November 23, 2024
"It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument."
Writes James Marriott, in "We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson review — rambling, hectoring and mad/The conservative polemicist’s new book is a bizarre study of the Bible featuring Jiminy Cricket, Harry Potter and Tinkerbell the porn fairy" (London Times).
Anyway, here, buy the book and send an Amazon commission my way: "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine."
"And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy?"
Writes Giles Coren — who is British — in "I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes" (London Times).
"[A]s a team of ideological rivals contesting for influence and favor, the Trump cabinet seems to be set up for a lot of internal conflict..."
"... Gabbard against the rest of the foreign policy team on whether to expose more national security secrets, the pro-choice and regulation-friendly Kennedy against abortion opponents and free-marketeers, the pro-union Chavez-Deremer against other economic appointees, Hegseth against the more cautious JD Vance, perhaps, on how far to go on behalf of Israel and against Iran.... But another way to look at these picks is that they’re designed to stoke conflict within the different agencies rather than within the cabinet... less the representation of different factions and more just disruption of all kinds.... [A] third interpretation of the Trump cabinet: That he’s assembling a 'team of podcasters'... a cabinet of 'communicators, not administrators,' who are picked for their celebrity and their experience as faces and voices — on cable news, on podcasts, on daytime television in the case of Mehmet Oz... or just in the general glare of celebrity that attends any scion of the Kennedy clan."
Writes Ross Douthat, in "Three Theories of the Trump Cabinet" (NYT).
"[D]octors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot."
"The next morning he arrives on set eating an egg sandwich and starts screaming that he’s not going to let me direct this film; I’m a nobody; he can cut me out at any moment."
November 22, 2024
"In private meetings at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Musk shows little familiarity with policy or the potential staff members being discussed, but..."
From "Elon Musk Gets a Crash Course in How Trumpworld Works/The world’s richest person, not known for his humility, is still learning the cutthroat courtier politics of Donald Trump’s inner circle — and his ultimate influence remains an open question" (NYT).
"It was unclear when the gas began flowing. Grayson rocked his head, shook and pulled against the gurney restraints."
From "Alabama man shook and gasped in final moments of nitrogen gas execution/Death of Carey Dale Grayson, 50, marks third time the southern US state has killed someone using controversial method" (The Guardian).
"Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself."
I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.
Presumably, Gessen has one relationship with each of the children, but it's possible that Gessen really does means to claim multiple relationships with each one. I suppose the grammar was a minor distraction on the way to proclaiming the superiority of a life lived without regrets.
Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways...
Puzzling commas again. And why choose a cutting metaphor here? Intentional prodding of our anxiety about surgery?
There's a lot more going on in the article, which was originally titled "The Secret Behind America's Moral Panic." What's the secret? And what are "Democrats... Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights"? This is the most useful passage:
"Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did."
Insane not to think about.
Just one of these could level an entire European city within 20 minutes of being launched. Insane to think about. https://t.co/9MkZBxp8DN
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 22, 2024
"I make a pretty sharp distinction between his medical ideas, which I think are really unsound and dangerous, and his critique of the food system, which has many elements I completely agree with."
Michael Pollan, perhaps the country’s best-known advocate of healthy eating and reforming the food system, caused a stir earlier this week when he posted an article on his X account headlined “They’re Lying About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” The article, published in the American Conservative, stopped short of endorsing Kennedy for the job of Health and Human Services secretary, but did endorse Kennedy’s critique of the food system and tried to add nuance to his skepticism of vaccines. Pollan posted a link to the story without comment, but the mere fact that he did so was interpreted as the latest sign of how the nomination of RFK Jr. has scrambled some partisan health policy divides.
The American Conservative article is by Spencer Neale, whose name does not appear in the Politico piece.
Pollan sounds nervous. He ends the interview with: "Are you going to publish this soon? Because I really want to stop this. I don’t want to get a phone call from RFK Jr. I want him to read this and not call."
Imagine being afraid of a call from Kennedy. What kind of people are leaning on Pollan?
Pollan originally liked Neale's article — unsurprising, because Neale mentions him with great favor:
November 21, 2024
Gaetz withdraws.
Former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) announced in a social media post Thursday that he was withdrawing his bid to be attorney general for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, saying his confirmation was “unfairly becoming a distraction.” “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle,” Gaetz said after meeting with senators on Wednesday. Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, is meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Thursday after police records revealed new details about a sexual assault allegation against him. Vice President-elect JD Vance is accompanying Hegseth.
"The DOGE Plan to Reform Government" — by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
We are entrepreneurs, not politicians.... We'll cut costs.... We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden's tenure.
"Most of the country shifted right in the 2024 presidential election...."
"House GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she will chair a new oversight subcommittee in the next Congress that will work with..."
Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue.
The obesity crisis has... brought its share of unintended consequences. Alarm bells have almost certainly nudged more people to eat healthier foods. They also helped spur the development of effective anti-obesity medications. But they have not touched off any meaningful effort to repair our food system, which most experts agree is the root cause of expanding waistlines.
"Obesity did not reach epidemic proportions because of changes in human nature or human willpower," says Tom Frieden, who served as C.D.C. director under the Obama administration and is now president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. "What changed is that our environment became far more conducive to weight gain."
What crisis vibes have managed to accomplish is to normalize fat-shaming, especially among doctors. Shame is a deeply ineffective way to resolve any health crisis, but it has proved especially counterproductive and cruel when it comes to weight loss.....
November 20, 2024
"Malpractice was committed by that campaign. They saw the ad, they knew it was being bought in heavy quantities. Where were they? What were they thinking?"
"She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim."
From "Becoming Cher Didn’t Come Easy/The first volume of her frank autobiography is a testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and the brazen path to stardom, with and without Sonny" (NYT).
"They’ve asked for these, and so I think it’s a good idea."
The Biden administration’s decision came despite widespread condemnation of mines by rights groups that cite their toll on civilians, which can stretch for years or decades after conflicts end as the locations of minefields are left unmarked or forgotten.... Russia has seeded mines throughout vast swaths of Ukraine since 2014 as front lines have swayed over forests, farm fields and villages. It has also set many so-called victim-activated booby traps, such as explosives rigged to detonate when a car door is opened, a category of weapon also prohibited in the mine ban treaty.
Why didn't the NYT publish this report before the election?
This would have been useful to voters. Too useful, I suspect. This issue seems to have been suppressed, papered over by Trump-is-a-racist rhetoric. "Hidden truth," indeed.
"America is not going to save Ukraine. Maybe we need Mr. Trump — brazen and unscrupulous — to finally say so out loud and act accordingly."
What methods has this 16-year-old girl used to measure the boys?
We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.
What made my skin burn most wasn’t that over 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. It was that this election didn’t seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me, whether their parents supported Mr. Trump or not. Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future....
The word "seem" doesn't cure all problems with assertions about what other people are thinking. The election didn't "seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me." Either you tried to measure them or you did not. If you had some sort of measuring device and applied it, you wouldn't need to use the word "seem."
If you're so worried about what the boys share with you — "didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair"/"don’t even share the same future" — why don't you share in the sense of speaking to each other? Why just look at them and decide they aren't enough like you to interact with?
Now that the election's over, MSM is free — and selfishly motivated — to present Trump in a favorable light.
The Mika/Morning Joe confabulation with Trump is just one manifestation of this phenomenon, which I'm seeing popping up wherever I look this morning. I need a tag to keep these things together so we can see the pattern. I was thinking of: Now we like him.
They don't like him that much. They're just taking a different tone and raising issues they'd have suppressed and they're not forcing the old template on everything.
"[Bike lanes] are often installed not to satisfy the barely measurable trickle of residents who pedal to work..."
From "The truth about bike lanes: They’re not about the bikes/D.C. is building miles of bike lanes, though fewer people are biking to work" (WaPo). That's an opinion column by Marc Fisher.
Trump isn't going to shut down the federal Department of Education.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education....
So it's just something to talk about, not actually do. So what is McMahon really going to try to do? She's the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.
[T]he America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding voucher programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
"Ozempic users... aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite..."
November 19, 2024
"Some folks might decry this practice as 'rent-free living.' However, if it maximizes Congress’s productivity..."
Writes Buddy Carter, a Republican representing Georgia’s 1st Congressional District, in "I sleep in my office. The rest of Congress should, too. The House would be more bipartisan if lawmakers made the Hill their home away from home" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the photographs).
"Ukraine’s military used American-made ballistic missiles on Tuesday to strike into Russia for the first time..."
From "Ukraine Fired U.S.-Made Missiles Into Russia for First Time, Officials Say/The attack came just days after President Biden gave Ukraine permission to use the weapons to strike targets inside Russia" (NYT).
"If some nonprofit needed a T-shirt design, Ed would always draw it. So we wrapped him up..."
From "A Visit to Planet Koren/A new exhibition celebrates the work of the late cartoonist Edward Koren" (The New Yorker).
