Tact: the ability to describe others as they see themselves.~Abraham Lincoln
I've been very disappointed with the online course I'm taking on writing and don't seem to be alone. The interaction has simply stopped.
Keone Kela drew a two-game internal suspension from the Pittsburgh Pirates this week, apparently after a fight with a coach.
Archer had another mediocre outing last night, looking more and more like a number five starter. Next year he is due $10 million. Is a number five worth that? And if they just say "no" and don't sign him, that will mean they gave away Meadows and Glasnow for nothing.
I have no idea what Mueller will say today but after the millions of dollars spent on what was clearly an effort to smear Trump, this looks like an attempt to bring innuendo to the final report. And these people think they are different from Trump.
What we see is not necessarily what is. There are stars we see in the heavens that are long gone, destroyed eons ago by time and physics although their light continues to fly on through the cosmos. It would be lovely to think that people shine on after their demise but it seems to me that, with few exceptions, only their bad ideas do.
Pro boxer Maxim Dadashev, who was hospitalized after his match against Subriel Matias and underwent surgery for brain swelling, has died from the injuries he sustained in the fight. The Russian fighter was just 28 years old. The St. Petersburg native was an astonishing 281-20 in his amateur career, and unbeaten in his first 13 professional fights before Friday's loss.
“For many new Chinese arrivals in the West, one of the hardest concepts to understand is the distinction, essential to democracies, between the nation and its government. When they do grasp the difference, they are open to becoming critics of the party-state without feeling they are betraying their homeland.”
Zion Williamson, the most hyped NBA rookie since LeBron James, has signed a multiyear endorsement deal with Jordan Brand.
In the city of Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted. A National Center for Education Statistics study found that 18% of the nation’s schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents.
On this day in 1969, at 12:51 EDT, Apollo 11, the U.S. spacecraft that had taken the first astronauts to the surface of the moon, safely returned to Earth.
A Definition of Progressivism
“I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization,” declared Republican President Teddy Roosevelt during a similar struggle a century ago to address economic inequality, social injustice, and the concentration of power in the hands of the rich.
This is in the summary of an article by two guys I do not know in Slate who are trying to define Progressivism and why one should admire it. Much of it is imbedded in the idea that government is a generally positive notion, that its function is not just to deter the negative but to create the positive. While the article is full of references to "who you can love"--not a large segment of the population needing rescue, to my mind at least-- the basic idea of a proactive government is an essential rewriting of the letter and the spirit of the American constitution. These guys may not be representative at all of Progressivism but their arguments sound very familiar. And ambitious.
From the article:
"We propose this unifying thread: Government is essential to making our country better and preserving democracy against oligarchy. Our vision of “government is good” will have crossover appeal to millions of people who don’t identify as left of center. Some 58 percent of Americans believe the government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Even among Republicans, 28 percent favor a more active government, more than double the number that did in 2010. A solid majority of Americans even favor the once-radical idea of a federal jobs guarantee. Americans—from both parties—are also quite happy, in their real lives, to rely on government. The average American has used 4.5 government programs, and the share of her income that comes from federal transfers jumped from 7 percent in 1969 to 17 percent in 2014."
Elsewhere one of the authors summarized the article this way:
“Progressives want to rescue our democracy from the powerful interests that place themselves above everyone else. Our nation and the world face enormous challenges that the current regime is bent on exacerbating through divisiveness, self-enrichment and deception. But united, a coalition of the decent can put progressives back in power to enact policies that solve our problems — including these five:
1. Dangerously high economic inequality. Progressives endorse policies that grow the economy by creating and sustaining jobs (including investments in infrastructure, renewable energy and retraining); that make quality education affordable and accessible; that create a tax code in which the most fortunate are asked to contribute more to help their country thrive.
2. Access to health care. Progressives embrace the Affordable Care Act’s success in expanding health insurance coverage to reach over 90 percent of Americans, and will work to rectify its shortcomings and ensure universal, quality health care to all Americans.
3. Prejudice. Progressives endorse policies known to reduce prejudice (such as bias training among law enforcement, educators and others) and to mitigate its ongoing harms (including criminal justice reform; investment in early childhood education; the protection of women’s health and reproductive freedom; and legislation banning anti-LGBT discrimination).
4. Perversions of democracy. Progressives seek to end partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the concentration of money in politics.
5. Climate. Progressives embrace policies that restrict carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy, and incentivize research, development and business practices that contribute to reversing the warming of the planet.”
This is strange thinking, omniscient and arrogant, which violates so much of the thinking that created the serious revolution that so many try to emulate, but can not.
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