Everybody is a star.

Ducks in this morning's sunrise, by Meade:

The song — "Everybody Is a Star" — came up in conversation just now. The tag suggestions for the first post of the day included George Prescott Bush, and I was wondering whatever happened to him. Remember when he was the anointed one? As Grok put it: "Bilingual son of a Mexican-born mother, Navy Reserve tour in Afghanistan, Rice and UT Law, telegenic, already campaigning for family members as a teenager. Consultants in the 2000s literally nicknamed him '47.'" He was like Schlossberg. Maybe people don't like an heir apparent. We prefer somebody who came out of nowhere. 

"The sad thing is a third of our nation has no clue what we're talking about."

"They haven't — they never witnessed the sacrifice and the courage and the dedication to serve a neighbor in need."

This morning's sunrise, in the rain.

This post is tonight's open thread. Scroll down for the 7th anniversary of the sunrise project, with the 19 best photos of the year — here.

Isolated Transient Alexia, Part 2.

No, I didn't have another incident, though I did run into another sentence that powerfully resisted reading. From Reddit:

But I did have to add an update to Monday's post, "Isolated Transient Alexia — a migrainous accompaniment — ever had it?":

The various doctors would not simply accept my opinion that this was an isolated transient alexia — a migrainous accompaniment. They had to see it as a possible TIA. Not only were various tests ordered up, but even the best results don't eliminate the possibility that it was a TIA and so the cautious approach is to assume that it was.

September 9th is the anniversary of the sunrise project here on the Althouse blog.

The traditional celebration is to post my favorite sunrises of the year. Here they are, in chronological order. Click through to see the precise date. 

"He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House. You can’t do that."

Said Richard Painter, "the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and a critic of Trump."

Quoted in "Trump gave $45,000 cash gifts to Natalie Harp, two other close aides/Financial disclosures released by the administration show the sums were equivalent to nearly one-third of each of their salaries" (WaPo).

"It’s not like tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue," Painter said. "These are U.S. government employees. If you want a job where you get tips, you shouldn’t be working for the U.S. government."

"This vision of an endlessly shrinking U.S. population will seem foreboding to many Americans. Yet it is essential to realize..."

"... that depopulation, if and when it comes, doesn’t preclude ever-greater prosperity — thanks to the remarkable 'human-ingenuity-driven' nature of modern economic development. Already humanity proved it could cheat Malthus during a population explosion. Since 1968, world population has more than doubled. Yet contrary to British demographer Thomas Malthus’s famous prediction, the world today is better fed, healthier and richer than ever.... We have figured out how to increase human productivity under more or less any material circumstances.... In the era of rapid population growth, that meant figuring out how to make essential resources inexpensively available for consumption. In an aging, shrinking world, it will mean increasing productivity through 'workaround' improvements in knowledge production, human capital (i.e., health and skills) and a propitious 'business climate' to help unlock the value in human beings...."

Writes Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, in "Can a depopulating America still flourish? Births and immigration are slowing at the same time. The U.S. isn't ready for what that means" (WaPo gift link).

"We’re building a rocket ship as we fly it."

Said Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Governor of New Mexico, quoted in "One year into free child care in New Mexico, too many kids and not enough slots/In a first-in-the-nation experiment with universal child care, demand is outpacing availability and costs are soaring" (WaPo).

Last September, Lujan Grisham took the final step, announcing that New Mexico would be the first to open its subsidized day care to any family, a move estimated to save families $13,000 a year per child.... The announcement was met with applause and cheers, but behind the scenes, state legislators — who said they had not been informed that the program would become universal — were confounded, along with some members of the department’s own staff.

“We were all shocked,” said state Sen. George Muñoz, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “Nobody knew about it until the day it was in the paper. All of a sudden we were all calling each other, saying, ‘Where did this come from?’ ‘Did anybody from the governor’s office talk to you about it?’ Nope, we were all in the dark.”...

"How all baseball announcers sound."

I like how the one word you can understand is "Moriarty" (that guy's name is Moriarty).

"Her heart’s desire included a $400 sea-foam green jacket from the New York Liberty women’s basketball team that reads 'New York or Nowhere.'"

She'd had more than $200,000 in student loans, but qualified for loan forgiveness, so "One thing I did is I gifted myself an extra loan payment for whatever my heart desired."

