८ जुलै, २०२३
Before blogging, there were proto-bloggers, and I have encountered another example: Rose Kennedy.
"Unlike a lot of self-help gurus, yogis and crackpot messiahs who rose to prominence in the early-1970s age of weird, Mr. Geller endured..."
"Zillow... does an analysis of paint colors. Its latest analysis said that a white kitchen, long de rigueur, could now hurt a house’s home price to the tune of $612..."
"I’ve worked with far lesser actors who would leave me to read with an assistant when they’re off-camera."
Said April Grace, about making the movie "Magnolia" with Tom Cruise, quoted in "Tom Cruise is here to help/For more than four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies." (WaPo).
It’s easy to be cynical about Cruise’s messianic energy, his zealotry on behalf of an art form that, when he practices it, looks less like a profession than a holy vocation (is it any coincidence that he once contemplated becoming a Franciscan priest?).
Why be "cynical" about "a holy vocation"?!
"Addiction haunts the recesses of this ancient port city, as people with gaunt, clumsy hands lift crack pipes to lips, syringes to veins."
So begins "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts" (WaPo).
"As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification..."
"... let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys...."
Writes Rebecca Traister, in "RFK Jr.’s Inside Job How a conspiracy-spewing literal Kennedy posing as a populist outsider jolted the Democratic Party" (NY Magazine).Now his brain trust appears to be the hyperonline, hard-right masculinity influencers who give him the approval he craves and encourage him to do things like post videos of himself shirtless, his chest and arms improbably pumped, doing nine janky push-ups.
Traister — who just revealed she knows her "empathy for the female candidates" is regarded by others as "probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification" — now openly displays her distaste for men who seem afflicted by overemotional attraction to the masculinity of a male candidate.
७ जुलै, २०२३
"I think the way she referred to a fellow member was probably not the way we expect our members to refer to other fellow, especially female, members."
"'There is a big secret about sex,' wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. 'Most people don’t like it.' The same might be said of translation..."
So begins "The Republic of Translation/Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris" by Anahid Nersessian in The New York Review of Books.
"Legacy students are just a tiny proportion of the pool of privileged kids who are rich in symbolic, social and cultural capital."
Writes Shamus Khan — a Princeton sociology professor, author of "Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School" — in "Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You Think They Do" (NYT).
Ron Johnson said that word that can get you in so much trouble: "purity."
"Patrick Logue, master dog trainer... said it is a possibility that the animal acted out of fear of the holiday fireworks."
I have one big threshold question about Threads, Zuckerberg's alternative to Twitter.
Currently you can access Threads only via the iOS or Android apps. There is no desktop version at this stage, and Meta could not say when it might make one available.
Bad. Prohibitively bad.
६ जुलै, २०२३
This new Politico poll puts the prosecution of Donald Trump in perspective.
"I admit with deepest embarrassment that it was only after what regrettably happened that I learned of the monument’s antiquity."
"Trump, who was at about 44% just before [the first] indictment, shot up above 50%. DeSantis, who had risen to 30%, fell to 25%."
Writes Byron York in "The shape of the GOP race so far" (Washington Examiner).
"We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with 'Good choice,' 'Excellent' or even 'Awesome.' "
"Plant medicines like psilocybin and ayahuasca... they are beautiful because they give you exactly what you need, even if you don’t know what it is you need."
Duron, a user of plant medicines, added that she didn’t know whether her boss would ever personally partake but knows the senator often “hears from his wealthy friends and supporters who micro-dose every day and have these experiences. And he is like, ‘These healing experiences shouldn’t be just for rich White people.’” Booker has co-sponsored legislation with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) similar to Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment to study the medical benefits of certain psychedelics....
It's a racial justice issue — that's good political packaging for Booker (and others). Don't say it so it might be heard as: Let's get more drugs to black people. It has to be: If some people feel completely free and don't worry at all about criminal law enforcement, then let's make it equal. Or: It's a matter that inherently belongs to the individual, who gets to decide which of the possibly beneficial drugs to take. I wouldn't recommend calling psilocybin and ayahuasca "these healing experiences." Leave it to the (supposed) experts in the FDA to determine which which drugs are effective cures for diseases and disorders. You sound anti-science when you say "these healing experiences." You might as well start recommending religions if you're going to talk like that.
Twitter banning Trump was "the right decision for the company, but the wrong decision for the world," said Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey said that he came of age as "a punk." He loved that "ethos" — "challenging the system." He didn't want to become an entrepreneur, but that's where he found himself, and he needed to learn how to grow the company. Learning that, he "learned what [he had] forgotten... about what [he] loved about the internet in the first place," which is that it was decentralized.Jack Dorsey, co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter is joining me on the show today and reveals what REALLY happened around Trump's infamous Twitter suspension @jack pic.twitter.com/2fwTty30an
— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) July 6, 2023
A delightfully fresh argument from a delightfully fresh Kennedy face.
To see the text of this rant and read about how this video is viral, go to "JFK grandson goes viral for anti-restaurant rant" (KTLA 5).Jack Schlossberg’s anti-restaurant tirade is the exact deranged himbo social cause JFK’s grandson should be doing. “My friends don’t like eating dinner. Most people in the world don’t spend their lives eating dinner.” Icon pic.twitter.com/XKk8JOX6Q5
— Russell (@RussellFalcon) July 4, 2023
"If reading opens up a world of imagination and possibility, then speaking and listening opens up a lifetime of empowerment — a chance for those who too often feel invisible in their own country, to be heard."
Labour will announce a review of the national curriculum that will seek to “weave oracy into lessons throughout school”....
Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association for School and College Leaders, said: “Oracy should be a core entitlement, and held in the same regard as reading and writing. Indeed, if students can articulate effectively in conversation, they are more likely to be assured readers and able to express themselves well in writing.”
Oracy. I don't remember seeing that word before, perfectly easy though it is to understand. The OED traces it back to 1965 where we see the author coining a set of words:
५ जुलै, २०२३
"Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught."
Said an unnamed official, quoted in "White House cocaine culprit unlikely to be found: Law enforcement official/Lines may have been snorted and crossed. But it’s possible we won’t know by whom" (Politico).
"But unlike the decision that ended Americans’ right to abortion, these most recent decisions are not as obviously unpopular with the American public."
"Gov. Tony Evers, a former public school educator, used his broad partial veto authority this week to sign into law a new state budget that increases funding for public schools for the next four centuries."
At one time, governors could veto individual words to create new words — known as the Vanna White veto — or strike words from two or more sentences to make new sentences, known as the Frankenstein veto. Voters eliminated governors' ability to make such changes in 1990 and 2008, respectively.
"Every time another conservative homeschool mom appeared in a dress I loved, it was [Son de Flor]...."
I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall of the meeting the marketing team had when they made this decision.... For Son de Flor, the target is women interested in timeless fashion and modesty. Overwhelmingly, that is going to translate to religious (read: conservative) women. While a partnership with an individual with over 150,000 Instagram followers might seem appealing on its face, Son de Flor doesn’t seem to understand that an individual is only an influencer for a brand if they actually influence potential customers in a positive way.
How hot was it?
"As far as I’m concerned, the crown jewel of unintentional ASMR is a 14-minute video that was uploaded seven years ago...."
"The breakthrough came... when hikers at Borderland State Park... heard Ms. Tetewsky screaming for help."
"Attacks are more common near bodies of water and when a person is accompanied by a pet...."
The woman... was found at the edge of a lagoon in Spanish Wells, a residential community in Hilton Head Island. She had left her home around 7 a.m. to walk her dogs, and relatives went looking for her when the dogs returned without her....
You may think your dog will protect you from dangers when you're out on a walk, but Butfiloski implies that the dog attracts the attack — in this case, from an alligator.
Just a couple days ago we were talking about an incident in which a dog running into the forest attracted a bear attack. There, the human being survived, and we learned that the woman intervened in the bear/dog fight. She punched the bear and got bitten. I asked "if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene?"
Who knows what happened in that Hilton Head incident, but if a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator were going after your dog, would you intervene?
"In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees... It was apparent to me that... Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others."
I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program....
The answer is in the official ideology of diversity, though I don't fault Professor McWhorter for failing to detect it on his own. The meaningful lesson in diversity is supposed to be that black people are individuals and not exemplars of a stereotype. By not being economically disadvantaged and by not choosing "race-related" major, these 2 grad students were teaching other students that black people are not all alike. (It's a very elementary lesson and thus scarcely the sort of "compelling" government interest needed to support race discrimination, but there it is.)
"About two months ago, after another stale Saturday night of binge-watching television at their Brooklyn home, Bill de Blasio and..."
"When the lockdown started... my husband and I decided to quarantine... at our house on Martha’s Vineyard.... A week later... my husband told me he wanted a divorce."
"Federal judge orders President Biden to stop censoring his critics including me."
From the article:Federal judge orders President Biden to stop censoring his critics including me. The decision mentions me on page 17. Happy Independence Day Everyone!https://t.co/nEE40XSjpC
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 4, 2023
४ जुलै, २०२३
"The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party."
"Adult friendship is touchy.... Everyone wants to be effortlessly surrounded by loved ones, so putting work into making friends can be embarrassing."
"Asian Americans, the group whom the suit was supposedly about, have been oddly absent from the conversations that have followed the ruling...."
"I'm not doing this. Enough is enough. Leave me alone. Period. I'm not doing this. Fine me if you want. I don't care. Catch the car thieves and check-washers first."
"And now, we are all thinking about the kitten. Wish I hadn't read this"/"I stopped reading a quarter of the way in"/"Wish I had."
The comments section is reviling this WaPo travel article: "They arrived to housesit amid 2 dogs and 16 cats. What could go wrong?"
"A month ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center declared Moms for Liberty an 'extremist group' devoted to spreading “messages of anti-inclusion and hate...."
३ जुलै, २०२३
"The mandate for audience recognition has pushed artists to take increasingly desperate measures—including scrounging up plotlines from popular snacks."
Wave your arms to show that you are human.
How far would you go to protect your dog? For two 60-somethings in Maine and Connecticut, doing so involved fighting a bear.... Wildlife authorities say that dog owners should walk their pets on a short leash that doesn’t retract, and that people should remove all sources of food, including bird feeders or bird seed, from outdoor spaces because they can attract bears.... According to the National Park Service, if you surprise a bear and it is not acting in a predatory way toward you, you should wave your arms to show the bear that you are human and then "slowly and calmly back away while avoiding direct eye contact."...
By the way, if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene? Keep your dog on a short leash and you won't face that test of dog love, like that 64-year-old lady who punched a bear in the nose.
ADDED: They're discussing the Maine incident at the subreddit Dogfree: "Woman has her dog off leash and it goes and harasses a bear in the woods. She then attacks the bear for chasing her dog and gets bitten. Of course now they are putting out traps for the bear."
Pay attention to what Joy Reid actually says here: It's not that she got into Harvard on lesser credentials!
She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn't have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn't come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn't changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn't have been enough if she were not black.Like me, @JoyAnnReid is a kid of immigrants from a former European colony who went to Harvard. Unlike me, she benefited from affirmative action because she counts as “black” & in her own words wouldn’t have gotten in without it. She complains that her peers looked at her… pic.twitter.com/zCMbXNHwEZ
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 2, 2023
"Clothes I dress my daughter in versus clothes her grandma dresses her in."
Lots of commenters over there (at TikTok) vote for "team grandma."
That video has over 5 million views, and the audio track is being used for other videos with their own variation on mother's clothes for daughter — utilitarian playclothes/tomboy style — and grandma's clothes — pink with frills.
#FranceHasFallen is trending on Twitter.
I don't want to embed anything I'm seeing here because I'm afraid of elevating something random, so go over there and scroll, but there is a good deal of calling people to nationalism and self-defense.
"The assassination was 60 years ago. What national security secrets could possibly be at risk? What are they hiding?"
It’s not about conspiracy – it is about transparency. In a midnight Friday night announcement the White House has delivered the bad news that President Biden will be maintaining secrecy indefinitely on some JFK assassination related records....
२ जुलै, २०२३
The narrative that Asian-American students were just used by white people who wanted to end affirmative action.
NPR airs a piece about how the Asians weren’t actually being discriminated against by Harvard etc and were just being used by white people who wanted to end Affirmative Action while interviewing exactly zero people who dissent from that view https://t.co/KnN3Ik77r2
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) July 2, 2023
"In April, President Biden told a group of children that he had 'six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.'"
5 out of 6 of the most popular comments over there are critical of President Biden:
"[H]is older brother 'messed up' his university entrance exam, became depressed and as a result has never had a job."
“As Rental Person, I have only the flimsiest connection with my clients,” he says in his memoir. “I am practically transparent. They have a story they have to tell and it’s my role to be there while they tell it. In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.”...
At best, Morimoto is an impassive confessor. He does not advise or commiserate or look people in the eye and tell them he understands. Usually, he says, the people telling him things don’t even want this of him. They just need him there, doing nothing, while they speak. Those who have never used him often think he is motivated by benevolence. He wants to be clear that he is not.
There's an excerpt from his book. An excerpt of the excerpt:
We’d been chatting for quite some time when, finally, in a very off-hand way, he started talking about his hidden past. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I was a teenager,” he said. “Oh yes?” I said, nodding as I normally do. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I… er… killed someone.”... Somehow it really took me aback to think that a person who cooked so well, who gave an overall impression of competence, could have such a dark past.
The incongruity had a real impact on me. In a way, I was very moved. Since then, I think I’ve looked at people in a different way, realizing that even the most ordinary, upright-looking people are not what they seem....
By the way, there was a blogger who heard there was an Aesop fable with a character who tells a secret to the reeds. The blogger searched the complete text of Aesop's fables for "reeds" and "secret" but found nothing. And the moral is:
"The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education."
"Ann! I saw video of naked bike riders down by the State Capitol bldg. True?"
4:38 — "That's brand new. I'm shocked as shit," says a black man, laughing. I ask him some questions about why he's shocked [by the Silent Majority Walk] and try to find out if he might perhaps actually be a Walker supporter himself.
5:54 — We hear a hubbub and I realize "These are the naked bike riders!" They ride by chanting "Less gas, more ass." I continue my discussion with the shocked-as-shit guy, who declares "That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"