Why didn’t four reporters from the NYT run this down before impugning Benevenuto’s professional integrity? They couldn’t risk it.

Impugning Benevenuto’s professional integrity was part of the narrative that Bill Barr was doing something corrupt right up to the end.

Bill Barr is working on a book. The first effort from the Democrats will be to prevent any publisher from agreeing to print the book. But that won’t work.

So the fallback position is to continue to hammer away on Barr in advance of his recounting of events.

It’s all about the narrative for the NYT — fact or fiction doesn’t factor into it.

Chris Wallace: So just to button this up, I’m gonna ask you one more question. Do you believe that the virus came from a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute?

Mike Pompeo: I do!

Wallace sat for almost 5 seconds, silently, after the former secretary of state answered, possibly stunned that he received such a direct, unequivocal answer on such a loaded question. No follow-up question was needed with that response.

Democrats are focused like a laser beam on passing a federal takeover of the voting system. In case you haven’t been taking notes, it’s completely out of bounds to question the veracity of our current election system — unless you want to mandate ballot harvesting, outlaw voter ID, and make mail-in voting universal across the country. Then, it’s totally cool to suggest our current elections aren’t free and fair. //

RNC Research
@RNCResearch
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on H.R. 1: "We cannot rely solely on a wish of winning elections" //

Oh, really? So Democrats can’t rely on simply winning elections fair and square? How very interesting.

Pan American World Airways is one of the most iconic airlines in history. It was the vision and determination of entrepreneur Juan Trippe that took the operator to unprecedented heights during some of the aviation industry’s most golden years.

In The 1990s, The Third-Richest Person On The Planet (Behind Gates And Buffett) Was… A Swiss Orchestra Conductor???

Let's travel back to June 1995 and take a pop quiz. Who were the three richest people walking the planet in the middle 1995? I expect even the casual CelebrityNetWorth reader would be able to name the top person. With a net worth of $22 billion, the richest person on the planet in 1995 was Microsoft founder Bill Gates. I actually think a lot of people will correctly guess the #2 richest person in 1995. With a net worth of $16 billion, that title went to Warren Buffett.

But who was the third richest person the world in the middle of the 1990s?

Larry Ellison? Nope.

One of the Waltons? Nope.

One of the Koch brothers? Nope.

Some Saudi king or prince? Nope.

Would you believe me if I told you that the third richest person on the planet was a random Swiss orchestra conductor name Paul Sacher?

In March 2020, Delta pilot Chris Dennis left a note in the aircraft he was parking in a storage lot in Victorville, California, thinking it would be found after a two-week quarantine. But after being discovered 435 days later, the note is now being called a "time capsule." //

Dennis said he parked the aircraft with dozens of other planes and said each represented hundreds of jobs. He described the scene as "Chilling, apocalyptic, surreal" in a Facebook post in March 2020. Airlines were parking passenger planes en masse as travel fell to historic lows.

Dennis wanted to commemorate his emotions in a note for the next pilot to find.

"Hey pilots - It's March 23rd and we just arrived from MSP," Dennis wrote in the note. "Very chilling to see so much of our fleet here in the desert. If you are here to pick it up then the light must be at the end of the tunnel. Amazing how fast it changed. Have a safe flight bringing it out of storage!"

June 12 marked the official 40-year anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first film in the Indiana Jones epic adventure series starring Harrison Ford.

Ford rose to popularity after playing Han Solo in Star Wars, and director Steven Spielberg tapped him for the whip-cracking Indiana Jones role after Tom Selleck backed out. What some fans may not realize is that the actor performed many of his own stunts, including that famous boulder chase. And Spielberg once called himself an “idiot” for putting Ford in that situation. //

Spielberg explained that they had to take the proper safety precautions to prevent injuries. But filming Ford directly from the front worked best for the scene “because the rock was more effective chasing Harrison with Harrison running toward camera, it just didn’t work as well having him doubled.” //

“A double would have cheated his head down, so Harrison volunteered to do it himself,” wrote Spielberg. “He succeeded. There were five shots of the rock from five different angles — each one done separately, each one done twice — so Harrison had to race the rock ten times. He won ten times — and beat the odds. He was lucky — and I was an idiot for letting him try it.” //

Though it was only a fake prop, Spielberg revealed it could have caused real damage to anyone in its path. Like death-level damage. He said it stood 12 feet and weighed 300 pounds. //

“We went to great lengths to make a 12-foot rock out of fiberglass and wood and plaster precisely so that it wouldn’t weigh as much as a real 12-foot boulder,” Spielberg recalled. “So whether it weighed 300 pounds, which it did, or whether it weighed 80 tons, as it would have, it could still have done bodily harm to anyone falling beneath it…” //

To operate it, they used a special rod hidden among rubber stalagmites on set. The entire contraption required a fully constructed set that could accommodate all its moving parts and enable the fake boulder to move 40 yards.

In many ways, Locke is considered the father of political liberalism, the ideas and the institutions we take for granted now in America.

For example, the principle of government by consent of the governed, the separation of powers, the idea of natural universal rights of freedom of conscience, religious liberty, property as being sacrosanct—these ideas, virtually all of them come out of Locke’s thinking.

He was certainly one of the most, if not the most, important English philosopher in the 17th century. He had a profound effect on the American founding, and I’m sure we’ll get into that as well. //

the amazing thing about the Founders, of course, Virginia, is that they really studied the past intently to learn the lessons of history, in a way that no other political generation had done.

So yeah, they studied the classical Greeks, the Romans, the Greek tragedies, Rome as a republic. But then also these philosophers, like Locke, who are making these arguments for self-rule and self-government. And there was no philosopher who was quoted more often than John Locke by the American revolutionaries. So, he had a real significant influence. //

Why was Locke so appealing? I think several reasons.

One is, he had this ability to talk about these large political questions about human rights, natural rights. The idea of self-government. The idea of freedom of conscience. He could talk about it in a grammar that everybody could understand.

He was clearly friendly to the Christian religion. He’s not a radical enlightenment guy, like a Voltaire. He knew the Scriptures thoroughly. He wrote commentaries on the Epistles of Paul. I think he believed in the inspiration, the divine inspiration of the Scriptures.

So he’s operating more or less within this Christian tradition, but he’s using a grammar, a rhetoric, a style of argument that could appeal to people across denominations, across faith traditions. So he had an incredibly persuasive power with his most important writings. //

you ask yourself, “Wow, why do these people still care about John Locke?” Because he still speaks into our contemporary issues about rights, about self-government, about tyranny, freedom. He still speaks to us. So we’ve got all these scholars gathered.

My particular contribution, I’m going to focus on Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration,” and that’s his great defense of religious freedom.

I think Locke’s letter on toleration, published in 1689, so a hundred years before the American founding, … I think that document, not only was it transformative in its own day, I think it stands as probably the most important defense of religious freedom ever written. //

I think not enough scholars have given enough attention to the religious influences on Locke’s thinking, particularly on his “Letter Concerning Toleration.” And what I’m going to argue in this paper is, there was an earlier reform movement called Christian humanism.

A Catholic thinker named Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was a contemporary of Martin Luther—so you’re talking 1517, 1520s. Erasmus had put a real emphasis on the inner life, the life of the heart, the life of the soul, as opposed to outward religious observances or dogmas. He said, “You got to imitate life of Jesus.”

This is basically Erasmus and this Christian humanism, and as a bringing together of the intellectual and the heart, the mind and the heart with the Christian humanists. That movement didn’t die with Erasmus.

That movement, it took root in different places in Europe—in Great Britain and also in the Netherlands. And those two places were actually very important to Locke.

He’s an English philosopher. He finds these Christian humanist followers there in Great Britain. He’s reading their sermons, he’s going to their churches, he’s befriending them. And then in the Netherlands, when he’s in political exile, he meets really the successors to Erasmus in the Netherlands with that same spirit, imitate the life of Jesus and apply the principles of the life of Jesus to civic and political life.

So what do I mean by that? Something real concrete. The golden rule, right? Treat others as you want to be treated. What Locke is saying in so many ways, especially on this issue of religious freedom, it’s the civic application of the golden rule: equal justice under the law. Treat everyone the way you want to be treated, regardless of religious belief, religious commitment.

Equal treatment under the law, it’s the political application of the golden rule. That’s one example of how [these] Erasmian Christian humanist ideas, I think, found their way into Locke’s thinking. //

Look, if you take the issue of natural rights, which Locke was a real pioneer in making the case that everybody has these universal natural rights—life, liberty, and property. Those are the big three categories for Locke—life, liberty, property.

And property meant not just your physical property, but the fruit of your labor, the fruit of your creative efforts. That’s your property, too. Your intellectual property is your property, too.

How are we doing in protecting those natural rights? Well, if you think about the 20th century, for example, which has been called by [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, has been called the caveman century, the great assault on human rights, natural rights, the challenge we have now, I think, Virginia, one of them is we don’t even understand what natural rights are. We’ve so confused “human rights.” Everything is a human right. We’ve confused natural rights with social aspirations.

For example, we’d like to have a country where people have access to quality health care. … Is that a human right? Is that a natural right? Or is it a social aspiration? I would argue it’s an aspiration.

And yet the confusion of these things, the things you’d like to see happen in society with your natural God-given rights, that confusion, that blurring of things, that has just invited all kinds of government mischief. The kind of thing that Locke would have been firmly opposed to, it seems to me. //

You say that the recovery of Locke’s singular moral vision is one of the most urgent cultural tasks of our day. What was that vision that Locke had? And how do we go about achieving that? //

The obligation, the responsibility, and the freedom of every person to seek after truth, according to the dictates of conscience, without the interference of church or state, this is one dimension of his singular moral vision.

Locke really believed that this, that the quest for truth, moral truth, spiritual truth, this is the most important quest anyone could be on in their life. And government’s prime responsibility was to create the civic space necessary for people to pursue truth.

So they have to have freedom, civic freedom, religious freedom. All of that is tied up with self-government. If you don’t have a political system that respects the individual’s quest, the individual capacity to govern himself, herself, then you’ve got a society that’s in crisis, and we’re edging in that direction you could argue. //

I think the assumptions that people’s rights and freedoms are negotiable because a government official says they are, if we think about the way we’ve responded to the COVID crisis—I’m not saying that there haven’t been real challenges and real issues, and a real need for concern and measures being taken. But you could easily argue that there has been an overstepping of political power.

The will to power, I think, has resurfaced in a way that I think is shocking to many Americans. The limitations on our liberties that have no rational defense in science, in civics, in our Constitution. And yet here they are still. We’re still living with them. I think Locke would look at that and be appalled at the erosion of human freedom, human liberty.