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To live freely in writing...
Writes Maya Chung, in "Go Ahead, Put Down That Book" (The Atlantic)(free-access link).
That links to "When Is It Okay to Not Finish a Book?/How to decide to put down a book—without all the angst" (also in The Atlantic, with a free-access link).
Before dropping a book, you need to figure out what’s motivating you to stop reading it.
Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, and these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children....
Stewart is getting points for bravery.Comedian John Stewart is now calling out the hypocrisy at the DNC. pic.twitter.com/zfzfltVmp3
— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) August 24, 2024
The DNC dragged us into court state after state.... It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw president Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden, then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose when they don't know who they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?
My father and my uncle were always conscious of America's image abroad because of our nation's role as the template for democracy, the role model for Democratic processes, and the leader of the Free World. Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon... well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates. Only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus....
How did the Democratic party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn't how the Democratic party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies when a US president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech. It's an attack on our most sacred right of free expression and that's the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest....
It's a bad move to trick people into staying tuned and then denying them what they thought they'd get, but I'm glad there was so little use of pop-culture celebrities. I was picturing one celeb after another, but I don't think they did that. I watched very little of the convention, but I got the impression that the Democrats went in the opposite direction and kept filling the stage with clusters of relatively ordinary people who exemplified one issue or another. That's good, though not enough for me to watch.
Haven't read anyone else's comments on Kamala speech. Here are mine:
High point: "out of their minds"
Other effective themes: Caring for one another, non-Dem outreach, Project 2025 attacks (however disingenuous); not a series of ethnic or interest group panders--represents broad American interest.
Low points: All that family stuff, all the furrow-browed pleading ( joy?), general blandness of text; oratorical Olestra.
Bottom line: Job of speech was to make her plausibly presidential. Mission not accomplished. I doubt this will hurt her campaign but a big missed opportunity. Hollywood trainers could not transform her (which is kind of reassuring).
ADDED: The "out of their minds" bit was this:
And get this. Get this. He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds. And one must ask — one must ask, why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? Well, we trust women. We trust women.
Language tip: It's better to say "They are out of their mind," singular, because each person only has one mind.
Tim Walz is under fire for aggressively pulling his son Gus Walz’s arm on stage at the Democratic National Convention.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 23, 2024
The incident was apparently filmed on the third day of the event (Wednesday), the same day Walz gave his speech.
Gus is 17-years-old and reportedly has a… pic.twitter.com/5yMWpgy8Ur
Tim Walz's son Gus is 17. We were discussing him yesterday in "Simply having a neurodivergent son is not enough reason for [Tim Walz] to be praised..."
This deceptive clip is going viral on right-wing media for supposedly showing Walz “abusing his son” by grabbing his hand & pulling him. In the 2nd clip, I show that he was pulling his son away from smashing his head into the teleprompter, which his daughter has to walk around. pic.twitter.com/EUE2AH5UdK
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 23, 2024
"I know what happened, and you're not supposed to do that. It's not supposed to be probably constitutional. She got no votes. He got 14 million votes. All of a sudden they're telling him to get out. or they threatened him. And he is an angry person."
Von breaks in to ask, "But who are 'they'?" and Trump responds:
"Well, I would say Schumer, Pelosi, and numerous other people — the heads of the Democrat Party, yeah — and they did, they threatened him violently, I think. And he didn't want to get out. Remember he said only God will get me out — right? Only God... Yeah, and what happened is they went to him, and they said — this was after the debate — now, if he didn't have the debate he would still be running...."
What violence is Trump talking about?
Haven't I looked into the word "violence" before? Yes, I did the OED routine back in 2019 when Elizabeth Warren introduced the term "traffic violence":
Back then, the issue was the lack of intentionality in car accidents. Pressuring Biden to drop out was completely intentional, so the issue here is whether "violently" connotes physically injuring him. I find it very hard to believe anyone threatened to physically injure him, but perhaps it's not so hard to believe that Trump thinks that or that Trump would lie and say that he thinks that.To what extent does "violence" mean that the damaging action was intentional? The first definition is, as expected, "The deliberate exercise of physical force..."
But then there's "Great strength or power of a natural force or physical action" — for example, a storm or an earthquake. There's no mind deliberating there (though maybe there's an implication of human will and the usage is metaphorical, such as when corny writers tell you the sea was "angry").
"Violence" is also "Great intensity or severity, esp. of something destructive or undesirable. Example: " Mrs. Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home..for a rest." (That's Aldous Huxley.)
Similarly, there's "Vehemence or intensity of emotion, behaviour, or language; extreme fervour; passion." Example, from Shakespeare, "Marke me, with what violence she first lou'd the Moore." But now we've got the human mind in play again. I don't think what's being called "traffic violence" is any intensity in the traffic, just accidents, by people who didn't mean to do that (if we set aside the very tiny proportion of car damage done by an evildoer deliberately running somebody down).
"Violence" is also used to refer to restrictions imposed on nature, as in "He was obliged to attend near a Quarter of an Hour, though with great Violence to his natural Impetuosity, before he was suffered to speak" (Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones" (1749)).
And then there's the "Improper treatment or use of a word or text; misinterpretation; misapplication; alteration of meaning or intention." Again, from "Tom Jones": "A Passion which might, without any great Violence to the Word, be called Love."
"He healed our sick and put the rest of us back to work. And he strengthened our alliances, for peace and security. He stood up for Ukraine. He's trying desperately to get a ceasefire in the Middle East. And then he did something that's really hard for a politician to do. He voluntarily gave up political power. And George Washington knew that. And he did it. And he set the standard for us serving 2 terms before it was mandatory. It helped his legacy. And it will enhance Joe Biden's legacy. And it's a stark contrast to what goes on in the other party. So I want to thank him — for his courage, compassion, his class, his service, his sacrifice. Joe Biden, thank you. And he kept the faith, and he's infected a lot of the rest of us. Now let's cut to the chase. I am too old to gild the lily. Two days ago I turned 78. The oldest man in my family of 4 generations. And the only personal vanity I want to assert is I'm still younger than Donald Trump...."
Take this on faith from me: I won’t tremble, at the last moments; I’m prepared. I don’t think at all about the entire day ahead. Praise and emulate that man who does not disdain to die, though it’s pleasant to live; what virtue is there in leaving by being thrown out? Yet here too is a virtue: I’m being thrown out, but let me take my leave nonetheless. The wise man is never thrown out, for to be thrown out is to be expelled from a place that you leave unwillingly; the wise man does nothing unwillingly; he flees from necessity, since he desires that which it will force upon him. Farewell.
Lively is at the center of a lot of controversy right now after a chaotic press tour for her movie It Ends With Us and an alleged feud she had with her director and co-star Justin Baldoni. Now, people are digging into her past to find more reasons not to like her....
In the late 2000s the word "tranny" was thrown around with wild abandon, and even became a part of the catchphrase 'hot tranny mess' thanks to beloved designer Christian Siriano coining the phrase on Project Runway.... But does it mean that a celebrity saying it ten to fifteen years ago has little impact on who that celebrity is now as a person? Probably."
President Biden was attempting to reference this passage in the Dobbs opinion, which took abortion out of the realm of individual rights and put it in play in the political processes:Women aren't without what? pic.twitter.com/MZVeVK6DxN
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) August 20, 2024
Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so. In the last election in November 2020, women, who make up around 51.5 percent of the population of Mississippi, constituted 55.5 percent of the voters who cast ballots.
Biden was making a good point but garbled it badly. He went on to say:
Women are not without electoral power or political power — no kidding. Republicans found out the power of women in 2022, and Trump is going to find out the power of women in 2024.
A very well-written line that had a hard time traveling from Teleprompter to vocalization.
By the way, Biden has found out the power of women in 2024. Nancy... Kamala... they ousted him.
Inside the West London crematory... Beyoncé’s hit song "Heated"....
When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, she had more than 200 distinct policy proposals. Four years ago, Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a task force write a 110-page policy document for his White House bid.I made the link a free-access "gift" link so you can help me read this thing. I am irritated by the claims of "buzz" and "good feelings and warmth." We're being instructed on how to feel, but it seems to be about how other people feel, or so we are told.
Now, Vice President Kamala Harris does not have a policy page on her campaign website.
A last-minute campaign born of Mr. Biden’s depreciated political standing has so far been running mainly on Democratic good feelings and warmth toward Ms. Harris, drafting off legislation and proposed policies from the man she is hoping to succeed....
Prominent Democrats flooded the airwaves Sunday morning to defend Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic platform — but they were hesitant to specifically back a proposed price gouging ban that has raised eyebrows among Republicans and some economists.
“I think picking this one proposal of the many she’s put out misses the broader point, which is that Vice President Harris is continuing the work of President Biden in reducing costs faced by working Americans,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”...
As Vice President Kamala Harris’s new economic proposals dominated Sunday morning’s political shows, allies touted her ideas to address food and housing costs as beneficial to middle-class Americans, while critics — including Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice-presidential nominee — slammed her plan as unworkable and unrealistic.
Harris’s economic plan... includes a ban on price gouging for groceries and food....
Democrats on Sunday defended Harris’s economic proposals as targeting many Americans’ key needs, and they noted that her speech... represented the start of her policy pitch, with more detail to come....
Mr. Delon had denied paternity of a third son, Christian Aaron Päffgen — later known as Ari Boulogne — from a brief relationship with the pop star Nico. But Mr. Delon’s mother raised the boy as her grandson, giving him her surname from a remarriage. He died in 2023.
Alain Delon was in a lot of movies, but I don't think I've seen any of them... not even "Rocco and His Brothers" or "Is Paris Burning?" or "Le Samouraï." The Criterion Channel has quite a few of his movies streaming now.
Here's the Criterion teaser, which displays the extreme male beauty he had to offer: