At the Midday Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

2 words I didn't expect to read in a biography of John Quincy Adams.

It took me literally a year to read James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned), but I have finally come to the end. Speaking of the end, JQA's famous last words were "This is the end of earth."

JQA:MS is not the only book I read in the past year, but it is the one I spaced out the most.

Anyway, here are 2 passages each with a surprising word that I will render in boldface:

"He wields a replica of a prehistoric club as he rages against enemies of the revolution..."

"...on his weekly television programme. He is rumoured to be one of the richest men in Venezuela, but insists he is but a 'humble soldier.' At night he tours Caracas in his bulletproof Toyota, rifle at the ready, reassuring his millions of TikTok viewers that all is calm in the homeland. This is the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know world of Diosdado Cabello: interior minister, head honcho of the security forces and possible roadblock to the Trump administration’s vision of a vassal-state Venezuela."

The London Times reports.

And look at that club! "Prehistoric," indeed. It's Flintstonesque:

(What is the origin of the phrase "mad, bad and dangerous-to-know"? It's something Lady Caroline Lamb wrote about her lover Lord Byron in 1812.)

"Hessy Levinsons Taft, who as an infant appeared on the cover of a Nazi magazine in Germany promoting her as the ideal Aryan baby..."

"... a distinction complicated by the fact that she was Jewish and had been exploited as part of a dangerous hoax, died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco. She was 91.... As Latvians, her parents were protected from laws targeting Jews of German descent. Still, they were terrified that the Nazis would discover what had happened and execute them. They kept Hessy inside, rarely taking her out, even for walks...."

From "Hessy Levinsons Taft, Jewish Baby on Cover of Nazi Magazine, Dies at 91/Without her parents’ knowledge, her portrait was entered as a prank in a contest in 1935 to represent the ideal Aryan infant — and she won" (NYT).

"During the Enlightenment, close attention emerged as a virtue essential to knowledge and disciplined investigation, as demonstrated in 1740, when the naturalist Charles Bonnet..."

"... conducted a vigil of 21 days, daybreak to nearly midnight, to study the life cycle of a single aphid. At the dawn of the 20th century, the American philosopher William James insisted that voluntary human attention was the linchpin of free will. By that time, some laboratory researchers had begun to turn their attention to attention as a subject of explicit scientific inquiry. One of the first to undertake such investigations was James McKeen Cattell, a German-trained American at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cattell, the first professor of psychology in the United States, used a fast-snap shutter to flash a few letters for a tiny fraction of a second. The test subjects then repeated back to him as many letters as they could remember. Observing a range of results, Dr. Cattell concluded that they reflected a significant feature of cognitive ability: what he called the 'span' of attention. Subsequent researchers used the attention span metric to identify children’s mental 'deficiency.'"

Write D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, in "The Century-Old Lie at the Heart of the Attention Economy" (NYT).

Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt have a book, "Attensity!" (commission earned). The word "attensity" appears in the column like this:

"Defeating the forces that frack human beings in order to extract the financial value of their attention is going to require... attention activism... a new politics of 'attensity.'"

"Rock was the greatest single social changing force of the 20th century..."

"And here we are 25 years into the 21st century, and rock couldn't be less of an influence on the social political order. Does anybody think that that's kind of strange?"

Asks Billy Corgan.

👀 Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Finds It ‘Strange’ That Rock Music Has Fizzled Out

“There are forces in the world that go out of their way to marginalize particular voices … because they refuse to accept the given narrative … Rock was the greatest single social changing… pic.twitter.com/OPD0pxIEQ4

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 10, 2026

"Don't worry about, like, squirreling away money for retirement. In, like, 10 or 20 years, it won't matter."

"If any of the things we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant."

Elon's advice for near-retirees: Don't save money for retirement. https://t.co/cD54K9OLIJ pic.twitter.com/BHseG7hpn2

— Peter H. Diamandis, MD (@PeterDiamandis) January 9, 2026

That's not a big "if," is it? "If any of the things we've said are true"? He must have said many things, and only one of them needs to be true before his prediction clicks in. Seems like a sure bet. If we assume Elon Musk always tells the truth. And knows the future. But he doesn't know the future, but he confidently asserts his prediction. So we know he doesn't always tell the truth. And yet, in his world, he only needs to be right about ONE thing, for his advice to pan out... if he's right about that only one thing needs to be true concept. 

"Now the senator came down here/Showing ev’ryone his gun/Handing out free tickets/To the wedding of his son."

"An’ me, I nearly got busted/An’ wouldn’t it be my luck/To get caught without a ticket/And be discovered beneath a truck...."

Sang Bob Dylan, in his most-Bob-Dylan song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

I'm just trying to read The New York Times* and the headline is "Handing Out Free Tickets, Mamdani Says Theater Should Not Be 'a Luxury.'"

What's with these politicians handing out free tickets? I'm suspicious, but maybe the mayor's just flaky, pie-in-the-sky.

“The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said later, explaining the initiative during a news conference at one of the festival’s venues, Brooklyn College’s Leonard and Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts.

That quote is wild. What man of the people would say "the eager debrief after a musical"? He seems like more of a poet... an abstruse poet. 

There was once a country ruled by a poet. It was Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia. 

_________________________________

* If you're with me in Bob Dylandom, you just thought "shoot a few holes, blow their minds." But I don't like seeing those words today, in the shadow of the killing of Renee Good, and there they are along with "showing ev’ryone his gun" and "discovered beneath a truck" — truck ≈ SUV.

Trump wore a lapel pin depicting himself.

Questioned about it, he said "Somebody gave me this. Do you know what that is? That's called a 'Happy Trump.' And considering the fact that I'm never happy—I'm never satisfied. I will never be satisfied until we make America great again. But we're getting pretty close, I'll tell you what. This is called a Happy Trump. Somebody gave it to me. I put it on."

 

And that's that. Somebody gave it to him and he put it on. Wore it on camera. I wonder what other things people could get him to pin onto himself just by giving it to him. He could be pranked so easily. But I suspect that he exercises some judgment about what to pin on himself. 

And who attaches an image of himself to himself/herself?

It happens, mostly entertainment celebrities in T-shirts.

"When they start killing white women, the devil not only leaves the station, but he moves to the suburbs and puts on a badge."

"When they start killing white women, they see a minivan and call it a tank.... When they start killing white women, and I have to say it...."

"Look at these terrible people who are interfering with law enforcement. Don’t they deserve to get executed in the middle of the street in the United States of America?"

Said State Representative Aisha Gomez, a Minneapolis Democrat, sarcastically characterizing the motive behind the release of new video, which you can see at "New Cellphone Video Shows ICE Agent’s Perspective Before Minneapolis Shooting/The Department of Homeland Security posted a clip of the video on social media and said it was taken by the agent, who killed a 37-year-old woman in the shooting" (NYT)(gift link).

And consider this:

At the Midday Café...

... you can talk until dawn.

"Erika Kirk is walking a fine line...."

Here, that's a gift link to The Washington Post.

I was puzzling over that headline at 4 a.m., but I'm only getting to blogging it now, and I don't want to go on too long at this point. So I'll just give you a numbered list and leave it to you.

The RNC posted yesterday that "Democrats were told to be 'willing to get shot' to obstruct President Trump."

I do think this posting should say that this interview took place last July. Posting it relates to the shooting of Renee Good, but when Blitzer and Jeffries spoke, the incident had not yet occurred:

Democrats were told to be "willing to get shot" to obstruct President Trump, and instead of condemning it, they incited it further.

Democrats are held hostage by their violent and deranged far-left base.pic.twitter.com/Y3DQw2UG4z

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 8, 2026

Here's the Axios article Blitzer cites, "Democrats told to 'get shot' for the anti-Trump resistance" (published July 7, 2025). Excerpt:

A lynch mob? A crowd chants "Kristi Noem will Hang!" in New York City.

NOW: "Kristi Noem will Hang!" Huge crowd chants in Foley Square NYC, also "Save a life, kill an ICE" as they gather to protest the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Some in the crowd condemn the talk of killing. pic.twitter.com/ifrXNZB0dz

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) January 8, 2026

Democrats who hope to win back power need to act now to reconnect with peace and good order. They seem to have encouraged the chaos yesterday, and they need something quite different today lest they be seen as they wanted us to see Trump after January 6th, as having incited insurrection.

Trump would like to be even more effusive in his female impersonation.

Strip away the context and it's fun for all: