११ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"People around the world have been through so many alarms — both real and false — that many have been conditioned to stop fearing Covid-19 in the same way."
Writes the psychologist Adam Grant, in "We’re Living Through the ‘Boring Apocalypse’" (NYT).
"The storms — dark and immense funnel clouds that roared across the nighttime landscape — obliterated homes, churches and businesses, leaving unearthly scenes of devastation."
From "Live Updates: Tornadoes Hit Several States, With at Least 50 Dead in Kentucky" (NYT).
"This Fox weather bitch... Any help painting her as a far right crazy?"
Chris Cuomo allegedly texted an Andrew Cuomo staffer, quoted in "Chris Cuomo allegedly blasted Janice Dean as ‘that Fox weather bitch’ in smear plot" (NY Post).
The "weather bitch" he wanted to discredited Fox News, meteorologist Janice Dean, had criticized Governor Cuomo for his policy of putting Covid patients in nursing homes. Her husband's elderly parents had died of Covid in March and April of 2020, and she said this in March 2021 on "Fox and Friends":
“We knew he was covering up the numbers and now we are getting more and more information and facts to prove this is true. And the fact that his top aide Melissa de Rosa was in on it to help cover up the numbers, to downplay them.... They have never apologized to the families, 15,000 that deserve an apology. The only thing the governor is going to be sorry about is that he got caught. You know what — he needs to go to jail and all of those around him.... Promoting that book and making money off of COVID and the deaths of our loved ones is disgusting, corrupt and it needs to be investigated."
Interviewed yesterday, Dean said:
"Some 'courses' were slivers of edible paper. Some shots were glasses of vinegar. Everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses...."
From "Bros., Lecce: We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever" (The Everywhereist).
I feel a little sorry for the restaurant, as all the world is getting pointed at this mocking review. I got there by Today — you know, the TV show "Today" — "27 courses, very little edible: Review of Michelin-starred restaurant goes viral/Would you want to eat foam served in a plaster cast of the chef's mouth?"
Virality brings excessive mockery, that is, mockery not merely because the food was bad and the total amount was small but from people who don't know what a tasting menu is or get the idea but would never choose to eat like that. The best meals I've ever had have been in tasting-menu form, and I would be very annoyed to have people at the next table laughing at the food and asking where's "the main." But each item should be delightful and delicious, not gross and nasty.
"Hey, Jimmy, how are ya, man?"
१० डिसेंबर, २०२१
"With infinite love we announce that Michael Nesmith has passed away this morning in his home, surrounded by family, peacefully and of natural causes."
Said the family, quoted in "Michael Nesmith, Monkees Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 78" (Rolling Stone).
“This being, ‘What is this thing? What have we got here? What’s required of us? Is this a band? Is this a television show?’ When you go back to the genesis of this thing, it is a television show because it has all those traditional beats. But something else was going on, and it struck a chord way out of proportion to the original swing of the hammer. You hit the gong and suddenly it’s huge.”
I thoroughly loved The Monkees. I remember reading about the show before it began and awaiting it eagerly. I remember when Mike Nesmith was called "Mike Wool Hat Nesmith" — as if he was too hard to identify without the added attribute of the hat and the continual pointing out of it. I remember he was, essentially, the John Lennon of the group, sarcastic and a little mean.
I still listen to The Monkees and too much time has passed to put them down, even if, long ago you did put them down, when they were too busy singing to put you down. They came up in my playlist as I was sunrise-running this morning: "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone."
Here are The Monkees — the Monkees then still living — last month:
"The Supreme Court on Friday allowed a challenge to a Texas abortion law that banned most abortions in the state after about six weeks to proceed... But the Supreme Court refused to block the law in the meantime...."
Space diapers.
"We want to have sex, not children.... Having a child or not is our choice to make and our fundamental right. We don’t need anyone to tell us how to live."
Another man "Jiang, 30, who works in customer service at an Internet company, visited six hospitals in his home province of Fujian before finding one more than 1,200 miles away in Chengdu in Sichuan province that would perform a vasectomy." He said: "I felt like I had finally gotten rid of this huge burden.... Those around me who are married and have kids have nothing that makes me envious."
"Prices climbed 6.8% in November compared with last year, largest rise in nearly four decades, as inflation spreads through economy."
Top officials at the White House and Fed have maintained that unsustainably high prices won’t become a permanent feature of the economy... But over the past few months, they’ve been forced to back away from their initial message that inflation is temporary, or “transitory”.... The Biden administration has suffered low approval ratings and political attacks from Republicans, who blame Democrats’ stimulus measures for overheating the economy this year. Inflation has also emerged as a top concern for voters ahead of the 2022 midterms, especially because the cost of food or gas is often a test for how people perceive the economy....
This is a such an obvious disaster that WaPo can't find a way to help Biden or blame Republicans. There's an ineffectual slap at Republicans — for blaming Democrats. But you can't blame Republicans for blaming Democrats. The Democrats are in charge.
ADDED: Here's the shocking chart:
"I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do... When the whole team is together, we have to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.’ It’s very fake...."
९ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"Why wouldn’t I prostrate myself before the petulant mobs who insist that my standard journalistic investigation into a medical mystery..."
"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with 'people of color' and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues..."
From "The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem It's Not As Bad As You Think—It’s Worse" by Ruy Teixeira (SubStack).
"After Mitt Romney was photographed drinking a Diet Coke while running for president in 2012, the church posted a statement on its website clarifying its stance on caffeine, saying it 'does not prohibit the use of caffeine.'"
"To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip."
Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.”
I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool. It's a great hypothesis. Who knows if it's true, but where did it come from in Paul? Without context, one is left to theorize that Paul criticized chaos because the other Beatles weren't rising to the level of organization he wanted, that came naturally to him.
Googling, I found this transcript of the whole conversation (published a few years ago). There's audio too, and it's crisper than the mix in the documentary. It's January 14, 1969 (in Twickenham Film Studios):
The Order of Orders.
This made me want to put order... in order. I don't really want to do something I know I can't do. It's more that I want to do a top 10 list, with 10 types of order, ranked so as to amuse me and amuse or provoke you.
"I'm not that worked up about the Disneyfication of the interior of Notre Dame. The contents of those alcoves along the perimeter are transitory — they'll live out their little lives and pass away."
I wrote on November 27, in a post that has a quote from The Spectator for its title "Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a 'politically correct Disneyland.'"
I'm rereading that this morning after encountering "Opinion: Sorry, Internet: Notre Dame is not being 'wreckovated.'" by art history professor Elizabeth Lev (at WaPo). She observes that the criticism is about what will be done with "the two dozen-plus side chapels" — what I called "those alcoves along the perimeter." Before the fire, they'd been "an ill-kept hodgepodge generally passed over by tourists."
In the new design, Lev explains, the side chapels will follow a chronological sequence beginning with Genesis and continuing through the resurrection and the story of the Church in the modern world. The visitor will follow a "catechetical path." That's less of a jumble, but chronological order isn't a special province of Disney. It's the most obvious order, used by lovers of order all over the world and through the grand course of time. There are other orders — alphabetical order, order of importance — but getting bent out of shape about chronological order is super silly.
There is also a plan to use 5 of the chapels to represent 5 continents, displaying Bible quotes in the languages of those places. That's a tad Epcot-y, but come on. Should the Church not flaunt its extension over the globe? If you think that, I must chide you, paraphrasing Jesus: Why do you look at the speck of political correctness in your brother’s mind and pay no attention to that plank of political correctness in your own?
On the other hand, if you are on the left and usually condemn colonialism and cultural appropriation, why don't you take over the condemnation of the renovation of the Notre Dame side chapels?
८ डिसेंबर, २०२१
Sunrise — 7:13, 7:40.
"I think the Commission's summary of the case against court-packing (pp. 79-84) includes much stronger arguments than its overview of the case for it (pp. 74-79)."
I'm reading "Biden Supreme Court Commission Issues Final Report/The report doesn't endorse court-packing or term limits. But it's generally more to the latter than the former. It also provides valuable overview of a wide range of SCOTUS-related issues" — by Ilya Somin (at Reason).
"Asked which party they would back if the election were today, 37% of Hispanic voters said they would support the Republican congressional candidate and 37% said they would favor the Democrat..."
"10-month review of Wisconsin’s 2020 elections conducted by a conservative Milwaukee law firm... found no evidence of the kind of fraud being alleged by allies of former President Donald Trump..."
"On Monday, a partially eaten full turkey at one abandoned site had two hypodermic needles sticking from it and needles were easy to spot elsewhere."
"Sins of the flesh are not the most serious" — pride and hatred are "the most serious."
The question came up [after]... the resignation of Michel Aupetit, the Archbishop of Paris, who offered to step down after the French magazine Le Point claimed that he had a consensual, intimate relationship with a woman, which emerged when he sent an incriminating email to his secretary by mistake....
Aupetit denies the accusation, but the Pope said: "It was a failing on his part, a failing against the sixth commandment, but not a total one" — not "total" because there were only — according to the accusation — "small caresses and massages."
The Archbishop was, of course, not married, so was it really correct to cite the Sixth Commandment, "You shall not commit adultery"? The London Times raises this question, but doesn't talk about whether the secretary was married. You're participating in adultery if the other person is married to someone else, unless you're trying to weaseling out of coverage — looking for loopholes — which has got to be some kind of sin in itself.
But I'll leave it to the Pope to define sins for Catholics. Maybe to break the priestly vow of celibacy falls within the sin of adultery.
"We’re an employer too, the state of Michigan is... I know if that [vaccine] mandate happens, we’re going to lose state employees."
"Like most kids, Henry spent the 2020-2021 school year learning from home...."
७ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"The priciest Advent calendar on the market is probably the new $150,000 Tiffany version, a four-foot-tall cabinet with a reproduction of the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting... on the front and 24 gifts inside."
"I had told myself that I’d never try heroin because it sounded too perfect. It’s like 'warm, buttery love,' a friend told me."
