१२ जानेवारी, २०१९
The decline of the flesh-and-blood world....
"I think writers are basically very sociable introverts. And I think that's also a description of serious readers too."
From a conversation with Jonathan Franzen.
I've been reading his novel "Freedom," just a few weeks after finishing his "Corrections." I decided to read his novels while I was in the middle of reading his newest book of essays, the third book of his essays I was reading. Why was I reading all this nonfiction — and only nonfiction — from a writer of reputedly great novels?
I'd gotten the idea of myself as a person who reads nonfiction, but in the past year or so, I've switched to mostly fiction. It all started here, strangely enough.
Anyway, I'm very interested in the idea of reading and writing — in solitude — as a way to have relationships with other people and something that really is sociable.
"MacKenzie Bezos... started writing seriously at age 6, when she finished a 142-page chapter book titled 'The Book Worm.'"
From "Who Is MacKenzie Bezos?/Her divorce from the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has made this novelist, and her private life, a public fascination" (NYT).
ADDED: What does MacKenzie Bezos care about the "blockbuster potential" for anything? She is on track to receive half of the $137 billion fortune she and her husband amassed. She will be the richest woman in the world. The challenge for her is — I would think — to maintain a motivation to do serious, valuable work. Why would she cater to the appetite of drooling publishing executives? It would make more sense to use her money to disrupt the whole publishing business.
I MEAN: Re-disrupt the whole publishing business.
The 37-year-old Tulsi Gabbard is running for President.
Within her party, the three-term congresswoman is viewed as a maverick with a penchant for bucking party orthodoxy. During the 2016 presidential election, Gabbard stepped down from her post as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee so she could endorse Sanders....37 seems way too young to be President, but there's also the problem of candidates who are too old. Biden and Sanders are more than twice her age (and Elizabeth Warren isn't much younger).
During the presidential transition period in 2016, the Hawaii Democrat met with then-President-elect Donald Trump, drawing condemnation from fellow Democrats. She also received widespread criticism in 2017 for meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad....
I haven't followed Tulsi Gabbard. This is the first time her name appears on my blog. I have to go to Wikipedia to get some background. She was born in Samoa, a she represents Hawaii's 2nd congressional district. Another Democratic President from far out in the Pacific Ocean?!
Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in a combat zone in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was later deployed to Kuwait... She supports abortion rights, opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has called for a restoration of the Glass–Steagall Act and changed her stance to support same-sex marriage in 2012. She is critical of aspects of U.S. foreign policy regarding Iraq, Libya and Syria. She opposes removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power....Home school, Hinduism, Samoa... what an interesting candidate!
Gabbard has spoken about growing up as a mixed-race girl in a multicultural and multireligious household: her father is of Samoan and European ancestry and an active lector at his Catholic church, but also enjoys practicing mantra meditation, including kirtan. Her mother [born in Decatur, Indiana] is of European descent and a practicing Hindu. Tulsi chose Hinduism as her religion while she was a teenager.
Gabbard was home-schooled through high school except for two years at a girls-only missionary academy in the Philippines.....
"In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious..."
Said Lisa Page, in private testimony to a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee, quoted in "F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia" (NYT).
Do you think it's true that Russia poses the most dangerous threat to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans — to our way of life?
I don't. I think we ourselves are the greatest threat.
ADDED: Nate Silver tweets this shot of the NYT from just before the 2016 election (note the date, October 31, 2016):
And says: "I’m not trying to be a jerk but the Times still owes its readers an explanation about what the f*** was going on with this vector of its reporting in 2016."
Then he clarifies: "NYT screwed up some shit in 2016. It’s OK. It was a hard election to cover. NYT is great. But the 'no clear link' story is literally sort of incomprehensible, in light of subsequent reporting. What happened?"
११ जानेवारी, २०१९
"Rep. Joe Cunningham, a newly elected Democrat from South Carolina, was barred from walking onto the House floor Friday as he tried to bring a six-pack of beer with him."
Fox News.
In other beer news...
"Sources confirmed to Fox News that the White House has quietly reached out to a small number of GOP lawmakers and conservative legal advocates, reassuring them it would be ready for any court vacancy."
From "Ginsburg absence shakes court: White House makes preparations, coming weeks seen as key" (Fox News).
"Soooo... I assumed they were all killed and the blackout was just to spare us from seeing it."
