Sunrise — 7:03.

"It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument."

"[Jordan] Peterson’s thesis... is that... 'archetypes' recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.' The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children’s film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia. Potential allegories lurk behind every tree and lamppost, waiting to be interpreted. Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about 'the intrinsic nature of being' in the most banal and improbable places.... And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology: 'Shoes signify class, occupation, purpose, role and destiny,' 'smoke is essence, gist or spirit,' the rainbow 'represents the ideally subdued community, which is the integration of the diversity of those who compose it.'..."

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).

Tell me about an "interpretative system" that is better than Jordan Peterson's "whim." He's one man, interpreting things. If my "job" is to "sit still" and take in his ideas, how is that different from reading any book? The author isn't here with me, the reader, to be "argued with." But I buy the Kindle version and excerpt any passage I want to pick apart, and I do my own writing here on this blog, which you are sitting still and reading. If you are "overtaken with apathy," you stop reading. If you want to argue, you go into the comments section. If it's just too much interpretation, coming at you endlessly, take a break. Nobody said you had to read this all at once. I heard that Elon Musk read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica when he was 9 years old. That's unusual, and it's not what the encyclopedia writers had in mind.

Anyway, here, buy the book and send an Amazon commission my way: "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine."

ADDED: The book review says that Peterson asserts that "the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.'" So — without mentioning Peterson or Cain — I asked Grok what those characters have in common. Answer:

"And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy?"

"Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything.... The ads stand for NOTHING.... They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s 'joy.' It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right. It’s happening to me even as I write this column!... I need to go and shout expletives into a pillow for a bit and then dig out my Maga hat."

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).

He's talking about this crazy commercial (that somehow I've avoided blogging about until now):

Why haven't I blogged about it? Not just because everyone was already talking about it. It's a bid for attention, so I don't want to give them what they want. But my depriving them of attention is, at this point, meaningless. Jaguar got the noise it wanted. 

"[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).

So there are 3 ways — at least 3 — that Trump's choices might work quite well... or quite badly. 

"[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."

"And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors....  The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent. The study showed more than just the chatbot’s superior performance. It unveiled doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one. And the study illustrated that while doctors are being exposed to the tools of artificial intelligence for their work, few know how to exploit the abilities of chatbots. As a result, they failed to take advantage of A.I. systems’ ability to solve complex diagnostic problems and offer explanations for their diagnoses...."

Writes Gina Kolata, in "A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness/A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories, even when those doctors were using a chatbot" (NYT).

It seems that there are systematic problems with the thought processes of doctors. I wonder how A.I. would have addressed the myriad problems of the covid pandemic — that is, A.I. without the interference of experts. Will studies like this result in doctors questioning their own thinking patterns?

"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."

"Oh yeah, he was a pig. He was an asshole.... He was not nice to the girls in the film and he was so f–king arrogant. I really, really disliked him."

Said Cher, about Peter Bogdanovich, the director of "Mask," quoted in "Cher blasts ‘arrogant’ director after he said she was most difficult actor to work with: 'He was a pig'" (NY Post).

Egg sandwich!

Don't get me started on the topic of egg sandwich.

I was going to discuss Cher's use of the semicolon, but the quote is not from Cher's book. It's from an interview originally published in The London Times, so it's a British approach to punctuation, about which I've got nothing to say.

Did Cher dump on Bogdanovich before he died? Even if she didn't, I can't help siding with her against a man who would eat an egg sandwich in front of people who don't have the option to walk away. And the screaming... Have you ever seen anyone scream with egg in their mouth?

Sunrise — 7:01.

"In private meetings at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Musk shows little familiarity with policy or the potential staff members being discussed, but..."

"... he returns repeatedly to a central point: What is required, he says, is 'radical reform' of government and 'reformers' who are capable of executing radical changes, according to two people briefed on the meetings, who insisted on anonymity to describe the internal conversations.... Mr. Musk has not been particularly aggressive about pushing his preferred names for administration roles.... Mr. Trump’s aides are divided on Mr. Musk’s role. Some see him as relatively harmless.... Others have chafed at his near-constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, especially given his lack of personal history with Mr. Trump. So it is notable that Mr. Musk has appeared concerned about the perception of his influence. On Wednesday, in response to a headline describing him as Mr. Trump’s 'closest confidant,' the tech billionaire went out of his way to praise 'the large number of loyal, good people at Mar-a-Lago who have worked for him for many years. To be clear, while I have offered my opinion on some cabinet candidates, many selections occur without my knowledge and decisions are 100% that of the President,' he wrote on X."

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).

Who's leaking?

"It was unclear when the gas began flowing. Grayson rocked his head, shook and pulled against the gurney restraints."

"He clenched his fist and appeared to struggle to try to gesture again. His sheet-wrapped legs lifted off the gurney into the air at 6.14pm.... He took a periodic series of more than a dozen gasping breaths for several minutes. He appeared to stop breathing at 6.21pm, and then the curtains to the viewing room were closed at 6.27pm, with Grayson pronounced dead at 6.33pm.... Alabama is the only state to use the method... pumping nitrogen through a mask and depriving someone of oxygen. It has been banned by veterinarians for use on most mammals.... John Hamm, Alabama corrections commissioner, said... he thought some of Grayson’s initial movements – shaking and gasping on the gurney – were 'all show' but maintained that other movements exhibited by Grayson and the two others executed by nitrogen gas were expected involuntary movements, including the breathing at the end."

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."

That's a very strangely written sentence... by M. Gessen, in "What Democrats Are Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights" (NYT). 

Context:

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."

"Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections. George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that."

Writes Peter Baker, in "The 'Landslide' That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory/The latest vote count shows that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century. But Mr. Trump claims a 'powerful mandate'" (NYT).

Saying it's a landslide is the same thing as saying it's not a landslide: propaganda.

It's just a word.

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."

Says Michael Pollan, quoted in "Michael Pollan Is Not Endorsing RFK Jr./A Q&A with the food reform advocate about the common ground he has with RFK Jr. — and why he does not want him to be HHS secretary" (Politico).

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:

Sunrise — 6:54, 6:55.

Gaetz withdraws.

WaPo reports.

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.

Read it in The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

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...."

"Trump won the suburbs.... Rural areas went even more for Trump.... Harris also underperformed in urban areas...."

NPR reports.

I see my county got bluer though.

First snow — this morning at 7:07.

"House GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she will chair a new oversight subcommittee in the next Congress that will work with..."

"... the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. House Oversight Chair James Comer 'intends to establish a new Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) for the 119th Congress,' a source familiar told CNN, confirming that Greene will chair the subcommittee.... The creation of the new subcommittee establishes a congressional arm to the broader effort by Trump and his allies to make significant cuts to the federal government. The subpanel will examine the salaries and status of members of the federal civil service and intergovernmental personnel among other oversight measures...."

CNN reports.

A quote from Greene: "Our subcommittee’s work will expose people who need to be FIRED. The bureaucrats who don’t do their job, fail audits like in the Pentagon, and don’t know where BILLIONS of dollars are going, will be getting a pink slip."

Speaking of bureaucrats, I'm seeing complaints about Trump's appointments that are faulting them for not being bureaucratic enough.

"If we're going to dance, let's all dance in the sunlight."

Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue.

I'm reading "We Tire Very Quickly of Being Told That Everything Is on Fire," by Jeneen Interlandi in the NYT:

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.....

Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue. He blames the food industry, and Trump's elevation of him to Secretary of Health and Human Services surely  represents a "meaningful effort to repair our food system." But why look at him when we have an Obama era former C.D.C. director to quote? And, more importantly, why give him any credit for getting something right when we are deeply into the agenda of portraying him as a dangerous crackpot.

Yes, I'm journalism-shaming, and I think it needs to be cruel to be productive.

Sunrise — 6:44.

"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?"

Said Ed Rendell, a former governor of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who "was so alarmed by the Trump attacks that he called top Harris campaign advisers, pleading for them to respond directly."

Quoted in "Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk About Transgender Rights/Kamala Harris left Donald J. Trump’s anti-transgender attack ads largely unanswered. Some Democrats call it political malpractice" (NYT).

Meanwhile, Republicans are not content to stand back and watch the Democrats screw up over the transgender issue. They want attention too: "Johnson pressured by GOP firebrands on trans bathroom access" (Axios)("House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is facing pressure from some of his most outspoken members to restrict transgender Rep-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) from using women's bathrooms at the Capitol... Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)... even went as far as to threaten to get into a 'physical altercation' with McBride").

"She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim."

"She was 16 when she met the 11-years-older, mid-divorce Salvatore Phillip 'Sonny' Bono, who lied to her about being a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, and she moved into his apartment in exchange for cooking and cleaning — not sex, at first."

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."

Said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, in a stunning feat of moral reasoning, quoted in "Biden Administration Approves Ukraine’s Use of Anti-Personnel Mines" (NYT). The U.S. did not merely approve the use of land mines. We are supplying them. 

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?

I'm reading "The Hidden Truth Linking the Broken Border to Your Online Shopping Cart/The incoming Trump administration promises an immigration crackdown. But for years, the on-demand economy has been fueled by unscrupulous staffing agencies exploiting migrant workers."

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."

Writes Megan K. Stack, in "Trump Can Speed Up the Inevitable in Ukraine" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Ukrainians would be hung out to dry, and Mr. Putin could end up attacking again or expanding his imperial designs to other neighbors. Mr. Trump should do it anyway."

What methods has this 16-year-old girl used to measure the boys?

You might wonder how a 16-year-old girl gets an op-ed column published in the NYT. I won't guess about her parentage, but her name is Naomi Beinart. The piece is titled "I’m 16. On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft." Excerpt:

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..."

"... but mainly to make car traffic worse enough that people will be discouraged from driving.... The city has built about 20 miles of bike lanes in the past five years, but despite that, the portion of D.C. residents who bike to work peaked in 2017 and has decreased each year since, falling from 5 percent to 3 percent.... Rodney Foxworth, a longtime civic activist who now leads an anti-bike lane group, says the city 'has a bias in favor of bike lanes no matter whether residents or businesses want them, and a lot of these lanes are being installed in Black, low-income communities. There is a nexus between bike lanes and gentrification.'... Adding bike lanes 'is meeting a relatively small demand' from cyclists in an older, largely African American area, [VJ Kapur, an advisory neighborhood commissioner,] concedes, 'but we are working to make the roadway safer. We are not scheming to induce developers to displace folks from the neighborhood. Change is occurring. Bike lanes potentially yield a visceral reaction because they are alien, visible implements going into a neighborhood that has looked very much the same for a long time.'"

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. 

Can I get an opinion from Pete Buttigieg? I remember this from back in 2022: "Pete Buttigieg launches $1B pilot to build racial equity in America's roads." He was inviting us to lean toward the interpretation that there is systemic racism in the design of road projects, so shouldn't we presume Rodney Foxworth is right about the motivation behind the installation of bike lanes?

Trump isn't going to shut down the federal Department of Education.

I'm reading "Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept./A friend and financial backer of Donald J. Trump’s, Ms. McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration during his first term, remained close to him during the campaign" (NYT):

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..."

"... but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. 'Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,' a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: 'And I love it.'... Now, 'my first place I hit when I get to the store is produce,' [one Wegovy user said]. “My favorite is Mount Rainier cherries and apples, peaches, pears.”... Major food companies are scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands — and figure out how to adjust.... Big Food is practiced at spotting perverse openings for new products...."

From "Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. As revolutionary new weight-loss drugs turn consumers off ultraprocessed foods, the industry is on the hunt for new products" (NYT Magazine).

Users of Wegovy and Ozempic are finding existing ultraprocessed foods disgusting, and they are currently drawn to fresh fruit, but Big Food can make new products for the new market — less sweet, more fruity, and much more fun and reliable and convenient. You know, fruit might need to ripen, it might bruise or rot. You've got to wash it and dry it and maybe peel it or core it, and it might drip on you or vary in flavor. It can be expensive, hard to carry around, not the right size for a snack, and in need of refrigeration. Big Food can compete for these newly created fruit lovers, and it is already hard at work on the task.

Sunrise — 6:50.

"Some folks might decry this practice as 'rent-free living.' However, if it maximizes Congress’s productivity..."

"... and camaraderie while respecting professional boundaries with staff, then it is a step worth taking."

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).

A commenter over there says: "More performative bullsh*t from the party that harbors felons, rapists and pedophiles. Spare me." Another commenter: "I agree this is performative behavior. The writer also doesn’t tell us that he is pocketing his taxpayer-funded cost-of-living reimbursements while staying in DC." 

"Ukraine’s military used American-made ballistic missiles on Tuesday to strike into Russia for the first time..."

"... just days after President Biden gave permission to do so in what amounted to a major shift of American policy. The pre-dawn attack struck an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of southwestern Russia.... The strike represented a demonstration of force for Ukraine as it tries to show Western allies that providing more powerful and sophisticated weapons will pay off — by degrading Russia’s forces and bolstering Ukraine’s prospects in the war..... The authorization came just months before the return to office of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has said he will seek a quick end to the war in Ukraine...."

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..."

"... in a quilt that a friend made of old T-shirts with Ed's drawings on them and gave him a green burial."

From "A Visit to Planet Koren/A new exhibition celebrates the work of the late cartoonist Edward Koren" (The New Yorker).

This is the best disposal of a human body I have ever seen.

"In the wake of Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the gender and sexuality scholar Asa Seresin picked up on a feeling in the air..."

"... and put a name to it: 'heteropessimism.' ... Mr. Seresin argued that heteropessimism was defined by 'performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.' By 'performative,' Mr. Seresin meant that though many women freely admitted that being attracted to men was at best a bummer and at worst a form of masochism, few acted on their beliefs. While expressing a sincere hopelessness, women’s disavowals seemed to be mostly gestural, like a sardonic Etsy mug."

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).

That's a long article, but I chose that excerpt because I have a tag "performative (the word)." Here's the post — from June 11, 2022 — where I created the tag. Interestingly, it was about a David Axelrod piece asking "Should Biden Run in 2024?" Axelrod wrote, "Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves... And part of the reason he doesn’t is performative." I said:

"Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures..."

"... which both their authors and their authors’ submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable. The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage."

From "The Madwoman in the Attic," quoted in "Sandra M. Gilbert, Co-Author of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ Dies at 87/A poet, scholar and literary critic, she turned a feminist lens on 19th-century writers like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, creating a feminist classic" (NYT).

“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?"

Said Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, quoted in "The Anti-Fluoride Movement Vaults Into the Mainstream/With the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, a formerly fringe opinion suddenly gets wide attention" (NYT)(free-access link).

Fixing the state borders — not the borders with Mexico and Canada — the state-on-state borders.

They ought to have more to do with mountains and rivers — and give the Upper Peninsula to Wisconsin:

"For the unacquainted, Mr. Trump’s gyrations are a far cry from the complexities of the moonwalk, the Macarena or the Electric Slide."

"Both simple and strangely hypnotic, Mr. Trump’s wiggle incorporates the kind of stiff swivel often employed by arrhythmic wedding guests or awkward, one-too-many conventioneers."

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).

It says there that McKinley is "a Styles reporter who covered the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump earlier this year, from opening statements to guilty verdicts."

McKinley has written a lot of other things too. Why focus on Trump's criminal trial? Maybe subtle humor: Not long ago it seemed that New York authorities had found a way to put Trump in prison, and now we're just wondering if it's okay for football players to dance the Trump dance.

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."

"Our final forecast had it so close to 50-50 that the outcome was literally more random than a coin flip. (Empirically, heads win 50.5 percent of the time.) But a Trump sweep of the swing states was our single most likely outcome, because polling errors tend to be correlated. It’s not great that the polls missed low on Mr. Trump for the third and final time, even in a year when survey companies adopted all sorts of novel strategies to avoid this exact outcome."

Writes Nate Silver, in "Don’t Blame Polling" (NYT).

I'm blaming polling. What's Silver's reason not to blame polling? First, Republicans are (supposedly) more suspicious and less likely to respond to polls. Pollsters using "weighting" to try to compensate. There's also "herding," which is massaging the numbers to make them more like other pollsters' numbers, but herding isn't a basis for not blaming polling, and Silver is certain that herding occurred in 2024. So what justifies that headline? I see this:

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.)

Sunrise — 6:31, 6:37, 6:46, 6:51.

"What is the insecurity, the anxiety, the deficit in our culture today that makes us worship figures like Leonardo?..."

"Leonardo sometimes seems like humanity’s miraculous pet unicorn, a pure and perfect, one-off instantiation of grace, intelligence, superhuman talent and bewildering wisdom. We feed and cosset his memory as if he is the spiritual father of all humanism, art and science, which he wasn’t. If Leonardo invented our world, how bad can that world be?... Near the end of the film, there is brief mention of 19th century rhapsodists... who helped launch Leonardo into the stratosphere of genius, 'lavishing Leonardo’s masterpieces with lyrical praise.' That’s what the film has also been doing for almost four hours. You can never say enough good about Leonardo, which is why it is an entirely uncontroversial cultural exercise to praise him. The work will continue until we actually understand the man, or no longer need his tacit benediction for the civilization we have inherited."

Philip Kennicott in "Ken Burns takes 4 hours to canonize Leonardo da Vinci. He needed only two.The celebrated documentarian turns his lens on the great Renaissance polymath, with mixed results" (WaPo).

Ken Burns things are always extra long. Why complain about this particular lengthiness? It's Burns's style to drag it way out. But Kennicott has a special problem here. It seems to have something to do with the idea that "our world" isn't so great, that "the civilization we have inherited" does not deserve reverence. I don't know if that's what Kennicott thinks or if he's just looking down on the people who feel "anxiety" and "insecurity" and want to be indulged with a vision of human glory. 

"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."

Said Rebecca Hall, in "Rebecca Hall: I regret apologising for working with Woody Allen/The British film star issued a statement after accusations were made against the director but now says ‘I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation’/‘I’ve had a wild, chaotic, beautiful life’: Rebecca Hall on race, regrets and learning to be herself" (The Guardian).

