Tuesday Short Cuts
Harvard’s Joyce E. Chaplin says America was “created by the international community.” Some students shell out $63,000/year for this hubris.
Insight: “Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: ‘Things must change — no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.’ Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. … Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.” —Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Non Compos Mentis, part I: “The USA, created by int'l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int'l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement.” —Harvard professor Joyce E. Chaplin
Non Compos Mentis, part II: “James Comey Is The Sex Symbol America Needs Right Now.” —The Daily Beast’s Lizzie Crocker
Dezinformatsiya: “The Washington Post’s one-year retrospective of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting omitted any mention of shooter Omar Mateen’s motives and ideology. … Despite the Post’s piece clocking in at over a thousand words, the words ‘terrorism,’ ‘terror,’ ‘ISIS,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘Muslim,’ and ‘al-Baghdadi’ never appeared once. The sole reference to ‘Islamic State’ occurs in a photo caption, and never in the body of the piece.” —The Washington Free Beacon
Alpha Jackass: “If you’re in NYC, go see Julius Caesar, free in Central Park, brilliantly interpreted for Trump era. A masterpiece.” —Fareed Zakaria (Trump is assassinated in the play.)
Grasping for votes: “I hope Congress and the administration will listen to [the voters] and enable Puerto Rico to become the fifty-first state. Its people — already American citizens — deserve full and equal representation in the Congress and equal treatment by federal agencies.” —Steny Hoyer
And last… “It’s an incredible privilege to lead the men and women who are providing intelligence so that we can do the national security mission, and in the finest tradition of the CIA, I’m not going to say a damn thing in front of the media.” —CIA Director Mike Pompeo