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... you can talk about whatever you want.
blogging every day since January 14, 2004
I don't remember ever noticing the word "soulcraft" before today, when I saw it in a David Brooks column. Writing about "the cultural transformation" that could be achieved through the Democrats' $4 trillion in spending, he declared: "Statecraft is soulcraft." I blogged that — with disapproval — here.
But what is "soulcraft"? If "statecraft" makes sense, it must mean the work of the state, so shouldn't "soulcraft" mean the work of the soul? But, in context, it seems to mean the state's work is to work on the soul. I think he's saying that the state ought to engage in massive spending with the aim of shaping the soul of the people who live under the power of the state, and the lack of parallelism in the use of the ending "-craft" is disturbing.
I try to think of other "-craft" words. "Witchcraft" is the work of witches, not the shaping of witches. It's done by witches, not to witches. It fits with "statecraft," not "soulcraft."
In the comments to my post, Lloyd W. Robertson and Peter Spieker independently bring up George Will, and Quaestor writes:
Out and about last night in Charlotte, NC pic.twitter.com/BWssvivAII
— Mick Jagger (@MickJagger) September 30, 2021
I know of no one who cares about politics who feels relaxed now. The problem, rather, is a sort of numb despair.... During the last five years, it was at least possible to identify dates at which things might turn around. The midterms offered an opportunity to curb Trump. The 2020 election was a chance to get rid of him.
And you did get rid of him, so now your anguish is more amorphous and aimless, and therefore more existentially awful.
Biden’s agenda is stuck in a congressional standoff that’s at once frustrating, terrifying and extremely boring.
The new political suffering is boring!
Someone wanted Kalispell Police Department to check on a man’s welfare after they saw him throwing his arms around, waving his shirt, and yelling. Officers checked on the man who was "just being his normal self."...
A man reportedly jumped out from between two recycling containers, scaring a woman and her son....
A bearded man with scruffy dark hair was standing in a duck pond, yelling and throwing rocks....
About five people were yelling at each other....
I got there via "NWSL players speak out amid abuse claims: ‘Burn it all down’" (WaPo).
The players’ union demanded an end to “systemic abuse plaguing the NWSL” in the wake of reporting from The Athletic that an NWSL coach, the North Carolina Courage’s Paul Riley, had sexually coerced multiple players, as well as reporting by The Washington Post about verbal and emotional abuse by the former coach of the Washington Spirit. Riley denied the allegations to The Athletic.
In both cases, former NWSL players did something they had never done before: they went on the record to detail the abuse they said they had experienced. And on Thursday, a long list of NWSL players... offered angry criticism of a league they said had failed to protect players....
Said Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-Mich.), quoted in "Biden sticks to his dealmaking strategy, as some Democrats want him to do more to bring holdouts on board" (WaPo).
He's great — don't get me wrong — I just wish he'd be a little more great.
The highest-rated comment over there is from Canadian Retired Guy:Politicians in the U.S. confound me. Totally self centered and desperately clinging to power. Unable to put self interest aside and do what is best for the people that put them in power. The result of this is that the Democrats will lose the House and the Senate and Trump gets positioned to win in 2024.......... and here we go again.
America's greatest enemies and foes are not the Russians or the Chinese, but themselves and the politicians they return to office time and time again.
From a letter by the History faculty and the Anthropology/Sociology/African Studies Program at Rhodes, quoted at Brian Leiter's blog. Leiter's point is that the Philosophy faculty invited Singer, and it's a matter of their academic freedom.
If you were listening to the radio in 1961, this will strike a chord of memory.
You remember all the "name" songs — lyrics focused on a name — like "Linda" and "Sheila" and "Oh, Donna"? "Norman" has to be the silliest choice of a name to build a song on. Who would choose that? I feel like maybe the writer was bragging about how easy it is to write a song based on a name and someone said oh, yeah, write a song called "Norman."
