HT: Karen L. Myers.

First they came for Robert E. Lee, and I did not speak out-
Because I was born outside the Confederacy.

Then they came for Abraham Lincoln—
and there was no one left to speak for Abe.

College Fix:

“Someone complained, and it was gone.”

That’s all Cornell University biology Professor Randy Wayne said he has been able to determine so far about the whereabouts of a longtime display in the Ivy League school’s Kroch Library of a bust of President Abraham Lincoln in front of a bronzed Gettysburg Address plaque.

Wayne, a frequent visitor to the library, which houses Cornell’s rare and manuscript collections, said when he stopped in several weeks ago he noticed the display had been disappeared.

“It’s been there since I can remember,” he told The College Fix in an interview.

He asked the librarians about it, and they had no details to provide, except to say it was removed after some sort of complaint, he said. It’s been replaced with, “well, nothing,” Wayne said. The walls are white, according to photos Wayne took for The Fix.

The bust and plaque had been on display in the library since at least 2013.

On June 23, Wayne emailed Cornell University President Martha Pollack, asking about the display:

Dear President Pollack,

I am wondering if you are aware that the bust of Abraham Lincoln purchased by Ezra Cornell and the bronze plaque of the Gettysburg Address that was beside it has been removed from the RMC in Kroch Library and replaced with nothing. If you are aware, can you tell me why? Thanks.

Pollack has not responded to him, the professor told The Fix.

The president’s office and Cornell media affairs has also not responded to repeated emailed requests over the last week from The College Fix, as well as a phone call Monday, regarding the whereabouts of the Gettysburg Address plaque and Lincoln bust, and why they were removed.

SCOOP: I've obtained video from inside Disney's all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and is regularly "adding queerness" to children's programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022

I’m very fond of Ayn Rand. However, I never had much use, even as a teenager long long ago, with the official Objectivist cult and all its seminars, lectures, personalities, feuds and excommunications. I did not think all that much of Nathaniel Brandon, and I always thought Peikoff was a sycophant.

Someone forwarded this video yesterday, which I thought quite amusing. Despite the fact that I had never heard of Yaron Brock, and I don’t actually know precisely where he sits in the Official Cult hierarchy, at Peikoff’s right hand? somewhere below the salt? I’ll have to look him up sometime on-line.

A 2014 interview.

He turns 75 today. If anyone thinks the novel is dead, he should just go read:

You’re going to need a bigger dress. https://t.co/QcrQDSbarS

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 24, 2022

This is about as far of an observation as any… pic.twitter.com/q6edP4JNqh

— 🇺🇸Texas Tweetheart🇺🇸 (@MechelleChristy) June 25, 2022

I used to defend legalized abortion. As time went by, I, too, found it impossible to be on the same side as these people who are utterly indifferent to Constitutional fidelity, Federalism, or the democratic process, as long as they get their way.

I’m fairly callous and unsentimental about babies, but even I started having problems with viable babies torn to pieces or left to die. Everybody should have problems with Planned Parenthood making money selling chopped-up baby parts. It reached a point in recent years where American Society as desired by our liberal friends could compete in lack of regard for human life with the Aztec Empire.

They really deserved to lose this one.

HT: Vanderleun.

They literally want you dead pic.twitter.com/7MVvlqFNMT

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 25, 2022

Not very, as the tweet above demonstrates. Defenseless? That tweet’s author seems to have no clue how many guns there are in rural America and how many people prepared to use them. Not to mention, how many backhoes.

Roger Brooke Taney, Chief Justice of the United States March 28, 1836 — Oct 12, 1864, Author of Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856).

The post-WWII Conservative Movement’s greatest accomplishment has clearly been elevating jurisprudential reasoning and debate at law schools and the Supreme Court sometimes from the level of “penumbras” and intuitions to a level of serious engagement with the Constitution and the intent of the framers.

Yesterday’s Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S deserves to be welcomed and applauded as a victory for the Constitution and the Rule of Law, regardless of one’s views as to desirability of access to abortion.

As a matter of fact, I personally think legal abortion was a good thing practically. Legal abortion was one of the few ways our Society’s policies were eugenic. I think it is hard to dispute that fewer women so wicked, or simply so morally obtuse, as to be willing to kill their own babies, reproducing has to be a Good Thing. Legal abortion undoubtedly also resulted in fewer criminals, fewer people living in dependency on Welfare, and fewer democrat voters. The argument from Utility is all in favor of Abortion.

Desirable as better eugenic outcomes may be, nonetheless, the integrity of our governmental processes and fidelity to the Rule of Law are more important.

The issue of Abortion is a classic instance, resembling a number of major public issues in the past on which the country was deeply, and fairly evenly, divided. The issue of Slavery in the 19th Century was, of course, the classic paradigm issue of the kind.

Justice Blackmun, in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), followed the precise example of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in his Dred Scott decision, by attempting to resolve finally a fractious, painful national quarrel by usurpative judicial fiat.

Supreme Court majorities experience a temptation to assume dictatorial powers precisely in the kinds of rare cases which evoke the deepest national passions and on which the opposing factions are both sufficiently strong as to preclude the near-term victory of either nationally. It is in just such hard cases that partisan Court majorities are prone to step forward highhandedly to try to impose a nation-wide consensus otherwise unachievable.

Dred Scott, predictably, inflamed Abolitionist sentiments in the North and was responded to with Nullification and open resistance. The Dred Scott decision, in fact, played a significant role in deepening the divisions leading ultimately to the Civil War that finally settled the issue of Slavery at the cost of many billions of dollars and the lives of two and a half per cent of the entire national population.

Removing decisions people care about deeply from elected legislatures accountable to the voters and substituting judicial fiat fundamentally violates the democratic process and denies the whole idea of Federalism. We hold elections so voters have the opportunity to express their policy preferences via the choice of their representatives in the legislatures. And the whole point of there being individual states is to allow different local cultures with different opinions and different ideals to make their own rules.

The 20th Century Supreme Court was no more entitled to tell strongly religious states they must countenance Abortion than the 19th Century Supreme Court was to tell citizens of New England and Midwestern states that they must become slave catchers.

Judicial Overreach is highly likely to fail in its intent to resolve a contest permanently. On the contrary, it is much more likely to embitter and more deeply arouse the losers to carry on the battle via electoral politics and thereby it politicizes judicial appointments. Judicial Overreach is inevitably inflammatory and divisive as well as corrosive to the competitive relationship between the rival parties. Just look at what has happened in Senate confirmations of Supreme Court nominees in the decades since Roe was decided.

Roe’s downfall, therefore, is a happy moment in our country’s history, proving thereby that, despite all, the American system of government really can function properly from time to time.

In response to all the caterwalling and references to back alley abortions, one can respond: This isn’t 1922. Safe and reliable birth control is readily available. There is in general no necessity for women to fall back on Abortion.

And, in any event, Abortion laws are obviously going to vary greatly, reflecting the extreme difference, state to state, in culture, religion, and moral opinions. If you want an abortion, you can always hop on a bus and travel to the nearest blue state.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) warns that the US had better start rethinking the downsizing of its Defense Industries and Stockpiles.

The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own. The mass scale combat has pitted 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers, together with 450,000 recently mobilised citizen soldiers against about 200,000 Russian and separatist troops. The effort to arm, feed and supply these armies is a monumental task. Ammunition resupply is particularly onerous. For Ukraine, compounding this task are Russian deep fires capabilities, which target Ukrainian military industry and transportation networks throughout the depth of the country. The Russian army has also suffered from Ukrainian cross-border attacks and acts of sabotage, but at a smaller scale. The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.

This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined. Read the rest of this entry »

HT: Karen L. Myers.