“Years ago, Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben introduced the [Jewish] New Year rituals of Rosh Hashanah by holding up a long, coiled ram’s horn. Pointing out the twists and turns, he used the shofar as a metaphor for life. ‘No one’s life,’ he said, ‘is straight and predictable.’ Twists, dips and bends, as well as ups and downs are inevitable. How we adjust and adapt to unplanned and often unwanted events is as crucial to successful living as good planning. If we become too fearful or frustrated, we will experience more sadness and grief than necessary. Yet if we accept and expect detours and even disasters, they can make us stronger and add richness to our lives.
There is comfort and wisdom in recognizing the uncertainties of life and understanding that all our actions and experiences — successes and failures, moments of joys and grief, pride and shame — interact to create the outer curves and inner texture of the horn that will produce our own unique soul music. They have made us what we are. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the most profoundly redeeming qualities of life are found not in moments of pure happiness or pleasure, but in the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it another way: ‘Life must be understood backward, but lived forward.’ Thus, we need to regularly remind ourselves to learn from the past without being overwhelmed by it.
As if to prove the inherent beauty of an examined life, the rabbi ended his sermon by blowing into the small end of the shofar to create a timeless and piercing form of music. Thus, he called on his congregation to celebrate their humanity by letting go of bitterness and resentments arising from old hurts and unmet expectations and eagerly moving toward the future.”
--- Michael Josephson, American author, speaker, and lecturer.
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The dumber our society, the more likely Democrats believe they are able to get way with their political skullduggery or that is their bet according to Gerald Seib (see attached:)
Gerald Seib highlights Democrat cynicism betting they can take over America through giveaways and voters will be stupid enough to believe there are free lunches. Time will tell.
Democrats Bet That Legislative Success Will Bring Political Rewards
The party believes an ambitious domestic agenda will help it win next year’s midterms, but Republicans see overreach
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) will need to overcome divisions among Democrats to pass two major legislative packages.
By Gerald F. Seib
The next few weeks will tell whether they succeed legislatively. We will find out in a year, during next year’s midterm elections, whether they succeed politically.
Democrats are gambling that success now, won by pushing through big changes from a narrow base of congressional power, will expand that base of support through sheer popularity of the programs once enacted. Legislative success, in other words, will breed political success.
That is far, far from assured. Many of the Democrats’ legislative dreams—new help for children and parents, expanded health benefits, aggressive efforts to combat climate change, new immigration rules—are all wrapped up in a $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill that can pass only if Democrats stand united in support of it.
And right now, two Democratic Senators and a handful of moderate House Democrats are balking at the price tag. In a House where Democrats have just an eight-seat advantage, and a Senate evenly divided between the two parties, that could be enough to bring down the whole edifice. Legislative action after the Labor Day recess is going to be marked by brinkmanship between the Democrats’ progressive and moderate factions over how to get beyond that impasse
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proven over the years that she is a magician at overcoming these kinds of divisions, and perhaps she will find the way to do so again. Still, the intraparty feuding threatens not just the $3.5 trillion measure, but also final passage of a separate, more traditional $1 trillion physical infrastructure package, which has bipartisan support and which President Biden considers one of the crowning achievements of his first year.
Democrats’ legislative agenda includes aggressive efforts to combat climate change; water levels in California’s Lake Oroville on Sunday.
Meantime, Republicans are almost giddy right now over their political situation. They believe the $3.5 trillion plan represents a big political overreach by Democrats, representing a level of deficit spending that is scaring middle-of-the-road voters. Combine those fears with Mr. Biden’s slide in popularity in the wake of the ugly withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and a resurgence of doubts about whether the coronavirus really is under control, and Republicans are starting to think they are nearly guaranteed to take over control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
That expectation, in turn, gives Republicans little to no incentive to cooperate with Democrats between now and next November—including on an essential measure to raise or waive the federal debt ceiling that must pass in the next few weeks to keep the government from going into default. In short, Washington is going to see some very high-stakes political gamesmanship in coming weeks.
Things have reached this point in no small measure because the two parties have starkly different calculations about the country’s current mood. Republicans think Democrats’ ambitions amount to hubris—of the kind the GOP itself has been guilty of in the recent past—and there surely is a bit of that at work.
But Democrats also are operating from a belief that they suffer from structural disadvantages that leaves their strength in Congress short of their actual level of support across the nation. In this view, Republicans’ superior strength in state legislatures has allowed them to draw up congressional districts in state after state that give the GOP an unfair advantage in the House. And they believe Republicans’ strength in less-populous states, combined with Senate rules meant to protect the rights of minorities and rural states, means the GOP is using political process to thwart popular will there.
Democrats have a point, but probably not as strong as they contend. In the cumulative, nationwide vote in House races last year, Democrats enjoyed a three-percentage-point advantage, but won just a 2.3-percentage-point majority in the House. So their power in the House is below their national strength, but not by much.
Similarly, among the nation’s 10 least populous states, Senate seats are divided evenly between the two parties. Democrats have an advantage in the nation’s 10 most populous states, and they win well more votes nationwide in Senate races than their power there suggests, but the balance may not be as far out of whack as the rhetoric sometimes suggests.
The real gap is between the two parties’ view of the national mood. Most Democrats firmly believe that the continuing struggle to recover economically from the coronavirus, the lingering effects of decades of growing income inequality and fears of climate change driven steadily higher by extreme weather events all make the country ready for assertive government action across a wide front, a belief they think is supported by public polls testing their initiatives
That is the real Democratic wager, and it is about to be put to the ultimate political test.
Gavin Newsom, Rep. Bass Appear at Rally Full of Racist Remarks About Larry Elder 
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We issue tough words, China plans tough measures and actions.
China’s Industrial Planning Evolves, Stirring U.S. Concerns
Beijing is catching up through technology investments in research with industrial applications, echoing American strategy
By James T. Areddy
For decades, China pursued a brand of centrally planned economic policies that the U.S. was happy to stand back and watch.
But a subtle yet critical recalibration by Beijing begun almost 15 years ago has recently set off alarms in Washington about China’s goals and tactics—not least because China is catching up in many cases by adopting past U.S. approaches.
Chinese central planning once highlighted targets for farm and factory production, Soviet-style. Beijing still uses five-year plans but now directs resources into basic scientific research with industrial applications.
China’s foray into areas like artificial intelligence and robotics once dominated by the U.S. helps explain the Biden administration’s tilt toward industrial development policies, like spending government money to reassert competitiveness in semiconductor production.
“Decades of neglect and disinvestment,” President Biden lamented in June, “have left us at a competitive disadvantage as countries across the globe, like China, have poured money and focus into new technologies and industries, leaving us at real risk of being left behind.”
Beijing also emulates Washington by pouring government investment into its own versions of U.S. government research powerhouses such as the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“China aspires to be the first ‘government-steered market economy,’” University of California, San Diego, professor Barry Naughton writes in his newly published book, “The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020.”
In Shanghai, new-generation humanoid service robot Walker X was set to play chess at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July.
The late Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s first five-year economic plan in 1953 included production of China’s first car, its first jet airplane and the first modern bridge over the Yangtze River, while the second plan launched in 1958, known as the Great Leap Forward, was a disastrously ill-conceived attempt to rapidly develop agriculture and steelmaking.
The planning tradition outlived Mao. For a long time China impressed Western politicians as the party’s centralized leadership plotted the future, telegraphing to officials, financiers and executives clear goals years in advance, helping lure hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investment and becoming a manufacturing powerhouse.
China’s industrial policy was focused on creating jobs and growth at home but benefited international business. After the country entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, Beijing’s plans also included dismantling bureaucratic control of commercial activity.
Mr. Naughton dates the first inklings of a new tack to the period around the global financial crisis in 2008, when Beijing stepped up funding for megaprojects like a jetliner to compete with those made by Boeing Co. and Airbus SE and its own homegrown version of the U.S. Defense Department’s Global Positioning System.