Rhodesia solution?I think Geraghty is ignoring the possibility that Milley and McKenzie are lying. And the possibility that they "recommended" it him, but in a manner calculated to avoid anyone actually doing anything about it. The Rhodesia solution, as it were. I do think it's more likely that Biden just went for the glib, impulsive, obvious lie on the spur of the moment, as has been his practice throughout his long career. But we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that other people in this little drama might also be liars.
In the era of Black Lives Matter, [he] found it particularly offensive that a White artist from the segregated South was using the work of an African teenager in this way.
“We won’t be altering people’s quotes.... It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
The ACLU rewrite was:
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
Here's a webpage showing more work from Na Kim. She's mainly a book cover designer, but she's also been prominent in social media, including in this Instagram account Panolo Blahnik, which is photographs of shoes made of bread (or... should I say bread made into shoes?):
Tonight on our special #ClimateNight episode, Bill Gates shares a very good reason for why you haven’t seen him in a rocket ship 🚀 pic.twitter.com/7C8cKarJl0
— The Late Late Show with James Corden (@latelateshow) September 23, 2021
Said U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman, quoted in "John Hinckley, who shot Reagan, to be freed from oversight/A federal judge says the man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan four decades ago can be released unconditionally from the restrictions he's been living under next year if he remains mentally stable" (ABC News).
But it was with the 50th-anniversary edition of “Diet for a Small Planet” that [Moore's daughter] Anna took on a specific goal of adding more recipes from Black, Indigenous and people of color and taking a serious look, with the expert help of nutritionist Wendy Lopez, at both culling and updating the recipes from the original edition. Ingredients such as soy flour and margarine and ideas such as “protein combining” (designed to alleviate the fears of skeptics of vegetarian diets) from the original book were scrapped, while the overall focus continues to stay on eating whole fruits and vegetables.
How can there be an "edition" of the book that omits the main idea?! That book didn't just "alleviate the fears of skeptics." It informed us about the completeness of the protein in eggs and meat and gave us a formula for building a complete protein from vegetarian elements. For example beans with rice made something like a complete protein. If you've taken that idea out, it's not what "Diet for a Small Planet" has meant to us devotées and former devotées for half a century.
The WaPo article links to a 2015 WaPo article that scoffs at the old "completing the protein" idea: "The best reason to eat beans and grains together: They’re delicious."
There’s a persistent myth involved, though: the idea that you have to combine the two to get a so-called “complete protein,” or protein that contains all the essential amino acids found in animal protein. In fact, some legumes, grains and other plant-based foods can be complete sources of protein on their own. Moreover, researchers have learned that you don’t have to eat complementary foods in the same meal to get the benefit.
Here's my post from June 24, 2020 about the toppling of 2 important (and progressive) statues during protest riots in our city.
And here's my post from yesterday with a photograph of the other statue, of Hans Christian Heg, on the other side of the square. The Heg statue is especially meaningful to me because Meade tended to it on 3 different occasions during the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011: 3/2/11, 3/13/11, and 3/21/11 (video by me at those links).
The author of the piece, Nathan Heller, emailed me and defended his language usage. I've added that to the post — with his permission — so go back here if you'd like to read it.
"Now, whether Norm Macdonald's comic persona was that of a loafer; a sponger and a loafer; a sponger, a loafer, and a worthless idler; or simply a man down on his luck is a matter I'll gladly turn over to the authorities...."
Ms. Little found herself in her yard on Ivy Street on a June afternoon as a police SWAT team negotiated with a man who had broken in, changed her locks and hung a red and green flag in its window. He claimed he was a sovereign citizen of a country that does not exist and for whom United States laws do not apply.
Ms. Little was a victim of a ploy known as paper terrorism, a favorite tactic of an extremist group that is one of the fastest growing, according to government experts and watchdog organizations. Known as the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of empowerment....
Before the man broke into her house and changed the locks, Little had received strange documents in the mail from "Lenapehoking of the Al Moroccan Empire at New Jersey State Republic." This was not an isolated case. The Moorish sovereign movement is, we're told, actively pursuing their idea of the law "across the country, filing spurious lawsuits and burying county clerk offices in flurries of fake deeds, liens and other documents."