… you can talk about whatever you want.
१८ मार्च, २०२३
Pandemic nostalgia.
It can feel a little callous, or at the very least uncool, to admit to missing any part of those days. While so many millions of people were sheltering at home, millions more were risking their lives just going to work, mourning lost loved ones or struggling to even get internet access.
"Trump says 'illegal leaks' indicate he will be arrested Tuesday in N.Y. hush money probe."
Trump, in posts on his social media platform Truth Social, referenced reports that he could soon face possible criminal charges in New York relating to a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The 76-year-old presidential candidate has said he has no plans to drop out of the race even if he gets indicted. “Absolutely not,” he told reporters at a political event in early March, adding that getting charged “would probably enhance my numbers, but it’s a very bad thing for America.”
AND: Here's the NYT headline: "Trump Claims His Arrest Is Imminent and Calls for Protests, Echoing Jan. 6 His indictment by a Manhattan grand jury is expected, but its timing is unclear."
Mr. Trump made the declaration on his site, Truth Social, at 7:26. a.m. on Saturday in a post that ended with, “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
"So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?"
From "Florida bill would ban young girls from discussing periods in school" (WaPo).
The GOP lawmaker representing Ocala, Fla., later clarified that it “would not be the intent” of the bill to punish girls if they came to teachers with questions or concerns about their menstrual cycle, adding that he’d be “amenable” to amendments if they were to come up.
The bill ended up passing, 13-5, on Wednesday in a party-line vote....
“I thought it was pretty remarkable that the beginning of a little girl’s menstrual cycle was not contemplated as they drafted this bill,” [said state Rep. Ashley Gantt (D)].
🆘
— Florida Planned Parenthood Action (@PPactionFL) March 15, 2023
Watch Florida State Rep. @StanMcClain tell Rep. @Gantt4Florida that his bill prohibits young people from talking about their period….
WHAT?!?! pic.twitter.com/PoEgRm4sK0
"How do you win the Big Ten regular season by a significant distance, roll through the conference tournament and then come out and lose to a team ranked 275th..."
Judge Duncan's Wall Street Journal column: "My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School."
Stanford Law School’s website touts its “collegial culture” in which “collaboration and the open exchange of ideas are essential to life and learning.” Then there’s the culture I experienced when I visited Stanford last week....
When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people.” Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and fliers declaring “You should be ASHAMED,” with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror-movie font. This didn’t seem “collegial.” Walking to the building where I would deliver my talk, I could hear loud chanting a good 50 yards away, reminiscent of a tent revival in its intensity. Some 100 students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling. As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed: “We hope your daughters get raped!”
It was a big protest, generated by the real human beings the law school had assembled as its student body, not propaganda on the institution's website. It's real life, like the life experienced beyond the courthouse and beyond the law school, and it's not that polite. You know, it's also not polite to put "trans people" in quotation marks. It's a more polished form of incivility, but law students have long protested about the way law dresses up and glosses over injustice.
१७ मार्च, २०२३
"It goes back to a poem by Yeats," said the architect Eric Owen Moss...
Writes Oliver Wainwright, in "‘A gas-guzzling villain’s lair’: welcome to LA’s grotesque new high-rise/Inspired by Yeats, Wagner and French realist painting, the (W)rapper tower was meant to reawaken the city skyline. But is this monstrous erection just a monument to its designer’s ego?" (The Guardian)
"When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame started in 1983, you would have thought they might want to begin with Sister Rosetta..."
Writes Courtney Love, in "Why are women so marginalised by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?" (The Guardian).
What's the point of Pence if he's going to be crudely disrespectful?
Critics of "woke" politics should not use the word "woke" because "one should never rely on language one cannot hope to control or even fully explain."
Writes Thomas Chatterton Williams, in "You Can’t Define Woke/The word is not a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains invested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber" (The Atlantic).
I watched the viral clip of the conservative writer Bethany Mandel...
Kamala Harris talks to the Howard basketball team — which was expected to lose and did lose — as if they were little kids crying over losing and desperate for a self-esteem boost.
ADDED: In other college basketball news:"You made all us Bison so proud." ❤️@VP Kamala Harris delivered a postgame message to @HUMensBB 👏 #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/zwQFcwlWYX
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 16, 2023
March Madness 2023 fans rip TNT over viral crying Utah State cheerleader https://t.co/bwAcJm47Xa pic.twitter.com/KgRYIK4oKy
— New York Post (@nypost) March 17, 2023
"The via negativa...is about recognizing that when you don’t know the right way forward, you might succeed by focusing on what you know to be wrong...."
"[T]he behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies."
१६ मार्च, २०२३
"You know, when you’re a certain age, you use the words that you know from when you were a kid or you remember saying, and that’s what I did today, and I shouldn’t have."
"I can read Henry James in a dim room near the ocean on a beach day without feeling I’m missing life."
Now there's a super-power! What reading skills of yours compare to that?
The impressive power belongs to Mona Simpson, quoted in "Mona Simpson’s Fiancé Promised to Read ‘Middlemarch.’ He Never Did. Now He’s Her Ex. 'Certain men are constitutionally incapable of reading one of the greatest novels ever written,' says the author, whose new novel is 'Commitment'" (NYT).
Oh? Do you want to talk about that fiancé? That's what made me click through to the interview. I've read the article, and I've actually read "Middlemarch." Have you? Would you reject someone who's "incapable of reading" "Middlemarch"?
"Until about a decade ago, though, elections for state supreme courts were usually only the province of wonky election nerds and those in the legal profession."
From "How Did State Supreme Court Races Get So Expensive?/Wisconsin's is only the latest example" (FiveThirtyEight).
"The Full Audio Recording Of Judge Kyle Duncan At Stanford Law."
Presented by David Lat at Substack.
I've listened to the first 22 minutes (and intend to finish later). That is, I've relistened to the Tirien Steinbach intervention, and I've heard, for the first time, everything that went before, that is, what students did that required the intervention.
As I heard it — and much of it was difficult to hear — there was one student who did most of the speaking, and she seemed to be trying to control the event by addressing the judge, inviting him into a dialogue instead of delivering his prepared remarks. The rest of the crowd seems to be supporting her effort, adding to the pressure on the judge, as if he might decide that the best path through the evening was to throw the written speech aside and take on all comers.
I can imagine a character in a movie doing something like that, really looking the questioning student in the eye and saying words that truly connected.
The movie in my head looks something like this:
"Hey Siri, what do you think of ChatGPT"
"The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban, TikTok said on Wednesday...."
I would like to link to a list or timeline showing the Biden Administration's rejection and more recent acceptance of Trump ideas/policies. There seems to be a cluster of them lately. It's causing opinion pieces like "Be careful, Biden. You might be inviting a challenge from the left" (in yesterday's WaPo).
"When you turn the neck side to side, those vessels will rotate within the bone. If you turn your head quickly or rotate quickly..."
Said the neurosurgeon Betsy Grunch, quoted in "Is It Safe to Get Your Neck Manipulated by a Chiropractor? Most joint manipulations aren’t dangerous, but one rare complication can result in serious injury" (NYT).
१५ मार्च, २०२३
"Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations. Why is it dangerous?"
"[Judge Kyle] Duncan was treated like a politician, because that’s what he is..."
"Generally speaking, the best you can hope for in Horizon Worlds is the kind of aimless if well-intentioned chat you might get on a smoke break outside the work canteen."
"[Paula Marantz Cohen] is a self-professed 'talker,' the sort of person who lives for chatty checkout lines, leisurely coffee dates, vigorous college seminars, and spirited dinner parties..."
Writes Hua Hsu in "What Conversation Can Do for Us/Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?" (The New Yorker).
"Declaring this week that defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was not a vital interest for the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida cemented a Republican shift..."
"I think the focus on the [Stanford DEI dean Tirien] Steinbach is a mistake, for reasons I articulated..."
Writes William A. Jacobson in "The Stanford Law School Culture, Not The Diversity Dean, Is The Problem (but I repeat myself)/Something is wrong with the culture at Stanford Law School, and many (most) law schools. Let’s address that issue" (Legal Insurrection).
१४ मार्च, २०२३
"Spanning thousands of miles... the blob — a tangled, buoyant, mass of a type of seaweed called sargassum — is expected to come ashore in Florida..."
"'Horror.' That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily."
"In decades of covering campaigns, I’ve seen plenty of historical relics... But none of that prepared me for the morning last fall..."
So begins "My neighbor found Lincoln’s hair in his basement. I found a mystery" by Matt Bai (WaPo).
"A Russian fighter jet forced down a US Air Force drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday after damaging the propeller of the American MQ-9 Reaper drone..."
CNN reports.
"[S]ome conservatives, unable or unwilling to adopt the type of horny-bro aesthetic that embraces sports, sex and generally letting 'you do you'..."
My city is suing Hyundai and Kia for not making their cars harder to steal.
.@MadCityCouncil votes unanimously to move forward w/ lawsuit against Hyundai, Kia. "This is a very serious security flaw in their products. And they, for a long time, took no proactive steps to remediate and it cost us a lot of time and money." https://t.co/SoMVdeOYVH via @WKOW
— Mayor of Madison (@MayorOfMadison) March 14, 2023
"... they wanted to be a mom and care for a house"... She doesn't seem to notice that she left out anything about having a husband.
Did these college friends get what they wanted... or did some man horn in on their sweet dream? Well, of course, there would need to be a man to float the dream with a cash flow, but if all they want is to be a mom and care for a house, they could lose the man and keep the cash, the kids, and the house and still have everything they want. I hope PoliMath is misstating the mindset of the college women, but I have a problem with a dream life that uses another person as a means to an end. The husband could also be seeing his wife as a means to an end. Maybe all he wants are children and a well-kept household.I say this in all love and earnestness:
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 14, 2023
The happiest people I know are women who realized in college that they wanted to be a mom and care for a house
It's not always an easy thing, but the rewards are enormoushttps://t.co/lD9UvqA9mr
"In the middle of one night eight years ago, when my daughter was an infant, I was nursing her on our living-room sofa when a hulking blur loomed in the corner of my eye."
"[Jimmy Carter] asked me to do his eulogy – excuse me, I shouldn’t say that."
"You might read comments somewhere that I was, at some point, given 'permission' to deliver my remarks by the DEI Assistant Dean, Steinbach. Nonsense."
Said Judge Kyle Duncan, interviewed by Rod Dreher (at Substack).
"It was alliterative, it was descriptive, and I liked the contradiction – a flop that could be a success."
His technique, honed in college competition in Oregon, involved jumping backwards and arching his back over the bar, thereby reversing and ripping up decades of high-jump orthodoxy....
It's hard to remember what everyone else was doing and thus how weird that looked to people in 1968.
Would you want to become famous like that?
"One of the most enduring public images of Ms. Schroeder is of her crying when she announced in 1987 that she would not run for president."
१३ मार्च, २०२३
"Changing a dysfunctional relationship will invariably require you to say hard things to a family member...."
"How to Get Behind the Scenes at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin?... The writer gets a room of her own at the architect’s former home in the Wisconsin hills. A weekend workshop offers ample time to explore the grounds."
Lady Gaga is here to help... but don't touch her!
Lady Gaga ran to help a photographer who fell at the #Oscars pic.twitter.com/czfGHvN29s
— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) March 13, 2023
I like the way she got all dressed and made up and coiffed for the red carpet, then took it all off to do her stage performance styled pretty much like the average person watching the show at home from the couch.
"The federal judge in a closely watched lawsuit that seeks to overturn federal approval of a widely used abortion pill has scheduled the first hearing in the case for this week..."
"We will slowly roll out to every individual news agency. They can come see the tapes as well. Let everyone see them to bring their own judgment."
On Sunday, McCarthy claimed he did not “give” the tapes to Carlson. “I didn’t give the tapes,” he said. “I allowed [him] to come see them, just like an exclusive with anybody else. My goal here is transparency.”
Well, you are failing. That doesn't feel transparent at all. And if everyone else could just do what Carlson had to go — where? — to "see," why didn't everyone else just do that? And how did Carlson produce an edited version if he was just "seeing" "tapes"? Something like this?:
"While the FDIC guarantees deposits up to $250,000, the overwhelming majority of SVB deposits exceeded that amount."
"The whole night, down to Rihanna’s eloquent performance of 'Lift Me Up' from 'Wakanda Forever,' felt well oiled but entirely preprogrammed because, of course, it was."
What?! Everyone seemed drunk? I might have watched if I'd known that.
Hey, WaPo, "well oiled" means drunk. If you don't mean literally that oil, the lubricant, was used, you have to get "machine" in there — something like The show worked like a well-oiled machine — if you want to say it functioned effectively.
I'm reading "It was a lovely, back-to-basics Oscar night. Sorry about that. At Sunday’s 95th Academy Awards, a focus on the winners, not the drama" (WaPo).Burning in a hopeless dreamHold me when you go to sleep
Keep me in the warmth of your love
When you depart, keep me safe
Safe and sound
But that nonsense did not win. This won:
१२ मार्च, २०२३
6:09 a.m. — Daylight Saving Time.
As long as we're talking about the president of Stanford University (see previous post)...
... let's read "This 18-Year-Old College Journalist Could Bring Down Stanford University’s President/Theo Baker recently became the youngest-ever recipient of the prestigious Polk Award" (BuzzFeed).
Baker and the Stanford Daily merited a “special award” for their series looking into allegations that scientific papers coauthored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a noted neuroscientist, contained manipulated imagery.
Did the Stanford president and the Stanford law school dean apologize for what the DEI dean said to calm the students who were shouting down Judge Kyle Duncan?
In an obvious reference to DEI dean Tirien Steinbach’s bizarre six-minute scolding of [Judge Kyle] Duncan, their letter observes that “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”
As you know, I defended Tirien Steinbach.
"How Rod Dreher's Blog Got a Little 'Too Weird' for The American Conservative."
Over the last 12 years, Dreher... has built a cult following with some of the most bizarre diatribes in opinion journalism. He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is “profoundly evil;” detailed the “formal” Catholic exorcism of a friend’s suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate's uncircumcised penis....