Chief Justice Roberts delivers a dispatch from a court under siege
This is typical Leftism: Attack anyone you disagree with. Revolution is its endpoint. Over the many years that the court was Left-leaning, Leftists were quite approving of it and conservatives were critical of its creative approach to the law. But a torrent of outright verbal attack on the court was unknown in those days
Chief Justice Roberts’s “Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary,” evoking memories of a federal judge “physically threatened for following the law” in 1957, is a dispatch from a Supreme Court under siege. After a year of stakeouts and protests, he thanks members of Congress “who are attending to judicial security needs.” He notes a recent law that helps “protect judges and their families,” a nod by the Article III branch to its Article I paymasters.
The thing that gets us is that the threats to the court are so often coming from lawmakers themselves. The chief justice is too polite to say this directly. Yet it has been horrifying editorial writers the way, say, Senator Whitehouse has been trying to palm off on Americans the idea that the court is controlled by dark money. He accuses conservatives of using money to “accomplish things that they tried and failed to accomplish” via regular means.
The Chief Justice is right to emphasize the “importance of rule by law instead of by mob.” This involves, in our view, not only the jurists’ physical safety, but respect for its constitutional authority after a year in which Democrats have begun portraying the court as an evil institution and a runaway bench. It is why the Chief Justice feels impelled to say that a “judicial system cannot and should not live in fear.”
After oral arguments over abortion at the court, Senator Schumer thundered “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” At the time, that prompted a rebuke from the chief justice, who labeled “threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government” as “dangerous.”
Mr. Schumer’s fellow New York lawmaker, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, opted for an attack of greater sophistication. In a summertime tweet, she called for “court expansion” — packing the bench to dilute its conservative complement — and limits to judicial review, meaning congressional action to curtail the scope of the high court’s appellate review. The call for stacking justice was seconded by Senator Markey of Massachusetts.
Democrats in office were joined by the court’s adversaries in the press that has been using opinion pages to undercut the court. Law professors Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath suggested in the Times that “liberal lawmakers should view the court primarily as a hostile political actor.” They claim that the court as constitutional arbiter “appears increasingly ridiculous” and describe the high court as a “maddening institution.”
Also taking aim at the court from the pages of the Grey Lady is a professor at Yale Law School, Samuel Moyn, who seeks to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” This rescue operation will, Mr. Moyn argues, jettison any notion of a “higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order.” That is necessary because the Constitution is “broken.” The “problem,” he contends, is “the Constitution.”
No wonder Americans are starting to act out against the court. The threats to the Supreme Court are not confined to the Founders’ designs. A man, skulking outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, was arrested for intending his assassination. A judge’s son was murdered at his front door in what was intended to be an attack on his mother, a federal district judge, Esther Salas. The killer had lost a case in her courtroom.
Chief Justice Roberts summons in his report the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education and the efforts to implement the court’s holding that schools, North and South, be integrated. This required both judicial determination and rigorous law enforcement. And humble reflection by millions of Americans. How rare such reflection seems during these days, when the left seems to have forgotten America’s charter and disdains its robed sages.
https://www.nysun.com/article/chief-justice-robertss-report
******************************************************A New Generation of Catholics Discovers the Latin Mass
Growing up in a rural enclave in western Pennsylvania, Gina McNulty regularly attended Catholic Mass with her family each Sunday. But something always felt missing about the experience, Ms. McNulty said— something she could not put her finger on until a few years ago when she and her husband, Steven, began attending a traditional Latin Mass at the Most Precious Blood of Jesus parish a 20 minute-drive away in Pittsburgh.
Initially the couple and their children worshiped at Most Precious Blood only occasionally; their regular parish was just a short stroll away. But by the time the couple had their third child three years ago, they started attending weekly. Now expecting her fifth child, Ms. McNulty says she feels deeply connected with the ancient ritual that is Latin Mass.
“My husband was definitely the driving force behind it,” Ms. McNulty, 35, said, of their shift to Latin Mass. “There are people who are interested in the Latin Mass that are drawn to it because of the intellectual aspect of it,” she said. “But there are people like me who are drawn to it for the beauty.”
Dating back to at least the 15th century, Latin Mass is rich, mysterious, strictly arranged and (as its name suggests) conducted entirely in Latin. Also known as the Tridentine Mass, McNulty said it offers a direct connection to the scores of generations of Catholics who came before her.
The service certainly feels ancient, like a journey through space and time. Rather than facing his congregants, for instance, the priest conducts the mass with his back to them. He’s facing the Eucharist — body and blood of Christ himself and the central act of Christian worship. There are also plumes of incense floating through the nave, while both Gregorian chants and periods of profound silence help instill within worshipers the mass’ history and significance.
