— Paul Johnson, born in 1928
Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
— Jacques Barzun, who died in 2012
An underground world of Soviet opulence BBC
— OUCH: Why are leftists so hatefully insensitive to women
The New York Times: “When Donald Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. The Times examined how, in the years since, he has fully integrated the social media platform into the very fabric of his administration…Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president’s Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Mr. Trump’s messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Mr. Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and pre-empt his staff. “He needs to tweet like we need to eat,” Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview…”
- See also via The New York Times – In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies – “We look inside the alternate reality of the president’s Twitter account, where he absorbs and amplifies a noxious stream of disinformation” and What Happens When Ordinary People End Up in Trump’s Tweets – “From an audience of 11 followers to 66 million: the chaos and the compliment of getting a signal boost from @realdonaldtrump.”
MY HOUSE IS A WRECK: In their justly famous article, “Broken Windows,” George Kelling and James Q. Wilson put forward the theory that disorder invites crime. When people see a disorder around them—broken windows, graffiti, trash, loitering, etc.—they act as if they have been given permission to engage in petty and not-so-petty crime. Communities that fix broken windows, clean up graffiti and trash, and discourage loitering will thus prevent crime.
MakeUseOf: “Having a record of everything you’ve searched on Google can be useful if you want to return to something you looked up earlier. But you might wish to clear recent searches for privacy or reduce the amount of data Google has about you…”
LawFare:”What is “executive privilege”? In the specific context of information disputes between the executive branch and Congress, the Supreme Court has never addressed—let alone answered—that question. Nevertheless, as the Trump administration repeatedly relies on that constitutional doctrine to reject demands for information and testimony, the question has been at the forefront of a spate of journalism and legal commentary. Almost every blog, newspaper and magazine has, at some point in the past year, published an “explainer” on executive privilege and its related doctrines or provided some descriptive account of the history of the doctrine. I have contributed several such pieces to Lawfare, and others have done the same.
MakeUseOf: “Having a record of everything you’ve searched on Google can be useful if you want to return to something you looked up earlier. But you might wish to clear recent searches for privacy or reduce the amount of data Google has about you…”
LawFare:”What is “executive privilege”? In the specific context of information disputes between the executive branch and Congress, the Supreme Court has never addressed—let alone answered—that question. Nevertheless, as the Trump administration repeatedly relies on that constitutional doctrine to reject demands for information and testimony, the question has been at the forefront of a spate of journalism and legal commentary. Almost every blog, newspaper and magazine has, at some point in the past year, published an “explainer” on executive privilege and its related doctrines or provided some descriptive account of the history of the doctrine. I have contributed several such pieces to Lawfare, and others have done the same.
