Althouse: Sunrise

July 8, 2023

Sunrise — 5:15.

26 comments:

rhhardin said...: Science

"Over the last two centuries we have discovered that atoms are not invisible entities but are composed of smaller particles"

Brian Schmidt; 7/8/23, 7:18 PM
Gerda Sprinchorn said...: Do the recent Supreme Court affirmative action rulings have any relevance to gender-based affirmative action? I assume they do not formally abolish gender-based affirmative action because they did not explicitly address that issue, but do these rulings perhaps undermine some of the legal bases or logic for gender-based affirmative action?; 7/8/23, 8:46 PM
AlanKH said...: I finally got around to reading The Great Gatsby, an unfortunate reading assignment from my high school days that was the subject of a few posts on this blog. I had forgotten most of the story by test time, and after the re-read I can understand why. Gatsby is short on events and long on descriptive narratives, which don't sink in the memory well coming from a story that the average teenage male can't relate to. After rereading the story, much of it is still a blur. I find the passages about the parties disorienting, like those dreams where I see people I can only halfway recognize doing and saying things I can only halfway comprehend. The main characters are useless rich people and an uninteresting couple from the figurative other side of the tracks. The narrator does not convey to me what guys find alluring about, well, any of the three main female characters - maybe that was intentional. The intersecting love triangles don't appeal to me, and even less to my teenage self. On the plus side, Fitzgerald gives both Gatsby and Nick Carroway personality; the narration comes across as normal conversation one would expect from someone with a William F. Buckley level of education.; 7/8/23, 9:15 PM
Caroline said...: @gerda sprinchorn : I certainly hope so!; 7/8/23, 9:31 PM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: YouTube Steve Lehto: when a fake case is too good to check, and winds up in front of the Supremes

Btw, there’s no such thing as a deep state.; 7/8/23, 10:20 PM
Gahrie said...: Phil Hellmuth busted out of the WSOP main event on day 2b with a 100,000 chip all in with 10, 9 suited against Rigby with A, 10.; 7/9/23, 12:25 AM
AlanKH said...: "Deep state" is a vague term that seems to conjure different images among different people. I think that some imagine a vast shadow hierarchy like in X-Files, when in reality far less organization is required to pull off the known government abuses such as the willful fraud behind the FISA court application re Carter Page, the alleged entrapment of Michael Flynn (backed up by various documents), or government collaboration with Twitter over moderation of its users' content. It would be a mistake to regard the Venn diagram for these shenanigans as a single circle - or on the other end of the spectrum, to deny that evidence of such is nonexistent.; 7/9/23, 2:09 AM
gadfly said...: Lem the misspeller said...

Btw, there’s no such thing as a deep state.

By any other name, politics is about power and nowadays, thanks to Trump, the Democratic Party is where the power of the "deep state" supposedly resides.

Those of us who used to hang on to every far-right reference uttered by Rush Limbaugh quickly adopted Angelo Codevilla's name for the rich and powerful. Professor Codevilla called them "The Ruling Class."; 7/9/23, 2:36 AM
Gahrie said...: Btw, there’s no such thing as a deep state.

Lois Lerner and Mark Felt could not be reached for an answer.; 7/9/23, 5:02 AM
Humperdink said...: Our rural county in NW PA has been on edge for the last few days because a county jail inmate escaped using the "old bed sheet" trick. That is: scaling down a wall using bed sheets tied together. The escape is all on video, but apparently out of sight of the jail guards. A group of inmates gathered together in the gym at 10:41 PM (huh???) and then the inmate went to the exercise yard at 11:20PM and escaped.

He is wanted for the following: murder, rape, arson and kidnapping. A few months ago while on the FBI's most wanted list, he kidnapped a local couple and fled to South Carolina where he released them. The kidnapped gentleman happened to be my forester. The bad guy was caught in South Carolina and returned to PA where he just escaped.

Living in the woods, it is good to have a German Shepherd who has been trained.

https://www.erienewsnow.com/story/49169036/what-we-know-about-michael-burham-escape-manhunt; 7/9/23, 5:21 AM
wendybar said...: The left are selling us out to China. Proof?? Yellen bowing like the fool Obama before her.

They disgust me. I am offended. Can we cancel them now??

https://nypost.com/2023/07/08/us-treasury-secretary-janet-yellen-commits-embarrassing-bow-during-beijing-visit/; 7/9/23, 6:25 AM
Dave Begley said...: In MPLS on Saturday night for a concert. On Nicolett Mall there is a statue of Mary Taylor Moore. At 9 pm, there was a shirtless and homeless guy asleep on the bench ten feet from the statue. Dayton’s is closed. A guy walking in front of me casually lit up a joint.

But the concert was great.

Another thing, both restaurants had a 5% surcharge for health insurance.; 7/9/23, 6:33 AM
gilbar said...: Last year, the Biden admin said that cluster munitions were ILLEGAL
Here is Jen Psaki in 2022 saying that using cluster bombs is a war crime
now, in 2023, resident Biden is sending cluster munitions to the Ukrainians.. Because they've used up their existing store of cluster munitions. It's important to realize, that each and Every bad thing the democrats accuse others of doing.. is a bad thing that THEY Are doing.; 7/9/23, 6:43 AM
gilbar said...: I always thought, that the point of The Great Gatsby was..
You NEED to throw away your stupid childish desires (Daisy)
You NEED to realize just how AWESOME your life IS
You Really NEED to nail that that hot golfer while you can.

Gatsby had it ALL, and he threw it ALL away; for Daisy (who never cared a wit for him)
Gatsby COULD have nailed Jordan (the golfer lady), and the story would have ended happily for everyone;
except for Daisy, and her husband, and his mistress, and her husband, and Nick..
And WHO THE HELL CARED, about ANY of Those LOSERS?; 7/9/23, 6:54 AM
Mike of Snoqualmie said...: Joe is sending Ukraine cluster-munitions because they ponied up his latest payment. He'll do anything to keep a customer happy.; 7/9/23, 8:00 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "I finally got around to reading The Great Gatsby, an unfortunate reading assignment from my high school days that was the subject of a few posts on this blog. I had forgotten most of the story by test time, and after the re-read I can understand why. Gatsby is short on events and long on descriptive narratives, which don't sink in the memory well coming from a story that the average teenage male can't relate to. After rereading the story, much of it is still a blur. I find the passages about the parties disorienting, like those dreams where I see people I can only halfway recognize doing and saying things I can only halfway comprehend...."

See, that's where you need to stop yourself and change what you are doing. It is the that incomprehensibility that is your key to what is really valuable. You have to read the book more like you'd read a poem, really dwelling in the sentences and abandoning any plan of plunging forward.

This is why I had my Gatsby project, explain here, going at one sentence in isolation. Do not read to follow the plot or to understand the characters. From my old post at that link:

"Here's a way the book could be taught in a high school class. (But maybe they'd fire you!) Class, this is a book with some very weird sentences. Who can find one? Students read individual sentences out loud and the teacher cuts and pastes the sentences, so they are projected on the board. Encourage the students to pull out things that are the most outlandish and impossible to understand. Encourage laughter. Email the list of sentences to the class and have them reply to the email cutting out all but one sentence, the sentence they'd most like to talk about. Quickly read the email and pick a sentence that got a lot of attention. Puzzle through what it might mean with the students so that they appreciate the fun of getting wrapped up inside one sentence. Give them 20 minutes to write about one of the other sentences.

"Must they read the book? Tell them they can read the book if they want. But tell them they can go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary and the list of characters there. The idea is to spend time with particular sentences and to figure out why someone would write like that. Must they love F. Scott Fitzgerald? No!..."; 7/9/23, 8:05 AM
Mark said...: "Dayton’s is closed"

They went under in 2001 based on my memory. Not exactly some new shocking change.; 7/9/23, 8:26 AM
chickelit said...: rhhardin quoted:

"Over the last two centuries we have discovered that atoms are not invisible entities but are composed of smaller particles"

It goes together with the new Pledge of Allegiance:

"I pledge allegiance to the flags of the Untied States of America, against Republicans and for what they stand, one nation above God, invisible, with libertine justice for all."; 7/9/23, 9:45 AM
Eva Marie said...: I like the photo. Very Maxfield Parrish-y.; 7/9/23, 10:09 AM
Narr said...: Every time I think I might try The Great Gatsby, it gets discussed here and I decide to read something else.; 7/9/23, 10:58 AM
lonejustice said...: Blue Morning, Blue Day.; 7/9/23, 11:21 AM
Lem the artificially intelligent said...: Whenever I look back at whatever article Althouse links to looking back, I look for what Rh contributed.

That man is an Althousian treasure.; 7/9/23, 12:58 PM
Dr Weevil said...: gilbar (6:43am) just can't stop lying about cluster bombs. Did he even watch the video he linked to? It's 35 seconds long, and the reporter asks Psaki about reports that the Russians have been using cluster bombs "against civilians" in Ukraine. Psaki waffles about whether they have done that (yes, they have done that, and are still doing that) and says that it would be a war crime if they did use them on civilians, which of course it is.

The U.S. is not providing cluster bombs to Ukraine to use on civilians. They have three uses that will help the Ukrainian army defeat Russia more quickly and thus save Ukrainian lives: 1. clearing trenches full of Russian soldiers, 2. stopping human-wave attacks by Russian soldiers, and 3. clearing minefields laid by Russians. Those that fail to detonate, thus endangering civilians after the war, will be utterly trivial in number compared to the Russian mines and unexploded Russian missiles, bombs, and cluster bomblets already covering vast areas of Ukraine. I have read figures of ten million each for mines laid and other ordnance fired/dropped, and claims that 30-40% of Russian cluster bomblets are duds, as compared to 1-2% of US bomblets. If gilbar has better figures, he needs to offer them. Here's one small part of the large area where the city of Kharkiv piles up the remnants of Russian missiles fired at them every day for 500+ days now: link.

The Ukrainians have calculated that having and using cluster munitions will save far more Ukrainian lives than the number that will be lost in post-war accidents. They're already going to have to de-mine and de-bomb every inch of the eastern half of the country, and are already doing so. (What Ukrainian has an even higher approval rating than Zelenskyy or Zaluzhnyi or Budanov? Patron the mine-sniffing dog.) It's their country, and they are the only ones who should decide that.

One more thing: people whining about how "100 countries!" have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions somehow never mention that only 2 of the 10 largest countries in the world have signed it (#6 Nigeria and #10 Mexico).

If gilbar can't stop telling easily-refuted bald-faced lies about cluster bombs, as he did a few days ago (link) and now does here, he needs to shut up about them.; 7/9/23, 2:47 PM
chickelit said...: @dr weevil: I’m cynical about the reasons the US is so irreversibly engaged in the Ukraine. The notion that “we” must defend a corrupt regime personally enriching the Biden family can’t be meaningfully discussed let alone refuted.

Let Bog sort it out.; 7/9/23, 8:10 PM
Dr Weevil said...: chickelit (8:10pm):

Your statement has nothing to with what I wrote about gilbar's lies, but since you brought it up:

What is the evidence that Zelenskyy's government is "a corrupt regime" or that it is "personally enriching the Biden family"? Those words perfectly describe the previous Poroshenko government, but Zelenskyy ran against Poroshenko as an anti-corruption candidate and was elected by almost 3-1 in the runoff because the Ukrainian people were sick of being ruled by corrupt oligarchs and decided to elect a clean non-politician. (Very much what the US did in electing Trump 2 1/2 years before.) Even in the middle of a desperate war, Zelenskyy's prosecutors have prosecuted and removed the chairman (=Chief Justice, I think) of the Supreme Court, prosecuted the mayor of Odesa, and quite a few others holding important positions, all for the kind of corruption that we have plenty of in the U.S. (Haven't 4 of the last 5 or 6 governors of Illinois have gone to jail for similar corruption?) All the claims that Ukraine is selling weapons on the black market have turned out to be easily-refuted lies.

As for "enriching the Biden family", Hunter left the board of Burisma and left Ukraine the same month Zelenskyy came to power. He obviously thought the gravy train was over.; 7/9/23, 8:50 PM
Dave Begley said...: Mark

I was in Minneapolis in 2014 and before that, back in the 80s.; 7/9/23, 10:01 PM