Althouse: At the Trout Lily Café...

April 21, 2025

At the Trout Lily Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

35 comments:

Narr said...: I get emails from the campus almost every day, but today may have been a first. A lot of the emails concern flying the flag at half-mast in honor of dead ex-governors or legislators, state troopers who die in the line of duty, and when remains of TN soldiers are discovered and returned.

I don't think I've ever seen it done for dead popes, and I have to wonder why a secular state institution needs to.; 4/21/25, 7:30 PM
Political Junkie said...: Who has/had a better career: Mike Trout or Lily Tomlin? Discuss.; 4/21/25, 7:32 PM
Iman said...: “Trout Mask Replica”, Captain Beefheart: a creative, groundbreaking album?

Or the musings of a madman?; 4/21/25, 7:49 PM
Eva Marie said...: If you have a business (and maybe if you don’t as well) and you have a checking account make sure you’re enlisted in fraud protection service. What that means is that you upload your checks as soon as they are written. The bank only cashes checks that are uploaded and no other checks. If your bank doesn’t have that kind of service then find another bank. This is a VERY expensive lesson I learned today and I would prefer if other people not learn my lesson the way I did.; 4/21/25, 7:59 PM
JZ said...: Is the band Crosby Stills and Nash a shallow, dated example of 70s music, as late art critic Terry Teachout believed?; 4/21/25, 8:01 PM
Gospace said...: The government of Canada sees dystopia in the future.
https://horizons.service.canada.ca/en/2025/01/10/future-lives-social-mobility/index.shtml
Seeing a dystopic future seems to be a liberal thing- on the American liberal/conservative scale. On the Canada/Europe/most-of-the-rest-of-the-world-scale, they're most conservative conservatives are liberals in American terms. Dystopia is built into their policies whenever they get them fully enacted. Starmer is very proud of having jailed >400 subjects (not citizens just as a reminder) for Facebook posts.; 4/21/25, 8:08 PM
Gospace said...: In the event of the death of other officials or foreign dignitaries, the flag is to be displayed at half-staff according to Presidential instructions or orders, or in accordance with recognized customs or practices not inconsistent with law

The Pope would count as a foreign dignitary. 20-25% of the US is at least nominally Catholic. So it would not be inappropriate for the US Flag to be flown at half-staff. personally, were I making the decision it would be done for one day, the day of his funeral. OTOH- I know a lot of Catholics who are, in their words, looking forward to an actual Catholic Pope.; 4/21/25, 8:16 PM
mezzrow said...: @Iman re:Beefheart
embrace the power of "both".; 4/21/25, 8:30 PM
Jersey Fled said...: “ I don't think I've ever seen it done for dead popes, and I have to wonder why a secular state institution needs to.”

The Pope is also a head of state.; 4/21/25, 8:42 PM
Narr said...: Of course the pope is a head of state, and an important figure to many. If there was an order it came from TN governor Lee I think, but I'll go back and recheck.; 4/21/25, 8:52 PM
Kakistocracy said...: Hegseth Faces Heat After New Signal Chat Emerges and Claim of Pentagon ‘Chaos’ ~ WSJ

