Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation. This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather” and go to the mattresses on this issue....So... gangster good or gangster bad? Which is it?
...
Weeks before the June 28 attack in Annapolis, Winters had taken active shooter training at her church, where a police officer presented the options: Run if you can run. Hide if you can hide. Fight only if you must. Winters fought....
From the details her family has of the attack, Winters’ son Phoenix Geimer said, “It sounds like her. She’s got four kids — she’s not going to take it from anyone”....
“If they can come to us and show us the basis and that it’s legitimate and that they have uncovered something, we can go from there and assess their objectivity,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview. He urged the special counsel to wrap up his inquiry and write an investigative report. He said Mr. Trump’s lawyers planned to write their own summary of the case.
I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.If you hate Trump, that's a huge, insane word salad — especially if you go with the transcript and don't get into the flow of the performance. Here's the top-rated comment on that passage at Reddit:
I really would like to know what people get out of listening [to] him at these rallies. I mean, my brain hurt just trying to read that transcript. How can people listen to that? Do they even understand what he's talking about? Does he? Christ, he really needs to be psychologically evaluated because there's something seriously not right.Note the assumption that a verbatim transcript should give more of a sense of coherence to spoken word. That's not true. On this issue, I always go back to this passage from Janet Malcolm's great book "The Journalist and the Murderer":
When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech — that Molière’s M. Jourdain* was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose — is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies** revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had been “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation. The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public.Quoting that passage in 2013 — before the ascendency of Trump — I said:
Now, I think some people do speak in unbroken, well-structured sentences that are free of grammatical errors that could be transcribed directly into excellent writing, but I don't think those stuck listening to them are very happy with it. We need the backtracking and disfluencies to feel comfortable....Reverse engineer that and you can see many things that could be true and appealing about Trump: He's talking straight from his head like me and my friends.
I'd tend to be suspicious of anyone who seemed to be trying too hard to speak like writing or to write like speaking. I'd wonder what's up? What's the motivation? A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature.
I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ.So that's a great set up for talking about male genitalia. There's no reason to bring up an organ unless that's where you want to go. Elton John does sometimes play the organ, like here, on my favorite Elton John song, "Daniel"...
We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments.Notice how fiercely he avoids saying "I." It's always "we," even when the point he's making is that he's alone on the stage, doing the entire performance:
This is the only musical: the mouth.He's speaking so impetuously that he just says "musical" for "musical instrument." You know what he means. If you like him, that is. If you don't then it's ridiculous insanity: The only musical, The Mouth??? Now, opening on Broadway, the new musical — The Mouth!
And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.I'm sure that if Trump were in private and he could work blue, he'd have opened up the subject of the brain as an organ that's "more important" than the other organ, the one he would have joked about earlier, but he just can't do it here... because his connected-to-his-mouth brain is telling him he can't say that, but he can show us enough to get into our brain-connected-to-our-ears that we can imagine what it would be like to hang out with Trump after the show. And then we are groupies.
[Many of the] members of the supporting cast and crew... were told that the film was a vaguely pro-life project tackling the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case “from another perspective,” only to arrive on set, view the script, and be shocked by the extremity of its point of view. “When I read the first two pages, I was like what the fuck is this?”...... and the subtext I read is: We'll give you a graceful out if you quit now — you just didn't know what you were doing — but if you continue, you'll be a social and professional pariah.
These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.That is, the Court characterized the decision to have an abortion as a deep contemplation that — like religion or philosophy — inherently belongs to the individual and not to the government. The woman's "personhood" must be preserved, and the question of the "personhood" of the unborn is something for her to think about and make a decision about. If the Court is right — and that's something we may be looking at very intensely in the coming years — then the question of the morality of abortion remains alive.
Research by Ipsos Mori found that 66 per cent of young people, aged between 16 and 22, are "exclusively heterosexual" - the lowest figure of any generation.Why do pollsters think it's okay to ask about the sexual inclinations of people they don't even know? I'm giving this my "gender privacy" tag. The question might be experienced as retrograde or politically incorrect. The thought might be: These old people with their stupid categories. And then: I'll give the answer that most challenges their pathetic little minds.
Among millennials, 71 per cent say they are exclusively heterosexual, as do 85 per cent of those in "Gen X", and 88 per cent of baby boomers....
Researchers said the statistic showed that the youngest generation were "being affected by more open and fluid attitudes".
"The undisputed facts show that the University breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract's guarantee of academic freedom," said the opinion written by Justice Daniel Kelly....I don't know what Marquette intends to do in the future, but it does have to give McAdams his job back, with back pay.
Justice Ann Bradley [joined by Justice Shirley Abrahamson] wrote a dissenting opinion, saying the court majority erred "in conducting only half of the academic freedom analysis. It fails to recognize, much less analyze, the academic freedom of Marquette as a private, Catholic, Jesuit university," Bradley wrote. "As a result, it dilutes a private educational institution's autonomy to make its own academic decisions in fulfillment of its unique mission.... Apparently, the majority thinks it is in a better position to address concerns of academic freedom than a group of tenured faculty members who live the doctrine every day."...
Marquette issued a statement continuing to defend its actions. "At Marquette University, we are proud that we have taken a stand for our students, our values and our Catholic, Jesuit mission," it said.
The tragedy was a frightening reminder of how dangerous it would be to dive the boys, in a weakened state and some unable to swim, through a labyrinth of winding, dark passages which take even fit, expert divers five hours, using four oxygen tanks, to battle through strong currents.
“Inside the cave is tough,” said Thai Seal commander Rear Admiral Arpakorn Yookongkaew. But he added: “I can guarantee that we will not panic, we will not stop our mission, we will not let the sacrifice of our friend go to waste.”
Former aides and supporters of Kethledge, a Michigan resident who moves outside Washington circles and is considered the least known of the leading contenders, are quietly circulating positive information about the judge’s personal life, political profile and reassuring record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit...What religion (if any) is Kethledge? I'm having a hard time finding an answer, though I see that Hugh Hewitt, pushing Kethledge in "Here’s who Trump should pick for the Supreme Court" (WaPo), called him "a man of faith." What faith? Is it possible that he's not Catholic, like every other Republican appointee?
Confidants also are sharing tidbits from what they describe as his encouraging early interactions with Trump, who is prioritizing personal chemistry and political magnetism along with a potential nominee’s legal record. “They just really hit it off,” said one Republican close to the White House....
Kethledge lacks Kavanaugh’s vast D.C. network and does not excite grass-roots conservatives in the same way as Barrett — a Roman Catholic, Notre Dame law professor and mother of seven who is electrifying the anti-abortion ranks....
Kethledge met his wife, Jessica, when they were only 13 years old. The couple have two children... Kethledge... once gave a speech at his alma mater, the University of Michigan Law School, which includes a somewhat unflattering comparison of himself to Bill Murray’s character in “Caddyshack.”Golf. There's a point of affiliation. Hey, I found the "Caddyshack" quote, in this speech text, which begins:
“Take Wisconsin, I just left Wisconsin,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Montana.Of course, the one state Reagan didn't win in 1984 was Minnesota, the home state of his opponent Walter Mondale. How does Trump not know that? And it wasn't the first time he made the mistake:
“Reagan had his big win. He won every state except one, the great state of Wisconsin,” Trump said. “I won Wisconsin, first time since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952."
Trump made a similar remark during an event in Wisconsin last week.He made the mistake right here in Wisconsin! How did no one correct him?!
"And I won Wisconsin. And I like Wisconsin a lot but we won Wisconsin. And Ronald Reagan, remember, Wisconsin was the state that Ronald Reagan did not win,” Trump said at the time.
Oh my name it is nothin’But that song is making a big show of nonspecificity. He doesn't even care about his own name within the mood he's spinning there. But Bob's Minnesotan. And he does specificity within the Midwest: "So I watched that sun come rising / From that little Minnesota town"... "Thought I'd shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth / Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walkin' the hills of old Duluth"...
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that the land that I live in
Has God on its side
When rearranging the piece, [Naseem] Alatrash kept the energy and, well, drive of the original while lending it an unmistakably Middle Eastern character. To do this, he swapped out the Beatles’ piano, drums, guitar, and electric bass for the qanun, cello, violin, double bass, and Arabic percussion instruments, incorporating that culture’s melodic aspects, ornaments, and microtones. He also ditched the guitar solo for a traditional Arabic improvisational interlude.They also had to change the lyrics:
The new version tells the story of a woman who’s in love with her newly granted freedom, and feels that marriage and family can wait. She sings, "Baby, I can drive my car/Yes, I’m gonna be a star/Baby I can drive my car/And maybe I’ll love you."In The Beatles version, the woman is the one acting dominant, and she's deigning to allow the man to be her chauffeur. She has big plans. She's going to be a star. But she doesn't even have the car yet. What did that say about female empowerment? I always took it to mean that the woman was deluded and grandiose and the man was onto her and not going to be conned.
Kancho is a prank played in Japan; it is performed by clasping the hands together so the index fingers are pointing out and attempting to insert them sharply into someone's anal region when the victim is not looking. It is similar to the wedgie or a goosing. Kancho means "enema". In South Korea it is known as "ddong-chim" This prank is also played in Scotland, in this case known as a 'fishy' or 'jobbie jab'. In Brazil is known as Pula Pirata (literally, Jump Pirate), named after the name which the game Pop-up Pirate is known there.The article ends with a link to "List of hazing deaths in the United States." That list goes back only to the 1800s. Here's something that happened at Yale in 1892:
A pledge was led blindfolded through the street during his fraternity initiation towards Moriarty's Cafe, a popular student hang-out. He was told to run and did so at top speed. He ran into a sharp carriage pole, injuring himself. He was rendered unconscious, but the injury was not thought to be serious at the time. He suffered an intestine rupture and died five days later of peritonitis.Here's something that happened at the Loyal Order of Moose in Birmingham, Alabama in 1913:
Kenny and Gustin... were made to look upon a red hot emblem of the Order, then blindfolded, disrobed and had a chilled rubber version of the emblem applied to their chests, while a magneto was attached to their legs and an electric current was applied to them by a wire to their shoulders. The aim was evidently to make them believe that they were being branded. Both men fainted, but, as it was thought that they were feigning, the lodge officers did not stop the initiation until it was evident that the two were dying and the lodge physician was unable to revive them.
Since it was impossible to build the wall in the middle of the Rio Grande River, which marks the natural border with Mexico, US federal authorities built it a couple miles (kilometers) north of the riverbank. That meant some of the lands through which the wall already passes... are owned by native tribes and private farmers.
This is what happened almost 10 years ago to [Eloisa] Tamez, a nursing professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a tribal rights activist....
When federal authorities installed their fence, they divided her land not exactly in half. Then they gave her a key to open the gate that allows her to access the other side of her ancestral land, three acres (1.2 hectares) of desert dotted with cactus and mesquite....
"It is not the first time that they violate our rights by taking away our land"....
During the grueling two-week competition, Mohamed was tested on proper pronunciation, voice and style as he recited from memory random verses from the whole Qur’an — not an easy feat, considering the Qur’an has more than 6,000 verses and spans 604 pages....Ahmed Burhan Mohamed plans to go to the University of Minnesota and study to become a doctor.
His triumph shocked members of the local Somali community, who have long doubted that a youth raised in Minnesota could compete with those raised in Muslim countries.
Mohamet “Hambaase” Ali, the former principal of the Islamic school at Abubakar As-Saddique mosque in Minneapolis where Ahmed trained, said Somali parents often dispatch their kids to Africa for what’s known as “dhaqan celis,” meaning to “rehabilitate kids,” so they are better accustomed to their culture and religion.
Most families, he said, are wary of their kids growing up in the West and losing their identity, which parents say makes youth vulnerable to all kinds of problems. But Ali believes that children can simultaneously maintain their American identity and meet cultural and religious expectations....
“I feel really proud to be the first American to win this,” Mohamed said. “They fear us now. They now know that we Americans are tough in Qur’an.”...
An estimated 7.5 percent of plastic in the environment comes from straws and stirrers, according to an analysis by a group of pollution research nonprofits called Better Alternatives Now, which based its results on trash collected by volunteers around the world.I'm dubious about the reliability of that count. How the hell do you collect trash "around the world," sift it down to just the plastic, and weigh/measure the percentage of "straws and stirrers"? Since the push is to ban straws in the United States, I really only care about the total volume of straws in the U.S. trash, not the weight of the straws relative to other things in the trash in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, etc.
A recent report by the World Economic Forum projects that by the year 2050, the plastic in our oceans will outweigh the fish.Mm. Yeah. I guess I really only care about the U.S. straws that go out to sea and become part of this massive plastic enterprise of outweighing the fish. Who puts garbage out in the ocean? I don't think we do that, and if we do, we should stop, and that would solve the problem of straws in the ocean.
Is this some weird quirk of mine or do I have support? I have support:Now, let's examine whether it's true that the ban on straws HURTS WOMEN. To argue yes, you'd have to say, it is primarily women who use straws and benefit by looking cute using straws. Men either don't use straws or don't realize how bad they look using straws, so they are either unaffected or (without realizing it) helped by the straw ban. But I can see the no side of this argument. Women are helped because they are freed from the burden of having to see men drinking from straws. And let's be honest, a lot of us are annoyed by the looking-cute straw antics of other women (e.g., the woman in the video embedded above and the woman in the photograph at the top of the WaPo article).
1. "After ordering a drink, do you take the straw out?"
I'd get a good chuckle out of seeing a man drinking his hard liquor through a tiny mixing straw.2. "Real Men Don't Use Straws," by Malcolm Freberg:
I want you to think about the most macho movie characters imaginable. The ones who define hero, the ones your dad hero worships. James Bond. Indiana Jones. John McLane. Now think about any scene in which they drink anything, be it water or alcohol or exotic space poison. I bet your Luminosity-trained brain couldn't insert a straw into that scene if it tried.3. "Why Men Hate Straws":
Harry Stamper does not suck Sprite through a bendy straw. Bruce Wayne does not drink pina coladas with a crazy straw. Real men don't use straws.... Hollywood and society had a meeting in our collective subconscious and decided that straws are for sissies. Obviously no one's going to see you sipping a gin and tonic through a cocktail straw and yell, "Hey Sally, that guy looks like he's sucking a tiny dick!" You may not have even considered that straws look like penises until you read that. I'm sorry -- but knowing is better than not knowing.
Oh. My. Goodness.@KeonDDBroxton pic.twitter.com/goOoQ0mUqM
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) July 4, 2018
At the time [Ahmed Best] was 25, and it was his first major film role.... Jar Jar Binks quickly became the most hated character in the Star Wars universe, and critics branded Best's cartoonish portrayal a dumbed-down exercise in child-pleasing - or worse, a racist stereotype with a misplaced Caribbean accent.I stopped watching "Star Wars" movies after "The Empire Strikes Back," but it's easy enough to find clips of this character who's obviously just supposed to be very cute:
Best did not name the Star Wars films in his emotional post... "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It's still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know."...
Actor Frank Oz, a puppeteer who voiced the Jedi master Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), declared that he "LOVED Jar Jar Binks", adding, "I just will never understand the harshness of people's dislike of him. I do character work. He is a GREAT character!"
Trump’s claim appears to have originated with Mojtaba Zonnour [an Iranian cleric who opposes the deal].... Trump said the Obama administration granted citizenship to 2,500 Iranians during the JCPOA negotiations, including government officials, but Zonnour’s claim is somewhat different....Rhodes's statement sounds cagey! He just hasn't heard "that figure." Has he heard some other figure or heard about it but without a specific figure? And "It is certainly the case that it was not part of the Iran deal" could just mean that it was a side deal not intended to be seen by the public. And then, too, Rhodes could be lying. Why no Pinocchios for him? Why not 4 Pinocchios, subject to revision if any corroborating evidence emerges? There is this additional support rustled up for Rhodes (and attempts at getting support for Trump were not responded to):
The White House did not respond to our request for comment. The Homeland Security and State departments didn’t answer our questions.
We asked Ben Rhodes, who was a key figure in the Iran deal negotiations and deputy national security adviser to Obama, whether it was accurate to claim that 2,500 Iranians were given U.S. citizenship or green cards during the JCPOA negotiations.
“I have never heard that figure before,” Rhodes said. “It is certainly the case that it was not part of the Iran deal.”
“This is not something that would have been negotiated without it being super public at the time,” [a senior Obama administration officials who had authority over immigration matters said to Fact Checker]. “There’s no question that Iranians were coming to the U.S. as refugees, and they have been for a long time. There are high levels of political and religious persecution in Iran. We may have brought in some refugees that were government officials of some level. But somebody who was a government official would be subject to a very high level of scrutiny and in most cases would be barred from entering because of the connection to the regime....The top-ranked comment at WaPo: "If trump says it, you know immediately that it is false. Very false. Bigly false. Yet, I would rather have 2500 Iranians in America than 1 trump."
“I have never heard any reference to this claim previously,” [said said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution]. “Frankly, if there is a single speck of truth to this, I’d be shocked.”...
Mr. Trump believes Judge Kavanaugh has been on the bench long enough to give the president a sense of where he stands on various issues and that Judge [Amy Coney] Barrett is fairly young and could use more judicial experience.She has less than 1 year of it!
The administration might want to keep her in reserve should Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, leave the court.....Barrett got an immense boost from Dianne Feinstein, who uttered the memorably poetic phrase: "The dogma lives loudly within you." Feinstein meant to challenge and criticize, but this was a striking case of an intended insult making the person more appealing.
“A lot of social conservatives have coalesced around Amy,” said Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, who said he knows and admires both judges. “The business folks and the D.C. folks tend to pull for Brett a little more.”
While Judge Kavanaugh, 53, has long been thought to be the front-runner and a favorite of Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, he has in recent days faced mounting opposition from social conservatives for aspects of his résumé.
We're being asked to rely on the decisions that will come from the mind of this nominee. That mind must be tested, and it can't be tested enough. There are all sorts of biases and disabilities within any human mind, and the hearings can do very little to expose the limitations of an intelligent, well-prepared nominee.
To create a special immune, untestable zone is absurd.
A nominee with a mind entirely devoted to religion and intending to use her position as a judge to further the principles of her religion should be voted down just like a candidate who revealed that he'd go by "what decision in a case was most likely to advance the cause of socialism."
I'd like to think that a religious person has a strong moral core that would preclude that kind of dishonesty, but we're not required to give religious nominees a pass and presume they're more honest than nominees who are not religious devotees. That would be religious discrimination!
If we conduct ourselves so as not to offend Republicans or give them photo ops for November as you say, then we are as complicit as is the GOP who stay silent in the face of Trump’s daily assaults against our republic. If you can wave your flags, drink your beer, and eat your hot dogs while children are separated from their parents by our government, amongst other outrages, then you are a caricature of an American, hollow inside, and devoid of any true love of this country’s founding values.What an insane idea: You must feel and express anger all the time or you are a hollow shell.
[H]e also responded to his critics on Twitter, saying he was “reveling, not whining” and “I’m proud of taking an unpopular, principled position that gets me shunned by partisan zealots. It’s not about me. I couldn’t care less about being shunned by such people.”...The NYT also digs back into New York Magazine to show that Dershowitz himself has been a shunner. From that article:
Where: At his Martha’s Vineyard homeThe NYT article quotes the disrespect for "my academic colleagues." It seems to me that shunning is part of elites being elite. Why were you ever on the inside in the first place?
Table Seats: 12. “I like large parties, but my wife, Carolyn Cohen, prefers more intimate parties with six couples. That’s the one thing we argue about.”
Guest List: Harvey Weinstein, William Styron, Larry and Laurie David (“Larry’s from Brooklyn. Sometimes we’ll have theme parties where everyone’s from Brooklyn”)
Guest qualifications: “I rarely invite my academic colleagues,” says Dershowitz. “Most of them don’t make good dinner guests.”
Guest Testimony: “Alan’s guests are creative, interesting intellects, not necessarily intellectuals, but witty or wise or profound or comic,” says one guest. “What bedazzles at Alan’s parties is not the jewelry but the conversation that issues from their lips.”
The Trump administration is moving against any use of race as a measurement of diversity in education. And the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the end of this month will leave the court without its swing vote on affirmative action and allow President Trump to nominate a justice opposed to a policy that for decades has tried to integrate elite educational institutions.The NYT article is rather long, and I think it is designed to lure people into confusing the question of the legal permissibility of taking race into account and the policy judgment of whether race should be taken into account. The Supreme Court cases are about whether affirmative action is permissible (and they say that it is but only if you do it the right way, for the right reason). The executive branch decisions are about whether to encourage institutions to choose to do what they are permitted (but not required) to do.
A highly anticipated case is pitting Harvard against Asian-American students who say one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions has systematically excluded some Asian-American applicants to maintain slots for students of other races. That case is clearly aimed at the Supreme Court.
“The whole issue of using race in education is being looked at with a new eye in light of the fact that it’s not just white students being discriminated against, but Asians and others as well,” said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity. “As the demographics of the country change, it becomes more and more problematic.”...
“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau....
The doctors group told the San Francisco delegation that while they loved the city, postconvention surveys showed their members were afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets....
Tourism is San Francisco’s biggest industry, bringing in $9 billion a year, employing 80,000 people and generating more than $725 million in local taxes — conventions represent about $1.7 billion of the business.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."3. Politics.
The sculpture has been used as a backdrop in commercial films, notably in the 2006 Hollywood film The Break-Up.... It is also prominently featured in the ending scene of Source Code. Director Duncan Jones felt the structure was a metaphor for the movie's subject matter and aimed for it to be shown at the beginning and end of the movie. The sculpture served as an aesthetic and symbolic setting for the 2012 film The Vow when the lead characters share a kiss under it. It also appears in the video to "Homecoming", a song by Chicago native Kanye West, featuring Chris Martin of the band Coldplay. The sculpture is also featured in the 2008 mumblecore film Nights and Weekends. It was also featured in the Bollywood film Dhoom 3 and the 2014 movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment in the Transformers series. A modified reproduction of Cloud Gate is also included in Watch Dogs, a video game released in 2014 that takes place in Chicago. Unlike the real sculpture, the in-game replica is a curved, white torus. A movement to Windex the Bean was started in 2017, gaining the attention of over thirty thousand people on Facebook. The event took place on November 15th, 2017, because of a consensus that the Bean is dirty and needs to be cleaned.By the way, that's the Trump International Hotel & Tower in the center of the 4th photograph.
But writing for the 4-3 state high court on Monday, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said the lower courts read the [federal] Communications Decency Act too narrowly in rejecting Yelp’s claim of immunity.Yelp's statement:
“Had plaintiffs’ claims for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and false light been alleged directly against Yelp, these theories would be readily understood as treating Yelp as the ‘publisher or speaker’ of the challenged reviews,” Cantil-Sakauye wrote in the 33-page opinion. “In this case, however, Yelp is inherently being treated as the publisher of the challenged reviews, and it has not engaged in conduct that would take it outside section 230’s purview in connection with the removal order.”
“Of course, Yelp has no interest in publishing defamation, which is not helpful to consumers, and our terms of service prohibit the posting of defamatory content. But defamation is more than just a label, and so Yelp studies court orders to ensure they are valid and actually make a showing that defamation has occurred, before Yelp removes reviewer content.”I like Yelp's position and, of course, I love the Communications Decency Act and don't want to see it eroded by judges. Without it, I couldn't have a comments section on this blog.
I recently discussed [the Balthus painting] Thérèse Dreaming with an older woman, an architect and former museum conservator. She told me that one thing she disliked about the painting was the brown spot on the girl’s underwear, which guided the viewer’s attention in a way that felt manipulative. I wasn’t sure if she was bothered by the brownness of the spot—with its possible menstrual or scatological connotations—or just the spot’s function as a focal point that drew one in, that narrowed one’s attention (like the punctum of a photograph, in Roland Barthes’s phrase—the point of interest, “that accident which pricks me”). Whatever the case, I was highly skeptical—in fact, in complete denial. I had looked carefully at the painting and had never noticed a brown spot. The whole thing struck me as absurd. The spot, I told myself, must be a projection of her imagination onto the painting.Here's the painting...
Feeling unsettled, however, about my own dismissiveness, I returned again to the Met and to Thérèse Dreaming. This time, I saw it, a sort of brown triangular shadow across the bottom of the girl’s panties and the slip of her skirt. I had been wrong after all about the absence of the spot. Still, it remained for me a rather incidental detail. I experienced no “prick”; it did not draw me in; it barely registered at all. Certainly I did not feel that I had been manipulated by Balthus.
“I had a very, very interesting morning,” Mr. Trump said as he met with Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands....
“Inside every bad thing is a good thing waiting to happen, and I feel very excited because I’ve already been offered so many things and I almost already accepted one really good offer to go back on TV and I might do it. But we’ll see."Good. She was overpunished. I feel the same way about Kathy Griffin, whose new standup performance I saw in Chicago. I was disappointed that Griffin — as she worked hard to fight her own way back from exile — chose not to champion Roseanne. And Roseanne is someone she apparently knows and has cared about in the past.
Divers reached the group after enlarging a narrow, submerged passageway that was too small for them to get through while wearing their air tanks.
Earlier, a team of rescuers had used huge pumps to reduce the water level, and divers had placed guide ropes and air tanks along the route to reach the site of the trapped boys.
Getting the boys and their coach out in their weakened condition, and without training as scuba divers, will be the next challenge.
"The tragic and comic component of this whole situation is that I caught a disease, which (let's not say how and why) makes a man quite stinky," Suchilin wrote, according to a translation from the original Russian....
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