४ मार्च, २०२३
"Twice in the past week, Republicans scored wins and divided Democrats by employing an arcane maneuver known as a resolution of disapproval..."
Writes Carl Hulse, in "Republicans Use Arcane Political Tactic to Thwart Democrats/The party has used resolutions of disapproval to confound President Biden and Democrats, forcing them to make tough decisions and debate issues they would prefer to avoid" (NYT).
"Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) felt that sense of tension, or agita as her Italian family might say, the moment she walked into the massive hotel — that burden..."
The bird news.
2. "Swedish power giant Vattenfall did a two-year, €3 million study of seabirds at an offshore wind farm off Scotland.... Not a single collision between a bird and a rotor blade was recorded... 'these birds are really good at avoiding the turbines'" (electrek).
3. "This year marks the 80th anniversary of the federal duck stamp. Since its enactment, this landmark initiative has generated well over $900 million to conserve nearly 8 million acres of wetlands all across the United States through the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund" (Democrat and Chronicle).
4. "Exploring how birds use contractions... A team of researchers at Kyoto University has found evidence that the wild passerine species Parus minor appears to merge two consecutive calls into a single vocal message... the cognitive capability known as core-Merge...." (phys.org).
"W. David Marx, the author of the book 'Status and Culture,' said that for luxury goods to function as status symbols, they need... to be used in a way that is not only to mark status."
U.S. News says the law schools withdrawing from its ranking system are in prep mode for the end of affirmative action.
“Some law deans are already exploring ways to sidestep any restrictive ruling by reducing their emphasis on test scores and grades — criteria used in our rankings,” Eric J. Gertler, the executive chairman and chief executive of U.S. News, wrote in an opinion essay on Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal....
It's a little hard to figure out the causality. If law schools can't directly take race into account, why would they make an adjustment that puts less emphasis on test scores and grades?
"Don’t hand that government more power under the guise of conservatism.... We shouldn’t look for larger-than-life personalities, but rather we should fight power in the rooms like this one."
Said Mike Pompeo, at CPAC, quoted in a WaPo column titled "Pompeo’s personal dig at Trump."
३ मार्च, २०२३
I haven't used my tag "the stupid party" in a while, but I'm thinking about it this morning...
"My conspiracy theory about eye cream is very arguably correct, but I had failed to consider a larger lesson of conspiracism: Truth isn’t the only thing that matters, and it might not even be that compelling.”
"Drag is a job. Drag is a legitimate artistic expression that brings people together, that entertains, that allows certain individuals to explore who they are..."
Said culture and gender studies professor Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, author of "Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance," quoted in "As Tennessee, others target drag shows, many wonder: Why?" (AP News).
I found that after struggling to read "Tennessee curbs trans treatment and drag for children" (BBC):
"For our £120, we got 45 minutes of brightly coloured splats [David] Hockney has done on his iPad..."
Writes Giles Coren in "Don’t splash out on Hockney’s splats and platitudes" (London Times).
"Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing. You feel it like a slow moving pressure system..."
२ मार्च, २०२३
The 3-year-old boy who won World Book Day.
Today is World Book day and this cute little boy dressed up has Prince Harry. He must be a fan, he also has great taste. Have a great day little Ellis. 🤗 pic.twitter.com/sF4JQUFOsL
— The Duchess (@h_desires) March 2, 2023
"A head teacher has apologised after replacing all the mirrors in a girls’ lavatory with motivational posters urging them to stop wearing make-up...."
O'Keefeless Project Veritas tries to roll out some hard-hitting undercover video, but it's just a run-of-the-mill jackass professor bad-mouthing conservative students.
"There’s still a lot of male parts. I don’t know if that would be fair" — fair to get rid of the gendered categories for movie awards.
Female nominees in particular expressed concern that the idea of a single prize would put men at a distinct advantage because of the richer and more numerous roles available to them....
Something I read in the news yesterday caused an old 3-word expression to come back to me: "modified limited hangout."
I looked it up in Wikipedia, where it's a subsection of the article "Limited hangout."
Here's the origin story:
"... Lightfoot may be a harbinger, or at least a warning, for the other big-city Black mayors..."
"A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks..."
Writes Adam Serwer, in "The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook/He just won’t allow it" (The Atlantic).
"In a statement, Sirhan’s attorney Angela Berry expressed concern that the board had been swayed by Newsom..."
"One agency, which the officials did not name, determined that it was 'unlikely' that a foreign actor was at fault, a slightly less emphatic finding..."
Some attempts to allay suspicion stimulate suspicion. I wonder what else does "not appreciably change the consensus." I remember when "consensus" used to feel reassuring.
The intelligence assessment also examined whether an adversary possessed a device capable of using energy to cause the reported symptoms. Of the seven agencies, five determined that it was “very unlikely,” while the other two said it was “unlikely.”
But what did cause the symptoms? Is every possible cause is unlikely? If so, the unlikely causes remain in play, because something caused them.
"The West continues its attempts to push everyone and everything."
१ मार्च, २०२३
Coaster found inside 1961 copy of "Tropic of Cancer."
Every American President, re-envisioned wearing a mullet.
Start here.
I'll single out Lincoln:16. Abraham Lincoln pic.twitter.com/djmXNi2BBa
— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 1, 2023
You'd think the answer to "AITA for wearing a wedding dress at a wedding?" would have to be yes...
... unless the bride herself is asking the question. But she's not, and the answer is quite clearly no.
Read the context, at r/AmItheAsshole, here.
"My parents, who were low-income and immigrants, instilled in me the very great importance of finding a concentration that would get me a job..."
Said a 2021 Harvard grad, quoted in "The End of the English Major/Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?" (The New Yorker).
"When California was drawing up its Constitution to join the Union, the state debated excluding Black people."
The last 2 paragraphs of "The ‘Dilbert’ Cartoonist and the Durability of White-Flight Thinking" by Charles Blow (in the NYT).
"Mr. DeRuvo initially decided to forgo shoes because of agonizing bunions, but he has stayed barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort."
"[O]n the morning of John Kennedy’s death in 1963 I was buying, at Ransohoff’s in San Francisco, a short silk dress in which to be married."
I'm reading that this morning after seeing "Linda Kasabian, Who Testified Against Charles Manson, Dies at 73/She had been a Manson family member and was along on the nights of the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, but she later became the prosecution’s lead witness" (NYT).
"Some might think that this pervasive progressivism would encourage conservative students to change their views."
Writes Adam Hoffman, a senior at Princeton, in "My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right" (NYT).
"Who are these dolls for? Little girls, but really, their mothers, who took their dolls to the American Girl 'hospital' for repairs, who lovingly brushed their hair..."
From a WaPo article about the new American Girl dolls — Isabel and Nicki — that supposedly represent the historical era known as 1999.
२८ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
"Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed deeply skeptical on Tuesday of the legality of the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt because of the coronavirus pandemic."
During the first of two arguments on the program, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. indicated that the administration had violated separation-of powers principles by acting without sufficiently explicit congressional authorization to undertake one of the most ambitious and expensive executive actions in the nation’s history.
"71% of Democratic Voters Think Biden Should Be 2024 Nominee."
"That's your candidate, Democrats. There's no getting around it. And it seems that America will spend the next 6 years in the arms of the gerontocracy. Snuggle up!"
I'd already factored in my belief that Trump will get the GOP nomination and go on to lose the election. I've decided I'm not getting cranked up about it. I have blogged the presidential campaigns for almost 2 decades, with day-by-day observations and insights throughout 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. What a hell of a thing to become so immersed in. This time will be different. And not because I'm tired of all the immersion. It's different because I can see it's different. We're in a ridiculous fix. But I'm not going to make it worse by struggling. The ancient grandfather will enfold us.
"Parents, we are not blaming you. Children and teens are learning to navigate the world free from supervision and often push the boundaries."
They cancelled Roseanne Barr for a lot less.
I don’t agree with everything Scott says, but Dilbert is legit funny & insightful.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2023
We should stop canceling comedy!
Quickly escalating on Twitter, an out-of-context quick escalation.
I tried to find the context, but didn't. Perhaps you can help.Someone got misgendered in the room and all hell broke loose pic.twitter.com/nAocDH5NDe
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 28, 2023
"Ephemeral Tattoos Were 'Made to Fade.' Some Have a Ways to Go."
२७ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
The female lawgiver.
The Washington Post Fact Checker says: "So far, Trump’s rollback of regulations can’t be blamed for Ohio train wreck."
We decided to examine every possible regulatory change made under Trump that could be related to the accident and assess whether it could have made an impact. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, said the Norfolk Southern crew received an alert about an overheated wheel bearing and was trying to slow the train before it came off the tracks. From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.
"Before Ozempic, she’d hole up in her hotel on film shoots, juice-cleansing to fit into her costumes. Now, she says..."
"People start to re-examine their lives. Let’s do something we can wrap our hands around."
Said Iso Rabins, who founded a company that teaches classes on how to forage for mushrooms (and other wild edibles), quoted in "Mushroom Boom: How to Plan a Foraging Adventure on the West Coast/Thanks to an unusually wet winter, mushroom hunters in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond will be greatly rewarded. Here’s a primer for first-timers" (NYT).
"Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams... in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip..."
Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.”...
In further tweets Sunday, Musk agreed with a tweet that said “Adams’ comments weren’t good” but there’s “an element of truth” to them, and suggested in a reply that media organizations promote a “false narrative” by giving more coverage to unarmed Black victims of police violence than they do to unarmed White victims of police violence....
Here's the Musk tweet, responding to someone who tweeted that the MSM had concluded that Adams is racist:
"[I]f we were able to more-or-less end teenage cigarette smoking over the last 20 years, it shouldn’t be out of the question to try to do the same with social-media use."
It’s hard enough being 14 or 15 without needing to panic about some embarrassing Instagram pic or discovering too late that something stupid or awful you wrote on Facebook or Twitter at 16 comes back to haunt you at 20.... We owe it to the kids to shield them from creating public records of their own indiscretions and idiocies. Life will come roaring at them soon enough. I say no social media till they’re old enough to vote, smoke and maybe even buy a drink. Full-frontal stupidity should be left to the grown-ups — like us!
You can see he thinks he's cute... just delightful. So blithely depriving teenagers of freedom of speech. Not even a word about freedom, just safety and protection, and no insight whatsoever into what you are teaching young people these days or awareness of what they will think of you and your repression of them and the values you crudely imposed.
Speaking of wearing blinders... in another part of this rambling but short conversation, they talk about the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter, and Stephens says, "Made air travel affordable to middle-class America for the first time," then barrels on to the next subject. I know this column is supposed to be jaunty, moving swiftly from one topic to the next, but it made me stop and think of the topic the good-thinkers always think about except when they don't: Global warming.
Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?
२६ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
"The E-Sports High School... was founded with the intention of feeding the growing global demand for professional gamers...."
"I have not worn a scarf for months — I don’t even carry it with me any more. Whether the government likes to admit it or not, the era of the forced hijab is over."
"Profoundly embarrassed" is putting it outrageously lightly.
ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject: "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says, as Spy Agencies Remain Split/The conclusion, which was made with 'low confidence,' was based on new intelligence. The information didn’t lead other agencies to change their assessments on the origins of the coronavirus."Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023
"Efforts by the ruling Communist Party to raise fertility rates — by permitting all couples to have two children in 2016, then three in 2021..."
"If you’re a fan – as I am – of Skinner’s standup, you’ll enjoy tracing how his poetry appreciation now dovetails with, and now diverges from, comedy."
Writes Brian Logan, in "From standup to stanzas: Frank Skinner's terrific guide to poetry/The comedian’s new podcast is bursting with enthusiasm for poems. If standup forces him to be funny, here he forces himself to be true" (The Guardian).
"Mrs. Space, 68… weighs just over 80 pounds, making it difficult for her to get warm."
"Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19."
Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19:
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 26, 2023
"The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in… https://t.co/3elrFv53GW pic.twitter.com/i0PfNrlcGd
I do the NYT crossword every day, and often it contains humor, but I had never, not once, until yesterday, laughed out loud.
It was just a small outburst. A "ha." But it was huge, because I've gotten so many clues over the years that went for humor and not one thing had burst through my steely exterior until yesterday.
I don't want to spoil the puzzle for you, and frankly, I don't want to have to explain the theme, which is a tad complicated. I'll just say: 88 Across. Finally, a crossword answer that made me laugh.
Do the puzzle yourself, or read Rex Parker's write up, here.
A little music to puzzle over:
"Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized..."
From "The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die/How the trolls on Kiwi Farms hounded people to commit suicide and created the online culture we have today" (Mother Jones).
That the "Day of Hate" did not happen is a news story that must be reported.
It's not nothing, because of the warnings. When I google "Day of Hate," I see no news of the actual day, when, apparently, nothing happened, but the warnings about it: