Tuesday roundup

You have to hand it to Kim Jong-un. He's made impressive strides getting the world to confer legitimacy on his evil regime, a process that will accelerate with his upcoming summit with Putin.

Fauxcahontas proposes forgiving all student debt and making college "free" from now on. 

What happens when we expect government to address the two inescapable conditions of human life: getting sick and getting old:

Medicare's trust fund will run out in 2026 and the combined trust funds of Social Security will run out in 2034, the trustees for the government programs projected Tuesday. 

The projected exhaustion of Social Security's trust fund is unchanged from last year. For Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund, the date has been moved up three years. 

If the Social Security trust funds do expire as projected, beneficiaries would face an immediate cut of about a fifth of their benefits.

Tuesday's report also indicated that Social Security’s costs are expected to exceed revenues this year for the first time since 1982.

Heather MacDonald, writing at City Journal, offers a glimmer of encouragement regarding university administrators growing a spine and standing up to campus jackboots. She cites recent examples at the University of Arizona and the University of the Arts, but, as has been said of the happy endings of Frank Capra movies, she makes you pay for it. You have to revisit a litany of instances of administrators wimping out at Claremont McKenna College, Yale, Emory, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, Evergreen State College, Texas Southern University, and Middlebury College. You'll get mad all over again.

Hugely important essay by Auguste Meyrat at The Federalist entitled "Niched Pop Culture Could Lead to Either a Renaissance or a Dark Age." A taste:

With no popular standard to serve as a point of reference, audiences in search of quality entertainment will need the help of critics—people who do the job of sifting, cutting through marketing propaganda, and applying objective standards of appraisal. Otherwise, these audiences will waste their time on so much dreck and be fooled by a compromised algorithm or clever advertisements.

This new deference and attention to critics will also require a general education in the arts. People do not need to become experts, but they should be able to understand the experts and the rules they apply to whatever medium. This means appreciating art and entertainment as disciplines and modes of knowledge, not just forms of pleasure. If people approach entertainment without any knowledge of objective aesthetic values—as many do now—they will select the ones that offer the greatest dopamine rush, setting aside so many works of beauty and brilliance for binge sessions of “Fortnite” and pornography.

Before the cynic tosses aside this whole discussion of art and entertainment as a “first world problem”—which, to some degree, it is—it should be stressed just how much art influences culture. Art informs the imagination, which in turn informs opinions and perceptions, which informs actions and behavior.

It is not unreasonable to judge a culture by its art or a person by her artistic preferences. Art often says much more about a place or a population than economic or scientific statistics do. Consequently, a culture that ceases to treat its art seriously and subordinates it to lower things like politics, pleasure, or commerce will lose its integrity, along with its identity.

With this in mind, there is reason to hope that this new phase in entertainment will be positive. If Americans resist the urge to huddle in niches and use entertainment for validation and pleasure (instead of the better purpose of edification and discovering beauty), then they will continue progressing towards a brighter future with stronger communities.

Just when you think Ilhan Omar can't get any more obscene, she does.