Dispositive Indication of Party’s Extremism

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In an article concerning Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate, Graham Platner, and whether he should drop out of the fall election contest over an allegation of rape (coming on the heels of a number of women who’ve said he’d been abusive toward them), there is this statement:

Over the last 24 hours, some of Platner’s advisers have been guiding him on what a withdrawal from the race would look like and helping him figure out a way to get a candidate and a selection process he could support, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

[A] candidate and a selection process he [Platner] could support. That’s a pretty definitive statement of the control over the Progressive-Democratic Party that the socialists have, and it demonstrates pretty clearly how socialism has become the center of Party and how Party Establishment has been relegated to Party’s extremist right (even as Party’s Establishment remains plainly Left Wing relative to American politics and voters).

And, just to emphasize that point, which even includes those wanting Platner to drop out, here’s Joseph Geevarghese, who is the Executive Director of Our Revolution, the progressive organization that socialist, but nominally Independent, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) generated:

To the Democratic establishment: this is not your opening. Mainers did not vote by an overwhelming margin against Janet Mills and the DSCC’s handpicked candidate just to be handed another status-quo candidate.

It’s hard to get any clearer than that.

Update: In the realization, Platner withdrew.

I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.

As Dana Loesch put it in her newsletter,

As the truth unraveled so did Platner’s polling. A recent NYT poll showed incumbent Susan Collins leading Platner with working class voters by 21 points, expanded more by narrowing it to white working class voters. Women, Hispanics, and other demos began sliding fast. Democrats couldn’t afford Platner hurting them in the midterms, too.

This is Party.

Revolution vs Evolution

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The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:

The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:

The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.

And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:

Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.

And this:

Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.

It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.

What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.

The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.

Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.

Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.

Celebrities and Champions

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently insists on being both.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared on the cover of the most recent issue of Essence magazine[.]

That prompted a Georgia lawyer to complain that

Supreme Court Justices are not celebrities and should not be treated like celebrities[.]

He’s right, but magazine writers are going write and magazine photographers are going to photograph. The real onus is on Supreme Court Justices to not act like celebrities.

On the other hand, Jackson enthusiastically accepts her label as “the people’s champion.”

Judges and especially Supreme Court Justices, though, cannot legitimately be the people’s champions, that’s the exclusive role of our elected officials in Congress and the White House. The role of judges and Justices is to be the champion of our Constitution and of the statutes before them, and apply both without regard to celebrity.

Too Many Choices

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A letter-writer in the Sunday Wall Street Journal Letters section whined that his SUV has too many choices, too many buttons, switches, levers, and touch-screen options, and he’s too easily confused by them.

We’ve owned our SUV for more than a year and still don’t understand how to control many of the interior environment options.
I find myself not watching the road while I search for the correct button or icon to turn on the air conditioner or change entertainment. I put tape on some of the many buttons in order to locate them by touch. The digital display around the speedometer has a mind of its own, often spontaneously changing.

Has he considered reading his SUV’s operating manual? Those very clearly explain the purpose of all of those controls and how to employ them.

The digital display around my SUV’s speedometer occasionally changes, seemingly on its own. It doesn’t, though, change on its own; it’s always due to my bumping one or another button on my HOTAS—the two small collections of buttons and rockers on the left and right side of my steering wheel. The letter-writer should give some consideration to his handling of his own steering wheel.

It’s a baseless beef. My SUV, like any other modern car, has just the right number of buttons, switches, levers, and touch-screen options; neither more nor less. I could wish the touch screen options were replaced with buttons, switches, and/or levers, but that’s separate from the letter-writer’s plaint.

If this person is that easily confused or distracted behind the steering wheel, maybe he should consider hanging up his keys/fob.

Radical Reform

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Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro wants our judges and Justices to be bound by popular assent instead of being bound by law.

I think we need radical reform that’s actually going to ensure that the voices of the people are heard from, that the voices of the people are represented in the three branches of government. We don’t have that right now.

Shapiro wants to pack the Supreme Court to address that, and Jonathan Turley was properly worried in his piece about Shapiro’s sharp turn to the extreme left with that remark.

I add this to that concern. This is another reason we can’t trust the Progressive-Democratic Party with control of our government. It has nothing to do with patriotism or integrity. It’s that so many Party politicians simply do not understand at all our Federal government or its structure.

Only two of the three branches of our government are intended to represent “the voices of the people,” those are the two political branches, and the granularity of that representation itself varies broadly across their elected roles. The politicians in our Congress’ House of Representatives represent, first, the voices of their district’s constituents, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation, since our Congress has national responsibilities as well as to its members’ districts. The politicians in Congress’ Senate represent, first, the voices of their State’s citizens, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation. The politicians in the White House, the President and Vice President, represent the voices of the citizens of our nation.

The judges and Justices of the third branch, though, represent no citizens’ voices. They represent our Constitution and the statutes that come before them and are bound by oath apply those laws without respect to persons and by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges to do so without fear or favor in order to facilitate the necessary political independence of our Judicial Branch and the judges and Justices within it.

Party politicians demanding that the judiciary represent the voices of the people is their demand for the subordination of judges and Justices to the vagaries of politics at the expense of their binding to law.