Week in Review
City Council, Monday, December 18
City Hall Carpet Bid Award
The Council deliberated on whether City Hall’s wrinkled carpets are to be replaced by Willowbrook Interiors’ antimicrobial carpet tiles for $21,000.
Paladino thought that the carpets were good enough considering the city’s other financial shortcomings: “We need to send this money to some other priorities in the city. We voted down the assessing vehicle, which actually might be more essential to the city’s functions. I think we have to consider any money from the general fund as fungible, so any year that we are collecting special assessments, we need to consider the expenditures under that framework. Would we collect a special assessment to replace the carpet? I hope the answer to that would be No, so I think we should pass on this.”
Jason, the facilities manager for the city, appealed to the goddess Safety: “There’s a lot of trip hazards in this room here. . .”
Vear also worried about the impending disaster of old carpet: “I’m thinking from the standpoint of a safety hazard, a tripping hazard. . . I would be in support of changing the carpet.”
The carpet bid passed 6-2, with Stockford and Paladino against, all others for.
EcoSmart Energy Choice Program
Under this proposed state-sponsored program, our paragons of virtue—both businesses and individuals alike—would be able to display their smartness by selecting what percentage of their electricity is from “green” sources.
Mackie dropped all pretense of impartiality: “It is something that Coldwater uses. . . Typically it’s used by your larger businesses, and this provides the solution to answer their desires.”
Sharp: “I’d like to give people options. If they want to do it, go do it.”
Socha offered his vote, but not his approval: “I just want to express my disgust that this is even offered. The timing of it is right in line with Governor Whitmer’s horrific legislation that she just passed. . . This is another force-feeding agenda and trying to get the city to promote alternative energy sources so that Michigan can go down the path of the other liberal states. . . I feel that if we on the council opposed these things, then there would be negative [consequences] in the future, and that’s already been suggested to me by a private individual.”1
Stockford remarked that the city should not be involving itself in such things: “I don’t want to have any part in feeding the monkey, whether that’s planting the tree or picking the bananas or peeling them and throwing them in the cage.”
The city administrator when asked by Paladino what the “blended renewable product,” that is, “green energy,” contains: “It could be coming from hydroelectric generation in Kentucky or a wind generator in Pennsylvania or or a solar field in Michigan. It could be coming from anywhere.”
The EcoSmart program is coming soon to Hillsdale by way of a Vear, Wolfram, Morrisey, Sharp, and Socha majority. Paladino, Stockford, and Stuchell opposed.
Stockford Running for State Rep.
With Rep. Andrew Fink turning his attention to Michigan’s Supreme Court, Hillsdale Mayor Adam Stockford has declared his candidacy for the soon-to-be-vacant state representative seat.
Upcoming Events
County Board of Commissioners, Tuesday, December 26.
External Links
“We are about to close on a ~70,000 square foot building which is located on the edge of downtown Hillsdale. This building formerly operated as a flour mill but it was closed down in the 90s. Today, it sits at the edge of downtown and casts a gloomy pall over the city. Restoring this building and placing a traditional trade school in it will be the core of Hillsdale’s renaissance narrative.” Luke Robson.
“As regards Hillsdale, I think the traditional curriculum here, with its emphasis on great books and primary material, brings to light elements of the Catholic intellectual tradition that prompts some students to stop and think about the ultimate questions of faith.” Professor David Whalen was asked why so many Hillsdale students convert to Catholicism.2
“Federal judges have declared 13 of Michigan's House and Senate districts unconstitutional and ordered them redrawn, overturning a key portion of the maps drawn in 2021 by Michigan’s inaugural Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission.” Detroit News.
“The Idaho Public Charter School Commission approved the state’s third Hillsdale-affiliated classical school last week as enrollment in charter schools booms nationwide.” Via The Lion.
“That’s a primary challenge that we’re facing that, again, we’ve not really been facing to this magnitude in the past.” Chad Steward, deer & elk biologist/manager at the DNR, on the aging of the hunting population in Michigan.
“A big part of the growth of pickleball is the socializing and multi-generational inclusivity of the game. It’s not so physically taxing that older players can’t participate, and the rules are simple enough that children can play as well.” Why freeze to death in a blind when you can spend two hours playing a “sport” in which youth offers no advantage?
“The most serious political question before us is whether we, as Americans, want our nation to survive. Is it even moral for us to preserve a nation that once had slavery and segregation? At core, all of our real political debates today boil down to how one answers that question.” Josiah Lippincott, writing at American Greatness.
“Having more loyalists in place would allow Trump to advance his foreign policy priorities faster and more efficiently than he was able to when previously in office, the current and former aides said.” According to four (!) Reuters reporters, NATO diplomats are sending frenzied “cables” back home in which they contemplate the horror of a slightly-more-competent President Trump.3
“We conclude that because President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Secretary to list President Trump as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.” The Colorado Supreme Court.4
“One of the persistent debates in American life centers on how strictly we should judge the sins of our national past. Were those people who owned slaves or broke faith with Native Americans or passed the Chinese Exclusion Act merely products of their time? MAGA Men and MAGA Women will not have that excuse. They know there is a different way.” A typically measured David French, writing in the New York Times.
“It is inconceivable that a scholar such as yourself, who has witnessed all this at close range, cannot see that further calls for free speech and independence of mind are wildly inadequate to these circumstances.” Yoram Hazony rebukes Robert P. George for his “more speech” response to DEI-abetted anti-Semitism.
“Instead of inventing new red herring fields, academics do have the option of actually fighting such brute misinformation in an efficient way. And that is by enhancing trust in our knowledge-generating institutions (academia & media) among the general public.” Ruxandra Teslo marks a useful distinction between “Brute Misinformation” and “Haute Bourgeois Propaganda.”
“From an early age, children now bathe in a sea of psychology that alienates them and undermines their sense of agency. . . . the overall effect of psychologization is to induct them early into the idea that their problems have a technical solution, and that they are vulnerable and may well have been the victim of something external that explains their difficulties—and thereby that either minimizes or excuses their own contribution to these difficulties. Parents are often too willing to accept this because they believe it of themselves: we are now several generations into the reign of psychology as explanatory sovereign.” Theodore Dalrymple, writing at City Journal.
“I argue that because the central question before the courts is whether medicalization of minor transition is medically necessary or justifiable, it is unreasonable to limit testimony to clinicians who themselves practice or otherwise endorse medicalizing minor transition . . . would make it impossible for courts to hear or take seriously testimony from experts who raise scientifically-founded concerns about the necessity and efficacy of medicalizing minor transition . . . there is no scientific consensus on the state of the evidence underlying medicalized gender transition.” Moti Gorin draws attention to the trans lobby’s attempt to determine who can qualify as an expert witness in cases dealing with “the medicalized gender transition of youth.”
“Nichols’s treatment also serves as a useful corrective to the widespread misapprehension of Aristotle, associated particularly with Hannah Arendt, that we most fully realize our human potential via participation in political life.” David Polansky reviews Mary Nichols’ Aristotle’s Recovery of the Human.
“It is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage.” Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernandez, Prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, practices “dynamic discernment”5 of the sort that will get you noticed by self-aware Protestants at Hillsdale.
“Freedom has an origin. There can be no freedom if there is no God at the origin of all things, no God who is at once Creator and Liberator of the world, who is free of his very being, whose nature it is to be both free and freeing. To be both free and freeing, this God must be able to give rise to a world that has its own reality in itself, its own principle of self-originating self-motion, which exists in some fundamental way in itself and from itself. This God must not, then, stand in radical competition with this creaturely reality but must be able to share its reality himself, which is to say to enter into its history and to establish that history tout court, giving a liberating, theological sanction to what is in its essence a wholly natural reality . . . If such a God is in fact the real origin of freedom, then the fate of freedom will be bound up with the fate of the self-revelation of this God in the actuality of created nature and of history.” Is D. C. Schindler an historicist?
Private individuals take note!
We hesitate to share this article because we’d prefer that Team Francis ignores Hillsdale altogether.
Who, by the way, shows no signs of making an appearance.
Steve Sailer: “Republican voters have reacted to these Democratic interferences in the democratic process with outrage and loyalty to Trump, the one Republican most likely to lose to Biden, propelling the old man to a huge lead over the field. The Democrats are having the last laugh as they manage to rig the Republican nomination process . . .”
In the good old days of Amoris Laetitia (2016) it was still possible to believe that the “dynamic discernment” articulated in §303 of that document would extend no further than the constellation of innovations around a penumbral core of allegedly “implicit” magisterial teachings. (See, in particular, Cardinal Hollerich’s claim that “the way the pope has expressed himself in the past can lead to a change in doctrine,” as well as Fr. Spadaro’s claims regarding the “conditional” character of the teaching of JPII and BXVI.) With Tucho at the helm, the DDF (which, unlike the antiquated CDF of 2021, now “reflects [Pope Francis’] mind”) issues tendentious magisterial work in which the implicit or conditional teaching—aided and abetted by a Strange New Respect for “popular piety”—is newly conscious of itself and desirous of making its power known. We can only admire a document that piously repeats a rigorist distinction between “strictly liturgical” and pastoral frameworks while encouraging priests (like James Martin and Daniel P. Horan) to “shy away from resting its pastoral praxis on the fixed nature of certain doctrinal or disciplinary schemes.” Just read serenely! See also Dan Hitchens on the unearned self-importance of Fernandez’s style, Cardinal Müller on his successor’s blasphemous participation in a false and fashionable anthropology, and Archbishop Chaput.