Barack Obama has unveiled plans for his presidential library and museum on the south side of Chicago. According to an Obama aide, the presidential library will have a children s play garden, sledding hill, green spaces for picnics and outdoor gatherings, basketball courts, and a recording studio. What the library will not have are any books or documents. Is there a more apt metaphor for the Obama presidency? We will explain Barack Obama s empty library and legacy, and then the mailbag.
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00:04:06.540There won't be any learning going on, by the way, at the Barack Obama Presidential Library because there aren't any books.
00:04:11.640Martin Nesbitt, the chairman of the Obama Foundation, explained,
00:04:14.800The Obama Presidential Center will be a global community center, a place of life and vibrancy that showcases the South Side to the world.
00:04:24.100So there's a basketball, possibly a yoga room, test kitchen to teach visitors about the, quote, full production cycle of nutritious food.
00:04:30.980There's a recording studio and auditorium, a sports facility, a 235-foot-tall tower for some reason, something, I don't know what they do in there,
00:04:39.700$350 million to build 22 acres of land.
00:04:42.300And the only thing it won't have are books or documents.
00:04:50.360I am so old that I actually remember when libraries contained books and documents.
00:04:55.600Now, presumably, there will be computers at this library or iPads or something so they can at least Google some of the terrible things that Barack Obama did.
00:05:03.620But if the lights go out, that means that the Obama Library will be identical to the Obama legacy.
00:05:10.480And perhaps that's really the brilliant artistic engineering here, form and content in perfect harmony.
00:05:16.800The Obama Library marks the decline of our politics and culture, just like the Obama administration showed the decline of our politics and culture.
00:05:23.840Even the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown newspaper, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, ran a headline asking,
00:05:31.260without archives on site, how will Obama Center benefit area students and scholars?
00:05:36.640The foundation's CEO, David Simas, explained.
00:05:39.920This is going to be completely different.
00:05:41.300What the president and first lady said is they simply did not want a museum that served as a mausoleum, a way to look back.
00:05:48.620This is typical Obama, typical Obama-ness, arrogant and ambitious enough to want constant change, constant activism,
00:05:57.540turning presidential campaigns into a permanent campaign, fundamentally transforming America.
00:06:03.240But it's completely ignorant of history, philosophy, culture, disdainful of the past, of the present, and of tradition itself.
00:06:10.700Obama's papers, by the way, are currently stored in a private facility in the city and suburbs of, not Chicago, Washington, D.C.
00:06:17.940They sent them all to Chicago, spent a lot of money doing it, and they said,
00:06:20.880no, we actually don't want them at this fake library, so they go right back to D.C.
00:06:24.200This gets perfectly to my theory of the left.
00:06:26.560The left always wants the appearance of the thing, but without the essence of the thing,
00:06:31.540like decaffeinated coffee, or they want hashtag activism.
00:06:35.120So they'll wear lapel pins to the Golden Globes and dress in black, but they won't stop raping people.
00:06:39.880Even their resistance movements are lazy and hollow.
00:06:43.100Do you remember, they didn't march or protest or even really petition anything after the financial crisis.
00:16:39.240So this means Media Matters or some other leftist group that is advising Google has put up flags even on tenured professors whose statistical research it deems dangerous.
00:16:52.800James Damore, the guy who wrote that Google memo, he alleges that Google managers would blacklist conservatives and even propose trials for people who hold conservative views.
00:17:03.020Now, Google has a virtual monopoly on information on the Internet.
00:17:05.900Prager University is already suing them for discrimination.
00:17:09.760Conservatives should consider a united front.
00:17:11.980It is really getting pretty oppressive out there.
00:21:24.160Another thing you can do is constantly innovate.
00:21:26.120So just a short story, I was on a congressional campaign when I was 18 or 19, and it was a challenger race against a Democrat incumbent.
00:21:34.280The incumbent, his name is John Hall, and he had been in the rock band Orleans in the 70s.
00:21:39.900They're the guys who did, like, still the one that do-do-do, and they did dance with me.
00:21:44.880I want to be your partner, can't you see?
00:21:46.720So I decided, as a lowly staffer on this campaign, we would start the Young Voters for an Orleans reunion tour to get John Hall back on stage and out of Congress.
00:24:06.740I was convinced of that by a few things, some by arguments, the arguments for the existence of God, some by writing, apologetic writing, like C.S. Lewis and like Chesterton and others.
00:24:18.380And then there is the numinous experience.
00:24:20.660You do have the experience of the world.
00:24:22.520I remember once, I didn't remember this until just now, I was smoking a cigar and looking out at some plants in my yard that I was, I don't know, a teenager.
00:24:31.120And I thought something clicked into my mind that pure rationalism, that my ideological view of the world and my atheistic view, it didn't explain these things.
00:24:42.100It didn't explain my experience of the world as I knew it to be.
00:24:45.340So that's a little bit more of the religious or spiritual or numinous experience that you would have.
00:26:37.640She's been asking me many questions about the many different things that are important to the Catholic faith.
00:26:42.940Like why the Virgin Mary is so important and why priests are able to forgive sins.
00:26:48.420I have a very basic understanding of why these are, but I want to learn more.
00:26:52.480Do you have any books that you would recommend reading so that a simpleton like me can get a deeper understanding of topics like these so I can answer my girlfriend's questions better?
00:27:02.340Thanks for all that you do, you handsome Italian.
00:27:41.280And then I recommend also reading as much as you can of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, some of the church fathers in that patristic era.
00:27:50.100And you'll see, you know, a lot of people just start reading things that were written after the Protestant Revolution.
00:27:55.200So they learn a lot of things that aren't exactly so, and they're responding to arguments from only one particular time.
00:28:02.680I think the church fathers are presaging.
00:28:06.580They're seeing in advance some of the arguments that will come up that we see in modernity,
00:28:12.720and they'll explain to you why practices and rituals and theology has developed as it has.
00:28:18.200So the easy answer is Catholic Answers, and the probably more edifying one in the long run is that patristic era in Augustine and later Aquinas.
00:29:36.560I mean, it's Christian throughout, beginning, middle, and end.
00:29:38.440The protagonist's name is a reference to Christ.
00:29:41.240But for those people who think that Christianity is just good manners and being polite and listening to some of that god-awful acoustic guitar music that they play at modern churches,
00:31:03.140Our Lord lived in reality, and he dealt in reality, and he dealt with the woman at the well, and he dealt with prostitutes, and he called tax collectors.
00:31:13.240You've got to deal in that reality, and I hope some Philistines get on board with it.
00:31:17.740But, hey, we can just keep making the art, and, you know, another kingdom has done very well.
00:31:22.280We're having trouble in Hollywood, not among the popular audience.
00:31:25.140So I think maybe the culture is changing a bit away from that sentimentalism.
00:31:34.240We recently watched a movie called Eyes Wide Shut, hedging our bets that Kubrick might be worth watching.
00:31:39.420Turns out it's about a wealthy men's sex cult.
00:31:41.860The next day, I serendipitously came across an article from Vanity Fair called,
00:31:46.000Oh, my God, this is so effed up, Inside Silicon Valley's Secretive Orgiastic Dark Side, which details popular sex and drug-fueled parties that wealthy tech founders host.
00:31:57.300The author, on feminist moral, not moral grounds, denounces the orgies, but the male participants claim this is another great way in which their great minds challenge convention, and it makes up for their late entry into sex life.
00:32:09.660So there's a lot on YouTube about polyamory, what do you say of the future of this undercurrent in society, and of monogamous marriage?
00:32:20.120I mean, these things always come up, especially in decadent cultures like ours, cultures where the moral strictures go away, but they've always existed.
00:32:28.080There was plenty of weird sex in the Victorian era, and certainly on college campuses, that's always been the case.
00:32:34.480Lord, make me chaste, but not yet, is an ancient maxim.
00:32:39.820What I would say, though, having been out here in la-la land, in the heart of darkness, I have noticed this.
00:32:45.780I know a lot of people who have open relationships, open marriages, polyamory, and they cheat on their girlfriend, and the girlfriend cheats on them, whatever.
00:32:53.860However, I've never met anyone who does that who's happy.
00:32:57.380I've never met anyone who does that who's fulfilled or pleased.
00:33:00.540It seems like you would be, until people get sex-austed.
00:33:08.460Meaningless, trivial sex with a bunch of random people isn't fulfilling in the long run.
00:33:14.360So as a matter of culture, it will ebb and flow, and you'll get some of that.
00:33:18.340I think smart people will realize it's not good in the long term and not fulfilling to them.
00:33:22.520But that will always be around, and hopefully we can hope for them and pray for them and try to teach them, people who do that, that it isn't good.
00:33:33.120It just doesn't turn out well, so maybe to avoid it.
00:33:40.720My name is Bill, and I'm a young practicing Catholic.
00:33:43.320However, my girlfriend of two years is a practicing Mormon.
00:33:46.240I get a lot of different comments on whether or not our marriage will work in the future, but I personally feel like it won't be an issue.
00:33:52.520With the exception of the question of what to raise our children, if we have any, we really have had a good and healthy relationship and openly discuss our differences in belief.
00:34:00.760What I'd like to know is, do you think that a marriage can be successful if the two individuals have a strong faith in two different religions?
00:34:22.980I have friends who have converted from religions, who have converted from Mormonism, actually, or friends who have become atheists, or people who have gone out of being an atheist.
00:34:30.380I was sort of an atheist for a long time.
00:34:32.640So I wouldn't worry about that, except for the kids, except for the raising of kids.
00:34:37.320That issue is going to be probably intractable.
00:34:40.680And you don't want to confuse the kids and have them one day think one thing and then be told that the opposite is true.
00:34:46.480And, you know, this parent is going to go to hell or this parent is going to go to hell.
00:34:50.620You really should decide with the children first.
00:35:13.720I don't think you need to dump one another, but you should solve that problem because it would be a real shame to get into the situation and say, we'll work it out later.
00:35:22.480And then you get to the most important aspect of marriage, the creation of family, and you fight and you have to break up or something.
00:35:35.040Dear Archbishop Thomas Michael Knowles,
00:35:37.360I have been giving a lot of consideration to the Catholic faith and already, to some degree, consider myself a small c Catholic.
00:35:45.240So your argument about God creating a particular church with a particular clergy resonated with me.
00:35:50.500But I have also heard the opposite side argued well from members of my evangelical family.
00:35:56.020They say that God's particular people was Israel and that the church is described by way of contrast as universal.
00:36:02.340Jesus, the particular man, fulfilled the messianic prophecies to Israel, whereas Christ, the universal logos of the universe, is head of the church.
00:36:11.660They quote two, I'm like Donald Trump.
00:36:44.160For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
00:36:51.980For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.
00:36:55.960If indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked, we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
00:37:03.420For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
00:37:11.480From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.
00:37:14.640Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.
00:37:20.620We regard no one according to the flesh because Christ's conquest of death gives us the hope of eternal life, of being eternal beings.
00:37:27.660But that does not mean Christ can be abstracted from his incarnation.
00:37:32.120This is the temptation of rationalism.
00:37:34.680It's a political temptation, it's a philosophical temptation, and a religious one.