Is Administrative Law Unlawful, Philip Hamburger

I have to love the name. Hamburger is very American! 

The Hamburger in this case is no joke at all. A Juris Doctor (highest degree in law) from Yale, now a law professor at Columbia and noted author of a number of books, articles, and recipient of prestigious awards. You likely have never heard of him because what he writes about clearly and unambiguously makes a nearly irrefutable case that we are subjects, not citizens, with our rulers having absolute power. 

How is that possible? Because the approved media and educational system narrative is that it is not possible for a "modern technological society" to be governed by citizens of a republic. Our betters find the very idea of separation of powers with a judicial system that enforces the separation through application of a written constitution to be "impossible". (the book lets you know it is fairly easily possible, just not desirable for our rulers), 

I seem to be on a tear of reading deep and difficult works for some reason lately. This one is no exception, although well written. Five hundred page, fairly small print, and over 100 pages of notes is not to be trifled with. If we are to return to being a Constitutional Republic, something over a majority need to understand some of these truths that are not so "self evident", but critical to any that want to return to being citizens rather than subjects. 

A shorter (and likely better) review of the book that I quote from in this post is here.

In the 1500s (and before), the application of absolute power was supposedly required because of "emergency" (like a "crisis" ... Covid, Climate Change, gun violence, etc, etc). 

Those who remain skeptical might consider one of Hamburger’s examples. He discusses the 1539 Act of Proclamations enacted by a cowed Parliament at Henry VIII’s insistence. The Act authorized the king to “set forth…proclamations, under such penalties and pains” as might be thought “necessary and requisite” by the king and his council. These proclamations “shall be obeyed, observed, and kept as though they were made by act of Parliament.”

If you have to go around Parliament and Congress from time to time, perhaps the "time" should be perpetually NOW.  One of our current ruling class has a definite handle on the importance of the passage of time. We should all be thankful that we are subjects to the brilliance of our betters through Administrative Law ... they have it together! 

The thesis of the book is simple: 

His thesis, in a nutshell, comes to this: the Constitution contemplates only two kinds of edicts that may bind citizens—rules enacted by Congress, and orders issued by duly authorized courts. Administrative edicts, by contrast, seek to bind citizens by commands that are neither legislatively enacted nor judicially decreed. They are, strictly speaking, lawless.

 Perhaps (though I'm pessimistic) people will start to realize that we have been brainwashed by our "educational system" (indoctrination system), our media industrial complex (propaganda), and of course our entire Administrative/Deep State. The Deep State has now been politically weaponized to defend our rulers in the Democrat Deep State.

The linked review is more optimistic than I am. We both see the ACA as an example of the tragedy of the Administrative State, however since the linked review is from 2014, it appears my pessimism is more accurate than their admittedly tepid optimism. 

The persistent, widespread, and increasing unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act may be an indicator of public exhaustion with the new regulatory paradigm. Despite early enthusiasm for health care “reform,” it gradually began to dawn on the public that a government plan to coordinate health care services all the way down, so to speak, is going to have a lot to say about when, where, how, and by whom you are treated, and for how long. And the government is not always going to say please and thank you as it steers citizens into mandated health care chutes. Despite repeated promises by politicians from the president on down, it turns out that large numbers of people will not be able to keep their previous health plan or doctors. And their new insurance policies in all probability will cost them more—considerably more.

I take a shot at making this simpler and more personal in this recent post. 

As the book repeats multiple times, our courts including the SCOTUS have decided it is almighty precedent that requires deference to the Administrative State, and Obama Care is a nasty example. 

A quote from the book by way of the review summarizes what has happened rather nicely. 

The history of government is largely a story of elite power and popular subservience. Americans, however, turned this old model upside down. By establishing a republican form of government, they eventually made themselves masters and made their lawmakers their servants. More than two centuries later, the shell of this republican experiment remains. Within it, however, another government has arisen, in which new masters once again assert themselves, issuing commands as if they were members of a ruling class, and as if the people were merely their servants. Self-government thus has given way to a system of submission.

Optimists honestly thought that the Covid authoritarian lockdowns, lies, destruction of our economy and educational system would wake up the population and draw them away from Netflix, social media, and general mindless entertainment to throw the bums out.  To the extent 2022 was an "election" it shows that was either a false hope, or that a serf thinking that an "election" run by the ruling class is going to free them from their servility is deluded. 

You probably started reading this thinking you were a citizen, welcome to being a subject!

No Truth, No Belief

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/thought-for-the-day-scruton-on-european-subsidiarity.php 

The Roger. Scruton quote is worth is the gem. 

Roger is one of my favorites!

Covid And Truth

Watching this if you don't have a Daily Wire subscription is like watching network TV ... the commercials are infuriating, but I think worth it.  

It covers a lot of facts about the strange response to Covid, the main one in my mind is "Why doesn't anyone seem to be curious about how Covid got started"?  (in fact they want desperately to close the case that it was not). The circumstantial evidence is very damning ... viral gain of function research was being done in Wuhan, Fauci was funding it, we know there was a conference call on which Fauci and a set of virologists were very concerned about this being a lab leak, and how they could "verify" that it was not. (they claimed they had found a "very similar" virus in a pangolin), however when guys like Ridley looked, it wasn't. 

If you take the time to look at the early part of the video, you will learn about protein spikes and ACE2 receptors, and why it is so difficult (thanks be to God) for nature to produce a virus that does human to human transmission. Is it "possible" that it can happen randomly? Certainly, someone does win the lottery after all. Occam would be skeptical. In this case, the Wuhan lab was specifically inserting genetic code to allow the virus to be highly transmissible to humans. 

This "Gain of Function" research was criticized as being likely to create the specific problem it was allegedly trying to prevent. An analogy used in the video is that it was like looking for a natural gas leak with a lighted match. 

I've long been convinced that Covid was a lab "leak" at least, if not an intentional insertion into the environment. Remember that just prior to Covid, our economy was booming, energy prices were low, and Trump was looking like an absolute lock for re-election. Trump was a huge thorn in the side of the Administrative State, Chinese world dominance, exposing Democrat weaponization of the "Great Reset", open borders, and many other things. From the POV of the global elite, defeating him was an absolute requirement from day 1 of his administration, and failure was not an option. 

Covid enabled the measures like massive mail in "voting" that averted what the woke viewed as an existential threat. 

In a world were killing millions of babies is considered to be a "moral good", as well as the destruction of the middle class and families, it is imperative that ALL means be used to prevent that disaster if you look at it from the POV of the global elite. Millions dying is just collateral damage. 

The last hour of the video discusses what Jordan and Matt think is even a more dangerous "virus", the rise of the woke authoritarian state, and the end of open inquiry. There is also some excellent discussion of how Christianity relates to the search for truth.  

I strongly suggest taking the time to view ... subscribing to the Daily Wire is not a bad idea either. 

Fishing With The Administrative State

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/time-to-toss-the-administrative-state-overboard/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

I'm slogging my way through "Is Administrative Law Unlawful", an excellent, though not exactly a page turner book. Short version, Administrative Law is both Unconstitutional and Unlawful ... there IS a difference, which I will TRY to unravel somewhat plainly when I review the book 

In the meantime, the linked gives the sad story of the Administrative State making life miserable for a small commercial fisherman. 

Federal law gives NOAA the power to force me to carry a monitor on my boat, but it doesn’t give the agency the power to make me pay for the monitor. If Congress had passed a law that allowed NOAA to force herring fishermen to pay for monitors, we could at least use our voices and our votes to check the lawmakers who’d voted for it. But since in this instance a federal agency has tried to do the same thing through an unconstitutional, unilateral power grab, we’ve been forced to settle the issue in the courts.

