Orwellian Moments Abound

 From Zero Hedge:

I won’t harp on Taiwan (or Chinese Taipei) or the “one country, two systems” policy because we touched on those in Things You Will Never See. It is easy to see how ambiguity might have helped as it lets everyone claim what they want, but the reality is that it is a bit absurd. As tensions rise around Taiwan I certainly have trouble fitting many of the statements and policies into a coherent and  predictable pattern for what happens next. Maybe these marriages of convenience where we avoid the details (to avoid conflict) tend to end badly? If Taiwan is truly independent and a nation that we have stated we will support military, then why does a senior official visiting spark such a strong reaction from China? Is it because they believe that we accept the one country, two systems policy? It just seems more and more difficult to believe that the positions regarding Taiwan can co-exist. Taiwan has become a major discussion point, so I will summarize the Geopolitical Intelligence Group’s current view:

• China does not want conflict with the U.S. so any aggressive behavior on their part would have to be framed as responding to some aggression from Taiwan. They would need (or want) a pretext, which brings back bad memories from discussing Putin and Ukraine late last year.

• The timing of any possible invasion or use of force has moved closer. Still unlikely and not the base case for most of the GIG, but a risk that has become more real over the past few weeks.

• The economic and political pressure points that China has with Taiwan will be used even more aggressively to shift behavior.

• There are parallels and lessons to be learned from Russia’s invasion, but there are also some differences:

  • Russia’s military system is a barbell (with senior officers and conscripts) and little in the way of non-commissioned officers (NCOs). China has had much more direct exposure to the U.S. (and NATO) style of command (joint exercises, etc.) so it may not face the same issues as Russia. The joint exercises conducted with land, sea, and air power as they intimidated Taiwan showed a level of coordination the Russians haven’t exhibited.

  • The Chinese military equipment, while untested, may not fail in actual use at the pace that Russian equipment has been failing.

  • Ukraine was poorly supplied with equipment at the start of the war (not the case with Taiwan), which has a well-equipped and well-trained military. But it is an island, making re-supply much more difficult. In Ukraine, the land route from the West into Ukraine is easy and well controlled. Also, NATO countries adjoin Ukraine, so we are to a large extent operating in our own backyard. Any conflict around Taiwan would be in China’s backyard, giving them logistical advantages.

Even without the prospect of war, I can confirm that more people are revisiting discussions with Academy regarding our supply chain theories. We’ve been highlighting to investors and corporations that supply chain “security” is an issue and we expect a shift in  supply chains to become more oriented around North/South transportation lines rather than East/West. Taiwan was effectively blockaded for a few days (many ships apparently wouldn’t go into the area with China and Taiwan conducting live fire exercises).

I’m old enough to remember when we were at war with deflation. That deflation kept central bankers and politicians up at night. It seems crazy, but I could almost be convinced that Japan has been trying to create inflation for 4 decades. Heck, I’d swear that it was less than a year ago that inflation was “transitory,” and many believed that, but I must be misremembering.  (Read more.)

From The Z-man:

Feudalism is a term that either brings to mind serfs slaving away on the land or knights on horseback jousting at tournaments. Neither image has much to do with the socioeconomic system that grew up after the fall of the Western Roman empire and carried on into the 18th century. Both the knight and the serf were real things, but they are not what defined the feudal order. It is the system in which people of all ranks lived that defined what we think of as feudalism.

That system was a series of interlocking relationships. It began with reciprocal relationships between the warrior elite. The leaders of the various peoples slowly evolved rules for dealing with one another. Over time those rules extended to the people over whom they ruled. First it was the vertical relationships and then the horizontal relationships. Most of these rules were not written down. They were the habit of mind that everyone understood and accepted.

What we think of as freedom and liberty come from the feudal era. The two words are used interchangeably today, but it was not always so. Liberty was the right to act within the context of the rules. Freedom was a state in which there were no rules. In the feudal age, liberty was the range of actions for people of a class. Freedman had different liberties than Knights or serfs. Freedom, on the other hand, was being free from those reciprocal relationships that defined the system.