I wrote on June 7, 2007, and today I'm seeing what I thought was confirmation that I was right: "Sopranos writer David Chase originally had a 'death scene' in mind for the show's finale" (Daily Mail):
Chase [said] 'Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end. I remember talking with [writer/ executive producer] Mitch Burgess about it. But it wasn’t - it was slightly different.... 'Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting. It was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting. But we didn’t do that.'Ah, well. We'll never know. I miss "The Sopranos." I miss Television Without Pity.
After what the journalists described as a 'long pause,' Chase responded, 'F*** you guys.'
According to Uproxx, Chase told [the journalists] he 'didn’t want to do a straight death scene,' and that the idea behind the scene [in the end at the restaurant] was that 'he could have been whacked.' Chase remained coy when [they] asked him directly if viewers would have been mistaken to believe Tony would have been killed in the scene, saying, 'I’m not going to answer that question.'
It's hard for Mitt Romney to win the Trump hater's love. So unfair!
Mr. Profile in Courage strikes again! https://t.co/l1kiYKPnxj
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) January 11, 2019
This Milwaukee bus driver did what every decent person does...
"Oh my God. Oh my God. I'm shaking." This Milwaukee bus driver went above the call of duty when she stopped and ran out to scoop up a baby girl, barefoot in freezing temperatures, who was quickly walking toward an intersection https://t.co/SCwNFZkgcQ pic.twitter.com/dIMSwbo5q2
— CNN (@CNN) January 11, 2019
"What brought Clinton down was public exposure not to her personality... but extended public scrutiny of every detail of a decades-long career in public life."
Writes Matthew Yglesias in "Americans want outsiders, reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage" (Vox).
"Is a Portland Professor Being Railroaded by His University for Criticizing Social-Justice Research?"
Last fall, it was revealed that a trio of researchers, the philosopher Peter Boghossian, the mathematician James Lindsay, and the medieval-studies independent scholar Helen Pluckrose, had perpetrated what they viewed as a spiritual successor to the infamous 1996 Sokal hoax: They’d sent out a bunch of ridiculous articles to a number of journals within “grievance studies” fields.... Of the 20 articles the trio submitted, seven were accepted....
The research-ethics experts I spoke with expressed a similar degree of agreement on the question of whether what the “grievance studies” hoaxsters did constituted data fabrication: yes, it did....
Letters of support for Boghossian have been rolling in in large numbers since this story broke.... “This strikes me (and every colleague I’ve spoken with) as an attempt to weaponize an important [principle] of academic ethics in order to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion,” wrote Steven Pinker....
It’s impossible to say that PSU would have imposed the exact same investigation on an equivalent study with a different political valence. But it also seems, with the benefit of a bit of investigation into and knowledge of how [Institutional Review Boards] work, pretty obvious that Boghossian was asking for trouble by going ahead and performing this research without at least seeking an exemption.
"If you could speak to animals, which animals would you want to talk to?"/"Deep-sea fish."
And I'm also pretty sure that deep sea fish have nothing interesting to say. You know, they're under a lot of pressure, but they don't even notice.
ADDED: There's always Wittgenstein:
That's just the last 2 panels. Go here for the full story.
"Thousands of requests by men to bring in child and adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past decade... In one case, a 49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl."
Time Magazine reports.
ADDED: I assume the reason the age of marriage is so low in some states is because there are American residents who get pregnant, and marriage is a traditional option for dealing with this predicament. But these low-marriage-age laws should not be adopted as the age for bringing someone in from another country to unite with someone who's already here. That kind of marriage doesn't deal with the after effects of sex. It exposes more young girls to sexual activity!
"Is the President Making Middle School Worse?"
From the article:
Cornell and Huang’s peer-reviewed paper, “School Teasing and Bullying After the Presidential Election,” [doesn't] claim to have discovered that a region’s backing for Trump causes an uptick...Pause a moment for a dance of joy from The Up Tick...
Back to the article:
... in reports of bullying, only that the two are correlated. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that kids who spend their time around Trump enthusiasts might be getting the message that picking on racial minorities, and those who deviate from traditional gender norms, is O.K.No, it's not hard to imagine. It's easy to imagine that every damned thing that wrong is wrong because of Trump. It's like a game you can play. Play it with your kids: Player 1 identifies something bad. Player 2 must state a way in which it can be considered to be Trump's fault. Builds their creativity and — come on! — it's fun.
“The adults that voted for Trump are much more likely to emulate Trump and be supportive of attitudes that we saw turned into bullying and teasing in middle school,” said Cornell. “I suspect it’s an indirect effect of the social environment that kids are in. It may be their parents, it may be other adults, it may be the adults in schools.”...And what is science but guessing at what's more likely and entertaining suspicions about indirect effects?
ADDED: Okay, kids, ready to play It's Trump's Fault? I'm Player 1 and the bad thing I'm identifying is: People are losing their powers of critical thinking.
Is Google programmed to teach us not to write "Democrat Party"?!
In the comments, mesquito said:
One of the funniest things I’ve ever read is Hendrick Hertzberg’s New Yorker denunciation of the use of “Democrat Party.” That’s what I call it now.I wanted to read that, so I cut and pasted "Hendrick Hertzberg’s New Yorker denunciation of the use of 'Democrat Party'" into the Google search window. Look what I got:
Does Google busybody itself into all the searches that say "Democrat Party"? And what's up with prodding me about the part of Hendrik Hertzberg's name that mesquito didn't misspell?!
Anyway, let me find the Hertzberg article. Here: "THE 'IC' FACTOR" (2006). I'll read it. I want a chance at being as amused as mesquito. Excerpt:
There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. “Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it’s an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation. During the Cold War, many people bridled at obvious misnomers like “German Democratic Republic,” and perhaps there are some members of the Republican Party (which, come to think of it, has been drifting toward monarchism of late) who genuinely regard the Democratic Party as undemocratic. Perhaps there are some who hope to induce it to go out of existence by refusing to call it by its name, à la terming Israel “the Zionist entity.” And no doubt there are plenty of others who say “Democrat Party” just to needle the other side while signalling solidarity with their own—the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.It fairly screams 'rat.'
"So you think that he's right that there is at this moment 'a crisis' at the border?" the NYT podcaster Michael Barbaro asks an Arizona sheriff.
That's at about 4 minutes into a 24-minute podcast titled "What a Border Sheriff Thinks About the Wall/A sheriff in Arizona tells us how President Trump's immigration policies have played out in his county, and why his interpretation of the president's message has changed."
"The Twitter hashtag '#KamalaHarrisIsACop' is popular among her progressive detractors..."
From "Kamala Harris in the Senate/California senator gains prominence by grilling Trump officials, laying the groundwork for a likely 2020 presidential run" (San Francisco Chronicle).
"Maybe it’s the aunt or uncle you didn’t want to invite to the wedding," but Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez "is part of the family."
Critics inside the [House Democratic Caucus] felt she didn't deserve [the seat she sought on the Ways and Means Committee], given her lack of professional experience on tax issues and her status as a freshman.From a more progressive angle: "PROGRESSIVES FOUGHT FOR KEY COMMITTEE SPOTS, BUT CENTRIST NEW DEMS CAME OUT ON TOP" (Intercept):
“It totally pissed off everyone,” said one senior House Democratic lawmaker of the campaign. “You don’t get picked for committees by who your grass-roots [supporters] are.”...
“The chances that the Democratic caucus will stand by and watch its chair get attack[ed] and people piling on him — by Democrats! — is so obscene that I think you’ll find one of the strongest reactions that could possibly be anticipated,” [said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo)].
“It’s one thing” for outside activists to go after Democratic incumbents, [said Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.)]. “It’s another thing when you’re in this institution and you’ve got to work to get things done.”
The good news for progressives in the House is that nothing matters — not this congressional cycle, anyway. As long as the Senate is run by Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the White House is occupied by Donald Trump, a Green New Deal has bigger obstacles than New Dems. But the structures being put into place today will shape the terms of legislative activity in 2021, when it may start to matter if Democrats take back the White House. The onus will be on outside activists to monitor the legislative behavior of the dual-loyalty members of the committees.ADDED: "Dual-loyalty" refers to membership in the New Democrat Coalition (a centrist group) plus membership in either the Congressional Progressive Caucus or the Blue Dog Caucus (a "Wall Street-friendly group").
By the way, why is it called "the New Democrat Coalition"? I thought Democrats were offended by the use of "Democrat" as the adjective instead of "Democratic." (That is, don't say "Democrat Party," say "Democratic Party.")
AND: One answer to my last question might be that it's not that the coalition is democratic but that it's a coalition of Democrats, but it's just as true that the party is not democratic — it's a party of Democrats.
१० जानेवारी, २०१९
"The fact that the white reporter sent to cover her didn't know what Skee Wee was is not a good sign...."
Kamala is running for POTUS (probably). She's an AKA.— Zerlina Maxwell (@ZerlinaMaxwell) January 10, 2019
The fact that the white reporter sent to cover her didn't know what Skee Wee was is not a good sign that the media is going to cover her with the cultural competency required. And it IS a requirement! pic.twitter.com/9MrZuGynIz
AKA, as described in Essence:
Whether it’s your mom, an aunt, a friend or yourself, chances are you know someone in your sister circle who is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated. Founded in 1908 at Howard University Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority was the first African-American organization of it’s kind. Notable members include Phylicia Rashad, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Alicia Keys — just to name a few. There are over 290,000 women who make up the organization and the sorority recently celebrated its 109th anniversary.The "Skee Wee" sound is a registered trademark of the sorority.
ADDED: The reporter, from the Washington Post, is Chelsea Janes, and her embarrassing tweet looked like this:
Janes has apologized and deleted the tweet.
"All I remember from the rest of that afternoon was sitting under an oak tree in a University of Michigan quad... thinking, This is it. This is the happiest I will ever be...."
From "What It Felt Like When 'Cat Person' Went Viral" by Kristen Roupenian in The New Yorker.
Um...
I found some steel slats down on the border. But I don’t see anything resembling a national emergency situation.. at least not in the McAllen TX area of the border where Trump will be today. pic.twitter.com/KRoLdszLUu
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 10, 2019
"Three days after his film 'Green Book' won top honors at the Golden Globes, director Peter Farrelly apologized for repeatedly flashing his penis two decades ago in an attempt to be funny."
Reports The Wrap.
"Both sides have taken absolutist positions that leave no room for the kind of split-the-difference compromise that usually ends budget impasses...."
From "Trump’s Emergency Powers Threat Could End Shutdown Crisis, but at What Cost?" (NYT).
"And that was his plan. He was going to live his normal life as if normal 'was living in darkness for the rest of my life.'"
From "Hallucinations and $100,000: the poker player who shut himself in a pitch-black room for weeks/Rich Alati had a six-figure sum in his sights. As long as he could survive 30 days in the dark with no human contact" (The Guardian).
ADDED: Alati had control: If he could stay in, he'd get $100,000 and if he came out he'd lose $100,000. That's $200,000 of incentive, for a 30-day effort. The other guy, Young, could only wait and see what Alati would do. Young's advantage was that he didn't have to do anything difficult, and he might win $100,000. One alternative was that Young could communicate by audio with Alati and make an offer to end it earlier. And that's what happened, with Young paying $62,400 for Alati's 20 days in the bathroom.
Was there any real danger that Alati would lose his mind? If so, Young faced the risk of having to feel bad about what he'd lured Alati to do, and Alati risked suffering that would extend beyond the 30 day period. But Alati also stood to gain from the 30-day experience. There was the enforced meditation in solitude and the chance to see what visions grow in darkness. And then there was all that physical exercise. You'd do a lot of push-ups and sit-ups. It would be fun to look at yourself in the mirror after all that, no?
"If we had the California republic, which is something some people in California would like, it would have a lot of leverage over Nevada that it doesn’t have now, wouldn’t it?"
Said Justice Alito, at oral argument yesterday in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt (transcript). The case, discussed at SCOTUSblog, raises the question "Whether Nevada v. Hall, a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that said a state could be haled into another state’s courts without its consent, should be overruled."
Arguing for the man who sued California in Nevada, UC Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky responded, "I think Nevada might already feel that California overwhelms it too much." But immunity isn't needed, he said, because there's still the idea of "comity," which exists in international law: "And there's no indication that that was insufficient. The reality is that this is an issue that relatively rarely arises."
Chief Justice Roberts pushed back:
Well, the remedy for the failure to accord comity at international law was recognized to be war. What remedy do the states have under your view if a state chooses not to extend comity to a sister state?
"While society rightly focuses on adults who abuse kids, nobody cares about the reverse."
From a question to the NYT ethicist.
New evidence, answering a 14-year-old question.
If you're trying to wish the person well in holding up to all that drinking, it's "hardy." If you want them to have a lot of rollicking fun, it's "hearty." If you're trying to say both, stick to the spoken word. If you're the NYT, and you mean to insult the catty, exclusionary state school girls, "hardy" actually is the better choice.I love when people comment on old posts, especially really old posts, and I was pleased to see that "Unknown" stopped by last night to contribute this:
९ जानेवारी, २०१९
"Now, nearly 150 years later, a new generation of biologists is reviving Darwin’s neglected brainchild."
From "How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution/The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?" (NYT Magazine)(with many beautiful photographs of birds).
"MacKenzie Bezos, a 48-year-old novelist, is often cited in the Amazon origin story as having supported her husband’s move off of Wall Street and into e-commerce."
From "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie are divorcing" (CNBC).
Drawing makes "a seamless integration of semantic, visual and motor aspects of a memory trace."
From "A Simple Way to Better Remember Things: Draw a Picture/Activating more parts of your brain helps stuff stick" (NYT).
"Ocasio-Cortez somehow assumed Americans eat out three times a day."
I can tell you a very personal story. As many people know, I was working in restaurants just a year ago, and when the president first assumed office with his racist and violent rhetoric, people started to send themselves home. And as we know, in restaurants, hospitality, every American eats if you can, if you’re lucky enough or we’re able to eat three times a day. And that means that we interact with the people who prepare our food three times a day. When those people start to go home, or rather go back to the countries which they originated from because many of them consider the United States their home, those places, they go into dysfunction.
"Nearly every story in You Know You Want This has someone getting stabbed, strangled, slashed, gouged, degloved, immolated, bludgeoned, bled out, brain-injured, or asswhupped."
From "Kristen Roupenian’s Power Dynamics/In her new book, the author of 'Cat Person' tells stories of sadism, narcissism, and gore" (The New Republic).
(I'm assuming you remember all the interest in the story "Cat Person." If you don't click on the tag.)
"Christie Tate has been writing online about her family for more than a decade. Now, her daughter is old enough to notice."
From "That Outrageous Mommy Blogger Who Refuses to Stop Writing About Her Kid Highlights a Key Parent-Child Generational Gap" (Slate).
Bizarre pre-dawn experience...
Hoff Sommers criticized Wright for "benevolent sexism" because of the way he'd diavlogged with a feminist philosopher. Instead of going at it with her, he babied the female philosopher with softball questions. Okay. Wright says he wants to defend himself and: "I've done dialogues with Ann Althouse that got so contentious that she accused me of being sexist in the other sense, of being too hard on her."
Bizarre. I'm just idly clicking around. I didn't expect to hear my own name. And now I feel called upon to correct the record. I didn't say it was sexist to be "too hard" or "contentious." I don't like that characterization, and now I feel sort of nauseated. Good lord, what all do people say about you when you're not around? Stumbling into one example, it makes me wonder! What a strange world!
Wright was referring to this diavlog with me from February 2017, which was the last time I talked with him. Watch this clip and you may see why I'm annoyed to be characterized as having called him sexist for being too hard on me. What's sexist is that he treats me differently and with far more hostility than he treats the men who engage vigorously and give him a hard time. He's never had me back on the show after this:
If you watch that clip, you'll see that I'm talking about how podcast listeners might not want to hear yelling. Wright volunteers that every time he talks to me he ends up yelling. "9 out of 10 of my podcast conversations do not involve this level of voice raising, however, all of the ones involving you do." That's what makes me want to do feminist analysis, which I introduce in the form of asking him "What's your analysis of that?" He says he doesn't know, so I tell him what my husband says: "He says that you should at least pretend to be enjoying speaking to me and that you should show appreciation for me and, whether you actually feel it or not, to make it feel like this is a fun, enjoyable conversation, this is a good place to be as opposed to an intense struggle."
I'm really talking about the aesthetics of radio at that point, the subjective experience of the brain between the earbuds, the listener. Wright repeats that he usually doesn't raise his voice, and I say, "but you do with me" and suggest again that it could be "analyzed." I remind him that I was the only woman on Bloggingheads in the early days. I say, "To some extent, I feel I'm being badgered and bullied because I'm a woman (and because you perceive me as conservative, even though I'm not)." I never use the word "sexism," but at 89:00, he tells me I've accused him of sexism.
Anyway, my objection wasn't to tough opposition and hardcore debate, it's about getting yelled at and treated with disrespect. Something about me triggers him, and he came right out and admitted it, but he resisted any sort of analysis of why. I think it's shallow (or repressive) not to want to consider whether there's a gender element to why another person is aggravating you so much. I'd go on the show — back when I got invited — and, as you can see, I'm smiling and really into the joys of conversation. Why is he yelling at me?!
"Trump tried to play a normal president on television. The result was very strange."
I'm more attracted to "Trump tried to play a normal president on television. The result was very strange." That also, obviously, aims to make something of normal, but seems more curious and almost playful, so this is the one I'll read. It's Alyssa Rosenberg:
Given the hype, it was disconcerting to hear a speech that, at least for the opening minutes, could have been delivered by any normal politician....Well, it seemed more curious and almost playful to me from the headline, but it turned out to be just about what I was imagining in the Rubin piece I didn't read.
Those very gestures of presidential normalcy revealed how futile it was for anyone to wish that Trump would start talking like that all the time. Trump may have told more blatant falsehoods about immigrants and crime over the course of his speech, but to watch him mouth these platitudes is to witness a more insidious and disorienting kind of lying....
Watching Trump’s flat delivery of sentiments that he can’t possibly believe was the inverse of comforting. Instead, the address had the queasy effect of a serial killer’s mask in a horror movie: It was a failed attempt to look normal that concealed something even more terrifying underneath....
But the WaPo readers probably love this sort of thing. I see the top-rated comment is:
"...the address had the queasy effect of a serial killer’s mask in a horror movie: It was a failed attempt to look normal that concealed something even more terrifying underneath."
Great line, and oh so true.
"And, most important, Pelosi and Schumer failed to use the one word that millions of Americans were longing to hear — compromise."
Writes Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post.
Here's the text of Trump's speech, if you want to look for where Trump used the word "compromise." He uses it twice, but both times it's about not compromising. First, there's a criticism of those who oppose the wall and won't compromise:
How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job? To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask: Imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken?Second, there's a refusal to compromise "safety and security":
My fellow Americans, there is no challenge so great that our nation cannot rise to meet it. We can re-open the government and continue to work through disagreements about policy. We can secure our border without an expensive, ineffective wall. And we can welcome legal immigrants and refugees without compromising safety and security.But perhaps he does, overall, sound conciliatory.
I watched the speech in real time last night, and it was much more moderate than I expected (because I was expecting him to announce that he was going to use "emergency powers" to build the wall). I haven't watched the Pelosi/Schumer response. But I will.
ADDED: I've now watched the Pelosi/Schumer response. I observed my emotional reaction, and I can tell you for sure that the line that reached me was "The fact is: the women and children at the border are not a security threat, they are a humanitarian challenge – a challenge that President Trump's own cruel and counterproductive policies have only deepened" (spoken by Pelosi).
The word with emotional resonance for me was "humanitarian." So I went back to the text of Trump's speech, and I see that he used the word in his first sentence:
My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.And, to skip ahead to the 6th paragraph:
This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul....
८ जानेवारी, २०१९
At the Backflip Café...
... keep your spirits up!
I know Trump is going to speak tonight, but I'll deal with it in the morning. Talk all you want here in the café. Go crazy!
We've been seeing so many bald eagles around here.
Provoked, Nate Silver calls the Hillary 2016 campaign "huge dumbasses."
The 538 model, which was based on publicly-available polling data, said the campaigns should target WI and MI. You didn't have to have any proprietary info to know they were important states. You just had to look at the data and not be huge dumbasses like the HRC campaign was. https://t.co/sbQgoq0gCO
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 8, 2019
"Trump’s Best Shutdown Move Is to Fold Now/It’s time for the president to quit while he’s behind."
Here we are in Day Whateverteenth of the shutdown, and it’s much like the day before. Congressional leaders meet and get nowhere. Democrats insist Trump will never get his wall. Trump treats “steel slats” over concrete as a magnanimous gesture of compromise....
Trump is losing this shutdown—which is why his best strategy is to fold without demanding any concessions from Democrats. He needs to move his presidency onto another subject before it gets canceled in 2020....
"The political-insider chatter is already suggesting that Warren might have a 'likability' problem, just like the one that supposedly was Clinton’s downfall."
Writes Karen Tumulty in "Elizabeth Warren has something Hillary Clinton didn’t" (WaPo).
"The hemp industry still has work ahead to win legal status for hemp-derived cannabidiol, or CBD oil..."
Reports the North Bay Business Journal.
"The challenge that the media faces is you don’t want to give a platform to somebody who is known to lie a lot, but at the same time, this is still the president of the United States..."
Said Mike Ananny, "an expert in media and technology at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism," speaking to The Washington Post, quoted in "'This president lies daily': Critics demand networks fact-check Trump’s live immigration speech."
How do you fact-check in real time without risking making mistakes yourself? You could have pre-written statements of fact and then simply display them in text at the bottom of the screen when it seems appropriate. If the text of the speech is available beforehand, the statements could be fine-tuned. Maybe different networks should do different things, and let viewers decide how they want to watch the news. One network could display a Pinocchio with a growing and shrinking nose. Another could have "Mystery Science Theater" style silhouettes at the bottom of the screen and voiced-over wisecracks.
Somebody... or everybody... is lying.
ADDED: A comment by sdharms makes me see how it could be that no one is lying. The comment is "so? HRC talked to Eleanor Roosevelt and no one had a problem with that." It could be that none of the living presidents have confided to Trump that they support building the wall, but some of the dead presidents have communicated with him. It's possible that George H.W. Bush, while still alive, spoke to Trump about the wall, but Trump said "some," so it must be more than one, and so something supernatural is needed for it to be true that no one is lying.
OH, WAIT: I'm working my way further into the CBS article, because I wanted to see exactly what Trump said and to think about whether there's weaseling over the question of what it means to "support his mission to build a border wall." The quote you see there is CBS's paraphrase of whatever it was that Trump said. Trump might mean that he's spoken to former Presidents who support some sort of physical barrier at the border, and the former Presidents who want distance from Trump are denying support because they don't support exactly the kind of wall that Trump has been talking about. But as I read the article, I was astounded — because I'd relied on "every living president has said otherwise" — to find this:
Mr. Obama is the only living president who has not explicitly denied having this conversation, and his office did not return a request for comment from CBS News. But Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out against Trump administration immigration policies and made clear since the 2016 campaign that he does not support a proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Politico also pointed out that Mr. Obama and his successor have not had any extensive conversation since the 2017 inauguration.
"Black covers placed over each chair are discreetly changed between sittings."
Here's my selection from one of the photographs. If I understand the caption correctly, it shows one of the owners stopping by at a table to chat up the customers:
I mean, what do you want to see competing with the wineglasses on the tablescape?
You'd never know it...
You’d never know it from much of the coverage but no federal employees have missed a paycheck yet.
— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 8, 2019
And I still don't feel that I "know" it. There's no link to an article in this tweet. Mainstream media is a horrifying wasteland.
Does Trump have "emergency powers" that he can use to build The Wall?
The president has the authority to declare a national emergency, which activates enhancements to his executive powers by essentially creating exceptions to rules that normally constrain him.... The National Emergencies Act... requires [a president] to formally declare a national emergency and tell Congress which statutes are being activated....
One of the laws [Trump could point to] permits the secretary of the Army to halt Army civil works projects during a presidentially declared emergency and instead direct troops and other resources to help construct “authorized civil works, military construction and civil defense projects that are essential to the national defense.”ADDED: I've read a lot of the most-liked comments in the NYT and it's dismaying how little they've absorbed Savage's very clear legal discussion. They're off in their own world:
Another law permits the secretary of defense, in an emergency, to begin military construction projects “not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces,” using funds that Congress had appropriated for military construction purposes that have not yet been earmarked for specific projects....
If he invokes emergency powers to build a border wall, Mr. Trump is almost certain to invite a court battle.... Before a court could decide that Mr. Trump had cynically declared an emergency under false pretenses, the court would first have to decide that the law permits judges to substitute their own thinking for the president’s in such a matter....
So much for the Constitution that I was taught in grade school was a marvel of governmental design. Turns out that a deranged executive can flail away with a machete, slashing everything in sight, while the other branches move in slo-mo to halt the damage. What a horror movie.
In the tradition of Richard M. Nixon's "I am not a crook"...
That locution screams: I am struggling to disentangle myself from trouble of my own making.
Here's the NY Post article — "Elizabeth Warren defends her DNA test: ‘I am not a person of color’" — if you need any background, which I can't believe you do. This story is so sticky. I don't see how Warren can ever move past it.
And she was responding to a question from someone who seems to hate Trump: "Why did you undergo DNA testing and give Donald more fodder to be a bully?"
As for "I am not a crook" — it recently appeared as #1 on a list of "Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners."
७ जानेवारी, २०१९
Whoopi Goldberg to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Before you start pooping on people and what they’ve done, you got to do something too."
My favorite thing about this is, Abby Huntsman immediately intones in the flattest possible voice, "That's well said. That's really well said." She knows her place, Huntsman does. Unlike some people. Pooping people.
"It Might Be Time to Start Fireproofing the Reichstag/Ruth Bader Ginsburg's absence signals our last line of defense is in peril."
It's time for everyone to start getting used to the fact that, unless some massive legal apocalypse intervenes, the president is going to get at least one more nominee for the United States Supreme Court and that, barring a sudden desire to keep the republic from turning entirely to guacamole, the Senate is going to rubber-stamp Justice Wingnut McWingnutty onto the Court for the next 40 years.....ADDED: I looked up how old Pierce is because I was thinking that there's got to be some age limit on humor like "Justice Wingnut McWingnutty" and "republic turning... to guacamole." I'd recommend moving on to a better level of sophistication certainly before leaving college. Pierce is 65!
[And Trump] has announced that he will give a Big Boy speech on TV Tuesday night, which will be followed by his taking his unending road show to the border on Thursday because that's just what the border needs. He can go there because there is no emergency....
"I am not surprised that this call could disturb people who are not familiar with insect sounds."
"How much of the internet is fake?"
From "How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually" (NY Magazine).
I never tire of looking at videos of Chinese click farms. It's just so surreal to see hundreds of phones playing the same video for the purposes of fake engagment. pic.twitter.com/bHAGLqRqVb— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) December 10, 2018
"The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right?"
Writes Paul Krugman in "The Economics of Soaking the Rich/What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot" (NYT).
From the comments there: "When top rates were high, 70-80 percent, executive salaries were lower, much lower. Why? Companies saw that if they raised executive salaries they would simply be shoveling most of that extra money to the government. They thought they had better uses for it, such as capital investment and better pay for workers. This is yet another way, an indirect way, in which low top rates encourage economic inequality, the bane of our society, today."
"Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will not be on the bench Monday when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments, the first time in her career she has missed a session."
“As long as I can do the job full steam, I will do it,” Ginsburg said last year. She has hired law clerks through the 2020 term.From the comments at WaPo: "11 more months until an election year, where we cannot replace Justices. Hang in there Ruth!"
ADDED: "As long as I can do the job full steam, I will do it" does not necessarily mean As soon as I cannot do the job full steam, I will not do it. There was no commitment to step down upon a reduction from full steam. It was a commitment to keep going, based on the implication that she had full capacity and hoped to maintain it. Must people retire at the point they detect some decline from "full steam"? Generally, I'd say no, because otherwise we'd be hostile to the disabled. Specifically, however, a Supreme Court Justice has so much power, so much ability to disguise a loss of a capacity, and life tenure, and that may mean that only a full-capacity Justice should hold onto the job. Ginsburg's quote — "As long as I can do the job full steam, I will do it" — suggests a belief in that proposition. But what about about the desire to control which President names your replacement? Is it ethical to hold onto the job, despite decline — and how much decline? Other Justices have done this, and many people, like the quoted commenter above, urge RBG to cling to her position no matter how far she declines. That encouragement is open and fervent, and I'm not seeing the expression of the opinion that it is somehow wrong not to let go when "full steam" is no longer attainable.
"The respect that Aisha and Zara commanded contrasts with the situation of most women in northern Nigeria...."
From "The Women Rescued from Boko Haram Who Are Returning to Their Captor" (The New Yorker).
"By 2039, the Supreme Court basically doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just wallpaper."
Writes Dahlia Lithwick in one of the "8 Predictions for What the World Will Look Like in 20 Years" (NY Magazine). She says "By 2039, the Supreme Court basically doesn’t matter anymore," but I guess it all depends on what "doesn't matter" means. Maybe it means it shouldn't matter when it's not doing what I want. That is, Lithwick and the people she likes won't channel their political aspirations into litigation. But I don't see how that makes the Court "just wallpaper," because if it's so bad at doing what you want, it's maybe good at doing what the other guy wants.
By the way, I love the phrase "I didn’t see anybody thinking about it." Maybe by 2039, we will be able to see what people are thinking.
Anyway, what are the other 8 predictions?, you might wonder. Is anything else as scintillating as the incipient wall-paperization of the Supreme Court?
Well, according to Kate Julian, "There Will Be a Lot Less Sex and a Lot More Masturbation":
Masturbation and other varieties of solo sex will continue to be more prevalent than they were before; porn aficionados will enjoy VR sex and sex robots. Like many other aspects of our world in the decades to come, the gap between the haves and have-nots will continue to grow. Those who have many advantages already will be disproportionately likely to find romantic and sexual partners if they desire them and to have fulfilling sex lives. There will be good parts of this: Nonconsensual sex will be far less common than it is today. There will be little to no social stigma attached to being unattached. Those who approach singledom with psychological and financial advantages will flourish. It will be the best time in human history to be single. But there will be less unambiguously positive developments as well: For better and for worse, the birth rate will continue to fall, and those who are less suited to solo life will suffer from profound loneliness....