Latin Mass was the standard service given by Catholic churches worldwide until the mid-1960s, when it was abolished as part of the Second Vatican Council in an effort to make the religion more accessible to the modern world.
Within months, the majority of Catholic parishes were conducting Sunday services in their local languages, while those Gregorian chants were replaced by guitar-playing and folk singers. Most crucially, a parish priest could now face his worshipers.
But the traditional Latin Mass never completely vanished; today of the 17,000 Catholic parishes in the United States 592 of them perform the extraordinary form in Latin, including at least six in New York City and four (including Most Precious Blood) in Western Pennsylvania.
Canon William Avis, a church cleric who was formally installed as the first pastor of Most Precious Blood of Jesus Parish in 2019, said their services have seen robust growth over the past few years. “We have 800 to 850 at our Masses on Sunday,” he said.
That robust growth isn’t just taking place in Pittsburgh; it’s happening nationwide. A recent survey by Crisis magazine, an independent journal covering Catholicism and Catholic issues, revealed a marked increase in Latin Mass attendance since the beginning of the pandemic. This boom is playing out against a backdrop of recent restrictions on the Latin Mass from Pope Francis.
Last year, the Argentina-born pontiff described Latin Mass as “divisive” and imposed new limits on the service, which had been partially reintroduced over the past three decades by both of his predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
In June, Pope Francis went even further, demanding the faithful stop exploiting Latin Mass for ideological reasons, which he feared might fracture the very unity of the Catholic Church. The pontiff was harshly criticized by many young traditionalists for his stance, some of whom took to Twitter in outrage.
Those worshipers included 26-year-old Brendon Miller-Boldt, who along with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two young children, also attend Latin mass at the Most Precious Blood parish at Pittsburgh. A Minnesota native studying in the PhD Computer Science program at nearby Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Miller-Boldt said he was drawn to Latin Mass for its solemnity, reverence and mystery.
“Just the atmosphere, the willingness to have a space that doesn’t feel like it’s as kind of trying to meet the broader American culture halfway; something that’s willing to stick to its roots was a big difference,” he explained. “While there is nothing egregiously wrong with (our local parish), it wasn’t as conducive to worship as what we found when we visited Most Precious Blood,” Mr. Miller-Boldt said. “The integration with the community definitely feels more vibrant.”
Many of the East Coast and Midwestern parishes where Latin Masses are still conducted are majestic and ancient in design, often built during the great European immigration wave of the 20th century and tucked into old ethnic working-class neighborhoods where most of the parishioners once lived, worked and worshiped.
They’re parishes like Most Precious Blood, which is filled each Sunday with hundreds of children, most of whom also attend weekly religious education programs in the adjoining elementary school. Canon Avis says that people are initially drawn to the liturgy for its sheer beauty, “especially the high mass where you have Gregorian chants, the incense and all ritual.”
Both the McNulty and Miller-Boldt families attended Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, a solemn ceremony where parishioners hold candles and sing carols as the church’s lights are dimmed in salute to the majesty of the birth of Christ.
They’re rites, observed Canon Avis, performed today much as they have been for centuries. “Latin Mass has developed through history since the time of the Apostles,” he said. “So it kind of gives a certain sense of foundation, of roots. It’s something that it’s not just going to randomly change.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/a-new-generation-of-catholics-discovers-the-latin-mass ?
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Their continued censorship drive over the years shows the progressive mob's inherent determination to erase all thought but their own
It's basic to them
In 1982, student agitators protesting U.S. policy in Central America silenced Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Minnesota. Smith College told her that it could not assure her safety during a commencement address, so that address was cancelled too.
Business as usual, you may be thinking.
In fact, the reaction of campus administrators, and even of students themselves, to these shutdowns seems to come from a different world.
The chancellor of the University of California announced his embarrassment that his university had 'succumbed to mob rule.' That university's Board of Regents demanded that an apology be sent to Kirkpatrick. Even the group that organized the Berkeley protest, Students Against Intervention in El Salvador, admitted that the heckling had gone too far.
The group had no intent, it said, to curtail the speech of 'those who disagree with us.'
As anti-military protests spread across the country, the American Association of University Professors, the United States Student Association, and other academic bodies denounced the use of the 'hecklers' veto' and asked faculty and students 'to reaffirm our traditional commitment to freedom to speak and to listen.'
Fast forward to 2015.
A group of Yale students scream and curse at Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis for what seems like an eternity, preventing him from addressing them. 'Be quiet,' shrieks one, 'you are disgusting!'
Christakis had defended his wife, another Yale professor, who had suggested that students could choose their own Halloween costumes without bureaucratic oversight.
'It's not a debate!' screamed another Yale student. Merely invoking free speech, said a third, creates a 'space to allow for violence to happen on this campus.'
Yale's President Peter Salovey rushed to express his sympathy–not with the beleaguered Christakis–but with his tormentors and their allies: 'their concerns and cries for help made clear that some students find life on our campus profoundly difficult.'
As if this were not nauseating enough, Salovey thanked Yale's students for offering him the opportunity to 'listen to and learn from you.'
In 2016, students at Atlanta's Emory University demanded protection from a few Trump 2016 slogans that had been chalked on campus sidewalks. Trump's name exacerbated the 'unsafety of minority students,' they said.
Emory's president validated what he called the students' 'pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.' The chalkers would be tracked down and potentially subjected to the 'conduct violation process,' and Emory would implement yet more diversity bureaucracy to protect students from 'harmful speech.'
In 2018 professors at the University of Chicago circulated a petition denouncing a planned debate between Steve Bannon and a business school professor. The debate would 'threaten the safety of people of color on and off campus,' the signatories said. The debate never occurred.
In June 2022, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School asked the faculty senate to impose 'major sanctions' on tenured law professor Amy Wax (plausible translation: fire her!) because of the 'severe harms' she had inflicted on the Penn community with her challenges to campus orthodoxies regarding racial preferences, immigration, and sex differences.
Apologies for 'offensive' speech are now de rigueur.
In 2021, an astronomer retracted an article proposing a method for predicting scientists' future research output. The project was said to conflict with equity. The astronomer groveled: 'I now see that my work has hurt people, I apologize to you all for the stress and the pain that I have caused.'
A 2020 paper found that male mentors prove more valuable to aspiring female scientists than female mentors. Following the predictable uproar, the publisher retracted the study and its authors expressed 'deep regret' for having 'caused pain.'
In August 2022, the president of the American Historical Association criticized contemporary history writing for imposing a 'presentist lens on the past.' He seems to have been surprised by the resulting outrage. Within two days he had apologized for the 'harm the article had caused to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.' He would hope to 'redeem' himself by 'learning and listening.' Good luck with that. His days are numbered.
The private sector has become just as eager to prevent alleged harm to its employees from contrarian speech.
In 2018, Google fired computer scientist James Damore for having suggested in a memo that males and females have different interests and personality traits. Those differences, Damore proposed, helped explain why Google's engineers are not 50% female. Heresy. Damore had to go because he had 'hurt' Google's employees, announced the CEO.
Book sellers are disappearing books, payment services are blocking donations to disfavored commentators, because those books and those commentators allegedly harm vulnerable victim groups.
So what has changed between the early 1980s and today?
The conquest of every mainstream institution by an idea that Ambassador Kirkpatrick memorably identified in 1984. 'The progressive left always blames America first,' she said in a GOP convention speech.
Kirkpatrick was referring to foreign affairs, but she would not have been surprised by the spread of the 'blame America first' instinct to every aspect of domestic life, and indeed to the entirety of Western civilization. After all, she invoked Jean Francois Revel's warning that a civilization that 'feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.'
And so today the elites themselves are waging war on meritocratic standards, on our civilizational inheritance, and on the West's unparalleled accomplishments, all in the name of atoning for what is said to be America and the West's unique racism and cruelty towards the 'Other.' This 'blame America first' instinct lies behind the war on free speech.
The novel justification for today's censorship is the maudlin claim that dissenting speech harms favored victim groups. The reason they are so easily harmed is that they are already barely surviving in the maelstrom of oppression that is the United States. So vulnerable are these victims that they can be struck down–even mortally–by ideas that they don't like.
The Democratic establishment labels those disagreeable ideas 'hate speech.'
If you think that Americans have the right to decide who crosses their borders, you are engaged in hate speech.
If you think that doctors should be selected based on their scientific knowledge, not based on their race, you are engaged in hate speech.
If you think that sex differences are written into our chromosomes and cannot be changed by fiat or by castration, you are engaged in hate speech.
And hate speech, the new dogma goes, can be censored, since it is not actual speech. Rather, it is conduct–assaultive conduct–against the marginalized. This definitional shift is at the core of the contemporary push for censorship.
So, how do we restore our freedoms?
We could try to give the left-wing establishment a crash course in the revolutionary breakthrough that is the First Amendment.
Our academic elites believe that the only speech that deserves protection is that with which the left agrees or which the government deems true. These opinion leaders portray the constitutional ban on censorship as a ploy used by the majority to maintain power, rather than, as Frederick Douglass understood, a key protection for minorities and dissenters who seek to break up illegitimate power. They have no appreciation for the marketplace of ideas and the difficult, dialectical process of truth-seeking.
We must assert at every opportunity that high standards, whether in academic achievement or public behavior, are not racist. And when they still call us racists for standing up for meritocracy and the rule of law, we must never, ever, as Jeane Kirkpatrick understood, apologize.
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Truth About Mandatory 'Safety Device' Biden Signed Into Law - This Is the Power Government Wants Over You
Many Americans are unaware that buried in the Democrats’ 2021 infrastructure bill is a measure to take just a little more of our freedom away from us that liberals have been trying to force on car manufacturers for years.
With President Biden’s signature on bill in November of 2021, they finally got it.
The Democrats sold the measure as a “safety device” to prevent drunk driving, one they will now force every car maker to add to every new vehicle starting in 2026. The device is a remote kill switch that could allow the government, the police, and car makers to disable your car from the comfort of their offices to prevent you from using it.
Alarmingly, the language in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is somewhat vague. It does not fully describe what this device will be able to do, if it doubles as a monitoring device outside the legislation, and how and when it can be used against citizens.
All the bill says on page 135 is that the device must “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired” and “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected.”
The devices are also to be mandatory.
This is little but a limit on freedom and a personal privacy nightmare.
The language in the bill means that the system is “passive,” meaning it is always on and cannot be shut off. It also means that the device will be able to completely shut down your privately-owned vehicle against your will and without your say.
It all sounds like a new level of state-sponsored surveillance.
As former Rep. Bill Barr wrote at the The Daily Caller shortly after Biden signed the bill, there is a lack of clarity to all this. What if a driver is drowsy and not drunk, but is locked out of his vehicle before being able to get to a hotel or other safe place to take a nap?
The operation of cars will be in the hands of computer algorithms. And as we have seen with how badly algorithms work on social media, how can that fill anyone with any confidence?
The legislation has also not been vetted for its constitutionality. Will this intrusion into our lives and this curtailment of freedom pass muster with the Fifth or Sixth amendments? The former assures the right not to self-incriminate and the latter is the right to face one’s accuser.
There is another problem with this legislation. Definitions of “impairment” can vary by state. Can these devices tell the difference from one state or locality to another? And what does “impairment” even mean? Legally drunk? Or does the “passive” device have its own standards?
The legislation also does not exactly specify who will be collecting this data. Will it include locations that drivers were driving through? And, will this data be held against you if your car had been shut off one time too many? Will you be prevented from getting a license or buying another car if the shut-off had been employed a certain number of times?
And if not now, how can we be assured this won’t be added to the capabilities later? Like the problems with Big Tech, this legislation is fraught with issues and unanswered questions.
Also, will this data be sold to advertisers and other entities that can use the data to enrich themselves? Is this just going to be another case of an invasion of our privacy like Google or Facebook?
This is not to even mention how this legislation curtails our freedom of movement and condemns us to potential punishment without a trial or charges being leveled against us in a court.
There is yet another major problem with this “law.” It doesn’t even tell us what sort of technology will be employed in these switches. Indeed, the law leaves the technical details to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to determine over the next few years. And so far, the actual technology does not quite exist.
Those involved in this new law have tried to wave off criticism.
Jeffrey Michael, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Injury Research and Policy, told the AP in a March report that the devices won’t be able to be accessed by the police. As one of those involved in developing the tech, he claims the devices are not supposed to be for law enforcement use.
“I’ve been associated with this technology since the beginning of its development and it has always been viewed as a prevention device rather than an enforcement device,” Michael said, adding that the new legislation has “nothing to do with giving law enforcement access to a kill switch.”
According to the AP, Robert Strassburger, president and CEO of the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety, claimed the NHTSA is pursuing rules that would prevent third parties from gaining access to the devices.
But neither Michael’s nor Strassburger’s assurances are reflected in the law itself because it does not preclude law enforcement or third parties from having access to the mandated devices. Indeed, the actual law is silent on those issues, meaning anything could happen and anything could change after implementation.
Finally, there is the problem of hackers and software bugs. Will hackers be able to brick your car unless you pay them to release control of the vehicle? Will future software updates contain bugs that will shut you down while you are driving and cause life-threatening accidents, like the dangers of the supposed self-driving technology that have already been so problematic?
Since there was never any debate in Congress about these issues, there won’t be any answers to them until we are already suffering the ill effects of the law. This was all very ill-conceived. But it is just another example of how regulations that limit our freedoms are slid into massive bills over and over again with no debate on their merits.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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