Maggie's Farm

That principle even applies to progressive types too. Some examples:

- People demand that their own kids go to school every day and learn things.
- People demand that their kids work and become independent
- People force themselves to conserve assets and not to be reckless
- People do not welcome strangers into their homes
- People demand that their families be law-abiding and respectful
- People demand perfect behavior, appropriate dress, and positive achievements of their kids

I guess I could go on and on, but it's interesting how our conservative, bourgeois expectations can dissipate the further people are from us. 

"How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of millions of dollars on the campuses of American universities?”

Thomas Merton, “The Seven Story Mountain” (via We Are the Barbarians Living in the Ruins of a Superior Civilization

Fake image via Powerline 

Instapundit has this meme: "If you consider reporters as Democrat operatives with bylines, a lot of things make sense."

Has it become a new normal that "journalists" have come to view themselves as advocates rather than as reporters? In some ways, Trump has removed the veil.  I recall how the press protected Obama and Hillary from all of their errors and misdoings, while anything Trump does is wrong. 

Maybe you can say that "journalists" see their role as "to make the world better" - by shaping opinion to fit their own. That is fake news, not reporting. Historically, we view it as propaganda.

The arrogance is mind-boggling. My suspicion is that journalists suffer from inferiority feelings because their role is essentially to be observers of things rather than actors, but if you can see yourself on a noble mission to fix the world in your own image, you can feel heroic instead of passive. You not only have the power to frame reality - you have the power to shape it. Bringing down a President would be a great coup.

Trump's public life will never be free of a Russia taint regardless of reality.

 Journalism Dies In Self-Importance

 Taibbi: As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin

Given that “collusion” has turned out to be dry well, to the ordinary viewer it will look a hell of lot like the MSNBCs of the world humped a fake story for two consecutive years in the hopes of overturning election results ahead of time. Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that “elites” don’t respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It’s hard to imagine what could look worse.

For the commercial press to recapture any dignity after this collusion debacle, it has to at least start admitting to its role in artificially raising expectations in the last two years. It’s hard to imagine them doing that, however. This story has been so enormously profitable for cable stations, in particular, it will be hard for them to let go of this narrative. What are they going to do, go back to just reporting the news? One can almost feel how depressed network executives must be at the thought. They’ve trained audiences to expect bombshells. What will they sell now?

An answer, from The Week:

 This is not a great moment for Trump's critics. We can see that he is a bad president and to watch his defenders proclaim him exonerated is frustrating and troubling. The work to hold this president accountable for his behavior isn't ending, though. Someday — sooner or later — the truth will at long last catch up to Trump. That too might be a painful moment. In the meantime, those who pursue that truth should keep working — and never apologize.

Glenn Greenwald re MSNBC:

“Intercept” co-founder Glenn Greenwald said that MSNBC deliberately lied to its viewers about the credibility of the charges that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to influence the 2016 election, claiming he and other left-wing journalists were banned from appearing on MSNBC due to their skepticism on the issue.

Talking to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Greenwald said that MSNBC “should have their top host on primetime go before the cameras and hang their head in shame and apologize for lying to people for three straight years, exploiting their fears to great profit. These are people who were on the verge of losing their jobs. The whole network was about to collapse. This whole scam saved them. Not only did they constantly feed people for three straight years total disinformation, they did it on purpose.”

Greenwald explained that “There was a whole slew, not just me, of left-wing journalists with very high journalistic credentials, far more than anyone on that network, like Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill and many others… who were banned from the network because they wanted their audience not to know that anybody was questioning or expressing skepticism about the lies and the scam they were selling because it was so profitable.”

Amherst College Releases 'Common Language Document'.

Laugh or cry? 

 “Kids are the best. You can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they practically raise themselves, what with the Internet and all.”

- Homer Simpson, via On Great Art 

The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself profit, or advantage, nor harm, but from externals.

The condition of a philosopher is this: he expects all advantage and all harm from himself. The signs of one who is making progress are these: he censures no man, he praises no man, he says nothing about himself as if he were somebody or knew something. When he is impeded or hindered, he blames himself. If a man praises him he ridicules the praiser to himself and if a man censures him, he makes no defence. He removes desires from himself, and transfers aversion to those things which are contrary to nature. He employs a moderate attitude towards everything; whether he is considered fooling or ignorant he cares not.  

In a word, he watches himself as if he were an enemy and lying in an ambush.

- Marcus Aurelius, The Enchiridion 

- "We need the strength of a diverse community in order to pursue the English department’s larger mission: to direct the force of language toward large and small acts of learning, alliance, imagination and justice.”

- "Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots."

At New Criterion: 

Well, this year, (Mrs.) Zuckerberg noted, the magazine would aim to make sure that “at least [at least] 70 percent of our contributors be women and 20 percent of our writers be poc,” i.e., “people of color,” i.e., not white. (But isn’t race merely a “social construction”? No, silly, that was last year.) And just how are those percentages going to be achieved? Well, going forward, Eidolon will ask people pitching stories for “demographics,” i.e., are you black or white? Male or female? “I have no interest,” Zuckerberg sermonized, “in providing bland and false reassurances that we only care about good ideas and good writing and not who our authors are.” Who would doubt it? And what about merit? “[A]ppeals to merit,” she said, are “often . . . white supremacist dog-whistles.” So: “If you’re white and we publish you, you will know, for maybe the first time in your career, that it was because of the merit of your idea and not because you’re white.”

We’d like to know if there are any cases of anyone anywhere being published in a classics journal because he (or even she) was white. Still, Zuckerberg’s destruction of Eidolon as a serious journal does raise an interesting question about the level of masochism among white classicists, especially white male classicists. Why would anyone of that description who was not a masochist submit work to a journal that is self-confessedly hostile to them? Indeed, why would anyone not a masochist read it?

The Drive to Tame the ‘Administrative State’.

Good luck. It's too big to fail. 

David Frum considers immigration in all of its forms: We need to make hard decisions now about what will truly benefit current and future Americans.

(Why he mentions fascists is unclear to me. Maybe he means racists? That was stupid because it is a thoughtful essay. Or is Trump a fascist? A fascist is a socialist.) 

A 5-minute video discussion

DST vs. Standard Time

First flight by a President (in this case, ex-president), 1910

Prof. Peterson nails it at the Oxford Union. There is really nothing more to be said on the topic. As he sagely observes, there are few "solutions" in life - just trade-offs.