... you can talk about whatever you want.
I'm not in Moscow, of course, just doing selections from Google Street View.
And here's where I encourage you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.
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July 12, 2017
At the Moscow Café...
... you can talk about whatever you want.
I'm not in Moscow, of course, just doing selections from Google Street View.
And here's where I encourage you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.
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When you wish upon a tsar
Is that "Red Square" actually written on the road in English, or is it something the Google software adds to let you know where in the world you are?
here's a squirrel getting a massage ;-)
sunsong said...
"here's a squirrel getting a massage ;-)"
Ooh! A squirrel!
So... are we sure that squirrel is still alive and hasn't been drugged or paralyzed? Was that video really cute, or future-serial-killer level creepy?
Context and preconceptions matter. One person's innocent email is another person's confession of treason.
Anyone see the David Brooks NYT op-ed piece yesterday on the lack of upward mobility?
Really disappointed (probably not as disappointed as some others) that I didn't see Donald Trump Jr. in any of those pictures carrying a bunch of top secret papers.
You'd think the Soviets would have tried building some wondrous, colorful architecture like the best of Imperial Russia's. Instead they went the opposite way, which made the old regime look so much better. Dumb move.
It is fun watching Chris Wray stay unflappable as the Senate's special clowns use airtime to preen and declare about their own greatness at putting words in the witness's mouth.
He is upholding the best traditions of Atlanta Lawyers. He only says what he wants to say.
brylun said...
Anyone see the David Brooks NYT op-ed piece yesterday on the lack of upward mobility?
The one where
Their chief message is, "You are not welcome here." which works on people who follow the maxim "don't eat anything you can't pronounce"?
Nope, haven't seen the column (fNYT, ya know), but isteve mentioned it.
How about Fake News. Today, I realized I don't really know what Fake News is.
There seem to be three contenders for what Fake News is:
1) Outright lies, unsupported claims, or innuendo, but presented in a serious context. "Bat Boy" was not Fake News, because it was not expected to be believed. The Trump Pee-Gate is an example of this type of Fake News.
2) Claims that, while factual, are so exaggerated or biased as to preclude accurate analysis.
3) News which, while accurate, is about a trivial subject. Trump's tweeting the CNN wrestling video is an example of this, as is most celebrity news.
Blogger Ralph L said...
You'd think the Soviets would have tried building some wondrous, colorful architecture like the best of Imperial Russia's.
They did. Look at the Moscow subways. I don't know if that's on Google view but if it is you're in for a treat.
I saw the Sailer comment, and also the Daily Mail had a story on the restaurant menu piece, but no one has addressed his point about the lack of upward mobility. I think he is correct on this point (university legacy preferences and two-parent investment in kids), but I'm not sure I agree with his conclusion. What does he want us to do, stop investing in our kids/grandkids?
Bad LT, it's bound to be better than the Stalinesque DC Metro. It was probably designed by secret Czarists.
What does he want us to do, stop investing in our kids/grandkids?
Stop self-segregating for one thing. Throw your status-seeking to the wind. Leave the big city. Eat your canned spinach.
brylun said...
but no one has addressed his point about the lack of upward mobility.
That's it's about the same as it was 50 years ago and depends a lot on where you live and don't be a single parent?
DC Metro actually seems pretty grand to me, at least in terms of being roomy, deep, sizable, capacious. Much less close quarters than the New York subways. I say nothing of the art or architecture but they sure do smell of money. Which is to be expected in the Imperial City.
In Moscow they built with marble and precious stones and metals to show that solidarity with the workers extended even to such basic necessities.
There is going to be a third party revolt somewhere along the way. The party that splinters will be the loser, perhaps for a long time. There is no better way to guarantee that the Republicans will be the splintering party than for Republicans to force out Trump in favor of Pence.
An upside to anosmia?
"Researchers at UC Berkeley say they’ve made a “really novel” discovery that smelling food before eating it could cause weight gain. In a Cell Metabolism article published last week, the team writes that the body’s sense of smell seems tied to its decision to store fat instead of burn it off."
http://www.grubstreet.com/2017/07/just-smelling-food-could-make-you-gain-weight.html
The deleted commenter is a new persona non grata. Please don't respond to him. I delete all his posts unread.
Fernandinande, for sure you are right about two-parent families. I guess it is just politically incorrect for David Brooks to address this issue. "The American Spectator has an article by Melissa Mackenzie with an answer to Brooks:
Encourage marriage before children.
Educational choice — vouchers, funding that follows the child.
Cultural esteem for blue collar jobs and technical training.
Get rid of unnecessary credentialing.
Loosen zoning laws.
Get rid of taxes and regulations constricting upward mobility for individuals and small businesses.
Buy David Brooks a mirror.
I've been meaning to write about that sandwich.
As Warren Zevon famously said: "Enjoy every sandwich."
The trick is to figure out how to enjoy it when a lot of other people have already written about it.
I need an angle.
Although I have been an Althouse habitué since her delicious skewering of the silly anti-Walker snits of 2011, I notice that she rarely posts and comments on pieces that look at the big picture of what is happening in our world today.
It's mostly stuff about incidents rather than trends that give rise to incidents. Thus we in the commentariat end up dancing to the tune played by the major MSM outlets in spite of our disdain for them and their dominance of the public debate. WaPo says "squirrel!" and we then debate the nature, value, and reality of the squirrel without once discussing the environment in which "squirrel!" exists in the first place.
Our resident lefties mostly repeat the MSM/DNC talking points, and even sometimes raise uncomfortable points to those of us on the other side. Our resident righties generally do a good job of lancing the MSM pomposities and arrogant worldviews, but to what end? It's fun to agree with folks here who write with wit and insight, and to disagree with those whose command of logic seems, to put a fine point on it, weak, but where do we think we are going?
One reason people like Jonah Goldberg, who have made major contributions to undermining the Gramscian/Frankfort School campaign to desiccate Western values, cease to lead is that their never-Trumpism leads to a dead end. By focusing on Trump but continuing to ignore the radical shifts in public opinion that elected him, anti-Trumpers like Jonah (and dear comrade LLR) offer no better alternative by which to supplant Trump with a much more powerful policy direction. Thus they end up, intentionally or not, allying with their political enemies and hasten the day that their enemies will triumph.
Sad, to steal a word.
Trump is the effect, not the cause--just as are Brexit, Macron, North Korea, Erdogan, the Swedish debacle, and countless other "incidents" that reveal a significant and overwhelming pattern. As Walter Russell Mead says in his essential column at The American Interest today entitled "Trump Scandal Festers While Country Burns," "For both the Left and the Right, the ever-Trumpers and the never-Trumpers, the scandal is a bright shiny object that distracts. Our national house is on fire, and we are all focused on a particularly challenging level of a hot new video game."
Mead seeks to focus us on the essential, not the incidental: "the basic social model of post World War Two America, the model that shaped our key economic, educational, social and political institutions, is functioning less and less well as the world moves away from the mid-twentieth century conditions that enabled it to flourish. The Information Revolution is disrupting our stable post-war social order the way the Industrial Revolution disrupted societies all over the world."
There are an unusual number of brilliant and thoughtful commenters here, especially the inimitable Laslo; it would be so much more stimulating for us to concentrate on Ann's hypothetical question for WaPo: What do we want instead of the current mess, and who do we get it?
Thus endeth the rant.
Brooks mentions capicollo, as if it were hoity-toity, and probably pronounces it as it is spelled. This is Cultural Appropriation. Where I come from, North Jersey, it's pronounced gobbagool and it isn't snooty at all.
Good comment, Marty Keller.
I think a lot of us just want to be left alone.
The problem is that many, many people have become attached to the federal teat.
Many are government workers but many are welfare recipients.
Particularly troubling are people who are new beneficiaries of the Medicaid expansion that is often referred to as "Obamacare."
Anyone who reads Theodore Dalrymple's books or reads British newspaper sites is aware that the social pathology we see in the black inner cities in the US is replicated, mostly sans the violence, in white populations in Britain in the Midlands cities where generations have been on the Dole since World War II.
Trying to get the economy moving again and trying to avoid the pathology of the welfare state are two ways to work on the cultural rot we see all around us.
What's it like in Moscow, Idaho?
"Cultural esteem for blue collar jobs and technical training.
Get rid of unnecessary credentialing."
This is important. The US educational system is highly inefficient, above all wasting kids time on repetitive, unnecessary, and low-value work. The typical BS-engineering degree for instance is bloated with 20% unneeded and irrelevant material.
And then there are useless majors. Leave aside the often-reviled "studies" majors - many more traditional ones seem of very little economic/social value. 5% of UCLA's undergrads are in Psychology. What does that professionally prepare them for? Certainly very few of these proceed to some professional graduate course, and even these graduate degrees very often do not turn into professional practice. Ditto I think Economics, another 5%, and of course the always popular undergraduate business school, both of which perhaps sound good, but I question the point of them.
There is also a huge Biology department. I understand its importance as pre-med, but even so only a minority of these actually go on to medical schools of any kind.
Actual employers are looking for literacy and numeracy and the ability to understand complex concepts, besides specific skills. These majors take bright kids and, well, I don't see that they sharpen anyone's mind any better than a set of trade certifications would, or help in creating life-long learners or sophisticated self-educating thinkers.
This matter of skills training certainly does not justify a university diploma, or the unnecessary investment in an expensive university, for the State or the student.
There is a role for a small extremely elite liberal arts school system (for the traditional education of gentlemen and scholars), and an extensive training establishment for technical and scientific careers. For the rest, I don't see the value. This seems to be pure consumption, on a social level, not investment.
What's it like in Moscow, Idaho?
I was just there! Fine college town. Good golf course. It's close neighbor Pullman, WA has a great one, too. Pullman's getting a new runway to accommodate the bigger jets for PAC-12 teams.
The Palouse stays cooler in the Summer.
Bob Boyd said... [hush][hide comment]
An upside to anosmia?
"Researchers at UC Berkeley say they’ve made a “really novel” discovery that smelling food before eating it could cause weight gain.
That was interesting. On same diet,mice with no smell did not gain weight. Mice with sense of smell gained excess weight, then lost it when sense of smell was removed.
I spent some time in Moscow ID many years ago. My daughter is in the process of buying some land in that area of the panhandle but north of Moscow.
It was a nice college town. The Pine Tree Tavern was a popular place but probably not there anymore.
There's a really cool Scientific finding linking happiness to generousity at Nature Communications (based on MRI data).
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15964
If I wear a clothespin on my nose at suppertime will I lose weight?
Bob Boyd said... [hush][hide comment]
If I wear a clothespin on my nose at suppertime will I lose weight?
Vaporub on upper lip? Everything taste like eucalyptus leaves.
The Terrorist funding country of Qatar has recently began attacking women in the airline industry.
The CEO states: "By the way, the average age of my cabin crew is only 26 years. So there is no need for you to travel on these crap American carriers... You know you’re always being served by grandmothers on American airlines..."
Qatar Airways is state owned, and like the Terrorists they fund, they don't have to compete with other organizations.
The U.S. operates the War On Terrorism™ out of Qatar, and is probably why the war is 15 years, 10 months and 1 day old. The Pentagon staff are corrupt, professional losers.
The profits are also staggering. The U.S. can even maintain over 8000 thermo-nuclear weapons within the current debt structure financed by Qatar.
I've never seen a skinny koala bear.
I wonder how they disabled the mice noses.
Boyd, it's fur, all the way down. Or is that feathers?
Encourage marriage before children
What is it with TV doctors/nurses having unplanned pregnancies?
No one seems to get married before children on TV anymore except teh gays.
sparrow said...
There's a really cool Scientific finding linking happiness to generousity at Nature Communications (based on MRI data).
That generosity "feels good" is a mechanism to cause generosity (generous acts) to happen, as hunger causes eating to happen.
It's obvious why people eat, but the more interesting issue about generosity is why should generosity "happen" in the first place? If there were a cost but no reproductive value to generosity, any link between generosity and happiness would eventually disappear.
E.g.
A link between altruism and sexual selection: genetic influence on altruistic behaviour and mate preference towards it.
If generosity is the result of sexual selection, that could explain the phenomenon of "pathological altruism".
I'm coming around to the Althouse view of travel. The internet has ruined it for me. It the pre internet era you could maybe find some picture in books or about a particular place, but there were always things that were hidden or unique that travelling allowed one to experience. Now I can literally walk the streets of Paris, London or Seoul. Why buy a plane ticket and hotel?
"Our findings support the hypothesis that people derive satisfaction from punishing norm violations and that the activation in the dorsal striatum reflects the anticipated satisfaction from punishing defectors."
Those defectors deserved everything they got.
Now I can literally walk the streets of Paris, London or Seoul. Why buy a plane ticket and hotel?
....and you can buy the souvenirs on Amazon Prime!! Remember to use the Althouse portal!!
You can't sit in a left bank cafe and have a glass of wine and have soupe à l'oignon
Speaking of the Althouse portal, the Carmen highlights CD I just bought through it doesn't have the justly famous Duet. I'd demand my 0.02 cents back from Meadhouse, but it's my own fault for choosing the best singers and not looking closely at the contents.
Qatar Airlines certainly isn't the only foreign carrier with young and pretty stewardesses.
This tradition is alive and well outside the US. Most foreign airlines have younger and better looking stewardesses than US Airlines.
Many of them do also play up the beauty of their staff, Singapore Airlines used to do that all the time.
Michael K channels David Brooks.
Guess I just did, too.
You can't talk to people (not really) on the internet.
Pictures, even video, are also a very limited medium. It is static, not live.
D. Brooks is like many of his kind. He pretends to worldly sophistication, but he simply is comfortable in a different bubble. I doubt he is a good man at breaking out of, and into, other bubbles.
Stick him somewhere truly foreign and he would be just as lost as his uncomfortable friend.
Me, on the other hand, I come from a tribe of bubble-breaking, or rather bubble-crossing professionals, the colonialists quartered way out there for generations.
Thanks Fernandinande
Here's a game I like to play: Ann is lying to us.
These photos are personal, modified by a strategic blur here and a "Red Square" there. Voilà! "Google grab" tag!
Or maybe I'm just vicariously living through her vicarious living.
"Michael K channels David Brooks."
Nope. Went to different schools.
sparrow said...
Thanks Fernandinande
Thanks for posting that! It's pretty amazing what they can do with "brain imaging" nowadays, check this out:
"using a combination of brain imaging and single-neuron recording in macaques, biologist Doris Tsao and her colleagues at Caltech have finally cracked the neural code for face recognition."
A ray of hope for health insurance
"You can't sit in a left bank cafe and have a glass of wine and have soupe à l'oignon"
There's a triteness to that sort of thing: Here I am, really in Paris, sitting in a left bank café, drinking wine.
Are you really there? You're not Ernest Hemingway. You're not even a Parisian. You're just a tourist, and you know you're a tourist. You went there, but you can't really get in, not into the Paris of your mind, the Paris that was more truly Paris than any place you can really relocate your body into. You can try: This must be it, this is a café on the Left Bank, this must be it. But it isn't it and you know it. You've paid dearly to clasp it in your fleshly arms, but it's not there.
In the end, it's just onion soup.
I bet Hemingway just drank scotch, but I'm not a fan. Likker is quikker.
It's the age of the internet when many people can sit at their computers, or their TVs , and imagine traveling without ever leaving the living room.
Now that I am getting old, I am reduced to this to a considerable extent.
When I was younger, travel and adventure was important and not from my living room.
As recently as 2015, we went to Brussels and to Ypres, one of the great battlefields of WWI.
We had had to cancel a trip to Greece and Crete because of the "migrants "in Greece who were flooding into the area we planned to visit.
Even if you only see it once, the Lion of Chaeronea. is worth a trip.
I took my daughters all over the world. When they were teenagers, I took six kids to England for two weeks.
All the Google Views in the world don't equal that in my opinion. If you have no choice, I understand. but taking your 16 year old son on a race to Hawaii is hard to beat.
It's not just onion soup.
"Are you really there? You're not Ernest Hemingway. You're not even a Parisian. You're just a tourist"
I was going to answer, but Dr. K did a great job on this. So ditto.
"into the Paris of your mind"
No, it's the Paris on your TV screen. No thanks.
Why do you and Meade go to your trips ? I:m sure you can find nice National Geographic articles and videos if you look.
Moscow -800 year old traffic mess! Uncle Joe wanted to tear down St. Basil's. The minions didn't want to, not that cultural icon, so they told him if it was knocked down, Red Square would flood. So he decided against it.
As for visiting a battlefield, I think reading a history book would be better and more respectful.
" I think reading a history book would be better and more respectful."
How about if I've read 20 history books about WWI ? Seeing the trench adds to the impression.
I know we will not agree because you don't like travel but will you at least admit some others have good reasons to do so ?
Having been on a good number of battlefields, no, you really do need to walk the ground to understand, to a degree.
I was just in Bataan last month, looking for the ground in the Abucay line, and passing over the terrain on the left flank, where the Japanese infiltrated over Mt. Natib and put a roadblock behind the allied line, forcing a retreat over the beach. One look at that place, the topsy-turvy jungle hills, the narrow mountain road through the foothills (near-impregnable), and the nature of the coastline, explains what is otherwise unexplainable.
The impression of the view to be had from one mountain to the other over the valley between two volcanoes over which the armies fought, and the nature of the jungle itself makes a deep impression. One of these is the sheer beauty of the place, of the landscape. There is no way it was less beautiful in 1942. Which is jarring, considering the blood that was spilled on that ground.
We did spend a couple of hours looking for the remnants of the Abucay hacienda (where my uncles 41st regiment fought) and its sugar-cane fields, but these are long gone, and the sugar cane has been replaced by rice and jungle. Someone with more time and instrumentation could probably find it (others have), but the ground in that case has changed a great deal.
My desire aboiut battlefiedls was frustrated about 15 years ago when I had signed up for a Military History tour of Guadalcanal.
The honorary tour guide was Mitchell Paige. It would have been awesome to see that battlefield with him.
The trip was cancelled when the Solomon Islands had some sort of revolution and Paige has since died.
Some of us read a lot of history and still want to walk the battlefields, too.
Love visiting Gettysburg.
It gives you a perspective books can't.
History comes to life.
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