If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
US household wealth rises in Q2 to record $163.8 trln (Reuters, 9/12/24)
U.S. household wealth rose last quarter to $163.8 trillion, a fresh record, driven by gains in real estate values as well as a rise in the stock market, data from the Federal Reserve showed on Thursday.
Order for a Disordered Time: a review of The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk (Daniel Pitt, University Bookman)
When one thinks of order one might think of the phrase law and order. Kirk explains, however, that order is wider and larger than law. Law is, of course, an important element of sustaining order but they are not indistinguishable. My own way of thinking about the difference between law and order is that law is a puzzle piece in the overall puzzle of order. The other puzzle pieces are traditions, norms, customs, and beliefs. Together they form the whole picture of order. Dr. Kirk provides us with two types of order: (1) order in one’s soul; and (2) order within the civil society at large. Kirk ensures that the reader is not led to believe that this categorization of order means that they are discrete and distinct, but quite the contrary is true, these roots of order are deeply “intertwined.” […]
What do we derive from these cities? From Jerusalem, the concept of “a purposeful moral existence under God,” who cares about His nations and human persons and who is the source of all morality. From Athens, we learn that human beings are social beings, and they need to live in a community and that order in the soul and order in civil society are linked together. From Rome, we learn the importance of venerating our ancestors. Of course, these roots were intertwined “with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes.” From London, we get Magna Carta, equality before the law, common law, representative government, the English language, America’s social patterns and the foundations of its economy. On personal freedom in America, Kirk states that “in its origins, American personal liberty perhaps owes more to the common law than any other single source.” Indeed, according to Kirk, “the law, which is no respecter of persons, stands supreme: that is the essence of British legal theory and legal practice, and it passed into America from the first colonial settlements onwards.” From Philadelphia, the roots are America’s founding documents. In other words, the importance of art, law, ordered-liberty, community and tradition derive from these five cities, and they are essential to human prosperity, flourishing, and order.
Full-scale demonstrator paves the way for hybrid-electric airliner (Ben Coxworth, September 12, 2024, New Atlas)
What this means is that for flights of up to 200 km (124 miles), the aircraft will just use two electric motors located relatively close in to the fuselage on each wing. For going farther – up to 400 km (249 miles) – two small turboprop engines located farther out on the wings will kick in to extend the aircraft’s range.
One charge of the aircraft’s BAE-Systems-designed batteries should take only 30 minutes.
Like other electric airliners, the ES-30 should produce fewer carbon emissions than its conventional counterparts, while also being quieter, cheaper to operate, and easier to maintain. Additionally, because its electric motors quickly deliver maximum torque, it will be able to take off from runways as short as 1,100 m (3,609 ft) – with its turboprops helping.
Sporting a 32-meter (105-ft) wingspan, the fully-functional new demonstrator aircraft is the planned size of the ES-30.
Trump says he won’t do another debate with Harris (Brett Samuels, 09/12/24, The Hill)
Former President Trump said Thursday he would not participate in another debate with Vice President Harris, squashing the potential for a second meeting between the two candidates before Election Day.
Trump Took the Bait. Harris Kept Her Cool (Eli Lake, 9/11/24, Free Press)
She was strategic. Around the half-hour mark, she invited the television audience to attend Trump’s rallies where “he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter.” Then, she laid the bait, landing a blow about the passion of his crowds, stating: “People leave early out of boredom.”
This was the moment that Trump began to unravel. He shot back with a retort: “People don’t go to her rallies,” before going on to assert that she had to bus in her supporters. But then his words sprawled. Millions and millions of illegals are coming into the country. The current administration is risking World War Three. “In Springfield they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said of migrants moving to the city. Then he repeated a line from his convention speech. If Harris wins, “we will end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
What?
Adam Smith: He shows how to reconcile natural liberty with ordered justice (Ian Crowe, September 10, 2024, Modern Age)
The Theory of Moral Sentiments places Smith firmly among the thinkers, such as Hutcheson and Hume, who emphasize the role of aesthetics and the natural human passions in the shaping of principles of moral philosophy. In the way he links sympathy, imagination, and ambition, however, he moves beyond his contemporaries in two main respects. First, in developing the “sympathetic” link between the impartial spectator and the individual conscience, he injects an objective quality of imagination into the impulse of sympathy (in which sense Smith might be seen as a “philosopher of the normal,” a term used by Dr. William Campbell to describe the political economy of Wilhelm Röpke). Secondly, his treatment of the motive of “self-love” reveals a subtle combination of utility and benevolence that passes between Hutcheson’s reliance on a separate moral sense and Bentham’s utilitarianism. Both of these concepts, conscience and self-interest, reveal the powerful influence of Stoicism on Smith’s thought, and are vital in appreciating how Smith linked the natural and the moral—motive and judgment—within his system.
Pain relief from mindfulness meditation not a placebo effect (Paul McClure, September 08, 2024, New Atlas)
New research has found that mindfulness meditation reduces pain by engaging a distinct brain pathway, separate from the pathway activated by a placebo. The standalone analgesic effect that mindfulness produces could be leveraged to help people living with painful conditions.