"When I did yield to temptation... [i]t was relief from my dread and anxiety, and a soothing sense that I was safe, nurtured and unconditionally loved.... Opioids mimic the neurotransmitters that are responsible for making social connection comforting — tying parent to child, lover to beloved. The brain also makes its own 'endogenous' opioids.... Today... what is now known as the 'brain opioid theory of social attachment' is widely accepted.... [O]pioid systems have evolved in part to fuel the good feelings people get from spending time with friends and family, he explained. There are many factors that contribute to addiction, and isolation is often one of them.... A 2021 study found that over 60 percent of young American adults report that they are either frequently lonely or lonely nearly all the time.... Understanding the social nature of opioids and addiction should help policymakers better care for those who suffer from it.... Some need new friends...."
"A 73-year-old volunteer died on Saturday after she was repeatedly rammed by a sheep while working at a Massachusetts farm that uses animals in mental health therapy...."
"Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the G.O.P., a libertarianism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lifers..."
Congress drops the proposed requirement that women register for the draft.
One of the people with knowledge of the move said the provision was stripped as a trade-off so Republicans would accept reforms to the military justice system....
Calls to expand the draft beyond men have grown recently, particularly after the Pentagon opened all combat roles to women in 2015....
This article isn't very informative. I suspect that requiring women to register for the draft isn't popular, but only certain Republicans want to speak against it publicly. On an abstract level, it's about treating men and women equally, and only social conservatives want to say anything other than that.
No one is actually drafted these days. Registering for the draft is symbolism, so why not have the symbolism of everyone registering? But why have registration at all? The government knows where to find us if it ever gets in the mood to use us against our will.
Personal note: My mother was one of the first women to join the Women's Army Corp (which began in 1941). That was a choice. My father was drafted.
"The value of a woman’s Indiana home more than doubled between appraisals last year after she stripped it of all evidence that it was owned by a Black person and a White family friend stood in as the homeowner."
६ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"White privilege, he told his nearly all-White class, is 'a fact.' Hawn apologized after at least one parent objected. But a few months later..."
"I remember...."
I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and present it for discussion, not in the context of the book as a whole, but purely as a sentence. I like to read on a sentence level, and this book has the best sentences.
The sentence of the day was "I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."
I believe what took me back to that post was the "gloved hands." They reached out to me from the past! What happened was that within the course of 2 days — November 18, 2021 to November 20, 2021 — I'd written 2 posts that had the tag "gloves." One was about Facebook's virtual reality device, a haptic glove, and the other was about a legal decision in India that meant groping while wearing surgical gloves was not a crime.
I love tags that are specific and concrete but that link up disparate things, and "gloves" is a great example. This is one of the true joys of blogging. Most things on that level of specificity do not get a tag. Excited about "gloves," the tag, I fell into a reading spree and ended up in that "Gatsby" post.
What I wrote back then about that sentence:
"In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness..."
"There are four main goals for TikTok’s algorithm: 用户价值, 用户价值 (长期), 作者价值, and 平台价值, which the company translates as 'user value,' 'long-term user value,' 'creator value,' and 'platform value....'"
From "How TikTok Reads Your Mind/It’s the most successful video app in the world. Our columnist has obtained an internal company document that offers a new level of detail about how the algorithm works" by Ben Smith (NYT).
"David Perdue, the former U.S. senator from Georgia and ally of Donald Trump, plans to announce on Monday that he will run in a Republican primary..."
५ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"Crews of burglars publicly smashing their way into Los Angeles' most exclusive stores. Robbers following their victims, including..."
"A former co-worker of Chris Cuomo made a sexual misconduct allegation against the former CNN anchor..."
"A group of white supremacists stormed through downtown Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening, bearing American flags and mildly menacing plastic shields while marching to the beat of a snare drum..."
Oh, I get it. White gaiters. White gators would be a little scary, kind of a Moby Dick on land concept.A beautiful night at the Lincoln Memorial interrupted by demonstrators chanting “reclaim America.“ The crowd gave them the finger and exchanged profanities. pic.twitter.com/Z2voculi9Z
— Andrea McCarren (@AndreaMcCarren) December 4, 2021
"Less well-known than jurisprudence is what the law professors Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres have termed 'demosprudence' — the idea that legal change does not flow exclusively from courts and other government actors, but..."
"The Michigan high school student accused of fatally shooting four classmates had numerous conversations with school counselors in the day and hours before the shooting..."
"The father plays absolutely no part in this. That is part of her rehabilitation. When she renounces her child for its own good, the unwed mother has learned a lot."
Because of the social pressures that shaped notions of “appropriate” pregnancy and “respectable” motherhood, the decades between World War II and Roe were dubbed the “baby scoop era.”...
I didn't remember ever seeing that term before and couldn't even understand it. What was "scooped"?
"I have 5 different colleagues who were in tight with him."
Steven Pinker discusses his impression of Jeffrey Epstein with Joe Rogan. pic.twitter.com/QwbFdw7k8i
— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) December 4, 2021