What did it mean? Scott Adams wrote in "Win Bigly":
One of the more notable persuasion failures from the Clinton campaign involved the slogan Love Trumps Hate. The first two thirds of the slogan is literally “Love Trump.” Again, human brains put more weight on the first part of a sentence than the end. On a rational level, the sentence makes perfect sense, and it says what Trump’s critics wanted it to say. But in the 3-D world of persuasion, this slogan simply told the world to either love Trump or love the things he hates, such as terrorism and bad trade deals.
Turned out we didn't get that 4 to 8 years of stupid — not that particular form of stupid, anyway (the stupid of getting called "sexist" every time you criticized the President).
"So, it's a great honor, a great honor that you're here. But we do have a very special relationship. In fact, I'll get that little piece of dandruff off, that little piece. We have to make him perfect. He is perfect. So it's really great to be with you, and you are a special friend. Thank you. Thank you."
I would have written not surprising for a president who knows they hate him.
"There will be subtle hints at bipartisanship in the décor: Along with 1,200 Obama-inspired cherry blossom branches to decorate the Cross Hall, Mrs. Trump will use china from the Clinton White House," the article continues, and the most-liked comment is:
So we can have a "nod to bipartisanship" in the dishes used - but no actual human beings who don't fawn at the feet of our dear leader?
Donald Trump representing the United States of America at a state dinner is an embarrassment to our country.
I've recovered from paranoia. I attribute the difference to the fact that something has to be around for awhile to rank as "most viewed" or "most emailed," but the "recommended" list is a place to promote the newest things. The "for you" business seems curated for me, but I don't know if that's based on invading my privacy or just some bullshit stab at niceness.
The "Why It Seems Like Everyone Is Always Angry With You" did just go up this morning, but I do — more than most? — suffer from the feeling that other people are angry at me. The article turns out to be about the skill in reading other people's faces. Last paragraph:
So what do you do if you’re an adult who often thinks friends and colleagues are upset with you? Dr. Schermerhorn advised trying to remember that just because a face is not brimming with positivity, it does not mean that it is conveying something negative. Also remember that what you’re picking up on might just be a person’s eyebrows. Low brows and brows that slope in like a V have a tendency to telegraph anger, researchers have found, even when none is present.
And let me add that if you're an adult who actually is angry at friends and colleagues but don't what them to realize it, get your eyebrows lifted.
ADDED: Remember Uncle Leo's eyebrows on "Seinfeld"? They got singed off and Elaine drew them in but in the angry position:
"A suit of armor fell on Ron Bultongez. Amelia Hammer Harris took a hard fall off the Orient Express. And now we’re at the top 14 with the shivering, terrified survivors who just want Ryan Seacrest to lower his monocle and solve this whole thing for everyone. But we’ve got five episodes left to deduce which contestant deserves the crown, and I have a sneaking suspicion it could be anybody. Let’s roll through these 14 contenders, comment on the eliminations, and wonder if Lionel Richie knows his sparkly blazer would look smashing on Vicki Lawrence."
And here's the link to the Sunday episode recap, with each performance ranked by Virtel, including #1, Maddie Poppe, doing "Homeward Bound":
ADDED: Here's what Virtel wrote about that "Walk Like an Egyptian" performance:
I’m all for Maddie Poppe’s calmed-down, twee’d-up renditions of songs... “Homeward Bound”? Sure. “Brand New Key”? Absolutely. But after Ryan Seacrest announced she was safely in the top ten, Maddie gave her first baffling performance of the season: an undanceable take on “Walk Like an Egyptian.” It’s as if she wanted us to pay attention to the Bangles’ lyrics, which are … well, they’re stupid. Let’s talk a look at “Foreign types with the hookah pipes say / Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh / Walk like an Egyptian.” That’s offensive, senseless, and then back to offensive. And she didn’t even throw us the saucy Susanna Hoffs side-eye to soften the embarrassment! I’m worried now. Soon, Maddie with perform “Kokomo” as a piano ballad or add marimba to “Tears in Heaven”! Here’s hoping she’s back on track with an angora-warm version of “You’ve Got a Friend” or something next week.
Ha ha. Ask Meade if I didn't say out loud, "The lyrics to this song are actually pretty offensive."
AND: Here's the old Bangles video featuring the ancient mystery of Susanna Hoffs's inability to position her irises in the center of her eyeballs. As for the idea of "the Bangles' lyrics," I've got to object. They didn't write the song. It was written by music producer Liam Sternberg, who, Wikipedia tells us, "wrote the song after seeing people on a ferry walking awkwardly to keep their balance." The only connection to Egypt is that Sternberg thought the people looked like the figures in the ancient Egyptian paintings.
Is the song offensive? It's one of the songs Clear Channel banned after the September 11, 2001 attacks. It's got that casual, silly attitude toward ethnicity found in many old songs — "Ahab the Arab" ("There he saw Fatima layin' on a zebra skin rug with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and a bone in her nose ho, ho"), "The Sheik of Araby" ("At night when you're asleep/Into your tent I'll creep"), "Midnight at the Oasis" ("You won't need no camel/When I take you for a ride"). I'm just naming ones about Arabs that spring immediately to mind. There's also Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs...
You wouldn't do that today. Domingo "Sam" Samudio was Mexican American, and he just enjoyed Yul Brenner as Pharaoh in "The Ten Commandments." As for Yul Brenner, he was a combination of Swiss-German, Russian, and Buryat, but it was accepted back then that he could play an ancient Egyptian. And he also got to play the King of Siam.
I'd branch out to other ethnicities, but I'll just say "Turning Japanese," and I'll leave it to you to come up with some other silly songs that would steam people up if they came out today (but maybe we can still love because they are old).
"Turning Japanese" was just a way of saying I feel like a foreigner in my own culture. The lyrics had nothing to do with Japanese people:
No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women
No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark
Everyone around me is a total stranger
Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger
But the video (and that musical riff)... just comically leaned into Japanese stereotypes (back in 1980, when not letting anything offend you was kind of the culture):
I won't pull out a large enough excerpt to make the story clear to you, only to give you as sense of the drama:
The morning after his interrogation, [Lam Wing-kee] was blindfolded, handcuffed and put on a train for an unknown destination. His captors didn’t say a word. When the train came to a halt 13 hours later, Lam’s escorts shoved him into a car and drove him to a nearby building, where they removed his hat, blindfold and glasses. He took stock of his situation: He was in an unknown location in an unknown city, being held by officers whose identity and affiliation he could not ascertain....
In January 2016, more than two months after he began counting the length of his detention, Lam was informed of the charge against him: “illegal sales of books.”...
Lam was transferred to a new city for the next phase of his detention. There, he was told he would be permitted to return to Hong Kong, but only on the condition that, upon arrival, he report immediately to a police station and tell them his disappearance was all a misunderstanding. He would then go to the home of Lee Bo and pick up a computer containing information on the publisher’s clients and authors, which he would deliver to China....
That night, alone in his hotel room, Lam violated the conditions of his limited release, using his phone to search for news about his case... He saw his name and the names of his Mighty Current colleagues appear again and again... Lam saw photos of thousands of protesters marching through the streets, holding posters of the missing booksellers and demanding their release; Lam’s shuttered shop had become a site of pilgrimage...
On the morning he was expected back on the mainland, Lam arrived at the train station with the company computer in his backpack. He paused to smoke a cigarette, then another. Other Mighty Current employees had friends, family or wives on the mainland. “Among all of us,” Lam told me, “I carried the smallest burden.” He thought of a short poem by Shu Xiangcheng that he read when he was young:
I have never seen
a knelt reading desk
though I’ve seen
men of knowledge on their knees
We're looking to speak to pet owners who haven't given their pets vaccinations because they're concerned about side effects - as well as people who have done so and now believe their pet has canine autism as a result.
There was plenty of support for widely publicized names already coined for the generation born, roughly, between 1995 and 2015: Generation Z, Homeland Generation, Post-Millennials and iGeneration.
A significant minority had grown comfortable with “Generation Z,” including Raquel Glassner, 22, of Olympia, Wash.
“I’ve never heard iGeneration before, but that is really horrendous,” she said. “Our whole generation shouldn’t be branded by Apple. Gen Z is the final generation of the 1900s, and a generational title using the last letter in the alphabet seems fitting.”...
The youngest respondent I tracked down was Mari Sobota, 8, a third-grader in Madison, Wis., who wrote in to say that her generation would be known for “girl power!”
Mari, 8, could identify an obvious generational difference between her and her 12-year-old sister Cassandra, and their mother, Carousel Bayrd. “We both like cotton candy, and my mom hates that,” she said.
This post-Millennial generation still has several moniker [sic], but has been most commonly called Generation Z or the iGeneration. They are widely considered to be young people born in the mid-1990s, and by 2020 they will account for one-third of the U.S. population. Gen-Z is also the most diverse in American history, and the first made up people who don’t know a world without the Internet or smartphones....
Blah blah blah. How vile to be thought of as the people who always had smartphones in their hands. Will these people not rebel? Here's Time's video, which is too candy-fluff for me to listen to the whole thing, but I did learn that that pronunciation, which surprised me, because we always said "gen-X," not "GEN-x" (which sounds like the name of a new drug).
Adding tags for this post, I see I already have one for Generation Z.
ADDED, on publishing this post: I see I had one other post with this tag, going all the way back to September 2015, and it was about the NYT pushing the term...
... so the NYT got its way, even as it later made it seem like the readers sent in the idea.
How did the millennials escape the fate of getting called Generation Y? It seems unfair to Generation Z, getting stuck with being an afterthought of the famous Generation X, which was itself a quasi-rebellious retort to the truly famous Baby Boomers. And clearly the post-Gen-Z generation won't get stuck with the next letter, there being no next letter. If I were a Z, I'd be very annoyed, but I'm saying that as a Baby Boomer, and we had a rebellious spirit, borne of the seemingly complacent 1950s and the desperately discordant next phase — assassination, riots, drugs, rock and roll, and the threat of a draft into a war that made no earthly sense.
"The character was a compound of stereotypes of people with dwarfism. He was hypersexual, unintelligent and aggressive. He was not even a character in his own right but a replica of another, average height role. Like dwarf performers in circuses of days past, his character only existed in contrast to others.... Throughout the series he serves as Dr Evil’s biddable pet. I imagine few who watched it know that in the past aristocrats and monarchs often 'kept' dwarf people like this – abusing, ridiculing, and, sometimes, even killing them... Troyer died on Saturday. He was just 49 years old. A statement on his Facebook page, said he had struggled with 'his own battles' but that 'unfortunately, this time was too much.'... Even in death, his body marks him as a target for ridicule. Ignorant still but much less malicious were comments that he was 'bigger than [insert height here],' 'a small guy but had a big heart,' or 'a big man in a tiny package,' and so on. Such remarks, commonly used by the media, propagate assumptions that dwarfism is something negative for which we have to compensate through our achievements or character.... [I]t is often in death that average height and able-bodied people easily erase an individual’s disability or difference – as demonstrated by the recent passing of Professor Stephen Hawking – to claim they were 'larger than life' or are 'finally free from their disability.'"
This continues the discussion we were having last month when Hawking died, here, after the actress Gal Gadot, surely believing she was being nice, said "Now you’re free of any physical constraints."
And here's the Wikipedia article on "Court dwarfs" ("Court dwarfs enjoyed specific placement right next to the king or queen in a royal court during public appearances and ceremonies, because they were so small, the king appeared much larger and visually enhanced his powerful position").
There's some interesting artwork, such as this, by Velasquez (c. 1645):
The picture is not sombre, even though this is a funeral. Obama and Bill Clinton are smiling broadly; W has that lopsided grin that suggests he’s cracked one of his fratboy jokes. They seem relaxed. And the source of that relaxation? Could it possibly be their collective relief that Trump is not there?
Oh! The snark never ends. Consider the possibility that these people are smiling because they believe in their professed religion.
Telling his family he was going to school, he rode his razor scooter to his local train station, from where he travelled to the airport and, using a self-service check-in terminal, boarded a flight for Perth, then another for Indonesia....
Discovering he was in Bali, his mother, Emma, flew there to collect him. Emma said the boy doesn’t like hearing the word “no”. “Shocked, disgusted, there’s no emotion to feel what we felt when we found he left overseas,” she told...
There’s no emotion to feel what we felt....
How could such a smart boy have such a stupid mother? I hypothesize that intelligence is not hereditary, and the condition of having a stupid mother encourages the development of one's own ideas, schemes, and skills.
"It is about strength, courage, responsibility, and suffering, but it is deep and difficult, and it is not easy to pigeonhole. In a sense, 12 Rules contains a number of hidden structures and hidden processes, and confusingly, these are not always made explicit in the text. The first of these is Deep Time. We are biological creatures, evolved beings who can only be truly understood through a model that encapsulates the notion of geological time.... Quite apart from the immensity of Deep Time, our story must take into account indescribable spans of historical time... His message is far from a 'Christian' one: it is a Jungian one... Like Jung, Peterson senses a secret unrest that gnaws at the roots of our being, because we have forgotten too much from our long and dangerous journey. We must listen to our myths, understand them, and learn from them.... This leads to a second hidden concept: the Unconscious. Here Peterson recaptures ground that’s become unfashionable in modern psychology. His model is heavily influenced by Freud and Jung. 'You don’t know yourself,' he says. We are not who we thought we were. We carry secret, shameful knowledge that’s scarcely accessible to conscious exploration (Freud). We also carry elements of a Collective Unconscious (Jung) that’s glimpsed via our myths and creation narratives. If you think you are an atheist you are wrong, says Peterson, because your mind has been bent and shaped and molded by a god-fearing past stretching back into the unfathomable abysm of time."
“Defendants’ enterprise of ostensible civil corruption bleeds collectors of deposits and payments, drawing on their funding without supplying a product in exchange therefor,” the complaint states. “While the design, manufacture and completion of the so-called Jeff Koons sculptures wallow at best and are continually and fraudulently postponed by a factor of years and contracted collectors wait interminably for delivery, Larry Gagosian and Jeff Koons live extravagant lifestyles financed in part by inappropriate and highly questionable practices underwritten by plaintiff and other collectors.”
Tananbaum says the refusal of Gagosian and Koons to identify the foundry that is purportedly manufacturing the sculptures keeps collectors in the dark as they manufacture false hope. Meantime the money Gagosian and Koons leech from collectors through “brutal payment plans” is used to fulfill a host of other obligations including “the manufacture of sculptures or other contracted “artistic” obligations commissioned at an earlier date by similarly duped collectors and/or to line the pockets of defendants.”
“The ‘estimated completion dates’ supplied by defendants to the collectors are a sham from the very outset,” the complaint states. “Defendants have and had no intention of completing the sculptures according to a completion and delivery schedule. At heart, this interest-free loan system – unbeknownst to the collectors – is less about creating timeless works of art and more about creating an ouroboros by which defendants maintain a never-depleting source of funds at the expense of eager and trusting collectors.”
My questions are: What were the terms of the contract you signed, you rich knucklehead? And: Is the complaint a work of art? And: Why can I never remember what an ouroboros is and have to look it up every damned time?
First, municipal officials have embraced the need to “refine” the country’s cities. From vast metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to thousands of smaller Chinese cities, the same government-sponsored buzzwords appear: “high-end,” “aesthetically pleasing,” “cosmopolitan.” Chinese urban planners strive to realize socially positive notions of “modern” and “green” cities, and the most successful are recognized by government ministries in a series of competitions. Cities are also eager to earn national awards for being exceptionally clean or “civilized.”
Municipal officials define “refinement” in remarkably similar ways. Typically, it involves inviting a renowned international architect to design a capital-intensive landmark building — say, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House or Meinhard von Gerkan’s Chongqing Grand Theater. Officials may also clear huge public squares in front of municipal government buildings, construct avant-garde statues largely devoid of any local cultural or historical significance, and erect “central business districts” that resemble cut-and-pasted copies of the Manhattan skyline. The natural result of this is cities that are indistinguishable from one another, something that continues to be a source of public complaint.
“Refinement” also means clean urban environments, a sense of order, and standards for the appearance of residences and street advertisements... Urban managers don’t want their cities referred to as zangluancha — a colloquial term used for anything substandard that comprises the characters for “dirty,” “messy,” and “inferior.”...
"... and hacking his phone and Netflix account, according to fits of delusions detailed in police reports," the NY Daily News reports.
When confronted by cops in a parking lot near Peoria during the 2016 incident, Tazewell County Sheriff's Office deputies said Reinking was convinced the singer... was following him. He believed she wanted to meet him at a nearby Dairy Queen.
He tried meeting Swift at the fast food joint but she yelled at him from across the street and bolted, according to his version of events. He gave chase "in an attempt to get her to stop harassing him," the police report read.
"Taylor climbed up the side of a building and Travis followed. However, when he reached the rooftop, Taylor was gone," according to the report.
As the candidates in an already large field search for ways to separate themselves from the pack four months ahead of the August primary, some Democratic insiders aren't pleased by the latest developments — but others say the continued interest in running is just a sign of strong tailwinds for Democrats going into November....