"In the wake of Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the gender and sexuality scholar Asa Seresin picked up on a feeling in the air..."
Writes Marie Solis, in "Men? Maybe Not. The election made clear that America’s gender divide is stark. What’s a heterosexual woman to do?" (NYT).
"Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures..."
“People forget that, when they were writing, even to talk about women writers as having anything in common, as having a story of their own, as being connected in any way to each other, was incredibly controversial,” Katha Pollitt, the feminist author, told The Washington Post in 2013. “Now it seems completely obvious.”
"Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?"
Fixing the state borders — not the borders with Mexico and Canada — the state-on-state borders.
"For the unacquainted, Mr. Trump’s gyrations are a far cry from the complexities of the moonwalk, the Macarena or the Electric Slide."
Writes Jesse McKinley, in "Trump’s Signature Dance Move Finds Its Way to the Sports World/Jon Jones punctuated his U.F.C. win with the president-elect’s shimmy, and numerous N.F.L. players followed suit on Sunday" (NYT).
McKinley also wrote, recently:
"Mr. Trump beat his polling numbers by about 2.5 points nationally... and 2.1 points in the average swing state."
Writes Nate Silver, in "Don’t Blame Polling" (NYT).
Should we trust polls less? I’ll offer a brave and qualified no, but only because the shift in public sentiment about polls — from viewing them as oracular to seeing them as fake news — has probably overcorrected relative to reality....
Blaming and not trusting are 2 different things! But that's an issue with the headline writer. Silver is talking about trust, and he's only saying don't trust polls any less that you already do. I guess it's like the way I feel about reading the mainstream news, which I do every day. I don't consider it a complete waste of time. I regard it as biased and manipulative, but the alternatives are even worse. (And this blog is not an alternative to MSM. It feeds off MSM.)
November 18, 2024
"What is the insecurity, the anxiety, the deficit in our culture today that makes us worship figures like Leonardo?..."
"It is very unlike me to make a public statement about anything. I don’t think of myself as an actor-vist. I’m not that person."
"I don’t regret working with him. He gave me a great job opportunity and he was kind to me.” Hall added that she did not talk to Allen any more, “but I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this.” Her policy now, she said, “is to be an artist. I don’t think that makes me apathetic or not engaged. I just think it’s my job.”
Morning Joe restarts communications with Hitler Trump.
ADDED: "Defeated left-wing MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski reveal they met with Trump: ‘Time to do something different’" (NY Post).Morning Joe then: Donald Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 18, 2024
Morning Joe now: We met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to settle our differences. pic.twitter.com/UkfMt9ScuP
"Trump’s team is already thinking about how to craft executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from immigrants' rights groups..."
From "Trump’s immigration crackdown is expected to start on Day 1/The president-elect is expected to take a series of actions aimed at restricting immigration and ramping up deportations" (Politico).
"President Zelensky has been pushing for this moment for months. When it finally came, he was a little coy."
BBC reports.
"The French Revolution looms large in the philosophy of crowds because it was the first time that a 'mob' or what looked like one..."
Writes Adam Gopnik, in "What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest? From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study" (The New Yorker).
"And so it became this kind of self-licking ice cream cone where Gaetz would say something, Trump would love it, Gaetz would want to please him even more. And on and on and went."
"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."
Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).
"Few forces have transformed our planet as thoroughly as the introduction of invasive species...."
November 17, 2024
"Omnivore, Intermittent Faster, Reformed Twinkie Lover: the R.F.K. Jr. Diet/Mr. Kennedy... could wield considerable influence over the nation’s food supply. Here’s what we know about his own habits."
In his [2023] interview with [Lex] Fridman, Mr. Kennedy said he ate his first meal around noon and tried not to eat after 6 or 7 p.m.... It is nearly impossible to avoid processed food, a category that is most broadly defined as any food altered from its original state, including chopped vegetables.
Including chewing!
Some of his podcast interviews suggest that he is using “processed” as shorthand for “ultra-processed,” a term that more narrowly refers to industrially made foods containing hard-to-pronounce additives and ingredients....
Oh, well, then... never mind.
Bobby surrenders.
Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/LLzr5S9ugf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 17, 2024
"RFK Jr. Fact-Check Dispute: Social Media vs. New York Times."
This “fact check” from the NYT is wild. Why have fruits and veggies when you can have lab-made chemicals? 💁♂️#MakeAmericaHealthyAgain pic.twitter.com/L7ZyD0cuU4
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) November 17, 2024