Why does the NOAA get away with expanding its power? In one word, Chevron. 

"Chevron is a rule that tips the scales in favor of a particular result when a statute is unclear," Yale Law's Abbe Gluck has written of the principle. "In Chevron's case, the scales are tipped toward the agency's preferred interpretation."

If you follow the Chevron link, you will also find that Chevron gave us Obamacare. 

One thing Obamacare certainly didn't do is reduce the amount spent on healthcare in the US.

If you go to the link and look at the chart, you see that up until 1970, the amount spent on healthcare seemed to be growing at a relatively similar pace to the population. Whole books are written on this contentious subject, and nothing lies like statistics. Why did this happen? 

• In 1965 LBJ signed Medicare and Medicaid into law. Those programs are the major driver of the huge increases in medical costs. Again, we could find endless discussion on this issue. My essential point is that in the countries that have "Single Payer", the government seriously controls the costs for people that use those programs. They wait for years if they need a procedure like a hip replacement, and if they go to a hospital, they are in "wards" 10, 15, sometimes 20 or more people. As defenders if single payer point out, though, "the people love it"! 
  
  Indeed, the healthy people do. Routine visits are well taken care of. Do you like your fire insurance? Probably yes ... because you never used it, and hope not to. Sick people don't love single payer so much (if they are able, they come to Mayo), and the really dissatisfied are generally dead. Something like we got a taste of with Covid, it can take a long time to get care when the government has you under its thumb, and the dead don't complain. They do however vote Democrat, which is likely a significant reason (on top of larger government) that Democrats like single payer  so much!
  
  
  
• Throwing government at a problem is like throwing gasoline on a fire, only in the case of government programs, they grow "spontaneously" like Jack's beanstalk. Why? Because there is nothing limiting them, so "more is better". But what about taxes and deficits? The sad truth is that a majority of the American people seem not to care, or are so bamboozled, they don't know enough to care. "The rich will pay", "Everyone will be more wealthy in the future, so it will be easy to pay it off", "The same unicorns that will give us low cost green energy will work the same magic on all our problems" ... etc,  etc.  Color me skeptical. 
  
  
  
• Obamacare just increased the flow of gasoline to the healthcare dumpster fire. Schmucks that bought into the old American idea of "Work hard and save for retirement" have been badly burned -- and who cares about those idiots? (of which I am one) 
  
  
  
• Close to home, friends at IBM had dutifully looked at the TOTAL they were paying for healthcare with premiums and deductibles included as they obtained coverage through IBM.  Health status made no difference on IBM premiums, and the deductibles were generally capped at about "4K" ... so that is what they made their retirement assumptions on as they left or were forced out of IBM. Typically, $12K a year total. Post Obamacare, premiums went up, but deductibles and caps REALLY went up. The typical couples premium cost went up to over $20K. Total expenditures typically  exceeded $30K as opposed to the estimated $12K, since older people  have higher healthcare expenses. Taking a $20K hit on your yearly budget is not a positive experience. Since my younger wife continued to work at IBM, and I was covered under her, our pain was less. (thanks wife!) 

Most of what we "know" is provided by the Administrative State, and their friends in large corporations and the media. Covid, and the attacks on Trump have made it much more clear what has been happening for a long time, and increases to happen. We are fed a "narrative" that lulls most Americans into the idea that whatever the Democrats, Administrative State and media (basically a single entity) tell us is truthful and things are good, except for the constant threat of Republican extremism. 

Once we had a Constitution that largely prevented and certainly curtailed much of this. With the overturn of Roe, there is a glimmer of hope that we may return to Constitutional government ... a SLIGHT glimmer.

Along with Stephan the fisherman from the top link, I would really like to believe that Americans will awake from their entertainment and entitlement slumber and realize that there is STILL no free lunch! 

 

The Elementry Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim)

 https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html

This is certainly not a recreational read ... much time is spent in the details of various primitive totemic religions (largely Aborigine), but also some reference to the religions of the native americans. 

The basic truth painstakingly worked out is that we are "Moral Believing Animals". In short, humans are inherently social, they will form groups, and those groups will believe in something that is at its base not rational/proveable, but totally real and sacred to the group. 

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing.

Scientism, historicism, materialism, Christianity, atheism, Taoism, Communism, etc are equal relative to being unverifiable in a philosophical sense. Since we can't philosophically/scientifically prove our existence, or even that we are "conscious" (which we also can't define), it is faith all the way down for all of us. 

At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding: ideas of time, space, [4] class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought;

One of the best descriptions of our state is expressed in the deeply intellectual film "This is Spinal Tap" relative to the Druids: 

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived an ancient race of people. The Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. 

Amazingly, I've been to Stonehenge, and that quote is etched in stone in the visitors center.

One of the base philosophical questions is "Why is there anything"? As the book says: 

Thus we find that we have here two sorts of knowledge, which are like the two opposite poles of the intelligence. Under these conditions forcing reason back upon experience causes it to disappear, for it is equivalent to reducing the universality and necessity which characterize it to pure appearance, to an illusion which may be useful practically, but which corresponds to nothing in reality; consequently it is denying all objective reality to the logical life, whose regulation and organization is the function of the categories. Classical empiricism results in irrationalism; perhaps it would even be fitting to designate it by this latter name.

As we believe we have recently observed, "reality" is an illusion. It is all interacting fields. 

We thus believe we discover that all our models ... the Platonic, the Aristotelian, the Newtonian, Einstein's static model, the Quantum model, the Standard Model, are all just that, "models". Models, like maps are very useful, however we need to always remember that the map is not the territory.

Durkheim is attempting to go back to the origin of religion, and one of the bases is what a group considers sacred vs profane. One of the laments we hear today is "is nothing sacred?". To classical empiricism, that there is no concept of sacred, and as stated above, classical empiricism as a way to understand the universe is irrational ... meaning "insane". An often heard question today is "has the world gone insane?". I'm pretty sure that Durkheim would say that is so, and a lot of evidence seems to support that view. 

To distinguish religion from all other classification systems: 

... it is absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the same order of facts, life, while the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common.

As our models of the universe have become more sophisticated, they more and more resemble religion. 

... between the logic of religious thought and that of scientific thought there is no abyss. The two are made up of the same elements, though inequally and differently developed.

Just as there is no known society without a religion, so there exist none, howsoever crudely organized they may be, where we do not find a whole system of collective representations concerning the soul, its origin and its destiny.

Today, science is our religion. We make statements like "trust the science", "the science is settled". Those that disagree are called "deniers", which is equivalent to "heretics" in Christianity. Their views must be suppressed, they must be punished (fired, cancelled, shunned). So far, no burning at the stake.

Page 369, "...he knows that it is faith that saves".

Search your heart. you know it to be true. Our lives are sustained by faith ... we have faith we will get up in the morning, we have faith we can drive to our destination safely, we have faith that the bridge we drive over will not fall, the list is endless, and in this mortal coil, many of the things we have faith in will fail. We will see that many of the earthly things we have faith in will fail. Even though we see that ... people fail to get up, cars crash and the occupants die, bridges fall, etc

But we still go to sleep, drive our cars, and go over bridges, because we can't live without faith. Even faith in people or things shown to be unfaithful, 

So faith saves. John 20:29 Jesus said unto him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

Believe!


 

 

Raid Mar-a-Lago For Nothing

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/11/nuclear-secrets-never-mind.php

At the time the FBI arm of the Democrat party raided the former presidents personal residence, even a few of the media arm of the Democrat party thought they better find something, or this is going to be seen as a politically motivated fishing expedition to add hatred for Trump to the 2022 midterms. 

So as the midterms were over, the FBI reported, that is just what it was. The Democrat media arm has already started the memory hole process. 