There are 11 candidates at this point. The newest one is Mike Crute ("co-host of the political Devil's Advocates radio show, owner of WRRD "Resistance Radio" and a Madison-area property manager"):
Crute, 47, said he's getting in because none of the candidates already in the field — which has been growing since last summer — are demonstrating the "boldness of candidacy" it would take for a Democrat to beat Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a skilled politician with a strong campaign infrastructure.
"It’s not that there are not people I admire in the field. They’re all really nice people," Crute said. "But Scott Walker, in my opinion, is an S.O.B. and if you are not willing to at least act that part when necessary, then you probably cannot beat him in a head-to-head matchup."
Ha ha, very funny. That's one way to stand out in a crowd. Ask Donald Trump.
"Mike Crute, doing what he is doing, makes this look like a circus. It is not serious," the insider said. "This field is naturally winnowing itself out and he is crowding it to serve his own ego. It’s a stunt, and it is bad for the race."
But it is a circus. So why not be a first-rate clown. Again: it worked for Trump.
Prior to Crute's announcement, 38-year-old corporate attorney Josh Pade announced his own plans to join the field... Shortly after Pade and Crute joined the race, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was considering another run.
Now, that's funny. Barrett is the one Walker beat in 2010, when he first became governor, and then beat again in 2012 when he was subjected to a recall.
But [a] Dem strategist — who voted for Barrett in 2010 and 2012 — feared a Barrett campaign would harm the party's chances. "He offers neither a fresh face nor fresh ideas," the strategist said.
Do any of the 11 already in the race have "fresh ideas"? Really, I'm just asking. Please, tell me in the comments: What are the "fresh ideas" offered by any Democrats in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race? If there aren't any, why not be out and proud? Your face is an unfresh face, and we should love that old face. Old faces are lovable too. And if you're destined to lose to Scott Walker — which I think you are — why not go down gracefully with the man who's got the most experience losing to Scott Walker?
"Not that you shouldn’t be able to have both. If I were voting, I just don’t want bull—-. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent. And politics has a reputation of not being that, right?”
That's what the Canadian pop star — who was just on "RuPaul's Drag Race" last week — said in an interview The Guardian published yesterday morning, WaPo reports. Social media got right on her case with a hashtag, #ShaniaTwainCancelled, and by evening poor Shania — the erstwhile lover of no bullshit — had apologized.
Here's the 4 tweetsworth of apology/"apology":
I would like to apologise to anybody I have offended...
She begins with classic nonapology words.
... in a recent interview with the Guardian relating to the American President. The question caught me off guard.
She blurted out that she likes the way Trump seems to speak his mind, his spontaneous transparency, but her own following of his model, just saying what she thinks straight out is something to regret and bemoan. She didn't have time to think it all through and plan it all out, so she hopes what she said won't count against her, as she retreats into the opaque, evasive world that she'd just decried.
As a Canadian, I regret answering this unexpected question without giving my response more context (1/4)
What's it like to regret as a Canadian? Is it a special sort of regret? I'm not picking up the applicable stereotype. Is she trying to say I don't vote in your elections so I should not have joined the debate about your leader? Or does she mean Canadians are supposed to be especially circumspect and polite — she who just said "Do you want straight or polite?" I guess you got your answer, at least from the "hundreds" of tweeters who jumped on that hashtag. They want polite — more than polite. They want silence, unless you're anti-Trump.
I am passionately against discrimination of any kind and hope it’s clear from the choices I have made, and the people I stand with, that I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President (2/4)
She won't get in trouble for that ridiculous absolute statement about moral beliefs.
I was trying to explain, in response to a question about the election, that my limited understanding was that the President talked to a portion of America like an accessible person they could relate to, as he was NOT a politician (3/4)
Oh! Here come the deplorables again — that "portion of America" — those dopes. Shania sees that those people could relate to that man who's so horrible she can't share one moral belief with him.
My answer was awkward, but certainly should not be taken as representative of my values nor does it mean I endorse him.
But you said you'd have voted for him. Do you mean you loathed Hillary? Because that would make sense of these remarks. Not that I need any sense to be made other than you got disciplined by the Trump haters and you caved. Why speak out at all if you're so vulnerable to push back?
I make music to bring people together. My path will always be one of inclusivity, as my history shows. (4/4)
Were those hashtagging tweeters fans of your music who know your history or just Trump haters ready to jump on any entertainment figure who fails to maintain the required hostility?
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