AOC denounces Manafort solitary confinement

This is all the reason why elections should mean “wait your turn till the next”. Manafort’s treatment may someday apply to his prosecutors. But people in power never realize this. “Happy Days” will never end. The money will never run out. The music will keep playing. Until it stops.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sided with imprisoned former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort saying he should be released from solitary confinement — though he is not currently in solitary confinement.
“Paul Manafort is being sent to solitary confinement in my district – Rikers Island. A prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That‘s what solitary confinement is. Manafort should be released, along with all people being held in solitary,” the New York Democrat said. 

Washington Examiner

AOC may have the wit to realize that the “revolution eats its own”. Madame Defarge is eventually called to mount the guillotine because by then it takes on a life of its own and must be fed … fed … fed.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the debut film for both Fails and Talbot, is a lament for the exodus of black people from the city and the affordability crisis that is pushing out all but the rich.

NYT

People think they can manage complex systems only to discover it leads to unintended consequences. I am still waiting for a prominent historian to write a volume titled “Ooops”.

But environmentalists are constantly flying to conferences

The glaciers are melting, the coral reefs are dying, Miami Beach is slowly going under.
Quick, says a voice in your head, go see them before they disappear! You are evil, says another voice. For you are hastening their destruction.
To a lot of people who like to travel, these are morally bewildering times. Something that seemed like pure escape and adventure has become double-edged, harmful, the epitome of selfish consumption. Going someplace far away, we now know, is the biggest single action a private citizen can take to worsen climate change. One seat on a flight from New York to Los Angeles effectively adds months worth of human-generated carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

NYT

Elizabeth Warren’s Corporatism

Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates.

National Review

“Corporatism” and all other systems of centralized control are ultimately dependent on the virtue of the person at the top.  It assumes a “good king”.  Therein lies its defect.  A centralized system is not sufficiently “trustless” to survive a “bad king” who statistically must come along.

The doctrine of deep ecology declares that we must keep our hands off nature

I found this out firsthand years ago, when I had a conversation with the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of what is known as “deep ecology” and guru of the European Green movement. How seriously did Naess regard the divinity of Mother Nature? He told me that the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature. The smallpox virus, he said—which had maimed, tortured, and killed millions of human beings—somehow “deserved” human protection.

City Journal

The upheaval in the West

There is a crisis of senescence in liberal politics. The reason Biden, Harris and Sanders are competitive is their ideas are all roughly the same age.

The strategy of recruiting fresh new faces like Beto, AOC cannot obscure the basic problem of intellectual decrepitude. The challenge facing the West is that a generational agenda has become the ex-future.

The current tide of political upheaval is basically rejectionist. It is a backlash against the 20th century nihilist project. It’s necessary but insufficient. The harder part, which comes next, is building a successor to the ruins of 20th century ideology.

The question every revolution answers is “what is man”? Once the answer was that he was free under the sky of truth, entitled to a personal relationship with eternity. Then he became a blob of tissue, a ward of history as represented by the state. What will he be now?

Whatever the answer turns out to be it will be stamped by the age of information, the first era in which humanity has had to explicitly account for reality of ethereal things.