१६ जानेवारी, २०२१
"Adnan Oktar... a Muslim televangelist and cult leader... proselytised about religion while scantily clad women bopped robotically beside him."
"The Cornish hotel flying a flag for QAnon’s cult delusion/Conspiracy theories spawned in America are taking hold in unexpected corners of British society."
The Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel, Cornwall, may be themed on Arthurian legends but the flag flown over its tower last year stood for a more modern myth.... Guests at the hotel, which displays a Q flag, said that the owner left conspiracy theory material in their bedrooms....
Since Mr Mappin, heir to the Mappin and Webb jewellery business, which holds a Royal Warrant, hoisted a Q flag above the battlements of Camelot Castle Hotel last January he has hosted a regular video broadcast called Camelot TV.
In a coded message on Wednesday to his 20,000 subscribers, he likened QAnon to an oak tree. “If the roots are strong, all will be well in the spring . . . 2021 is all about the rebirth of our civilisation,” he said.
"Justice Sotomayor opens her dissent in U.S. v. Dustin Higgs by saying the names of every person executed by the federal government over the past year."
Sister Helen Prejean continues her summary, here, at Twitter, but here's the full text of the dissent, issued yesterday. Excerpt:Justice Sotomayor opens her dissent in U.S. v. Dustin Higgs by saying the names of every person executed by the federal government over the past year. pic.twitter.com/KLHcRTWMIZ
— Sister Helen Prejean (@helenprejean) January 16, 2021
"If you took the fact out that he is the president of the United States and look at the conduct of the call, it tracks the communication you might see in any drug case or organized crime case. It’s full of threatening undertone and strong-arm tactics."
"Senate Democrats could vote to abolish the legislative filibuster, and then pass Biden’s plan on a party-line basis."
A fantastic example of the problem of humor that some people are going to take for truth.
Honestly no. (I laughed too...but people are already using it to bash CNN. This “some people know it’s a joke but lots of other people don’t” kind of fakery has consequences. OK carry on.) https://t.co/m9o1HcIeaq pic.twitter.com/uhk5uhHpi0
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 16, 2021
"As mayor, I will regularly get around the city by subway, bus, or bike, because that’s the way most New Yorkers get around..."
१५ जानेवारी, २०२१
"There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current."
"Federal prosecutors offered an ominous new assessment of last week’s siege... saying in a court filing that rioters intended 'to capture and assassinate elected officials.'..."
"In his illuminating book 'The Ministry of Truth' a biography of '1984' and its influence, Dorian Lynskey makes a persuasive case that..."
There have been several biographies of George Orwell and some academic studies of his book’s intellectual context but never an attempt to merge the two streams into one narrative, while also exploring the book’s afterlife. I am interested in Orwell’s life primarily as a means to illuminate the experiences and ideas that nourished this very personal nightmare in which everything he prized was systematically destroyed: honesty, decency, fairness, memory, history, clarity, privacy, common sense, sanity, England, and love....
"Adolfo 'Shabba-Doo' Quiñones, who grew up dancing in a bleak public housing project in Chicago and went on to become a pioneer of street dance in the 1980s..."
"Oh, hello, nice to see you, have a seat — let’s stress-eat some chips together. Let’s turn ourselves, briefly..."
१४ जानेवारी, २०२१
"'There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.' Those words are as true today as when Abraham Lincoln spoke them."
Biden shows no leadership... I mean... Biden tries to stay above the fray.
... President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has maintained a studied cool, staying largely removed from the proceedings... Mr. Biden’s focus on the governing challenge ahead... it also underscores the contrast between his cautious, centrist approach to politics and the anger of many Democratic officials and voters over Mr. Trump’s assaults on democratic norms.
Actually, this little article is rather critical of Biden, even with that coolness spin. He's "removed," "above the fray," but is that good? Some people would like him to express hotness — anger and leftism — not this "cautious, centrist approach."
I like cool, calm centrism. My problem with Biden is that he's not imposing his restraint on his party, just standing back and standing by* as his party goes on a wild pursuit of something other than "the governing challenge ahead."
I have to give this post my "Democratic Party in Trumpland" tag. That tag should be relegated to the dustbin of the blog's archive. But the Party loves the stomping ground of Trumpland. They don't want to leave. They don't care about the dawning of Bidentime.
______________________Is the impeachment funny?
The most impeached president in American history! I wonder if Trump is tired of all this winning…
Half of all impeachments of an American president have been of Trump!...
We’re going to have impeachment, like you wouldn’t believe. A lot of people are saying he’s the best president ever at getting impeached. No one had ever heard of impeachment before Trump.
"Some say the riots were caused by Antifa. There was absolutely no evidence of that. And conservatives should be the first to say so...."
Trump got his message out on Twitter.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 13, 2021Transcript here. Excerpts:
I want to be very clear, I unequivocally condemn the violence that we saw last week. Violence and vandalism have absolutely no place in our country and no place in our movement. Making America Great Again has always been about defending the rule of law, supporting the men and women of law enforcement and upholding our nation’s most sacred traditions and values. Mob violence goes against everything I believe in and everything our movement stands for. No true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence.... Whether you are on the right or on the left, a Democrat or a Republican, there is never a justification for violence, no excuses, no exceptions. America is a nation of laws....
"The ability of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to control what people see online is so potent, it is the subject of antitrust hearings...."
Parler was already on AWS.So the baker (aside from scale, monopoly considerations, and anti trust issues) situation would have to be more like:The gay couple hired the baker, paid the baker, and then on the day of the wedding the baker refused to deliver the cake. The baker, however, delivered a lot of cakes to your ex-boyfriends wedding on the same day. And then the baker announced you were dangerous.
"QAnon reshaped Trump’s party and radicalized believers. The Capitol siege may just be the start."
Another bloggiversary: This blog is 17 years old, and the record of blogging every single day is still intact.
That's 6,210 days. There have been 61,712 posts — not counting this one. An average just under 10 posts a day. There were 3,644 posts last year — again, just under 10 posts a year. You can see the number per year and per week for the 17 years in the side bar. I don't count the posts each day — or any day — to see if I'm hitting 10.
The number of posts per day isn't a goal. I just have my way of looking around, seeing what's bloggable to me, and hanging out with the blog, mostly in the morning, until it feels done. One day, the whole thing might feel done and I'll walk away. More likely, I will ramble along until — one way or the other — I am incapacitated.
१३ जानेवारी, २०२१
At the Sunrise Café...
"On the surface, it’s a little weird that digital culture in 2021 would become suddenly obsessed with 200-year-old folk songs about men on whaling boats."
"Given the smaller number of seditious members in the Senate, McConnell’s task is far easier: Conduct a quick Senate trial; convict Trump and..."
Look at the top 2 best-selling books at Amazon.
List here. Orwell's "Animal Farm" ranks high too — at #18. Isn't it amazing that "1984" seems so continually relevant? I clicked into my Kindle, and it was the book that was already open. I'd been doing a search on a word — "fight" — after it came up in the context of re-impeaching Trump:
I note that the Trump quote [the Democrats included in the Article of Impeachment] did not make my list "The 7 most violence-inciting statements in Donald Trump's speech to the crowd on January 6th"! I thought "fight like hell" sounded too much like ordinary politics to make the list. We fight for our rights, we fight in political campaigns, we fight in court. Are we going to outlaw the word "fight"?! We'll be descending into Newspeak.
But it was this more general concept about Newspeak that was important — from the essay on Newspeak in the back of the book:
"This was not a protest, this was a well-organized insurrection against our country that was organized by Donald Trump."
... even though the text of the article says "Republicans were fracturing over the vote." And:
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has embraced the effort as a means to purge Mr. Trump from the party, according to people who have spoken to him, and at least five House Republicans planned to vote to impeach.
I'm interested in seeing how the proof will be accomplished. McGovern sets a high bar in calling it "well-organized" and an "insurrection against our country" and saying that this organizing was done by Trump.
ADDED: I'm interested in this notion that you can look into eyes and see evil. I remember how ludicrous it seemed when George W. Bush said he looked into Putin's eyes and "got a sense of his soul" — and decided he was "straightforward and trustworthy."
But here's an article from 2011 in Scientific American, "The Eyes Have It/Eye gaze is critically important to social primates such as humans. Maybe that is why illusions involving eyes are so compelling." That's about the relatively objective issue of misperceiving where eyes are looking. Harder to study whether there is evil in there!
Do courts allow witnesses to testify about what they feel they saw in someone's eyes? I have not researched this question, but I believe it would not be acceptable to testify "I looked into his eyes and saw pure evil."
Why I put AdSense ads back on the blog — self-defense.
I'm tired of checking to see what's supposedly a violation. I get so many of these and they're often posts that are nothing but a quote from a commentator in the NYT. But to see that the review didn't okay these pages... it's just mind-bending. I can't waste my energy dealing with this bullshit. In every case, I'm told that I've violated their policy with "Dangerous or derogatory content," which I find insulting. Here are recent posts that have been found in violation of that policy — even after review...
How did these articles get flagged? By robots or by opponents of this blog? What kind of review does Google have that would reinforce the idea that this is "Dangerous or derogatory content"?! Review by robots or by opponents of this blog? I can't imagine an unbiased human being finding all — or any — of these posts to have "Dangerous or derogatory content." It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments....I'm not dealing with it any more. So enjoy ad-free Althouse.
Well, I am going to deal with it now and in the future. I just turned AdSense ads back on. At least, Google was nice enough to offer me cake....
... yeah, Google, your AI did a nice job of knowing what I like. Cake. I like cake. But it's not yummy cake that has me coming back. And it's not the income from the ads. I realized I can use AdSense in self-defense. Google has the power to delete this blog. Whatever force caused those exasperating notifications is still out there, exerting pressure, whether I'm getting notifications or not.
As I noted in that October post, "It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments." In the comments there, Yancey Ward said:
It isn't your content that is getting flagged, Ms. Althouse, it is what we commenters are saying - they are flagging the separate blog post which contains all of the comments at the end. You just have too many of us deplorables.
I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and I gave up ads because it seemed like too much work to go searching for what might be the problem in the comments. But the mechanism for reporting abuse to Google remains. This presents a risk to me, and I think the risk has increased in the past week. So I want those notifications. I'm worried not only that Google will overdo its censorship but also that haters of this blog — of the comments section of this blog — will come in here with pseudonyms and write violent threats and racist crap for the purpose of drawing censorship down upon me.
There are various ways to deal with the problem of commenters who are here to hurt me, and some of them are too labor intensive. Some of them would diminish (or destroy) the flow of the comments. The comments at their best are phenomenal, and I'm very happy with the good commenters and have greatly appreciated their company these last 17 years. (Bloggiversary #17 is tomorrow.) But one thing I can do is to put the ads back up and then use the notifications to identify the comment threads that have something Google sees as a problem. Then it's a limited task to look for what needs to be deleted.
I delete comments without prodding from Google when I see threats of violence. I delete comments with the "n-word." I probably have a standard that's close to what Google is identifying, so I'm going to accept the help from Google now. I can't read every comment on every post — there are close to 4 million comments on this blog — but I can comb through the comments sections on posts where I get a Google notification. Google is getting vigilant about material that I don't want either — and, of course, I don't want a festering problem that I cannot see and that is undermining the existence of this blog.
And that's why there are ads on this blog.
१२ जानेवारी, २०२१
At the Sunrise Café...
"Trump’s Twitter feed... was a window into his deranged and disordered mind. The insults, grandiosity, lies, threats, bigotry and incitement..."
"President Trump on Tuesday showed no contrition or regret for instigating the mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened the lives of members of Congress..."
"Which comes closer to your point of view: democracy in the United States is alive and well or democracy in the United States is under threat?"
"Pseudocoup. Can be pronounced like Sudoku if wordplay demands it."
"We began preparing for Inauguration Day last year."
The downfall-of-Trump conspiracy theories will go on for 100 years. They will never end in my lifetime. I have accepted this reality.
"I’m not the one storming the capital, I’m literally changing the world by putting my life and thoughts and love out there on the table 24 seven. Respect it."
... I'm just here to quote the comment, "For Christ’s sake folks (not just Lana)—it’s spelled 'Capitol'—I feel like no one knows this?"
Here's the title track, in case you might enjoy the music (and the visuals):
Here are the lyrics, in case you, like me, don't want to strain through the mumbling to get to the words but somehow still care what she might be saying.
There's nothing wrong contemplating God/Under the chemtrails over the country club/We're in our jewels in the swimming pool/... It's beautiful, LSD, normality settles down over me/I'm not bored or unhappy, I'm still so strange and wild/... Washing my hair, doing the laundry/Late night TV, I want you on me....
"There came a moment, around the time I turned 70...."
११ जानेवारी, २०२१
"Hours after it went offline on Monday, the social media start-up Parler filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Amazon of violating antitrust law..."
Okay, Joe. Thanks. I will link back to this if it ever seems you might be stoking the flames of hate and chaos.
The work of the next four years must be the restoration of democracy and the recovery of respect for the rule of law, and the renewal of a politics that’s about solving problems — not stoking the flames of hate and chaos.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 11, 2021
"But 'dilettante' is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults."
"German Chancellor Angela Merkel considers it 'problematic' that Twitter would toss President Trump off its social media platform..."
"House Democrats on Monday introduced an article of impeachment against President Trump for inciting a mob that attacked the Capitol last week, vowing to press the charge..."
The fork as a weapon.
But we're talking about the table utensil of our time.
I see that using a fork to fight is common enough in popular culture to have a page to itself at TV Tropes:
[I]f chaos breaks out at the dinner table, a diner may have to get creative with what they have on hand, turning their utensils into an Improvised Weapon. Normally played for laughs (especially if there's Sword Sparks), but if the chips are down, things can get pretty ugly: this can lead to sickeningly devastating effect in the hands of someone skilled/determined enough.... Subtrope of Improvised Weapon. Compare Frying Pan of Doom....
That sounds funny, but remember that an improvised weapon — a fire extinguisher — was [allegedly] used at the Capitol and it killed a police officer.
If the "Capitol mob" was "a raging collection of grievances and disillusionment" as The Washington Post says...
Those who made their way to the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday hail from at least 36 states, along with the District of Columbia and Canada, according to a Washington Post list of over 100 people identified as being on the scene of the Capitol. Their professions touch nearly every facet of American society: lawyers, local lawmakers, real estate agents, law enforcement officers, military veterans, construction workers, hair stylists and nurses. Among the crowd were devout Christians who highlighted Bible verses, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory and members of documented hate groups, including white nationalist organizations and militant right-wing organizations, such as the Proud Boys.
The list is just a limited cross section of the thousands of people who descended upon the area, yet some striking commonalities are hard to ignore. Almost all on the list whose race could be readily identified are White.
Not sure how that is done. But okay. The Washington Post seems to have compiled a list of 100 people — a hundred out of what? "thousands"? — and it's making assertions about these people, somehow "readily identifying" their race and capitalizing "White." How many of the 100 were in the category whose race was "readily identified"? 10? 80? I have no idea.
Most are men, yet about one in six were women...
2 grammar mistakes there. It needs to be "one in six was a woman" to get subject/verb agreement, and, for parallelism, it needs to be either "Most were men, yet about one in six was a women" or "Most are men, yet about one in six is a women." We can argue about whether past or present tense is worse (or an outright error). But enough tripping along the pleasant side road that is grammar. Back to the substance:
... also almost all White. Many left extensive social media documentation of their passions, ideologies and, in some cases, disillusionment and vendettas.
Great. This is what I've been waiting for. Reading the social media of the various participants in the breaching of the Capitol.
Their paths to the nation’s capital were largely fueled by long-standing grievances and distrust, and yet planned in spontaneous and ad-hoc fashion.
Was there a plan? If it was "spontaneous and ad-hoc" then maybe it was not a plan, just diverse individuals whose paths flowed together at that place and time?
Several reported pulling together their travel funds and schedules in just a handful of days. Some took a solitary journey, including flying from coast to coast alone, only to find a shared community upon their final destination in Washington. Others traveled in buses that departed Wednesday at dawn, filled to the brim with other Trump supporters....
Don't mix up the plan to go to a big rally and street protest with a plan to break into the Capitol (and don't mix up a plan to break into the Capitol with a plan to take Mike Pence or members of Congress hostage).
Several who traveled to Washington to support the “Stop the Steal” rally told The Post they were driven by two primary grievances: their opposition to the election results and the restrictions in place to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Lindsey Graham...
"[A]void books that are supposed to be 'good' for us. It isn’t necessary to read a single turgid sentence of Boring Saul Bellow..."
"'Soon after he met me, he took me to lunch and told me he was in love with me. I thought it was sweet, but he was 11 years older and I had a boyfriend at the time who I was madly in love with.'"
The New York Times revealed the presidential penchant for "My Sharona" -- about an underage vixen -- in a story about Bush's iPod mix last week.Yikes. 2005 was so long ago. Imagine seeing "underage vixen" blithely tossed out like that today!
१० जानेवारी, २०२१
At the Bird's Nest Café...
Object lesson.
"I grew up in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy..."
My message to my fellow Americans and friends around the world following this week's attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/blOy35LWJ5
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) January 10, 2021
The many voices of Paul McCartney.
May I recommend this highly detailed episode of "The Beatles Naked" podcast?
I'm not yet half way through, but I'm so impressed with the analysis. There's so much of it! With the music played, so you can judge for yourself.
I was interested, for example, in the discussion of the emotional effect of any slightly out-of-tune singing. Is it "soulful"? And has our experience of it changed over the years as present-day music is electronically tuned to perfection?
And is it the case that there is a song that only Paul McCartney can sing and that song is "Helter Skelter"? The Wikipedia article on the song cites a number of cover versions, but the only one mentioned in the podcast is Bono's. It is mentioned with a scoffing laugh (just before saying that if Kurt Cobain had tried, he might have succeeded). I just annoyed myself by listening to the Mötley Crüe version. I also sampled a little of the Marilyn Manson "Helter Skelter." Here's the awful Oasis version.
I'm no expert, but I'd say if you're just going to do it like Paul and just approach what he did, why do it at all? As an homage? But it's an homage with a song that got its reputation twisted up into the Manson murders. Bono said Charles Manson "stole" the song from The Beatles and he was "stealing it back."
Having just written about the connection between Trump's January 6th speech that — intentionally or unintentionally — seems to have inspired the storming of the U.S. Capitol, I'm interested to stumble so soon into this story of a vocal presentation that may have inspired murder. According to one Manson follower:When the Beatles' White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn't that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song 'Helter Skelter'—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.
Of course, there's no way to hold The Beatles complicit in a murder scheme. At most, they could have thought that too many people are too attached to them and looking for messages and crazy connections and maybe they ought to stick to the peace-and-love songs so they don't accidentally inspire murder. It would be a different matter if The Beatles knew before they put out the White Album that there was a violent group set to rise up when The Beatles gave the signal "helter skelter."
Bring us the head of Hans Christian Heg!
A criminal complaint charged Rodney A. Clendening, 34, of Beloit, with felony theft after police said they identified him as the driver of a car into which the head of the abolitionist statue was placed on June 23, after a group of people, using another vehicle to assist them, pulled down the statue of Heg during a destructive night Downtown.
According to the complaint against Clendening.... He walked toward the Heg plinth, just out of the camera’s view, and came back into view alongside two other men who were carrying Heg’s head. One of the men put the head into the trunk of the Ford. After the trunk was closed, Clendening went back to the driver’s seat and drove off. The car was seen a short time later on video footage at John Nolen Drive and East Wilson Street. A man who appeared to be Clendening got out and ran toward South Blair and East Wilson streets. A short time later, he was seen standing near a man police say was the driver of the Nissan used to pull down the Heg statue....
Getting the head back is important, but they are already spending $51,600 to recast it, and the plan is to have the statue reinstalled by "the middle of the year."
If Trump knew there was a plan to storm the Capitol building, then his speech to the crowd was an incitement, even though he never told the crowd to commit any act of violence.
But what if Trump knew there was a plan to storm the Capitol? Then all those words are transformed! They become an incitement to the violence, especially if the people in the crowd know he knows. The avoidance of references to violence would be part of a shared understanding — like winking. We know what we're going to do.
Now, at this point, I don't even know that there was a plan.
Yesterday, I wrote about a New Yorker article titled "A Palm Beach Proud Boy at the Putsch," and, in the comments, Bob Boyd said, "Putsch implies a plan. There was no plan. It was a protest that turned into a riot."
The first glimpse of the deadly tragedy that was about to unfold came at 9 a.m. on the morning of the insurrection for one Black veteran of the US Capitol Police....
“I found out what they were planning when a friend of mine screenshot me an Instagram story from the Proud Boys saying, ‘We’re breaching the capitol today, guys. I hope y’all ready.’”
Now, that's 9 a.m. on the day of the protest, so it could be a plan that arose at the last minute. But Trump's speech did not begin until 1:11 p.m. That's 4 hours of lead time. Perhaps that Capital Police officer is lying or mistaken or perhaps he doesn't exist at all and Buzzfeed is wrong. But it's a fact that can be checked with Instagram. And I want to see all that there in social media, all the evidence of a plan, and what law enforcement knew about this plan, whether Trump was informed, and why there wasn't better protection of the Capitol.
I have held off from believing that Trump incited the crowd to breach the Capitol. You can see that in my 7 statements post. But if he was informed of a plan, then I will read all of those statements as an incitement, and I would have to say that he should resign.