One of the interesting things about the feudal order that has been forgotten is that freedom was a powerful weapon used by kings. Freeing people from their feudal obligations did not necessarily grant them more liberties, but it did weaken the power of the people to whom they no longer had obligations. Freeing the serf from his duties to his lord not only meant he could sell his labor but it meant that his lord no longer had control over him or the proceeds of his labor.

In a system where everyone is defined by their relationship with everyone around them, monarchical power is diffused through the system. The noble who controlled a portion of the kingdom had a great deal of power relative to the king, because all of the rights and duties of his people flowed through him to the king. Once those people were free then they reported directly to the king. A great irony of the feudal order is that individual freedom turned out to be the great centralizing force in politics.

A similar dynamic is at work in this age. As recent as the 1950’s the primary duty of most men was to their family. From there it was their community then the larger political entities like city, county and state. Outside of the draft and the post office, people had no reason to think about the national government. Go back further and the national government played little role in the life of Americans. You could live your life never having had contact with the national government.

As Americans have been freed from the old rules of life, like marriage, family and community, the power of the government has grown. The weakening of state and local government by direct intervention by the federal government has corresponded with the collapse in things like property rights and freedom of association. Young women are no longer dependent on a man, but they are entirely dependent on government. It is impossible to live without interacting with government now.

The conventional conservative critique argues that personal liberty has declined because the power of the state has increased. In reality, personally liberty has declined because freedom has increased. As people have been freed from their particular obligations to one another, their liberties have declined, which is what has allowed the power of the federal state to grow. Each new “freedom” comes with less liberty and therefore a declining ability to resist the state. (Read more.) 

 

From American Greatness:

Former President Donald Trump said the FBI “stole” three of his passports during its raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday, calling the unprecedented search a “third world” “assault” on a “political opponent.”

“Wow! In the raid by the FBI of Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three Passports (one expired), along with everything else,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “This is an assault on a political opponent at a level never seen before in our Country.” He added: “Third World!”

Agents hauled off approximately 20 boxes of materials, after carrying out a broad search warrant at the former president’s private residence in Palm Beach, Fla.

The Mar-a-Lago search warrant and property receipt were unsealed on Friday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart. The search warrant indicated that Trump is under investigation for violating the Espionage Act, among other crimes dealing with the mishandling of classified records.

The Department of Justice on Monday said it opposed the unsealing of the affidavit that was used to secure Reinhart’s permission to obtain the search warrant.

“If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,”  DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing responding to efforts by news outlets to make it public.

The property receipt showed that FBI agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents.

Trump and his allies have disputed the National Archives’ classification of those records, arguing they have all been declassified.

“It was all declassified,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 12.  He added that the feds didn’t need to “seize” anything. “They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request,” he said.

Former National Security Council official Kash Patel, whom Trump made his representative in the National Archives dispute, said in an interview on Fox News Sunday that in October of 2020, Trump was issued a sweeping declassification order for every RussiaGate document, and every Hillary Clinton document. (Read more.)

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China’s Job Market Crashes

 From TFP:

Everyone knows that today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. Even China’s president Xi Jinping recognizes that the dismal future of his communist regime must rely upon new blood. In a speech in 2019, he affirmed that “China’s hope lies in youth.” He flattered them by calling young people the most energetic force in society and encouraged them to defend the nation’s high ideals ardently. After all, the communist tyranny can only continue if the youth are on board.

Unfortunately for Xi, many Chinese youths are jumping ship. They seek something more than his “high ideals.” Many young people are well educated, and some work high-paying jobs. However, the pressures to survive in a highly competitive workplace have taken their toll. Many people just want out.

Using highly suspicious statistics, China claims to have averaged a growth rate of 10 percent GDP over the last thirty years. However, that rate has proven unsustainable with the COVID crisis and supply chain problems. In a perfect storm that is much of its own doing, Beijing’s totalitarian “zero tolerance” attitude toward COVID has triggered massive layoffs and an uncertain business climate. Its regulatory restrictions are suffocating companies in the private sector.

To make matters worse, 2022 has produced a record number of graduates from universities and vocational schools. More than 12 million jobseekers are now competing in a market that does not have enough corresponding jobs. This mismatch is causing rising frustration among applicants with high expectations. (Read more.)

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18th-Century Shoes and the Contradictions of the Age of Enlightenment

 From Smithsonian:

High heels also changed the way women walked, giving them a tottering gait. According to the exhibition, feminine footwear of the 18th century thus played into prominent theories about women’s “innate” inferiority—their smallness of intellect, their wobbliness of mind. Though Enlightenment thinkers trumpeted liberty for all rational persons, few argued that women should be granted the same political and economic rights as men. Instead, women were expected to occupy the domestic sphere, taking on roles as pleasing wives and doting mothers. Those who supported women’s subordination looked to nature to justify their beliefs; women were simply biologically different, they argued, and inherently less capable of rational thought.

“[W]oman was specifically made to please man,” wrote the preeminent Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762. “[Man’s] merit lies in his power; he pleases simply because he is strong. I grant you this is not the law of love; but it is the law of nature.”

Even women who worked outside the home were expected to conform to feminine ideals that emphasized their differences from men. One pair of heels at the BSM shows signs of alterations suggesting they were acquired secondhand, possibly at a used-clothing market or from a wealthy employer who no longer wanted them. Dated to the 1730s, the shoes were originally fastened with bows that appear to have been replaced by more stylish straps several years later. These changes may have been made for a working-class woman who could not afford the latest footwear trends but who nevertheless wanted to dress in fashionable heels. (Read more.)

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Democratic Operatives Control Voter Rolls In 31 States

 From The Federalist:

The prominent voter-roll management system used by 31 states and the District of Columbia has politically compromised ties, according to a new report by independent research group Verity Vote. The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, was sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls. Started in 2012 by far-left activist David Becker and the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts, the program is ostensibly run by the member states themselves. But as public records show, Democratic operatives are working overtime under the cover of ERIC to accomplish their partisan goals and drive Democratic voter turnout. 

Becker’s left-wing ties have long concerned Republican state officials participating in ERIC. Before he started ERIC, Becker worked as a lobbyist for People for the American Way, a George Soros-funded advocacy group best known for the Right Wing Watch project, a website that catalogs and attacks conservative politicians and movements.

Before that, though, he was a Justice Department attorney whom colleagues remember as a “hard-core leftist” who “couldn’t stand Conservatives.” 

While at the DOJ, Becker became the subject of an ethics complaint after he contacted Boston and offered his help in defeating a lawsuit made against the city by his employer for voting infractions. According to Hans von Spakovsky, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the time, Becker “was supposed to be nonpartisan, but his emails uncovered in the Boston investigation revealed nasty, disparaging remarks about Republicans. Very unethical and unprofessional.”

After his stint at the DOJ and People for the American Way, Becker became the director of election initiatives at Pew Charitable Trusts, where he organized the creation of ERIC in 2012. Though Becker officially left ERIC in 2016, public records show he has continued to play a strong role in the organization, coordinating with state officials on ERIC-related activities and even running ERIC meetings. Documentation of that role is provided in Verity’s report. This is in violation of ERIC’s bylaws as Becker is a “non-voting board member” of ERIC and should not have the power to direct projects. (Read more.)

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Clanging and Schizophrenia

 From Medical News Today:

Schizophrenia causesTrusted Source formal thought disorders. A formal thought disorder is a condition that affects the way a person communicates and expresses themselves. Doctors view formal thought disorders as a sign of psychosis, which is a symptom of schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia commonly experience things others do not, including delusions and hallucinations. These experiences may alter their thinking, causing non-typical or harmful thoughts. Schizophrenia may also cause people to have changes in their ability to have insight into their own behavior or into others’ thoughts and feelings.

All of these symptoms can affect the way a person expresses themselves. A person may not notice that they are communicating in non-typical ways and may not realize that others may perceive these communications as unusual. Additionally, people may find that cognitive changes make expressing themselves more difficult.

Clanging is a sign of a thought disorder. A 2020 studyTrusted Source emphasizes that language changes are common in schizophrenia. Comparing 26 people with schizophrenia to 22 people without this condition, the researchers of the above study were correctly able to diagnose 89% of participants with schizophrenia by monitoring for language changes. The researchers also found that language changes have an association with negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Negative symptoms include not feeling motivated or finding it difficult to feel pleasure. (Read more.)

