Sunrise — 7:13, 7:17, 7:25.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed."

"The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: 'I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.' He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. 'I don’t want it,' he says. 'I don’t want any of it.'"

From "Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Born into exceptional privilege, Belle Burden had it all: love, money, family. Then her marriage fell apart" (NYT).

Now, I clicked on that link because the headline bugged me. I keep seeing these sudden-collapse headlines. Articles are always offering to pinpoint the moment when things changed. There's one on the front page of The London Times right now: "The moment Landman’s teenage blonde changed American TV." It's annoying me. They think we're manipulable by our belief in the magic moment.

But I'm blogging because of the mattress, the "terrifically expensive mattress." I think I've blogged about that mattress: "[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...." I've made a new tag, "mattress," and added it retrospectively, which is a much bigger task than you might think. There are so many posts about someone known as "mattress girl" and I've repeatedly blogged about the line "it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine."

But really, if you were the stay-at-home wife to a rich man, would the purchase of a terrifically expensive mattress make you think he is more likely to stay or less likely to stay? He might want to cushion your fall, to pacify and lull you. What is the meaning of a mattress?

AND: Maybe the mattress was the tipping point. That mattress was exactly what made him see that the life they'd formed together was her vision of the good, and he couldn't relate to it at all. She wanted grand material things and he didn't want any of it. You don't need me, you have the mattress. 

Have you experienced this "Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right" or is the NYT pushing it at us to foment contempt for conservatives?

I'm reading "After Renee Good Killing, Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right/Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal" by Clyde McGrady.

I hadn't seen this term, and I read all sorts of things every day, so that makes me think this term isn't really a thing... though I've certainly noticed that people of the right are passing around a lot of videos of highly emotional left-wing white women.

But then I asked Meade, and he had heard the term and it seems to be catching on. 

Needless to say, I don't like the term. I don't like expressions of contempt and I don't like commentators  trading on the idea that women are over-emotional. I also don't like freaking out and yelling in public (or at home), but you can say just that, without contributing to sex-based hatred. 

Despite that NYT headline, McGrady's column isn't really about the term AWFUL. It's more about the phenomenon of going after activist liberal white women:

"What's the original version of the adage 'Friends don't let friends [blank]'? Is it about drunk driving? is it 'vote Republican'? What's the first one and where did it go from there?"

Just a random A.I. prompt of mine. That came up this morning.

Yesterday's equivalent was: "What was that hippie poster that was mostly text and included something like and if we find each other it will be beautiful?"

On Thursday, my idle musings got me to: "What is the old waltz most associated with ice skating?"

Without A.I., things like this would float along, fermenting, festering, and maybe one day you'd happen to run into the answer and think aha! I've been wondering about that for the longest time. Now, you can get the answer immediately, and it doesn't amount to much other than that I've destroyed the groundwork for what might have been a delightful aha moment somewhere done the road.

"There is no evidence that Gladis and her pod are attacking humans or that they intend to harm people at all."

"In fact, wild orcas have never been seen treating people as prey. They do, however, have a thing for 'fads,' where they take up behaviour that has no obvious benefit. One famous example involved a female in the Pacific northwest who, in 1987, was seen wearing a dead salmon on her head. The trend spread. Other orcas across Puget Sound were soon spotted with their own 'salmon hats.' And then, as abruptly and as mysteriously as it started, the fashion fizzled out. Other orcas have been seen draping kelp over their backs or heads.... To scientists, the behaviour with the boat rudders looks similar. After wrenching one free, Gladis and her companions tend to bat it around for a while, then lose interest and swim off.... One [researcher] believes the orcas see the yachts, with their long detachable rudders, as 'giant toy dispensers.'"

From "Orcas blamed for yacht attacks are speaking their own language/Scientists studying killer whales linked to hundreds of encounters with boats near Gibraltar have discovered that the pod communicates using a unique dialect" (London Times).

"President Trump is, Joe Manchin believes, the 'most charming person in the world.'"

"'I wish that people could see that part of him,' the former Democratic senator told The Times. 'And I wish he could show more of that compassion. He’s a tremendous host and he talks to you and he listens to you and he engages with you. He might do whatever he wants, but he still engages.'"

From "Joe Manchin: Democrats have lost their way — I want Trump to succeed/The former senator was one of Biden’s most vital allies. Now he says the Democrats have gone too far left and has joined a record number of independents" (London Times).

Trump embraces the title "King." Either he's laughing in the face of the "No Kings" crowd or he's forgotten about them altogether.

That's at Truth Social.

What's the context? I had to look it up. I found "Trump threatens tariffs to force support for US control of Greenland/Trump's threat marked another escalation of his campaign to control the island, which is a territory of US ally Denmark" (USA Today), which reports on a health policy event at the White House yesterday, where Trump "trumpeted how the threat of tariffs forced other developed countries to accept higher drug prices so U.S. prices could come down."

Trump then added that he might use tariffs to get what he wants about Greenland. He said:  "I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland because we need Greenland for national security."

And then he praised himself more generally, declaring: "I’m the tariff king and the tariff king has done a great job."

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UPDATE: "Trump Announces 10 Percent Tariff on European Countries in Standoff Over Greenland/The president escalated his drive to take charge of the Danish territory, targeting Denmark and seven other nations aligned with it" (NYT):

Denmark, which oversees Greenland, will be hit with a 10 percent tariff on all goods sent to the United States beginning on Feb. 1, he wrote in a social media post, along with Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland. If they don’t relent, he added, the tariff rate will increase to 25 percent on June 1, “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

Yikes. 

At the Friday Night Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

"Does he think westerners are softer? 'Much, much! And getting weaker and weaker. We say in China it’s hard for three generations of a family to be wealthy.'"

"'Because the third, they don’t even know what money means. It’s automatically in their accounts. So people become … a designer.' He laughs. 'China became strong because people work hard with no holidays. Not just eight hours, but ten, twelve hours. That’s how they bring their children to your British schools, Cambridge and Oxford.' The West, he says, cannot take tuition fees from China and then moan when it tries to restrict academic freedom or complain about Chinese spying 'because you’ve become the underdog. You cannot compete with China, so you blame it.'"

From "Ai Weiwei: ‘You in the West can’t compete with China’/The dissident artist Ai Weiwei became a global icon when he was forced into exile by China. So how come the 68-year-old is defending the autocratic regime’s stance on Taiwan, censorship and global politics?" (London Times).

"It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like 'White Fragility' seriously."

"So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets. Fox News’s Will Cain described a 'weird kind of smugness' in the way 'some of these liberal white women interact with authority.' For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women" (NYT).

There's a link on "casual contempt for white women." It goes to a 2020 BBC article about the mythic figure known as Karen — "What exactly is a 'Karen' and where did the meme come from?"

Contempt toward women is pervasive throughout the world and throughout history, but it can also be a special left-or-right problem happening at particular times and in particular places. Social media keeps feeding me videos of women acting hyper-privileged and oblivious of the risk or screaming and losing her mind over practically nothing.

"Brendan Liaw was kind of joking when he agreed he was a professional stay-at-home son during his appearance on 'Jeopardy!' in May...."

"'I figured, why not have some fun with it?' he said. 'Better to be a "stay-at-home son" than "unemployed" or "schmuck" or "lazy guy."' He certainly wasn’t expecting to set off a media moment of stories and think pieces on so-called 'trad sons' — adult men who embrace the lifestyle of living with their parents."

From "Stay-at-home sons are here — and they’re not going anywhere Why some young men are finding happiness in their parents’ homes" (WaPo)(gift link).

"'I’m sort of the origin of all this discourse,' [Brendan] Liaw, 28, said. He was speaking from an apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.... After his 'Jeopardy!' appearance — during which he won almost $60,000 across four games — several media outlets, including Vanity Fair, People and the Wall Street Journal published stories about a rise in 'trad sons' or 'hub-sons.'"

"I’m raging and sobbing simultaneously"/"This makes me weep. What are we?"

"I haven’t heave-sobbed like this in a long time. Dang, that hit HARD"/"Well this hit home. Minnesota girl here."

Comments on this TikTok video:

"What is that Billy Collins poem about poets and metaphors that talks about poetry going on until everything has been compared to everything else?"

A question I asked Grok because I was listening to Mel Torme singing "Windmills of Your Mind."

Here's the poem: "The Trouble with Poetry." Excerpt: "And how will it ever end?/unless the day finally arrives/when we have compared everything in the world/to everything else in the world...."

And here's Mel:

I usually refrain from embedding song videos that only show a still image of the album cover, but that cover is worth gazing upon. Adorably absurd couple. The year was — need I say it? — 1969.

"[H]is policies ranged from ripping up the streets and replacing car transport with bicycles, to putting dishonest drug dealers in the stocks because 'no drug worth taking should be sold for money'..."

"...to disarming police because street violence was usually down to 'some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.' He also cut his hair off so he could refer to his Democratic rival in debates as 'my long-haired opponent.' This might have seemed a satire of politics, populism as a joke, but Thompson was very serious. 'There is common sense in the apparent madness of my campaign,' he told an audience ahead of polling day. 'I am not running for sheriff in the traditional sense, but to help get hold of our destiny and begin controlling development.' He wouldn’t try to force changes, but encourage referendums and create a legal advisory board of lawyers to sit with select citizens to consult with the sheriff’s department. 'We either have a participating democracy or a police state.'... To Thompson, a 'freak' was 'not a beast roaming the streets chewing drugs, but someone who is spiritually disenfranchised, who has not wanted to participate in government.'... Thompson’s individualism... feels at odds with the community spirit and citizen participation required to realise the ascendancy of the collective good.... 'Unfortunately,' Thompson said in his 1970 concession speech, 'I proved what I set out to prove… that the American Dream really is fucked.'..."

From "Hunter S Thompson’s freaks have overrun America/The pioneer of gonzo chronicled his people’s wild descent – and saw what his country has now become" by. Barney Horner (New Statesman).

The boldface is my nudging to tell you that I see what maybe you see: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

"I presented the President of the United States the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom."

That's María Corina Machado, who had the power to make a gift of the object, the medal, but cannot cause Trump to become the prize-winner.

Presumably, she did not give him any of the money — about $1 million — that came with the award. That money means much more to her than to our billionaire President, but more important, visitors to the President can't be handing over piles of money. And she wants something from him. She wants a lot.

He wanted something too, the Nobel Prize, and now he's in the ambiguous position of sort of having it. You just have the medal. It's like Putin's Super Bowl ring.

What do you have when you have the token of winning and you did not win? It's not the token of winning with respect to you, so what is it? 

Sunrise — 7:00, 7:20, 7:33.

Cloudless, but somber.

The man-made clouds were picking up some sprightly pinkness...

"Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose."

"I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s 'Politics and the English Language,' with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s 'Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,' which advised me to 'avoid slovenliness of form' and 'eschew surplusage.'"

Writes Briallen Hopper, in "DOES IT HOLD UP?/Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block/Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace 'shitty first drafts.' But there’s more to the creative process" (TNR).

ADDED: Here's the full text of "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Sample: "In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick."

"So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund [Freud] had nurtured nearly 100 years ago."

"A cutting grows up to be a perfect clone of the original – no matter how many times you pass on cuttings of the cuttings of the cuttings, they’re all genetically identical to the original shrub. Sigmund died before I ever met him, but I now owned a tiny part of his story. A biological heirloom that had lived alongside him and brought oxygen into his pioneering study – growing alongside his evolving ideas, laying down roots as he laid down theories...."

From "The strange tale of Sigmund Freud’s begonia/How the gift of a plant helped Emma Freud finally get to know her great-grandfather" (The Observer).

"I have given already given nine different arguments for my immortality. I’m fallible..."

"... maybe there’s a clunker or two in there. But surely at least one is a good argument! Therefore I am immortal."

From "Why I am immortal," by Hilarius Bookbinder, at Substack.

"The last thing we need to do, again, is to make the same mistake when it comes to 'Defund the Police' rhetoric."

"That ended up not actually helping communicate what people wanted. People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security."

Said Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, quoted in "Abolish ICE? It’s a Slogan Some Democratic Critics of ICE Would Abolish/As Democrats grow more alarmed about the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids in American cities, some worry that calls to eliminate the agency will distract from efforts to rein it in" (NYT).

Third Way, a centrist Washington-based think tank, released a memo [saying]... “Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want”.... 

“The radical ‘Abolish ICE’ crusade from far-left Democrats seemed like a relic of the past, but it’s the brand-new litmus test for Democrats who are barely hanging on and begging on their knees to get approval from their socialist base,” [said a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee].

"If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job..."

"I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you attention to this matter!"

Writes "President DJT" at Truth Social.

Trump questions the Shah's support-garnering capacity.

The news as displayed at Memeorandum:

From the Reuters article, a quote from Trump: "He seems very nice, but I don't know how he'd play within his own country. And we really aren't up to that point yet. I don't know whether or not his country would accept his leadership, and certainly if they would, that would be fine with me."

I know he's not the Shah. Not yet. Just testing the concept on you after Meade called him the Shah. I said he's not the Shah, and Meade said it was like addressing a nun as "Sister" when you're not Catholic. I said: "You mean like using someone's preferred pronouns?" It doesn't matter what you think the person really is, you're showing respect. 

Is it wrong to call Reza Pahlavi the "Shah"? Does it help him garner support or not? He's not in power, not yet anyway, but is there good reason to refer to him as the Shah?

"Republican leaders were able to garner enough support for their procedural maneuver to kill the resolution after Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana flipped their position..."

"... and joined the effort to stop it from coming up for a vote. The shift brought about a 50-50 tie, which was broken late Wednesday in favor of Republican leadership by Vice President JD Vance, in his role as president of the Senate."

From "Republicans Block Effort to Check Trump’s Power in Venezuela/G.O.P. leaders succeeded in pressuring fellow senators who initially supported the measure that would have limited President Trump’s military authority in Venezuela" (NYT).

That was close. Sufficient garnering occurred.

"[Rand] Paul, the sole Republican to cosponsor the resolution, said that he too had spoken with Mr. Trump but was unmoved. He criticized party leaders for 'playing games' and accused the administration of misleading lawmakers. 'Oh, it’s a drug bust. Oh, we’re going for drugs. Oh, it’s not really drugs, now it’s oil,' he said. 'So see, the bait and switch has already happened.'"

"Dolphins darted and leaped around the capsule as it bobbed in the Pacific Ocean, awaiting retrieval and transfer to a recovery ship."

I'm reading "Watch: Nasa astronauts return to Earth after evacuation from space/Crew 11 splashed down off California on Thursday morning after travelling around the Earth 2,672 times during their time onboard the International Space Station" (London Times).

Four crew members from the International Space Station have returned safely to Earth, completing the first medical evacuation in the 65-year history of human spaceflight....

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule... streaked across the night sky over California in a blazing ball of plasma as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, reaching exterior temperatures up to 1,900C (3,500F) before parachutes deployed to slow its descent.

Sunrise — or 1 hour after sunrise — 8:25.

That's Meade's photo. I did not go out. The wind was 30 mph. Meade said that 3 times he nearly got blown off his feet. He said it was as if some invisible person had shoved him.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

And here's some additional Meadeification:

"Students from both Madison East and West high schools have walked out to protest against ICE at the state Capitol...."

Students from both Madison East and West high schools have walked out to protest against ICE at the state Capitol.

I’d estimate there’s 200-300 students between the first floor rotunda and second floor bridges above pic.twitter.com/xnMjqEAsmo

— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) January 14, 2026

"But to me, a question lingers: Why?"

Writes Justice Gorsuch, concurring, alone, in William Trevor Case v. Montana, issued this morning, which held that "police officers generally do not violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights when they enter his house without a warrant, but with an 'objectively reasonable basis' for believing someone inside is in physical danger and in need of immediate aid."

Does the Fourth Amendment tolerate this limited emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement just because five or more Justices of this Court happen to believe that such entries are “reasonable”? Or is this exception more directly “tied to the law”? Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 397 (2018) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting). The answer, I believe, is the latter. 

"I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates. Elections are important, but so are many things in life."

Writes Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Elena Kagan, in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, a case issued this morning.

Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant.

"But local civil rights leaders decided not to make Ms. Colvin their symbol of discrimination."

"She was, she later said, too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s Black middle class. (She was not, as some later claimed, pregnant at the time, though she did become pregnant later that year.) Instead, the leaders waited...."

From "Claudette Colvin, Who Refused to Give Her Bus Seat to a White Woman, Dies at 86/Her defiance of Jim Crow laws in 1955 made her a star witness in a landmark segregation suit, but her act was overshadowed months later when Rosa Parks made history with a similar stand" (NYT).

"For Nguyen, the point — and pleasure — of games is play, not efficiency; a person who simply wants to catch more fish would trade Nguyen’s feathery hand-tied flies..."

"... for a big net or a blast of dynamite.... Nguyen, whose day job is as a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, contrasts the delightful thrill of playing games like basketball, The Legend of Zelda and Dungeons & Dragons with the demoralizing pursuit of university rankings, page views and social media likes: 'Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?'... Nguyen, 48... brought out various toys...yo-yos, spin tops, a Japanese ball-and-cup thingumajig known as a kendama.... 'All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,' Nguyen said at one point. 'Every time you’re yo-yoing, you’re like, If I change my angle this much, or if I pull a little bit here, or if I drop it, oh, then it works!' The fact that the stakes are so low is not a deficit of the yo-yo (or the kendama, or D&D, or fly-fishing); low stakes are part of the point, allowing us to move from one game to another. Nguyen argues that problems emerge when the stakes become all-consuming, taking over our sense of self and dictating what we should value...."

I'm reading "Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore/In a new book, C. Thi Nguyen looks to his personal passions — from video games to yo-yoing — to illuminate the downside of our increasingly gamified world" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT)(gift link).

I see the connection to blogging. I'm going to read Nguyen's book, "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" (commission earned).

I thought the article was going to have something in it about how sports betting ruins the fun of spectator sports, but no. Is that in the book? I can tell you that the word "football" does not appear in the book and "baseball" only appears in the context of a baseball cap worn by Tsukasa Takatsu, "a minor saint, beloved of a very tiny sect of passionate yo-yo players."

ADDED: Nguyen sees low stakes as a positive force, but the most famous thing anyone ever said about low stakes is Sayre's law: Responding to "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake," Sayre quipped: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Usually restated as: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." 

What is excluded by that "almost"?

"Cinemark is going all out for National Popcorn Day in 2026 [January 18 and 19], offering moviegoers in Austin and around the country the chance to BYOBucket: bring almost any kind of container to the theater and fill it up for just $5 (plus tax)...."(culturemap).

MEANWHILE: Another Austin movie theater distinguishes itself in a wholly different way:

Pick your style of theater here in the Magnited States of America.

Mamdani gives clear instructions on how to deal with ICE.

Does he get anything wrong?

It's this blog's 22nd anniversary.

22 years of doing exactly this. Year 23 begins today. 

The bloggiversary arrives 2 days after my birthday, but I didn't blog about my birthday — though I appreciated the birthday wishes that popped up here and there in the comments section. And it was one of those big birthdays, the 3/4 of a century mark, 75.

Here on the blog, it's the bloggiversary that matters. This is the milestone I choose to highlight. I'm delighted to be here to blog another day, Day 8,037.

Thanks for reading!

Sunrise — 6:58, 7:21, 7:35, 7:51, 8:03.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Rand Paul on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Transcript here, at Podscribe.

"Live Updates: Transgender Athletes Ask Supreme Court to Overturn State Bans."

Here's a gift link to the New York Times, which has been providing a lot of clips and quotes and summaries.

I listened to a big segment of the oral argument, which has already been going on for more than 2 hours, but it's not over yet, so drop in over here if you want to get a sense of how it is going.

I'll just make one observation, about something I was hearing for the first time, which is the idea that male-bodied persons who take puberty blockers might be disadvantaged in sports because they have larger bones but these bones are not powered by the strength and drive that the testosterone of puberty would have provided. By taking puberty blockers, they are choosing to go forward with underpowered bodies. That is, in this way, these children not only don't have an advantage if they play in girls' sports, they have a disadvantage!

ADDED: An interesting comment by Adam Liptak over in the NYT live updates: "The question before the court is whether states may exclude transgender athletes from women’s sports. Questions from Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan raise an issue not directly before the court: must states exclude them?"

AND: You can listen to the entire argument here, at YouTube.

ALSO: Here's that argument that struck me. From the transcript, page 112, Kathleen R. Hartnett, for the respondents: 

"But I think the point is that sometimes counter-intuitively it's like having a larger frame but not having the muscle and the testosterone to drive it could actually put the person in a worse position. And that's a study that was commissioned by the Olympic Committee -- it's Footnote 6 of our brief -- indicates that actually it could be actually put the transgender woman at a disadvantage if they happen to have larger bones and less testosterone or muscle to drive those bones."

"Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation..."

"... for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go. I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and look forward to spending an eternity with Him. The part about me not being a believer should be quite quickly resolved; if I wake up in heaven, I won’t need any more convincing than that. I hope I’m still qualified for entry."

Wrote Scott Adams, just before dying.

It's an impressive mix of intelligence, respect, humor, and honesty. He implicitly concedes that he doesn't really believe, but anticipates instant arrival in a state of true belief if he finds himself waking up in Heaven. He acknowledges that that form of belief might not count as sufficient, but he expresses hope. And he did have that part where he incanted the key phrase: "I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior." That might be what it takes, and it's worth the risk — no risk. It will make some of his friends feel better, and if there are others who don't like it, they can take comfort in his assurance that he's not a believer. 

ADDED: In the preceding post, Paul Zrimsek said: "His support for Trump probably means he's been darned to Heck, and that Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, is poking him with that big spoon now." That nudged me to find this:

Goodbye to Scott Adams.

He shared his dying with us right up to the end. We knew he was going, and now, suddenly he's gone.

I received the news through my son John, who's put up this post at Facebook that provides a gift link to the Washington Post obituary, which has a headline that I don't like, "Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ creator who poked fun at bad bosses, dies at 68/His three-panel comic strip was once published in more than 2,000 newspapers. Publishers cut ties with Mr. Adams after he made racist comments on a YouTube live stream."

From the obituary: "His former wife Shelly Miles announced his death in a live stream Tuesday morning, reading a statement she said Mr. Adams had prepared before his death. 'I had an amazing life,' the statement said in part. 'I gave it everything I had.'"

Coffee with Scott Adams moves to The Scott Adams School 01/13/24 https://t.co/RsXWMvV6yA

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 13, 2026

"Philosophy professor Martin Peterson was ordered to remove excerpts from Plato’s 'Symposium' that seemed to violate the new guidelines..."

"... passages about Diotima’s Ladder of Love and Aristophanes’ speech regarding split humans. Peterson was told the course would be reassigned to someone else if he didn’t delete the readings from his introductory philosophy syllabus. Peterson says his course does not 'advocate' for any ideology but teaches students how to structure and evaluate moral arguments."

From "Plato falls victim to campus culture wars/Jettisoning the Greek philosopher hurts students who yearn to learn how to reason, argue and think" by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

What's really going on here? Wasn't this some sort of "malicious compliance" move by opponents of restrictions on left-wing gender ideology?

"The Quest to ‘Make America Fertile Again’ Stalls Under Trump."

The NYT reports.

[O]ne year into President Trump’s second term, his administration has enacted few policies to reduce the rising cost of having children — frustrating some conservatives who expected Mr. Trump to prioritize their plans to boost the U.S. birthrate as it continues to drop.... 

Conservative advocates in touch with the White House said family policy issues were not a current priority for Mr. Trump’s domestic policy team, which has been hyper-focused on immigration.

"The thing that has made doctors raise an eyebrow and reach for the defibrillator... is... 'We are ending the war on protein.'"

"Red meat, in particular, is fine. Steak, meatloaf and cream are back on the table of God-fearing Americans. Plus, they need to aim for three servings of full-fat dairy a day.... To see whether these dietary guidelines are going to make me live for ever or are a recipe for cardiac arrest, I tried out RFK’s butter and steak diet for a few days...."

I'm reading:

He looks skeptical, but skip past all the details of what Harry Wallop ate, here's where he ends up: "Curiously, over the four days on the Maha diet I have lost 3lb and gained some strength — I manage 72 push-ups on day 5. The weight loss is almost certainly because I cut out most carbohydrates and I studiously avoided any added sugar...."

"My implicit equation of attention is: Curiosity plus conflict equals attention."

Says Ezra Klein, in his podcast, which is titled "Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?" (NYT).

Talarico is on the podcast because, as Klein puts it, he "was breaking through on TikTok, Instagram and viral videos" and "ended up on Joe Rogan’s podcast — the first significant Democrat that Rogan seemed interested in, in a very long time."

