११ मार्च, २०२३
Sunrise — 6:19.
"Out-of-Towners Head to 'Climate-Proof Duluth'/The former industrial town in Minnesota is coming to terms with its status as a refuge for people moving from across the country because of climate change."
I took global warming seriously in 1984 when I decided to move to Madison, Wisconsin. I thought within about 10 years, everyone would notice the South had become unlivable, and a massive population shift would occur. Well, 40 years have passed, and it's just beginning to happen, this migration to the Upper Midwest. But I bet most people in the South will just laugh at this idea.
From the article:
"Lauren Boebert will be a grandmother at 36. This is what conservatives want for us."
I want to stress that the only reason her growing family is at all newsworthy is because Boebert decided to turn a private affair into a big public statement about how the rest of us should live....
“There’s something special about rural conservative communities,” Boebert effused. “They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they’re the same, [in] rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas. Teen moms’ rates are higher in rural conservative areas, because they understand the preciousness of a life that it’s about to be born.”
Boebert's son, the father-to-be, is 17.
" In one of its most consequential climate decisions, the Biden administration is planning to greenlight an enormous $8 billion oil drilling project in the North Slope of Alaska...."
Willow would be the largest new oil development in the United States, expected to pump out 600 million barrels of crude over 30 years.... Environmental activists, who have labeled the project a “carbon bomb” have argued that the project would deepen America’s dependence on oil and gas....
Willow was initially approved by the Trump administration and the Biden administration later defended the approval in court. The project was then temporarily blocked by a judge who said that the prior administration’s environmental analysis was not sufficient....
A harrowing scene at Stanford Law School. ADDED: What the associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion did was just fine.
ADDED: I embedded this tweet without listening to much of the "nearly 10 minutes" of "lectur[ing]," because I had to run out to catch the sunrise, but I listened to the audio track very closely while I was out, and now I need to say that I disagree with the text of the tweet.Stanford Law students shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan while he was trying to speak.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 11, 2023
When he asked for an administrator to control the situation, Stanford’s “associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion” got up and lectured him for nearly 10 minutes pic.twitter.com/tjlUPOIMmQ
"He was upset because I wasn’t pushing the snow off the road far enough, and I was putting it all in his driveway, which I’m going to be honest with you, that’s what I do."
Said the snowplow truck driver, quoted in "New Hampshire lawmaker arrested for obstructing snowplow" (NY Post).
Musk contrasts Jacob Chansley with the man who attacked Dave Chappelle.
Why compare these particular 2 individuals? You're always going to be able to find someone who got an easy sentence to contrast with the person you think got a harsh sentence, so why pick that specific instance of what looks like leniency?Chansley got 4 years in prison for a non-violent, police-escorted tour!?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 10, 2023
Dave Chapelle was violently assaulted on stage by a guy with a knife. That guy got a $3000 fine & no prison time. https://t.co/qDRWxozD8B
१० मार्च, २०२३
"There’s absolutely no one on the radio that can do it like him. All of today’s hosts, including his replacements..."
That's the top-rated comment on the NY Post article "Rush Limbaugh’s wife sells his longtime Palm Beach home for record $155M."
"Greg [Lukianoff] hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then..."
"... this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: 'The Coddling of the American Mind.' Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was 'Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.' He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title. After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse...."
I'm reading "Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest/Evidence for Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis," by Jonathan Haidt.
Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
I made a new tag — "pretzels" — and applied it retroactively.
"Them crackers are salty and they made me thirsty."
९ मार्च, २०२३
"And Remember... It Always Happens First On Records."
"Fields once wide open to English majors — teaching, academia, publishing, the arts, nonprofits, the media — have collapsed or become less desirable."
Writes Pamela Paul in "How to Get Kids to Hate English" (NYT).
"Doctors caring for him have said Mr. Fetterman should limit his exposure to cable television, the internet and social media..."
"[T]he human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information..."
Write Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull in "The False Promise of ChatGPT" (NYT).
"I always thought when you got to be a certain age, you’d give anything to be younger. But I am so excited to be dead in, like, 20 years. Because there’s not much more of this I can take."
"While these couples had wedding parties that ignored gender norms, some may decide to not have wedding parties at all...."
"This process of fear, this Russian complex of being a small person, is a state of mind. We grew up with it and we’re always afraid. You’re a tiny person..."
Said one underground artist, quoted in "To see Russia’s secret antiwar art: Meet at a bus stop. At dark. Phones off." (WaPo).
"We were afraid if we had an exhibition the police would come and arrest us, so we decided to be underground. It’s like turning the lock back to the Soviet years."
I'd like to understand more about "this Russian complex of being a small person." Is it mainly the opposite of individualism?
This isn't something that is easy to google. Wikipedia has an article "Little Russian identity," which is something else. And I found many articles about the physical smallness of Vladimir Putin, such as "Vladimir Putin and the rise of the 'short kings'/Critics suggest Russian leader has 'Napoleon complex' but numerous world leaders match his stature" (The Week) and, from 2018, "Putin, a Little Man Still Trying to Prove His Bigness" (The New Yorker)("'He walks like someone who thinks, How do I walk like a cool guy?' a seasoned Russia expert told me...).
"We did not receive that video footage. We asked for it, and not just once or twice. Whether we asked for it or not is irrelevant because the government had an absolute, non-compromisible duty..."
Said Albert Watkins, who was the lawyer for Jason Chansley ("The QAnon Shaman"), "‘It’s Appalling’: QAnon Shaman’s Lawyer Says DOJ Lied, Withheld Videos Aired By Carlson" (Daily Wire)
८ मार्च, २०२३
"So I Went On Bill Maher And This Happened..."
"I asked what can be done to ensure the respectful passing of our baby, and what could protect me from a deadly infection, now that my body was unprotected and vulnerable."
Said Amanda Zurawski at a press conference yesterday, quoted in "'Sick and Twisted': Women Describe Losing Pregnancies, Nearly Dying Because of Texas Laws Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans" (Rolling Stone).
"Inside McCarthy’s conference, few if any members would say outright on Tuesday night that their speaker made a mistake by sharing the footage with Carlson..."
"4B is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi-, or 'no'..."
From "A World Without Men/The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely" (NY Magazine).
७ मार्च, २०२३
"With the rival's head stuck in its antlers, it’s as if he is wearing a trophy."
A researcher in the ecology of Hokkaido sika deer... said the two animals presumably butted heads during the autumn rutting season. The researcher speculated that they were unable to separate because of their interlocking horns and that the rival eventually died. As decay set in, the body rotted away but the head stayed on, and the survivor of the epic battle carried it through the winter....
There's a lesson here about fighting...
"I’m Eddie. There’s another name I’m going to add in as well, which is Suzy, which I wanted to be since I was 10. I’m going to be Suzy Eddie Izzard..."
"For much of the recent past, one assumption in addressing homelessness has been that everyone wants a solid roof."
From "Disband homeless camps? Some cities rethink them instead" (Christian Science Monitor).
How to be a stickler in the fuzzy aura.
I'm reading "Listening to ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ is exhausting work/A podcast promised clarity from Harry Potter author on how she feels about trans issues. But it falls to the audience to fact-check her" by Monica Hesse (WaPo).
Journalism is a business for sticklers. Reporters are discouraged from calling anyone transphobic, or homophobic, or racist, because doing so requires knowing what’s in their hearts when the only thing we can know with certainty is what comes out of their mouths. So what I can say is that what comes out of her mouth, or goes onto her Twitter account, has a fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric.
"The average child has its image shared on social media 1,300 times before the age of 13...."
"I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!"
Said Roald Dahl, quoted in "Roald Dahl promised to set a crocodile on anyone who changed his words" (London Times).
This is from a recorded conversation he had with the artist Francis Bacon in 1982.
"As well as changing cultural references such as 'Walkman,' the publisher removed words that it believed some readers might find offensive. A character is described as 'cheerful' rather than 'plump'..."
६ मार्च, २०२३
"Their marriage had ended up being more asymmetrical than they had expected."
"We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline."
"Michelle Pfeiffer and Jonathan Majors look like crap. Usually, they’re two of the most radiant, dermatologically exceptional people in the world."
"I want to write a story about whale research"/"That is boring"/"What if I insinuate misogyny in the headline?"/"What does that have to do with the research? And how would you manage that?"/"Oh... I have a plan."
"[O]n March 13, Adams plans to launch 'Dilbert Reborn' on his subscription site, Locals."
Fawning over Biden, the Washington Post inspires me to create a Mixed Metaphor award.
Biden’s twin-barreled economic offensive faces numerous hurdles but has sparked billions of dollars of private-sector investment and changed entrenched corporate practices.
The sentence appears in "Biden scraps reliance on market for faith in broader government role/The administration is pushing businesses to change with a carrot — and a stick."
Had you even realized that Biden had been relying "on market" and avoiding "broader government role"? That's just silly, and it's why I wrote "Fawning over Biden," but I'm interested in counting the metaphors in that one sentence.
Do you see the 6 that I see? Any others?
By the way "a carrot — and a stick" is also a metaphor, but I think the headline writer intended to refer to "carrot or stick," because "carrot and stick" is this:
"Whereas Republicans once talked openly about [Jan. 6th] being disqualifying for the former president, today it is little more than..."
"Besides Eric Heiden, the great American speedskater to whom Stolz is compared, Stolz’s performance recalled some of the folklore at the heart of speedskating here in the Netherlands."
⚡️️STOLZ SPEED ⚡️
— Team USA (@TeamUSA) March 3, 2023
18-year-old speedskater Jordan Stolz is officially the youngest single-distance world champion in history!
cc: @USSpeedskating pic.twitter.com/DnDJEvs2zp
५ मार्च, २०२३
"It was only later in the 19th century, with the Romantic cult of the author and the rise of academic textual scholarship, that the notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision began to take hold."
Writes Matthew Walther, the editor of a Catholic literary journal, in "The Truth About the ‘Censorship’ of Roald Dahl" (NYT).
"I only wanted to create a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault without being needlessly discredited or judged."
"He was always at the centre of high fashion and yet existed outside of it. Keith Richards, John Lennon, Jim Morrison — they all copied Dylan."
Said Lucas Hare, the co-host of the "Is It Rolling, Bob?" podcast, quoted in "When it comes to style, Bob Dylan still gets it right/Even in his eighties, the enigmatic performer always looks elegant" (Financial Times).