Maggie's Farm

There have always been elements of ironic comedy about the spectacle of Marxist academics fervently proclaiming their revolutionary message while safely ensconced in Western institutions of higher education.

Roger Kimball, in Was Jesus Christ a Palestinian Insurgent? He goes on:

As the years have passed and another generation of young radicals has settled into middle age, tenure, and pension calculations, one might have hoped that these freethinkers would have had manners enough to mute their demands for the destruction of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, “the repressive state apparatus of late capitalism,” etc. After all, blue jeans or no blue jeans, what these middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism have unwittingly been clamoring for is nothing less than their own destruction.

It is the time of year to focus on helping, remembering, and praying for the poor and the poor in spirit.

Hard Times

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay.
There are frail forms fainting at the door.
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

There's pale drooping maiden who toils her life away
With a worn out heart, whose better days are o'er.
Though her voice it would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

Editor - Here's an excellent performance of the song by Bob Dylan:

From No Left Turns, a quote:

The Journals of the late Arthur Schlesinger have received a good deal of attention, but most of it has concerned Schlesinger’s writing style, personality, or the broad topic of keeping and publishing diaries. The strangely neglected question of Schlesinger’s politics is finally addressed by the New Yorker’s George Packer, writing as one liberal assessing another. “In [Schlesinger’s] long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s,” observes Packer, “there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. . . . It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession [of it] ever since Roosevelt.”

Read the whole brief piece.

...the conflation of democracy with liberty is fallacious but I realise that we have quite a bit of work to do at the axiomatic level to bring that once obvious and widely accepted fact back into the broader intellectual meta-context. The notion that "our democracy depends on individual freedom" strongly implies that freedom should or does serve democracy. I would argue that democracy is not an end in and of itself at all but at best merely a tool by which freedom is pursued by mitigating the power of the state.

Samizdata, on The Ideological Divide

Here. h/t, Don Luskin

My favorite:

"An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well." -- Lead sentence to a May 2 front-page story by sportswriter Alan Schwarz about an academic paper alleging discrimination in foul calls against black NBA players.

From Borowitz:

December 17, 2007.
Clinton Says Being Married to Hillary 'Has Never Influenced My Behavior;' Former President Defends Role as Campaign Spokesman
Addressing questions about his objectivity as a campaigner for his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former President Bill Clinton said today that being married to Sen. Clinton "has never influenced my behavior in the least little bit."

During an interview on PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show," the former president said that those who accuse him of favoritism towards his wife "have got it all wrong, because, you know, Charlie, I've pretty much lived my entire life as if I wasn't married to her at all."

Mr. Clinton added that in order to demonstrate his objectivity about Sen. Clinton's qualifications, he would remove his wedding ring and keep it off for the duration of the campaign.

"As far as I'm concerned, from this day on I'm single," the former president said.

During the free-wheeling one-hour chat, aides to Mr. Clinton gathered in the studio control room and frantically attempted to induce the engineers to cut short the interview, with one aide trying to pull a cable out of its socket in the hopes that it would plunge the studio into darkness.

But their efforts were in vain as the former president continued his unbridled monologue, at one point touching on the similarities between a president and a prostitute.

"Being a president is a lot like being a thousand-dollar-a-night call girl, Charlie," he said.  "Experience matters."

Putin.

Which is the greater lost cause: Russia or Time Magazine? 

Authoritarian-oriented Russia always loves The Man With The Whip. But why Time?

We never signed Kyoto, but we did better than all of them. Insty. Not that it matters to me at all. I believe that it's all baloney.

Speaking of which, what is Surface Air Temperature anyway? I thought only the tropospheric temp mattered.

Meanwhile, Germany pitches a fit about controlling emissions of their cars. Maybe they didn't think this stuff applied to them. Hey, why doesn't Mercedes just make a Peel P50: