Obama believes he is so brilliant he not only can drink his own bath water but when he says anything it becomes so. What he fails to hear is that he is tone deaf.
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Obama Mocks Rape Victim’s Pain — This Judge Makes Him Regret It
By Scott Dowdy
Terry McAuliffe seems to be in trouble in the state of Virginia, and he has been bringing in the heavy hitters in the DNC Party to increase turnout in his favor. But Obama’s weekend campaign appearance could have done more harm than good, as his comments about recent controversies involving school boards were slammed for being tone-deaf.
“We do not have the time to waste on these fake trumped-up culture wars, the fake outrage that conservative media pushes to boost their ratings,” Obama claimed.
In Virginia’s Loudoun County, the school board was under fire for covering up a rape of a student by a so-called gender-fluid student. In May, the male put on a skirt and followed one girl into the restroom, where the rape happened. Rather than refer this case to police, the school board decided to deal with the matter internally. The rape victim’s father was of course outraged, and school leaders called the police when he confronted them. He was then arrested for talking about the rape. The National School Boards Association mentioned the event in their now infamous letter comparing concerned parents with domestic terrorists.
Obama did not mention Loudoun County directly, but the situation was undeniably within his “fake outrage” idea that he said was not “a serious issue that affects serious people.” Parents slammed Obama’s comments for being tone-deaf. But this week, only two days after his campaign appearance, a Virginia court has ruled that there is in fact sufficient evidence that the boy raped the girl inside the school restroom.
So, Obama said this outrage over a girl’s rape (and the school board’s attempt to silence it) as “fake outrage.” Obama cares more about McAuliffe’s career than the privacy and safety of children.
It is not surprising that the extreme liberal Obama has this attitude. He unilaterally redefined Title IX to force schools to accept boys who identify as female to play on the girls’ teams and use the girls’ locker rooms and restrooms under the threat of losing their funding.
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Meanwhile, two members of the Union, who wrote the letter they sent to the AG, have caused the Union to apologize and acknowledge it was extreme suggesting parents are terrorists for wanting their children appropriately educated. When the AG cannot bring himself to also apologize for authorizing the FBI to pursue a matter of this kind and basically turns the FBI into a Gestapo gum shoe organization like Wray allowed happen it is only reasonable to ask what the hell is going on in D.C?
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Two articles about one of the most articulate Rabbis in recent times. Rabbi Sacks died a year ago. He was the chief Rabbi in London.
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Realizing the Legacy of Jonathan Sacks
Next week, thousands around the world will gather in person or online to mark the first anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020). His yahrzeit falls on 20 Cheshvan, October 25-26.
The erudite and eloquent Rabbi Sacks was a walking sanctification of G-d’s name, in both the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds – among kings, philosophers, theologians, politicians, congregants, and students alike. No-one else in recent decades made Judaism more relevant on the world stage.
In his lifetime’s last book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times [3] (published March 2020), Sacks traced the escalating poisonous discourse in Western public life (including the rise of identity politics and extremism) to loss of a shared moral code and the elevation of self-interest over the common good. He argued that the secularization of knowledge, power, economy, and culture over the past 250 years was the root cause of these ills.
He also linked today’s terrible upheavals – addiction to debt and drugs, high depression and suicide rates, child abuse and loneliness, even the growing gap between the super-rich and the poor – to the breakdown of family cohesiveness, which for centuries has been associated with religious faith.
“What the secularists forgot,” wrote Sacks, “is that Homo sapiens is a meaning-seeking animal.” Technology, the market, and the liberal democratic state “give us choices, but don’t teach us how to choose. They provide neither identity nor the set of moral sensibilities that are inseparable from identity: loyalty, respect and reverence.”
Sacks distaste for the so-called “progressive” or “woke” identity juggernaut of recent years, and the “cancel culture” bulldozer which it uses to violently crush other perspectives – are on display in another book (published last week), and in one of his last major lectures.
The Power of Ideas: Words of Faith and Wisdom [4] (London: Hodder & Stoughton, October 2021) brings together a compelling selection of Sacks’ radio broadcasts, newspaper columns, House of Lords speeches, and significant lectures delivered around the world. Here, Sacks brings his solid grounding in Jewish theology and philosophy to bear on the grand debates underway in modern economics, social policy, psychology, political science, science, art, architecture, and engineering. And he clobbers today’s supposedly liberal social media mobs.
Also notable is a pre-selichot address he delivered at the Hampstead Synagogue in London in September 2019, called “An Unforgiving Age.” (Available on YouTube and at rabbisacks.org.) Sacks calls instantaneous twitter-shaming and the “cancel culture” that characterizes today’s media and politics – wicked behavior.
“(We live in) a world of Facebook and Twitter and viral videos in which anyone can pass judgement on anyone without regard to the facts or truth or reflective moral judgement… This is what happens when an entire culture loses faith in God. All that is left is an unconscious universe of impersonal forces that doesn’t care if we exist or not.”
“…Has anyone heard of the word ‘justice’? Can you condemn someone with no trial, no evidence, no judicial process, no reflective moral judgement, no vedarashta vechakarta veshaalta haytayv (you shall seek and interrogate and inquire thoroughly) as the Torah tells us to do? Can you condemn someone without examining the evidence well and seeing whether emet nachon hadavar (whether the facts are true), as demanded in Deuteronomy 13:15?!”
“(Alas, we have) none of that. Just simple condemnation! Ours is an unforgiving age.”
“And what happens in an unforgiving culture? The people who survive and thrive are the people without shame. They become the powerful people, because they are the only people who survive in a world without forgiveness.”
THE PIERCING VISION of renewed morality for the modern age proposed by Rabbi Sacks begins, not surprisingly, with selicha, forgiveness.
“At the heart of our faith is a G-d who forgives. We believe that G-d gives us a chance to acknowledge our mistakes and where, if we are honest about the wrong we have done, if we stand before G-d with a broken heart, if we are willing to have the guts to say, aval asheimim anachnu, we really did get it wrong, if we are able to say, like King David, chatati, I sinned – then G-d gives us a second chance.”
“So, Jews have a unique calling to make the case for an understanding of human nature that names good and evil yet recognizes the inherent ability of human beings to repent and grow.”
The second building block in Sack’s recipe for repair is the building of “covenantal communities” based on a “we” consciousness (where people share concerns for one another), rather than “I” awareness (individualism that atomizes society). He shows how tribalism can be balanced with universality; how spiritual and social cohesion can be synthesized with respect for liberty of conscience.
A third element is “a sense of the sacred.” “What lifts us above instinct and protects us from our dysfunctional drives is respect for God. When human beings lose respect for God, they eventually lose respect for humanity.”
A fourth element, especially for Jews, and especially for Jews in the Diaspora, is education. “The best, indeed the only, defense of a religious people is not military or political but educational.” And this does not mean learning only about the travails of Jewish history, like the Holocaust. “Holocaust education in itself offers no meaning, no hope, no way of life.” Rather, “Judaism is culture of study and debate, absorption in texts, commentaries and counter-commentaries, devotion to literacy and life-long learning.”
Sacks: “If there is one leitmotif, one dominant theme linking the various eras of the people of Israel, it is the enthronement of Jewish education as the sovereign Jewish value. The history of the Jews has been a history of communities built around schools. [DMW: Day schools!] That is the secret of our collective immortality.”
And thus, Rabbi Sacks offers a path forward. For Jews: A path grounded in love for, and fealty to, G-d’s authentic teachings and to Jewish law, alongside commitment to universal verities and modern intellectual advances. For gentiles: A path grounded in Biblical morality, while embracing the history of liberty. Atop it all: “Courage to confront the nihilism that currently passes for enlightenment.”
(Expansive readings on these themes can be found in two volumes of collected essays on the weekly Torah reading by Rabbi Sacks, published posthumously: Studies in Spirituality [5] and Judaism’s Life-Changing Ideas [6].)
I SENSE THAT were Rabbi Sacks still alive and active today, he would be leading interfaith efforts to create a renewed global code of social-political morality based on the above principles.
He would be driving towards a resurgence of religious faith, in a world where both liberal democracies and dictatorships have failed to sustain generosity of spirit and uphold essential restraints on passion and power.
I bet that he would be capitalizing on the breakthrough Abraham Accords to generate Moslem-Jewish religious dialogue in the Middle East, like the Christian-Jewish dialogue in the West that slowly has gathered steam since the Second Vatican Council.
Consider this clarion call for multi-faith synergies that Rabbi Sacks delivered to Pope Benedict XVI and his cardinals in 2010:
“In the face of a deeply individualistic culture, we offer community. Against consumerism, we talk about the things that have value but not a price. Against cynicism we dare to admire and respect. In the face of fragmenting families, we believe in consecrating relationships.”
“We believe in marriage as a commitment, parenthood as a responsibility, and the poetry of everyday life when it is etched, in homes and schools, with the charisma of holiness and grace.”
In his footsteps, Rabbi Sacks’ many admirers must recommit to the truths he taught and advance the moral society he sought
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Jonathan Sacks, morality and Facebook algorithms
Before blaming a company for fomenting partisan hate, the late rabbi's teachings would have us take a good look at ourselves in the mirror
By Kenneth Brander
Before blaming a company for fomenting partisan hate, the late rabbi's teachings would have us take a good look at ourselves in the mirror
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
–Pogo, Walt Kelly
Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen probably thought she’d driven her message home when she recently recommended the removal of algorithms on Facebook, telling the US Congress it was “because I think we don’t want computers deciding what we focus on!” When it comes to computers telling people what to do, whose blood would not boil?
Of course, as with most such reductionist lines, Haugen was able to appeal to our emotions through oversimplification. But computers don’t decide, we do. And even if we allow computers to steer us, those computers (more precisely, algorithms) were all designed by human beings who are ultimately no different from us.
The problem with Haugen’s claims goes beyond the misleading nature of her line about computers making decisions for us. Her more substantive position – “I’m a strong proponent of chronological ranking, ordering by time” instead of by algorithm – is like suggesting that television remove its visual component and that its programs only be heard and not seen.
I know. I tried it. Although the default on the Facebook timeline is what the algorithms calculate you “most want to see,” up until very recently there was an icon on the sidebar that allowed you to see everything posted by your contacts chronologically. If you are anything like me, you would have lasted less than two minutes! Do you really want to see what someone you barely know is having for breakfast? Or whether anybody can help with their carpool in Minneapolis?
True, there are many ways that algorithms can determine what you want to see, some of which might be more manipulative than others. And I am not saying that there is no room for more responsibility from the companies that use algorithms, and that government has no role to play in regulating them. But there is an important part of the equation that never seems to get mentioned here.
The cries for more responsibility are all aimed at government or industry. Yet as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (whose first yahrzeit we are now marking) repeatedly pointed out, in a liberal state, these institutions are not primarily designed to promote morality or to enforce it. Of course, they have a role to play: Industry should understand that the legitimate desire for profits does not make everything legitimate; and government needs to support whatever basic moral consensus still exists. But as Sacks wrote in his last aptly titled major book, Morality, morality’s home is primarily in the third sector – voluntary communities that are formed around tighter and more rigorous definitions of what we should be doing to maximize who we are as human beings.
Accordingly, one of Sacks’s most valiant crusades was the call for individuals and communities to step up and take responsibility for the moral state of society. He argued that we have reached a crisis point because we have spent too much time going to the wrong addresses when the most important address is right at our doorstep.
The issue becomes clearer with a Biblical metaphor, as explained by the famous 19th-century rabbi and commentator, Malbim (Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser). After telling us that, “He who tends a fig tree will enjoy its fruit, and he who cares for his master will be honored,“ the Bible tells us that, “As in water, face answers to face, so the heart of man to man” (Proverbs 27:18-19). The metaphor is based on the mirror image of our face that we see when we look at water. So too, claims the Bible, is the response of a person’s heart. Malbim understands this quite literally. For him, it is saying that the blood that is pumped out of a man’s heart is the exact same blood that returns to that heart. As for the teaching, he expands it broadly, telling us that what happens to us is often a direct reflection of how we act in a wide variety of contexts.
Does this not sound a little (a lot!) like algorithms. These programs don’t make up anything on their own. Their output – like the reflection of our face in the water – is completely responsive to our input. In this respect, then, the blame society is aiming at social media algorithms is like throwing a rock at the water reflecting the ugliness of our own face.
The result is that we turn to forces outside and tell them, “Show me a prettier face.” In the short term, that may happen. Algorithms can be adjusted to appeal to our better sides or, at least, to mitigate some of the more significant negative outcomes. However, as Facebook has already anticipated, that will lead to less user time, meaning less business. And that may lead to other companies finding a way to fill the vacuum and supply us with what we seem to want.
For if we are allowing ourselves to wallow in partisan hate and never looking at the other side, it means that on some level this is what we prefer. If we are willing to read things the reliability of which is questionable, it means that this is what we want. If we let ourselves be drawn to the bizarre, the silly and the sexually enticing, this too is what we are ultimately choosing. As in real life, knowing that any of these practices is not optimal is not the same as deciding to live otherwise. No doubt, others, including Mark Zuckerberg, have a part in the blame. But what about ourselves?
A more serious and introspective society would understand that there is a deeper problem that goes beyond Facebook and the lack of government regulation. As Rabbi Sacks never got tired of reminding us, the home of that problem is within ourselves.
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Biden befuddled?
Axios: Is Biden Confused Or Signaling With Statements On Taiwan Defense?
Biden has now asserted twice that the United States will stand with Taiwan and defend it against the Chinese invasion instead...
And:
What say Doofus?
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If China attacks Taiwan will Biden sit on his thumbs as Huter paints?
The Fight for Taiwan Could Come Soon
Beijing may think it has an opening to seize the island before the West’s military investments pay off.
By Elbridge Colby
The U.S. and China are engaged in a “strategic competition,” as the Biden administration has put it, with Taiwan emerging as the focal point. But an ascendant view inside the administration seems to be that while China represents a serious economic, political and technological challenge to American interests, it doesn’t pose a direct military threat. This is a very imprudent assumption that could lead to war and, ultimately, American defeat. To avoid that disastrous outcome, the U.S. must recognize that China is a military threat—and conflict could come soon.
What makes China an urgent military threat? First, Beijing has made clear it is willing to use force to take Taiwan. Subordinating the island isn’t only about incorporating a putative lost province—it would be a vital step toward establishing Chinese hegemony in Asia. And this isn’t mere talk. The Chinese military has rehearsed amphibious attacks, and commercial satellite imagery shows that China practices large-scale attacks on U.S. forces in the region.
Second, China doesn’t merely have the will to invade Taiwan, it increasingly may have the ability to pull it off. China has spent 25 years building a modern military in large part to bring Taiwan to heel. China now has the largest navy in the world and an enormous and advanced air force, missile arsenal and network of satellites. This isn’t to say China could manage a successful invasion of Taiwan tomorrow—but Beijing could be very close. It will be “fully able” to invade by 2025, Taiwan’s defense minister said recently. China’s military power is improving every month.
Third, China may think its window of opportunity is closing. Many wars have started because one side thought it had a time-limited opening to exploit. Certainly this was a principal factor in the outbreaks of the two world wars. Beijing may reasonably judge this to be the case today.
The U.S. is finally, if too slowly and fitfully, waking up to the China challenge and reorienting its military efforts toward Asia. But these investments won’t really start to pay off until later this decade. Meanwhile, coalitions like the Quad (the U.S., Australia, Japan and India) are coalescing to deny China the ability to dominate the region. From Beijing’s view, if it waits too long, America’s military investments will yield a much more formidable opponent, while an international coalition works to frustrate Chinese ambitions.
This all adds up to a situation in which Beijing may reckon it would be better to use force sooner rather than later. To avoid a conflict, and possible defeat, the U.S. must act quickly to deter Beijing. Repeatedly declaring our “rock solid” commitment to Taiwan is fine but insufficient.
The most urgent priority: Taiwan must radically upgrade its defenses. The island’s own efforts in this regard will decide whether it survives as a free society. Taipei must multiply its defense budget, grossly neglected in recent decades, and focus its expenditures and efforts on two things: degrading a Chinese invasion with the help of the U.S. and making the island resilient to a blockade and bombardment by Beijing. This will require antiship missiles, sea mines and air defenses, as well as stockpiles of supplies to ride out a blockade. The U.S. will need to use every lever to prod or force Taipei to make this shift.
Washington should also bring comparable pressure on Japan, America’s single most important ally. If Taiwan falls, Japan will be under direct military threat from Beijing. And Japan would play a critical role in any defense of Taiwan. Japan should at least double its defense budget (now merely 1% of gross domestic product) immediately.
Meanwhile, the U.S. needs to strengthen its military position west of the international date line. A potent forward-deployed force of Marines, submarines and other survivable forces would ensure America and its allies could blunt any attack against Taiwan. The U.S. must buy and rapidly field systems like antiship missiles and unmanned reconnaissance platforms that would be essential to defeating a Chinese invasion.
Averting war against a superpower will require being ruthless about American priorities, though. Holding the line in Asia will mean the U.S. military will have to stop doing almost everything else other than nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism. The U.S. military will have to scale down in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and even Europe. America had a chance to make a more evolutionary and balanced shift to Asia, but we blew it. Now we need to focus, even if it means the military must effectively drop everything else.
China will surely pose a long-term challenge to the U.S. in areas outside the realm of military power. But the most pressing risk is that Beijing may see an advantage in resorting to war. Convincing Beijing it won’t gain from aggression must be the overriding priority.
Mr. Colby is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and author of “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict.” He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, 2017-18.
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Why doesn't Manchin make his move? Does he enjoy being at the center of the stage while playing Horatio? Me
Common-sense Democrat moderate Manchin declares it would be `much easier' for him if he became a Republican
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin might be one of the not so many Democratic Party members of the US Congress with a decent amount of common sense and modern integrity.
After all, among other things, he has just single-handedly achieved the cutting of President Empty Shelves Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion communist spending package to under $2 trillion, saving lots of tax dollars of the American nation.
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