Althouse: At the Snow Car Café...

January 29, 2023

At the Snow Car Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(I took that photo at 6:04 this morning. We got a lot of snow, and it's quite cold, and it's going to be cold all week.)

40 comments:

madAsHell said...: I imagine Lake Mendota will miss your visit.; 1/29/23, 7:18 PM
rehajm said...: Maue reporting Friday Maimi will see 90F and Toronto -25F. That’s some delta…; 1/29/23, 7:21 PM
Beasts of England said...: Ilhan Omar has apologized for her ‘Benjamins’ tweet, saying she was unaware of the ‘Jews and money’ trope. And I believe her, as I doubt anyone in the Muslim community would say anything like that…; 1/29/23, 7:28 PM
Original Mike said...: Looks like in needs chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.

9.5" in our driveway this morning, beginning from Friday morning. New snow blower did great.; 1/29/23, 7:44 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Deer wins live to tell the tale bet... unexpectedly

Or...

That canceled Ted Talker was on to something about the non-physicality of consciousness; 1/29/23, 8:33 PM
FullMoon said...: I envy you. If we want to see snow that beautiful, we must travel for over an hour.; 1/29/23, 8:41 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Following up on that banned Ted Talk; what if what we say we want has a habit of coming true?

In the 70's the culture asked for women's empowerment, equal rights, feminism.

Around 30 years later kids born male want to be females. Very common for me to pick up rideshare of adolescent kids with makeup and nails done but obviously male.; 1/29/23, 8:44 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: All you need to know about the people pushing Wokeism is revealed in their persuasion methods.

(Unless you too could easily be dazzled by the SBF frauds) (Is that unfair? Sounds like a cheap shot)

Cancelling somebody has value added in scaring the bejesus out the friends in the sphere of the cancelled.

A Darkhorse clip: "Wavering at the threat of a friend’s cancellation."; 1/29/23, 9:06 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Rihanna can sing better than Beyoncé.

I think most people already know this. But it only occurred to me today.; 1/29/23, 9:09 PM
Rusty said...: FullMoon said...
"I envy you. If we want to see snow that beautiful, we must travel for over an hour."
We were told, here in our little corner of N. Illinois, that we would get 5 to 6 inches of beauty last night. We got maybe two. I still had to remove that beauty from my driveway and sidewalks. You are, of course, welcome to take as much beauty as you like home with you.; 1/29/23, 9:22 PM
Kevin Walsh said...: NYC "celebrates" an all time record of consecutive days without snow accumulation in the warmest January on record.; 1/29/23, 9:45 PM
Christopher said...: Until I achieve my dream of owning a house with a garage from which I can ride a little John Deere tractor with plow, I will have a hate-hate relationship with snow. Shoveling my cars out can be a speedy path to a heart attack in middle age.

I am winding down my evening with idle reading, and a YouTube livestream of La Grange, Ky., with a street who train tracks go through not just the town, but the middle of the street with parking on both sides. La Grange has a romantic mist at the moment.

My other favorite lately is Charlevoix, Michigan, whose livestream is an excellent vantage of a nicely lit drawbridge over an inlet, and a soothing blanket of snow on land. It is soothing because I don't have to shovel it.; 1/29/23, 10:27 PM
Mason G said...: "NYC "celebrates" an all time record of consecutive days without snow accumulation in the warmest January on record."

Climate change.; 1/29/23, 10:56 PM
traditionalguy said...: But, but the Globe is warming nearing extinction level. We must not believe our eyes.; 1/29/23, 11:28 PM
Original Mike said...: "You are, of course, welcome to take as much beauty as you like home with you."

I doesn't transport well.; 1/29/23, 11:35 PM
Lawnerd said...: -9 F this morning from the north woods of Wisconsin.
Snow? Yea, we got snow.; 1/30/23, 4:34 AM
tastid212 said...: What are the chances? The Saturday WSJ and the Sunday NYT crossword puzzles each had the same answer - "promposal" - an odd word I'd never come across before. I wonder if Rex was waxing wroth.; 1/30/23, 6:02 AM
Humperdink said...: US is ending Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Now Germany is also sending tanks to Ukraine, presumably through Poland. It will be like old times - German tanks rolling through Poland.; 1/30/23, 6:18 AM
Humperdink said...: General of the Army Douglas MacArthur pledged to return to the Philippines as he evacuated the islands early in World War II, he was reported to have said: “I will return.”

Novak Djokovic, deported from Australia in 2022, wins the Australian Open in 2023. No confirmation as whether he said "I will return ...... unvaxxed".; 1/30/23, 6:45 AM
wendybar said...: Once again...the GREAT Victor Davis Hanson tells it like it is.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/anarchy-american-style/; 1/30/23, 6:45 AM
tim in vermont said...: "climate change."

I spent a good part of my career designing software that did real-time trend analysis on firehose of incoming data, the idea being to detect trends that legitimately required attention, and ignore those which could be safely ignored. Lots of money depended on getting those things right. Unfortunately, it would take a proper foundation in statistics from the reader, and maybe several paragraphs to explain why attributing a snowless month to global warming is nonsense. Simply put though, we don't have records from NYC except for a small sliver of this interglacial warm period we are in, and it's not randomly distributed through the years. It's like if a purported nationwide poll only asked people who lived in a particular town claimed that it accurately represented the nation as a whole. For instance, a thousand years ago there is a record in Europe of eating Strawberries in January.

By nonsense, I mean if you meant "Climate Change (TM)", if you just meant that the climate varies, well that's as true as saying the sun is gonna rise in the morning.; 1/30/23, 6:47 AM
MadTownGuy said...: I had a trial NYT subscription that resulted in my getting emails. This one was of interest:

"Good morning. A surge of migrants taking buses northward has led Mayor Eric Adams to describe New York City as close to a “breaking point.”

Seeking a strategy
Many Americans see the flow of migrants crossing into the U.S. as primarily a border issue — and with good reason. As this newsletter has documented, the boundary between Mexico and the United States is where the vast majority of illegal border crossings occur and where many people come to seek asylum.

But as the country confronts a surge in migration, its effects are increasingly far-flung. Thousands of migrants are transported to Democratic-run cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington. Today’s newsletter will zero in on perhaps the biggest destination, New York City, to explain how the movement is testing the city’s pledge for compassion and scrambling politics thousands of miles from the southwestern border.

New York City has prided itself for centuries on being a haven for immigrants. Even today, nearly two in five city residents were born in other countries. However, the pace of the current wave of arrivals has little precedent. Since last spring, at least 42,000 migrants who say they are seeking asylum have arrived in the city in need of shelter and basic services.

The escalating emergency has prompted Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, to declare that New York is nearing “its breaking point.” He made the migrant situation a focus of his annual State of the City address last week. And he has increasingly gone where others in his party have balked, joining Republicans to call on the White House to step up its response.

How it started
The origins of the current migrant influx to New York can be traced to last summer, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began paying for buses northward for foreigners who had sought asylum at the border. The gambit had clear political motivations. Abbott is a sharp critic of President Biden’s immigration policies. He was seeking to saddle Democratic cities with some of the financial burden of caring for the migrants and to increase pressure on the president to crack down on illegal border crossings.

Democrats accused him of cynical partisanship and cruelly using migrants as political pawns. But Republican governors in Arizona and Florida soon followed suit. Border cities and nearby states run by Democrats have also helped thousands of migrants travel to major urban centers, though typically without invoking political overtones.

New York City has seen far more migrants arrive than other big Northern cities. In one recent week, more than 3,000 asylum seekers arrived in New York City alone. By comparison, Chicago has absorbed more than 5,000 asylum seekers total since August, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.

A strained support network
New York and its vast network of aid groups pride themselves on supporting migrants. The city also has a decades-old legal requirement to shelter anyone who asks. For now, city leaders are including migrants who recently entered the country.

As a result, the city is reporting a record number of people sleeping in its shelter network and has opened nearly 80 hotels and other relief centers with beds to migrants, including one at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.

In some cases, the city or nonprofit groups are also paying for translation services, legal support and meals; enrolling children in schools; and assisting parents who are awaiting court hearings in a system with a yearslong backlog. (My colleagues Karen Zraick, Brittany Kriegstein and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura have written about how the city and its newest arrivals are rushing to respond.)

The city says it has spent more than $300 million since last spring. For a rough comparison, the city spends about $400 million a year on public libraries. In a turbulent economy, the extra costs could force the city to trim some popular social services, though state and federal aid could lighten the burden."

More to come...; 1/30/23, 6:59 AM
MadTownGuy said...: The rest:

"The politics
When Texas first began sending migrants northward, Adams and Abbott got into a high-profile partisan fight about right and wrong. But at least part of the governor’s plan appears to be having its desired effect.

That is because Adams has begun using his sizable platform as mayor of the nation’s largest city — and his close alliance with Biden — to put public pressure on the White House. He recently visited the southwestern border himself and used a keynote speech this month at a mayors’ conference in Washington to call on the president to put in place a national strategy to quickly take the burden off cities.

“What’s the short-term plan?” he asked last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “If my house is burning, I don’t want to hear about fire prevention.”

Adams has cast more blame on Republicans for blocking progress on a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws than on his own party. But by speaking out, Adams is undermining the Biden administration’s attempt to defang the politics of a thorny policy issue, as my colleague Michael Shear, who covers the White House, explained to me.

“Their strategy at the White House is to cast the Republicans as outrageous, Trump-like and obsessed with border security,” he said. “It becomes harder to make that distinction if your own party is yelling at you.”"; 1/30/23, 7:00 AM
Danno said...: It is 67 and cloudy here in Panama City Beach, with an expected high of 73. Looks like a bike ride coming up.; 1/30/23, 7:08 AM
iowan2 said...: Until I achieve my dream of owning a house with a garage from which I can ride a little John Deere tractor with plow, I will have a hate-hate relationship with snow.

Christopher, I have achieved, that which you seek.

Seeing the picture, my first thought was, "well, at leas I have a garage". Silly, stupid head games I am trying to rid myself of, but its progress, no perfection. Comparing yourself to others is such a waste of emotional energy.

But I do not have the John Deere tractor with a plow. I pay a retired neighbor with a plow on his Pickup, $20 per snow to clear about 130 ft on 2 driveways. I get enough exercise clearing the decks, sidewalks, and 4 ft in front to the garage doors.

But the last two snows were the picture perfect kind of thick, fluffy, blanket like coverings.; 1/30/23, 7:43 AM
William50 said...: Godzilla meets bad egg; 1/30/23, 7:47 AM
tommyesq said...: 20 below here in Jackson Holw this morning.; 1/30/23, 8:00 AM
William50 said...: I see that you're going to get rid of your piano. Good luck with that. We couldn't even give ours away so I took it apart and cut it up and got rid of it by putting it in the trash over a 4 week period. I broke up the string harp with a sledge hammer. Used a drill to loosen the strings then just cut them off.; 1/30/23, 8:00 AM
planetgeo said...: Humperdink, that's why Novax Djokovic is not just the greatest tennis player ever, but also a true epic hero fighting the globalist elite trying to force him (and all of us) to submit to their will - or else! And apparently, the US Open has not yet given up trying to punish him as an example to the rest of us proles.

Go, Novax, go!; 1/30/23, 8:12 AM
madAsHell said...: Gavin Gruesome must be desperate. He has announced that people in Texas pay more taxes than Californians.

Last I checked, Texas didn’t collect any income taxes.; 1/30/23, 8:34 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "... I took it apart and cut it up and got rid of it by putting it in the trash over a 4 week period. I broke up the string harp with a sledge hammer. Used a drill to loosen the strings then just cut them off."

Meade suggested doing something like that. I see multiple reasons to prefer to pay a reputable piano dealer $360 to swiftly spirit the whole hulk out of the house.

1. It's a lot of work taking the thing about and lugging it into the street, consuming time and effort and possibly resulting in injury to yourself and damage to doorjambs and floors.

2. It would sit out there on the terrace for all to see and to find ugly and offensively wasteful.

3. It will burden the city -- and the taxpayers -- to need to pick up these pieces and carry them away.

4. The reputable piano dealer is experience in disposing of pianos and may find an actual home for the intact piano.

5. The piano will sit in its usual place, unmolested, until professionals come in and skillfully remove it in one piece. This is a company I have used 3 or 4 times in the past to move this piano from room to room, and I truest them to do it well.

6. I like supporting a good local business! They deserve to be paid for the work that they do. You don't have to use your own labor just because you (or your partner) can perform labor. We're doing a lot of painting this winter, putting labor into that, but if I had a local business I trusted to do this work well and without needing to spend too much time in our house, I would be glad to pay someone.

7. $360 may sound like a lot, especially if you believe your beautiful piano should be worth at least $5,000, but I choose to live in the real world, where prices are determined by supply and demand. Accept reality and make your time living in it as good as you can. Maybe you enjoyed sledgehammering a piano. I hope you did!; 1/30/23, 8:48 AM
Big Mike said...: It will be like old times - German tanks rolling through Poland.

