According to Jewish tradition, at any given time there are no less than 36 righteous men who sustain the world and keep it from imploding.

Either one was born today, or somebody just got promoted.

I'd never heard that before. Sobering, that the fate of so many rests in the hands of so few, but I suppose it was ever thus.

In fact on second thought, it sounds like one of those things that can't not be.

Thanks for linking. An amazing story.

In the same Harvard speech, he talked about the state of the media - eerily true, just as he described it:

"The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But
what sort of use does it make of this freedom?

Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for
deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If
they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we
know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same
newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a
mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the
opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors
and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers'
memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing
readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may
see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may
witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to
know everything.""

Hey, MSM: if the shoe fits...