The Amazon Kindle is a better mousetrap.\u00a0 Insignificant power consumption, extremely clear easy-on-the-eyes graphics, easy to manage file system, nice feel in the hand, this is all good for starters.\u00a0 The great paradigm shift in the system is in the ease with which content can be extracted and aggregated.\u00a0 When you find a passage you want to preserve, just underline it, and a copy of that passage gets placed into a “My Clippings” file.\u00a0 You can copy the “My Clippings” text file to your computer and then work with the distilled wisdom of the book.\u00a0 For example, here are clippings I pulled from 3 books I was reading on the plane last week.\u00a0 This is a game changer that goes well beyond mere convenience.<\/p>\n
\n\n\n==========<\/p>\n
Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (G\u00f6tz Aly)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler\u2019s National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>the Nazis\u2019 genocidal policy gained momentum from the fact that it also improved the material welfare of the German people.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>everyday people, acting on ordinary calculations of self-interest, could become complicit in a government-driven program of larcenous genocide.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Like all other revolutionaries, the predominantly youthful members of the Nazi movement had an urgent, now-or-never aura about them. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels was thirty-five years old. Reinhard Heydrich was twenty-eight; Albert Speer, twenty-seven; Adolf Eichmann, twenty-six; Josef Mengele, twenty-one; and Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank, both thirty-two. Hermann G\u00f6ring, one of the eldest among the party leadership, had just celebrated his fortieth birthday. And a decade later, in the midst of World War II, Goebbels could still conclude from a statistical survey: \u201cAccording to the data, the average age of midlevel party leaders is 34, and within the government, it\u2019s 44. One can indeed say that Germany today is being led by its youth.\u201d At the same time, Goebbels nonetheless called for a continuing \u201cfreshening of the ranks.\u201d2<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>They overcame differences in background through their collective struggle for a National Socialist utopia, a utopia at once romantic and technologically modern. Viewing themselves and their peers as the avant-garde of the \u201cyoung Volk,\u201d they disdained their more experienced, skeptical elders as \u201ccemetery vegetables.\u201d To members of the new generation, veteran civil servants, with their devotion to rules and principles, were \u201cossified old geezers.\u201d8 The movement\u2019s activists and the far greater number of cautious but curious sympathizers looked beyond the constraints of the present toward the dawning of a new, v\u00f6lkisch age.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>National Socialism can be seen as a dictatorship of youth. Within only a few years, it developed into the most destructive generational project of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Eichmann added, he and his comrades had viewed Nazism and Communism as \u201cquasi-siblings.\u201d10<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>These so-called special measures, now regarded as the first steps toward the Holocaust, could only be put into practice with the help of precise work by bureaucrats and civil servants.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The Nazi leadership made automobiles affordable to everyday Germans. It introduced the previously almost unknown idea of vacations. It doubled the number of days off for workers and began to develop large-scale tourism in Germany. The Berlin regional warden of the German Labor Front was particularly energetic in his promotion of such benefits: \u201cIn 1938 we want to devote ourselves more and more to reaching all those comrades who still think that vacation travel isn\u2019t something for blue-collar workers.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>From its earliest days in power, the Hitler regime privileged families over single people and childless couples, and it insured farmers against the vagaries of the weather and the world market. Nazi-era policies paved the way for many postwar reforms, everything from European Union agricultural policy, joint tax returns for couples, and compulsory liability insurance for drivers to state child-support allowances, graduated income tax, and the beginnings of environmental conservation. Nazi civil servants drafted the outline for a pension system that anticipated the one adopted in 1957 by the Federal Republic of Germany. The 1939 system tried to end the poverty faced by retirees and decreed that \u201cthe living standards of veterans of the workforce should not deviate dramatically from that of currently employed comrades.\u201d19<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The 1938 Old Debt Eradication Law invalidated hundreds of thousands of titles to collectible debts.<\/p>\n ==========<\/p>\n The Grand Jihad (Andrew C. McCarthy)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Alinksyites are fifth-columnists. They have, in substance, the same goals as open revolutionaries: overthrowing the existing free-market republic and replacing it with a radical\u2019s utopia. That is why Obama could befriend such unrepentant former terrorists as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and take inspiration from Jeremiah Wright, a black-liberation theologist.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Alinskyites, though, are more sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, taking on the appearance and argot of the heartland. Their single, animating goal is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialist, etc. Everything else\u2014including the cultivation of like-minded Islamists\u2014is negotiable: They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. Transform it into what, they haven\u2019t worked out in great detail\u2026except that it will be perfect, communal, equal, and just.8<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Neocommunism is leftism liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Far from instilling humility in progressives\u2026, the collapse of socialism has revived their self-righteousness and reenergized their assault on the democratic West.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.9 Nihilism is the key. Today\u2019s hard left is defined by what it is against: the United States, free-market capitalism, and any foreign policy premised on defending American interests or promoting individual liberty.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>This \u201cchange\u201d is not designed to create a new system. Its purpose is to destroy the old one. What comes next is negotiable.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Israel serves as the commentariat\u2019s unified field theory for explaining all Islamic hostility. The theory is fatuous.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>In their telling, the \u201cinternational community\u201d (not just the West) is locked in a \u201cstruggle\u201d (not a \u201cwar\u201d) against \u201cviolent extremism\u201d\u2014not mere \u201cextremism,\u201d lest anyone doubt that we\u2019re fine with any insane belief system anyone comes up with so long as things are not going boom.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Defending ourselves will require flushing out the Islamists: identifying them and imposing on them the burden of defending their totalitarian ideology against the positive case for liberty and human reason. Doing so will undeniably burden true moderate Muslims as well: Given the prevalence of anti-Constitutional beliefs in Islam, foreign Muslims should not be permitted to reside in America unless they can demonstrate their acceptance of American constitutional principles. But those who satisfy this burden should be welcomed, encouraged, and given the space necessary to seek reform.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Very simply, the purpose of jihad is not violence for its own sake. It is to pave the way for the imposition of sharia, the Muslim legal code and the necessary precondition for erecting an Islamic state and society.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The disposition that we must not critically examine Islam is both unnecessary and self-defeating. It is unnecessary because the Framers gave us a Constitution that guarantees freedom of conscience, not freedom from examination. You can believe whatever you wish to believe, but you do not foreclose your beliefs from inspection by labeling them \u201creligion\u201d\u2014even if the label is accurate.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>For Islamists, democracy is a tool for acquiring power, not a culture of governance.<\/p>\n ==========<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The sophomoric \u00a0<\/span>ratiocinations, moral contortions, and collectivist absurdities articulated by the Supreme Court of the United States as it purported \u00a0<\/span>to justify legally human slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford spawned 150 years of government-sponsored horrific treatment of blacks that destroyed lives, suppressed freedom, and wrecked our American culture with a vengeance.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>But it was the State that conferred upon owners the power to punish, and without this power the slave system could not exist.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Yet Aquinas did not stop there. He wrote that because unjust laws are not within the power of government to enact, only just laws need to be obeyed. Moreover, unjust laws carry with them a duty of disobedience. \u00a0<\/span>If laws do not seek and promote goodness, they are unjust and in violation of natural law-and our cognizance of this requires us to disobey them.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The White House itself was constructed \u00a0<\/span>by slave labor.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Justice Nevius’ reasoning is rooted in positivism. The theory’s fundamental premise is that there is a difference between what the law is and what the law should be, and that a responsible jurist should adhere to the current law and refrain from casting value judgments that are best reserved to the people through the exercise \u00a0<\/span>of their voting rights and the democratic process. This dilemma has confounded the legal world for millennia. Should societal \u00a0<\/span>change be effectuated by an unelected judiciary or through the democratic processes embedded in our constitutional system? Should it perturb us when change is spurred by appointed judges, even if we find the change liberating? Or should it bother us when judges do not use their power to strike down laws that are consistent with positive law but inconsistent with natural law?<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>But where positivism is limited to laws passed by governments, natural law is not. Natural law knows only one authority: Our own human nature that is created by God. Therefore natural law allows judges to strike down properly passed laws that infringe on our freedom \u00a0<\/span>of speech, worship, or assembly even if the Constitution did not protect these freedoms. The great individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution reflect natural God-given rights that no government \u00a0<\/span>can properly restrict, absent a violation of natural law itself.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The Dred Scott case is widely considered to be one of the greatest disasters in Supreme Court history because it defined blacks as nonpersons.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>It would be followed by similar disasters in which Japanese-Americans \u00a0<\/span>(in U.S. v. Korernatsu [1943]) and babies in the womb (in Roe v. Wade [1973]) would also be held by the Court to be nonpersons.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>During the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln stated: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”‘<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>South Carolina started the trend of secession in December 1860. Concerned with preserving the Union at all costs, Lincoln was determined to use military force to bring the rebel states into line. But he did not want to be portrayed as an aggressor and needed the South somehow to ignite the conflict. This would make the Southerners look like the aggressors and would give the impression that Lincoln simply had no choice but to declare war as a defense against aggression.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>The solution devised by Lincoln triggered a war that would kill seven hundred thousand Americans. Advised by his top military commanders that an incoming ship would be considered a threat to Confederates and would prompt an attack, Lincoln deliberately sent a ship of food provisions as well as additional armed soldiers to Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The Confederates fell for the ploy and fired the first shot. Lincoln responded by sending armed warships and deployed a total of seventy-five thousand troops to invade all of the Southern states.’<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>His plan, however, did not go unnoticed. Northern newspapers \u00a0<\/span>were quick to inform the public that Lincoln had instigated the Fort Sumter incident.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>In a clear display of Lincoln’s priorities, the President proposed to permit the continuation ofslavery in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware so long as those states remained in the Union. To save the Union from further division, Lincoln was willing \u00a0<\/span>to continue the subjugation of blacks.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>(Lincoln and the Radical Republicans had enacted an income tax, but it was declared unconstitutional-the Constitution at the time expressly forbade it after the war ended.)<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>In a letter to the New York Tribune, he expressed his true sentiment:<\/p>\n o\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the union.’<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>It is vital for a country’s citizenry to have an accurate representation \u00a0<\/span>of its own history. Enshrining Lincoln as the Great Emancipator obscures a more complicated and less pleasant truth: Lincoln had the same racist tendencies as other whites in those days and cared solely about preserving the Union, not freeing the slaves. Slaves were freed in the South only when it was clear that a proclamation of freedom would aid the Union psychologically, economically, \u00a0<\/span>and militarily in its victory over the Confederate South.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Most Americans have only heard of how slavery was ended in the Confederacy and are unaware of how it was ended peacefully in the Northern states and in the rest of the Western Hemisphere during \u00a0<\/span>the nineteenth century. Abolitionists around the world combined \u00a0<\/span>religion, politics, public education campaigns, and the legal system to put an end to slavery. There were no wars of emancipation \u00a0<\/span>anywhere else but in Lincoln’s America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2083","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-education","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}