Today marks the anniversary of the of the Battle of Tsushima (1905). In the Empire of Japan it was celebrated as Navy Day from 1906-1945.
In 1942 the official proclamation was justifiably triumphant. Japan had just completed six months of conquest that were unrivaled in history.
Today Britain's control over the seas has vanished, thanks to the work of the German and Italian submarines and more the work of the Japanese Navy. Britain's auxiliary, the United States, has likewise had her navy practically destroyed by the Japanese navy. As a result, Japan stands today as the premier naval power of the world. It may well presage the rise of Japan in the future history of the world to a position comparable to that which Britain has occupied in the past
Left unmentioned were the Doolittle raid on Tokyo and the Battle of Coral Sea. The "practically destroyed" US Navy was not yet ready to concede global supremacy to the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Also on this date in 1942, the USS Yorktown, badly damaged at Coral Sea, entered Pearl Harbor. Three days later, patched up and resupplied, she would leave Hawaii to rendezvous with Enterprise and Hornet near Midway.
Japan's global naval supremacy was about to come to an early, shattering end.
As you probably know, Andrew Cuomo ordered elderly persons infected with coronavirus back into their nursing homes, where they could -- and did -- infect all the other nursing home residents and kill thousands of them.
He did this deliberately. Why?
It's hard to think of a reason why -- these people could have been isolated in the thousands of unused temporary hospital berths built to... well, to keep coronavirus patients isolated.
Instead he ordered them back into nursing homes, to infect other people of a very high risk of dying from the disease.
And die they did.
By the thousands.
All the while, as thousands were dying, the press just could not pour enough praise on Andrew Cuomo.
He killed them.
If people have "blood on their hands" for permitting businesses to reopen -- how can it be that Andrew Cuomo is not the murderer of 5300 extremely at-risk people by ordering the infected to be crowded together with them?
Andrew Cuomo and New York State realize they have a huge scandal brewing -- if the media ever feels like reporting easily-discovered facts.
It looks like New York State is taking pains to correct its error.
And by correct its error, I mean -- fudge the numbers to hide the numbers killed.
He just won't take responsibility for having sent covid-infected people back to nursing homes to infect everyone else. He begins sputtering out an Eric "Otter" Stratton series of rhetorical questions about who's really to blame.
This reveals something interesting about the roles of tone and norms in politics and governance. Critics of Trump’s hyperbolic rhetorical style and willingness to say things that offend them seem to think that good tone and maintenance of norms by a politician indicates he is pursuing positive policies and in control of the situation, but this is often not the case. In fact, a polished tone more often elides failures than it symbolizes success.
Here’s an example. Would Barack Obama have ever called the press “the enemy of the American people”? Certainly not. But would his administration spy on journalists? Absolutely, and it did. Would Obama cackle about political opponents going to jail? Not a chance. Would his administration try to send political opponents to jail? Yup.
To put it bluntly, Cuomo has not been an effective governor during this crisis, but he has played one on TV. At least in terms of early public opinion, that was enough.
The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns… They literally know nothing
They cover policy like they do politics and they cover politics as theater.
Ace:
The leftwing members of the Professional Managerial Class (including, obviously, hyperpartisan "NeverTrump" Democrats) ... never look at policy outcomes, only "tone" and "norms:" that's how you get a ton of dead bodies while babbling about how well he presents himself at press conferences.
The Cuomo brothers made for good theater. They bashed Trump, issued dire warnings of impending doom, posed as defenders of the vulnerable, bantered like frat boys. Fredo even suffered in his basement – quarantined after he caught the Corona virus.
It was all lies, a series of performances, a ploy for TV ratings, for poll numbers, maybe a spot on the 2020 ticket.
CNN missed one of the biggest stories of our time. It played out under their noses in NYC. Instead they created “The COVID Chronicles with the Cuomo Bros". Everyone had a great time except for the senior citizens who suffered and died alone and their grieving families.
CNN's handling of this story should be an an extinction-level event. They did not just fail to cover the real story: they helped cover it up. Walter Duranty would be proud.
And, like Duranty and Stalin, CNN and the Cuomo brothers will get away with it. Their “competitors” will probably give them prestigious awards.
1. A government agency fails.
2. When it finally ‘fesses up, the failure is immediately consigned to the memory hole.
3. The consequences of its failure are then used as a justification for giving that agency more power over ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with the failed policies and botched operations.
Trump “asks the question at the core of whatever the issue is that is the one question that everyone has been avoiding because they don't have the answer to it”
This reminded me of a story that organizational scholar Charles Handy used to illustrate the differences between two organizational cultures. Handy moved from a large, bureaucratic organization to an ill-defined role with an entrepreneurial investment bank. He was appalled at the slap dash way things were run.
Clearly, some serious professional project appraisal was urgently needed. Luckily, I just happened to have brought along with me from my previous organization a set of procedures and tables for project appraisal. I could readily adapt these, and then I could propose introducing a little more system nd procedure into the current craziness.
In a week I was ready. The chairman arranged for me to present my ideas to a meeting of the board. They all listened very attentively and politely. At the end, the chairman thanked me for all the work I had put into I, and then observed, “I suppose a project would have to be very marginal to justy all this analysis and procedure?”
“Well, I said, “it's obviously vital to marginal propositions, but you can't even know if it's marginal until you've done this kind of formal analysis.”
“Hmm. You see, we're probably wrong,” (in the tone of voice that Englishmen use when they know they're not), “but in this group we've always thought that we got success not by making better decisions on marginal propositions than our competitors did, but by making quicker decisions on obvious propositions.” … In the end, I realized that I had a different cast of mind and left before they threw me out.
For three decades Republicans and Democrats, neoliberals and neoconservatives, debated the proper mix of tax incentives, transfer payments, and trade concessions required to bring China into the New World Order. Trump had no time for that: he wanted to know why it was good for America to send good jobs, even vital jobs, to a potential adversary. His rude questions proved to be more popular than the conventional answers Republicans usually offered to the conventional questions.
Only Trump, a man who had spent decades leading companies with a Zeus culture would base a campaign and a presidency on asking rude questions the Acela Blob wants to bury.
It is not surprising that a Zeus president was going to clash with an Apollo bureaucracy and their media clones.
Zeus vs Apollo
Handy defines four basic organizational cultures which he names after Greek gods: Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and Dionysus.
Zeus cultures are entrepreneurial. They operate in the out-sized shadow of the leader. They excel at speed of decision and in turning decisions into action. They have little time for procedures and policy manuals. Their strength comes from a shared mindset and commitment to the leader's goals and vision.
Zeus does not write; he speaks eyeball to eyeball if possible, if not, then by phone.
As a politician Zeus tweets directly to the voters over the heads of his bureaucratic gatekeepers, media minders, and media deciders.
Apollo cultures are classic bureaucracies. They focus on rules, procedures, flow charts, and org charts. They value stability and predictability.
The Apollo style is excellent when one can assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday.
What he have seen in Washington for the past three years is more than a clash of cultures. The Apollo bureaucracy, with breath-taking arrogance, decided that Trump's style was not merely unconventional but wrong and dangerous. They want an end to the rude questions that they cannot answer.
They demand not merely independence from the president, but supremacy over the executive branch.
The irony, and maybe the tragedy is this: Trump's style, the Zeus style, is the style and culture best suited for turbulent and chaotic times.
Tomorrow is not like yesterday. Pretending that the procedures, norms and protocols based on the presumption of stability will work in the midst of an unprecedented crisis is foolish, self-serving, and futile.
The bureaucratic/media Apollos will not save us; they very well may destroy our economy and what is left of our tattered social fabric.
There is a contemporary tendency to try and sever politics from fundamental and first-order questions about the nature of reality. Politics, and our political institutions, are understood in narrowly procedural terms, legitimized by aggrandizing claims of expertise that reduce what are ultimately political questions to dry technical problems to be solved by experts.
…. an overconfident hubris that we have essentially “figured it all out” and arrived at an end of history moment with little left to do. In addition to producing the kind of cultural and social nihilism that Ross Douthat captures in The Decadent Society, this hubris has helped produce sclerotic and decaying political institutions unresponsive to democratic and geopolitical pressures.
These political institutions are undergirded not just by democratic legitimacy but by technocratic legitimacy. Technocracy, in its very essence, implies that technology and knowledge can render fortuna obsolete. In After Virtue (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that modern managerial expertise is predicated on the predictive social sciences. These offer a systematic understanding of reality that gives the managerial class access to a superior form of knowledge and enables them to effectively govern society.
Steve Sailer made an interesting point on Twitter
I personally admire how often Trump admits he doesn't have a clue what will happen due to this novel coronavirus.
Many admirers of the Fuhrerprinzip wish the President would just tell them what's going to happen, but instead he keeps admitting he doesn't know:
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
On the surface, Trump's governing style seems outlandish and unprecedented. Look a little deeper and you can see parallels with some of our greatest presidents.
Here's historian John Gaddis on FDR:
He improvised, edging forward where possible, falling back when necessary, always appearing to do something, never giving in to despair, and in everything remembering what Wilson forgot – that nothing would succeed without widespread continuing public support. 'It is a terrible thing', Roosevelt once admitted, 'to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead – and to find no one there.'
FDR did not juggle only for political reasons. He also understood that bureaucracies and the experts who run them try to use their rules and procedures to limit the freedom of action of presidents and cabinet officers. FDR understood the danger that this represented:
Roosevelt did not so much distrust experts as lament their limited horizons.
A president needs a very broad field of vision. FDR went to great pains to ensure that he retained his. Experts might despair but the results speak for themselves.
Liberal Roosevelt would probably have agreed with the British arch-conservative Lord Salisbury:
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of common sense.
Pragmatism and opportunism also marked Lincoln's governing style.
Lincoln critically assessed costs, neither brushing them aside – like Napoleon in Russia – nor dreading them to the point of immobility –- like Union army generals before Grant. He relied on experience, incrementally accumulated, to show what worked, not on categories, professorially taught, to say what should.
What matters, in the end, are the results:
Napoleon lost his empire by confusing aspirations with capabilities; Lincoln saved his country by not doing so. Wilson the builder disappointed his generation; Roosevelt the juggler surpassed the expectations of his.
Colin Gray:
Both strategy and policy are almost always required to be somewhat flexible and adaptable to the changing circumstances of context. Good enough policy and strategy should always be 'work in progress,' at least to some modest degree.
Lord Salisbury:
There is no such thing as as a fixed policy because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.
The disruption unleashed by the new coronavirus is different in that it has highlighted country risk at an unprecedented scale. Nobody could have foreseen what would happen when the world’s second-largest economy went offline and completely shut down external logistics connections. And because of supply chain tiering and the delays inherent in ocean container shipping, many companies are only now coming to grips with the depth of their dependencies. What the current situation exposes is that the risks associated with supply chain fragmentation and globalization have been unpriced and largely ignored. For many companies, the combination of lean production and global multistage supply networks is leading to crises.
The good professor is a little disingenuous here. Some people did foresee the dangers of off-shoring, globalization, and systemic risk.
For instance, there's this guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb....
The coming of global information networks deepened Taleb’s concern. He reserved a special impatience for economists who saw these networks as stabilizing—who thought that the average thought or action, derived from an ever-widening group, would produce an increasingly tolerable standard—and who believed that crowds had wisdom, and bigger crowds more wisdom. Thus networked, institutional buyers and sellers were supposed to produce more rational markets, a supposition that seemed to justify the deregulation of derivatives, in 2000, which helped accelerate the crash of 2008. As Taleb told me, “The great danger has always been too much connectivity.” Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more fat-tail risks into a more interdependent and “fragile” system: not only risks such as pathogens but also computer viruses, or the hacking of information networks, or reckless budgetary management by financial institutions or state governments, or spectacular acts of terror. Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.
It's pretty clear, now, that The Black Swan was one of those books that important people bought for show: they talked about it but never actually read it.
Shih makes an important point about the way good methods and good theories can be misapplied:
When Toyota pioneered lean production in Japan back in the 1970s, its suppliers facilitated this by being colocated nearby. Chinese manufacturers did the same as they evolved their operations during the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet many companies, lulled by efficient and relatively inexpensive logistics and transport, have been applying lean and just-in-time production methods that span global networks. The current crisis exposes the vulnerability of this approach. Notably, Toyota continues to practice localization to a greater extent than many of its competitors. In fact, for its Georgetown, Kentucky, factory, more than 350 suppliers are located in the United States and more than 100 inside the state of Kentucky.
But note how the issue is framed: “companies were lulled.”
Who lulled them? Did mystical Sirens of Off-shoring slip into boardrooms and C-suites?
This framing absolves executives and corporate directors of any responsibility.
A more accurate way to describe the problem is something like this:
Many companies – out of fear, ignorance, stupidity and greed – implemented lean manufacturing in dangerous ways.
And this is the beginning of wisdom when thinking about China's role in the post-pandemic world order:
The PRC's leadership is committed only to its own survival. If that means, for President Xi and his successors/competitors, allowing an entirely false narrative on a deadly virus to go out to the world, or for Uighur Muslims to be brutalised in cantonment camps, or this group to be repressed or that person to be silenced, then so be it. No one in Beijing looks at the dissolution of the Soviet Union and with it the former communist party, as anything other than as a fate to be avoided.
He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood.
Chris Arnade is a remarkable reporter and a better man. His book Dignity has a special resonance during this corona virus crisis.
Front Row America is doing pretty well. Back Row America is devastated. The brave firefighters of the MSM – First Row America at its least appealing – have no real desire to report on that devastation.
This CSPAN interview with Arnade is remarkable and powerful.
Good essay on Arnade and his book by Rob Dreher here.
In practice the great difference between the medieval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all.
... We are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor.
We are always ready to make a saint or a prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or a prophet was something quite different. The medieval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated.
To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed information arena, it can mobilize all means of communication-- printed, spoken, artistic, and visual -- and press its claims to maximum advantage.
Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.
And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.
And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.
And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:
And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.
And they remembered his words,
And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.
It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.
And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.
Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.
This passage from Martin Bell's remarkable little book The Way of the Wolf: The Gospel in New Images seems especially timely this Easter season.
God raised Jesus from the dead to the end that we should be clear-once and for all-that there is nothing more important than being human. Our lives have eternal significance. And no one-absolutely no one-is expendable.
Colored Eggs
Some human beings are fortunate enough to be able to color eggs on Easter. If you have a pair of hands to hold the eggs, or if you are fortunate enough to be able to see the brilliant colors, then you are twice blessed.
This Easter some of us cannot hold the eggs, others of us cannot see the colors, many of us are unable to move at all-and so it will be necessary to color the eggs in our hearts.
This Easter there is a hydrocephalic child lying very still in a hospital bed nearby with a head the size of his pillow and vacant, unmoving eyes, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs in his heart, and so God will have to color eggs for him.
And God will color eggs for him. You can bet your life and the life of the created universe on that.
At the cross of Calvary God reconsecrated and sanctified wood and nails and absurdity and helplessness to be continuing vehicles of his love. And then he simply raised Jesus from the dead. And they both went home and colored eggs.
The core, the nugget, of a survival mindset is not positive thinking, or resiliency, or focus, although all three of those things play a critical part. I think that the centerpiece of a survival mindset is acceptance. ... Denial can be described as the mental processes that allow us to avoid acknowledging a threat of any kind, essentially sticking our collective fingers in our collective ears and collectively shouting, “LA LA LA LA LA…”
Acceptance, on the other hand, is facing the world as it actually is and basing our actions on, dare I say it, reality.
First, never quit. Three strikes and you're not out. Put that on your refrigerator.
Number two - there's always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor. There's always a way.
Number three - trust your instincts.
It would be mid-1943 before Roosevelt finally completed an effective apparatus to execute his roles as commander in chief of the armed forces and chief executive of the government. He relished setting up officials with overlampping and often conflicting authorities. Perhaps the epitome of this was his early effort to mobilize the 'Arsenal of Democracy'. At one time he created sixteen different agencies to manage the different aspects of mobilization, all under the executive branch and all without a superior save for Roosevelt himself. This refusal to delegate poower gained him a degree of control, but he lacked the time and interest in details to make such slapdash structures efficient.
Dwight Macdonald was the intellectual par excellence, which is to say without any specialized knowledge he was prepared to comment on everything, boisterously and always with what seemed an unwavering confidence.
Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography
Is Joseph Epstein America's finest essayist? I know I've never read anyone who is better.
The mark of a great essayist is that you can read an enjoy them even if you initially have no keen interest in the subject of the piece at hand. Epstein never fails that test.
Jacques Barzun reminds us that “Love of what is fine should not make one finicky”. Essays in Biography embodies this worthy credo. An essay on Michael Jordan exhibits the same insight and skill as those on Susan Sontag or Bernard Malamud.
Every now and then Epstein drops a bombshell into the course of his pleasant rambles. They are not delivered as critical thunderbolts -– just an offhand comment that can change your whole outlook on a subject.
[Saul Bellow] created no memorable female characters. Neither, one needs to add here, have Philip Roth or John Updike or Norman Mailer, whose female characters exist chiefly to service their author's sexual fantasies. The great novelists -- Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Marguerite Yourncenar -- were androgynous in their powers of creation. Recent male American novelists almost universally fail this test.
….
Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life.
Content collapse, as I define it, is the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance. As social media becomes the main conduit for information of all sorts — personal correspondence, news and opinion, entertainment, art, instruction, and on and on — it homogenizes that information as well as our responses to it.
Content began collapsing the moment it began to be delivered through computers. Digitization made it possible to deliver information that had required specialized mediums — newspapers and magazines, vinyl records and cassettes, radios, TVs, telephones, cinemas, etc. — through a single, universal medium. In the process, the formal standards and organizational hierarchies inherent to the old mediums began to disappear. The computer flattened everything.
I remember, years ago, being struck by the haphazardness of the headlines flowing through my RSS reader. I’d look at the latest update to the New York Times feed, for instance, and I’d see something like this:
Dam Collapse Feared as Flood Waters Rise in Midwest Nike’s New Sneaker Becomes Object of Lust Britney Spears Cleans Up Her Act Scores Dead in Baghdad Car-Bomb Attack A Spicy New Take on Bean Dip It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder.
I wonder, though, if this really began with the computer and the internet. Didn't we start down this path with television? The same indictment – “ a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial” – can be laid against the Today show or Good Morning America.
One minute George Stephanopoulos is gravely reporting on the civil war in Syria or a deadly natural disaster. The, seamlessly, he is hyping Disney's next blockbuster or some pop diva's latest album.
Facebook did not give us the Oprah-style townhall debates – television did. The epic decline from Lincoln vs. Douglas to boxers vs. briefs happened before social media was born.
If there is anything novel about about our internet-fueled media environment it is that now the information consumer largely determines their own mixture of high/low, silly/smart instead of a priesthood of deciders in New York and LA.
“Formal standards and organizational hierarchies” were undermined by the internet. The deciders lost credibility and authority when they could no longer hide their mistakes. No more 40 word “corrections“ on page A14 six days after the story ran. Now errors and bias were laid bare in real time.
How can we speak of “formal standards” when Dan Rather and Brian Williams are still treated as reputable journalists by other journalists?
And what of Twitter? We see content collapse in the timelines of the very priesthood that pretends to uphold the standards of serious, high-minded journalism. One moment there is the sober pronouncement about trade policy and the next moment brings another sober pronouncement but this one assigns the hot dog a position in the sandwich hierarchy. Then, after a quick comment on the president's speech we get excited effusions about the latest comic book movie.
Small liberal arts colleges are feeling the brunt of demographic changes and America’s declining faith in the higher education system overall, as evidenced by recent closures and mergers. That the situation is boiling over despite correlations between degree attainment and higher lifetime earnings shouldn’t just be chalked up to learners being short-sighted. Financial risk is indeed growing, and increased earnings 40 years post-graduation don’t pay next week’s student loan bills.
Michelle Weise, the senior vice president of workforce strategies at Strada Education Network and the chief innovation officer for the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, has written that although 93% of CEOs surveyed by PwC recognized “the need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent,” a stunning 61% revealed that they hadn’t yet taken any steps to do so. Employees seem to agree. According to a recent survey by Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning and Degreed, nearly half of employees are disappointed in their employer’s learning and development programs.
But there are some notable exceptions to this prevailing trend. For instance, in July 2019, Amazon announced that it would “spend $700 million over six years on postsecondary job training for 100,000 of its soon-to-be 300,000 workers.” For now, Amazon says it intends to outsource that training to traditional colleges and universities. But once Amazon has begun to provide the bridge for that training, it’s not hard to imagine that it will be well positioned to create that training itself — without the “middle man” of colleges and universities — in the future.4 Although Amazon’s competitors will undoubtedly keep a close eye on its training moves, perhaps the education industry ought to keep an even closer eye, given that those moves may herald a total transformation in the landscape of learning, from college through retirement.
In War and Peace Tolstoy captures the hubris which led Napoleon to launch his catastrophic invasion of Russia:
To his mind everything he did was good, not because it agreed with any notion of what was good and bad, but because he did it.
The Never Trump conservatives have inverted this mental and moral failure but still suffered dire consequences. failure with dire consequences.
No matter what President Trump does they oppose and deride it. They speak of principles and standards yet the only standard they seem to hold to is Orange Man Bad. They praise intellect and expertise yet their own arguments on TV and twitter are little more than “irritable mental gestures.”
Never Trump “libertarians” announce that they will support socialism with a heavy infusion of Stalinism. “Constitutional conservatives” sing the praises of nanny-staters who are eager to gut the First and Second Amendment.
What we have here is a severe deficit of "lightness of being.”
'Lightness of being,' then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry.
From political consultants who are no longer consulted to writers who are no longer read, this is the Woodstock for conservatives who never actually conserved anything.
As FDR said “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead – and to find no one there.”
