On Jan. 20, Donald Trump will officially inherit a colossal mess almost beyond description — Humpty Dumpty has been shattered by the Biden administration. And it is hard to believe that President Trump can fix Biden’s mess in only four years. American power and influence seem at the nadir of their post-war existence, and regardless of passions about the new president, the country needs to get serious about self-improvement and global leadership. 1. Morale The morale of the country is in the tank due to raging inflation and a sense that matters are out of control domestically and internationally, while political grandees in the meantime talk down to the country and force all things woke down the nation’s throat. There is also the sense that Biden’s entourage and the complicit media covered up his obvious mental deterioration. Further, some ridiculously strident members of the House, bent on impeding the cohesiveness needed for traction on major issues, have the ability to posture and stymie a tiny Republican majority. And it is no secret that there is a lack of confidence in institutions such as Congress, the Department of Justice and FBI, and the Supreme Court. Moreover, violent crime and carjackings are a way of life in major cities, which, as so-called “sanctuaries,” have decided “not to use … resources to help federal agents identify, and deport, undocumented immigrants.” 2. Border Security Assurances by Vice President Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas that “the border is secure” have been ludicrous, with such neglect of national security requiring what the English poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a willing suspension of disbelief. In late September, the House Committee on Homeland Security estimated there are about 2 million known “gotaways” since the beginning of FY 2021. And, excluding the “gotaways,” the number of border encounters is more than triple those of the first Trump administration. 3. Inflation Inflation that peaked at 9.1 percent in mid-2022 is now approaching 3 percent and here to stay for the foreseeable future, as is the current price level for goods thanks to what is known in economics as downward stickiness of pricing. (Even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin regretted saying that inflation was “transitory.”) By one estimate, grocery prices are 22 percent higher since Biden’s inauguration. A monetary stimulus that contributed to inflation, it is questionable whether Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, announced in early 2021, was actually needed on that scale. Mysteriously, the quantitative easing (purchase of bonds) by the Federal Reserve should have already been halted when, by March of 2022, inflation hit 5.2 percent. While there are also global inflationary forces at work, Trump will need to address the cost of living at the grocery store and at the gas pump. 4. Defense and Foreign Policy In defense and foreign policy, the U.S. has surrendered global influence to bad actors. Reports on the culture at the top of the Pentagon suggest that careerism and catering to elements of DEI are dominant — instead of a focus on addressing the current geometry of threats, particularly preparation for a conflict with China. Immediate attention is needed to build a procurement and logistics chain that can sustain a major conflict. A current estimate in Defense One is that the Navy needs to build, on net, 10 ships a year for the next 35 years — yet due to aging, the Navy had a net loss of nine ships for fiscal 2025. China, in the meantime, has a shipbuilding capacity that dwarfs our own in stunning proportion. 5. The Middle East The disgraceful and botched withdrawal from Afghanistan — ceding to the Taliban the Bagram Airfield and billions of dollars worth of military equipment — was an invitation to aggression for Russia and Iran who perceived a lack of American resolve. Further, the Biden administration continued with President Obama’s appeasement of Iran, which through proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Syria and Iraq, was able to loom large in the Middle East, creating the so-called Axis of Resistance. Today, Iran is known to be on the edge of possessing weapons-grade uranium. By the middle of 2024, its proxies, the Houthis, had caused nearly an 80 percent reduction in shipping traffic through the Red Sea. In the meantime, the U.S. response has been to defend and protect but with sporadic and limited retaliatory efforts. In another act of weakness, in early 2023, the Biden administration allowed a Chinese surveillance balloon to traverse the entire country, including remote territory in Alaska, before finally shooting it down off the East Coast. (READ MORE: American Appeasement Emboldens Bad Actors 6. Energy Dominance Another Biden legacy is the loss of leadership in world energy. Cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline, termination of leases and mining permits, and stopping new LNG export infrastructure are symptomatic of a naivete that caters to progressives yet damages our energy security. And while the U.S. is restricting its energy exploration and production, Russia has used energy as a weapon against Europe. China’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative, established in 2013, is aimed in part at energy security for a country that has imported over 11 million barrels of oil per day, the largest oil importer in the world. Increased U.S. production over the long term should inhibit both Iran and Russia from amassing further hard currency reserves. 