And now "Talarico is running for Senate in Texas. He’s running in a primary with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett...." There's no other mention of Crockett in the article. Why not? Talarico was never invited to speak against her, but this podcast is clearly boosting him, which is inherently against her. I presume hardcore Democrats, focused on winning the Texas Senate seat, don't want Crockett to win the primary.

The question isn't really Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left? It's Can James Talarico Seize the Nomination from Crockett?

Ezra Klein says: "The biggest concern I hear about you in Texas is that you’re sort of a liberal’s idea of what a Christian politician should be."

Sunrise — 6:58, 7:08, 7:16, 7:28.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

A short tower of Reddit shavings.

1. "Babe wake up, they gerrymandered reincarnation."

2. "I live on my own right now and she saw my room and said it is an instant red flag."

3. It's mildly infuriating when the delivery guy takes that photo of the delivered package and includes your bare legs in the picture. Presumably, you were wearing shorts.

4. "Decorative tower in South Korean plastic surgery clinic made from the jawbones of patients who received plastic surgery for jawline reduction."

Bob Weir's "Bobby shorts" were NOT hot pants.

All respect to Bob Weir. My blog tribute to him is here. But now I need to talk about a NYT article that talks about his pants, his shorts. Here: "Bob Weir, a Virtuoso of Hot Pants/The Grateful Dead guitarist wore short shorts like no other" (NYT).

Okay, I am an expert on this subject... and not because I've been talking about the issue of men in shorts for 20 years. I was there, at ground zero, in the summer of 1971, when the "hot pants" fashion trend peaked. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was 20 years old, and I worked — for what was probably less than $2 an hour — in the juniors department of Lit Brothers department store in Camden county, New Jersey. New hot pants outfits came in every week and we positioned them on the racks near the store entryway so they'd, presumably, mesmerize the passersby. I saw and handled this merchandise in real time. It was not made of denim. It was polyester. It was certainly not cut off and frayed. It had neatly finished edges. And most important, it had a 2-INCH INSEAM.

Now let's look at what that NYT is calling hot pants:

The article leans heavily into the idea that these shorts are really really shorty short. Key language: "chopped-to-the-heavens jean shorts," "Mr. Weir’s shorts were short," "snipped high enough that fans quite a distance from the stage could make out Mr. Weir’s upper thighs," "not Daisy Dukes, they were 'Bobby Shorts,'" "The Bob Weir Inseam... five inches max."

5 inches! 5 inches, you say?! Hot pants had a 2-INCH INSEAM! A woman in shorts with a 5-inch inseam would — in the era of hot pants — have been seen as frumpy and ultra-modest. 

Don't fight with me. I am a 1970s hot-pants purist. I was there. I didn't measure the inseam at the time, but I handled the merchandise, and I've researched the measurement, and the number is 2 inches. You may marvel — I'm marveling now — at how these pants could adequately enclose a woman's crotch, let alone a man's.

I am not taking one more step 'til I know where I'm going.

Ricky Gervais "would like to thank God and the trans community."

Says Wanda Sykes accepting the Golden Globe for the absent Ricky:

Wanda Sykes calls out Ricky Gervais' transphobia while accepting the Golden Globe for Best Stand-Up Comedy Performance on his behalf: "He would like to thank God and the trans community."
byu/voguediaries inFauxmoi

ADDED: I did not interpret Sykes's statement as "call[ing] out Ricky Gervais' transphobia" any more than I thought she was calling out his atheism. I didn't notice the text when I chose the Reddit clip. Reading it now, I just think it's wrong. It doesn't match what I thought when I first read it. I was just looking for a clip to embed and that Reddit presentation popped up. My immediate interpretation: I thought she was tweaking the over-eager defenders of trans people for going after her fellow comedian. 

Sunrise — 7:25, 7:50.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"We've seen it since the 1960s.... Police violence lands on this country in a tinderbox fashion."

"And so what is so important for leaders to do in that circumstance is: to obviously lament the lives lost, pledge an independent transparent investigation, and pledge to... seek justice no matter where it leads.... It strikes me that the exact opposite of that is what has occurred. And  immediately after [Renee Good] was killed, she was called a domestic terrorist, very publicly. There are people who then accuse the cop of murder, very publicly, right off the bat. That is pouring gasoline on this situation, and it's horrific.... This incredible rush to judgment results in fixed positions about complicated matters.... And then... there's this assertion, well, this is completely your fault because... when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life. No, no, no, no. That is not what a free society says. We should respect officers... but it is simply not the case that... your right to your life depends on compliance with federal officials.... It's dangerous to drive away from the police. You should not drive away from the police. But under no circumstances is America a country where the command should be obey the men and women in uniform or your life is forfeit. That's not the standard of the United States of America."

Says David French on the new episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast (transcript and audio at Podscribe).

ADDED: If you are questioning the usage in the phrase "or your life is forfeit," know that C.S. Lewis used in in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" (full text at Gutenberg):

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I contemplated whether I was named after Ann Arbor.

My mother grew up in Ann Arbor, I heard about Ann Arbor throughout my childhood, and I went to college in Ann Arbor, but it had never occurred to me that I might have been named after Ann Arbor. The story my mother told me about my name is that they wanted a name that began with the letter A — so I ended up with the initials AAA, straight As — and they wanted something as simple as possible. The second-choice name was Amy, which is also only 3 letters, but it's 2 syllables, so Amy it wasn't. 

I'm also only just now looking into the question whether Ann Arbor was named after someone named Ann. Wikipedia says: 

"In an event that became part of Grateful Dead lore, a 16-year-old Mr. Weir was wandering with a friend in Palo Alto, Calif., on New Year’s Eve 1963 when they heard a banjo playing..."

"... and followed the sound to a music store where Mr. Garcia, five years his elder, was preparing to give lessons. 'We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave,' Mr. Weir later recalled. 'I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.' Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions was the earliest iteration of what would eventually become the Grateful Dead...."

From "Bob Weir, Guitarist and Founding Member of the Grateful Dead, Dies at 78/His songwriting and rhythm guitar playing helped shape the San Francisco band’s sound as it became an American institution" (NYT).

He said this last March: "I look forward to dying. I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived. That’s it."

"For people who make and sell beef tallow, a golden age has dawned. Consumers spent $9.9 million on food-grade beef tallow in 2025...."

"Jars of it landed on the shelves of Costco this year, and big retailers like Walmart and Target sell it. Fat Brothers beef tallow sells for almost $20 for 14 ounces on Amazon, and business is brisk... Jenni Harris is a fifth-generation rancher whose father in the late 1990s transformed their small conventional cattle feeding operation in South Georgia to an organic one where cows are raised on pasture. She remembers a time when they had no market for the fat from the animals they slaughtered. 'We damn near gave it away' she said...."

From "Beef Tallow, Long a Health Pariah, Rises to the Top of the Food Pyramid/The new dietary guidelines give federal approval to a fat that has slowly caught on with consumers, even as doctors have warned against it" (NYT).

Have you made the transition from seed oils to beef tallow? Or do you think butter is tracking the new food pyramid well enough? Or do you think this new fat advice is just crazy?

I'm reading the comments over there, including: "The man is barefoot as he stands next to a vat of hot oil while removing a drippy bird. What can go wrong?" And: "Anyone that works over a vat of 400 degree oil barefoot shouldnt be in charge of anything safety-related be it food, drugs, or healthcare."

They're responding to this photo, which is taken from RFK Jr.'s own social media:

And I like the NYT's correction at the bottom: "An earlier version of this article misstated how much consumers spent on beef tallow in 2025. It was $9.9 million, not $900 million." That's kind of a never mind correction. They wrote this whole article about the hot new business that is beef tallow and then it turned out to be on 1.1% of what they thought it was!

What's worse, the Secretary of Health's risky approach to home cooking or The New York Times's embarrassing and extreme botching of the dollar amount as it conducts its supposedly professional journalism?

And by the way, while RFK's feet deserve some attention, a lot of us are noticing his torso. He's 71 years old, and look at him. And he's eating beef tallow.

"Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the President receives right now."

Elon Musk wants you to know what it will be like 5 years from now.

Elon Musk's jaw-dropping prediction (Jan 2026):

“Don’t go into medical school.”
Elon Musk: “Yes. Pointless.”

In 3 years (2029), Optimus robots will be better surgeons than any human on Earth — at scale.
By 4–5 years? Not even close. The best medicine in the world will be free… pic.twitter.com/q7KTMpICk8

— Camus (@newstart_2024) January 10, 2026

And don't bother with higher education... except for "social reasons."