Cut to the News Weekend - April 25, 2021
Published: Sun, 04/25/21
Orwell’s 1984 and Today . . .Former President Trump's Project 1776 seeks to counter the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The 1619 Project promotes the teaching that slavery, not freedom, is the defining fact of American history. The 1776 Commission aims to restore truth and honesty to the teaching of American history. We must carry on the fight because our country is at stake. Indeed, in a larger sense, civilization itself is at stake, because the forces arrayed against the scholarship and the politics of freedom today have more radical aims than just destroying America. I taught a course this fall semester on totalitarian novels. We read four of them: George Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The totalitarian novel is a relatively new genre. In fact, the word “totalitarian” did not exist before the 20th century. The older word for the worst possible form of government is “tyranny”—a word Aristotle defined as the rule of one person, or of a small group of people, in their own interests and according to their will. Totalitarianism was unknown to Aristotle, because it is a form of government that only became possible after the emergence of modern science and technology. To present young people with a full and honest account of our nation’s history is to invest them with the spirit of freedom. It is to teach them that the people in the past, even the great ones, were human and had to struggle. Depriving the young of the spirit of freedom will deprive us all of our country. It could deprive us, finally, of our humanity itself. This cannot be allowed to continue. It must be stopped. Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College. Imprimis
Why I refuse to take the Trump vaccine . . . Vaccines are a marvel of modern medicine that have saved countless millions of lives throughout the world. Operation Warp Speed will go down in history as a miracle of presidential vision, political leadership, bureaucratic humility and free enterprise genius. When President Trump announced the project to invent a vaccine, all the experts in Washington scorned and mocked him. If Joe Biden had been president a year ago, he would have sidelined the drug companies, deputized the federal government to invent the vaccine and airlifted millions of disposable face masks. From China, of course. The vaccine would still be five years away. My point is that I have unstinting respect for how Mr. Trump envisioned and inspired these vaccines. And, more generally, I have tremendous faith in vaccines. But this COVID-19 vaccine is, apparently, different. In the first place, I am highly suspicious of all the government bureaucrats who are now so breathlessly peddling the vaccine today. Every single one of them were among the early “experts” who assured us all that a vaccine was a hopeless fairy tale still years away. And now that it is here — in months, not years — the very same people who doubted the vaccines are now beating the bushes with threats and jeers that we all have to get the vaccine right away. It is suddenly our patriotic duty. Our duty as humans. Charles Hurt. Washington Times
For the record, I've gotten my first jab of Pfeizer, albeit being "strong-armed" into it by my "white privileged" husband, who has been name-calling me a 'anti-vaxxer.' :-) I firmly believe though, that in America, everyone should have the freedom to make his/her own decision whether or not to get the "Trump vaccine."
A Real (Consumer) Revolution Is Starting to Take Over Education . . . A real revolution is brewing, in this case, a positive one, in education. And it’s manifesting from kindergarten to college. People are fed up. They’re trying to change and often leaving the educational system altogether. They’ve had enough of the “woke” taking over our schools. Just one recent example of this is how a letter from an angry father who is pulling his daughter out of New York City’s upscale Brearley School has gone viral. This father, Andrew Guttman, accused the all-girls’ private school of “cowardly and appalling lack of leadership [for] appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob.” The letter, something of a tour de force, hits many nails on present-day heads. The overnight popularity of this letter (read the whole thing, as they say) across the internet is a measure of how this man is speaking not just of Brearley but of what is now the majority of educational institutions, public and private, in this nation. Families are voting with their children’s feet, you might say, taking them out of these doctrinaire institutions, an increasing number to be homeschooled. So what is evolving is a consumer revolution in the most crucial field to our country’s future—education. Epoch Times
Could the United States Fight Russia and China at the Same Time? . . . It's the question that haunts strategic thinkers in the Pentagon and elsewhere. The United States can still fight and win two major wars at the same time, or at least come near enough to winning that neither Russia nor China would see much hope in the gamble. However, that situation will not last forever. The United States discarded its oft-misunderstood “two war” doctrine, intended as a template for providing the means to fight two regional wars simultaneously, late last decade. Designed to deter North Korea from launching a war while the United States was involved in fighting against Iran or Iraq (or vice versa,) the idea helped give form to the Department of Defense’s procurement, logistical, and basing strategies in the post–Cold War, when the United States no longer needed to face down the Soviet threat. The United States backed away from the doctrine because of changes in the international system, including the rising power of China and the proliferation of highly effective terrorist networks. But what if the United States had to fight two wars today, and not against states like North Korea and Iran? What if China and Russia sufficiently coordinated with one another to engage in simultaneous hostilities in the Pacific and in Europe? National Interest
A World Split Apart. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Commencement Address, delivered 8 June 1978 at Harvard University . . . When the modern Western states were created, the principle was proclaimed that governments are meant to serve man and man lives to be free and to pursue happiness. Now, at last, during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness -- in the morally inferior sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development. The majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about. It has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leaving them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money, and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. And for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country? Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism.
If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism. American Rhetoric
As relevant today, if not more, as it was in 1978.
The difficult realities of lethal force . . . The shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio, has produced a torrent of objections to how police respond to armed suspects. Some, like MSNBC host Joy Reid, simply declare that the use of lethal force to stop a knife attack is “murder.” “The View” co-host Joy Behar thinks officers who come upon someone about to knife another person should shoot into the air, as a warning. President Biden has long maintained that police officers should shoot armed suspects in the leg. However, there is a reason why police manuals do not say “aim for the leg” or “try to shoot the weapon out of the suspect’s hand.” It is called “imminent harm,” the standard governing all police shootings. The fact that many of us describe such shootings as “justified” is not to belittle these tragedies but to recognize the underlying exigencies that control the use of lethal force. In the slow motion videos of shootings played on cable television, there often seems to be endless opportunities for de-escalation or alternatives to lethal force. None of us want to hear of the loss of another young life like Bryant’s. But Biden’s suggestion — that “instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg” — is not exactly how it works, practically or legally. By definition, the use of lethal force is justified only when a threat of death or serious bodily harm is “imminent.” At that point, even if trick shooting or firing at limbs were feasible, an imminent threat must be neutralized without delay. JONATHAN TURLEY. The Hill
The Dying Swan performed by the Bolshoi's Svetlana Zakharova. Vaganova Blog
Breath-taking performance by the Russian prima ballerina.
UFC's Lithuanian-American Rose Namajunas defends politically charged remark about China's Weili Zhang fight . . . UFC strawweight fighter Rose Namajunas defended her "red is dead" comment when talking about her upcoming title fight against champion Weili Zhang on Wednesday. Namajunas explained to Lithuanian media earlier in the week that, to her, going up against UFC’s first Chinese champion means more than just fighting for the gold. Her politically charged comments raised eyebrows but the Lithuanian-American wasn’t backing down from them. "I'd probably have a really different life if it wasn't for everything in that documentary, how Lithuanians had to struggle with communism oppression," she said referring to the documentary "The Other Dream Team."
See Rose Namajunas's stunning KO of Zhang Weili Saturday night at UFC 261. Rose dethroned Zhang Weili, reclaiming the strawweight championship and 115-pound belt. The official stoppage came at the 1:18 mark.
Congrats Rose! You ARE the best!