@Humperdink, it goes deeper than that. German tanks rolling through Poland to kill Russian troops in Ukraine. Just dust off the plans for Operation Barbarossa from 82 years ago and change “Wehrmacht” to “Bundeswehr.”; 1/30/23, 8:49 AM
Iman said...: TT on Ice…; 1/30/23, 9:09 AM
wendybar said...: CNN’s Dana Bash actually called Adam Schiff a liar so OF COURSE this was their chyron

https://twitter.com/SteveKrak/status/1619766553339400192?

Of course, we ALL know what a great Republican Adam Shifty Schiff is.. ;); 1/30/23, 9:14 AM
Meade said...: Iman said...
TT on Ice…
1/30/23, 9:09 AM

Haha. Nice.
Also, Ice T…T.; 1/30/23, 9:40 AM
CStanley said...: Between the neutral painting and piano clearing, I assume the Althouse-Meades are moving house soon. I’m curious if a new location has been chosen.; 1/30/23, 11:00 AM
tim in vermont said...: This guy never says it, but the Ukraine war is lost. We don't have the artillery, and can't make it fast enough, our weapons systems we sent are not robust enough, we are all but out of heavy shells, and have no prospect of replenishing supplies in any kind of numbers. We sent tanks, but without artillery, it's going to be a game of Duck Hunt for the Russians. So we want to send F-16s as air support, but that will just be another game of Duck Hunt, and Ukraine will not be able to operate them anyway.

The defenses of Bakhmut are collapsing as I write this, but it will take time for the Russians to methodically take the city, as they abandoned their tactic of trading soldiers' lives for land, and now use their overwhelming advantage in artillery to sterilize areas before they move in.

https://youtu.be/pUgEkDsVr88

Best case for the US? This is all an elaborate trap to trick China into attacking Taiwan by feigning weakness, and then we whip out the real stuff. Most likely? Either Ukraine loses the war conventionally, or NATO joins in, which they won't because they have been bled white already, and feel vulnerable themselves, but say they do and manage to roll over Russian defenses and into Crimea, well then the war goes nuclear, and who knows what happens next? Do we sacrifice London and Washington in an attempt to exact revenge for the glowing ruins of Kiev by retaliating?

This war was stupid from the start, lost from the start, and the US bit off more than it could chew. Joe Biden is an idiot.; 1/30/23, 1:13 PM
Saint Croix said...: Louie CK is still funny; 1/30/23, 1:30 PM
tim in vermont said...: Russia also has a system that uses passive sensors, infrared and acoustic, to locate artillery for destruction. HIMARS won't launch if they detect counter battery radar in the vicinity, but these systems are undetectable unless sighted visually. Thing is that they will hear a drone coming a mile away. So they have been slowly destroying the HIMARS we sent, and we are running low on ammo anyway.

We were told that Russia was running out of artillery, which was projection. Russia was running out of missiles, projection.

If you listen to neutral observers, who are called "pro-Russian" because an accurate description of the situation paints Russia in control of this conflict, you hear calm, rational arguments, which point to news sources, the opinions of western experts, and appeal to logic, from the Ukrainian side, the reports are more like "The dastardly Putin with his unprovoked and genocidal attacks on the peaceful nation of Ukraine which never hurt anybody...." It's obvious bullshit propaganda. It took them two weeks to admit that they had lost Soladar, when the Russians were posting videos of their soldiers calmly strolling around the town in mid January.

We just got rushed into this war with no thought about how it would play out. When the Nazis invaded Holland, the military put up some resistance, and then did the math and figured that it was not worth it to destroy the whole country in a futile effort to delay the inevitable. This is how military decisions are made. It's not how decisions regarding Ukraine were made.; 1/30/23, 2:10 PM
gpm said...: It's been in the 40s and 50s in Boston the last couple of days. A few inches of unexpected snow a couple of weeks ago that quickly melted away. Forecast is for it to be a bit colder for the rest of the week, but Saturday is supposed to be the only really cold day (in the teens). Then back to the 40s. Knock wood, but a pretty mild winter so far.

I pass on heading to New Hampshire if there's any threat of serious snow. I just can't deal with the thought (and probably the activity) of digging a car out of the snow at this point. I went a couple of weeks ago when there was only supposed to be an inch of snow, which I could handle, but it turned out to be more like four or five. The last thirty miles or so the road hadn't been plowed and there was snow blowing all over the place. When I finally got there, the driveway wasn't plowed. I had to leave the car at the end of the driveway, so it never did get plowed and I had to walk a couple hundred feet through the snow to get to and from the house. A real, if modest, nightmare.

--gpm; 1/30/23, 4:02 PM