7. Ukraine Finally, there is Biden’s legacy in Ukraine. While the Biden Administration did not correctly anticipate or deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it is admittedly difficult to deter a superpower with over 1,700 deployed nuclear warheads and over 1,500 tactical ones. A country that, believing in its own historical continuity, wants to retake what was once part of its empire. Nonetheless, there is no clear objective or disclosed endgame for NATO and the U.S., with premature use of the word “victory” unrealistic. On the positive side of the ledger, presently 23 out of 32 NATO member nations are at or over the 2 percent of GDP requirement for defense, based on a NATO announcement using mid-2024 data. This achievement is due to intense pressure by Biden to continue with a policy that was started by Trump. Whether 2 percent is a realistic percentage given today’s array of threats is another matter. (READ MORE: What’s Wrong with Canada?) Trump will need to prioritize this litany of inherited domestic and world problems created in large part by Biden and his coterie. As president, he will have strategic opportunities to end the Russia–Ukraine war and conflict in the Middle East, and bring Iran, weakened by the collapse of the al-Assad government in Syria, and by Israeli military prowess in the Levant and against Iran’s own air defense systems, into the international community again — and restore confidence in Americans that our borders are secure and that the country, a meritocracy, is on the right track with a sound economy. READ MORE from Frank Schell: Justice Department Indicts Top Indian Company for Bribery Separating Fact From Hype About BRICS What’s Wrong With Canada? Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.   The post Blessed Is Donald Trump, For He Shall Inherit a Mess appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins. “Ethics and aesthetics are one,” or so the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted in his 1921 treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He was by no means the first to do so. The ancient Greeks, 23 centuries earlier, formulated the societal ideal of kalokagathia, a term derived by fusing the adjectives καλός (beautiful) and ἀγαθός (good). And he would not be the last. Yukio Mishima, standing amidst the psychic rubble of his grotesque childhood, and the physical rubble of post-war Japan, would similarly insist that “beauty and ethics are one and the same,” and embark on a self-improvement program of sun, steel, and exquisite prose, while the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, standing amidst the aesthetic horrors of high modernism, maintained that, despite the fashionable nonsense of our times, “beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.” It was the foremost reactionary philosopher of the 20th century, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who best expressed the unique relationship between goodness and beauty: Sólo el bien y la belleza no requieren límites. Nada es demasiado bello o demasiado bueno. [Only goodness and beauty do not require limits. Nothing is too beautiful or too good.] It does stand to reason that ethics, the general inquiry into what is good (or bad), would be closely correlated with aesthetics, the study of beauty and taste (or the lack thereof). When we stand in the presence of a Pontormo fresco in a Florentine chapel, or before a glittering reliquary in an Aachen cathedral treasury, or beneath the ribbed vaults of a Gothic nave, we cannot help but feel that the artistic beauty on display has afforded us a glimpse of divine goodness. As the architect Edwin Lutyens struggled gamely to articulate it in a 1907 letter to his wife Emily: There is that in art that transcends all the rules, it is the divine — I use poor words — and this is what makes all the arts so absorbing and thrilling to follow, creating a furore…there is the same effect produced on all and in all work by a master mind. To short sight it is a miracle, to those longer sighted it is Godhead, if we could see yet better, these facts may be revealed before which the V[ery] God as we conceive him will fade dim. Just as there is something heavenly in artistic beauty, there is something infernal in its antithesis, something that makes us — or at least those of us with functioning amygdalae capable of producing disgust responses — feel as William Butler Yeats did when he wrote of how: The wrong of unshapely things Is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew And sit on a green knoll apart, With the earth and the sky and the water, Remade, like a casket of gold…  The immense “wrong of unshapely things” concerned many of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries, those poets like Georg Trakl who longed for a “beautiful world filled with infinite harmony,” but feared the “godless, cursed century” to come, and those cultural critics like Karl Kraus who anticipated hyper-modernity’s “destruction of the human spirit.” And so it was that the forthright assertion that Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins, while not particularly original, became something of a rallying cry for many aesthetically sensitive post-war Viennese intellectuals. It should be a rallying cry in our own benighted era as well. Those who had the good fortune to attend the recent reopening ceremonies at Notre Dame de Paris doubtless experienced anew the transcendent nature of architecture as produced by the masterminds of the High Middle Ages, as light poured in through the famed rose windows, illuminating the motes of dust dancing in the air, passing over the surface of the fretted stone, and coming to rest upon the freshly-carved liturgical furnishings. Before the April 15, 2019 fire that devastated Notre Dame, some 12 million visitors were visiting the cathedral annually — a figure that is expected to grow to 15 million upon re-opening. Forty thousand visitors per day, all drawn to the venerable basilica by that divine light. Yet, as the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz pointed out in his 1713 polemic “Against Barbaric Physics,” “it is, unfortunately, our destiny that, because of a certain aversion toward light, people love to be returned to darkness.” There are those who, for ideological or utilitarian reasons, harbor an aversion to the infinite harmony of structures like Notre Dame de Paris, and are hell-bent on producing a world of concrete and rusting rebar, a world of plastic and slave-labor junk, of brutalism and desolate sprawl, a world increasingly devoid of beauty and, consequently, of good. “Beauty,” as Sir Roger Scruton observed in his documentary Why Beauty Matters, “is assailed from two directions: by the cult of ugliness in the arts and by the cult of utility in everyday life. These two cults come together in the world of modern architecture.” Slowly but surely, people are beginning to realize the damage that the cult of ugliness has inflicted on our civilization. Last autumn, in Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) legislators issued a document entitled “Irrweg der Moderne — für einen kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Bauhaus,” or “The Erroneous Path of Modernity — Towards a Critical Examination of the Bauhaus,” which urged the East German city of Dessau not to go ahead with plans to honor the centenary of the Bauhaus design school’s move to that city, on the grounds that the “international spread of the Bauhaus style created a porridge-like homogeneity that displaced local architectural traditions.” Getroffene Hunde bellen — a hit dog will holler — and the German Left reacted with horror and outrage at the opening of this new front in the Kulturkampf. The AfD legislator spearheading the assault on Bauhaus, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, gleefully mocked his Bauhaus-loving critics: “Your worship of Bauhaus seems very fragile … [as] if our subjecting it to a little criticism might take your precious Bauhaus away from you.” The AfD’s “Irrweg der Moderne” presented a devastating case against Bauhaus architecture, with its “cold, unwelcoming, and unattractive [kalt, abweisend und unattraktiv]” style, its “inhuman [menschenfeindlich]” approach to social housing, and its “radical simplification and functionalization of the living environment, which often contradicted traditional and culturally anchored ideas about living spaces [die radikale Vereinfachung und Funktionalisierung des Lebensumfeldes, widersprachen oft traditionellen und kulturell verankerten Vorstellungen von Wohn- und Lebensräumen].” There is also the matter of Bauhaus’ political and social ideologies, which, as the document notes, were “clearly closely aligned with communism during the time of Hannes Meyer’s leadership [die insbesondere während der Leitung von Hannes Meyer eine klare Nähe zum Kommunismus aufwiesen],” leading to a “politicization of architecture [Politisierung der Architektur]” which continues to this day. It is worth noting, however, that a great many Bauhauslers joined the Nazi Party. Herbert Bayer was not averse to making posters for Nazi political campaigns, Wilhelm Imkamp became a Nazi war artist, and Fritz Ertl served as the deputy head of the Central Construction Management of the Waffen-SS and Police at Auschwitz, helping to design the “swimming baths” or “washhouses for special actions” — which is to say the crematoria — of the Nazi death camps. Bauhaus did not start out this way. As Tom Wolfe noted in his 1981 takedown of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, the movement’s founder, Walter Gropius, was initially “in favor of bringing simple craftsmen into the Bauhaus, yeomen, honest toilers, people with knit brows and broad fingernails who would make things by hand for architectural interiors, simple wooden furniture, simple pots and glassware, simple this and simple that.” Gropius had not anticipated that Theo van Doesburg and other attendees of the First International Congress of Progressive Art in 1922 would ridicule such a movement as thoroughly bourgeois. Gropius quickly realized, as Wolfe put it, that “van Doesburg was backing him into a dreadful corner,” and so a new motto for the Bauhaus movement was devised (“Art and Technology — A New Unity!”) and “[h]onest toilers, broad fingernails, and curves disappeared from the Bauhaus forever,” replaced by a fundamentally socialistic vision to which architectural design was subordinated. It did not take long, under such conditions, for the Bauhaus movement to descend into absurdity. As the traditionalist blogger Wrath of Gnon has astutely pointed out, Bauhaus was “a school of arts and crafts that taught almost no arts and little crafts, and, in later years, their much talked about school of architecture was completely absent. What they did teach however was a colorful potpourri of sects, cults, theosophy, and occultism.” The so-called “Master of Form” of the Bauhaus school, the expressionist painter Johannes Itten, was pretty much a maniac, a devotee of the neo-Zoroastrian cult of Mazdaznan who shaved his head, dressed in monkish attire, and encouraged his Bauhaus acolytes to eat massive amounts of garlic, to regularly subject themselves to major enemas, and to prick their skin and then rub in exotic oils, which resulted in agonizing infections. His paintings, naturally, were terrible. Yet for some reason we are expected to take all of this seriously. The Scottish art historian and former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, in Germany: Memories of a Nation (2014), described Peter Keler’s infamous Bauhaus baby crib, designed in 1922, as a “beautiful, elegant, practical object, circles, triangles, and squares, cheerfully painted in red, yellow, and blue — perfect Bauhaus. Any baby lucky enough to sleep in this cradle  would imagine the world as ordered, balanced, and bright.” In actuality, it is an absolutely absurd design, shaped like a deep feeding trough precariously resting on two metal circles. Neil MacGregor might be willing to put a precious newborn baby in such a ridiculous contraption, but the art historian Nicolas Fox Weber apparently has a great deal more common sense, writing in his 2020 treatise IBauhaus that Keler’s design might be “original and clever” — original, maybe — but: Imagine putting a baby in there! How many pillows would be needed to make the infant comfortable? What would the risk of those pillows be to the child, who might roll over and suffocate? And wouldn’t the pillows destroy the pure design that was the whole point anyway? Yes, the Kandinskyish coloring is delightful, and the object is fun to look at, but is it not indifferent to true human needs? Bauhaus, as an architecture and design movement, is indeed “utterly indifferent to true human needs.” It is the architecture of menschenfeindlich, of inhumanity, and it is time that we stop pretending otherwise. The cult of ugliness, propounded by the Bauhauslers and the other modernists and brutalists who declared that “ornament is crime,” laid the groundwork for what the Serbian-Norwegian architectural theorist Branko Mitrovič has called an “age of fraud,” one perpetrated by these modernist incompetents and scam artists. Mitrovič urges us to remember that: Mies van der Rohe, [Frank Lloyd] Wright, and Le Corbusier were never trained to use traditional systems of ornamentation, the classical orders or spacial composition. As a student with poor graphical skills who dropped out of architectural school, it is unlikely that Gropius ever mastered them. In order to take advantage of the exceptional career possibilities that became available in the post-World War one era, Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier had to argue against ornamentation and spatial composition. If they did not assert the irrelevance of the skills taught in architectural academies, they would have to admit their limited competence for the projects and commissions they aspired to get. This explains the fact … that the tenets of the modernist approach to design were predominantly negative and centered on the rejection of traditional systems of ornamentation and spatial composition. Unserious design, created by unserious people, resulting in an unserious built environment. These are perilous times, however, and they cry out for seriousness. As Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, has persuasively argued, architecture rooted in the past has the potential to bolster our republic by anchoring it in traditions and promoting a shared civic identity, while modernist architectural design accomplishes precisely the opposite, as if by design. There is no need to idolize a school of design that produced hideous architectural monstrosities, soul-crushing housing projects that failed even to be “machines for living,” and preposterous gewgaws like the Bauhaus crib. And this isn’t just about architecture, but every aspect of daily life and culture that leftism has beset and eaten away at like tuberculosis of the bones. I am reminded of Alexandre Dumas’ preface to his 1873 novel La Femme de Claude: Take care, you are passing through troublesome times. You have just paid death and are not through paying for your earlier faults. It is no time to be a wit, a trifler, a libertine, a scoffer, a skeptic, or a wanton; we have enough of these for a time at least. God, nature, work, marriage, love, children, all these are serious, very serious things, and rise up before you. All these must live or you will die. Germany, in these early days of 2025, admittedly has bigger problems than the legacy of Bauhaus architecture, including its bizarrely suicidal energy policy, as a result of which ancient forests are being chopped down and turned into wood pellets in the name of “green energy,” and its equally suicidal immigration policy, which has proven just as ruinous to its own interests. These are troublesome times, brought about by deeply unserious, genuinely self-loathing people. Aesthetic decline is a symptom of the disease, not a cause, but it does serve as something of a leading indicator. If we start to see a built environment characterized not by inhuman, cold, unwelcoming, and unattractive buildings, and instead by beauty and harmony, then we will know that serious things are being taken seriously once again. READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Death Throes of Free Speech in the United Kingdom Confronting Decadence and Decline Chinese Dissidents Seek to Undermine the Regime With Egg Fried Rice Recipes The post Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Patience has understandably worn thin with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). After America’s mail carrier lost $9.5 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2024 and announced plans to raise stamp prices five more times through 2027, it’s little wonder that President-elect Trump has contemplated selling the agency off to the highest bidder. Short of a buyout, there’s plenty the incoming administration could do to ensure increased competition and lower costs at the USPS. President Trump should loosen the screws on the onerous postal monopoly and let private providers give the agency a run for its money. Since the appointment of Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General in 1775, the federal government has taken a leading role in the collection and delivery of mail in the United States. This control has taken on various forms, as the government has repeatedly evaluated and re-evaluated how it should organize its postal infrastructure. One interesting theme has repeatedly emerged. Private posts have tried and tried again to compete with the USPS, only for the federal behemoth to take their ideas and subsume them — or use the legal system to run them out of business. One early example was the private, New York-based City Despatch Post, which rose to prominence in the 1840s. They pioneered the stamp as a novel way for senders, rather than recipients, to pay for their mail. City Despatch Post also had the sensible idea of placing letter collection boxes in popular areas as part and parcel of early delivery routes. The Post was ultimately bought out by the government and became part of the New York Post Office. However, the innovative payment, branding, and collection methods long outlived the defunct company. Fast forward nearly two hundred years, and mail carriers taking a page from the private sector doesn’t seem like a half-bad idea. While the USPS has maintained a monopoly on the delivery of letters weighing fewer than 12.5 ounces, nations such as Germany and the United Kingdom have exposed their posts to private competition. Deutsche Post and Royal Mail face a variety of competitors, including Evri, DPD, and even each other from across the English Channel. These nations are undoubtedly better off for it. Central Washington University economists Robert Carbaugh and Thomas Tenerelli compare the United States’ postal policies with those of five countries (Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia). Each significantly commercialized their postal sectors over a 20-year period and found plenty to write home about. Namely, “prices have not risen, productivity has increased, costs have decreased, the universal service obligation continues to be met, service quality measured by on-time delivery has not dropped, and overall customer satisfaction (though difficult to measure) seems to have increased.” Once competitors are allowed to enter the fray, national posts such as Deutsche Post respond by innovating and improving services for consumers. When the German postal monopoly was abolished in the early 2000s, Dutch postal services provider TNT announced plans to offer end-to-end letter delivery and strove to reach a majority of German households. This private competition made a sizeable dent in the Post’s letter market share, spurring the former monopolist to roll out a service that allows mail to be scanned and emailed to recipients. Consumers will only trust their post offices to carry out such a service if the post has a positive reputation for safeguarding consumers’ data and information. Deutsche Post has been busy shoring up its safety bona fides to prove it can handle such delicate tasks. For instance, the Post created a well-publicized “Deutsche Post Security Cup,” which rewarded researchers up to 6,000 euros for finding significant bugs in their E-Postbrief secure message service. USPS consumers wish they could have a similarly safe and tech-friendly experience. The closest equivalent to Deutsche Post’s scan and emailing service is “Informed Delivery,” which only offers images of the outside of consumers’ incoming mail. Too bad that stalkers and identity thieves have been having a field day exploiting weaknesses in the program’s authentication system. There is, of course, no guarantee that the USPS would get some much-needed business sense if it went the way of Deutsche Post and Royal Mail and relaxed its monopoly on mailing letters. However, international and historical experience suggests the agency could better itself by embracing competition. America’s mail carrier, the incoming administration, and Congress can work together to build a more vibrant and dynamic postal system. READ MORE from Ross Marchand: No, the USPS Isn’t About to Be Privatized Crumbling Post Offices Pose Problems and Opportunities for USPS Ross Marchand is a senior fellow for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. The post US Postal Service Needs Some Competition appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from The People’s Voice: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by R. Cort Kirkwood, The New American: In a shoot-from-the-lip news conference today, President-elect Donald Trump said the United States might take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, and that the Palestinian Hamas terror outfit had better release hostages taken in its October 7, 2023 raid on Israel before he takes office. Trump told […]

'Do you owe citizens an apology'

Wednesday's Final Word