RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/gertrude-himmelfarb-the-enlightenment

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism—relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”
                  —Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994

When Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote about the abyss consuming the intellectual and moral traditions of her own time, she was one of the first to recognise how seductive was its appeal and how depraved its outcome. In her book On Looking into the Abyss, she attributed the original insight to the critic Lionel Trilling, who detected it in the early 1960s in the underbelly of the modernist movement that had dominated literature and the arts since the early twentieth century. Himmelfarb, however, came to her own recognition from another direction entirely, partly from her study of the history of ideas in Britain’s Victorian era but also from the apparently unlikely field of the history of social policy that led the Victorians to define poverty as a social problem. In the process, up to her death on December 30 last year, aged ninety-seven, those who knew her work came to regard her as not only one of the great American historians of her time but one of her nation’s most compelling moral critics. In American political circles she was best known as Bea Kristol, wife and mother, respectively, of the neoconservative authors and editors Irving Kristol and William Kristol.

Modernists, from their earliest public manifestations in London’s Bloomsbury, had regarded the Christian morality of the English-speaking world as the greatest obstacle to the bohemianism of “free thought” and “free love” they craved.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/490745-a-strong-us-5g-sector-p

On Dec. 12, 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the very first transatlantic radio-wave transmission and ushered in a new age of wireless communications. More than a century later, wireless technology still is one of our primary sources of communication. But as our radio-wave highways become increasingly congested, each new generation of wireless technology is forced to ascend into higher and higher frequencies. The fifth generation of wireless technology, known as “5G,” will expand into spectrum bands Marconi could never have foreseen.

Because it will allow data to be transmitted more quickly and efficiently than ever before, 5G technology has the potential to improve everything from search and rescue missions and medical care to transportation, real-time language translation and precision farming. It could allow firefighters to use thermal imaging to see through smoke and locate victims more easily. It could help specialists perform remote robotic surgery on patients who are far away. And it could help American soldiers on the battlefield, giving them real-time information about their adversaries while monitoring their status and location. Such developments could revolutionize the technological landscape and pump trillions of dollars into our global economy. Perhaps most important, 5G could create millions of new U.S. jobs and become integral to our competitiveness in the global marketplace.

But like any new technology, 5G is not without risks. Currently, the only global company that is competitively producing all of the equipment necessary to fully implement 5G is China-based Huawei. While Huawei calls itself “employee-owned,” Chinese laws require companies to assist in national intelligence work unbeknownst to their customers — potentially rendering the equipment unsecure. This presents a major challenge for 5G implementation in the United States, since American companies either have to invent their own equipment or utilize Huawei’s — knowing that it could be accessed by the Chinese government.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/490694-just-say-no-to-typical-washington-m

NBC News reports that preliminary discussions have begun on Capitol Hill regarding the establishment of a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry about the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The discussions are said predominantly to involve Democrats and to be focused on the Trump administration’s performance. As outlined, the exercise would smack of the worst aspects of the 9/11 Commission: the partisan blame-game, which eventually petered into the look-like-we’re-doing-something creation of bloated and ludicrously expensive new bureaucracy.

The 9/11 Commission was a brainchild of the political class, which is why Washington remembers it fondly. To be fair, the report it generated was well written, as these extravaganzas go. It was remarkably gimlet-eyed about radical Islamic ideology (what would be more accurately described as sharia supremacism) as the instigator of jihadist terrorism — indeed, much more willing to confront this challenge than the progressive political class’s typical approach of reimagining Islam into a relentlessly “peaceful” creed to which terrorism is anathematic “anti-Muslim activity.”

That said, the 9/11 Commission was primarily an exercise in partisan politics. That is why, in the actual formation of substantive counterterrorism policy, the commission was ignored once Washington’s virtue-signally objectives were achieved. Quite contrary to the commission’s conclusions, it became de rigueur in the Obama years to shift our national security approach to opposing “violent extremism,” on the premise that fundamentalist Islam is no more likely to spur terrorism than movements derived from other religions or political agendas (e.g., limited-government conservatism, Second Amendment advocacy).