunding the police was a ridiculous idea; critical race theory would be a giant step backward in race relations; leftist radicalism was a fringe element of the Democratic Party. Suddenly all have gone mainstream.
Recent election results have seemed encouraging. Voters rejected a ballot measure to defund the police in Minneapolis, and Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in Virginia was in part a referendum on critical race theory. Voters punished Democrats for their sharp move to the left. But there is a less reassuring way of looking at these results. In Minneapolis, 44% of voters wanted to replace the city’s police department with a Department of Public Safety, which would have been mandated with a “comprehensive public health approach to safety,” and remove the minimum funding requirement for police. This is an astonishing level of support for sheer lunacy.
In Virginia, Terry McAuliffe and his race-baiting radical agenda lost by less than 2%. Only a short while ago most Americans would have been appalled to find that almost half of voters were foolish enough to want a lawless society, accept the teaching of racial hatred to children, and embrace radical leftist ideology.
So how much should last year’s election results reassure us? That depends on whether you think that the popularity of these destructive ideas has peaked or is still on the rise. A powerful new force caused the surge in popularity: radicalized college campuses. Is this force really spent?
Both critical race theory and antipolice sentiment had been part of campus radical chic since the 1980s, and enthusiasm for socialism is also concentrated among recent college graduates. Are these radical-left ideas still gaining strength on campuses? Has campus influence on society peaked, or is it still growing? I fear the answers to those questions aren’t encouraging. Leftist radicalism is still strengthening on college campuses, and campus influence on our society still is intensifying.
Why is this happening? The shocking developments of the past few years are the result of a plan formulated by Marxist radicals of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 and published in the Port Huron Statement. SDS decided that given their lack of success at the ballot box, their only choice was to try to seize control of academia and use universities to convert young people to their ideology. That plan seemed fanciful at the time because the campuses were balanced politically, but radicals patiently built their numbers until they had achieved a 5-to-1 left-right faculty ratio by the turn of the century. That dominance allowed radicals to control most new faculty appointments, and the left-right ratio accelerated dramatically, reaching about 12 to 1 by 2016.
Where are we headed now? On campus, radicalism grows stronger each day. The current left-right campus faculty ratio is probably about 15 to 1, but new appointments are being made at a rate of about 50 to 1. As we approach complete leftist saturation among professors, college campuses will become even more intolerant, irrational and politically aggressive.
More important still, academia’s influence on society will intensify as the number of people who have graduated from radicalized campuses increases and the number of those who graduated with a conventional college education declines. A generation—students from about 2000 to now—has graduated from one-party campuses. Where will we be when two generations have done so and another generation has died off?
One thing stands in the way of the onward march of this malevolent force: the public’s common sense. Parents have mounted spirited campaigns against teaching critical race theory in schools, but will this pushback weaken as the number of politically indoctrinated college graduates rises?
We shouldn’t wait to find out. We must stop the political radicals who have a stranglehold on U.S. campuses. Why isn’t that happening already?
Parents and students feel a need for credentials, even while the credential of a college degree has been corrupted. A more important factor is that public perception hasn’t caught up to the reality of academia. Older adults cherish memories of their time at college. Campus buildings are as impressive as ever, and the names of the institutions like Harvard and Yale are still magical, but a stream of poisonous ideology flows daily from academia into American culture. Woke district attorneys may be a proximate cause of the current crime wave, and woke teachers feed children the ideology of racial hatred, but the root cause of these and other related woes is America’s corrupted universities. Our future depends on whether the public can overcome its autopilot embrace of these institutions and take a clear-eyed look at what they really are. If not, future election results won’t be so encouraging.
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”
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