America Is a Theocracy

On this day:
1515
Thomas Wolsey is invested as a Cardinal
1823
Simón Bolívar is named President of Peru.
1846
Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
1897
Lattimer massacre: A sheriff’s posse kills 20 unarmed immigrant miners in Pennsylvania, United States.
1898
Empress Elizabeth of Austria is assassinated by Luigi Luchen
1939
World War II: The submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy’s first loss.
1963
20 African-American students enter public schools in Alabama.
2008
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Poland shot down drones that entered its airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine on Wednesday, the first time a NATO member state has fired shots in the war. Russia launched around 415 drones and over 40 missiles across 15 Ukrainian regions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. Ukraine's air force reported shooting down 386 drones and 27 of the 43 missiles.
The first violation of Polish airspace occurred at around 2130 GMT on Tuesday, and the last one took place at around 0430 GMT on Wednesday.
Polish officials said they were unable to say immediately whether any of the drones had been targeting the capital Warsaw, a western Ukraine aid logistics hub in southeastern Poland or any NATO infrastructure.

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When he was 21, Ryan Peake was a member of the Rebels, an outlawed motorcycle gang, and he wound up being sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a serious assault. In March, he won the New Zealand Open. No mention was made of the gallery.

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Prosecutors have charged 75 Kenyans with terrorism in recent weeks, the majority for allegedly destroying government property during street demonstrations against President William Ruto. The charges raise the possibility that dissidents could find themselves in maximum-security prisons for decades. Defense lawyers say none of the accused has a known criminal record or connections to designated terrorist groups. The anti-terrorism courts are U.S.-funded. *** On the most recent state tests in math and English language arts (ELA), for example, black students in NYC charter schools had a proficiency rate of 61.5 percent in math and 58.6 percent in ELA. Black students in district schools had a proficiency rate of just 34.3 percent in math and 40.3 percent in ELA. At the same time, Latino students in charter schools had a proficiency rate of 60.5 percent in math and 55.2 percent in ELA, while Latino students in district schools had a proficiency rate of 35.7 percent in math and 39.4 percent in ELA. *** Qatar threatened to "retaliate" against Israel in the wake of an airstrike in Doha that targeted the leaders of Hamas, as the country’s prime minister called the situation a "decisive moment" for the Middle East. *** So the decision to have Biden run again was a personal one, not a democratic one? *** America Is a Theocracy The behavior of American politicians from month to month and year to year often amaze. So many policies make no sense, so many problems vulnerable to sensible solutions are ignored. Bizarre statements, strange antagonisms, curious rebranding terminologies sneak into the discussions. The new bright lights in the Democratic Party speak a political language formerly heard only in the echoing political museums of Europe. The good news is that we may have an explanation; the bad news is that it's terrifying.   A Riley Barnes, nominated to serve as assistant secretary of State (for "democracy, human rights, and labor"), appeared recently before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. In his opening statement, he said that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.” So we are, by our nature, endowed, not granted, rights. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) offered an astounding response: “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.” Kaine ran for Vice-President under Hilary Clinton. He is not a Mamdani; he was a national candidate. The idea that laws “come from the government” is the basis of what is called “legal positivism,” which holds that the legitimacy and authority of laws are not based on God or natural law but rather legislation and court decisions. This is a sort of a naturalistic fallacy, a legal Darwinism where laws evolve subject to accidents and plots, stupidity, twists, turns, rational and irrational conflict, graft, greed...all the inevitable human factors the geniuses who crafted the American Constitution tried to protect us from. This allows politicians to bypass any basic human responsibilities and defer instead to the self-declared expertise of... ambitious politicians. Law is the consensus of the day. Legal Positivism is university-speak to say, "the citizen is caught with what we've given him." This is exactly what sparked the American Revolution. A commentator, Jennifer Szalai, has denounced what she called “Constitution worship” and argued that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” That chorus includes establishment figures such as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley Law School and author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.” Other law professors, such as Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale, have called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” What exactly is reclaimed when the law has such a whimsical basis is hard to explain. That “reclamation” is easier if our rights are based not in natural law, but rather in the shifting priorities of lawmakers like Kaine. Law protections then become based not on divine human rights, but on needs divined by humans. The American Constitution was a revolutionary creation. It turned government on its head, putting the nature and rights of the citizen first. The American legal system starts not with efficiency but with the protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary and from governmental abuse. Such a belief is binary; you either believe it or you don't. Why do people like Kaine, who don't believe it--more, think it's offensive--continue to stay and suffer under its assumptions rather than go to other places compatible with his narrow thinking is a source of wonder.