Weigel takes to the pages of First Things and informs us that the United States has arrived at its sorry state because we have paid insufficient heed to Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: For Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde diagnosed a primary cause of our current distress over half a century ago.  Böckenförde was a German constitutional law scholar whose “dictum” is familiar to, if often ignored by, political scientists: “The liberal secularized state lives on conditions that it cannot guarantee itself.” Put another way, the liberal institutions of a modern democracy—free speech, a free press, freedom of association, universal adult suffrage, majority rule and protection of minority rights, religious freedom, and so forth—rely for their credibility, and their tensile strength under pressure, on cultural foundations Read More ›

Yes, it’s real: And if this is being “mainstreamed” at Sandia National Labs, it’s going to be all but pervasive in Government and in the sort of corporations that typically get government contracts. Across today, DV, I intend to put up screen shots from his presentation, as points to ponder. As a start, clip 1: Clip 2: Clip 3: Petersen’s caveats: Let me add, on HR etc vs surveys of actual black Americans: Similarly, though there is a general violence problem in the US and such is echoed in policing, US DoJ figures as cited give a picture different from the narrative (especially if we recognise that, sadly African American youth are heavily over-represented in violent crimes, as perpetrators and Read More ›