I remain somewhat mystified as to why they did not just plant something, or just fail to report it at all? Is it possible that there is still a TINY bit of concern that with a Republican majority in the house, there is a small chance that accountability could be demanded, or that there is still a decent person the FBI that would leak the truth? I suppose one can hope.

We live in a single party / weaponized Deep State Banana Republic.  Any fair minded person has know this at least since Chappaquiddick and Watergate, to not understand this after even the Russia Hoax, shows either a complete lack of attention to our supposed "by the people" government, or the belief that a one party Oligarchy vs a Republic is where they want to live.

DeSantis Takes Over

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/14/desantis-normal-republican/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wp_opinions&utm_source=twitter

I happily voted for Trump twice. Did I find him perfect? Certainly not, but I pick the best alternative available, and character wise, I think Trump outstrips Hillary or Biden by a mile anyway. "Mean Tweets" are not on my list of concerns. 

Trump's flaws have always been narcissism, a thin skin, an obsession to eliminate his "enemies", and apparently no ability to build a coalition of trusted friends. You either follow him like an obedient dog, or you. are OUT. 

He is in the top 5 reasons we lost the midterms. I can't really order them: 

• Trump fatigue. To a great extent the media and Democrats "won", but Trump helped. January 6 was nothing, but then neither was Watergate. The Democrats control the narrative, and everyone was just tired of Trump "news". 
• Trump primary interference. I agree the 2020 election was stolen ... but the Democrats and media made the "Denier" narrative stick. The "denier" candidates lost. The truth often loses. 
• Massive voter fraud in key states. Arizona and Nevada are obvious. I'm sure there are are plenty of congressional races across the country where fraud was the "winner". 
• Dobbs misinformation. A huge percentage of voters believe that Dobbs outlawed all abortions, when in fact it only returned decisions on abortion law to the states -- which for the Democrats in blue states, nothing happened. 75% of childbearing age women voted Democrat, significantly because of this lie. 
• Fear of "loss of Democracy" if Republicans were elected. The Democrat definition of "Democracy" is one party rule by them, the Administrative State, the weaponized "justice" department, big media, big pharma, etc While it is true that if one or both houses of congress went to the Republicans, the Democrat control would be less than total, such a situation is really only frightening if you believe 100% Democrat totalitarianism is "democracy". 

Go read the Geraghty linked article. Other than some gratuitous Trump bashing, it is a worthy read and makes a strong case as to why DeSantis needs to be the clear leader of the Republican party right now! 

"The Ruling Class": How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It

 https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8253-0558-0

A quick and worthy read, especially based on it's concise analysis of our current divide. 

Anyone that has set eyes on this blog, knows who "The Ruling Class" are. They are "the Swamp",  Mass Media, the Democrats and the RINOs, the Administrative State, Social Media, the Ivy League brats, etc

"Excellent Sheep" gives a nice overview of the educational  element of our rulers. As the book says; "The top schools select for compatibility, not excellence". I've read way too many books of this ilk, and as our recent "election" shows, we continue to accelerate toward the abyss.

While the Ruling Class thinks that Americans are unfit to run their own lives, most Americans have noticed that our Ruling Class has lost every war it has fought, run up an unpayable national debt, and generally made life worse.

Well, they have made life worse for anyone not in the upper 10% of income/wealth, and increasingly for anyone not in the top 1%. 

The counterpoint to "The Ruling Class" is labeled in the book as "The Country Class". It is hard to really out a label on this class because it is so diverse, but the big issues are religion, family, freedom, being a good neighbor (especially knowing who they are), respect for people beyond (or sometimes in spite of) their "credentials. "The salt of the earth". As they continue be attacked, The Country Class  is "losing it's savor" (especially in religion), but at least in the red states, there is a lot of salt left.

The book says of the Country Class that; "... its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice." I would be tempted to add guns. 

The ruling class has put a lot of labels on them ... the deploreables, bitter clingers, deniers, racists, fascists, etc. Humans are prone to label their perceived enemies negatively ... the Country Class is no exception, and anything bad they say about the Ruling Class is a "vicious attack". 

"... Rather, the sense of intellectual and social superiority over the common herd is arguably the main component of millions of people’s self-conception. Such people can no more believe that a Christian might be their intellectual and moral equal than white Southerners of the Jim Crow era could think the same of Negroes."

A quote which those of us of minimal intelligence and attention to current affairs see as obvious;

Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it.

The difficult part (isn't it always?) is what to DO about our rather pitiful situation? The book is painfully honest on how hard this will be. One would HOPE that the Republican Party could be the vehicle for this, but can it be? As is said early in the book ... 

Republicans are the way they are in Washington because Washington is a culture and a place that is run and dominated—not just politically, but socially—by Democrats, by the left. They’re the big clique. The Republicans also live there. Everybody wants to get along with those you live next to, ...

As I personally feel, and  I think the Trump phenomenon proves, faith in the Republican party to fight these natural tendencies is low: 

That’s because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans say the same about the Republican officeholders.

 As 2022 shows, the "Country Class" is divided and rudderless. There is a significant core that is Trump Forever (and nobody else), a significant number that are Never Trump (and will stay home if he is the nominee), and another (I think largest group) that are "I don't care about a party, just represent my Country Class rather than a person (Trump) or certainly not "Ruling Class lite". 

We have a long tough road ahead if we want a decent country again. We need to reverse totalitarianism's  (Communism, Fascism, Oligarchy ... or whatever we label the Ruling Class) "long march" with a march of our own.  

First we MUST get some election integrity.  Why does the Ruling Class fight election integrity tooth and nail? The fact that apparently a significant number of Americans can't figure out why, is not a good sign at all.

 

Woke Culture, Nick Cave

 https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Hope-Carnage-Nick-Cave/dp/0374607370

I subscribe to the American Spectator because it challenges me in especially arts, music, wine, food, travel, and architecture. It is considered to be "conservative", but in the classical sense of the word "liberal", meaning free markets, radical free speech, civil liberties under the rule of law, limited government, and some sense of  "enlightenment". 

It often covers people and topics that are "out of my lane", which I find to be important.

I would likely have never ran into Nick Cave, save for a review of the linked book from the current issue of the Spectator. I would normally have just done an incomplete blog and waited for Spectator online to catch up with my paper copy.

I didn't, because Nick lost his15 year old son Arthur in July 2015 when under the influence of LSD, he walked off a cliff and died. I have not had that exact experience, however there were times I could see something like it as somewhat likely.

The second reason is that although I'm going to have to do some typing rather than cut and paste, I didn't want this one to be semi-misplaced among the 100's of incomplete blog entries on my account.  I'm blessed to not have felt all of that pain,  but I have some of the pain of cancel culture. It seems nearly universal, though as Nick mentions, to some of the cancel purists, it is ecstatic.

A quote from the article:

For a man who by his own admission, spent much of the Eighties and Nineties in a miasma of heroin addiction, he is admirably clear-sighted about the greater hypocrisies of our age. He describes woke culture as:

... akin to to a fundamentalist religion impulse ... it may reflect on an unconscious desire to return to a non-secular society, and talks angrily of the "performative aspect to the theater of cancel culture that is essentially vindictive ... it's as if autocratic ideas of virtue and sin have come into play, and as a result, prohibitions and punishments have been put in place, enforced by a kind of callousness that, in my view, is akin to the very worst aspects of religion -- the fundamentalist, joyless, aspects of religion that have nothing to do with mercy. Cancellation is a particularly ugly part of it's weaponry and can end up as a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue"

I've been struggling through Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life". Durkheim is considered one of the main, if not THE experts on "why religion"?  In every human culture, no matter how primitive in time and space, and how similar at the base, every manifestation is ... sacred/profane, spirit(s), a creation myth, symbolic totems,  and how critical it is for every tribe/family/community/team/culture it is for a "social imaginary" to be shared for the health of both the individuals and the "group". 

I recently reviewed "The Rise And Triumph of the Modern Self" which gives some good insight as to why the woke culture came about.

Having just attended a wedding at a very fundamentalist church, it is clear that "joyless" is not a common experience of all "fundamentalists", and the Durkheim book shows that rigorous standards, prohibitions and punishments" are an integral part of obtaining the solid community and "joy" -- belonging, comfort, camaraderie, the feeling of being happy ...

Think Navy SEALs. The initiation is brutal, the bond approaches unbreakable, the sense of joy, pride and accomplishment is palpable. We can't all be SEALs, but we can be a member of SOME group of "like minded people". To "work" it has to be something "real", where you know each other F2F, have some "rituals" (like maybe just breakfast after church). The more rigor in the connection, the more likely the group will be significantly helpful.

Like exercise, training, ritual, symbols, rules, etc, there are parameters that have to be carefully aligned and calibrated  in order for the danger of the flame of faith can be properly respected and utilized. This takes decades, lifetimes, sometimes  millennia. We know that cars are dangerous, and we accept the danger (minimizing it as much as possible), in order to reap the benefits they provide. Life is often a tradeoff between risk and reward. To be real, it involves sacrifice.

 

We WILL all have a "worldview" that is either explicitly or implicitly a "religion" ... how much "choice" we have in what that is,  given genetics, family,  the probable existence of "spirits" -  Holy, Totemic, Tao, daemons, etc, along with community, mental health, physical health, etc, the range of "choices" (or enlightenment)  is a matter of little agreement for those that believe that the examined life is the only real life. 

While not a popular path today, the examined life seems like something worthy to give at least a cursory examination. 

I hope to get around to the book ... my stack is a bit deep and esoteric at the moment though.

Chip Wars

 https://spectatorworld.com/topic/semiconductors-key-fight-china/

There is a joke in Taipei that if China invades Taiwan the best place to shelter is in microchip factories, the only places the People’s Liberation Army can’t afford to destroy. The country that controls advanced chips controls the future of technology — and Taiwan’s chip fabrication foundries (“fabs”) are the finest in the world. Successful reunification between the mainland and its renegade province would give China a virtual monopoly over the most advanced fabs. Given that Xi Jinping has made clear his intention to take control of Taiwan by 2032, it is no wonder that the American government is worried about the concentration of cutting-edge semiconductor technology on the island.

I tend to like those sort of dark humor jokes. I'm trying to develop one something like "Biden is building us back to a better stoneage". 

The idea is that with all of his attacks on energy production and now the rising tensions with both Russia and China, we may have some form of nuclear, or advanced drone, cyber, and almost certainly targeted mRNA viruses in our fairly near future.  

One statement that I often make is "The greater the efficiency in a system, the greater the fragility". It seems I ought to be able to quote someone on this fact, however it may just be too obvious for anyone with intelligence to write it down. (now we know where that leaves me)

Our supply chains are generally VERY efficient  "Just In Time" manufacturing with near zero inventory, and single source suppliers are very common. Have a pandemic, shut down a single link in your supply chain, and you can't produce your product. 

The whole article (short) is worth your time. Just consider this ... 

At present there is only one company in the world that can make lithography machines that print wafers at the five-nanometer gauge. Based in a nondescript suburb of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography is perhaps the world’s least well-known hi-tech business. Yet it ranks just behind Shell as the fourth-largest company in Europe.

ASML’s highest tech machines use a process called “extreme ultraviolet” lithogra- phy, which makes them the only systems that can do lithography below 13.5 nanometers. The company produces approximately fifty machines a year at $150 million a pop (plus service contract). As a result, it owns that rare commodity — a market monopoly.