15 min read

A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration

Dear Intelligent American,

Coming from a place (The Bronx at first, and for three decades now Connecticut), where water is that thing which comes out of the faucet, there is no more thought about the wet stuff because the assumption is it will always be there. Drought? Shmout! Back East, water rights and mineral rights and those sorts of things are unknown except maybe in movies, where an old Western plot about the farmer, the rancher, the sheepherder, the miner may have Alan Ladd, or maybe Clint Eastwood, settle scores.

But now we’ve gotten a bellyful of unavoidable education, as Los Angeles mimics Dresden and Toyko circa 1944, and blame is hurled at those who could have prevented the preventable.

A few years back on a National Review cruise, some attendees—Fresno-area folks with major agricultural chops—told tales of plentiful Golden State water being denied to Central Valley farmers because of this obnoxious, invasive fish, the delta smelt. Say what you will about National Review: a variety of its writers, including Yours Truly, consistently sought to spotlight this terrible state of affairs and point towards calamity. Here’s proof.

But no Cassandra-esque colleague’s wildest dreams pictured this intentional deprivation of H2O resulting in the catastrophe playing out in the City of Angels—seemingly of Fallen ones (“HELL.A.” punned a New York Post front page). This is what comes of the axis of ideology, the aggrandizing state, the tyranny of bureaucracy when stewed in a culture of death—which hates fellow men. Who in authority cares to slake thirst, or wet burning embers? As the L.A. Fire Department’s deputy chief victim-blamed and excuse-mongered, the man in need has only himself to blame: “He got himself in the wrong place.”

Hey: How did she get in that place?

 

Here Is a 14-Alarm Call for Broadening Your Reading

 

1. At TomKilngenstein.com, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney decries the idea of “false moderation.” From the article:

True, we must be prudent, even in the midst of battle. But authentic prudence does not mean meeting assaults half-heartedly. While the free man in principle prefers peace to war and the arts of persuasion to endless conflict, he cannot be afraid to stand up and fight when he must—to the death, if necessary. Edmund Burke put things well at the beginning of his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): In resisting the fanaticism of those who war against ordered liberty, we must embody and defend what he called “a manly, moral, and regulated liberty.”

 

We need to rally a broad “anti-revolutionary party,” as Jordan J. Ballor has called it, comprising all who refuse to deny common sense and the moral truths reflected in the Decalogue, to sever attachment to what is good and noble in our patrimony, and to deny affection for our country. There can be no compromise with the revolutionary party.

 

To be sure, as I have mentioned, a healthy civic order values compromise, but such compromise requires what we lack today: a shared commitment to the life of reason and to the decencies and shared values required for a functioning republic. Emphasizing civility at the expense of these fundamentals opens the door wide to the revolutionaries. When this happens, good people become weak and ultimately complicit in the assault on their own way of life—on the premises, institutions, and traditions on which a free society rests. Conservatives need to remember this as we move forward.

 

2. At Forbes, edu-guru Bruno Manno suggests no hair of the dog, and worries about the lingering effect on education of the pandemic lockdowns. From the piece:

The gloom overshadowing K-12 schools begins with declining test scores. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report card, reports that average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020. This is the largest average score decline in reading since 1990 and the first-ever score decline in mathematics. In both subjects, scores for lower-performing age 9 students declined more than scores for higher-performing students compared to 2020.

 

The latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) shows that between 2019 and 2023, U.S. mathematics performance declined 18 points in fourth grade and 27 points in 8th grade. Science scores in both grades were around the same over that period but were 9 points lower for fourth graders in 2023 compared to the first TIMSS assessment in 1995.

 

Finally, there is a gender gap in learning loss, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of test scores. “Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe,” writes Matt Barnum.

 

3. At National Review, Kelly Shackelford argues that the fight to protect religious liberty is quite far from being over. From the piece:

Over the past several terms, when faced with far-reaching religious liberty cases, the Court sided with both the text of the Constitution and the intent of the Founders.

 

American Legion v. American Humanists Association upheld the 40-foot Bladensburg, Md., WWI Peace Cross memorial. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District found post-game prayer by a public high school football coach constitutional. And in Groff v. DeJoy, a unanimous Court granted victory to a former postal carrier who lost his job for observing the Sunday Sabbath. In each of these cases, the Court set aside decades-old precedent that had been hostile to religious freedom and incongruent with the Constitution.

