September 18, 2024
"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."
"So you can have people who attempt to gesticulate. Again, modern politicians, you’ll see this sometime where they feel like, 'I’m supposed to be making hand gestures'..."
"... and they’re terrible at it. And it undercuts it. Cicero and Quintilian give some very amusing examples from ancient Rome. He says, there was this one guy who when he spoke, looked like he was trying to swat away flies because there were just these awkward gestures. Or another who looked like he was trying balancing a boat in choppy seas. And my favorite is there was one orator who supposedly was prone to making, I guess, languid supple motions. They actually named a dance after this guy, and his name was Titius. And so Romans could do the Titius, which is this dance that was imitating this orator who had these comically bad gesticulation...."
From "Transcript for Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443"
The segment on gestures begins here. Or watch the video:
How does this go on for 16 years?
The crimes Combs and his associates are accused of committing and covering up include sex trafficking, narcotics distribution, arson and kidnapping. Many of these alleged crimes took place at illegal sex parties that Combs referred to as “freak offs.” During these parties, Combs allegedly threw objects at the victims and dragged them by their hair.
"Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral controversies over whether emotional-support animals belong on airplanes..."
From "Is Culture Dying? The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that 'deculturation' is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences." The article, by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker, reviews Oliver Roy's book "The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms."
September 17, 2024
"Hundreds of pagers blew up at the same time across Lebanon on Tuesday in an apparently coordinated attack that killed eight people and injured more than 2,700..."
"Hamas’s reasoning is simple — winning simply means surviving and, at least for now, the group has managed to do that..."
"Hamas Is Surviving War With Israel. Now It Hopes to Thrive in Gaza Again. Khaled Meshal, one of Hamas’s most senior officials, said in an interview that the militant group expects to play a decisive role in the enclave when the war is over" (NYT).
"And, sadly, the press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should. They careen from one outrage to the next...."
From "Hillary Clinton: I Don't Get 'Why It's So Difficult For The Press To Have A Consistent Narrative About How Dangerous Trump Is'" (Real Clear Politics, with video from the Rachel Maddow show).
"Of the many recent failures of the American left, one of the greatest is making entry-level battle-of-the-sexes humor seem avant-garde."
That's a free-access link, because there's a lot going on in that article, beyond what I chose to excerpt.
How to argue that Trump is responsible for attracting assassins without catching hell for blaming the victim.
So I'll choose one piece, on the chance that it might go a bit deeper. It's by Peter Baker in the NYT and the title suggests some sobriety and moderation: "Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence/The latest apparent assassination attempt against the former president indicates how much the American political landscape has been shaped by anger stirred by him and against him."
At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed....
Mr. Trump’s critics have at times employed the language of violence as well, though not as extensively and repeatedly at the highest levels. The former president’s allies distributed a video compilation online of various Trump opponents saying they would like to punch him in the face or the like. Some of the more extreme voices on social media in the past day have mocked or minimized the close call at the Florida golf course. Mr. Trump’s allies often decry what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome, the notion that his critics despise him so much they have lost their minds.
Anger, of course, has long been the animating force of Mr. Trump’s time in politics — both the anger he stirs among supporters against his rivals and the anger that he generates among opponents who come to loathe him....
"A liverwurst sandwich with mustard is quite possibly the perfect lunch for me. It tastes somewhere between bologna and bacon."
We'll all be on our best behavior, because — with cameras everywhere, monitored by AI — we'll all be supervised.
Watch the whole Q&A session here.Oracle's Larry Ellison says a surveillance system of police body cams, cameras on cars and autonomous drones, all monitored by AI, will constantly record and report on police and citizens, leading everyone to be on their best behavior pic.twitter.com/RAq5XGaNmZ
— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) September 15, 2024
September 16, 2024
Who wrote this headline?! What would taking it to 11 mean in this context?
The influence of the phrase "up to eleven" is such that it has been used outside of music; in 2016, for example, astronomer Krzysztof Stanek described the then brightest-known object in the universe, ASASSN-15lh, as being "as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11".
Kamala Harris sounds so weary of all those people in Pennsylvania. Does she even want to be President?
Please watch the TikTok video I've put at the bottom of this post, after the jump, or you can also go here, for YouTube video (begin at 1:06). Alternatively, read the text.
But you won't get the point from the cold text, so I'll have to ask you to imagine a first rate actress reading the lines in the role of a woman who can barely cover up that she's really had it with being carted around to these bullshit nothing places with their tedious needy people:
"I am feeling very good about Pennsylvania, because there are a lot of people in Pennsylvania who deserve to be seen and heard. That's why I'm here in Johnstown, and I will be continuing to travel around the state to make sure that I'm listening as much as we are talking and, ultimately, I feel very strongly that I've got to earn every vote, and that means spending time with folks in the communities where they live, and so that's why I'm here. We're going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania."
Harris was speaking at a bookstore in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Can you put your usual partisanship to the side and genuinely empathize with her as human being?