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Madame Sullivan

Eleonore Sullivan is the lady Axel von Fersen was involved with when he was supposedly exchanging "love letters" with Marie-Antoinette. She is the "El" or "elle" referred to in his letters to his sister. Mrs. Sullivan did play a part in the Royal Family's aborted escape attempt. More information at Le Boudoir. And HERE and HERE. Share

On the Razor’s Edge

 From American Greatness:

The planet faces an existential threat. If we don’t act soon, and with great effort, all may be lost. The point of no return is racing toward us at breakneck speed. Action is required today, not just talk. But this apocalypse is not the one we’ve been warned about—the rise in global temperatures by a measly half degree—but rather the complete and total abandonment of logic, reason, and reality in huge swaths of our collective lives. Like children born into great affluence, many seem to believe the incredible wealth, freedom, tolerance and peace we live with—unique in the annals of all human history—is just the way things are. It just “happened” because of the inevitable march of progress and isn’t rooted in any special system design or way of thinking. They think we can’t go back.

What’s more, it is our right to live this way—ours by our very existence. Somehow, we—at least some of us with the correct thoughts—have turned a corner in human history. We are better than those who came before us, and at a very fundamental level—morally, intellectually, spiritually just better than those unwashed, bigoted rubes who came before us. Some have called this a period of untruth; a willful casting aside of that pesky thing called  reality. Becoming unmoored from reality allows insane ideas to spread and propagate, putting all life on the planet in jeopardy. The genius design of our Constitution is now seen by many not as the driver of the freest, most prosperous nation the world has ever seen but rather as a hindrance to their hopes of remaking the country into a socialist utopia. (Read more.)

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Latin and God’s Holy People

 From The Catholic Thing:

I do not attend the Latin Mass.  I believe that the Novus Ordo Mass can be filled with beauty, but that the surroundings, the habits that have grown into prescriptive laws, the ancillary people and their actions, and the problems with the lectionary, especially in its English rendering, make that beauty difficult to attain.

The problem is not that the Mass, as it is in fact celebrated almost everywhere in the English world, fails to be overpowering, like a Beethoven symphony.  We cannot live on grandeur alone.  We must have ordinary bread.  But there’s a beauty to ordinary bread, too, the beauty of what is simple, wholesome, unpretentious.

The old low Mass had that simplicity.  You could say it was not grand, but it did not pretend to be.  What you could never say was that it was ugly, silly, or sentimental.  It was reliable, like a rock.

Cardinals Cupich and Gregory, Bishop Burbidge of Arlington, and others insist that we Catholics shall not be united unless we cause everyone to give up the beauty and power they find in the Latin Mass – for it is there to be found, and even at a low Mass, the quiet power is as solid and confident and firm.

But that is like demanding that we shall find beauty where it is not, because it has been shorn away, or where we are battered by banality or silliness or ugliness or politically motivated trimming of Scripture.

It’s like saying, “You shall get rid of your altar rail, and you shall at the same time be just as profoundly touched by the excellence of the Sacrament as you were before, and by the unity of the people of God, humbly submitting to be fed by Christ.”

It’s like saying, “You shall whitewash most of the paintings in your church, and you shall at the same time feel embedded in a family and all its family stories that extend over thousands of years.”

It’s like saying, “You shall replace the chants with these songs here, by these authors who can’t write a lick of poetry and who have not studied Christian hymns since Saint Ambrose, songs that are at best sentimental and inoffensive, at worst stupid and heretical, and you shall sing, and you shall be lifted up in the soul, whether you like it or not.”

It’s like saying, “You shall be content with Scriptural readings riddled with holes, and translated by people whose literary achievements make for adequate office memoranda, and you shall be stirred by their eloquence, nor shall you notice what is missing.”

It’s like saying, “You shall be content with prayers that ignore great fields of the spiritual life.  You shall be content with prayers painted in orange, yellow, and white.  You shall never long for the deep red of suffering and the somber blue of falling night.  You shall want what is pretty and pleasant – never the dread of eternal loss, never a frank acknowledgment of how wretched you are, always a smile and a pat on the back.  You shall buy what good feelings the huckster has for sale.  You shall be happy with that, or else.” (Read more.)

 

Also from The Catholic Thing:

Here are some other remarkable traits about the crucifix.

