May 28, 2020

At the Hit-the-Wall Café...

IMG_5415

... you can write whatever you want... within reason.

I couldn't get a sunrise picture today, because it rained, and it rained all day, so it's a good day to use the Althouse Portal to Amazon. The warmer weather is here, and we bought 2 of these Bionaire window fans (which the NYT rated as by far the best window fan).

41 comments:

Martha said...

Bye, Felicia.....

Dave Begley said...

I didn't get any money from those two, but I do note that the copyrights on their IP expired centuries ago and it is all in the public domain.

And Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is in the public domain too and the IP has great value. That's why I will sell, "Frankenstein, Part II."

narciso said...


A war between two nuclear powers


https://mobile.twitter.com/DEFCONWSALERTS/status/1266168191383830533

Yancey Ward said...

Since it fits better here, I have reproduced the latter part of my Klobuchar comment below:

For those following, here is the updated spreadsheet for the US COVID-19 including today's data.

For Inga, there is bad news- new cases in Wisconsin fell, and so did the positive test rate, which you can see in Sheet 2 of the state level data. I even graphed Wisconsin's 7 Day moving average of daily positive rates for those who don't like numbers.

stevew said...

Sorry but I have to pass on the Althouse Amazon Portal buying experience. We are moving, literally, two weeks from tomorrow and trying to shed things rather than add new ones. Once we get settled I'll be able to re-engage with the consumer economy.

My favorite quotes:

"Do or do not, there is no try"

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity"

Big Mike said...

New York Times says it’s the best fan? Must be pretty mediocre.

Bay Area Guy said...

In 2018, there were 16,000 murders in the US.

I think murder is so bad, that I support the death penalty for the perp.

Yes, if you look at the whole picture, the data shows blacks kill a lot more people than other groups. And of those yearly 16,000 murders, very few of victims were cops, and few very few of the perps were cops, too. Those are facts. Deal with it.

So, Yes, the video of George Floyd looks terrible. Conceded.
But the neutral question posed is: Is the apparent murder of a black man by a white cop more or less or equally disturbing as each of the 16,000 murders in the US each year?

I tend to think it is not too distinct from the garden variety murders, and thus I usually ignore the racial hucksters, race-baiters, and do-good liberals who insist it is worse, because of the past & current racial injustices committed in this country. But I'm open to changing my mind. I am skeptical of authority. And I also have both cops and black relatives in my family, so I often hear it from both perspectives.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

Are those shit stains on the wall? It must be grand living in a liberal utopia.

rhhardin said...

All day rain is a great time to scythe the lawn. The grass cuts much more neatly. It's the came principle as a vegetable crisper.

narciso said...


Seriously

https://mobile.twitter.com/davereaboi/status/1266153366553583618

mandrewa said...

I just found another rational and good interviewer. He is Freddie Sayers on the channel UnHerd on YouTube.

YouTube did not recommend this to me, which is slightly puzzling, since I've been quite been paying a lot of attention to this sort of thing for about three months now. Of course that's the big problem. How do you find the people doing the stuff you are interested in?

Anyway so the first video that I watched is Professor Karol Sikora: fear is more deadly than the virus
and it is quite good.

And then I'm reading the comments and I discover that Google had deleted this video -- and it was only reinstated because of a lot of complaints -- and now I'm struggling to see what in the world it is about this that YouTube found objectionable.

It feels like YouTube went from deleting Alex Jones to cancelling very normal people in less than a year.

mandrewa said...

Thanks Yancey Ward for introducing me to The Critical Drinker. I have never watched most of the movies he reviews and probably never will watch almost all of them, but I love the sarcasm.

See Female Thor! At last, Marvel gives fans what they always wanted!

narciso said...

I have my own project jambiya im nearly 24,000 words in, jambiya mean curved trinal dagger.

chickelit said...

TYeah, Althouse, what's up with the splotches?
Is splotch a real word - in the singular?

Anne-I-Am said...

Bay Area Guy,

Had a boisterous argument with a friend last night after our Wednesday run. She is married to a black man and has a 2 year old son. I WAS married to a black man and have a 26 year old son. She insists that the police are murdering black men right and left; I told her she needs to check her facts. That some studies show that when a white man has an encounter with police when he is suspected of a crime, he is MORE likely to be shot than a black man. She was skeptical. Those are the facts, though.

Of course, she had heard of Eric Garner and Philandro Castile, but she hadn't heard of that poor guy who was shot by cops as he sobbed in a hotel corridor. Because he was white. She had heard of the gal who was shot on a no-knock warrant, because she was black. She hadn't heard of the guy who went to the door at 2 am when the cops had the wrong apartment on a no-knock and was shot...because he was white.

She hadn't heard of the two old people murdered by a black man as they stood at their son's grave. Because...they were white.

Interesting that two women with similar histories have such different understandings..but she is liberal and depends on the MSM; I am conservative and read far more widely. And I also have WHITE sons. Between the two of us, I tend to think that I have a more realistic view of human nature.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

There will be no "Hitting The Wall" in Beantown

Boston Marathon canceled for 1st time in 124-year history

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/boston-marathon-canceled-for-1st-time-in-124-year-history/ar-BB14Jbh6

In 1918, the format was modified to a relay due to World War I

stephen cooper said...

I am a big fan of Homer and Shakespeare, both of whom basically said what they had to say and then went on to say something else, but I have to say, posting here on these all-night forums - saying what one wants to say and then moving on - is sort of like sticking a note on a bulletin board, in some basement at some university sometime in the midsummer when almost nobody is around.

Even those of us who never went to college can imagine what a bulletin board in a basement corridor at a university is sort of like, and while in the real world very few of them (very few colleges, that is, have a building with a basement corridor with a bulletin board that hosts comments anything remotely like the wonderful comments I have read over the years here at the Althouse blog, much less the posts by the blog host) - while, assuming there are such bulletins boards in the basements of colleges, there is more to life than the real world, and in this world I am imagining, the comments section on these overnight threads is asymptotically (but quickly) approaching that dreamtime basement bulletin board.

William said...

Shakespeare's Sonnets are on Amazon Prime. They are read by different actors. I knock off about four or five a night. Sometimes the conceits are hard to follow, but they are sonorous and pleasant on the ear. Patrick Stewart seems to be hogging the greatest hits.

Andrew said...

I was worried this would happen. I live in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. At this moment there's a BLM protest downtown, with about 1,000 people. The police have blocked off the streets around the Statehouse building. I hope that what happened in Minneapolis and St. Paul doesn't happen here. There are lots of easy potential targets in that area - stores, government buildings, etc. So far it looks non-violent, but the protesters are getting in the faces of the police. It's very tense. Supposedly the police have given orders to disperse, but the crowd is not responding. The news said that tear gas was used, but I didn't actually see that happen. Anyway, I sincerely hope things don't go downhill from here.

David Begley said...

The police have abandoned their police station in Mpls. No National Guard.

People also surround the county attorney’s HOME.

William said...

White people sometimes feel uncomfortable around young black men because they feel that young black men sometimes act out on impulse such as happens during riots. The rioters' protest against racism will not diminish or inhibit racism in any way, although it will probably succeed in making it more subterranean.

Lurker21 said...

If you're looting tonight, could you pick me up a CD player from Target? They don't sell them around here anymore.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

In 1968 white suburbanites had the bejesus scared out of them by urban riots. Richard Nixon won.

I know the Left is trying to make things as horrible and scary as possible so they'll regain power, but I think it might seriously backfire on them.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

Do you think these riots will convince any law-abiding gun owner in the country that giving up their guns is a good idea?

bagoh20 said...

If I wanted to improve the respect my group gets from the general public, I would not choose to make that same general public see me as violent, destructive, and unwilling to discuss issues. The protesters do not really care about black lives. They make that obvious, so they need to be ignored. The one thing they do care about.

stephen cooper said...

"you could not get a sunrise picture because it rained and you do not own a private plane or a large balloon with a passenger basket or a helicopter or ZEPPELIN or anything like that" --- True.

"you could not get a sunrise picture because it rained" - only partially true.

unless you are one of those secretive people who own zeppelins and do not want anybody to know about it.

Inga said...

Get Lost Corona! Beautifully sung.

This has got to make you smile.

AZ Bob said...

Watching the reports on CNN and MSNBC on the burning and looting in Minn, the reporters all repeat the same line:

"I am shocked, shocked that the police aren't doing anything about the rioting."

I'm not surprised.

stephen cooper said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lurker21 said...

Latest word on Central Park dog lady Amy Cooper is that she may not be a big liberal Democrat donor. People - apparently people in the big media, Britain's Independent newspaper -don't know how to use the donor look-up sites, or they assume New York City and the United States are a lot less populated than they are.

TheThinMan said...

Am I the only one who sees that photo and thinks of the back of The Who’s Next album?

walter said...

Yancey,
The BIG news in WI is the death spike...

Gospace said...

I took the time to read 47 U.S. Code § 230 tonight. It's really not all that complicated.

Two entities are defined in the code: “interactive computer service" and “information content provider”

The first has protection against civil liability for information that comes from the second. The second doesn't have that protection. So the question is, have Twitter and Facebook crossed the line from “interactive computer service" to “information content provider”? IMHO, the better argument is- they have. And blatantly so.

The Crack Emcee said...

"I couldn't get a sunrise picture today, because it rained, and it rained all day, so it was a good day to stare out the window like a fucking cat on acid and think about buying a new song by The Crack Emcee that's about to come out." Something about a car that won't let him leave Salt Lake, I don't know.

I wasn't there.







Ann Althouse said...

"Yeah, Althouse, what's up with the splotches?"

It's not like it's my house. I think my photographing it represents my saying what's up with the splotches, so I asked first. What would Shakespeare say? What would Homer?

The wall is next to the entrance the main UW library on campus.

I thought it was a significant literary statement, this juxtaposition.

Ann Althouse said...

"Patrick Stewart seems to be hogging the greatest hits."

I believe he's been reading all of them, in order, not playing favorites.

Mr Wibble said...

I thought this was going to be a thread about SE Cupp...

Big Mike said...

I thought it was a significant literary statement, this juxtaposition.

Nah. The splotches are dried blood and this is the wall where Wisconsin stands up truly conservative faculty to be shot. Althouse herself retired in the nick of time.

PJ said...

@Gospace - that’s exactly right. Blocking certain content from your platform is one thing. As I understand it, there’s at least an argument that blocking isn’t “provid[ing].” But Twitter’s “Get the facts” link is added content.

PJ said...

Also, I believe Twitter’s Terms of Service (used to?) state that Twitter owns all the content others post to it, so there’s a question about whether they can own all that content except when they’d rather not.

tcrosse said...

After 37 years in the Twin Cities, I seem to have chosen the right time to GTFO.