She is New York City Council member Tiffany Cabán, who "spends much of her day thinking about how to address New York City’s affordability crisis," and rents a two-and-a-half-bedroom place in Astoria, "where she lives with her rescue dog Ducky."

I'm reading the latest entry in the NYT series "Affording New York," "How a City Council Member Lives on $148,500 in Queens" (gift link, with photos of Cabán place and her dog and her jacket).

It is a nice jacket for a City Council member, and it's nice that she has season tickets to the game ($5,000), and that her salary is going up from $148,500 to $175,500, after she and other council members voted them a raise. Well earned, no? You wouldn't want to try to live in NYC for only $148,500.

The jacket's slogan is "It will Always be New York or Nowhere." You know that wonderful New York feeling: every place else is nowhere. It reminds me of my old saying: Better than nothing is a high standard. But acquiring nothing leaves you intact as a living human being, and you save whatever money you'd have spent on that item that's not better than nothing. But with "New York or Nowhere," it seems you cease to exist if you can't swing life in New York. Life without being in New York is not better than nothing. It's nowhere. 

"He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children."

There will never be a more obvious sentence to look back on and explain the insanity of our times than the following…

“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children." pic.twitter.com/i7dnLg2MlE

— Tandy (@dantypo) September 8, 2026

Said one of the Lindsay Clancy jurors, Kellie Farina, about the holdout juror.

She's quoted in "Three Jurors in Clancy Trial Describe Frustration With Holdout/The three jurors, who voted to acquit Lindsay Clancy of murder, described the tense deliberations in an interview with a Boston TV station" (NYT gift link).

CORRECTION: I'd connected the quote to one of the other jurors who spoke to the press.

ALSO: Another juror "said that the holdout 'completely disregarded' information that nurses on the jury provided to help interpret medical reports from the hospital where Ms. Clancy stayed after she killed her children." Wasn't the juror at least entitled to reject extraneous "information" from an unsworn witness?

Sunrise.

"At these gatherings, even the most peculiar activities are turned into celebration. Beyond amusement, though, I was searching..."

"... for proof that in an age of social isolation and online disconnection, people still hold on to the traditions that bring them together and make their hometowns unmistakably theirs. While I was in Sopchoppy, I asked Gary Revell, 74, why he still grunts for worms. He told me that the times he goes out at dawn in the forest behind his house, the sunlight filtering through the pines, are when he feels closest to God...."

Writes the photographer Nat Segebre, in "The Strange, Hyperlocal Customs of the Country" (NYT gift link)(lots of oddball photos at the link).

That very weird trailer for the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

Extreme close-up Holmes: "I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you?"

I don't know whose face is more disturbing, hers or Fielder's. 

Here's the NYT article about the film: "Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Upends Telluride Film Festival/The comic Nathan Fielder and the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim teamed up to interview the convicted executive for 'You Can See Everything.'"

"Police set a dog on the two thieves, who were wearing masks and gloves. They dropped the two paintings in the museum’s garden..."

"... before escaping through a hole in the fence. One of the works abandoned was an 1895 portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon, according to Caroline Amat, the deputy mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer. The second abandoned painting has not yet been named."

From "Thieves steal four Renoirs — and drop two while fleeing/Works worth millions of euros, taken in the early hours from a museum near Nice dedicated to the painter, are missing" (London Times).

Here's Madame Pichon, pinched in her yellow dress, seemingly knowing she'd be the one the dog-chased thieves would drop in the garden:

But really, you should see the ones they got away with. They're material for the old "Renoir Sucks at Painting" Instagram account. I deplore all theft, and the theft of unique objects is a special problem. And yet....

"In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves. No dogma, no religion is above the laws of the Republic."

Wrote Aurore Bergé, France’s minister for gender equality. And "hard-right" presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said France would "never accept that women’s presence be 'limited.'"

Quoted in "Strike at Eiffel Tower after female staff ‘told to be out of sight’/Women workers at the Paris landmark were allegedly told to make themselves scarce for a visit by representatives of a Hindu religious ­organisation" (London Times).

The Hindu group is BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, which, we are told, "is close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling conservative Hindu nationalist party."

Who owns and operates the Eiffel Tower? You might wonder: Isn't it the French government? It is the government of the City of Paris, operating through a public company called the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel. The Hindu group asked the Society of Exploitation to limit its interaction with women, and the Society told its female employees to make themselves invisible.

ADDED: Here's a gift link to the NYT article on this story. Excerpt: