At the Brewers Cafe...

... here we go again.

"[R]egardless of the effectiveness of [Kanye] West’s precise words, he does represent something — and that something is frightening to Democrats."

"Heaven forbid a successful, independent, young African American with a huge social media following would get out of line and gleefully support Trump. Watching the liberals panic has been kind of fun.... CNN’s coverage was particularly hysterical, alarming and insulting. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) went so far as to question West’s sanity for meeting with the president. 'I felt like I was sitting in on a psychiatrist visit and a commercial for Donald Trump,' she said. Eager to pile on, CNN host Don Lemon ranted against West on Thursday, saying he put on a 'minstrel show' for the president, in essence questioning the legitimacy of West’s blackness. Even before West’s Oval Office meeting, CNN commentator Tara Setmayer said, 'He’s the token Negro of the Trump administration.' Another CNN commentator, Bakari Sellers, in an apparently botched and distasteful reference to a decades-old Chris Rock bit, said, 'Kanye West is what happens when Negros don’t read.'... All of this kind of reminds me of the infamous 2009 'beer summit' when President Barack Obama convened a Harvard professor and Cambridge police officer to discuss race relations and racial profiling. But that gathering accomplished nothing aside from providing the media with a feeding frenzy of contrived coverage. So if Obama could have his beer summit to do nothing, Trump and West can meet in order to stir the pot and see what happens. This will be interesting to watch. I hope the Trump and Kanye show continues."

Writes Ed Rogers at WaPo. Rogers is a GOP consultant who worked in the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations. I quoted him because he summed up the CNN coverage concisely, and because he's right that the Democrats are not helping themselves by making such a big deal out of the West-Trump meeting and inviting disrespect for West. But Rogers's leaning back and enjoying the "show" isn't much different from Don Lemon's calling it a "show" (except that Don Lemon, tappng his own racial privilege as a black man, called it a "minstrel show").

Here's a Jonathan Chait piece from July 2017: "I Have Found America’s Worst Columnist" ("Ed Rogers is a Washington lobbyist, and, for reasons I have never been able to discern, a regular op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.... First, as founding member of a lobbying firm with a wide-ranging portfolio and a presumably enormous income, literally everything he writes suffers from crippling conflicts of interest. Second, he is a terrible writer whose arguments lack any originality, persuasive power or, quite often, even facial plausibility").

I don't know about that, but here's what I'm thinking about Kanye West and Trump. West is an artist. Words flow out of him in a way that doesn't make you want to give him any political responsibility but that reaches your emotions. You can distance him and laugh at him and deem him crazy. But you can also be with him and hear him and love him, which is what Trump did. We watched West open up to Trump, trust Trump with his inner, artistic self, and we watched Trump accepting that connection and intimacy. Trump gave West access to the Oval Office, and West determined how to use that access, and Trump let West happen in his presence. Many onlookers felt uncomfortable, but they are, perhaps, condemned by their own discomfort.

I'm going to give this my "Trump's genius" tag.

"For decades, China’s middle school students were introduced to the world’s first seismograph through an image in their history textbooks: a large, bronze urn with eight dragons perched the same distance apart along the outside, each with a copper ball hanging precariously in its mouth."

"Whenever there was a tectonic tremor from a particular direction, the corresponding dragon would drop its copper ball into the gaping mouth of a frog perched below it — or so students were taught. But for a new history textbook being used in public school classrooms across the country this fall, the image of China’s iconic earthquake detector and its accompanying text were removed.... The seismograph is widely believed to have been invented by Zhang Heng, a scholar and polymath who was born in the first century A.D. during the Eastern Han Dynasty.... For decades, the popular conception of Zhang’s seismograph came from a 1951 model by the historian Wang Zhenduo, based on the description in the ancient biography. This image was added to China’s textbooks, but in most cases without a caption explaining that it was merely a scholar’s artistic interpretation. It became so commonly accepted that even U.S. President Richard Nixon was shown a seismograph model based on Wang’s during his historic visit to China in 1972. However, the 1951 model’s fame and ubiquity have worried seismologists, who aren’t convinced that the design holds scientific weight. Most notably, it failed to detect tremors that could have predicted a devastating earthquake in 1976 that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and rescue workers."

Reports Sixth Tone.

Here's the Wikipedia article on Zhang Heng (b. 78 AD, d. 139 AD), with a long section on his seismograph:

During the Han Dynasty, many learned scholars—including Zhang Heng—believed in the "oracles of the winds". These oracles of the occult observed the direction, force, and timing of the winds, to speculate about the operation of the cosmos and to predict events on Earth.... Zhang Heng [wrote]:

The chief cause of earthquake is air, an element naturally swift and shifting from place to place. As long as it is not stirred, but lurks in a vacant space, it reposes innocently, giving no trouble to objects around it. But any cause coming upon it from without rouses it, or compresses it, and drives it into a narrow space ... and when opportunity of escape is cut off, then 'With deep murmur of the Mountain it roars around the barriers', which after long battering it dislodges and tosses on high, growing more fierce the stronger the obstacle with which it has contended.

In 132, Zhang Heng presented to the Han court what many historians consider to be his most impressive invention, the first seismoscope.... It was named "earthquake weathervane" (houfeng didongyi 候風地動儀)...  To indicate the direction of a distant earthquake, Zhang's device dropped a bronze ball from one of eight tubed projections shaped as dragon heads; the ball fell into the mouth of a corresponding metal object shaped as a toad, each representing a direction like the points on a compass rose. His device had eight mobile arms (for all eight directions) connected with cranks having catch mechanisms at the periphery....

Reasons to eat chocolate... from Brazil.

Via "These Brazilian Candy Ads Are Undeniably Dark Yet Surprisingly Entertaining/Mondelez brand Lacta creates confectionary chaos" (AdWeek)("wow, talk about a grim way to market chocolate").

"Will you work for a murderer? That’s the question a host of ex-generals, diplomats and spies may soon face."

A headline, on a WaPo column by Fred Hiatt, just one of many things I'm seeing this morning as I try to find some inroad into the story of Jamal Khashoggi.

Now, as more and more evidence implicates Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in the reported murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Saudi diplomatic property in Istanbul, the equation has changed.

The "reported murder" is a strange way to say "suspected murder" or "alleged murder" and it makes me uneasy about fake news. The fact that something has been reported doesn't make it true unless journalism itself is a process that ensures truth. I remain confused.

Hiatt imagines a daughter asking "Daddy" about why he works for a murderer, which just seems like sententious blather. Hiatt goes on to paint Trump as unscrupulous and greedy, thinking only about the money we get from Saudi Arabia. The column is padded out with the moral struggle of the imagined "Daddy" and concludes "No matter what Saudi Arabia offered, could its supposed friendship be worth shrugging off the ensnaring and killing of a critic whose only offense was to tell the truth?"

I'm wary of the foreign-policy-as-friendship rhetoric. I'm wary of the test: Can Daddy explain it to his little girl? In this invented moral scenario, why are we using a parent and child and why have a male parent and a female child? I know you want to play on my heartstrings, but could you play something less babyish? Was Obama's foreign policy — say, with Iran or Syria — put through an explain-it-to-a-child test?

People criticize Trump as being a big child, but this criticism of Trump expects us all to think like children.

I watched all 3 parts of ABC's "20/20" show with Melania Trump.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I'm not going to embed anything or point you to any specific clips. I'll just give you a list of thoughts that are nothing more than what I remember, in the order I remember them:

1. Melania sat stiffly and nearly immobile, her hands clasped firmly, as she gave calm, careful answers to everything the interviewer asked.

2. The scene was a balcony — someplace in Kenya — that overlooked a small, bleak, red landscape that we were urged to see as beautiful. I noticed the standing water in pools and imagined the insects and the chemicals that would need to be used to control the insects. And that was before ABC quoted President Trump as having called some places "shithole"/"shithouse" countries.

3. I didn't catch the name of the interviewer, a dark-haired man I didn't recognize. He was polite, but tried to draw something interesting out of Melania. The show had been promoted as an interview with no question off limits, but there was absolutely nothing that threw her off her determined firm poise.

4. We did not see — unless there are more than those 3 parts — any confrontation about sexual affairs that Trump may have had during her marriage to him. There was only a question whether she was wary about marrying him, given his reputation. She gave a strong no, and the interviewer did not follow up with specifics. In fact, no names of other women were ever spoken, including the names of his 2 ex-wives.

5. There were many nice clips of Melania doing First-Lady things while looking beautiful in beautiful clothes, and several repetitions of her saying that she wants to be known for what she does, not what she wears.

6. She was asked about her "I really don't care/Do u?" jacket, and she gave the answer she's given before: It was a message directed at the press. Specifically, she called it the "left-wing" press.

7. She expressed support for her husband about everything, it seemed, except the parent-and-child separations at the border with Mexico. She tells us she let him know that it was unacceptable, and then he agreed with her.

8. She was asked about the seeming discordance between her anti-bullying initiative and her husband's bullying of people (and we saw a montage of Trump calling people names and imitating how they talk and gesture). All I remember of her answer is that she spoke about how she herself is bullied: She is one of the most bullied persons "on the world." I would have been tempted to defend his speech as robust criticism of individuals who have chosen to pursue political power and to distinguish it from other bullying, but once you make a controversial distinction, you are showing everyone exactly where they can attack you, and she chose instead to put herself front and center as a straightforward, strong, independent, imperturbable woman. That's very hard to attack without looking like another one of her many, many bullies.

9. My memories of this soporific safari into the mind of Melania are fading fast. I had one more thing. Oh, yes. She's not unhappy being First Lady. The people who say that about her are wrong. She does miss being able to decide to go somewhere and leave in "a minute." And she has only her old friends — a small group — and she keeps in touch with them by phone and text. The interviewer prompts her about what they say about what to do if you want a friend in Washington. Yes, she knows the saying: If you want a friend in Washington, "buy a dog."

10. I thought the old saying was "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog," and I was going to muse about Melania's orientation to shopping and wealth. The saying is associated with Harry Truman, who didn't buy his dog, Feller. It was given to him. I'm reading the Quote Investigator article about the saying, and I see that Truman wasn't interested in that dog. From a 1948 newspaper article: "But Harry seems about as close to this pup as he does to Hank Wallace.... And now, months later, the animal is still an outsider." And, from 1949: "Why doesn’t Truman have a dog? … It is my understanding Truman does not have a dog because Mrs. Truman thinks dogs are too much trouble to care for." So quite aside from whether it's "get" or "buy," did Truman even ever express this thought? This was a guy who seems not to have wanted the dog he was given, but that's not inconsistent with saying "If you want a friend in Washington, get/buy a dog." That could be read as a disparagement of the common person's desire for friends. Just get a dog if you're so needy. As for me, I really don't care.

At the Brewers Cafe...

... talk about whatever you want, but we’re watching the game.

This is what I've been waiting for: a full transcript of Kanye West's Oval Office monologue.

Here it is (at New York Magazine). I needed it in writing, because it's such an overload when he's speaking. Some highlights:

You know, people expect that if you’re black you have to be Democrat... You know they tried to scare me to not wear this hat, my own friends, but this hat, it gives me power in a way.... [W]hen I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made us Superman, that’s my favorite superhero, and you made a Superman cape for me.... So, I had the balls, because I have enough balls to put on this hat.... I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was connected with a neuropsychologist that works with the athletes in the NBA and NFL. He looked at my brain, it’s equal on three parts. I’m gonna go ahead, drop some bombs for you. 98 percentile IQ test, I had a 75 percentile of all human beings when it was counting eight numbers backwards, so I’m gonna work on that one. The other ones, 98 percent, Tesla, Freud. So, he said that I actually wasn’t bipolar, I had sleep deprivation, which could cause dementia 10-20 years from now, where I wouldn’t even remember my sons name. So, all this power that I’ve got, and I’m taking my son to the Sox game and all that, I wouldn’t be able to remember his name, from a misdiagnosis. What we need is, we can empower the pharmaceuticals and make more money... we can empower our factories.... And one of the things we gotta set is, Ford to have the highest designs. The dopest cars. The most amazing. I don’t really say, “dope,” I don’t say negative words and try to flip ‘em. We just say positive, lovely, divine, universal words. So, the flyest, freshest, most amazing car. And what we start with, is – I brought a GIF with me right here. [Scrolls through iPhone to show Trump.] This right here is the iPlane 1. It’s a hydrogen powered airplane, and this is what our president should be flying in.....

"I don’t read reviews. Many writers say this, and they’re lying — but I’m not lying."

"My wife reads every review, though, and she only reads the bad ones out loud to me. She says I have to accept bad reviews. The good reviews, forget it."

Says Haruki Murakami, interviewed at the NYT on the occasion of the release of his new book "Killing Commendatore."

I'm in the middle of reading it. Are you?

You have said that “Killing Commendatore” is a homage to “The Great Gatsby,” a novel that, as it happens, you translated into Japanese about ten years ago. “Gatsby” can be read as a tragic tale about the limits of the American dream. How did this work in your new book?

“The Great Gatsby” is my favorite book. I read it when I was 17 or 18, out of school, and was impressed by the story because it’s a book about a dream — and how people behave when the dream is broken. This is a very important theme for me. I don’t think of it as necessarily the American dream, but rather a young man’s dream, a dream in general.

In the interview, Murakami says he originally wrote the first "one or two paragraphs," then put it in a drawer and waited until he got the idea that he could write it. The first 2 paragraphs are:

Today when I awoke from a nap the faceless man was there before me. He was seated on the chair across from the sofa I’d been sleeping on, staring straight at me with a pair of imaginary eyes in a face that wasn’t.

The man was tall, and he was dressed the same as when I had seen him last. His face-that-wasn’t-a-face was half hidden by a wide-brimmed black hat, and he had on a long, equally dark coat.

The way to continue is that the man without a face asks the narrator to paint his portrait, and the narrator, we learn, is an artist who paints portraits, but only because it was a way to make a living, and what he really wants is to paint abstracts.

A new political costume? A sad-faced girl with 2 bruised eyes, imploring us to vote to save her from further violence?

That's what I wondered, when I opened my email and saw this (click to enlarge and sharpen):



Maybe that's supposed to just be a pretty way to do your eyes — all purple, with glitter.

Decades ago, it was a cliché of feminist critique to say that eye shadow looked like 2 bruised black eyes so if you think it's attractive, what you are finding attractive is the violent subordination of women. Despite the mass quantities of feminist critique on line these days, I can't find anyone saying that.

So what's going on with that girl's eyes? (I'm saying girl because she looks about 12.)

Is it a deliberate effort to look as though she's been punched in the face a couple times? If so, it's not like in the old feminist critique, a misguided effort to look sexy by looking like a beaten-up victim, but a misguided effort to lend credibility to a message that — because violence against women is bad — you ought to vote (presumably for a candidate that cares about women's rights).

I expect many of you to say I'm going too far. She's just supposed to look like a cool young rock music fan.

AND: I am reminded of last week's New Yorker cover, which used lipstick to represent violence against women:



The woman with the dulled eyes has what seems to be a lipsticked mouth, but it's a hand. She's being silenced... by her own makeup. The New Yorker's art editor, Françoise Mouly, explains that the cover, by Ana Juan, is commentary on the Kavanaugh hearings.

IN THE COMMENTS: Commenter BJK says that the person I called a girl is in fact a 31-year-old woman, Lauren Mayberry and that she's the lead singer of CHVRCHES, one of the groups listed in the email I received. Here, you might enjoy her music:

Tennessee Senatorial candidate Phil Bredeson promotes that endorsement he got from Taylor Swift.

Here's the ad:



I think that works more as an anti-Taylor Swift ad. Is that her music in any way? It was horrible! CNN reports:

In a video, simply titled "Taylor Swift," Bredesen's campaign cribs Swift's song, "Look What You Made Me Do" with a slate aimed at his opponent, Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, that reads, "Look What Marsha Made Her Do." The video then proceeds to clip together news coverage of Swift's unexpected endorsement, with reporters repeatedly noting the move is "out of the norm" for Swift.

Wow. So that was Taylor Swift music?! Here's the original, which seems kind of okay, maybe because we get to look at the lovely young woman (and not that Harry-Morgan-looking guy):



And if the sheer badness of that appropriation of her music and her once-politics-free image were not enough, the new NYT/Siena poll has support for Blackburn suddenly up by 14 points!

"Watching hours of Trump at his rallies, it’s easy to sympathize with the desire to ignore them."

"John Dean tweeted a picture of the crowd waiting in line for the Erie rally and derided it as a 'meaningless show.' For supporters, it’s hyperbole, just rhetoric, entertainment, part of the unvarnished appeal; for opponents, it’s old news painful to watch, maybe, but inconsequential, narrow-casting to his base... But what the President of the United States is actually saying is extraordinary... It’s not just the whoppers or the particular outrage riffs.... It’s the hate, and the sense of actual menace that the President is trying to convey to his supporters. Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster. I listen because I think we are making a mistake by dismissing him, by pretending the words of the most powerful man in the world are meaningless...."

From "I Listened to All Six Trump Rallies in October. You Should, Too/It’s not a reality show. It’s real" — by Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker.

I was just inquiring into who's properly characterized as "exhausted." Supposedly, according to "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape," it's everybody but the progressive activists, the traditional conservatives, and the devoted conservatives.

But that New Yorker writer sounds powerfully exhausted and she's talking to New Yorker readers who she presumes are exhausted.

By the way, I had to laugh at the line "Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous." Glasser is disparaging Trump for saying that. She's paraphrasing. But you could just as well paraphrase the message from Democrats as: Republicans are not just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Glasser acts appalled by "the sense of actual menace" that Trump supposedly is "trying to convey to" his audience, but Glasser seems to be trying to convey a sense of actual menace to hers.

I would be exhausted if I were not amused.

I'm hearing about the "exhausted majority." Is that something different from the old "silent majority"?

A lot of people — including me, here, yesterday — are linking to the Atlantic article, "Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture" by Yascha Mounk.

I usually give the subtitle along with the title, but this article has a distractingly incomprehensible subtitle: "Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either." I mean, I can comprehend it now that I've read the article, but unlike most subtitles, it doesn't help you see what you're going to get by reading it. The use of the word "proxy" is, if not entirely wrong, entirely confusing. The idea is supposed to be that you're wrong if you assume that the older and whiter a person is there more likely they are to think "political correctness" is a problem. It turns out that all groups — except "progressive activists" — say they think "political correctness" is a problem. And the majorities are overwhelming.

The article draws from a new report, "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” which sorts Americans into various political "tribes." This depiction is a good quick summary:



Look at how many people are collected under the label "exhausted"! Obviously, we're a huge majority, and it's nice to see all the detail within the majority, but why are we all labeled "exhausted"? And why are "traditional liberals" said to be exhausted when "traditional conservatives" are not? The Atlantic article says that the views of the "traditional" and the "devoted" conservatives "are far outside the American mainstream." I guess the "traditional liberals," unlike the "traditional conservatives," don't belong in the "wings," and therefore get grouped with the "majority." But why is that entire diverse group, the majority, deemed "exhausted"?

To go to the underlying report:

In talking to everyday Americans, we have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. While they differ on important issues, they feel exhausted by the division in the United States. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.

Is this group really tired or just hard to hear "above the shouts of the partisan tribes"? I suspect that the authors are using the term "exhausted majority" because they don't want to say "silent majority."

Here's the Wikipedia article for "Silent Majority":

"Nature's nuke."

"We were at home in Salt Lake City in when I tweeted — at 2:11 a.m. — I just woke up and had this thought in my head: Oh, my God, this is going to make so much sense."

"And then I tweeted it and then I went right back to sleep. And when I woke up at 7, the shit had hit the fan."



It was one of those things, she says, where you "just want to get it down," and you'll "expand on this later."

Why would anyone think your iPad Twitter app should be your bedside notepad? It's an especially bad choice if you go to sleep on a mind-altering drug. Roseanne says she used Ambien. Drug or no drug, it's possible to jot down a note in the middle of the night that even you can't understand the next morning or that you understand but realize in your wide-awake clarity is a bad idea or an idea you don't want to use in your public presentation of yourself. That's why a paper note pad is a classic bedside table item.

But Roseanne's public presentation was someone who would blurt out things that could sound crazy, and that is something that works on Twitter. You score with retweets. Was the 2 a.m. thought, "Oh, my God, this is going to make so much sense" or was it something more like: "This is so weird, I'll make them go nuts trying to figure out what this means"?

ADDED: You can listen to the entire 2+ hour long podcast here. And let me give you another clip, in which Roseanne expresses her sadness and anger that the network would take an artist's work away from her. The show represented 30 years of her work, drawn from her life and the Conner family is her real-life family. She had legal rights in the show, but she signed them away, she said because she'd have been a "hypocrite" to have cared about "labor rights" for so long and then, by not signing off, be responsible for 200 people losing their job.

"Mom, I really didn’t do this, but I’ll see you in two years instead of 20 if I sign. And everyone here believes her, uncritically."

Imagined dialogue, the last line of "I believe in Me Too, but I believe no one uncritically" by Marc John Radazza in the ABA Journal.

At the First Frost Café...

... you can warm up inside.

It's going down to 29° tonight — and it was almost 80° a couple days ago — so it was the day Meade dragged the big avocado tree inside. He dismantled all the ferns too. It looks so empty out there now!

"We are now one step closer to same-sex reproduction: Scientists in China have produced healthy offspring from two mother mice."

Reports Sixth Tone.

While it is possible for some reptiles, amphibians, and fish to reproduce without two parents of the opposite sex, achieving this in mammals has proved challenging even with fertilization technology.... But for the CAS researchers, 210 embryos made from the DNA of two mothers yielded 29 live mice.

“We were interested in the question of why mammals can only undergo sexual reproduction,” co-senior author Zhou Qi was quoted as saying in the press release. “So we tried to find out whether more normal mice with two female parents, or even mice with two male parents, could be produced using haploid embryonic stem cells.”

"When we greenlit The Conners we thought that the public would tune in to see the family return but what we've discovered is that people want Roseanne — they don't want the family by themselves."

"The marketing and publicity teams are horrified as no matter what promotional material is released — and let's be honest it's been limited for a show that launches next Tuesday — Roseanne's fans come out in force stating that they won't watch the show. The comments on social media tend to skew in favor of Roseanne and slam The Conners and the cast members who came back. Even dedicated fans of the Conner family feel conflicted about supporting a show that so swiftly eliminated the show's matriarch and creator."

From "EXCLUSIVE: 'People want Roseanne!' ABC execs fear spin-off show The Conners will crash without its fired star when it debuts next week and tell DailyMailTV killing off her character was a hasty 'knee-jerk' decision" (The Daily Mail).

ADDED: I suspect that the execs are angling to bring Roseanne back. I heard that they were going to begin the new show with the news that Roseanne had died, but the first episode hasn't aired yet, and it might be easy to edit the story into just having her away in the hospital, struggling but not yet dead, and then bring her back — the character and the celebrity. I think most Americans these days — especially the subset that watched "Roseanne" — want to see somebody in trouble fight back. Look at Brett Kavanaugh. Trump didn't abandon him, and he didn't apologize and disappear. It's just not a good story going forward if they killed off Roseanne and took the easy way out. The Conner family is about struggling through adversity and sticking together. It's completely incoherent to throw the mother away because she said one bad thing. And an awful lot of people think she was punished not for saying that one bad thing but for liking Trump. A lot of TV-watchers like Trump.

AND: I've been meaning to get around to posting this: "Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture" (The Atlantic). 79% of  white people think political correctness is a problem, and the opposition to political correctness is even stronger among Asian-Americans (82%), Hispanics-Americans (87%), and American Indians (88%). Among racial groups, African-Americans are the most supportive of political correctness, but still, 75% are opposed. The only group that supported political correctness was "progressive activists," but even in that group 30% thought it's a problem.

"Just hours before the curtain was to go up, Shorewood High School has canceled its production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' in response to a planned protest over its use of the n-word."

"News of a planned protest had circulated on social media early Thursday. And by early afternoon, Superintendent Bryan Davis pulled the plug, saying the district should have done a better job engaging the community 'about the sensitivity of this performance. We’ve concluded that the safest option is to cancel the play,' Davis said in a statement."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Imagine letting students learn all the lines of a play, rehearse their parts, get all nervous and excited about the performance and then just cancelling it on them — cancelling it on them not because of anything they did wrong or anything that was wrong but because other people talked about protesting it. What kind of lesson is the school teaching?! What's the point of working hard and doing something worthwhile that you believe in and build with other people if the authorities won't support you but will take the "safest option" and side with the people who see an opportunity for protest and disruption.

I see the protesters don't like the "n-word" in the show. It would be so easy to modify the script to take out one word. But I guess cancelling is the "safest" thing to do. It's practically telling the students who worked peaceably on their theater project that they should be less well-behaved, so that ruining their work won't seem "safe."

***

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Atticus Finch.

ADDED: I have drawn a line through one sentence because I now believe the licensing agreement forbids making any change to the script. My son John linked to this post at Facebook, and someone there made that point. My response there:

I'm sorry if my blog post makes it seem as though my first choice is to take out the word or if anyone thinks I'd support the cancellation if the word could not be taken out. I think the school authorities saw fit to make that play the one the students should do and the students committed a lot of work and dedication to a project in reliance on the school's choice. It is a terrible betrayal of the students who trusted the school. I was in school plays in high school, and I remember how deeply emotionally important they become to the students. Here's a play with very serious subject matter, and the subject is specifically courage in the face of ignorant opposition.

"You know, they tried to scare me to not wear this hat—my own friends. But it’s hot! It gives me, it gives me power in a way. "

"You know, my dad and my mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though! But there’s times where, you know, it’s something about—I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign, 'I’m With Her,' just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son. There was something about, when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman—that’s my favorite super hero. You made a Superman cape for me, also, as a guy who looks up to you … looks up to American industry guys, nonpolitical, no bullshit—put the beep on it—however you wanna do it, five second delay…"

Said Kanye West, talking to Donald Trump today. I got the transcription from "Inside The Historic Trump-Kanye Oval Office Summit" (New York Magazine). You can watch 24+ minutes of Trump and Kanye and Jim Brown, here:



ADDED: Kanye hugs Trump and tells him he loves him:

Kanye West with President Trump in Oval Office: "I love this guy right here." pic.twitter.com/40Q24j5fRJ

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 11, 2018

What if your child's teacher thought this about your son: "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time"?

Teachers want us to believe that they love children and care for and support them. They have — through the compulsion of the state — the opportunity to observe them and interact with them for long hours and many days in their formative years. To trust teachers in that role, we need to believe that if they saw that our child was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time, their heart would go out to our poor little child, and they'd talk with us and try to help. Or maybe we would wonder whether the teacher understands psychological diversity. Why is she tagging our child as "a loner" rather than appreciating the introvert or trying to figure out if there's some unseen burden making the child withdrawn? The teacher shouldn't be like another one of the children, who decide that a kid is a weirdo and shun him. But imagine a teacher who remembers the children she thought about as a weirdo, waited decades, and when that fellow human being achieved some success in his adult life, she wrote a newspaper column to tell the world "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time."

This is Nikki Fiske, Stephen Miller's Third-Grade Teacher. Stephen Miller is a Trump political adviser. Maybe Nikki Fiske was lured into "writing" this article. I put "writing" in quotes because the byline is "Nikki Fiske, as told to Benjamin Svetkey." I hope she's dreadfully sorry at her terrible breach of a teacher's moral responsibility toward a child. I was a teacher for more than 30 years, and my students were all adults, but I have never — in all the tens of thousands of blog posts I've dashed off and published impulsively — even considered naming one of my students and saying something negative I thought I observed about their personality.

I googled the line "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time" and not everything that came up was about Nikki Fiske and Stephen Miller. There was also:

1. "The Badass Personalities of People Who Like Being Alone/Four studies shatter stereotypes of people who like to be alone" by Bella DePaulo (Psychology Today).

True loners are people who embrace their alone time.... If our stereotypes about people who like being alone were true, then we should find that they are neurotic and closed-minded. In fact, just the opposite is true: People who like spending time alone, and who are unafraid of being single, are especially unlikely to be neurotic. They are not the tense, moody, worrying types.

2. "The Lethality of Loneliness/We now know how it can ravage our body and brain" by Judith Shulevitz (New Republic).

“Real loneliness”... is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is “real loneliness” the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your friend or lover or even spouse— unless you chronically find yourself in that situation, in which case you may in fact be a lonely person.... Loneliness... is the want of intimacy.

3. "The Virtues of Isolation/Under the right circumstances, choosing to spend time alone can be a huge psychological boon" by Brent Crane (The Atlantic):

And even though many great thinkers have championed the intellectual and spiritual benefits of solitude–Lao Tzu, Moses, Nietzsche, Emerson, Woolf (“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table”)– many modern humans seem hell-bent on avoiding it....

Generally, [Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist] contends that our “mistrust of solitude” has consequences. For one, “we’ve become a more groupish society,” he says.... “We’re drawn to identity-markers and to groups that help us define [ourselves]. In the simplest terms, this means using others to fill out our identities, rather than relying on something internal, something that comes from within,” Bowker says. “Separating from the group, I would argue, is one thing that universities should be facilitating more.”

4. "Why do some people become loners? What type of people become loners? What are the advantages of being a loner?" by Anonymous (Quora):

I don’t really have any big hopes for future. At least I am glad I live in North America where loners are somewhat accepted by the society. I used to blame my parents a lot for being this way. I used to be very angry, especially at my father. There is a saying “You become like the people you resent to”. I think it’s happening. My father is a loner too. The difference is that he belongs to a different generation. He was able to build a family and his own family is big. He is a loner at heart who never had a chance of actually becoming one. Now he is in his 60s and my mother complains that he has no friends to spend time with so he is bored all the time.

5. "Depression is a disease of loneliness/A lack of friends can suck someone into solitude – sharing the language of affection could help to ease the pain" by Andrew Solomon (The Guardian):

It would be arrogant for people with friends to pity those without. Some friendless people may be close to their parents or children rather than to extrafamilial friends, or they may be more interested in things or ideas than in other people....

Many people, however, are desperate for love, but don’t know how to go about finding it, disabled by depression’s tidal pull toward seclusion....

For some, friendship has become a vocabulary as obscure as Sanskrit. Lack of emotional fluency may cause depression; it may exacerbate it; it may cast a shadow over recovery. But there are ways to help people who want friendships to learn the language of affection. Parents and schools can teach children productive ways to engage....

"Michelle always says, 'When they go low, we go high.' No. No. When they go low, we kick them."

Said Eric Holder, quoted at WaPo in "'When they go low, we kick them': How Michelle Obama’s maxim morphed to fit angry and divided times." Morphed? It's not some kind of updating or evolution. It's the opposite. The only coherence comes from understanding that calls for civility are always bullshit — just a con to get the other side to stand down, because when you think incivility suits your interests, suddenly it's a good thing.

[Holder] said a more antagonistic spirit is “what this new Democratic Party is about,” adding, “We are proud as hell to be Democrats. We are willing to fight for the ideals of the Democratic Party.

He tried to clarify that he wasn’t calling for violence, saying later in his remarks, “I don’t mean we do anything inappropriate, we don’t do anything illegal, but we have to be tough and we have to fight.” A combative strategy, he said, would honor the legacy of civil rights leaders, such as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Martin Luther King Jr.

Yeah, MLK had a "nonviolence" shtick but he would have morphed to fit angry and divided times — if only he hadn't been a victim of violence. But Holder says he is "honor[ing] the legacy" of MLK by getting "combative." Maybe MLK was only choosing a means to an end and didn't have high principles at all, but if so, at least he picked effective tactics. Holder isn't even doing that. The angry aggressive approach is failing. Look at the post-Kavanaugh-hearings polls.

The WaPo article also has the new Hillary Clinton quote (which we talked about yesterday here): "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."

It doesn't have the second part of her quote — "That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again" — which I credit for its humorous frankness. It's what I've been saying for years under my "civility bullshit" tag. In that view, Michelle's "When they go low, we go high" never meant we're lofty and principled and stick to our values, but that the idea we're high and they're low is effective rhetoric.

I suspect going high would have been more effective in 2018 than crazy-sounding combativeness, but in choosing a tactic, you're always at risk of being wrong. If you're principled and do what's right as an end in itself, then if it turns out not to get you want you want, you still have your honor. No one needs to follow you. No one needs to believe in you. But I don't think you are in politics. That's why I say calls for civility are always bullshit.

Combativeness isn't a new idea for Democrats, of course. Michelle Obama's line is memorable, but so is "If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard" (spoken by Obama's deputy chief of staff Jim Messina in 2009).

Other recent rejection of "When they go low, we go high," collected in the WaPo article:

"When I got pregnant, I was f**king freaking out. Everybody around me was like, ‘No, this never happened before.'"

"'Every artist that had a baby, they already put in years in the game. This is your first year. You’re going to mess it up. How are you going to make it?’ While I was pregnant, I kept telling myself, I can’t wait till I’m back out there. I’m going to look hot, and I’m going to be that bitch. Four weeks after giving birth, I was supposed to start rehearsals for a fall tour with Bruno Mars and I couldn’t even squat down. People don’t really talk about what you go through after pregnancy... When Kulture was born, I felt like I was a kid again; everything was making me cry, and I needed a lot of love. I feel ­better now, but sometimes I just feel so vulnerable, like I’m not ready for the world yet."

Said Cardi B in a W interview quoted at Tom & Lorenzo. She didn't go on that tour, she "sacrificed that to stay with my daughter," and that explains, she says, why she physically attacked Nicki Minaj:

[S]he saw that Minaj had liked, and then unliked, a tweet disparaging Cardi’s mothering skills, something Minaj has denied. “I was going to make millions off my Bruno Mars tour, and I sacrificed that to stay with my daughter,” Cardi went on. “I love my daughter. I’m a good-ass fucking mom. So for somebody that don’t have a child to like that comment? So many people want to say that party wasn’t the time or the place, but I’m not going to catch another artist in the grocery store or down the block.”

At the Scrapple Café...

... get scrappy.

Hillary Clinton: "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."

"That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again."

Quoted at Facebook (with a link to CNN) by my son John, who adds a quote from me: "Civility is called for to tame the opposition, when it serves your interest."

AND: As long as I'm talking about the woman who lacks the sense to lie low before the elections, let me throw this in here "Hillary says series of sex claims against Bill are NOT like the Kavanaugh confirmation because her husband faced 'intense investigation'" (Daily Mail):

Loneliness — "A problem that almost anyone can relate to."

The quoted phrase is mine, from a post this morning about a NYT op-ed by a college sophomore titled "Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student."

The Crack Emcee responded, "Almost" and linked to Greta Garbo's iconic "I want to be alone":



That made me think about something in a novel I just read, "Convenience Store Woman." The title character takes in a young man who proceeds to live in her bathtub. She wants him not as a lover or a companion but just so her friends and family won't be troubled by thinking of her as pathetic because she is a woman without a career or a man. He's not interested in her as a lover or a companion. Here's his explanation of all he wants:

“I want you to keep me hidden from society. I don’t mind you using my existence here for your own ends, and you can talk about me all you want. I myself want to spend all my time hiding here. I’ve had enough of complete strangers poking their noses into my business.... When you’re a man, it’s all ‘go to work’ and ‘get married.’ And once you’re married, then it’s ‘earn more’ and ‘have children’! You’re a slave to the village. Society orders you to work your whole life. Even my testicles are the property of the village! Just by having no sexual experience they treat you as though you’re wasting your semen... Your uterus belongs to the village too, you know. The only reason the villagers aren’t paying it any attention is because it’s useless. I want to spend my whole life doing nothing. For my whole life, until I die, I want to just breathe without anyone interfering in my life. That’s all I wish for,” he finished, holding his palms together as if in supplication.

I don't have a "loneliness" tag. I've always had "solitude." That is, I keep open the question whether being alone is a more negative experience than being with others. It's in that context that I made up my aphorism, "Better than nothing is a high standard."

Obviously, Garbo is unhappy. She wants to be alone not because it's sublime and rewarding, but because the alternative is sadder. The man in the bathtub is in even worse shape. And it's a cliché to say You can be lonely in a crowd. One might seek solitude because the loneliness is more painful when you are surrounded by people who are engaged with each other. You may do damaging, dangerous, regrettable things when feeling the pain of loneliness in a crowd.

"A game of brinkmanship began when the Musée d’Orsay here invited Julian Schnabel to choose paintings from its 19th-century collection to exhibit alongside his own works of art."

"At a certain moment the museum said: You can’t have this or that painting, so I said I can’t do it,' Mr. Schnabel said in a recent interview at the museum. 'I thought, if I can’t pick the paintings, there’s no reason for me to say that I picked the paintings.' The American artist and filmmaker, 66, had his eye on works by four artists in particular — Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Cézanne — which the museum did not want to move from their usual places."

In the end, Schnabel got everything but the Cézanne for the show, described here, in the NYT.

The article doesn't say which Cézanne was so firmly unmoveable, and I don't think it's the Cézanne mentioned in this paragraph (which confused me):

The earliest of [Schnabel's] works in the show is the large-scale “Blue Nude with Sword” from 1979, the first figurative, as opposed to abstract, plate painting that Mr. Schnabel made. It hangs alongside Cézanne’s much smaller tableau “La Femme Étranglée” (“The Strangled Woman,” 1875-1876), with which it shares a similar red, white and blue palette.

I was struck that the NYT would allow such a blurry, distanced hint at violence against women in this article. Women are strangled, not just in the Cézanne painting...



... but in the newspaper that also, when it's in the mood, tells us about the women protesters who scream about our subordination. But in the museum, the men dominate as usual. Schnabel is a man with the power to compare himself to anyone he likes and he likes all men — Van Gogh, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne.

But at least Schnabel's nude woman isn't strangled but wields a sword. No! Faked you out: Schnabel's "Blue Nude with a Sword" is a man:


What's he aiming that sword at? A curled up red dog? A pile of shit? I don't know, but why, with all those phallic symbols — the pillars, the sword — do we see no genitalia between his legs? Or is that the point — "Blue Nude Without Testicles"?

Are you enjoying the Gender Studies at Althouse this morning?

"Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student/Last fall, I made a viral video about having trouble making friends. Here’s what I’ve learned."

A NYT op-ed by Emery Bergmann, a Cornell sophomore who made this video when she was a freshman:



I like the way in the video she reads a NYT op-ed and — a year later — she's writing a NYT op-ed. The op-ed she's reading is "The Real Campus Scourge" by Frank Bruni (September 3, 2017). The "real campus scourge" is loneliness. What was the "unreal" campus scourge? I can't help thinking: rape.

Bergmann's viral video shows her as a freshman imagining that other students were having so much fun together, and the video clips show drinking parties. I'm surprised the NYT published Bergmann's op-ed so close in time to our immersion in the story of Christine Blasey Ford's teenage drinking party nightmare.

But what "unreal" campus scourge did Bruni allude to? You can see from the last paragraph it's drinking too much and eating too much:

We urge new college students not to party too hard. We warn them of weight gain (“the freshman 15”). We also need to tell them that what’s often behind all that drinking and eating isn’t celebration but sadness, which is normal, survivable and shared by many of the people around them, no matter how sunny their faces or their Facebook posts.

What’s often behind all that drinking and eating isn’t celebration but sadness....

I'm so sure the NYT does not want us going back into old Frank Bruni columns that will get us empathizing with teenage males who drink too much! (Poor Brett Kavanaugh! He must have been sad and lonely when he got stumbling drunk with his so-called friends!)

But it's very easy to see why the NYT published Bergmann's op-ed, and I'm probably the only one who looked up and read the article we see her pulling out of an envelope in her viral video. Bergmann's op-ed is phenomenally publishable. It fits the season of going back to school. It's about understanding social media. And we see a young woman who's charmingly attractive and suffering just touchingly enough from a problem that almost anyone can relate to.

How can the NYT think this photograph is an illustration of "The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics"?

The article, from 2 days ago, is "The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics/Republicans are an authoritarian regime in waiting" by Paul Krugman. (The phrase "The Paranoid Style" is an invocation of the 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter.)

The photograph — which is a nice photograph by NYT photographer Damon Winter — shows anti-Kavanaugh protesters. The signs make that clear. Perhaps the idea is that "paranoid" Republicans characterize Democratic protesters as crazier than they really are. The only slightly "crazy" sign is the one that shows angry-face Kavanaugh wearing one of those hats that hold 2 beer cans with a tube feeding beer into the hat-wearers mouth. The protesters' faces look not crazy but — if I had to choose one word — concerned.

I haven't read a Paul Krugman column in a long time, but because the headline/photograph combination raised a question for me, I'm going to read to get my answer.

Krugman begins at a level that I consider rash. He calls Kavanaugh "a naked partisan who clearly lied under oath." This is why I don't read Krugman. It's red meat for readers who are hungry and know what they want. The Supreme Court's "moral authority" is "for the foreseeable future," "destroyed."

If there's one person who should not use the phrase "the foreseeable future," it's Krugman. It's alway a silly phrase. We're not psychics. We don't see into the future. But Krugman is famous for writing, the day after the 2016 election, that the financial markets will never recover from the election of Donald Trump. He should know he got burned and be careful.

Back to this new column. Krugman accuses Republicans — based on their performance during the Kavanaugh hearings — of "contempt for the truth" and "a rush to demonize any and all criticism." He sees Republicans as susceptible to "crazy conspiracy theories" because Kavanaugh accused the Democrats of making "a calculated and orchestrated political hit" and seeking "revenge" for Hillary Clinton's loss of the election. Kavanaugh's statement, according to Krugman,  was a "completely false, hysterical accusation." Completely false? That sounds... hysterical.

Trump made things worse, Krugman says, by "declaring, falsely (and with no evidence)" that some anti-Kavanaugh protesters were getting paid. How can Krugman know that the President has no evidence? How can Krugman know that it's false to say they were paid? Does Krugman have evidence conclusively proving that the protesters were all self-funding? I'd like to see an investigation into the inner workings of the protests, and I do think there shouldn't be accusations without evidence, but criticism of the accusers should model proper concern for evidence, or everyone seems to be putting partisan fervor above scrupulous adherence to the truth.

Midway through the column, Krugman shifts from saying that the GOP uses the "paranoid style" to the announcement: "the G.O.P. is an authoritarian regime in waiting." In Krugman's analysis, when those who hold government power use the paranoid style, it's evidence that they're going for authoritarianism. Krugman lists some things — evidence? —  "investigations," "scandals," "tax cheating," "self-dealing," "possible collusion with Russia," and then asks "Does anyone doubt that Trump would like to go full authoritarian, given the chance?"

Well, of course, many people doubt that Trump would like to go full authoritarian! Why did Krugman write a question in such an extreme form that any intelligent, fair person would have to answer yes? Is he paranoid?

I'm not quick to guess paranoid. I think it's more likely that he's angry, cynical, tired of losing, and aware of his readership. In other words, he's deeply entrenched in the very sort of political discourse he's hoping to critique. It's paranoid when they do it. Uh huh.

His last line is another look into the "foreseeable future": "If you aren’t terrified of where we might be in the very near future, you aren’t paying attention." Be scared! Be very afraid! Be terrified... of the way those other people are spreading fear!

And I still don't know why that's the right photograph. I can only guess that the idea is: Look at these very real, sincere faces. Surely, they paid their own expenses.

ADDED: With an eye out for paid protesters stories, I found "Trump apparently misunderstands ‘Fox & Friends’ joke, makes baffling tweet" (WaPo), which tries to understand a Trump tweet that says "The paid D.C. protesters are now ready to REALLY protest because they haven’t gotten their checks - in other words, they weren’t paid! Screamers in Congress, and outside, were far too obvious - less professional than anticipated by those paying (or not paying) the bills!" WaPo puzzles:

In a literal sense, it’s true that the protesters didn’t get checks, because as far as anyone knows they had not expected any payment. But Trump’s tweet seems to be an elaboration on the original fiction, rather than a retraction of it. As best we can discern, he’s saying the imaginary benefactors of imaginary paid protesters have skipped out on their imaginary obligations and left the imaginary paid protesters with imaginary unpaid wages.

It’s a weirdly specific scenario to conjure out of thin air. We can’t even find any fake news articles to support it....

Some Trumpsters theorized that Trump deliberately said something wrong to trick some protesters into admitting that they did get paid. But "the dominant theory" is that Trump heard Asra Nomani, a guest on “Fox & Friends,” say, "People have sent me lots of messages that they’re waiting for their check." Later, she said it was sarcasm, but whether it was a joke or not, Trump apparently didn't think it was a joke.

At the Freedom Café...

... you're free to talk all night (and shop Amazon through the Althouse Portal all night).

"I’d noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy."

"If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone seemed pleased that I was angry too. Now, too, I felt reassured by the expression on Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara’s faces: Good, I pulled off being a 'person.' I’d felt similarly reassured any number of times here in the convenience store."

From the novel "Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata, which is a fun, very fast read that's both light and deep. The audiobook reader is Nancy Wu, who's fantastic.

I had to look up the word "skiving." It means avoiding work. Another word I learned reading this book is "freeter":

When I was in my early twenties it wasn’t unusual to be a freeter, so I didn’t really need to make excuses. But subsequently everyone started hooking up with society, either through employment or marriage, and I was the only one who hadn’t done either. While I always say it’s because I’m frail, deep down everyone must be thinking that if that’s so, why would I choose to do a job in which I’m on my feet for long periods every day?

Here's the Wikipedia article for "freeter":

Freeter (フリーター furītā) is a Japanese expression for people who lack full-time employment or are unemployed, excluding housewives and students. The term originally included young people who deliberately chose not to become salary-men, even though jobs were available at the time....

If they work at all, freeters often work at convenience stores, supermarkets, fast food outlets, restaurants, and other low paying, low skill jobs....

The Japan Institute of Labor classifies freeters into three groups: the "moratorium type" that wants to wait before starting a career, the "dream pursuing type", and the "no alternative type". The moratorium type of freeter wants to enjoy life, and deliberately chooses not to join the rat race of the Japanese work environment. The dream pursuing type has specific dreams incompatible with a standard Japanese career. The no alternative type could not find a decent job before high school or university graduation in the system called "simultaneous recruiting of new graduates"...

The character in the book doesn't fit any of those 3 categories. She's someone who doesn't feel like a normal person, but feels normal as part of the entity that is the store.

ADDED: Speaking of novels by Japanese authors, the new Haruki Murakami book is out today. Here: "Killing Commendatore." That's what I'll start today. Read with me!

"Jared is such a hidden genius that no one understands,” said Haley. “What I have done working with him on the Middle East peace plan. It is so unbelievably well done."

Said Nikki Haley, as she resigned from her position as U.N. ambassador.

Who gets the Nobel Prize for Literature this year?

Nobody.

About those gecko feet.

I mean, look at them:

THERE IS A GECKO SITTING ON THE TOUCHSCREEN OF THE PHONE, MAKING CALLS WITH HIS TINY GECKO FEET!!! This gecko has called me 15 times, and everyone in our recent call list. *Actual photo of telemarketer* @TMMC @GEICO @HawaiianTel pic.twitter.com/USyKeOiDbE

— Dr. Claire Simeone (@Claire_Simeone) October 5, 2018

I got there via "A gecko, seriously, made dozens of mysterious phone calls from a Hawaii marine mammal hospital" (WaPo). And I found the closeup of the gecko foot on the Wikipedia article "Gecko feet" (there's an article just for the feet!).

The interactions between the gecko's feet and the climbing surface are stronger than simple surface area effects. On its feet, the gecko has many microscopic hairs, or setae... that increase the Van der Waals forces between its feet and the surface.

The Van der Waals forces!

The following equation can be used to quantitatively characterize the Van der Waals forces, by approximating the interaction as being between two flat surfaces:



where F is the force of interaction, AH is the Hamaker constant, and D is the distance between the two surfaces. Gecko setae are much more complicated than a flat surface, for each foot has roughly 14,000 setae that each have about 1,000 spatulae. These surface interactions help to smooth out the surface roughness of the wall, which helps improve the gecko to wall surface interaction.

And the gecko to touchscreen surface interaction!

"Weeks ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans have cast the Trump resistance movement as “an angry mob'... a modern incarnation of the law-and-order thrusts Republicans have used before in tough campaigns..."

"... most notably 50 years ago, when Richard Nixon used the specter of rioting at the Democratic National Convention to cast the opposing party as the tool of antiwar protesters and violent malcontents.... Earlier this year, when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service at a Virginia restaurant and when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled by protesters at a Mexican restaurant, Republicans cast Democrats as overreacting and unable to withhold their animus toward Trump.... 'They have encouraged mob rule,' Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said on the Senate floor Friday... Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wondered on Twitter: 'Imagine the coverage on cable news if an angry mob of conservatives stormed the steps of the Supreme Court building.'... At his Saturday night rally in Topeka, Kan., Trump joined in, asserting that 'the radical Democrats have turned into an angry mob.'"

I'm reading "‘An angry mob’: Republicans work to recast Democratic protests as out-of-control anarchy" by Matt Viser and Robert Costa in The Washington Post.

There are 3 things that strike me that Viser and Costa don't talk about (and that others who are promoting women's rage are not talking talking about):

1. Law and order may be an old conservative theme — and I certainly remember how Nixon used it back in the days of angry anti-Vietnam War protests — but rape and sexual assault are violent crimes, and the #MeToo movement demands a more vigorous crack down on crime. Do you want more severe anti-crime enforcement or not? If you do, you're a law-and-order person. Own it!

2. Kavanaugh expressed anger at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and he was condemned — by Democrats — for lacking the right "temperament." His opponents acted so shocked and disturbed by the display of emotion. Is showing righteous anger a good tactic or not? If it's bad only when the other side does it, you're engaged in the kind of hypocrisy that I collect under the tag "civility bullshit."

3. It's sexist to minimize the threat of violence coming from women. Some people use the term "cat fight" to suggest it's cute or sexy or laughable when women are violent, and women may sometimes take advantage of that low opinion of our capacity to do real damage. Female privilege. I'm seeing that in the current protests, with women expressing open, screaming rage. If these women think they don't deserve a law-and-order reaction, they are trusting that the rest of us hold the sexist opinion that they are ineffectual. Let them explain why that's pro-woman.

This is the first I'm seeing of "#HimToo" hashtag activism and it's a mother screwing up big time.

I'm reading "‘This is MY son’: Navy vet horrified as mom’s tweet miscasts him as #HimToo poster boy — and goes viral" (WaPo):

“This is MY son,” began his mom’s viral post, which featured a photograph of Hanson posing in his Navy uniform. “He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE. #HimToo.”...

“It doesn’t represent me at all,” said Hanson, who is studying entrepreneurship with plans to open his own brewery. “I love my mom to death, but boy . . . I’m still trying to wrap my head around all this.”

Hanson and his brother, Jon, said... [their mother] she did have a tendency to write gushing social media posts about her sons and sometimes could make “loose cannon” statements, but not like this....

Mothers and social media... when are they going to learn. Get consent! You may think you're complimenting your offspring, but consent matters, and you don't see all the dimensions of what you are doing.

The #HimToo tag is now a lot of comedy. WaPo cherry picks a bunch. I'll give you:

This is my son, the Titan Cronus. He castrated me with a sickle and threw my testicles into the sea. He won’t go on solo dates anymore as it is prophesied that he will be overthrown by his own son, just as he overthrew me. I VOTE. #HimToo pic.twitter.com/Ql9NaVyOlW

— pixelated (something halloween-related) (@pixelatedboat) October 9, 2018

This is MY sun. He graduated #1 in THE SOLAR SYSTEM. He is a star who respects planets. He won't go on solo orbits because his gravitational pull is so strong that one day he will explode! I VOTE. #HimToo pic.twitter.com/FXe5ipyOSM

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) October 9, 2018

"In my interview with Rener Gracie, whose grandfather established the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu method 90 years ago, he told me there are four phases to nearly all sexual attacks on women..."

"... 1) Identify an unsuspecting target, 2) Subdue the target, 3) Exhaust the target, and 4) Execute the sexual assault. We want to fight with all our might and the moves we have above in the second phase. In the third phase, however, right before an assailant executes his sexual attack, all he wants to do is exhaust the victim and gain complete control, so fighting back actually may backfire at that point, wasting energy. Gracie’s Women Empowered training program teaches women to recognize when they’ve entered that phase where they are truly trapped and are no longer in the defensive movements phase—and to feign giving in. Pretend to be compliant (kind of like playing dead for a bear). In those split moments, the predator will think you have given up and will loosen his grip, giving you a chance get away."

From "Basic Self-Defense Moves Anyone Can Do (and Everyone Should Know)" (LifeHacker).

The violence of ice throwing.

That’s not gonna cool this guy off. #OurCrewOurOctober pic.twitter.com/KfGqfET2pU

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 8, 2018

Compare: "Kavanaugh accused of throwing ice at a man in altercation at college bar."

What to wear to the marijuana harvest festival.

Greenness:



Pineapple shorts:



Perfection!

"Carry Nation’s wrath was a response to matters both private and public: she was furious at her alcoholic husband..."

"... and furious at the legal system that let men like him drink freely to the detriment of women, children, and society at large. Although her means were unusual and her desired ends unfashionable, she was representative of a recurring figure in American history: the woman whose activism is fuelled by anger. Such women are much in the news today, and much in the streets, too, although generally without the hatchet. Since the 2016 Presidential election, countless numbers of them have set out to make hell howl—by disrupting government hearings, occupying federal buildings, scaling the Statue of Liberty, boycotting businesses, going on strike, coming forward with stories of harassment and assault, flooding congressional telephone lines, raising a middle finger at the Presidential motorcade, and attending protests by the millions, sometimes carrying with them representations of the President’s castrated testicles and severed head."

From "The Perils and Possibilities of Anger/After centuries of censure, women reconsider the political power of female rage" by Casey Cep in The New Yorker.

Tweeting Columbus Day.

Christopher Columbus’s spirit of determination & adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On #ColumbusDay, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, & celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. https://t.co/Mg3dxRfPuN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2018

I’m with you Amy https://t.co/OA32dUrKfs

— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) October 7, 2018

"False memories of sexual abuse lead to terrible miscarriages of justice/To avoid the innocent being convicted, police, lawyers and judges must understand the fickle nature of human memory."

No! That's not a new article. That's from 2010, in The Guardian, but I'm reading it now because my son John posted it yesterday on Facebook.

Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur....

During therapy, and often as a result of "memory recovery" techniques such as hypnotic regression and guided imagery, the client may gradually develop clear and vivid memories of abuse having taken place, typically at the hands of parents and other family members.

On the evidence of a huge amount of well-controlled research, we can now be confident that these memory recovery techniques are highly likely to give rise to false memories – apparent memories for events that never took place.

For contrast, here's WaPo yesterday: "The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh."

Mara Mather, a professor at the University of Southern California, has performed laboratory studies in which volunteers are given electric shocks or subjected to loud noises while they look at a set of symbols — to find out which ones they remember while their brains are flooded with the same chemicals released during trauma.

“I guess the Republicans have been debating why does she forget getting home, but that sounds very plausible," she said. “It focuses the brain on whatever stands out at that moment. The things that are not standing out are even more ignored.”

Like other researchers, she could not recall a single case of a sexual assault victim misremembering a known attacker — save for rare instances in which people, often children, were coached into falsely accusing friends and family members....

IN THE COMMENTS: Michael K said: "I initially thought she had recovered memories but I have come to the conclusion that she is lying."

The Senators and pundits were operating under rules of engagement that put it off limits to inquire into whether Christine Blasey Ford might be lying. That led them into a lot of discussion of the mysteries of memory, and if the science got weak or bad, it might be because it stood in for something else that they were committed not to talk about. I'd like to see some serious defense of whatever good memory science there might be out there, but the WaPo article is not serious. It's propaganda, purporting to straighten us out on the science, but exploiting science in service to a political end.

"I hate babies. Is something wrong with me? I'm a female in my mid 20s and I find myself loathing babies."

"Is there anything wrong with me? No, I never had any traumatic childhood experience or something of that sort. Seeing baby photos and videos make me mad and want to squish their chubby cheeks to death. Of course, I wouldn't do that and I'll never try to hurt babies but I can't help but hate them. Is this some kind of mental illness like the psycho-freaks who hurt the animals for pleasure? Because I'm really bothered. Please no answers like 'Babies are the greatest gift on earth' or 'You were a baby once' or something of that sort. Other than that, I think I'm pretty compassionate about other things like animals, elderly, etc."

A serious question, asked at Reddit 2 years ago. Notice that she's mainly concerned with her own mental health: Is there something wrong with me if I don't have the feelings that seem to come naturally to others? And the naturalness of those feelings can be explained through evolution — a practical, not a moral explanation. One could also question the data: There are social constraints on expressing negative feelings about babies. The questioner may not be as unusual as she worries she is.

The top-rated answer points her to the subreddit childfree. I haven't read that, but I'd guess that there's a lot of material about the burdens of childcare as opposed to actually hating babies. Hating babies! It sounds so wrong. Imagine seeing baby photos and videos and getting mad, as the questioner describes. The questioner does come back to say:

Okay. Maybe I don't hate them, reading these comments here made think that it might have something about the demand and expectations of people around me. Or probably because my Facebook timeline is full of children and babies since people my age are already starting their own families-- which makes my annoyance even worse. But in my head I'm like "Guys, stop it, I'll be polite and like your photo just so you don't think I'm mean but your babies aren't cute. :("

Of course, I feel bad about my distaste for babies.

I have the perfect "Friends" clip for that:

A graphic depiction of the inane gender politics of The Washington Post.

Here's a screen selection of the upper right corner of the WaPo front page right now:



It looks as though they're hot and desperate to show the importance of women, but they've got next to nothing. This, after a week of centralizing women. These are the crumbs of regard we get on Monday morning? Another story about Melania's hat, and a dopey attempt to disqualify her because of what the hat means. Checking in with the #MeToo movement, going back to the same minor actress for accusations that the supporters aren't supportive enough. And above all...

"Can Taylor Swift, revered by young Americans, help lead Democrats out of the woods?"

The photo Swift is from 2016, so WaPo went out of its way to choose the platinum blonde, black-red lipstick look. Does it inspire "reverence" or hope that this is the person to "lead Democrats out of the woods"? Are the Democrats lost in the woods? I guess we've gone from presuming it's a big blue wave election to finding ourselves far from the beach and up in the woods.

The news is just that Swift put up an Instagram post that told her fans they should vote and endorsed 2 Democrats — Tennesseans Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. Here's the post, with a photograph of Swift in much darker, longer hair. WaPo:

A black-and-white Polaroid was swapped in for a standard headshot.... By early Monday, more than a million Instagram users had registered their approval.

A million? That's not impressive when you consider that Swift has 112 million followers on Instagram.

By characterizing the midterms as “an overall struggle for protecting human rights and dignity” rather than a partisan grudge match, Swift is speaking effectively to young people who have less fealty to the party structure, said William Fotter, the vice president of the University of Arizona Democrats. “Young people are less party-oriented and more issue-oriented,” said the 21-year-old political science and international relations major. “If Taylor Swift is able to convince millennials that their votes matter, that could make a huge difference,” he said....

What if the young people are inspired by Swift to vote but not for Democrats? This danger is squirreled away deep in the article (which is so insanely padded that it would be weird if normal readers got this far, but it's the most interesting part):

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union scolded her for threatening to sue a California blogger who accused the singer of being associated with white supremacy. And in an editorial, the Guardian called her an “envoy for Trump’s values.”...

Here's what the Guardian wrote last November:

[Swift and Trump both have] their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.

Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships.... The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway....

[N]otably her much-publicised “squad” of female models, actors and musicians is largely thin, white and wealthy. In a well-publicised Twitter exchange with rapper Nicki Minaj, she treated the discussion of structural racism as not only incomprehensible, but a way to disempower white people such as herself....

As for those other 2 WaPo articles, what Rose McGowan said about entertainment industry #MeToo supporters was:

“I just think they’re douchebags.... They’re not champions. I just think they’re losers. I don’t like them.... I know these people, I know they’re lily-livered, and as long as it looks good on the surface, to them, that’s enough.”

As for Melania and the pith helmet — despite the headline, the actual article has some depth and nuance. I'll highlight the details that really ruin the hat-based attack on Melania:

In 1994, The Washington Post’s Phil McCombs reported that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton “appeared in a pith helmet, looking vaguely like a North Vietnamese Army officer” on a visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park....

[P]ith helmets are worn by motorcycle taxi drivers in Hanoi, as well as police officers in Cameroon and Peru. In the U.S., postal workers wear pith helmets as part of their uniforms on exceptionally rainy or sunny days, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ marksmanship coaches wear them at shooting ranges....

In 1966, the civil rights activist James Meredith marched through Mississippi wearing a pith helmet while encouraging African Americans to vote. Charles W. “Hoppy” Adams, the legendary black DJ at WANN in Annapolis, Md., wore a pith helmet during live appearances in the 1950s and 1960s... And the rapper Andre 3000 of OutKast wore a straw pith helmet with a bow tie and overalls on MTV’s Total Request Live in 2006.

So are pith helmets properly called — as in the WaPo headline — "a symbol of colonialism"? If you want to say yes, you'll have to attack James Meredith!