First, on the crucifix, the body of the Lord is lifted off the ground and placed in “the air.”  We – with our scaffolding, elevators, and skyscrapers – don’t even notice that this is unusual.  Yet the Fathers of the Church were so taken with this aspect – that a crucifixion implied a suspension in air – that they held that the element of “air” (traditionally also a dwelling place of daemons) was thereby purified and sanctified, just as Our Lord’s baptism affected all waters.

Second, on the crucifix, Our Lord assumes a posture not seen in ordinary life, namely, standing upright, legs together, with arms outstretched.  The posture is so unusual that Leonardo’s drawing of it, “Vitruvian Man,” has become iconic.  Leonardo was not drawing Christ on the cross but intending to illustrate the proportions of the human body: a man standing upright with outstretched arms is inscribed perfectly by a square (that is, a man’s “wingspan” is generally equal to his height).

For Leonardo, the proportions internal to the human body, a “microcosm,” testified to man’s ordered place within a universe of law and proportion, the “macrocosm.”  But the crucifix, through the same bodily form, teaches this very truth at its deepest, spiritual level: “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” (Phil. 2:8)  More than this: because the hands of the Vitruvian man face downward, while Our Lord’s face outward, this display of humility on the cross is clearly, at the same time, a priestly embrace.

Third, the standard crucifix depicts Our Lord as still alive, even though salvation is fully accomplished only at his death (“It is finished”, Jn 19:30).  But this too is remarkable: everyone who has ever kept vigil at a deathbed knows how precious those last hours are; but it seems improper to try to capture them, and we don’t do so – perhaps because we recognize intuitively that death for us is a penalty for sin. For Our Lord it is different: since his death was unwarranted but freely accepted, we can depict his “death bed” always, and are invited to keep vigil always.

The crucifix and the cross: the former is found almost solely in churches in which Our Lord is Really Present, which suggests a last recommendation – the  crucifix with its substantial corpus is simply a better sign that, indeed, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.” (Read more.)

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The Cosmologies of Sigrid Undset

 From Genevieve Kineke at Catholic World Report:

Fr. Nichols traces the major influences on her formation—familial, cultural, and political—but it is his tender illustration of the curious soul creeping forward that is so competently done: distinguishing the telltale clues and intellectual breakthroughs that create the essential pivot points in Sigrid’s growth. A successful novelist dissects such a journey and reassembles it on the page for the sake of the reader, and what Sigrid did for her fictional characters Fr Nichols does for us, although not in narrative form but as a mosaic—arranged according to myriad themes, and how and where they emerged in her writing.

Sigrid’s experiences, a “storehouse of life’s impressions,” were poured into her fiction, allowing her to create profoundly interesting characters who grow organically according to circumstances and grace. Indeed, it was her own rocky setting that simultaneously caused her to flee Europe, to apply her writing skills to war propaganda, and ultimately to embrace the Catholic Church. Near the end of this book, Fr Nichols offers the image of the bridge, which makes sense of her life, the arc of her writing, and even the larger culture being transformed in radical and disturbing ways.

These ends, unfortunately, are at cross-purposes, because while she was driven to sharpen the distinctions between froth and Faith, at the same time the wider world was letting go of hard-won truths and sinking back into chaos. Her love of Scholasticism allowed her to let go of sentimentality and idealism for the sake of “the philosophy of the real,” which would carry her securely through the shifting sands of modernism and the “intellectual anarchy” of Protestantism. She saw clearly that the vague “brotherhood” being sold in the secular market—especially after the war—was impossible without the Fatherhood of God and the discipline of applied virtue.

This is where the bridge imagery fits. With the rejection of natural law, the traditional family, and Christian morality already taking firm shape all around her, she stressed the importance of motherhood as a critical bond between the child and the world, the family as a bulwark against the chaos of political instability, and the truths of the faith as essential bedrock to instantiate reality in a world grasping for comfortable ideologies. She saw that the rationalist view of man was shredding his ability to find God, because man is, in actuality, a creature in need of soil, roots, and structure—ideas which were amply illustrated in all her writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Without such concrete things at his fingertips, modern man was prone to anxiety and despair, and yet his sophisticated pretentiousness blinded him to the “miniature cosmologies” all around him. (Read more.)

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