१२ सप्टेंबर, २०२०
Anxious and unsettled?
I always wear a mask when I go outside. But something about it was leaving me anxious and unsettled. I thought about the problem, addressed it, and here is the solution. pic.twitter.com/aUW4jHI3dX
— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) September 12, 2020
"Sometimes called paltering, the artful use of small, truthful statements to convince people of a much grander lie is a common propaganda technique..."
From "Debunked 'Antifa' Wildfire Rumors Spread on Facebook Overload 911, Spur Calls to Violence" (Gizmodo).
"Every passenger and crew member on the plane had a life filled with love and joy, friends and family, radiant hopes and limitless dreams."
From a transcript of President Trump's speech yesterday in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
From a transcript of Kamala Harris's speech yesterday in Virginia: "I was in California [on 9/11]. It was early in the morning there, I was actually at the gym and then the images started to come on the TVs and everyone stopped, got off their equipment, and we all stood around in utter disbelief, in utter disbelief. Strangers were hugging each other. People that had never spoken to each other before were holding each other and crying. Out of that tragedy and as we try to reconcile and understand what was happening, without any reflection, we as Americans, as our first reaction, without pause, was to hug and hold each other. Perfect strangers. Understanding at our core without reflection, without thinking about it, that we’re all in this together. We’re all in this together.... [I]n times of tragedy, in times of despair, in times of suffering and pain, we by our very nature as who we are, we stand together. We stand together, understanding we are all in this together.... What our attackers fail to understand is that the darkness they hoped would envelop us on 9/11 instead summoned our most radiant and defined human instincts. The instinct to care for one another, to transcend our divisions, and see ourselves as fellow citizens. To race toward danger and risk everything to protect each other. The instinct to unite."
"Nationwide, six teachers have died of Covid-19, reports Katie Shepherd in the Washington Post. 'It isn’t clear whether any of the teachers were infected at school,' she writes."
Writes Joanne Jacobs (on her education blog).
Here's the WaPo article: "As students return, the deaths of at least six teachers from covid-19 renew pandemic fears."
Do you think WaPo readers were deceived into thinking going back to classroom teaching is killing teachers? Well, let's just check out the highest rated comments over there. Highest rated: "Trump fans sure picked a funny time to start pretending that they think it’s super important to attend school." Third highest rated: "The blood of teachers, staff, students, parents, and relatives are on the hands of Donald Trump...."
ADDED: That "blood" commenter gets the grammar wrong: "blood... are..."
Life in New Hampshire.
The Merrimack Police Department in New Hampshire is asking for residents to look out for a missing forty pound, four year old African Serval named Spartacus that is a family pet and legally owned and permitted. pic.twitter.com/6Qexuv8cuf
— Only In Boston (@OnlyInBOS) September 11, 2020
Note: The serval has been found.
For more on servals, here's the Wikipedia article. I see: "The association of servals with human beings dates to the time of Ancient Egypt. Servals are depicted as gifts or traded objects from Nubia in Egyptian art. Like many other species of felid, servals are occasionally kept as pets, although their wild nature means that ownership of servals is regulated in most countries."
"Whether the director (who is a woman) intends to or not, she has made a film that serves to accustom us to the sexualization of children."
Writes Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. Dreher actually watched the movie. There's a clip of one of the dance scenes embedded at the link. I attempted to watch it, and you can see from my screen shot where I gave up forcing myself:
Joe Rogan and Tim Kennedy analyze the danger of protests.
The first few minutes of this is about the stupidity of open carrying at a protest. At around 5 minutes, Kennedy begins discussing his experience in the military dealing with insurgents in foreign countries, and he compares the American protesters/rioters to insurgents.
At around 10 minutes, Kennedy talks about how perverse it is to defund the police. What is needed is more police, with more funding.
"We are preparing for a mass fatality incident based on what we know and the numbers of structures that have been lost."
Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost, most of them in Oregon, where an estimated 40,000 people have been evacuated and as many as 500,000 live in evacuation alert zones, poised to flee with a change in the winds. Tens of thousands of people have sought refuge in shelters, with friends and in parking lots up and down Interstate 5 — with emergency responders struggling to create safe shelter for all of them in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. On the outskirts of Portland, a site set up to shelter evacuees had to be evacuated itself as the fire line continued expanding toward suburban towns south of the city. State fire officials said winds had pressed a 36-mile-wide wildfire front toward those outlying Portland suburbs on Thursday, with fire jumping over the community of Estacada and threatening others around the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.... As residents flee fire-ravaged communities, officials have struggled to manage a series of migrations reminiscent of a war zone, with distraught families showing up with little in hand beyond an overwhelming fear that their homes have been lost for good. Emergency responders have only begun to get a sense of how many victims they have and the grueling effort to rebuild that will lie ahead.... On Thursday night, about 2,300 people slept in emergency accommodations provided by the American Red Cross and its partners — 520 of them in traditional mass shelters. Tens of thousands more were crashing with friends or family members. Others were pitching tents in high school football fields or sleeping in shopping mall parking lots — many of them unsure whether they would be displaced for days, or weeks, or more.
"Going more negative while increasing the raw amount of attention — 'copious coverage and aggressive coverage' — allowed networks to retain or even increase the monster ratings Trump offered..."
From "Tape shows: ethically, CNN chief a little shaky/A conversation between Jeff Zucker and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen removes all doubt: our hated president is a beloved commodity to network executives" by Matt Taibbi.
"If I constructed a grid and ended up with 'whites' as one of the entries, I’m really not sure how I would clue it."
११ सप्टेंबर, २०२०
A new dimension of Portland woe: "The mayor of Portland declared a state of emergency as fires burned toward the city."
The wildfire crisis on the West Coast grew to a staggering scale on Friday, as huge fires merged and bore down on towns and suburbs, state leaders pleaded for firefighting help from neighbors, and hundreds of thousands of people were told to evacuate, including about one of every 10 Oregon residents....
“We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state,” said Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon, where the Beachie Creek and Riverside fires threatened to merge near Portland’s suburbs. Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland declared a state of emergency on Thursday night, and residents of Molalla, about 30 miles to the south, packed highways as they fled from the approaching fires....
Several law enforcement agencies in Oregon said they had been flooded with inquiries about rumors that activists were responsible.
"Hite did not create the clitoris or discover the female orgasm, but she pointed a lot of women — and men — in the right direction."
From "Shere Hite obituary/Groundbreaking if controversial sexologist and feminist who shed new light on the female orgasm and once posed for Playboy" (London Times).
I was one of the women who completed the original Hite Report survey! I don't know why the survey got to me, but it did. I was living and working in NYC in the early 70s. I thought I wrote a lot of interesting things, and I read "The Hite Report" very carefully hoping to find something of mine, but no, I'm not in the book, other than as part of the statistics. I didn't feel much connection to the findings in the report, and the failure to use any of what I thought were my excellent quotes made me suspect that the quotes that were used were picked to fit a preexisting framework. The book certainly made a big splash back in the 70s.
Here's Hite exploring male sexuality with Mike Douglas and David Hasselhoff in 1982:
Wait. This is better, with Geraldo Rivera in 1977:
"But as the election approaches, I know I can’t rely on a President Biden to cure my Trump-era depression."
Writes Mychal Denzel Smith in an adapted excerpt from his forthcoming book "Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream" (NYT);
"Yeah, Skip, but I think there was a big stigma... especially as a black man in America and talking about mental illness. And I think a lot of black men deal with things."
Said Shannon Sharpe to Skip Bayless, who — criticizing Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott for going public about his depression — said (transcript):
I have deep compassion for clinical depression, but when it comes to the quarterback of an NFL team, you know this better than I do. It’s the ultimate leadership position in sports. Am I right about that?... You are commanding an entire franchise.... And they’re all looking to you to be their CEO, to be in charge of the football team. Because of all that, I don’t have sympathy for him going public with, 'I got depressed. I suffered depression early in COVID to the point that I couldn’t even go work out.' Look, he’s the quarterback of America’s team. And you know, and I know this sport you play, it is dog eat dog. It is no compassion, no quarter given on the football field. If you reveal publicly any little weakness, it can affect your team’s ability to believe in you in the toughest spots, and it definitely can encourage others on the other side to come after you.... They’re all looking to you to lead them. And I don’t know. Look, if he said, “I got really depressed and down after the suicide of my brother,” I got you. But he was talking about when the pandemic first hit....For context, see "Fox Sports condemns Skip Bayless’ comments criticizing Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott for speaking about his battle with depression" (Chicago Tribune).
"He renegotiated NAFTA and you didn't is the point" — said Jake Tapper, putting pressure on Joe Biden.
RCP reports:
TAPPER: Doesn't he deserve some credit for that? It's better, USMCA is better than NAFTA.Trump gloated like mad in Michigan:
BIDEN: It is better than NAFTA. But look at what the overall trade policy has been, even with NAFTA [sic]? We now have this gigantic deficit in trade with Mexico. Not because NAFTA wasn't made better, because overall trade policy and how he deals with it made everything worse.
TAPPER: I guess my only point is: I'm a blue-collar guy sitting in Macomb County, Michigan, if I were that person.
BIDEN: Yeah.
TAPPER: I'm sitting here listening to your pitch and I'm thinking, "I like what he has to sell but he's part of the establishment that has been selling my jobs down the river. He supported NAFTA, he supported Most Favored Nation status for China and Trump renegotiated NAFTA and Obama and Biden didn't."
BIDEN: I'll tell you what we did do. We inherited the greatest recession short of a depression....
"[Biden] was interviewed by Jake Tapper who I find to be a nice guy. I don’t think he likes me too much, but that’s okay. He was interviewed on CNN and they said, 'Which is better, NAFTA or the USMCA?' He said, 'No, no, the USMCA.' Tapper goes, 'What?' Couldn’t believe it. He said USMCA. He made a mistake. From his perspective, he made a mistake because he doesn’t know what’s going on. Even though he’s right, he doesn’t know. There were a little surprised to hear that. They gave him a few chances."
Trump is leaning into the idea that Joe's mind is shot, but it didn't look like that to me. When cornered, he admitted USMCA was better than NAFTA. That wasn't "a mistake." That was, Tapper did his job and cornered Biden as he was following a strategy of weaseling and changing the subject. Biden got back to that strategy as soon as he could "I'll tell you what we did do. We inherited the greatest recession short of a depression." He is reasonably nimble. He can evade. He's very evasive. You've got to give him that. He's old and often seems confused, but when cornered, he's quick to evade.
When Trump said "I wanted to always play it down" and not "create a panic," did he believe that 11 million Americans were going to die?
Now, I'm looking at the transcript of Trump talking to Bob Woodward on February 7th, and Trump — comparing the coronavirus to the flu — says: "This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff."
He believed the death rate was 5%! Fortunately, that turned out to be wrong, but Trump had to speak and act using the imperfect information he had, and — if he spoke truthfully to Woodward — he believed 5% of those who get infected would die. He envisioned a far worse dying off of Americans! I don't know what percent of Americans he thought would become infected, but he was using the same 5% death rate that I'd used to get to 11 million. Even if you go down to 30%, you still end up with a shocking number: 5 million!
Here we are today, thinking that approaching 200,000 is horrible, but back when Trump was talking to Woodward, I believe he was thinking that millions of Americans would die. The health care services would be overrun, and we would be dying without access to any care. Would health workers even continue to show up for work? How could the food supply chain continue? We would starve and, before that, panic about the prospect of starving. Americans would soon be at war with each other. There would be civil disorder — far beyond the Black Lives Matter riots — and the disease would spread even more quickly, with nothing to stop it.
In that light, consider what Trump said to Woodward on March 19th (in the same transcript), "Well, I think Bob, really, to be honest with you... I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic."
If the real prediction of death — 5 to 11 million — had been stressed in early February, how would we have behaved? Would we have flattened the curve and preserved access to medical care the way we did? There's a lot of trashing of Trump right now over how he handled the crisis, but the criticism of his effort to suppress panic is — in my view — completely wrong.
Can we put our discord and divisiveness to the side for one day and remember that we are all American?
१० सप्टेंबर, २०२०
"Near the beginning of 'Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President'... President Carter offers a revelation involving one of his children, country singer Willie Nelson and what Nelson once described as 'a big fat Austin torpedo.'"
From the L.A. Times.
Isn't it cosmically cool to have smoked pot with Willie Nelson on the roof of the White House? No higher place on Earth!
But what did Chip Carter do with his life? He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page (though his name appears on a disambiguation page to distinguish him from one other person with that name). I do see an August 1977 article in the Washington Post reporting that Jimmy Carter kicked 27-year-old Chip out of the White House because Chip had entered a "trial separation" with his wife Caron. Caron and the couple's baby, James Earl Carter IV, stayed in the White House. "The White House Press office, however, denied a published report that the President, in a fit of anger, ordered his son to move out because he had said he was breaking up with Caron."
And whatever happened to James Earl Carter IV? I found a September 19, 2012 article in The New Republic: "The Aimless Career of James Carter IV."
"[T]he 19-year-old woke up about 4 a.m. Sunday to a 'crunching sound' with his head inside the bear’s mouth."
From "Officers seek bear that bit camper’s head" (WaPo).
Imagine being awakened by the crunching sound as opposed as opposed to the feeling of being inside a bear's mouth? The sound wakes you up, and then you realize where you are.
Also at that link: "One killed, 8 injured at gender reveal party/A 22-year-old woman was found dead at the scene of a home invasion near Cincinnati where two gunmen opened fire, wounding eight people, including three children and a pregnant woman who had revealed the gender of her fetus at a party Saturday night."
No one at a "gender reveal party" refers to the thing at the center of the revelation as a "fetus," do they? I believe they do say "gender," but if WaPo is going to correct "baby" to "fetus" — presumably to move from the language used by the participants to something journalistically neutral — then why don't they correct "gender" to "sex"?
How could anyone figure out the gender of a fetus?! What's the fetus doing in there that the sonogram is picking up? Wearing a tutu? Playing with electric trains?
"The subject of 'Cuties' isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived..."
Writes Richard Brody in "'Cuties,' the Extraordinary Netflix Début That Became the Target of a Right-Wing Campaign" (The New Yorker).
But doesn't that describe exactly how a mainstream movie outlet would package pedophilia?! And isn't it specifically titillating to present the children with "the absence of knowledge... about sex and sexuality"?! Brody sounds so disingenuous.
AND: Here's my earlier post about "Cuties."
"Goodbye to the indomitable Mrs Peel: Acting legend Diana Rigg..."
"The episode... signaled the repudiation of an honored and admired intellectual archetype – the curmudgeon."
From "Inside an Elite Cancel Culture Session, Where Leftists Met the Enemy and It Was ... One of Them" by Richard Bernstein (RealClearInvestigations).
I'm most fascinated by the question what it means to be "a modern person" these days. The meaning of "modern" is changing!
I googled the phrase and quickly got to Carl Jung's "Modern Man in Search of a Soul":
"One poll finding that indicates some potential for skepticism of the election result is the fact that more registered voters think Trump (48%) will win the election rather than Biden (43%)..."
Monmouth reports.
"A new study offers the first clear evidence that, in some people, the coronavirus invades brain cells, hijacking them to make copies of itself."
The NYT reports.
"The fact Bob Woodward has written another book about the current occupant of the White House should be greeted with roughly the level of enthusiasm reserved for..."
From "There's nothing shocking about Bob Woodward's new book" by Matthew Walther (The Week).
ADDED: On that question "Why do presidents talk to Woodward?," here's Politico, "Behind Woodward’s September surprise: White House aides saw a train wreck coming, then jumped aboard":
The debate prep Trump really does need.
९ सप्टेंबर, २०२०
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the sunrise run, which I will celebrate by making the final categorization of the 10 types of sunrises...
1. Solid, undifferentiated clouds. Though the list is not 1-10 worst-to-best, Type #1 is the least interesting, and it happens quite a bit. Total opacity.
2. Complete cloud cover but you can see shapes and texture in the clouds:
3. No clouds at all. Nothing but sun and clear sky:
4. Almost completely clear, but there are a few spots of clouds — clouds that don't really affect the light much at all:
5. This was the first sunrise type I identified. It's what made me start the list. There is a distinctive Z-shape where the sun is. It's hard to discern with the naked eye, but it shows up in the photographs:
6. This would be a Type #2 but there's a gap in the thick clouds, so you get to see some of the sun. The color effects can be very interesting, and it can look like a nuclear bomb is exploding out there:
7. I call it the "Broiler." Intensely hot color shoots up onto the clouds 10 or 15 minutes before sunrise. It fades, and there can be a complete loss of the red/pink by the actual sunrise time. I need to use a secondary vantage point to catch the good part when I exclaim — as I'm driving out to my starting point — It's a Broiler!:
8. This is the sunrise I call "Inky." The clouds come out really dark in the photograph, so the contrast is extreme and dramatic. This isn't my favorite, because it lacks the delicacy of dawn and it seems needlessly aggressive. But I do enjoy when Inky pays a visit. The full effect only comes through in the photographs. He's a lot more normal in person, but Inky is photogenic. 2 examples:
9. Fog! Yes, I've got to honor the fog. It's not the same as the all-over cloud cover of Types ##1 and 2. There's an enveloping intimacy that's distinct from everything else:
10. This is the most beautiful sunrise to me: The sky is filled with wispy clouds that filter the sunlight into lots of delicate colors and shapes. I have always kept the December 20th sunrise in mind as the ideal, the sunrise that most truly touched my heart:
But here are some other nice 10s:
Trump gives his new list of potential Supreme Court nominees — including Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz — and challenges Joe Biden to produce his own list.
pic.twitter.com/RGnqBeDDjC https://t.co/iRxBXnfCtH
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2020
There's a reason why Trump can produce a list like this and Joe Biden can't. Prove me wrong, Joe.
Imagine 80-year-old John Lennon.
John would’ve been 80 today I send you peace and love I still miss you man peace and love to Yoko and Sean.😎✌️🌟❤️☮️ pic.twitter.com/wQzM884pzT
— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) September 9, 2020
"You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen. It doesn’t take you 10 minutes and it doesn’t take you six weeks. It’s like, whoa. OK. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."
Any actual bombshells in Bob's new book? Well, we hear that according to his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, Trump said "My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals." And he "called the United States military 'suckers' for paying extensive costs to protect South Korea."
And former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said: "When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit."
And Woodward talked to Trump and tried to get him to say something about race other than that a good economy is good for black people:
When Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged,” and asked if Mr. Trump could see that they both have to “work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”The NYT characterizes that as a failure to be "reflective."
"But here’s the deal, the federal government — there’s a constitutional issue whether federal government could issue [a mask] mandate. I don’t think constitutionally they could, so I wouldn’t issue a mandate."
Is this really a walk back? On June 26th, I blogged about Biden's statement the he would "everything possible to make it required the people had to wear masks in public." I said:
Maybe "do everything possible to make it required" is clever phrasing and he's really thinking the President lacks the power to order everyone to wear masks or to commandeer local law officials to enforce a mask requirement. So it wouldn't, in fact, be possible....
The idea of a federal requirement to wear masks is so bad, so out of touch with the values of federalism. The conditions vary from place to place, even within states, even within municipalities. It's wrong to have one rule for everyone....
Do "allies" of President Trump really "worry" that he's not preparing for the debates with mock debates in which somebody plays the part of Joe Biden?
“It’s not the traditional, ‘we need Chris Christie to fill in and play Hillary Clinton’ like we did four years ago,” one of the president’s allies said, referring to the former New Jersey governor who has helped Trump prepare in the past.... Not all of the president’s allies think his casual approach is a wise strategy. Privately, some of them are expressing concern that the president’s overconfidence could backfire.A gaffe moment or stutter! Give me a break. It's not about a moment. It's about sustained debate standing in front of the camera getting pressured for 90 minutes. Biden is unlikely to do well at all, but what's the good of having mock sessions with someone playing Joe Biden and losing track of his statements and saying "look" or "come on" before running out the clock on some random thing that seems related or reminiscing about Scranton? Trump has to decide how merciless he ought to be. That's all. I suspect he'll decide on the spot whether to show compassion or go for the jugular.
In particular, they’re worried that Trump appears to be banking on a Biden misstep in the first 2020 debate; all the three debates are scheduled for 90 minutes each. They said Trump has repeatedly told aides that he’s not worried about debating Biden because the former vice president is likely to have a gaffe moment or stutter. Biden had a severe stutter as a child that he overcame....
In both 2008 and 2012, Biden took an extended stretch of time off the campaign trail to prepare for debates, participating in multiple mock sessions at a makeshift debate set constructed inside a Wilmington, Delaware, hotel. Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm played the part of Sarah Palin in 2008, and now-Sen. Chris Van Hollen played Paul Ryan in 2012.Who's playing Trump in 2020?
[Compared to debating Bernie Sanders in the primaries] Biden is likely to find it far less difficult to spar with Trump, whom he’s increasingly targeted in more personal and stark terms....Stark differences make it easier?
"I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a 'feeling brain.'"
From "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?" by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator (The Guardian).
The falsification of falsification.
Scientific American turns to Critical Studies of Science to conclude that we should retire the idea of falsification, upon which the negative half of scientific epistemology rests. The sciences are under serious threat.https://t.co/loEZMiFjdd— James Lindsay, relevant white dude (@ConceptualJames) September 8, 2020
I don't know if Lindsay's trashing of the article is correct. I simply invite discussion. From the article:
Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after “explaining” how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a 'physicist’s history of physics,' which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!
"Is the joke that... the young woman doesn’t realise the interviewer does not have the same interests as she does and is asking sarcastic questions?"
I honestly don’t understand how this is funny. Is the joke that the interviewer doesn’t like the same things the young woman does? Or that the young woman doesn’t realise the interviewer does not have the same interests as she does and is asking sarcastic questions?
— Andy Young (@andyryoung) September 9, 2020
"Just weeks after helping to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), President Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize."
Fox News reports.
ADDED: What did Obama do to win the Nobel Peace Prize? He won in October 2009, less than 8 months after he became President. What the committee said was:
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population....He created a new climate!
AND: Meade, prescient in April 2018:
"The man formerly known as 'Junior,' who later became 'Bush 43,' was amazingly helpful, dishing the sort of inside-baseball detail and real-time dialogue that reporters dream about."
Writes Tom DeFrank in "'I’ll have to say it’s total bull***t': How political sources play the anonymity game/George W. Bush dished on his father's campaign, with the understanding that he'd later have to deny it. Such arrangements have long been part and parcel not just of journalism, but of politics" (National Journal).
The occasion for DeFrank's story is, of course, Jeffrey Goldberg's recent suckers-and-losers article in The Atlantic. DeFrank ends his article with: "The White House response to this story has been so turbocharged not because of anonymous sources, but because it rings true, and they know it could damage a key component of his base."
It could! I tend to think it "rings true" to the people who already hate Trump, and not to his base. Or to the extent that it rings true to anyone in his base, it doesn't damage him, because they feel they understand the way Trump talks, with an edgy sense of humor and they think that if he said it, it was within a context of truly caring about the people in the military — because look at how he allowed them to win the war against ISIS, how he's ended conflict, avoided new conflict, built up the military, and improved access to medical care.
By the way, I love the new admiration for George W. Bush. Remember when he was Hitler?
I don't know how to start with the way to talk about a headline like this.
That's by Esther Mobley at the San Francisco Chronicle. She says "it’s becoming clearer than ever that the conventional language used to describe wine isn’t merely intimidating and opaque. It’s also inextricable from racism and sexism, excluding dimensions of flavor that are unfamiliar to the white, Western cultures that dominate the world of fine wine and reinforcing retrograde notions of gender."
There's a paywall after that, so you can just imagine the silly wine words that are open to race-and-gender critique.
"Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category, as part of its Academy Aperture 2025 initiative. "
An announcement from Oscars.com.
How hard will it be to meet these standards?
The first standard applies to the cast. You just need one of the "significant" actors to be Asian, Hispanic/Latinx, Black/African American, Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native, Middle Eastern/North African, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, or "other underrepresented race or ethnicity."
What's a "race or ethnicity" that's not underrepresented? Jewish? Italian? Irish? But even if you don't meet that criterion, you can have the "Main storyline/subject matter" "centered on an underrepresented group," and the list includes women!
The second standard has to do with the "creative leadership and project team." Similar categories and options. If the head of makeup and the head of hairstyling are women, you've done enough.
The third standard is about "industry access and opportunities." Here we are talking about "paid apprenticeship and internship opportunities." It's not clear whether you can meet this standard by simply filling these slots with women, because the words "and" or "or" are not used, but the groups that the apprentices and interns must be "from" are: "Women, Racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ+, People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing."
The fourth standard is labeled "audience development." But this isn't about what audience the movie is aimed at. It's about the "in-house senior executives" in "marketing, publicity, and distribution."
So, lots of details to be attended to, but only if you want to be eligible for a "best picture" nomination. I guess that some really small movies that turn out to be great will be excluded from contention because they didn't check these boxes on the way in and that big places will hire lawyers to do the box-checking for them and to deal with whatever litigation threats arise from all the illegal race and sex discrimination that they will deliberately undertake.
From a longer perspective, what's in it for us, the potential audience for movies? I don't know when if ever we're going back to the movie theaters, but this doesn't have anything to do with whether what's on the screen will be worth looking at.
ADDED: You only have to satisfy 2 of the 4 standards to be eligible. And I shouldn't have said "Nothing about transgender people," because they're in "LGBTQ+."
८ सप्टेंबर, २०२०
"People are getting killed figuratively and literally across the board. Folks, look, in spite of all of this, I’ve never, Rich, been more optimistic than I am today."
From "Joe Biden AFL-CIO Virtual Event Transcript September 7" (Rev).
You know, you think only Trump can do stream of consciousness, but Biden can do it too. He's funny too. He's 77 and still puzzling over how his parents had sex without his hearing it. He's still optimistic as hell even though people are getting killed — figuratively and literally — across the board.
"Monoprinting is a form of printmaking that has lines or images that can only be made once, unlike most printmaking, which allows for multiple originals...."
From "Monoprinting" (Wikipedia), which I'm reading this morning, because "monoprint" is a pangram in today's NYT Spelling Bee...
... but you get a "Not on the word list" rejection if you try to enter it. They keep obscure things off the list, but "hali" and "baht" were accepted words on yesterday's Spelling Bee. Ah, well. Your obscurity is not my obscurity. Here's a reproduction of a monoprint by Georg Baselitz:
"Now, she also said earlier that Trump had no sense of humor, therefore it couldn't be a joke. To which I pointed out..."
From "Scott Adams: Trump Is The Most Successful Stand-Up Comic Ever; Democrats Want To Burn Down The Country Because They Don't Get The Joke" (RCP)(video at the link).
"After years of accidents stemming from gender-reveal parties, the woman who is widely credited with starting the trend has a new message for excited parents-to-be: 'Stop it.'"
From "A gender-reveal stunt sparked a California wildfire that has forced 21,000 people to evacuate" (WaPo).
Taking direction from Room Rater.
Whoa! Okay, I guess it’s back to the Rec room for me. And here i was, thinking i was making progress.
— Mark Leibovich (@MarkLeibovich) September 7, 2020
Why is Kamala Harris taking her mask off specifically to yell at people?
After her roundtable with Black biz owners in Milwaukee, @KamalaHarris walked out to address ~45 fans standing across the street. “I need your help in Milwaukee, OK? We’re going to get this done. Make sure everybody votes early, right?” @axios pic.twitter.com/NYiZBBseYR
— Alexi McCammond (@alexi) September 7, 2020
I do like the shoes.
"I can’t prove the negative that he never said those things. The president has a habit of disparaging people. He ends up denigrating almost everybody..."
Said John Bolton, quoted in "John Bolton denies claim Trump disparaged fallen American soldiers in France: 'Simply false'/'The main issue was whether or not weather conditions permitted the president to go'" (Fox News).
७ सप्टेंबर, २०२०
"Speaking at a combative White House news conference, Trump said leaders at the Pentagon probably weren’t 'in love with me' because 'they want to do nothing but fight wars...'"
From "Trump says Pentagon chiefs are accommodating weapons makers/'One cold-hearted globalist betrayal after another, that’s what it was,' the president says in talking about '“endless wars'" (Politico).
"Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today."
From "Why Disney’s new ‘Mulan’ is a scandal" (WaPo).
"Kundun" deserves a more respectful description than "a film glorifying the Dalai Lama"! This is a beautiful film directed by Martin Scorsese:
6:34 a.m.
In 2 days, I'll reach the one-year mark in my ritual of the sunrise run. I intend to produce my definitive list of the 10 types of sunrises — on the theory that in a year, I've seen all the types. I've given a few numbers already. As I said last May:
I haven't assigned numbers to all of the sunrise types. I want to cover them all and only have 10. I'll figure it out when the year comes full circle on September 9th (my first day of doing the sunrise run).My favorite type has all-over wispy clouds with the sun showing through. Today's sunrise is unusual, with wispy clouds, almost all over, but a bumper of thick clouds at the bottom, right where they completely obscure the sun. I consider this sunrise quite beautiful but rather subtle. It's a sunrise for the sunrise sophisticates.
So far there's 1 & 2 (very cloudy days) and 3 & 4 (very clear days) and 5 (a distinctive Z shape of sunlight). All of the best sunrises are 6-10, but they are harder to classify. I know what 10 -- my favorite -- is, I believe. 6-10 has to do with broken up clouds -- partly cloudy situations that disperse the sunlight.
"It really does feel like Biden himself is almost the best candidate for this moment because of who he is as a person and his ability to talk about racial justice and racial equality in a way that sounds like a traditional white, suburban guy."
Said Vaughn Derderian, the chair of the Democratic Party in Oakland County, Michigan, quoted in "Why Biden could still lose the suburbs to Trump/Among local party officials, there’s an undercurrent of uneasiness about how quickly the president shifted the focus of the campaign away from his coronavirus response and toward public safety" (Politico).
Biden said of the public’s response to Trump’s law-and-order posturing last week that “they ain't buying it.” And most Democratic political professionals — and some Republicans – believe that’s probably true at the moment. Frank Luntz, the veteran Republican consultant and pollster, said in an email that Trump “is talking about the right issue, but he's talking the wrong way. Suburban voters want ‘public safety’ even more than law and order. They want ‘safe streets’ rather than ‘dominating the streets.’ His rhetoric is over-caffeinated.”People always say Trump is "talking the wrong way." He was talking the wrong way in 2016, and then he won. Talking the wrong way is Trump's super power. The question isn't whether people will say Trump is talking the wrong way, but whether, in the end, they'll vote for him, and they voted for him in 2016 when he talked the wrong way, and I assume they'll do it again. Who cares what's "probably true at the moment"?!
"Steve Jobs would not be happy that his wife is wasting money he left her on a failing Radical Left Magazine that is run by a con man (Goldberg) and spews FAKE NEWS & HATE."
I only read that because the headline was so odd — "the sixth-richest woman." Is that supposed to make him seem more sexist than calling her Steve Jobs's widow?
"But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is 'believable' or 'seems like it could be true.'"
Writes Glenn Greenwald in "Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite/Outlets claiming to have 'confirmed' Jeffrey Goldberg’s story about Trump’s troops comments are again abusing that vital term" (The Intercept). The "ludicrously and laughably false" CNN report was that "during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks’ servers containing the DNC emails."
If Rumormonger tells a story to Newspaper1 and then Rumormonger tells the story to Newspaper2, Newspaper2 can't say that it is confirming the story! It can only confirm that Rumormonger is mongering that story. There's no more confirmation than if Newspaper1 and Newspaper2 were on a conference call with Rumormonger and heard the story simultaneously.
"Thirty years ago one could reply, ‘So what,’ ‘laugh it off,’ ‘talk back,’ or some other cliched response."
Said lawprof Richard Delgado, quoted in "The Deeply Pessimistic Intellectual Roots of Black Lives Matter, the '1619 Project' and Much Else in Woke America" (RCP). Much more at the link. I wanted to highlight Richard Delgado, who was a colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin back in the days when Donna Shalala was chancellor.
"The most effective way to combat racial discrimination..."
The most effective way to combat racial discrimination is to continually remind white people that they are inhuman demons who are beyond redemption. pic.twitter.com/WclBps4IKz
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) September 7, 2020
Meanwhile, at the New York Times, "More Than Ever, Trump Casts Himself as the Defender of White America" and the basis for that assertion is this:
Trump Orders Purge of ‘Critical Race Theory‘ from Federal Agencies https://t.co/ygXcTXRHsQ via @BreitbartNews This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020
६ सप्टेंबर, २०२०
A NYT juxtaposition.
The Hitler image is part of a teaser to "10 New Books We Recommend This Week."
Here's the article on Jenna Bush Hager's new book, "Everything Beautiful in Its Time." I've got to admit, I think the sentiment in the title is utter bullshit, and I myself would be tempted to put a photograph of Hitler next to it to make it look especially stupid, so I'm just pointing out that the NYT did this.
Is it pro-science when Joan Baez paints "TRUST FAUCI"? It's art, by a person presenting artist credentials, and it's telling you to trust an authority figure.
Dr. Fauci continues to be disrespected & marginalized by the administration's lack of commitment to science. My painting offers the message to TRUST FAUCI. We can put our faith in science & truth, not lies, smoke screens & snake oil. #TRUSTFAUCI #TRUTHMATTERS #SCIENCEMATTERS pic.twitter.com/candsYYDPt
— Joan Baez (@joancbaez) September 4, 2020
Dancing in the streets.
Graphic: Another angle of the person being set on fire by a Molotov cocktail thrown by antifa militants in SE Portland. Rioters try to help but don’t do much. Cops are the ones who rush in & put out the flames. Video by @BGOnTheScene. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/9gNFo73Lyc
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) September 6, 2020
"This girl should be the poster child for white privilege... I wonder how her rich parents feel about their daughter. How would they feel if they graffitied their townhouse?"
It's not surprising that privileged young white women would get caught up in Black Lives Matter. It's a classic theme. Haven't you read "American Pastoral"? Don't you remember Patty Hearst? Haven't you looked at the photos of who's out rampaging on the streets this year?
Here's my teaser line for a movie about a young white woman in the BLM protests of 2020: Sometimes protesting against white privilege is the most white-privileged thing you can do.
I couldn't take my eyes off Bill. What's he thinking?!
What do you think the bubble above Bill Clinton's head says right now? https://t.co/p3efFzKAFK
— Sharyl Attkisson🕵️♂️ (@SharylAttkisson) September 5, 2020
"My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. Every 'Princess Bride' fan who wants to see that perfect movie preserved from Hollywood politics makes it now."
The cast members participating in this unusual fundraisers are Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, and Billy Crystal. The director Rob Reiner is also participating.
Here's the IMDB list of the whole cast of the 1987, in case you want to figure out who's not going along with this event. Peter Falk and Andre the Giant are no longer among the living. But Christopher Guest and Fred Savage are not in the group. All the other non-participants in the credited cast are English actors.
Actually, Christopher Guest, though born in New York City, "holds a hereditary British peerage as the 5th Baron Haden-Guest." He would be entitled to a seat in the House of Lords, but the membership was reformed in 1999. He's expressed interest in seeking election to the House of Lords. So I can see why he'd want to stay out of American politics.
As for Fred Savage, this might have something to do with his nonparticipation.
"Boris Johnson privately told US diplomats that Donald Trump was 'making America great again'..."
The Telegraph reports.
"Trump hired a 'Faux-Bama' to participate in a video in which Trump 'ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him.'"
CNN reports.
How weird is this? It's similar to debate preparation, where someone is brought in to play the role of the candidate's opponent, so he can sharpen his arguments and work on an effective self-presentation. Trump, of course, would never have to face Obama in a debate, but he was running against a continuation of the Obama administration, and he did need to practice arguing against Obama, even though he didn't need to figure out how to be in the room with him and counter his weighty presence. The exercise of telling him off to his face might have been conceived of as an effective way to build Trump's style and confidence. Put Trump in his familiar milieu as a business boss with Obama cut down to the size of a subordinate whom Trump could fire. Do the theater of "The Apprentice." It's a way to practice.
It could also have been an idea for an ad. It might have worked. But it wasn't used, perhaps because it didn't build the belief that Trump has analyzed Obama's work and seen why we shouldn't want the same thing anymore. Cohen isn't a credible witness, but if we take his characterization seriously, once videoed, the scene looked like Trump had "ritualistically belittled" Obama, and it would have been quite sensible to predict that the ad would stimulate a protectiveness toward Obama. Trump certainly managed to criticize Obama successfully, but we never had a picture of him humiliating the man personally. If that was to be an ad, it was scrapped, and that was a sensible enough decision, in retrospect, because Trump won the election.
And now we have Cohen, trying to make some money and to hurt his former client, with this book "Disloyal." With that title, the publisher flaunts Cohen's contemptibility — that's the best move, with this author nobody likes. So the Trump-hating media can rifle through the book and what does it find? CNN leads with this imitation Obama story. That's the worst thing in the book? It's new and it's concrete... and it doesn't rest entirely on Cohen's credibility, because there's a photograph:
Other cherry-picking in the CNN article: