“You heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s when you adopt a goal that influenced your behavior in a way that causes that goal to become a reality. … But if you think you’re never going to go anywhere in life, you won’t. … Likewise, if you believe you can achieve greatness, bar getting a job at CNN, it will happen. But if you focus on division, you will remain divided. The power of positive and negative thinking are two sides of the same coin, and you control the flip. It wasn’t always like that, especially for [b]lacks. The scale was weighted against them. But unless you’re Asian trying to get into Harvard, discrimination is illegal. The Democrat legacy of Jim Crow is gone, all that’s left are the accusation that it isn’t.” (07/23/21)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Andrew J Bacevich
“The armed forces of the United States have plainly failed in Afghanistan. They have not succumbed to outright defeat. But they have come nowhere near to accomplishing their assigned mission. To pretend otherwise is pointless. President Biden has wisely chosen to pull the plug on this misbegotten enterprise. That the United States retains a moral responsibility for what may come next is doubtless the case. … But the larger question remains: How did this happen? Why is America’s longest ever war ending on such an abysmal note? And why does such an eminently germane question go not only unanswered but also unasked?” (07/23/21)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“‘If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,’ proclaims Department of Homeland Security boss Alejandro Mayorkas, directing his remarks to Haitians, whose president Jovenel Moise was recently assassinated, and Cubans protesting the Communist regime. News reports on developments there have overlooked a few realities. … Cuba’s 800,000 African slaves were more than twice the number in the United States. Cuba did not abolish slavery until 1886 and there was no Cuban equivalent of the historically black colleges in the USA. By some estimates, only one-third of Cubans are whites, like the Castros and Miguel Diaz-Canel.” (07/23/21)
“We get told, interminably, by those over to our left that we should have a truly democratic economy. The argument being, as I understand it, that voting on stuff is the highest value. Who does what, how, at what price, is something that should be determined by us all marking a piece of paper so as to determine what the collective view is. … democracy is not the highest value at all, is it? Something else is — liberty. We do indeed say that some things are not for the tyranny of the majority to decide. We tend to call these things civil rights, human rights, freedoms even. There are areas of life where what other people think of our actions, what other people get to do about, in what manner they get to restrict, mean bugger all.” (07/23/21)
“For America’s millennials, the long pandemic has created quite an introspective moment. According to stationery company Shutterfly, 40% of them said they would be sending a greeting card for the first time in 2021. Something in the lockdowns and social distancing is compelling them to send notes of appreciation. The shift toward gratitude fits with a new survey in Britain by Virgin Media O2. It found that more than half of adults in the country have become ‘more grateful’ during the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of 18- to 24-year-olds, who are usually glued to digital screens, made new friends in their local areas. For all the reports of a rise in loneliness, drug addiction, and other issues associated with mental health during the pandemic, the rise in gratitude has been overlooked.” (07/23/21)
“‘99% of COVID deaths are now of unvaccinated people, experts say’ … Such claims struck me as implausible. The estimated effectiveness of the vaccines used in the U.S. is about 95%. Since a majority of adults, and a large majority of those most vulnerable, are vaccinated, one would expect more than 5% of those dying to be vaccinated. It might be somewhat lower if more of the unvaccinated are located in areas with higher than average infection rates but it would be surprising if it was that much lower. The solution appears part way down the story under the headline: ‘In Texas, 99.5% of people who died from COVID from February through July 14 weren’t vaccinated’ … As of the beginning of February very few people had been vaccinated and deaths were running about ten times their current level. A calculation for a period starting then can be expected to greatly overestimate the current ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated deaths.” (07/23/21)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Eric Fleischmann
“Sciabarra’s monograph (or ‘Homonograph’ as he likes to call it) Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation is best understood in a dialectical fashion; that is, to quote some words from Sciabarra himself, to look at it ‘from a variety of perspectives and levels of generality, so as to gain a more comprehensive picture of it[,]’ which ‘requires that we grasp the object in terms of the larger system within which it is situated, as well as its development across time.’ … Ultimately this piece was written with an Objectivist audience in mind—hence its more or less obvious right-wing flavor — but as described above, it is, at its core, a study of the subjective experiences of both LGBTQIA+ individuals and cisheterosexual individuals involved in the Objectivist movement in an effort to ascertain as close to the objective reality of the situation as possible.” (07/23/21)
Source: Tenth Amendment Center
by Laurence M Vance
“It was sixteen years ago last month that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Gonzales v. Raich (2005), ruled that the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 801) did not exceed the power of Congress under the Commerce Clause as applied to the intrastate cultivation and possession of marijuana for medical use. … A federal district court ruled against the defendants. However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision and ruled that the CSA was unconstitutional as it applied to intrastate medical marijuana. The government appealed the decision, and the case was argued before the Supreme Court in November of 2004. The 6-3 opinion, which was delivered by Justice Stevens, with Justices Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Thomas dissenting, effectively says that the federal government has the authority to prohibit marijuana possession and use for any and all purposes.” (07/23/21)
“When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, he promised from outside 10 Downing Street that ‘we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all.’ With his premiership since being dominated by Brexit and then Covid-19, little has since been heard about how this may be achieved, but reports in July 2021 suggest that a rise in the basic rate of income tax or in National Insurance Contributions (NICs) is being considered in order to increase Social Care funding for England. Such a move would break a Conservative manifesto pledge and would also be highly contentious in terms of intergenerational fairness.” (07/23/21)