"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.

Morning Joe then: Donald Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler.

Morning Joe now: We met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to settle our differences. pic.twitter.com/UkfMt9ScuP

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 18, 2024

ADDED: "Defeated left-wing MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski reveal they met with Trump: ‘Time to do something different’" (NY Post).

"Trump’s team is already thinking about how to craft executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from immigrants' rights groups..."

"... all in hopes of avoiding an early defeat like the one his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations suffered. This time, Trump may have friendlier arbiters. These fights will be refereed by a federal judiciary that he transformed during his first term, including by appointing more than 200 federal judges himself. And at the very top — the ultimate decider of these questions — is the Supreme Court, to which he appointed three conservative justices...."

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."

"Strikes are not made with words, he said in his nightly address: 'Such things are not announced, missiles speak for themselves.' President Biden has given Ukraine permission to use long range missiles supplied by Washington to strike deep inside Russia."

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..."

"... was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was... very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest.... Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.... When you are 'taking democracy into your own hands,' what you have in your hands is not democracy, because democracy begins with the recognition that other people have hands, too....  Can we speak of the wisdom of crowds? Sometimes. The madness of mobs? Sometimes, too. Perhaps, within the winningly minute range of terms that Bobrycki captures, vulgus and populus and the rest, lies a truth that resonates through centuries, even millennia. We see the shifting varieties of human assembly and search to give them meaning, when the meaning lies exactly in the mutability.... A crowd can become a mob; a crowd can even become an army. To turn a crowd into a community? Ah, that’s the hard work."

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).

Bobrycki = Shane Bobrycki, author of "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages."

"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."

Said Robert Draper, in "Will Republicans Reject Gaetz?" this morning's episode of the NYT podcast The Daily.

"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).

The recipe refers to the candy as "Starlight," and they are still sold under that name. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the product, in case you're yearning to relive old-timey hard-candydom. And here's the Keebler chocolate crust. Now all you need is a can of evaporated milk and some packaged gelatin and you can figure out how the restaurant did it. Stivers makes a posher version of the antiquated treat. She makes the crust from scratch... if you consider Oreos scratch. 

"Few forces have transformed our planet as thoroughly as the introduction of invasive species...."

"Burmese pythons have eaten their way through the Everglades; Indo-Pacific lionfish have swum roughshod over Caribbean reefs; silver carp have taken over Midwestern rivers. Most non-native species spill into novel habitats incidentally, as in the case of quagga mussels that likely poured into the Great Lakes from the ballast water of container ships. But ecosystems have also been distorted on purpose. John Muir argued that stocking trout in the fishless lakes of the Sierra Nevada would make angling 'the means of drawing thousands of visitors into the mountains.'... Reginald Mungomery, an Australian entomologist... imported toxic South American cane toads to eat beetles that were devastating the country’s sugar crop. The toads didn’t control the beetles but poisoned native mammals and snakes.... Jon Sperling... theorized that because New York has few native lizards to displace, Italian wall lizards would harmlessly fill an unoccupied niche. He even claimed that predators would benefit from a new food source.... 'My first instinct is, Who are you to play God like that?' Earyn McGee, a herpetologist... said...."

From "The Lizard King of Long Island/Jon Sperling secretly spread a non-native species across the Northeast. 'It’s insane what this guy was doing,' a biologist said" (The New Yorker).

Sunrise — 6:48.

"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."

The NYT asks "What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eat?" Go down one post to see him feasting on McDonald's things alongside Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But let's check out this article:

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."

That's a big trend on X. Top post on the topic:

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

Oh! That is really quite insane.

Or is there some complexity in the phrase "But he was wrong" that I am missing?

Here's the original NYT article, "Kennedy’s Vow to Take On Big Food Could Alienate His New G.O.P. Allies/Processed foods are in the cross hairs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but battling major companies could collide with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s corporate-friendly goals" (and that's a free-access link, so you can scour it for a justification for that insane paragraph). No comments enabled over there. I wonder why. (I love social media!)

"Did you just do the weave?"/"It's my own version of the weave, I call it the wander."

"Your brain knows bullshit," said Joe Rogan.

"You could kind of bullshit someone for an hour, but... hour two and hour three.... that's when the real you comes out.... How much are you bullshitting the world?...[T]he narrative about Trump has always been that he's bullshitting everybody.... But that's him, that's the, the guy's right there. You could talk to him about everything and anything. He's right there.... Your brain knows bullshit...."

Context (from the full transcript at Podscribe, which I edited a bit for accuracy):