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Elitist Hillary will be delighted when more "deplorables" are unemployed, destitute and hopeless.
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The Chinese are masters at propaganda, have the patience of "Job" and we are no match when it comes to their Trojan Horse techniques.
"Shag -Chi" and the Legend of the Ten Rings" was released by Disney and broke gross revenue records for the 4 Labor Day weekend.
It reminds me of when we sold scrap iron to Japan only to have it return in the form of bombs which destroyed Pearl harbor.
When you don't know your own history you eventually succumb to your own ignorance.
And:
Is Biden an apple rotten to the core?
Does Joe Biden Have Any Core Principles?
Leadership hasn’t been a hallmark of his long political career. His real talent is following the herd.
By Gerard Baker
Someone once said of a British politician of notably flexible moral principles that his frequent wrestling bouts with his conscience must have constituted one of the longest winning streaks in sporting history.
The jibe comes to mind in these turbulent moments for Joe Biden’s presidency. His proliferating woes are his own making: Afghanistan, a stagflating economy, renewed lack of confidence over the course of Covid. All presidents hit turbulence at some point. What sustains the better ones is a sense that they have a compass, a clear set of values beyond the fickle dictates of their party’s political demands. The problem for Mr. Biden is that, throughout a long career in politics, he has never given the slightest indication that he has such a compass. For him the tussles between conscience and political expediency always seem to result in an easy win for expediency. There’s a giant hole where the man’s principles should be.
No issue better captures this than his stance on abortion, a topic of renewed attention in the last week. Mr. Biden is a cradle Catholic, a weekly Mass-goer who is frequently photographed clutching a rosary. In his inaugural address he quoted St. Augustine. For all I know, he has a bathtub Madonna installed in the Rose Garden.
But like many Catholic Democrats in elective office, he has long found politically convenient ways to accommodate the church’s authority on some of the fundamental moral issues of the modern age—homosexuality, divorce, and above all abortion—to the ascendant social progressivism of his party.
In the past Mr. Biden has insisted that, while he personally opposed abortion, he couldn’t impose his views on others. But last week he responded to the arrival of the new Texas law that in effect bars abortion after six weeks with a much less nuanced denunciation, saying, “My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right [to an abortion].”
I can’t know Mr. Biden’s conscience. Abortion is an issue that genuinely tortures the souls of many Catholics. They believe that God-given life begins at conception but recoil from actually criminalizing it. As a Catholic myself I find repugnant the easy certainty with which too many dogmatists seem to think this dilemma can be resolved. There’s much about the Texas law that repels even those who are strongly pro-life.
This is the Biden pattern; casting principles and values aside he slides comfortably into the slipstream of the most progressive Democratic ideology on issue after issue.
It’s hard to think of a single issue of importance in the past 30 years on which Mr. Biden has espoused views that are seriously at odds with his party. Whatever your faith, whatever your ideological priors, odds are that you’d find yourself diverging from the party line on at least some questions. But if he ever has, Mr. Biden certainly hasn’t let it be known. He has a record of seeking out the fulcrum of opinion among Democrats and then lashing himself to it.
Previous Democratic presidents have occasionally taken stands against the party line, even if only in pursuit of larger political advantage. Think of Bill Clinton in 1992 denouncing calls for racial violence from a black rapper and her enablers. Think of Barack Obama condemning the Iraq War in 2006.
But the concordat between Mr. Biden’s principles and the political demands of the Democratic Party is a one-sided surrender document. In the 1990s, as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Clinton’s New Democratic politics, Mr. Biden shepherded the 1994 crime bill through the Senate. Now, he’s a passionate advocate of racial justice and a scourge of “systemic racism.”
In 1991, as a senator who had preached at length about the virtues of international law, he joined the majority of Senate Democrats in opposing President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq—after Saddam Hussein clearly breached international law by occupying Kuwait. Twelve years later Mr. Biden joined the bulk of his colleagues in supporting George W. Bush’s Iraq War, premised on the shakiest of legal grounds.
This is not leadership. It is followership; and it helps explain the sudden collapse of the Biden presidency. The Afghan debacle over which he’s presiding is no issue of conscience, merely one of incompetence. Mr. Biden’s wider problems are born of his slavish devotion to a party whose lead he has chosen to follow.
In the opening scene of “A Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt’s electrifying account of the life of Thomas More, a Catholic politician of a very different age and mettle, the saint is chastised by the scheming cynic Cardinal Thomas Wolsey for insisting on placing his own conscience ahead of his political obligations. More answers: “When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
Joe Biden is in no danger of losing his head, thankfully, but we’re well on course for that chaos.
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That good ole liberal hypocrisy rears it's head.
The Real Structural Racism
Is it OK that black eighth graders aren’t proficient in math and reading?
By William McGurn
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have a point about structural racism. But it’s probably not the point the Queens Democrat and her progressive allies think it is.
For if ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big city public-school systems. By any objective measure, these schools consistently fail to provide their African-American students with the basic education they will need to get ahead. But instead of addressing achievement head on, the progressive answer is to funnel yet more money into the existing failed structure, eliminate tests that expose its failure, and impose race-based preferences to make up for it.
Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth graders in their care are proficient in either math or reading.
It isn’t even close. In a number of these school districts, proficiency rates for black eighth graders are down in the single digits (see Detroit’s 4% for math and 5% for reading, or Milwaukee’s 5% for math and 7% for reading). Most are in the low teens.
In Bill de Blasio’s New York City, for example, the public schools show 10% proficiency for black eighth graders in math and 14% in English. Yet the mayor then professes to be shocked, shocked that black students aren’t passing the highly competitive entrance exams for the city’s most elite public high schools.
On this measure, even the country’s best results are still pretty rotten. Charlotte, N.C., is way ahead of the rest of the pack with 24% of its black eighth graders proficient in math. For reading, Boston took the top slot at 20%.
Think about that. The best the best school districts can do is fewer than a quarter of black eighth graders proficient in math and reading.
Certainly it’s not for lack of money. Here’s how a Census report released earlier this year puts it:
“Of the 100 largest public school systems (based on enrollment), the six that spent the most per pupil in FY 2019 were the New York City School District in New York ($28,004), Boston City Schools in Massachusetts ($25,653), Washington Schools in the District of Columbia ($22,406), San Francisco Unified in California ($17,228), Atlanta School District in Georgia ($17,112), and Seattle Public Schools in Washington ($16,543).”
San Francisco and Seattle aren’t part of the Trial Urban District Assessment districts reporting their scores. But the other four are, and their scores for black achievement are as bad as the rest. Now imagine what this means in real-life terms for the majority of black students who are not proficient in these skills. For most, it means consignment to a place on the margins of the American Dream.
In the past, progressives tried to lift black achievement. Today, they have given up.
Embarrassed by the way our big city public school systems are failing black children, progressives answer not by making it easier for these kids to get into schools where black children are achieving, whether this be charter or parochial schools. Instead, they focus on getting rid of the embarrassment by getting rid of the achievement tests that expose it, doubling down on race preferences and trying to hamstring the schools that show black children can and do learn in the right environment.
Soon the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. At issue is Harvard’s use of race in admissions.
Harvard’s defense is that it can’t achieve diversity without some race preferences. But few will say aloud the ugly implication of this argument: If black students had to compete on merit alone, they would largely disappear from our top universities. Didn’t someone once say something about the soft bigotry of low expectations?
In her majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued that the University of Michigan Law School’s race preferences she upheld were meant to be temporary.
“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary,” Justice O’Connor wrote. The nearer we get to that deadline, the more we see the truth: Race preferences only feed the demand for more.
Much of the objection to Harvard’s use of race in admissions is that it unfairly discriminates against Asian-Americans. True enough. But as the high court considers the case, the justices would also do well to consider how ill-served African-Americans are by a big city public education structure that is systemically failing them.
And they should ask themselves this: Is the answer to a black achievement gap to paper it over by eliminating any objective measures of achievement—and then to try to make up for it all by imposing de facto race quotas later on up the line?
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