Once a broadcaster, always a broadcaster……

Text STOP to no longer receive secret US war plans.; 4/21/25, 8:54 PM
wild chicken said...: Eva what happened exactly? I wrote my first check in ages to some junk haulers.; 4/21/25, 8:58 PM
Eva Marie said...: What happened exactly: We are assuming someone got a hold of a check we had mailed to pay for expenses. (We think they got 2 checks) and altered the amount and the payee and the date. They deposited the checks electronically.
The bank payed the checks. The amounts were large but not unusual for our account. Grok tells me the bank will probably reimburse us. (Grok tells me that for personal accounts the reimbursement is almost immediate.) They look like our checks. We should be able to find out which checks were altered by the signature. Each signature is a little bit different. I think for personal accounts the danger is not as great because the banks quickly reimburse their customers. For businesses the process is longer and not as sure although chances are we will be reimbursed.; 4/21/25, 9:15 PM
Jaq said...: We ordered some physical checks and they were stolen at the post office before we ever got them. Then whoever stole them wrote out checks to street people to cash at the bank in person for "labor" in another town a hundred miles away, and the banks cashed them. A detective talked to us and told us that a ring at the post office had already stolen more than $2 million dollars in this way. There are a lot of claims by mail carriers that their keys to the collection boxes were taken from them by armed robbers, but this sounds a little like losing your gun in a boating accident, if you know what I mean.; 4/21/25, 9:16 PM
Jaq said...: We were reimbursed for the business account, but it was a decent day's pay for the check thief, in any event.; 4/21/25, 9:18 PM
Eva Marie said...: What’s frustrating is that they can’t put a hold on the account. We can’t just give them the amounts of the outstanding legitimate checks and I can’t freeze the account and I can’t close it. By the time I finished talking to the banks fraud department my bank was closed. So I don’t know what will happen tonight (banks never sleep. There’s an hour from 11 to midnight when they don’t process checks) although the gentleman at the fraud department said that pending checks can be stopped within 24 hours. So if there’s another check by tommorow’s bank opening we should be able to stop it.; 4/21/25, 9:27 PM
Eva Marie said...: We had this happen once before except that we caught it almost immediately. Someone (we tracked them down - they were in Colorado) submitted an electronic payment for supplies. We gave the information we found to the police and to the bank. I don’t know how the situation was resolved. For that amount (approx $2000) we were reimbursed within 3 days.; 4/21/25, 9:34 PM
FullMoon said...: For what reason was Biden photoshopped into that Easter photo?
Is he dead? What are they hiding, and where and why?; 4/21/25, 9:57 PM
Immanuel Rant said...: Nice pic.; 4/21/25, 10:06 PM
Jim at said...: Somebody line up another rake for Rich to step on after this one hits him between the eyes.

You'd think some people would learn after awhile .... unless they actually like looking like a spoon-fed moron.; 4/21/25, 10:11 PM
Original Mike said...: Criminals suck.; 4/21/25, 10:15 PM
Mary Beth said...: There are a lot of claims by mail carriers that their keys to the collection boxes were taken from them by armed robbers

This has happened in Louisville. At least one of the robberies was on video.; 4/21/25, 10:19 PM
Mr. T. said...: Allan Josephon just won 1.6million against U Louisville for correctly pointing out that child gender mutilation is in fact child gender mutilation.

PedoFredo and Groomer GuitarJoe hit hardest.

Watch too from Readering and Robert Kookie to post some schlock about how this somehow violates the 3rd Amendment.; 4/21/25, 11:12 PM
Disparity of Cult said...: Of course this also happens in Chicago.

https://cwbchicago.com/2025/03/thief-with-postal-service-master-key-stole-mail-from-nw-side-dropbox-twice-in-a-day-prosecutors.html; 4/21/25, 11:12 PM
gadfly said...: “…Hopefully, other public universities will learn from this that if they violate the First Amendment, they can be held accountable, and it can be very expensive,” said Travis Barham, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented former University of Louisville professor, Dr. Allan Josephson.

That is great news for the many foreign students who ICE deported illegally for participating in protests surrounding the Gaza War at NYU and elsewhere with nary a court hearing. What's good for the goose . . .; 4/22/25, 3:12 AM
Kakistocracy said...: 'Trump probably won’t try to force Powell out, because that would be a fantastically dumb thing to do.'

There’s a flaw in this argument somewhere but I just can’t put my finger on it.

As with so many articles on the prospect of a dumb move by Trump, the word "probably" seems to be doing an awful lot of work. Those examining the odds on a Trump decision need to factor in that, in his second term, there really are very few adults in the room to offer sound advice when a dumb idea gets raised.; 4/22/25, 5:51 AM
Rocco said...: Political Junkie said...
“Who has/had a better career: Mike Trout or Lily Tomlin?”

Let’s shake up the question: Mike Tomlin or the trout lily?; 4/22/25, 5:53 AM
Mary Beth said...: That is great news for the many foreign students who ICE deported

It looks like Germany is doing it too. I wonder what country is next.; 4/22/25, 5:54 AM
Ralph L said...: I often dropped off the company deposit on the way home. A homeless man broke into my alarmed car under my carport, took the bag with the slip, and ran while I cursed him in socks. The boss was paranoid he had the account number, so he opened a new account. Quite a mess to straighten that out, as we'd just sent out 30+ checks for thousands each.

I keep a hatchet by the back door now. The night before our Thanksgiving trip last year, I put $100 cash in the covered ashtray, and forgot to lock the car. Someone took it. Do they check every night, or did someone see me with the cash?; 4/22/25, 7:19 AM
Jersey Fled said...: Happy Earth Day.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-were-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/; 4/22/25, 7:30 AM
wendybar said...: Meghan Maureen
@Keggs719
·
34m
The Democrats voted against deporting illegals convicted of sexual assault & are fighting to bring "home" an illegal who is a gang member.

Nice to see them take a break this week from their main focus of aborting babies & letting men in women's sports.; 4/22/25, 7:35 AM
MadTownGuy said...: In Highest Comedy, David Brooks, Arch-Priest of "Elites," Calls for "Civic Uprising"

Yuppies of the world, unite!

By Matt Taibbi

New York Times columnist David Brooks, calling for a “mass civic uprising” against Donald Trump:

We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place… [that] this is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.

You don’t say!

It’s hard to convey the scale of the comedy involved in this article, which received a fair amount of attention. David Brooks in 2000 wrote Bobos in Paradise, a seminal work of aristocratic self-congratulation declaring the epoch of the “Bourgeois Bohemian,” or bobo. “All societies have elites, and our educated elite is a lot more enlightened than some of the other elites,” Brooks quipped. The bobo was a delicious confection in which “You got your countercultural sixties in my high-achieving eighties!” The resulting admixture was part rebel, part establishment pillar whose mere presence would radiate fabulousness. “Wherever we educated elites settle,” Brooks wrote, “we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying.”

The book was a tribute to the superior looks, taste, and romantic strategies of America’s elites, who’d not only won the Cold War but conquered the problem of power itself, by being so chill and amazing that no one would ever think to resent their authority. They wore jeans and sat on purposefully downscale furniture, being utterly casual, unlike previous ruling classes (in one upper-class suburb, “the restaurant La Fourchette has changed its name to the less pretentious Fourchette 110”).

Don’t be fooled, though: underneath that jeans-and-coffee exterior, the Bobo cultivated what the Greeks called metis, loosely equivalent to savoir faire, a type of extrasensory knowing. “This trait cannot be taught or memorized. It can only be imparted and acquired,” Brooks proclaimed, adding: “People sharing metis do not lecture; they converse… To acquire metis, a person must not only see but see with comprehension. He or she must observe minutely to absorb the practical consequences of things…” The yuppie version of the all-seeing Third Eye was a wonder, departing bobos just once — well, twice — in the small matter of populist voter revolts they failed to detect that were fueled by a mass desire to pitchfork them.

Now that it’s happened for a second time, and as treasured tenets of Bobo life like the New York Times wedding announcement page, white shoe law firms, and the Ivy Leagues are under real assault, elites realize they need help. Throwing a “mass civic uprising” isn’t like a Park Avenue cocktail party. You need lots of guests. Like, millions! So serious is he about the need to get this done that Brooks is doing the work, realizing middle America will need first to be talked out of shooting them into space or burning them in a televised auto-de-fe before they’ll sign up, because as he points out, “this is not just defending the establishment.” It’s also something else! But mostly defending the establishment. But that’s good. Really! I’m pretty sure!

As revolutionary manifestoes go, it’s either the funniest of all time, or the most unintentionally touching. You be the judge:; 4/22/25, 7:52 AM
Jaq said...: The funny thing is that once a couple of years ago I tried to use my ATM in the town where the stolen checks were cashed, and the bank put a temporary hold on my account until I called them and verified that it was me. Still they cashed the check even as the bank had already been notified that the checkbook was missing.; 4/22/25, 8:14 AM
Jaq said...: The ruling coalition in Germany just declared the most popular political party in German "extremist" and revoked the gun rights of all members of that party. Their crime? Opposition to the war in Ukraine.

I know people think that this war is some kind of side issue, but it is the central issue of our time. It was behind the impeachment of Donald Trump, it was behind the theft of the election for Joe Biden, political opposition to the war is getting popular politicians arrested across Europe, not to mention places like Pakistan. I strongly suspect that this is why Canada has had a hissy fit over being asked to curb the import of fentanyl through their ports that then easily leaks into the US, and turned it into a major hate fest of Americans, although I think it is really funny now that Canada is getting flooded again with illegal migrants across the border, the one they refused to do anything about, because reasons. The reason being that Trudeau was a card carrying member of the WEF cult, and took orders out of Davos, and Davos doesn't control the Russian Federation or its estimated $72 trillion in resources.; 4/22/25, 8:25 AM
Narr said...: The half-masting for the pope was by order of the president; the governor just passed it along apparently.

Now I wonder if, for instance, Elizabeth II (head of state and of a religious denomination with many American adherents) got the same honor.; 4/22/25, 9:36 AM