Practice don’tmindfulness and just your quibbles.
Tucker Carlson and the Beer Hall Putz: The logical conclusion of the “redpill” mentality that’s increasingly prevalent on the right. (Cathy Young, Sep 09, 2024, The Bulwark)
In the Free Press, Sohrab Ahmari (attempting to don a new centrist hat in his latest political pivot) describes Carlson’s praise of Cooper as a manifestation of the “Barbarian Right,” more or less overtly racist and preoccupied with racial hierarchies. The “Barbarian Right,” writes Ahmari, is characterized by the conviction that one is championing facts and ideas suppressed by the establishment—things they don’t want you to think and to know. Its distinctive features also include “revulsion for the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold across the West in the postwar period,” a conservatism that accepted the civil rights movement and that “marginalized Jew-haters.” Indeed, Ahmari notes, Carlson’s interview of Cooper shows “how far the Barbarian Right will go in seeking to delegitimize the actually existing American order.”
It’s an accurate observation, but the rot goes beyond the hardcore racialist right. The “redpill” mentality which holds that everything you’ve been told by the “establishment” and the “elites” is a lie—and of which World War II revisionism and Holocaust denial are arguably the logical conclusion—has become fairly standard in right-wing and “heterodox” circles. So has distaste for the “actually existing” American and Western order. Here’s a startling example: In July 2021, Tablet, the Jewish online magazine which in the past several years has increasingly drifted from pluralistic centrism toward nationalist/populist conservatism, published an article, based on its author’s viral Twitter thread, in defense of Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lie. Its argument: Whatever the evidence with regard to alleged election fraud, Trump supporters have every reason to believe, especially after Russiagate, that “the Regime” and its subservient media are rotten through and through and cannot be trusted. Its author? None other than Darryl Cooper.
The rush to condemn Carlson’s promotion of Cooper by many people to the right of center, from the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon to radio host Erick Erickson to Ahmari and others at the Free Press to National Review authors and editors has been laudable. But some of this pushback had overtones of alarm at the fact that trends these same outlets and authors had condoned and even normalized had now crossed a red line. In a Newsweek column, conservative writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis acknowledged as much:
It is on those of us who have, for too long, closed our eyes to the madness among our own ranks, to ensure this chaos of conspiracy does not spread to the mainstream, any more than it already has.
And indeed, for a long time, many of Carlson’s current detractors, not only “closed [their] eyes” to his peddling of conspiracy theories and bigotry but engaged in active apologetics for it. As I noted in The Bulwark more than a year ago after Carlson was booted by Fox News, Weiss wrote a fairly appreciative post about him at the time—acknowledging that she found his views on Ukraine and immigration repugnant, but also stressing “how important he was (and is)” and praising him for challenging COVID lockdowns and telling the truth about Black Lives Matter riots and “the alliance between Big Tech and the government.”
No one is just a little bit Identitarian.
When pain really is in your head (Nancy Shute, 9/-7/24, Science News)
As we report in this issue, researchers are now getting a better handle on the complexities of chronic pain, including the brain’s role in amplifying or maintaining pain, and people’s perceptions. As freelance science journalist Cassandra Willyard reports, scientists are pursuing possibilities ranging from new medications to a tiny injectable electrode to forms of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help patients grasp that chronic pain is sometimes a misfiring signal from the brain that can be managed. Rather than one-size-fits-all, these treatments will be tailored to the patient, and will likely include multiple treatments to better address the complexities of chronic pain.
Individualism: Balancing freedom and social order is a fundamentally American challenge. (Wilfred M. McClay, August 28, 2024, Modern Age)
[A]lthough “individualism” is a relatively new term in Western intellectual and religious history, it has a long and distinguished pedigree, informed by rich antecedents and fertile anticipations. Belief in the dignity and worth of the individual person has always been a distinguishing mark, and a principal mainstay, of what we call Western civilization, the defense of which has become an increasingly central element in what now goes by the name of conservatism.
Elements of that belief can be detected as far back as classical antiquity, particularly in the Greek discovery of philosophy as a distinctive form of free rational inquiry, and in the Greco-Roman stress upon the need for virtuous individual citizens to sustain a healthy republican political order. Other elements appeared later, particularly in the intensely self-directed moral discipline of Epicureanism and Stoicism. Even more importantly, the traditions and institutions arising out of biblical monotheism, whether Jewish or Christian, placed heavy emphasis upon the infinite value, personal agency, and moral accountability of the individual person. That emphasis reached a pinnacle of sorts in Western Christianity, which incorporated the divergent legacies of Athens and Jerusalem into a single universalized faith.
None of these expressions of belief in the individual were quite the same as modern individualism, however, for the freedom the premodern individual enjoyed, particularly since the advent of Christianity, was always constrained. It was constrained by belief in the existence of an objective moral order not to be violated with impunity by antinomian rebels and enthusiasts. And it was constrained by belief in the inherent frailty of human nature, which indicated that virtue cannot be produced in social isolation.
The genius of our system of republican liberty is that the individual is entitled to exactly as much freedom as we afford to each other and no more.