... you can talk about whatever you want.
May 6, 2023
"Koontz writes terrifying stories of murder and mayhem, yet is incapable of watching a gory movie. He hasn’t flown for 50 years..."
I had a sincere, but odd question, so I decided to ask ChatGPT.
In one second, it began writing what became — 3 seconds later — a lucid 5-part answer.
My question:Why wouldn't most people decide the best way to live is to be as inconspicuous as possible?
There could be several reasons why most people may not decide to live an inconspicuous life. Here are some possible explanations:
"One Twitter user dubbed the woman 'Insurrection Eva Braun'.... Someone called her 'fascist Matilda'..."
Here's the FBI tweet:
#FBIWFO released photos of this woman who allegedly participated in the U.S. Capitol riots on January 6, 2021. If you recognize her, call 1-800-225-5324 or visit https://t.co/t8G7LO4hxu to submit a tip. Refer to photo 537 in your tip. pic.twitter.com/cJ9oYfSxxu
— FBI Washington Field (@FBIWFO) April 27, 2023
Envisioning the absent Meghan.
The rare moment of pathos was provided by the Ascension Choir, a selection of gospel singers from England, belting “Alleluia (O Clap Your Hands)” and swaying. You could almost see Meghan, whose 2018 wedding to Harry also famously included gospel music, smiling victoriously as the sun began to rise in southern California. (Perhaps she’s even pajama-clad on Oprah’s sofa for a watch party?)
AND: Visions of those who are on the outs but were in there nonetheless (and what they wore):
Non-working royal Prince Andrew arrived at Westminster Abbey in full regalia while Prince Harry wore a plain suit. Follow live updates: https://t.co/jJaucoQ4tU pic.twitter.com/2JsMTAPtTy
— Yahoo News UK (@YahooNewsUK) May 6, 2023
We're just not existing at the same speed as the birds.
"Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said that genocidal leaders often use fear of a looming threat..."
From "Few Are Addressing One of Social Media’s Greatest Perils" by Julia Angwin (NYT).
"Trump claimed in a deposition that he couldn’t remember if he was seeing Marla Maples before his divorce. It would be quite a thing to forget."
At one point, [E. Jean] Carroll’s attorney asked Trump a basic factual question: “Isn’t it true that you were seeing Ms. Maples before you were divorced from Ivana Trump?”
Trump responded, amazingly, “I don’t know,” in the sworn deposition. “It was towards the end of the marriage. So I don’t know, really. It could be a lapover, but I don’t really know.”...
It was such bullshit he had to invent a word: "lapover."
Or... wait... Google says it is a word:
"Riders on the subway deserve to have a ride where they don’t feel threatened. And the mentally ill deserve to have the treatment and the protection..."
Said Gregory Umbach, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, quoted in "After homeless man choked on subway, NYC grapples with treatment of mentally ill" (WaPo).
The incident makes me think of Bernhard Goetz, and reading on, I see he's briefly mentioned in the article:One of the most famous incidents occurred in 1984, when Bernhard Goetz, a White man, shot four Black teenagers he said he believed were going to rob him. Goetz became a folk hero in a city dealing with sky-high crime. The media called him the “Subway Vigilante.”...
It would be good to say more about why he became a folk hero. It is, I think, evidence of how oppressed ordinary people felt about what they had been forced to endure on the subway — or felt forced to endure. Goetz represented the idea of somehow fighting for your right to be left alone in this public space.
But the Goetz case was different. The young men he shot were simply criminals, robbers, on the subway to find victims. Neely was, it seems, mentally ill and on the subway for shelter.
Are you watching the Coronation?
May 5, 2023
Does your floor have a soul?
Lucía Massucco, a 28-year-old artist, is no fan of the flooring. “It’s impossible to have a warm, cozy ambience with them,” said Ms. Massucco. “They have a very soul-deprived and clinical feeling.”....
Claire Lower, a 36-year-old editor at Lifehacker, a blog for life hacks, bought her Portland, Ore., home, which came with gray floors, in 2020. She called the floors “soulless” and “corporate neutral,” but noted that they were, at least, easy to clean....
Do you think people are unconsciously relating "soul" to "soil"? Do your intimate inanimate objects seem imbued with "soul"? Should they? What would cause that perception? It's perception only, an association with something that you think or would like to think is part of the human being. Is the perceived soullessness of your floors a sign that you feel as though you have lost — or never had — a soul? Is it that gray floors are a trend, so when you see your own gray floors, you're seeing yourself as a mere follower of crowds, a minuscule fiber caught up in a drifting dust bunny? But what can you do? You're only catching up to the decline of the gray floor trend. To fight the gray is to follow the crowd, you lost soul, you.
"Wow."
Via Metafilter, where many comment "Wow"... because Owen Wilson says "Wow."
"Gen Z-ers grew up with hypercautious parenting that exaggerates the dangers in life."
Writes David Brooks in "What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young" (NYT).
"I’m going back to New York. I was falsely accused by this woman, I have no idea who she is – it’s ridiculous."
"Putting any kind of public pressure on Ms. Feinstein has been criticized by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others as sexist."
Writes the NYT Editorial Board, calling on Dianne Feinstein to resign from the Senate.
I can't remember ever seeing the term "judicial activist" to refer to anyone other than a judge supposedly engaging in "judicial activism."
But here's The Washington Post using the term to refer to a political activist who concerns himself with the judiciary: "Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’/Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice."*
Who's Leonard Leo? The first sentence of the piece calls him "Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo," and the third paragraph calls him "a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges." He's not a judge, and he's not, at least not openly, a proponent of judicial activism.
In the 18-year archive of this blog, Leo's name has come up exactly once, back in 2006, when the NYT invited various legal writers to offer questions that could be asked of Samuel Alito at his confirmation hearing. I wrote:
Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, asks the one that Robert Bork gave his most damaging answer to: "why do you want to be on the Supreme Court?" (Bork said he thought it would be "an intellectual feast.")
"Satirizing the attention-seeking culture wrought by social media is almost as difficult as impersonating Donald Trump..."
Writes Carrie Battan, in "Desperate to Be Micro-Famous/The satirical film 'Sick of Myself; shows the warping effects of social media by way of a character who gives herself a hideous rash" (The New Yorker).
"[T]hree different sets of jurors have concluded that Jan. 6 was no spontaneous riot. It was planned, organized, incited..."
Writes Eugene Robinson in "The Proud Boys jury got it right on Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy" (WaPo).
May 4, 2023
Asked at deposition about whether it's "True with stars that they can grab women by the pussy," Trump said...
"I am obviously very happy with the outcome of the case. At the same time, I am unbelievably frustrated that baseless claims like this are allowed to go to court at all."
"As Elvis Costello pointed out back in 2021 when social media users accused Olivia Rodrigo of lifting elements of 'Pump It Up' for her song 'Brutal'..."
"This honestly feels like a new low: not being able to clearly condemn a public murder because the victim was of a social status some would deem ‘too low’ to care about."
The city medical examiner ruled Wednesday that Neely’s death was a homicide due to “compression of neck (chokehold).” Witnesses say that Neely was having a mental episode when another straphanger, identified as a 24-year-old Marine from Queens, took him down from behind and placed him in a chokehold for about 15 minutes. Still, Adams stressed that there are “so many unknowns at this time.”
"I talked with Nader about his role much later, and he basically said the outcome was Gore’s fault for being a bad candidate."
Writes Gail Collins in "Repulsed by Biden vs. Trump? Tough" (NYT).
It was bad enough to go through the 2020 campaign once and it's bad to go through any presidential campaign twice, but to go through the 2020 campaign twice is just such an outrage. Why aren't people kicking and screaming as we're dragged into this?!
Gail Collins belabors what, of course, I already knew was the answer to my question. Just put up with the disgusting reality that we've got 2 parties, they do their thing, and you obediently vote for the better of the 2, even though Ralph was right and they're both terrible.
CORRECTION: This post originally had Ruth Marcus for Gail Collins. I need to think about why I'd merged these 2 writers!
"So much of loving dogs is learning to tolerate repulsion. You live knowing that this beloved muzzle is..."
So says the NYT ethicist, John Hodgman, responding to a man whose wife "has taken to kissing the dogs" before she kisses him goodbye in the morning (including giving "one of the dogs 'raspberries' on his belly before expecting a goodbye kiss from me").
The ethicist is pretty unsympathetic to the man, though he doesn't get around to the obvious twist on "So much of loving dogs is learning to tolerate repulsion": So much of loving humans is learning to tolerate repulsion.
I wonder if the man tried talking to the wife about his feelings. Maybe they had a funny conversation about it and composed the letter to the ethicist together. But if he's suffering from disgust on his own, then coming up with the idea of writing the ethicist as a solution, then he really is in a terribly beta position vis a vis his wife. And she's consciously or subconsciously openly expressing it with that order of kissing. Does he even get raspberries on his belly?
By the way, it's totally legit to feel repelled by dogs and to decline to "learn to tolerate" it. If that's you and you want community, I recommend the subreddits r/Dogfree and r/TalesfromtheDogHouse.
"Courts have long recognized that reporters are entitled to engage in legal and ordinary news-gathering activities without fear of tort liability — as these actions are at the very core of protected first amendment activity,."
"If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, that looks like a really good deal today."
Said Bobby Kennedy, quoted at RCP. I've made small edits to the transcript based on the video that's also at that link. The transcript continues. Excerpts:
May 3, 2023
"I now feel happy and satisfied with my legs, but I’m hit by a wave of hate on the Internet. It hurts me a lot."
"A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid..."
Tucker Carlson texted a Fox News producer on January 7, 2021, quoted in "Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’ The discovery of the text message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Tucker Carlson’s firing" (NYT).
"Fiction matters more now, in a world increasingly deracinated by technology. A.I. will never pose a threat to the real thing..."
"Going home after a long day, I cannot help but observe that those of my colleagues who were protesting so vigorously that the Court’s judgment today will do it irreparable harm..."
Wrote Justice Scalia to the rest of the Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, quoted in a CNN article by Joan Biskupic, "New documents show how Sandra Day O’Connor helped George W. Bush win the 2000 election."
"The notoriety would no doubt rob this child of peaceful existence."
"Twelve people who had been living on the streets of Seattle are now snug in 12 tiny houses tucked into backyards throughout Washington’s largest city."
"He sent a message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players up here. We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry."
A state judge who previously served in the legislature as a Democrat rules against the Democrat who was ousted from the legislature by Republicans.
The lawmaker, Representative Zooey Zephyr, was ousted... after making impassioned comments against a ban on hormone treatments and surgical care for transgender minors....
Ms. Zephyr, a Democrat from Missoula who is transgender, filed the lawsuit on Monday.... “I’m determined to defend the right of the people to have their voices heard,” she posted on Twitter....
Judge Mike Menahan, who served in the House as a Democrat before being elected to the state’s First District Court a decade ago, said... he did not have the authority to intervene in the legislative dispute.
It's somewhat encouraging to see a judge decide against a political figure from the party he is/was associated with, but — to resist overpraise — this was probably an easy case.
"A base knowledge in history and civics is critical for students to become engaged, informed citizens, particularly amid misinformation on social media platforms..."
"The Alzheimer’s treatment donanemab, which is made by Eli Lilly, significantly slowed progression of the mind-robbing disease..."
May 2, 2023
Sunrise — 5:54, 6:08.
"Does President Biden have any reaction to CIA Director William Burns meeting with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014?"
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 2, 2023
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: "I'm just not gonna comment on that from here" pic.twitter.com/dd1pv8WOZP
"What [E. Jean] Carroll did not do that day in the lingerie department dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, where she says Mr. Trump pinned her against a wall..."
Writes Jessica Bennett in "Why Didn’t She Scream? And Other Questions Not to Ask a Rape Accuser" (NYT).
"The first in the procession to enter Westminster Abbey will be representatives from the Jewish, Sunni and Shiite Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Bahai and Zoroastrian communities..."
I'm reading "Latest coronation ‘update’ shows that the palace still doesn’t get it" (WaPo).
Unless I'm addressing my immediate family (dad mom), I can't ever seem to use anyone's name. Even when I'm talking to some of my friends..."
"Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. just wants you to know: The leaker didn’t come from the conservative wing of the court...."
Alito didn’t name names but freely assigned motive. “It was part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court,” he said. “And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside — as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”
Nice work, because this is the kind of inchoate smear that is impossible to defend against....
Ah! Can we have a general rule against inchoate smears?! They're impossible to defend against, so it's scurrilous to make them. Think hard before agreeing to the rule. How will you feel when it's used against you or someone you like? And what about the unintended side effects? If smears must be not be inchoate,* then sometimes, instead of blind items or silence, you'll get names.
For the annals of servitude.
Thank you, Gordon Lightfoot.
Joni Mitchell said: "There came a point when I heard a Dylan song called 'Positively Fourth Street' and I thought 'oh my God, you can write about anything in songs.' It was like a revelation to me."
May 1, 2023
"The 5,000-square-foot Insectarium... features a slew of digital exhibits and maps, along with artfully pinned butterflies and beetles, oversized models of bees and mosquitos..."
From "New $465M American Museum of Natural History center is crawling with bugs" (NY Post).
This post was written for good luck!
By the way, what's the stupidest argument you ever got into with a smart person? I won't name the person, but he objected to my categorization of butterflies as insects. I couldn't believe I had to argue about this. I remember, at what point, saying, "Well, what do you think they are? Birds?!"
"He still believed the [Google and OpenAI built] systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways..."
"The Supreme Court on Monday said it would take up a case that could do away with a decades-old precedent that tells judges to defer to federal agencies..."
"ChatGPT doesn’t just get things wrong at times, it can fabricate information. Names and dates. Medical explanations."
From "When A.I. Chatbots Hallucinate" (NYT).
"People threatened employees with guns, knives and sticks. They flung food, screamed, fought and tried to defecate on the floor..."
"This term, 'biological males,' is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians."
"The modern men’s perm is loud for a hairstyle so soft. On TikTok, the hashtag #menperm... has garnered more than 20.7 million views."
I'm reading "Why Are More Men Getting Perms? The modern male perm is softer, more natural and has taken off, thanks to K-pop and TikTok" (NYT).
"My heart is with this 8-year-old little boy. I don’t care if he was here legally. I don’t care if he was here illegally. He was in my county."
As survivors and the community came together at a vigil, hundreds of law enforcement officers were searching for Francisco Oropesa. The victims were all from Honduras, officials said. Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said that Mr. Oropesa and [Wilson] Garcia and his family were all in the United States illegally.
Also:
April 30, 2023
"Ambient music is the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence. It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms..."
Said Tim Hecker, quoted in "Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry. The artist’s phosphorescent electronic albums helped make way for the recent bloom of lifestyle playlists and background music. He’s turned on that trend to take on real life" (NYT).
A man from a place called Dildo has taken a photograph that turns everyone into a comedian.
"Reporters who profess to support women and denounce deadbeat dads have either ignored this story or belittled her mother, Lunden Roberts."
"President Biden, who has frustrated some reporters with his lack of press conferences, showed up with jokes (and some serious remarks) to the White House correspondents’ dinner."
The complicated woman and the complicated man.
I was deeply puzzled by "Here’s the real reason the Vikings left Greenland/A new study found some Viking settlements experienced up to 10.8 feet of sea level rise over four centuries."
"[A] man... had been suffering from schizophrenia for more than a decade. And everything had been tried for him..."
"To many women, Mr. Trump has come to represent male sexual entitlement. I heard this repeatedly as I researched my book about why accusers are often doubted."
One woman I spoke with, Marissa Ross, who has written about sexual assault and harassment in the wine industry, explained her quite typical reaction to the notorious “Access Hollywood” videotape that surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Mr. Trump brags: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” including “grab” women’s genitals. When she heard the tape, Ms. Ross told me, “I didn’t just hear Donald Trump. I heard every man that’s ever hurt me. It was those boys in high school, it was my ex-boyfriend, it was all those men. For me, and I imagine for many other survivors, it was not just hearing Trump. It was everyone that violated me.”...
This column was published just before Carroll began her testimony at trial, so Tuerkheimer is anticipating how Trump's lawyers will undermine her credibility:
"The siblings had stumbled on the spoken-word idea after Mr. Tempo had failed to memorize the lyrics in time for a rehearsal."
Here's the song — with the distinctive spoken-word section that begins at 1:11:
“Deep Purple” was recorded in 14 minutes, with Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who told them his partners "think it’s the worst record you’ve ever made." The siblings threatened to leave Atlantic and sign with Phil Spector, so it was released.
It hit #1 on the Billboard chart on November 16, 1963 and was #1 for only one week. The last day of that week John Kennedy was shot.
It's a song about memory — "In the mist of my memory, you wander on back to me" — and Nino Tempo couldn't remember the words. April Stevens had to remind him, her whispering vocal made the song memorable, and it is woven in our memory of the unforgettable tragedy.
In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you've gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover, we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams