"We've seen it since the 1960s.... Police violence lands on this country in a tinderbox fashion."

"And so what is so important for leaders to do in that circumstance is: to obviously lament the lives lost, pledge an independent transparent investigation, and pledge to... seek justice no matter where it leads.... It strikes me that the exact opposite of that is what has occurred. And  immediately after [Renee Good] was killed, she was called into domestic terrorist, very publicly. There are people who then accuse the cop of murder, very publicly, right off the bat. That is pouring gasoline on this situation, and it's horrific.... This incredible rush to judgment results in fixed positions about complicated matters.... And then... there's this assertion, well, this is completely your fault because... when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life. No, no, no, no. That is not what a free society says. We should respect officers... but it is simply not the case that... your right to your life depends on compliance with federal officials.... It's dangerous to drive away from the police. You should not drive away from the police. But under no circumstances is America a country where the command should be obey the men and women in uniform or your life is forfeit. That's not the standard of the United States of America."

Says David French on the new episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast (transcript and audio at Podscribe).

ADDED: If you are questioning the usage in the phrase "or your life is forfeit," know that C.S. Lewis used in in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" (full text at Gutenberg):

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I contemplated whether I was named after Ann Arbor.

My mother grew up in Ann Arbor, I heard about Ann Arbor throughout my childhood, and I went to college in Ann Arbor, but it had never occurred to me that I might have been named after Ann Arbor. The story my mother told me about my name is that they wanted a name that began with the letter A — so I ended up with the initials AAA, straight As — and they wanted something as simple as possible. The second-choice name was Amy, which is also only 3 letters, but it's 2 syllables, so Amy it wasn't. 

I'm also only just now looking into the question whether Ann Arbor was named after someone named Ann. Wikipedia says: 

"In an event that became part of Grateful Dead lore, a 16-year-old Mr. Weir was wandering with a friend in Palo Alto, Calif., on New Year’s Eve 1963 when they heard a banjo playing..."

"... and followed the sound to a music store where Mr. Garcia, five years his elder, was preparing to give lessons. 'We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave,' Mr. Weir later recalled. 'I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.' Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions was the earliest iteration of what would eventually become the Grateful Dead...."

From "Bob Weir, Guitarist and Founding Member of the Grateful Dead, Dies at 78/His songwriting and rhythm guitar playing helped shape the San Francisco band’s sound as it became an American institution" (NYT).

He said this last March: "I look forward to dying. I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived. That’s it."

"For people who make and sell beef tallow, a golden age has dawned. Consumers spent $9.9 million on food-grade beef tallow in 2025...."

"Jars of it landed on the shelves of Costco this year, and big retailers like Walmart and Target sell it. Fat Brothers beef tallow sells for almost $20 for 14 ounces on Amazon, and business is brisk... Jenni Harris is a fifth-generation rancher whose father in the late 1990s transformed their small conventional cattle feeding operation in South Georgia to an organic one where cows are raised on pasture. She remembers a time when they had no market for the fat from the animals they slaughtered. 'We damn near gave it away' she said...."

From "Beef Tallow, Long a Health Pariah, Rises to the Top of the Food Pyramid/The new dietary guidelines give federal approval to a fat that has slowly caught on with consumers, even as doctors have warned against it" (NYT).

Have you made the transition from seed oils to beef tallow? Or do you think butter is tracking the new food pyramid well enough? Or do you think this new fat advice is just crazy?

I'm reading the comments over there, including: "The man is barefoot as he stands next to a vat of hot oil while removing a drippy bird. What can go wrong?" And: "Anyone that works over a vat of 400 degree oil barefoot shouldnt be in charge of anything safety-related be it food, drugs, or healthcare."

They're responding to this photo, which is taken from RFK Jr.'s own social media:

And I like the NYT's correction at the bottom: "An earlier version of this article misstated how much consumers spent on beef tallow in 2025. It was $9.9 million, not $900 million." That's kind of a never mind correction. They wrote this whole article about the hot new business that is beef tallow and then it turned out to be on 1.1% of what they thought it was!

What's worse, the Secretary of Health's risky approach to home cooking or The New York Times's embarrassing and extreme botching of the dollar amount as it conducts its supposedly professional journalism?

And by the way, while RFK's feet deserve some attention, a lot of us are noticing his torso. He's 71 years old, and look at him. And he's eating beef tallow.

"Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the President receives right now."

Elon Musk wants you to know what it will be like 5 years from now.

Elon Musk's jaw-dropping prediction (Jan 2026):

“Don’t go into medical school.”
Elon Musk: “Yes. Pointless.”

In 3 years (2029), Optimus robots will be better surgeons than any human on Earth — at scale.
By 4–5 years? Not even close. The best medicine in the world will be free… pic.twitter.com/q7KTMpICk8

— Camus (@newstart_2024) January 10, 2026

And don't bother with higher education... except for "social reasons."

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: