Annals of derp: Chaotic sea of short-term trivialities

Arthur Brooks for the American Enterprise Institute sends me a note every once in a while, which you can't read if you're not on his exclusive mailing list, inviting me to come over—

If it’s been a while since you browsed our home page[paracom.paramountcommunication.com], take a look[paracom.paramountcommunication.com]. You’ll find an island of thoughtful, substantive takes on a host of issues that stands apart from the chaotic sea of short-term trivialities.

I'm not sure why he thinks he needs to put the name of his email marketing service provider in the links, or maybe he had the marketing service provider put in the links for him and they were anxious to get credit for their work, but there it is.

Anyway, for those of us who are actually in it for the short-term trivialities, he appends a "newsletter", and as you'd expect it's all about the Trump, and some ways of looking at the news and feeling a little less panicky, for those who happen to be Republicans.

First, if it makes you anxious to hear that the polls are all predicting outsize victories for Trump, you'll be glad to know that the polls are all wrong:

First-rate intelligence

Today's David Brooks is written for some reason by Mr. Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, no relation, I believe, who doesn't do it quite as well, but stands in a similar position, urging American conservatives to adopt an innovative "compassionate" conservatism (Hey, kids! Let's put on a show!) with fresh ideas like offering more tax breaks for poor people (look at all tax breaks have done for the rich!) and the inevitable Scott Fitzgerald quote:

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

I can't understand why people think Fitzgerald's Law means if you want to show a first-rate intelligence you must hold opposed ideas in your mind at all times. That's not first-rate, it's irrational.

What Fitzgerald was talking about in The Crack-Up was a serious crisis in his own life that hit him in the early 1930s, a moral-emotional collapse that hollowed him out and left him in despair. The "test" was not to spend the rest of his life living in contradiction but to live through it to some kind of resolution. You have to at least look at the next sentence: