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blogging every day since January 14, 2004
Also, is it racist to accuse Trump of bad taste?Question: Where is Trump during the 9/11 anniversary ceremony?
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 11, 2021
Answer: Preparing to do commentary for a boxing match in Florida. pic.twitter.com/tS2Sw63Dxf
I don't know what you think of "celebrity 9/11".... It's a matter of taste, but they are trying, with decent enough sincerity.Imagine all the people living life in peace. pic.twitter.com/5xA11BVN3p
— Yoko Ono ☁️ (@yokoono) September 11, 2021
Top Republicans are calling for a public uprising to protest President Biden's broad vaccine mandates, eight months after more than 500 people stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the election.
Why it matters: It has been decades since America has witnessed such blatant and sustained calls for mass civil disobedience against the U.S. government.See what he did there? He conflated civil disorder and civil disobedience! Civil disobedience is protest that takes the form of not following the rule that you oppose. Here, that would mean you don't get the vaccine. That's nothing like storming the Capitol.
Exceptional piece. I liked your blog early on, then became annoyed when it seemed like you kept taking shots at novels and fiction in general -- as this was/is my chosen field, the highest calling in my view, where I excel. I thought you were perhaps demonstrating some misgivings about how the writing of blogs might be viewed in the future (where, as Criswell reminds us at the beginning of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, we all shall one day reside); also, listening to some actor's performance on an audiobook does not equal the actual reading experience, end of fucking story (to invoke TRAINSPOTTING's Irvine Welsh).
Then the Comments section of your blog became taken over by a far-Right cabal which was just as offputting as any conceivable Far Left gang of assholes might have become. You came to realize this, it seems, but it took you a long time.
I brought your attention recently to the Netflix series based on my book just as a friendly gesture and I suppose because of the friendly feeling engendered by years of reading your blog. The show has become a phenomenon.
Grimson gave me permission to publish that. The Nexflix show is "Brand New Cherry Flavor":
And here's Criswell:The WSJ piece points us to Kyle Smith's piece in National Review: "Why Isn’t the Attack on Larry Elder the Biggest Story in America?"Breaking: A flying egg narrowly missed the back of recall candidate @larryelder's head after it was thrown by an activist wearing a gorilla mask in Venice. A scuffle broke out and the candidate was escorted into an SUV.
— Kate Cagle (@KateCagle) September 8, 2021
Here's the raw (pun intended)
CW: f-bombs@SpecNews1SoCal pic.twitter.com/FeFx3wnuSD
Said Darin Hoover, father of one of the Marines who died recently in Afghanistan, quoted in "Trump reaches out to families of U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan" (WaPo).
Hoover, who traveled to Dover Air Force Base when his son's body was brought home, "declined an offer to meet with President Biden. But out of the blue last week his cellphone rang, and he instantly recognized the voice on the other line: Donald Trump."
I'm blogging this mainly because it's positive coverage for Trump that is appearing in The Washington Post. I read The Washington Post every day, and I find it blogworthy that The Washington Post would treat Trump this well. Maybe it's just pure empathy for the Gold Star father, and I should just stop there, but I read on.
I think I see the motivation:
When I asked the question, I thought this shows AI is not so smart. I mean, most of the time I get ads that seem apt — cashmere sweaters, expensive lip balm — but this goes to show just how wrong they can be. But Meade is right. My first post of the day, about taking down the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, refers to the plan to cut the massive bronze object in the 3 pieces.
Said Donald Trump, in a written statement at his website, here.
1. I had some trouble finding the original statement. News sites quote without linking, and Trump's website is rather hard to find by casual Googling. They don't want you to see it. So, when I finally found it, I made a bookmark, and now I intend to make a point of checking it every day. These efforts to hide things can backfire.
2. I notice that Trump is far more grounded in aesthetics than your run-of-the-mill politician. The first thing he talks about is the magnificence and beauty of the statue. That's my first reaction to this issue: Richmond, you have had a beautiful statue in your midst! Regardless of the extent to which you want to honor or dishonor the man it depicts, it is a work of art. To tear it down because of the ideas you think it represents is like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.
3. Trump has a visual mind: The "magnificent statue" is attacked by the "massive crane." He's especially drawn to the huge. That's his word — yooge. And here you have 2 huge things in confrontation. It's epic, the crane vs. the statue, like Godzilla v. Rodan. For that link, I Googled "Godzilla vs." and Google wanted to autocomplete that as... let's just say another large movie monster that it would be distracting to name.
4. But I will sidetrack you into this crucial piece of the Trump-and-art puzzle: To prepare the site for Trump Tower, his yooge monument to himself, Trump famously destroyed prominent Art Deco bas-relief sculpture that had been a focal point of 5th Avenue in New York City. In his new statement, Trump observes that the statue of Lee will be cut in 3 pieces, but Trump completely destroyed that stone artwork.
5. More visuals: The cut-up sculpture is "thrown" into storage. It will be stored, not completely destroyed. On first glance, you might think you read "complete destruction," but Trump writes "complete desecration."
6. To say "desecration" is to say that the statue of Robert E. Lee contained sacredness.
7. But the rest of the statement is not about holiness but military aptitude. Trump vaunts Lee as a great military strategist. Like a moviemaker pitching an alternative history script, he visualizes Lee in command of the Union Army: "the war would have been over in one day." And Lee in command in Afghanistan: There would have been "a complete and total victory many years ago."
8. It's not enough to end wars. You need to end them well, something we didn't do with Afghanistan, but which Lee — in Trump's telling — did: "He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country."
9. That makes me think of Trump's January 6th speech. After losing (or ostensibly losing) the 2020 election, Trump could have been more of a "unifying force," "ardent in his resolve" to bridge the partisan divide. He could have pursued "many means of reconciliation and implor[ed his supporters] to do their duty in becoming good citizens."
10. Trump enlarges the picture — I think of the crane shot in "Gone With The Wind" — and we see the entire culture. The Radical Left is destroying not just this one sculpture, but everything. This is Trump's cinematic visual mind operating again. The filmmaker has us concentrating on Scarlett looking for one man then pulls back and exposes hundreds of wounded men.
One of the comments on "How Your Comments Make Our Journalism Better/Reader responses add an extra dimension to Times articles, and a lot more" (NYT).
In its ruling, the Supreme Court had considered a challenge to the law in the northern state of Coahuila, which had set prison penalties of up to three years for having an abortion. The justices struck down the state law, finding broadly that any criminal penalization of abortion violated Mexico’s Constitution.
"The members of Congress know, from their colleagues in Congress that, uh, you know, the, looks like a tornado, they don't call them that anymore, that hit the crops and wetlands in the middle of the country, in Iowa and Nevada. It's just across the board."I just learned the word myself a few weeks ago, blogged here.
On August 10–11, 2020, a powerful derecho swept across the Midwestern United States — predominantly eastern Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. It caused high winds and spawned an outbreak of weak tornadoes.... The greatest damage occurred in eastern Iowa, and northern Illinois, where multiple tornadoes touched down.... Terry Dusky, chief executive officer of electrical infrastructure company ITC Midwest, described the storm damage as "...equivalent of a 40-mile wide tornado that rolled over 100 miles of the state."
Now, there is something dumb about Biden's statement. He said "Nevada" when he meant Nebraska.
From "The Stench of Living (and Working) With Parosmia" (NY Magazine).
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that some evacuation flights out of Afghanistan have been prevented from taking off because they included passengers without valid travel documents, an explanation that undercuts Republican claims that the Taliban is holding Americans hostage....
He added that he was comfortable with a film almost wholly dependent on improvisation. “If I’m told exactly how to do everything,” he said, “I become stiff and uncomfortable.” He embraced Godard’s suggestion to “play around” with the character.
Knowing that Mr. Belmondo liked to shadowbox in character, Godard filmed him boxing in front of a mirror as he experimented with his lines: “I’m not much of a looker, but I’m quite a boxer.”
AND: There's much to say about Jean-Paul Belmondo, but this is a blog, so I'll just say one thing that is important to me. He makes a prominent appearance in the Donovan song "Sunny South Kensington" — (on the delightful "Mellow Yellow" album).The film — sexy, witty, youthful and fatalistic — became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Belmondo became the subject of articles chronicling “le belmondisme,” his appealing air of insouciance.
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Mary Quant got stoned to say the least
Ginsberg, he ended up dry and so he took a trip out East
What's in the verses? We're invited to take a walk in the London neighborhood of South Kensington, "a groovy place to live." Donovan points out the various characters — girl in a silk blouse who "ain't no freak," "a fella with a cane umbrella" — and tells us how we might act: "flip out, skip out, trip out" and "spread your wings."
Ginsberg is presumably Allen Ginsberg, who was famously in London in 1965. The "Mellow Yellow" album came out in 1966. When did Ginsberg go to India and why? We could read this from an Indian website from 2019: "Disillusioned with America, did the poet Allen Ginsberg find an antidote to rationality in India?" ("India turned his attention 'away from his cosmic obsessions and toward the humanity around him in the swarming streets of Kolkata and Varanasi'").
As for Mary Quant, she was celebrated last year in at the V&A South Kensington Museum — South Kensington, the place where Donovan pictured her stoned in 1966 — and here's the museum's video, intended to capture that 60s vibe, half a century after the fact:
I can attest to the fact that the false eyelashes I'm wearing in that picture I used in the sidebar on my now defunct blog The Time That Blog Forgot were Mary Quant eyelashes. The photo was taken by my father in 1968, when I would have been thrilled to wear anything and everything Mary Quant, and my Aunt Dorothy, who lived in London, sent me those eyelashes.
Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.
Should we be mortified?
I'm sure Pinker could give a rational or rational sounding answer to the question whether he contradicted himself, but let me try to do it myself. You can wish people would favor rationality so much that they'd be mortified by reliance on anecdote and still notice, quite rationally, that as irrationality rages on in the human mind, it will, at least some of the time, drive people in the right direction.
By using climate change as his example, Pinker is assuming the reader already believes what he believes and what he believes rationally, which is that climate change is indeed an immense problem and one that the less rational people have difficulty facing. So he likes that irrational thought — reliance on "images and narratives and anecdotes" — will work on these less rational people. We already know what we need them to think and that their minds don't work right, so it's okay — it's rational — to do what's necessary to get them to think what it's good for them to think. In that sense, propaganda is rational.
I'm not agreeing with all that, just sketching it out as a sympathetic reader after I flagged a seeming contradiction.
Said Alexandre Arnault, a communications vice president at Tiffany, quoted in "Basquiat’s friends ‘horrified’ by Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Tiffany campaign" (NY Post).
I was going to quote the expressions of horror by Basquiat's friends, but when I got to Arnault's defense of Tiffany, I saw that those expressions were surplusage. You've heard the phrase "The best defense is a good offense." But sometimes the best offense is a bad defense. Defense is self-serving, so when it works against you, it really works.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose 33 years ago at the age of 27.
But Beyonce and Jay-Z are living well and posing artfully....
It's all so stilted, this "modernization." To my eye, Jay-Z is a tribute to the Maxell blown-away guy of the 1980s...
... and Beyonce is a tribute to John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X":
Not too "modern."
Then again I could be wrong in my mental associations. At least they are — unlike Arnault's idea that Basquiat mixed that color blue to say "Tiffany!" — unaffected by commercial interests.
From "Why can't we mandate anything?" by Stephen E. Hanson (vice provost for academic and international affairs at the College of William & Mary) and Jeffrey S. Kopstein (professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine) (The Hill).
I added that link on "patrimonialism." And I want to underscore that the authors are saying that mandating things is a way to push back against a system in which power flows directly from the leader. In this view, bureaucracy is a safeguard, and people ought to appreciate it. But how do you get people to appreciate it? One idea that a mask requirement would provide an occasion for speaking persuasively to the people about how "rational, reasonable" experts are working earnestly to preserve good order.
Mr. Biden has never claimed that his son died in combat, but he has often spoken of his son’s overseas deployment and the toll it took on his family. Mr. Biden’s supporters say that military families are entitled to their grief, but that the president is also entitled to his....
The general thinking among Mr. Biden’s supporters is that he is a welcome change from President Donald J. Trump, who was almost always publicly unable to express empathy. They believe Mr. Biden is the right president for this moment in history, one so far marked by the unthinkable loss....
Biden needs to show people that he's focused on the problems that beset us now and that he can do something to help us. To stand there offering up himself as an example of a person who has suffered doesn't send a message of focus and competence. It's a message that can be read as Hey, I've got problems of my own. Faced with parents of marines who'd just been killed, he said, essentially, my son died too.
His son died 6 years ago. You might be tolerant of an old man who came up to you at your child's funeral and wanted you to know how much he still hurts from the death of his child 6 years ago. It might be difficult, but you'd probably think something like, that poor old guy. But this poor old guy is President of the United States. He asked to be President of the United States, and by some strange twists of fate, he got what he said he wanted. And now everyone's problems are his. He needs to act like someone who can handle all that. If he's swallowed up in grief over his lost son — if he's "haunted," as the NYT headline has it — perhaps he should resign.
It is possible — though it's awkward to say this — that he's not as absorbed in grief as he acts. He may be doing the theater of empathy. It's worked for him to a certain extent. Some people like to see a big display of empathy in politics. Others — a dead marine's father, McGurn, etc. — are telling Biden he's going too far. If it's theater, he can rein it it. Touch up those speeches. Get back to Obama-level empathy, but stress competence and mental clarity.
But it's no wonder he's lapsed into the misconception that "Beau" is a magic word. The press has propped him up so much — including with this "Invoking Beau" article. You know, to "invoke" means "To call on (God, a deity, etc.) in prayer or as a witness" or "To summon (a spirit) by charms or incantation; to conjure; also figurative" or "To call upon, or call to (a person) to come or to do something."
How is Biden "invoking" Beau?
President Biden’s personal hell month featured... Hurricane Ida... Afghanistan... covid-19’s delta variant... a dragging economy... and uncontrollable fires out west....
The president has been bouncing all over the four Horses of the Apocalypse....
It's not "four Horses of the Apocalypse." It's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And I can't picture bouncing all over them. Is he supposed to be the rider of all 4 horses, like he is all 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse? I don't think the Biblical reference is properly understood here.
Back to the column:
The president has been bouncing all over the four Horses of the Apocalypse, a reluctant gladiator trying to rein in the ruin of his presidency when...
So a gladiator is bouncing on the horses, trying to rein them in? Here's a nice painting of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1887):