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Treason talk.

Let's look back before this week, to "treason" as it has appeared within the lifetime of this blog. In chronological order:

April 27, 2005: Discussing the "blood" metaphor in constitutional law, I quoted Article III: "The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

May 28, 2006: I wrote about the protest singer Phil Ochs declaring the Vietnam War over:

So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

July 1, 2006: "The editors of The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times explain how they decide when to publish a secret... Baquet and Keller have written a lengthy defense of their behavior, behavior that they know has been severely criticized, even called 'treason.'"

September 20, 2006: "To me, that's treason. I call it treason against rock-and-roll, because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics," said Alice Cooper, indicting rock stars who were telling people to vote for John Kerry.

August 3, 2007: Markos Moulitsas says that in 2002, "Dissent against the president was considered treason."

August 11, 2007: A 9/11 truther criticizes me for declining to debate him, which he took to mean that I know I'm "complicit in covering up mass murder and high treason."

May 12, 2008: A scholar assures us that the Muslim world would view Obama, the son of a Muslim father, as guilty of apostasy, which has "connotations of rebellion and treason," which is considered "worse than murder."

September 12, 2011: I'm live-blogging a debate in which "treason" is thrown around casually: "Perry stands by his 'almost treasonous' remark, referring to the use of the Federal Reserve for political purposes... Huntsman accuses Perry of treason for saying we can't secure the border."

May 8, 2012: "Isn't it funny, this 'treason' incident?" Mitt Romney, running for President, failed to chide a woman who asked whether Obama should be tried for treason. I brought up (as I did today), the 1964 book "None Dare Call It Treason." I also quoted the casual use of "treason" by Chief Justice John Marshall  Cohens v. Virginia to refer to doing something unconstitutional. ("We have no more right to decline the exercise of jurisdiction which is given than to usurp that which is not given. The one or the other would be treason to the Constitution.") And a commenter brought up an even more venerable use of the word, Patrick Henry's "If this be treason, make the most of it." That made me say: "The country was founded on treason. We celebrate the treason we like."

Also on May 8, 2012: "Obama supporters who express outrage over the use of the word 'treason' seem to think the word means nothing but to the crime defined in law — as if the woman Romney talked to wanted Obama tried and executed. It's as if people who say 'property is theft' are freakishly insisting that property owners be prosecuted for larceny. Think of all the words we use that have more specific legal meanings that do not apply: This job is murder... The rape of the land... Slave to love..."

June 17, 2013: Edward Snowden explains why he left the country: " [T]he US Government... immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it."

July 26, 2013: From a post about the death penalty: "Here's the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which found the death penalty for rape (even rape of a child) to be unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. No one has been executed in the U.S. for a crime other than murder since the 1960s, though the Kennedy case leaves open the possibility of capital punishment 'for other non-homicide crimes, ranging from drug-trafficking to treason.'"

April 22, 2014 : Above the Law had hyperventilated, "Justice Scalia Literally Encourages People To Commit Treason," and I punctured it, saying Scalia was just giving his usual speech about the Constitution, which is always subject to the right of revolution explained in the Declaration of Independence. I bring up Patrick Henry's "If this be treason, make the most of it."

February 23, 2015: "'Edward Snowden couldn't be here for some treason,' said Neil Patrick Harris, the Oscars host, when the documentary about him won an award." I said: "I liked the joke, because of its language precision and because it seemed at least a tad risky in the context of Hollywood celebrating itself."

February 29, 2016: Trump hesitated to "unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election" after Duke it would be "treason to your heritage" for a white person not to vote for Trump.

October 14, 2016: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree," said Ezra Pound, who was charged with treason in WWII. He was disaffected after WWI, moved to Italy, felt inspired by Mussolini, and went on the radio criticizing the U.S., FDR, and the Jews.

December 21, 2016: I quoted the official course description for "The Problem of Whiteness," a course offered in the African Cultural Studies department of my university, the University of Wisconsin–Madison: "In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor’s motto, 'treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.'"

January 16, 2017: I quote someone talking about Chelsea Manning: "He is a member of the military who knowingly committed treason. His, or her, gender status has nothing to do with his conviction for treason."

February 10, 2017: I quoted Trump (before his election) talking about Edward Snowden: "I think he's a total traitor and I would deal with him harshly," "And if I were president, Putin would give him over," and "Snowden is a spy who should be executed." I wondered: "But maybe you think Trump will end up looking good forefronting the iniquity of treason."

February 7, 2018: Trump had used the word "treasonous" to describe the Democrats who didn't applaud during his State of the Union Address. Yeah, it was a joke, but: "He's President and in the position of enforcing the law, and from that position punching down. He really should not be joking about treason. And I get that he's punching back, and that's his style. But people aren't just idiots if they feel afraid of a President who isn't continually assuring us that he's aware of his profound responsibilities."

April 17, 2018: I quoted Neil Gorsuch, concurring — and voting with the liberals ‚ in a case about immigration: "Vague laws invite arbitrary power. Before the Revolu­tion, the crime of treason in English law was so capa­ciously construed that the mere expression of disfavored opinions could invite transportation or death. The founders cited the crown’s abuse of 'pretended' crimes like this as one of their reasons for revolution. See Declaration of Independence ¶21."

May 4, 2018: A conservative commentator sarcastically said he was "waiting for the Left to scream treason" over John Kerry's "quiet play to save Iran deal with foreign leaders."

July 17, 2017: I quoted Byron York: "Would it have been appropriate for the Trump campaign to try to find the [Clinton] emails?... What if an intelligence operative from a friendly country got them and offered them? And what about an unfriendly country? Would there be a scale, from standard oppo research on one end to treason on the other, depending on how the emails were acquired?"

"I will live my life very carefully from now on, to thank everyone."

Said Ekapol Chanthawong, the assistant coach who was rescued, along with the 12 soccer-playing boys, from the cave in Thailand, quoted in "Thai soccer players and coach speak publicly for first time since their rescue from flooded cave" (WaPo).

Also:

The Thai navy SEALs who stayed with the lost team until the rescue said Wednesday that they worked to keep the boys’ spirits up and ensure they were in good health. Wearing hats and sunglasses — Thai SEALs are not identified due to the nature of their work — they said they gave the boys high-protein rations and played chess with them to pass the time.

The SEALs used food as motivation, reminding the boys of all the treats that awaited them when they returned home....

“They were like my brothers, like my family,” Ekapol said of the SEALs. “We ate together, and we slept together.”

I was surprised to see overt support for Trump on the UW campus today.

Parked very conspicuously, by the lake trail:



But I hear some very quiet expressions of support here and there. It is so socially unacceptable in Madison that it means a lot to hear or see any at all.

"Daily Show host Trevor Noah is accused of racism after joking that 'Africa won the World Cup' because most of the France team players are black."

The Daily Mail reports (with a clip showing the comic riff: "Africa won the World Cup. I get it, they have to say it's the French team. But look at those guys. You don't get that tan by hanging out in the south of France, my friends").

French former reality TV star Martin Medus... said: 'You're a f****** racist. Those people are French and p***** to always be reminded of their background. They fight hard to tell people they are proud French people and yet you disrespect them calling them African. Are the Lakers an African team?'

Elise Frank added: 'So basically, Trevor, all the African-Americans in the US are just Africans, right? Know that as a french of Algerian, German and Spanish descent, I find it insulting. We are all french, we are one people. Ask the players,they'll tell you they're proud frenchmen!'

One man said: 'This is so racist to think that because they are black they are not French. They claimed their love of France. You denied them the right to be French? Is this what you want to deliver to all afro americans also? 98% of the players were born in France. Only two players were born in Africa, but they came at the age of two. So they've grown up in France.'

The All-Star Game was not a good event for the Milwaukee Brewers.

I didn't watch the game. I don't like the All-Star Game, so I only checked out the National Anthem and left. I prefer normal games, but I was interested enough to see how the Brewers performed. I found this in WaPo:

Racist, homophobic and misogynistic tweets that Milwaukee Brewers reliever Josh Hader sent in 2011 and 2012 surfaced as he pitched in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game at Nationals Park, turning his appearance into an embarrassing stain for Hader and a public-relations nightmare for Major League Baseball.

After Hader surrendered a three-run homer in the eighth inning, several Twitter users — starting, it seems, with an account named MLB Insider Dinger — found and retweeted messages Hader sent as a 17-year-old. The tweets included numerous uses of the n-word and an allusion to “white power” next to an emoji of a closed fist. One tweet read only, “I hate gay people.” Another referenced wanting women only for sex, cooking and cleaning....

Hader discovered that the tweets had surfaced after he exited the game.... When the National League clubhouse opened to media, Hader was standing alone at his locker, his blond hair pulled into a bun. Reporters surrounded him. A public-relations official asked reporters to wait. Another PR man said to the other: “Give it a second. We got a couple more [reporters] coming. We got a bunch more.”...

Before the game ended, Hader had deleted his old tweets and locked his account. He said he would accept any suspension or punishment.... “I’m ready for any consequences for what happened seven years ago,” he said. “Like I said before, I was young, immature and stupid. There’s no excuses for what was said or what happened.”...

The weird thing is that those old tweets hadn't been deleted before last night. Really, that's inexplicable. The team's management is inept not to notice and attend to that sort of thing. It took giving up a 3-run homer in the All-Star Game to get anyone interested enough to look into his social media. It's some kind of measure of how unimportant and important social media is. What a screw-up!

"The reaction by most of the media, by the Democrats, by the anti-Trump people is like mob violence. I've never seen anything like it in my life."

"This is the president of the United States, doing what every president... since FDR in 1943 with Stalin, meeting with the head of the Kremlin. And every president since Eisenhower, a Republican by the way, has met with the leader of the Kremlin for one existential purpose: To avoid war between the two nuclear superpowers. Today, in my considered, scholarly, long-time judgment, relations between the U.S. and Russia are more dangerous than they have ever — let me repeat, ever — been, including the Cuban missile crisis. I want my president to do -- I didn't vote for this president-- but I want my president to do what every other president has done. Sit with the head of the other nuclear superpower and walk back the conflicts that could lead to war, whether they be in Syria, Ukraine, in the Baltic nations, in these accusations of cyber attacks. Every president has been encouraged to do that an applauded by both parties. Not Trump. Look what they did to him today. They had a kangaroo court. They found him guilty. And then you had the former head of the U.S. CIA, who himself ought to be put under oath and asked about his role in inventing Russiagate, calling the President of the United States treasonous. What have we come to in this country? And what is going to happen in the future?"

Said NYU Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen (speaking on Tucker Carlson's show Monday).

Cohen is a contributing editor at The Nation, a left-leaning publication. In the interview, he said to  Carlson, "Let me ask you a question, you know D.C., why do these people dislike Putin, the president of post-communist Russia more than they ever seemed to dislike the communist leaders?" Carlson just repeated the question, and Cohen said "There is an answer but we'd need a lot more time and a psychiatrist."

Note: The transcript at the Real Clear Politics link was full of little errors. I watched the video (embedded there) and have corrected the text. Nothing substantive.

ADDED: In a similar vein, there's Rand Paul:

You know, I think engagement with our adversaries, conversation with our adversaries is a good idea. Even in the height of the Cold War, maybe at the lowest ebb when we were in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, I think it was a good thing that Kennedy had a direct line to Khrushchev. I think it was a good thing that we continue to have ambassadors to Russia even when we really objected greatly to what was going on, even during Stalin’s regime.

So, I think that it is a good idea to have engagement. And I think that what is lost in this is that I think there's a bit of Trump derangement syndrome. I think there are people who hate the president so much that this could have easily been President Obama early in his first administration setting the reset button and trying to have better relations with Russia, and I think it's lost on people that they're a nuclear power. They have influence in Syria. They're in close proximity to the troops in Syria. They are close to the peninsula of North Korea and may have some influence that could help us there....

"How Trump Withstands So Many Controversies... The word 'treason' is being thrown around..."

"... to describe how President Trump seemed to take Russia’s side during his summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. But as with every major controversy that Mr. Trump has faced, it’s unclear if anything will happen as a result."

An excellent topic, well-explored on the NYT "Daily" podcast with Michael Barbaro. I recommend listening to the whole thing. There's no transcript, but from the notes on the show:

Under fire for contradicting United States intelligence reports of Russian interference in the presidential election, Mr. Trump asserted on Tuesday that he had misspoken at his news conference with Mr. Putin, and that he had meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,” rather than “would.” He added, “Could be other people, also.”

Never in the modern era has the word “treason” become part of the national conversation in such a prominent way. Some of those who voted for Mr. Trump struggled to endorse his approach, but many are reaffirming their support.

On the subject of the prominence of the term "treason," there's a link to an article from yesterday that says:

[John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director... called [Trump's] performance “nothing short of treasonous.” The late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel also invoked treason on their shows. The front-page banner headline for The New York Daily News declared “OPEN TREASON.”

Max Boot, the former Republican who has become one of Mr. Trump’s sharpest critics, noted in a column on Monday in The Washington Post that accusing him of treason was once unthinkable. No longer....

Mr. Trump returned to the White House on Monday night as protesters outside the gate shouted, “Welcome home, traitor.” Even Dictionary.com trolled the president, tweeting out a definition: “Traitor: A person who commits treason by betraying his or her country.”

It later said that searches for “treason” had increased by 2,943 percent. By Tuesday afternoon, the word “traitor” had been used on Twitter 800,000 times and the word “treason” about 1.2 million times....

When I hear "treason" used in political discourse like that, my mind drifts back to 1964 and the rise of Barry Goldwater. One of the key books of that time was "None Dare Call It Treason." I look it up, and what they hell? The first hit is the NYT obituary for its author, dated yesterday!

John A. Stormer, whose self-published 1964 book, “None Dare Call It Treason,” became a right-wing favorite despite being attacked as inaccurate in promulgating the notion that American government and institutions were full of Communist sympathizers, died on July 10 in Troy, Mo. He was 90....

Communists, Mr. Stormer wrote, were bent on infiltrating the American government and had largely succeeded, as evidenced by American and United Nations economic support for Communist countries.

“The Communists have sworn to bury us,” Mr. Stormer wrote. “We are digging our own graves.... From where has the money come to build and finance the vast collectivist underground which reaches its tentacles into education, the churches, labor and the press?” he asked. “Amazingly, the fortunes of America’s most successful tycoons, dedicated by them to the good of mankind, have been redirected to finance the socialization of the United States.”

That was the deployment of the word "treason" that went big in the 60s. People who were not right-wing, of course, viewed it as anti-communist hysteria, a throwback to the McCarthy era, and that's the way I've seen the word "treason" all this time. But John Brennan threw it back into the American discourse and the Trump antagonists have run with it. Nothing else has worked to stop Trump, so why not crack open this 100-foot long gushing fissure?



IN THE COMMENTS: Robert Cook writes:

It's really outrageous and alarming, this tsunami of people shouting "treason" at Trump for...what? Because he disputes our intelligence agencies? That does not fit the definition of treason. And besides, fuck our intelligence agencies!

This must be a coordinated effort to drown Trump in shit to the point where he can't move or speak, where he is immobilized. I don't say this as a fan of Trump--I think he's terrible in just about every way--but to recognize that there are powerful forces who will do whatever they must to stop any president from pursuing courses of action that they do not approve of. The Military/Industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us of, by whatever name it should be known now, is more powerful than ever, and sees itself as sovereign over us all. Those who hate Trump may cheer this now, but they will cry when the same tactics are used by these forces to paralyze the efforts of a president whom they do support.

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." Thomas Paine

"Manning up and womaning down: How husbands and wives report their earnings when she earns more" — a study from the U.S. Census Bureau.

"Do gendered social norms influence survey reports of 'objective' economic outcomes? This paper compares the earnings reported for husbands and wives in the Current Population Survey with their 'true' earnings from administrative income-tax records. Estimates from OLS regressions show that survey respondents react to violations of the norm that husbands earn more than their wives by inflating their reports of husbands’ earnings and deflating their reports of wives’ earnings. On average, the gap between a husband’s survey and administrative earnings is 2.9 percentage points higher if his wife earns more than he does, and the gap between a wife’s survey and administrative earnings in 1.5 percentage points lower if she earns more than her husband does. These findings suggest that gendered social norms can influence survey reports of seemingly objective outcomes and that their impact may be heterogeneous not just between genders but also within gender."

By Marta Murray-Close and Misty Heggeness, "not necessarily represent[ing] the views of the U.S. Census Bureau." I don't like the government nosing into the psychology of marriages.

I'm seeing that because it's discussed in "When Wives Earn More Than Husbands, Neither Partner Likes to Admit It/Deceiving the census: New research suggests that social attitudes are lagging behind both workplace progress and how people actually live their lives" (NYT). From the Times article:

Marriage therapists say marriages can become shakier when women earn more than men if men feel insecure or women lose respect for them. Economists say it’s one reason the loss of working-class jobs for men has led to such discontent — and to fewer marriages.

“Blokes are threatened by wives who earn more, which surprises nobody but is interesting that you can actually find it in the data,” said Justin Wolfers, who studies the economics of the family at the University of Michigan....

Blokes....

“When the gender norm is violated, there is some compensating behavior to try to undo some of the utility loss experienced by the husband,” said Marianne Bertrand, an author of the study and an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

From the comments at the NYT, this is the second-highest rated:

This is the most important article in the newspaper today, not the clown's antics. The crisis in masculinity, the failure to acknowledge, understand, or find comfort in women entering the workforce since the 1970s, is what got the clown elected in the first place, and is what drives rightist politics. See Krugman today on the ideology of right-wing politicians despite what their constituents vote for or want. The desperation to recover masculinity in its older forms drove men and women of Germany to embrace someone who promised to lead them out of the humiliations of WWI. We face not a culture war as a distraction, but as the driving force. See Edsall on this topic in his recent post. See gun advertisements promising a purchase of manhood, as if the symbolism weren't enough.

"Well, I love Apu. I love the character, and it makes me feel bad that it makes other people feel bad."

"But on the other hand, it’s tainted now — the conversation, there’s no nuance to the conversation now. It seems very, very clunky. I love the character. I love the show.

Said Matt Groening, the creator of "The Simpsons," talking to the NYT about the character who seems to many people to be too much of an ethnic stereotype. What's he supposed to do about the problem?

We’re not sure exactly how it’s going to play out. Back in the day, I named the character after the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray. 

When I was young, back in the day, educated people got the message there were certain films you needed to know and ought to see if you ever got the chance. This was back at a time when you had to keep an eye on the movies that were showing at some "art house" movie theater and arrange your schedule to prioritize important movies. These days, it's so easy to see anything you want to see that you can put it off for ever, and maybe people just stopped applying pressure on each other to see the great classics when it was no longer necessary to remain vigilant in case, say, "Pather Panchali" played anywhere near you.

In short, the name "Apu" can no longer carry the message Groening may once have thought it contained:

I love Indian culture and Indian film and Indian music. I thought that the name was a signal that we had, at least, a scholarly intention. 

A scholarly intention!

I thought maybe a kid was going to grow up and find out what the name came from and go watch the Apu Trilogy, which are the greatest films, basically, in the history of cinema.

Or a kid would grow up, notice the films and laugh at the name because of "The Simpsons" and move on.

The Times questions Groening about his statement that "people love to pretend they’re offended"?

That wasn’t specifically about Apu. That was about our culture in general.

Yikes. Be careful, Matt, you might step on the anti-Trump hysteria that's raging this week (and every week).

And that’s something I’ve noticed for the last 25 years. There is the outrage of the week and it comes and goes....

But did Groening mean to say the Apu critics weren't sincere? Asked, Groening quickly credits them with sincerity and volunteers that he agrees "politically, with 99 percent of the things" they believe. He repeats that he loves Apu and shifts the blame onto all the other shows for not having an Indian character.

It's so much easier to avoid criticism by just not doing the thing that somebody might say you're doing wrong.

ADDED: Compare Groening to Roseanne Barr, who, speaking only for herself and being carelessly expressive, brought destruction to work that hundreds of people were participating in. Groening is, I am guessing, thinking of preserving not only his work but an entire workplace. He needs to be careful, even if that carefulness is the opposite of what makes comedy great, what got him where he is. And now, I'm back to wanting to talk about Trump again. Why doesn't he look at what's happening and tone it way down to save the show?

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Trump says he just botched a double negative.

"Under unrelenting pressure from congressional Republicans, his own advisers and his allies on Fox News, President Trump abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and claimed he had misspoken during a news conference with President Vladimir V. Putin about whether Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Trump, reading from a script, said he believed the assessment of the nation’s intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the campaign after having seeming to have accepted Mr. Putin’s assertion the day before that Russia was not involved. The misunderstanding, he said, grew out of an unsuccessful attempt to use a double negative when he answered a question about whether he believed Mr. Putin or his intelligence agencies. 'My people came to me,' he said in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday. 'They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.' On Tuesday he said that he had misspoken. 'The sentence should have been, "I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia," sort of a double negative,' the president said. 'So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good.'"

The NYT reports.

Are you buying the double negative theory?

I believe it.

I can't believe it.

I can't not disbelieve it.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Most Science-fiction missed the most important thing in the world, which is the internet itself. They had flying cars. They had rocket ships. None of that exists..."

"... but the internet governs our lives today. It used to be that when you communicated with someone, the person you were communicating with was as important as the information; Now on the internet, the person is unimportant at all. Becoming your own filter will be the challenge of the future. Will our children's children's children need the companionship of humans - or will they have evolved in a world where that's not important? It sounds awful doesn't it? But maybe it will be fine, and the companionship of robots and an intelligent internet will be sufficient. Who am I to say?"

Says Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist, at the end of the Werner Herzog documentary, "Lo and Behold/Reveries of a Connected World."

These are the last spoken words in the film, which then ends with some scientists outdoors playing guitar/banjo/fiddle and singing the old song "Salty Dog." I can see there's a Johnny Cash version of this song and a Flatt & Scruggs, but the version I've known for half a century is by Mississippi John Hurt.

Flatt & Scruggs sing, "Let me be your salty dog or I won't be your man at all," and so does Johnny Cash, but Mississippi John Hurt sings "Let me be your salty dog/I don't want to be your man at all." It makes a difference! Ah, here's the whole script for the movie, and it gives the lyrics: "Let me be your salty dog/I won't be your man at all." That makes a difference too — a difference that affects what I want to say. But let me try anyway.

The movie not only talks about the loss of humanity on the internet (as the last spoken words show), it includes the famous cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" (showing an actual dog using the internet). You see where I'm going with this. The film ends with the spoken idea that maybe in the future people won't need the companionship of another human, and then you get the sung lyric of an offer of companionship that excludes being an man. The singer wants to be your dog and not your man. In one way, very literally, it reinforces the Krauss + New Yorker cartoon idea of evolving away from real touch with another person.

But because of the way we suddenly see and hear live human beings together playing and singing, we are roused into feeling that nothing could be more important than getting together with other people in the flesh. It's the very last thing in the movie, number one. Secondly, these men are obviously vitally alive and enjoying their immediately company. Thirdly, they are singing an enthusiastic plea for physical love from the "you" whose salty dog they are begging to be. I feel certain the film's final send off is a message to hold onto your humanity.

And yet that message is complicated by the old line about not wanting to be a man at all. Even before we got abstracted into the bodiless world of the internet, there were songs expressing an intense desire to escape being a man. But that was in the opposite direction from abstraction and into the role of dog. It was a desire to be even more intensely in the fleshly, embodied world.

"Salty Dog" is an old song, not to be confused with "Salty Dog" by Procol Harum (which is about sailors). The idea of being your dog has been around for a long time. Here's "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges:



Also, for those who've followed the story of Althouse and Meade, there's the line "We want to BE your dog."

"There have always been two parts to the Trump-Russia probe: the what-Russia-did part... and the get-Trump part...."

"Trump's problem is that he has always refused, or been unable, to separate the two. One is about national security and international relations, while the other is about Donald Trump. The president clearly believes if he gives an inch on the what-Russia-did part — if he concedes that Russia made an effort to disrupt the election — his adversaries, who want to discredit his election, undermine him, and force him from office, will take a mile on the get-Trump part. That's consistent with how Trump approaches other problems; he doesn't admit anything, because he knows his adversaries will never be satisfied and just demand more."

Writes Byron York at The Washington Examiner.

"I think I was so taken by how the Orioles played because it was different—Earl’s philosophy was effectively countercultural at a time when many teams..."

"... especially in the National League, placed great emphasis on the running game, on bunting men over—on scratching a single run from an infield single, a stolen base, a bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Earl thought that required too many things to go right for a maximum reward of a single run. He preferred to encourage his hitters to work the count, to take walks, and then, with a man or two on base, swing for the fences. If you followed that strategy, he believed, you had a far better chance of putting three runs on the board than the run-scratchers had of putting up a singleton.... In my instinctive contrarianism I grew deeply attached to this way of playing baseball, so you can easily imagine how I felt when, in my twenties, I started reading... Bill James’s Baseball Abstract. For James’s early and profoundly influential exercises in sabermetrics... proved pretty conclusively that Earl was right all along, and those guys scrabbling for one run at a time were just chasing a losing hand. I felt vindicated, and even more so as the years went by and sabermetrics grew more detailed and sophisticated. Earl Weaver was in a way the patron saint of sabermetrics, and I was happy to bask in the reflection of his glory. What makes this a problem is that, as boxing fans have always known, styles make fights. What made Earl’s Way so fascinating all those years ago was its distinctiveness; and that’s what made the arguments among fans fun too. As fascinating as the sabermetrics revolution in baseball has been—and I cheered it on for decades, following James and the other pioneers with passionate intensity—the comprehensiveness of its victory has simply made baseball less enjoyable to watch, for me anyway. Strangely enough, baseball was better when we knew less about the most effective way to play it...."

Writes Alan Jacobs in "Giving Up On Baseball" (Weekly Standard).

And there's the trouble with rationality, in a nutshell. At some point, you may ask yourself, why bother at all? And the rational answer is: Don't bother! The whole wonderful, fascinating thing was irrational, and if it's going to be rational, what's to love?

Now, this makes me think of a scene in the Werner Herzog documentary "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World," in which we see robots programmed to play soccer:



If you watched that to the end — and maybe you didn't, because robots playing soccer... why bother? — you heard Herzog ask the young man holding one of the robots, "Do you love it?," and the man answered yes. So is the perfectly rational thing lovable? Well, the man loves the robot he's making. But he's experimenting and creating. He's not just a spectator. And I'm watching a Werner Herzog documentary because I love things like the moment when he gets the scientist to experience awareness of his love and to express it.

"Drought Reveals Giant, 4,500-Year-Old Irish Henge."

"The circular structure in the Boyne Valley was discovered by drone photographers searching for signs of hidden Neolithic sites" (Smithsonian).

So why do these ancient structures stand out during times of drought? The henges are actually a series of concentric circles created by placing large posts in the ground. When the henge fell out of disuse or was burned down, the underground portions of the posts rotted away, changing the composition of the soil in the posthole, causing it to retain more moisture. During a drought, while the surrounding crops yellow, the plants over the post holes have a slight advantage. “The weather is 95 percent responsible for this find,” Murphy tells Best. “The flying of the drone, knowledge of the area, and fluke make up the rest in this discovery.”

"An animated political video featured in The New York Times’ opinion section has sparked outrage among a number of leaders and advocates in the LGBTQ community."

"The short cartoon depicts U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as gay paramours — a trope used numerous times by comedians and satirists seeking to mock the relationship between the two leaders," NBC newsplains.

“Trump and Putin: A Love Story” is part of a three-video series titled “Trump Bites,” which was animated by Oscar-nominated animator Bill Plympton and produced by Billy Shebar and David Roberts. In The New York Times article accompanying the video, which was posted on the Times website in late June, the creators said the series is a “riff on Mr. Trump’s absurd utterances to illustrate the president’s tumultuous inner life of paranoia, narcissism and xenophobia.”

In this episode of Trump Bites, Donald Trump’s not-so-secret admiration for Vladimir Putin plays out in a teenager’s bedroom, where the fantasies of this forbidden romance come to life. https://t.co/h5gpVJzj69 pic.twitter.com/f4aBEOfRYt

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) July 16, 2018

Bill Plympton has been around a long time. He's most famous (to me anyway) for "How to Kiss" (and his Trump + Putin video uses the same humor of making kissing grotesque and ridiculous):

"Nevada’s legal brothels, hailed as safe, benign, and desirable, work as a propaganda machine for the illicit Vegas sex trade."

"From the ads for escorts on hotel key cards, to the young men out on the streets handing out cards with promises of 'A girl to your room faster than a pizza,' as well as women visibly plying the trade both on the streets and in hotel lobbies, illegal prostitution flourishes in Las Vegas—to the extent that many johns have no idea that the business isn’t legal in Vegas. There is big money to be made there from sex tourism, and as with any illegal activity, there are links with police corruption.... In the [HBO reality] show Cathouse, supposedly a fly-on-the-wall depiction of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, one of Hof’s brothels, the women appear liberated and happy in their work. They tell viewers that this is simply a job like any other; the clients are lovely, and living in a brothel with other women is akin to a permanent pajama party. But my research suggests that life for the women in Nevada brothels bears little resemblance to this rosy picture...."

From "A Ballot on the Brothels of Nevada" (New York Review of Books).

"Was it some rigging of facts? Was it some forgery of facts?... Any false information planted? No. It wasn't."

"They hacked a certain email account and there was information about manipulations conducted within the Democratic Party to incline the process in favor of one candidate. And as far as I know, the entire party leadership resigned. That manipulation is where public opinion should stop, and an apology should be made to the public at large instead of looking for the responsible – the party at fault."

Said Vladimir Putin (in an interview with Chris Wallace).

ADDED: The whole interview:

Nonhuman animals too fall for the "sunk cost" fallacy.

"In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, investigators at the University of Minnesota reported that mice and rats were just as likely as humans to be influenced by sunk costs" (NYT).

“Whatever is going on in the humans is also going on in the nonhuman animals,” said A. David Redish, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and an author of the study....

“Evolution by natural selection would not promote any behavior unless it had some — perhaps obscure — net overall benefit,” said Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who praised the new study as “rigorous” in its methodology and “well designed.”

“If everybody does it, the reasoning goes, there must be a reason,” Dr. Kacelnik said.

Smart-ass reaction: Scientists have sunk costs in the theory of evolution.

Evolution-centered response: It doesn't matter that individuals suffer and die, only that some reproduced. If individuals realize that it's in their interest to be aware of the "sunk cost" problem as they decide what to do, it might help them live better lives for themselves, individually, but will they have a long line of descendants? The ultimate in a sunk cost is your own progeny.