 

Yet even as these decisions continue to ripple through our law and culture, we have more work to do. While these important victories changed the religious liberty landscape for the better, too often, Americans of faith still meet unwarranted opposition—often from government officials. That’s why, this term, First Liberty has asked the court to review a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that sided with the City of Stockton in firing former Fire Chief Ron Hittle. Stockton wrongfully terminated Fire Chief Hittle simply for attending a leadership conference hosted at a church. He did so because his supervisor suggested he receive leadership training, so Chief Hittle chose to attend one of the nation’s leading leadership conferences—Willow Creek Church’s Global Leadership Summit—which was hosted at a local church.

 

4. At City Journal—from the archives in 2011, but still plenty relevant—Victor Davis Hanson reports from the front lines of California’s “Water Wars.” From the analysis:

You can learn an important fact about the water wars simply by driving the width of California’s vast Central Valley, where most of the battles erupt. True, there is a rich agricultural economy of dairy, wine, row crops, and rice elsewhere in the state, both to the north and to the south. But the farming engine that drives California’s $14 billion export industry is centered in the hot flatlands of the 450-mile-long Central Valley, bounded by the mountains of the Sierra Nevada to the east and those of the Coast Range to the west. . . .

 

What the drive teaches you is that there is no single Central Valley agriculture. Rather, the state is divided longitudinally, right down its middle, into two farming landscapes. These regions—the East Side and the West Side of the Central Valley—differ not only in the nature of the crops grown there but also in the relative availability of water and, more specifically, in the origins of the water that their farms so desperately need. Start with the East Side, which looks like a verdant, well-tended park from the air, thanks to the Sierra Nevada watershed—a freakish development of nature. On their steeper western slopes, the mountains rise precipitously to jagged peaks ranging from 9,000 feet high to more than 14,000. The towering wall collects massive snowfalls from Pacific winter storms that often pass over the valley without producing much rain. In the spring, the snow melts and flows into such rivers as the Kings, Kaweah, and San Joaquin, which then descend into the Central Valley.

 

5. At Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli dives deep into the Golden State’s water-policy whirlpool. From the piece:

Later, in the middle of that century, federal and state officials were successful and sometimes audacious in addressing California’s water needs. The Central Valley Project, approved in 1933, linked the northern Sacramento Valley region, where two thirds of the state’s precipitation falls, to the San Joaquin Valley, where two thirds of the state’s irrigable land is located. The project connected them by building 20 dams and reservoirs, eleven hydroelectric powerplants, and 500 miles of canals and tunnels. In 1960, spurred by Democratic governor Pat Brown, California launched the even more extensive State Water Project, described by Starr as “the most ambitious water storage and distribution system in the history of the human race.” Its 21 dams and 705 miles of canals deliver water collected in northern California to 27 million residents and 750,000 acres of farmland.

 

The State Water Project system remains unfinished. Since the 1970s there has been more litigating and planning than building, despite the fact that California’s population doubled between 1970 and 2020. Two recent books—Winning the Water Wars (2020) by journalist Steven Greenhut and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022) by Edward Ring of the California Policy Center—argue that the cycle of droughts and floods owes less to capricious nature than to failed governance. The “core problem,” writes Greenhut, is that California policy has come to emphasize “boosting fish populations” over meeting residents’ and farmers’ needs. Indeed, it has come to favor water scarcity as “a means to limit growth and force changes in the way we live.” He believes that the key component of a successful policy is expanding water storage throughout the state, both above and below the earth’s surface, so that rainfall and snowmelt is preserved for future use, rather than draining into the Pacific Ocean or overflowing riverbanks.

 

6. At Modern Age, A.G. Gancarski spotlights Morrissey: pop-singer, controversialist, and cancelee. From the beginning of the piece:

The pop singer Morrissey made news on his just-wrapped American tour, but it wasn’t for the music so much as for speaking out about his outcast status.

 

“As you know, nobody will release my music anymore. As you know because I’m a chief exponent of free speech. In England at least, it’s now criminalized. You cannot speak freely in England. If you don’t believe me, go there. Express an opinion, you’ll be sent to prison. It’s very, very difficult,” Billboard reports.

 

Those who have followed Morrissey into this late stretch of his career know of his difficulties in getting a label—an unimaginable state of affairs four decades ago when his band The Smiths’ first album came out, featuring classics like “Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man.”

 

His last album, which came out four years ago after years of trouble getting it released, demonstrates how his ideological evolution has made him unmarketable in a world where pop stars do nothing more controversial than endorse Kamala Harris. But is the heart of Morrissey’s problem his political provocations, or does it lie elsewhere: in the music itself, or the dark realities of the pop music industry? The answer is all of the above.

 

7. At The Spectator, Sean Thomas makes the case for Eastern besting Western Europe. From the article:

The list of Eastern superiorities goes on. Thanks to their traumatic history, they are cautious about socialism and resistant to communism, which is handy if you don’t want your nation to go broke. The idea of a Corbyn arising in Croatia is laughable. Equally, because Eastern Europeans have so often seen their identities repressed or even erased, now that they’re finally and proudly free they are not about to yield to cultural cringe, vitiating guilt, or corrosive theories of “white privilege” (compare that with the polls showing a plunge in pride in the UK’s history). Eastern Europeans are basically patriotic in a way we have foolishly forsaken.

 

Even on the literal street level, Eastern Europeans evince more pride than Westerners: their cities, despite relative poverty, are often cleaner, with less graffiti, less trash, less of a sense of “Meh, whatever.” Krakow in Poland, for instance, is probably better kept than any city in Britain. Central Lviv, in western Ukraine, is possibly more spick and span than any town in Italy.

 

It is important not to overdo this point. Eastern Europe faces terrific problems. Depopulation and low birthrates haunt nations as diverse as Hungary, Poland and the Baltics (though as natives realize East is possibly best, those human flows might reverse). Crime may be relatively absent from the pavements, but corruption is rife in higher echelons. And then there’s Putin, stalking the frontier like some sociopathic Vlad Dracul with nukes. But Putin also knows he faces countries grimly determined to defend themselves, unlike the flabby, declining westerners.

 

8. At UnHerd, Mary Harrington analyzes Britain, where the Thought Police are out in force. From the piece:

In The Trial, published 1925, Kafka recounts the tale of Josef K., accused by a remote and impersonal authority of an unknown crime, whose nature neither Josef nor the reader ever discovers. Now, as we approach the centenary of its publication, in Britain The Trial reads less as dystopian fiction than a Telegraph headline.

 

On Remembrance Sunday, Essex Police visited the journalist Allison Pearson, to inform her that—in Pearson’s telling—she was the subject of a non-crime hate incident report. Allegedly this concerned something she posted on X a year ago, and subsequently deleted. But the police would not specify what. Nor would they disclose who had made the report. In a subsequent statement, it transpired that the “non-crime hate incident” was in fact a criminal investigation for “inciting racial hatred”. . . .

 

From America, if my most recent visit is anything to go by, Thought-Police Britain is now viewed as somewhere between a laughing-stock and tragic cautionary tale. For this is far from the first such incident. In 2021, Harry Miller took the police to court and won, for allegations of “transphobia” based on internet posts. Feminist writer Julie Bindel reports that she was visited by police for her tweets in 2019. And Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater was subjected to a 15-month “hate crime” investigation by Scotland Yard on the basis of a post, and that was only recently dropped. What these surreal incidents illustrate is the gap between bureaucratic promise and reality: one in which, the more impersonal the system, the more effectively it can be weaponised by those who understand it.

 

9. At The European Conservative, Rob Roos reports on global bureaucrats and their war against farmers. From the article:

The assault on farmers is not confined to Europe. Across the globe, agriculture is under siege. In the United States and Australia, water regulations are driving farmers to the brink. In Canada, fertilizer restrictions are crippling productivity. New Zealand targets methane emissions, while South American farmers face an onslaught of environmental and economic pressures. From a broader perspective, these trends suggest a coordinated effort to dismantle the traditional foundations of food production in Western societies.

 

Why is this happening, and who stands to benefit? These questions point to a deeply troubling agenda. History provides a grim warning. Stalin’s collectivization policies in the 1930s decimated the Ukrainian peasantry, leading to the Holodomor—a man-made famine that claimed millions of lives. Similarly, Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 1960s wreaked havoc on Chinese agriculture, causing widespread starvation. In both cases, the destruction of farmers paved the way for the consolidation of Communist power. The parallels with today’s assault on agriculture are chilling.

 

At the heart of this assault lies a globalist agenda spearheaded by the United Nations (UN). Cloaked in the rhetoric of sustainability and equality, the UN’s policies often serve the interests of unelected elites rather than the citizens they claim to represent. Through initiatives like Agenda 2030 and the woke climate agenda, the UN advances a vision of top-down control that sidelines national sovereignty and democratic accountability. The role of powerful NGOs, funded by wealthy philanthropists with vested financial interests, further illustrates how unelected actors dictate policy. These oligarchs, shielded by their philanthropic facades, wield immense influence over supranational organizations, bypassing the will of the people.

 

10. At Commentary, Seth Mandel smacks around an anti-Zionist organization that is . . . Jewish. From the article:

A new report on JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] from the pro-Israel group StandWithUs helpfully condenses the available information for anyone interested, but it ought to be required reading for media and politicians. Although JVP’s contribution to the global wave of anti-Semitism is by now well-known—JVP is proud of itself and presumably wants its donors to know they are getting a return on their investment—two trends are worth highlighting.

 

The first is that JVP has gotten more and more extreme over the years, to the point where—and this is important—its original founding mission statements and organizing principles are irrelevant. It is not “against the occupation,” it is against Israel’s existence. JVP made the change explicit in 2019, though it was always clear where their hearts were, even if they wouldn’t say it. In 2011, JVP’s deputy director Cecilie Surasky spoke to the New York Times about why her group was coming out in force to support the Egyptian protests during the Arab Spring, leading to an all-time-great sentence in Jewish history: “Ms. Surasky said she hoped a new political order in Egypt would help speed the end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which her group opposes.”

 

Ah yes, the Jews who pine for the Egyptians to liberate the region from the Jews. Some activists want to undo the events of 1948, but that’s child’s play to JVP, which wants to undo the events of the Book of Exodus.

 

11. At The Free Press, Reihan Salam shares what it is like to be a conservative resident of the Big Apple. From the article:

Unlike most of my neighbors in brownstone Brooklyn, though, I’m also a political conservative. To those of us on the ideological right, caring about cities—and choosing to live in them—has become something of an unconventional move.

 

The conservative caricature is that cities are for elitist libs, who sneer at the suburbs and rural areas while indulging in wild ideological experiments like defunding the police. There’s some truth to that, certainly when it comes to the urban political intelligentsia. These are people who root for Hamas the way normal New Yorkers root for the Yankees or Mets, and believe that the city’s destiny is to become a socialist utopia. If you found yourself, as I did, surrounded over the past five years by “In This House We Believe” signs, you, too, might want to run for your life.

 

But believe it or not, most New Yorkers are not tiresome, virtue-signaling ideologues. Most of us are strivers, immigrants, and friendly eccentrics who, like 42 percent of Americans, happen to prefer walkable neighborhoods over sprawling suburbs. This is the silent urban majority that just wants a city that works, and that is increasingly open to commonsense ideas, even from conservatives.

 

12. More TFP: Sasha Chapin explains how to like things. From the piece:

Find a Vocabulary: Talking about something you enjoy almost always enhances the enjoyment—especially if you talk about it well. On the other hand, if you don’t have any vocabulary to express your experience of a thing, then it lingers only as a blur of impressions. Having a better vocabulary to talk about what you like doesn’t just make you sound smart; it increases the resolution of your enthusiasm.

 

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys undirected study, simply browsing glossaries of terminology can help. The way the wind whistles through Thomas Hardy’s poems? That’s onomatopoeia. But a more approachable way to expand your vocabulary is to read a book by a respected critic about the material you already enjoy. Alan Pollack’s incredible Notes on. . . The Beatles were a revelation to me, as was the book Perfumes: The Guide, and On Food and Cooking.

 

I also highly recommend developing a few items of idiosyncratic personal critical vocabulary. I think of certain perfumes as “photocopier musks” (warm but industrial) and certain songs as “straight shots” (monotonously high energy). Certain people are “downward portals”: They pull you into their energy rather than broadcasting their identity. These phrases help me sort my experiences in ways that are internally meaningful even if nobody else would understand them.

 

Lucky 13. At Comment Magazine, Yana Jenay Conner discusses how forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. From the essay:

Here is my definition of forgiveness: Forgiveness is the committed decision of the offended to not retaliate against an offender and instead release them from receiving the just punishment their offence deserves. It’s the choice to acknowledge your offender’s wrong but, in mercy, not to harm them in return or to require restitution for the rupture their offence has caused to your overall sense of safety, security, and shalom. Reconciliation, on the other hand, has a different definition: Reconciliation is the committed decision of both the offended and the offender to do the hard work of restoring safety, security, and shalom to the relationship. It’s the two of them rolling up their sleeves, getting into the dirt of their relationship to uproot the weeds of distrust, shame, and distance, and sowing seeds of changed behaviour, vulnerability, and practices of trust.

 

Understanding this distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation is pivotal for anyone seeking to engage in the work of either of them. And let me be clear: it is work. It is not a feeling, and the work is not complete after you have uttered, privately or publicly, the words “I forgive.” This distinction also clarifies that forgiveness is the solo work of the offended, and reconciliation is the shared work of both the offended and their offender. You have the agency and ability to forgive someone apart from their confession or apology. You are free to release them from paying back what they owe you because of their sin against you. This is good news! You don’t have to wait for their apology or restitution to have your sense of safety, security, and shalom restored. Depending on the offence, even your offender’s best efforts couldn’t restore what was lost. Only God himself can “restore, establish, strengthen, and support” you and cause you to make a full recovery from the pain and fallout of the offence (1 Peter 5:10). You can abandon your inclination to retaliate and resolve your anger in the truth that “‘vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). You can set the offender free and leave them in hands that are more just than yours. Your ability to obey Jesus’s command to forgive so that you will be forgiven is not contingent or dependent on them (Matthew 6:14; Mark 11:25; Luke 6:37). Forgiveness is a work solely contingent and dependent on you and your obedience to Christ. Reconciliation is not.

 

Bonus. At Humanitas, Noël Valis tilts at no windmills while admiring how Cervantes resurrected that man from La Mancha to fashion a sequel. From the essay:

Cervantes’s own writing trajectory was also somewhat hit-or-miss. When Part I appeared, it had been twenty years since his last publication, and another eight years would pass before the Exemplary Novels came out. So, who knew if he was ever going to produce anything else? Evidently, that same thought occurred to an enterprising writer, the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, because he jumped on it and published his own sequel in 1614. This infuriated Cervantes, who was by this time busy composing a second part to the novel, disregarding the old maxim that “sequels were never any good” (482), as Sansón Carrasco remarks in Chapter IV of the continuation. It is widely believed that Cervantes learned of Avellaneda’s false Quixote in the middle of devising Chapter LIX (to which I will return), but it is just as likely that he came across it earlier and was simply plotting, in both senses of the word, how he was going to deal with the theft of his work.

 

Why dwell on these details of a rival sequel to Cervantes’ masterpiece? Because the whole idea of a second part, like second acts in life, is crucial to the conception, development, and meaning of Don Quixote. The sequel does not simply follow in the footsteps of Part I, but enriches, deepens, and interacts with it, creating yet another narrative layer to the already intricate storytelling of the first volume. Part II is both a continuation and a reflection of and on Part I, but it is also Don Quixote’s comeback, in his knightly quest for fame. Indeed, the second part transforms Cervantes’ protagonist into a celebrity by harking back to the adventures of the first volume and, later, responding to Avellaneda’s version of things. Along parallel lines, Don Quixote’s originality as a character, demonstrated (and parodied) in his exploits, allows Cervantes to illustrate the originality of the book itself.

 

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Frank Filocomo contemplates whether social-media apps can bolster civil society. Read it here.

Due. More PD: Patrice Onwuka explains why America is moving away from DEI. Read it here.

Tre. The Center for Civil Society hosts its important “In the Trenches” Master Class on Strategic Planning this January 30th, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern, via Zoom). Nonprofit leaders who are contemplating the need for, and the benefit of, having an actionable strategic plan would be well advised to attend. Get more information right here.

 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Why was George Washington buried standing up?

A: Because he never lied.

 

A Dios

The readings last Sunday included this, from Psalm 104: “You have constructed your palace upon the waters. You made the clouds Your chariot; You travel on the wings of the wind. You make the winds Your messengers, and flaming fire Your ministers.” Timely.

 

May Travails Burnish Our Souls,

Jack Fowler, who shakes his head at the madness from the safe precincts of jfowler@amphil.com.