Abby's Magazine Issue Finally Out.
https://docs.google.com/
And:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Guidance counselors know best: "A school guidance counselor says to two parents, “your son is vicious, mean-spirited,
dishonest and likes to spread rumors.
I suggest a career in journalism.
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Democrats have little ground to stand on regarding their recent history of the way they treat SCOTUS nominees.
Ted Kennedy epitomized the worst with his knowing lies and, then Senator Biden, showed his his true weak kneed turncoat colors when both turned their guns on Robert Bork.
These two men did to Bork what Japan did to America at Pearl Harbor. (See 1 below.)
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George Gilder was a top machinery and technology guru during my generation. I was not aware he was still"kicking." In view of what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence and social media companies accused of impacting free speech etc., I thought this article interesting. (See2 below.)
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George Gilder was a top machinery and technology guru during my generation. I was not aware he was still"kicking." In view of what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence and social media companies accused of impacting free speech etc., I thought this article interesting. (See2 below.)
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Sunday we attended the funeral of a good man and dear friend. Jerald Cohen, was old school. One of the few remaining Jewish merchants whose family ran, and still do, a store in a small rural community.
Lynn and I went with Jerald and Carole to Alma , Georgia for the Blueberry Festival. It was as if an old war hero had returned to his home town. People crossed the street to come and inquire about his health, to shake his hand, to remind him of their many visits to the store and how he always greeted them as if they were "cousins" and cherished customers.
One woman even told Lynn and me that her son's first name was Cohen.
Jerald's son now run's the store that bear's their family name. Cohen's is 100 years old. His son was the former President of Alma's Board of Education and Jerald's father was mayor.
If you have not visited Alma, I urge you do so and during The Blueberry Festival is the best time. It is like you are stepping into one of Norman Rockwell's painting.
Everyone knows everyone. Everyone seems to know everything about everyone and it is evident most everyone cares about each other.
Alma is the best of what makes America great. Trump seems to understand the significance of Alma's and coal miners. Hillary does not. Therein lies the answer to why she is not president nor should have been.
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Dick
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1) Robert Bork’s Proud Legacy and the Senate’s Shameful One
His defeat taught interest groups to demonize judicial nominees based solely on their worldview.
By
When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in June, liberal interest groups were apoplectic. Many Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, vowed to oppose any nominee and kept their promise when President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Liberal groups rail against him for transparently political reasons: They don’t like the way they think he will vote, as if he were a legislator.
The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees hasn’t always been so contentious and partisan. The Senate used to evaluate nominees based on qualifications and temperament. As recently as 1986, the upper chamber unanimously confirmed Justice Antonin Scalia. But things changed the following year, when a Democratic Senate denied confirmation to perhaps the most qualified candidate ever nominated to the court: Robert Bork.
Despite Bork’s unsurpassed credentials, liberals opposed him solely because of his conservative judicial philosophy. They succeeded and in the process coined a new verb, “to bork.” The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees has been corrupted ever since.
The Bork saga has begun to recede from public consciousness, so it’s worth recalling those events and the man at the center of them. Bork had an illustrious legal career. After graduating from the University of Chicago, where he obtained both his undergraduate and law degrees, he practiced law with the prestigious firm Kirkland & Ellis, where he became a partner. He joined the faculty of Yale Law School—generally considered the nation’s best—in 1962, specializing in antitrust and constitutional law.
Bork left his tenured position at Yale to serve in the Nixon and Ford administrations. From 1973-77, he served as solicitor general, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, representing the federal government before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Warren Burger rated Bork the most effective advocate to appear before the court during his tenure.
Following a brief return to Yale, in 1982 Ronald Reagan appointed Bork to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The American Bar Association gave him its highest rating, “exceptionally well qualified,” and in February 1982 the Senate unanimously confirmed his nomination.
Conservatives were delighted when Reagan announced on July 1, 1987, that he was nominating the 60-year-old Bork to replace the retiring Justice Lewis Powell. Reagan described Bork as “a premier constitutional authority . . . the most prominent and intellectually powerful advocate of judicial restraint.”
Bork had earned this reputation by swimming against the ideological current as a scholar during the 1960s and 1970s—the heyday of the “living Constitution,” when most of the legal academy was busy justifying judicial activism. Bork believed that judges should enforce the law, including the Constitution, as written. This approach has variously been referred to as strict construction, original intent, interpretivism, judicial restraint, textualism and originalism. Bork wasn’t the only conservative in legal academia, but he was the most influential advocate for originalism.
His forceful opposition to activist constitutional decision-making made the idea of a Justice Bork anathema to the left. Less than an hour after Reagan announced the nomination, Sen. Ted Kennedy made one of the most disgraceful speeches ever delivered on the Senate floor. He falsely accused Bork of standing for “back-alley abortions,” segregated lunch counters, “rogue police” conducting midnight raids, censorship and other horrors. “Not one line of that tirade was true,” Bork later reflected.
The judge assumed no one would believe Kennedy’s hysterical charges. He was naive. Kennedy’s extreme rhetoric resonated with the left’s grass roots, prompting Judiciary Committee Joe Biden—who had previously said if Reagan nominated Bork, “I’d have to vote for him”—to announce his opposition. A coalition of 300 organizations, led by Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, spent more than $10 million in anti-Bork advertisements, some narrated by actor Gregory Peck, and intense lobbying efforts directed at uncommitted senators.
The televised confirmation hearings in September 1987 lasted an unprecedented 12 days. Bork was grilled and testified in detail about his views for five full days. The Judiciary Committee’s rejection of Bork by a 9-5 vote spelled political doom, but he refused to withdraw. After several days of bitter argument on the Senate floor, Bork’s nomination was defeated, 58-42.
The borking of Robert Bork taught special-interest groups that they could demonize judicial nominees based solely on their worldview. Worse, character assassination proved an effective tactic, nearly sinking Justice Clarence Thomas’s appointment four years later.
Soon afterward, Bork resigned his life-tenured seat on the D.C. Circuit and embarked on a campaign to educate the public about “the proper function of judges in our constitutional democracy.” Thanks in part to his persistence, originalism has triumphed, as demonstrated by the canonization of fellow originalist Antonin Scalia and the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, Judge Kavanaugh and other originalists to the federal bench. Bork’s potential contribution to constitutional jurisprudence as a justice on the court is, sadly, lost to history. What remains as Bork’s undeserved legacy is a muddled court and a politicized judicial-confirmation process.
In February 1988, the Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy for the seat left vacant by Powell’s retirement—the last unanimous confirmation vote for a Supreme Court nominee. By confirming Judge Kavanaugh, the Senate can go some way toward atoning for its shameful treatment of Robert Bork 31 years ago.
Mr. Pulliam, a contributing editor at the Law and Liberty website, blogs at MisruleOfLaw.com. This article is adapted from the Summer issue of City Journal.
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2) Sage Against the Machine
A leading Google critic on why he thinks the era of ‘big data’ is done, why he opposes Trump’s talk of regulation, and the promise of blockchain.
Mr. Gilder is one of a dwindling breed of polymath Americans who thrive in a society obsessed with intellectual silos. As academics know more and more about less and less, he opines brazenly on subjects whose range would keep several university faculties on their toes: marriage and family, money and economics, law and regulation, and the social role of technology, a subject that engrosses him at present and the topic of his latest book, “Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy.”
ILLUSTRATION: TERRY SHOFFNER
Mr. Gilder has published 20 books, the best-known of which, “Wealth and Poverty” (1981), sold more than a million copies and made him rich. It was an impassioned defense of the morality and compassion of the free market. Ronald Reagan acknowledged that the book bolstered his confidence in supply-side economics, and he was known to be particularly beguiled by its opening line, which reads: “The most important event in the recent history of ideas is the demise of the socialist dream.”
Mr. Gilder also had a vast and avid following during the tech boom of the 1990s, when his Gilder Technology Report—an idiosyncratic subscription newsletter—shaped the investing habits of thousands around the world. Analysts spoke of a Gilder Effect, which had investors rushing to buy stock in any new company mentioned in the Report. The newsletter effectively ended, Mr. Gilder tells me, “in the months after the stock market crash of 2000, when I lost nearly all my 106,000 subscribers.”
Mr. Gilder, 78, is still immersed in the world of tech, but he doesn’t like all that he sees. Google makes him mad, as does Silicon Valley more broadly, and his ire is directed at the “new catastrophe theory” which holds “that artificial intelligence will make human minds obsolete, and that we’ll soon produce machine-learning tools and robotics that excel the capabilities of human brains.” He calls this attitude “Google Marxism”—a phrase he utters with a certain salivary distaste—“because Marx’s essential theme was that the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century had overcome all the challenges of production.” From that point on, Marx held, “human beings would focus on redistributing wealth among the classes rather than creating it.”
Marx was convinced that the steam turbine, electrification and what William Blake called “dark satanic mills” were a final stage in social evolution—“an eschaton.” Mr. Gilder loves abstruse words, and this one, which signifies a kind of climax in human attainment, is a particular favorite. “Google and the Silicon Valley people also imagine that their artificial intelligence, their machine learning, their cloud computing, is an eschaton—another ‘end of history’ moment. And it’s just preposterous.”
In truth, Mr. Gilder says, Google is at the end of its “paradigm,” which he defines as “avoiding the challenge of security across the internet by giving away most of its products for free, and financing itself with an ingenious advertising strategy.” Mr. Gilder also contends that Google believes capitalism is at an end—that “this is the winner-take-all universe,” as he puts it, “and the existing generation of capitalists are the final capitalists. That’s their vision.” And if you believe that “machines can re-create new machines in a steady cascade of greater capabilities that are beyond human comprehension and control, you really believe that’s the end of the human race.”
Mr. Gilder rejects the premise. “Machines can’t be minds,” he says. “Information theory shows that.” Citing Claude Shannon, the American mathematician acknowledged as the father of information theory, Mr. Gilder says that “information is surprise. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it wasn’t surprising, we wouldn’t need it.” However useful they may be, “machines are not capable of creativity.” Human minds can generate counterfactuals, imaginative flights, dreams. By contrast, “a surprise in a machine is a breakdown. You don’t want your machines to have surprising outcomes!”
The narrative of human obsolescence, Mr. Gilder says, is giving rise to a belief that the only way forward is to provide redundant citizens with some sort of “guaranteed annual income,” which would mean the end of the market economy: “If everyone gets supported without any kind of growing up and facing the challenges of life, then our capitalist culture would collapse.”
Mr. Gilder worries deeply about the state of capitalism in America, and President Trump’s adamant focus on the trade gap irks him. “To the extent that the U.S. is the world’s leading capitalist power and welcomes foreign investment, it can’t possibly run a trade surplus.” Mr. Trump “is a politician, and his chief goal is to communicate to the unions in the Midwest that he’s on their side. Besides, it’s a lot easier to blame China than it is to really explain the widespread campaign in the colleges of this country to suppress manufacturing and industry in the United States.”
As we talk of capitalism and America’s universities, Mr. Gilder sits upright, unable to mask his indignation. “The point is that we didn’t want manufacturing in this country, and we suppressed it. All of our colleges are devoted to stopping things rather than starting them.” The “whole focus” of science in American higher education, he says, is on “the dangers and perils of technology rather than its promise.”
America’s university system, says Mr. Gilder, is “incredibly corrupt and ideological.” How did it come to be like that? Surely, I observe, it wasn’t that way when he graduated from Harvard in 1962. “It was beginning to get that way,” he says, as he revs his engines for a fresh sortie. “The rise of affluence through the 1960s created this kind of amazing irresponsibility that resulted in a whole generation losing track of reality.”
The pithy aperçu is Mr. Gilder’s forte. He tells me here that “human beings have a propensity to believe in leftism”—in the idea that government can “answer all of their problems, guarantee their future, and relieve them of the challenges of life.” The idea of a “completely providential government” arose in America, and a “whole generation of young people were given college loans in a fabulous national mistake, in which the Republicans participated.” These loans were used by the university system to “increase perks and tenured luxuries and ideological distractions”—all of which led to the “diversity campaigns and CO2 panics” that currently dominate university faculties.
The only way to undo this “vast blunder,” says Mr. Gilder, is to forgive student loans across the board and “extract the money from all the college endowments and funds that were used to just create useless departments and political campaigns.” More than $1.5 trillion in student-loan money is outstanding, according to the Federal Reserve. That money, Mr. Gilder says, “wasn’t deployed to improve education. Not a scintilla of evidence has been adduced that learning has been improved. It was used entirely to lavish on bureaucracies that, in turn, paid tribute to government and leftist nihilism.”
The impact of these loans, and of the academic ecosystem they engendered, has been catastrophic, in Mr. Gilder’s view. “The result was to destroy the entrepreneurial optimism of a whole generation of young people, to drive them toward socialism, which they now tend to favor, and to even dissuade them from marriage.” The last is a consequence of debt, “which cripples them for the future.” Any benefit that education might confer on the young is, in Mr. Gilder’s dark view, nullified by the economic burden inflicted on them, which “leaves these kids impotent in the world.”
We turn to national politics, and Mr. Gilder reaffirms his view—which he’s expressed often—that Reagan set the gold standard for the modern American presidency. “I hope Trump emulates him,” Mr. Gilder says. “I don’t know Trump, but he beat all my candidates, and he’s got something going for him. He’s a man of action, and I think too much stress is placed on his verbiage.” He credits the president with having “rolled back the climate-change cult in government to some degree. He’s appointing good justices, who can actually see through leftist claims, and he’s dismantling the reach of the administrative state.”
Although Mr. Gilder is a critic of Google, he disapproves of Mr. Trump’s talk of regulating the search engine—a prospect the president raised in a tweet describing its results as “rigged” against him and possibly “illegal.” This is no time, Mr. Gilder says, “for American conservatives to advocate an expansion of the administrative state into social networks and search engines.” If right-leaning content ranks low on Google, that shows that “conservatives still have a long way to go if they are to prevail in the opinion wars on social media. They cannot expect the government to do it for them.”
For all the gloom about Silicon Valley that appears to suffuse his new book, Mr. Gilder insists that he’s not a tech-pessimist. “I think technology has fabulous promise,” he says, as he describes blockchain and cryptocurrency as “a new technological revolution that is rising up as we speak.” He says it has generated “a huge efflorescence of peer-to-peer technology and creativity, and new companies.” The decline of initial public offerings in the U.S., he adds, has been “redressed already by the rise of the ICO, the ‘initial coin offering,’ which has raised some $12 billion for several thousand companies in the last year.”
It is clear that Mr. Gilder is smitten with what he calls “this cryptographic revolution,” and believes that it will heal some of the damage to humanity that has been inflicted by the “machine obsessed” denizens of Silicon Valley. Blockchain “endows individuals with control of their data, their identity, the truths that they want to assert, their transactions, their visions, their content and their security.” Here Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade.
With the cryptographic revolution, he says, “we’re now in charge of our own information. For the first time in history, really, you don’t have to prove who you are, or what you are, before a transaction.” A blockchain allows users “to be anonymous if they wish, while also letting them keep a time-stamped record of all their previous transactions. It allows us to establish unimpeachable facts on the internet.”
That evokes trust in the internet, “without having to trust or rely on Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, or whoever the paladins of the new economy may be.” In the age of the almighty machine, Mr. Gilder believes, this is a notable victory for mankind.
Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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