"Ann: Used to be a frequent reader. But, it has become a waste of time trying to understand what you are attempting to cryptically express in your blog posts these days."

"I wish to stay informed, not play clever head games. If you have something to say, just say it. I'm too busy to play your silly exercises. Otherwise, find a more productive use of your and my time. As judge and jury and former reader, I find you in Contempt. Case dismissed. Goodbye!"

Someone wrote that and emailed it to me. It's not a name I recognize, just an email address that's a stray collection of numbers and letters.  

I laughed out loud at "I wish to stay informed, not play clever head games." People read this blog to "stay informed"? That seems ill-informed. And as for that "judge and jury" and "Contempt/Case dismissed" business — that can't be a lawyer. Must just be someone cranked up about my being a (former) law professor and thinking I'm vulnerable to criticisms containing legalistic lingo. 

But you need a specific charge if you want to find me guilty, and what is it? Failure to keep you informed?  Not having something to say and just saying it? The crime of playing clever head games? The infliction of silly exercises? Cryptic expression?

Oh, there I go, asking questions when I don't allow comments. Oddly enough, the complaint you see above never mentions the abolition of comments. Is it possible the person thinks the blog "has become a waste of time" because there are no comments anymore — that the comments used to help him understand what I was cryptically expressing? Ha ha — I can't understand what the emailer is cryptically expressing. And now here I am imposing it on you!

FROM THE EMAIL: Mary writes: 

"Men are exposing their legs in public as a reaction to our public behaviour being so tightly policed in public for the last year. They want to feel the wind’s tactile caress on their skin."

Said Prof Andrew Groves, the director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster, quoted in "Micro shorts for men: how short is too short?/With lockdown easing, will you be following Paul Mescal and Harry Styles and baring more leg than usual this summer?" (The Guardian). 

This isn't just another men-in-shorts article. This is the news that men are going back to the kind of short shorts runners wore in the 1970s. 

And it's a Gen Z thing. So says Shane C Kurup, a Men’s Health’s editor: “They are the most socially aware, health-conscious generation we’ve ever seen. There’s a strong emphasis among this generation of being comfortable in your own skin and not blindly conforming to a prescribed body type.” 

Great! I'm looking forward to a clown show of atrocious fashion. And I intend to enjoy the fun of the Z kids annoying the millennials. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Amadeus 48 writes:

Your short note on shorts impelled me to dig up the following quote from George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier.” Orwell got so many things right he seems like a prophet:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth [a new model town favoured by progressive intellectuals] when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got onto it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long gray hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured, ‘Socialists’, as one should say, ‘Red Indians’.”

So, the kiddies of Gen Z may find that their ideas have consequences.

"As the only Asian American woman on the academic faculty, I can’t imagine any other faculty member would be treated with this kind of disrespect and utter lack of due process."

Writes Yale Law School professor Amy Chua.

Some of you may have seen the YDN hit job on me, full of false allegations. I did not violate any agreement, nor have I been hosting wild parties during COVID. On the contrary, what I HAVE done is comforted a small handful of students who reached out to me in moments of crisis... pic.twitter.com/9tOoOu9p6G

— Amy Chua (@amychua) April 8, 2021

Megyn Kelly reacts:

Now they’re trying to cancel @amychua for absolutely nothing. Make no mistake: this is retribution for her support of Bret Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting. If @YaleLawSch has any backbone, it will stand up for one of its most beloved teachers & tell the damn whiners to sit down. https://t.co/2vwLGWmI9w

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) April 8, 2021

At Lawyers, Guns, and Money, lawprof Paul Campos goes on the attack in a blog post that begins "Rules are for the little people, chapter infinity":

Meanwhile Chua and [her husband lawprof Jed] Rubenfeld continue to get paid collectively close to a million bucks a year to basically not do their jobs any more, but apparently being asked to at least avoid getting drunk around the kiddies is just too much to ask of our best and brightest.

I can't possibly know exactly what the facts are. I've read Chua's letter, and I don't think the law school has put out its version of the facts. As a law school professor, I was never someone who invited students to my home, so I tend to admire the lawprofs who do extend this kind of sociability to their students. I would find it very difficult to do, and I assume that, generally, students would love this kind of festivity. 

But I could imagine professors inviting students into their home for the wrong reasons. There could be the Harvey Weinstein of law professors. I visualize a continuum of motives for professorly parties, from unselfishly magnanimous to utterly monstrous. But where's the line on the continuum where the professor should know this isn't right and the law school should intervene and say no more parties for you? Why did Yale intervene? I think it intervened and entered into some sort of no-parties agreement with Chua and Rudenfeld, and now, it seems, the question is whether the agreement has been violated. That's the basic factual question here. I'm not looking at the agreement, but Chua does seem to say that she has continued to have students over to her house. 

In her letter (embedded in the tweet, above), Chua justifies what she did based on anti-Asian violence and racism. She's the Asian-American female law professor, and students in her diversity category need support, so... there's an implied exception to the agreement? Or... interpret the agreement properly, and there's no violation? I'd have to see the agreement and know what, exactly, she did. 

Does the agreement refer to "parties" and define parties? Is the law school dean following the students' interpretation of the agreement? Do the students even have the text of the agreement?

IN THE EMAIL: Tank writes:

The horror of efforts to connect the Pittsburgh massacre to Trump.

I will just give one example of the kind of commentary that feels like an immoral elevation of politics over humanity: "Trump’s Response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting and His Obsession with the Word 'Frankly'" by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. First, overuse of a word, a verbal tic, is not an "obsession." Second, 11 people were shot to death; who cares about Trump's repetition of a word? I like to do language analysis, but 11 people were murdered. What seems like an "obsession" here is the desire to get after Trump with anything and everything that comes up. Can you just stop for one day?

I'll just quote the fifth of the five paragraphs in the linked piece. Was this worth saying? Does it even make sense?

Before opening fire on the Tree of Life congregants, Bowers posted a message to Gab, a right-wing social network that, like other online forums for extremists, casts itself as an embattled bastion of free speech. “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers complained on the site. “There is no #maga as long as there is a kike infestation.” The gunman’s accusation evoked a riff-cum-vocabulary lesson from Trump’s rally in Houston on Monday. “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much,” the President explained, before asserting, “I’m a nationalist.” The “frankly” in this case—meant to expose the dirty truth about globalists, and to preface Trump’s oath of fealty to tribal politics—reads as far more honest than anything the President said on Saturday. He is frankest at his rallies and on Twitter. There is a difference, of course, between saying what you mean and saying what is true. Trump is not practicing frankness when he deplores hatred. He is being frank when he foments resentments that are phantasmal. For him, falsehoods carry the weight of facts, whereas reality is “truly unimaginable.”

You can connect anything to anything if you want, and when it's that hard to do, you must really want it. Did Katy Waldman look back on that paragraph and think, God, am I smart. What a language master I am, unlike Trump who keeps saying "frankly"?

"He is being frank when he foments resentments that are phantasmal" — I can't believe she didn't get out the thesaurus and find a synonym for "resentments" that began with an "f" sound. Let me try... He is being frank when he foments fuckeries that are phantasmal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 said:

A frank assessment of the functional flim-flam of this over-exposed flunky writing for that fortress of fatuousness, fripperies, and follies, the New Yorker, fatigues and, frankly, frightens me, fragile flower of fortune that I am.

A frank fermentation of the functional flim-flam of furious florid flunky Flair flicks...

I called it an "apparently serious" question because it was selected for serious discussion in an advice column in The New York Times.

Here's my post from August 13th, "I’m riddled with shame. White shame.... I feel like there is no 'me' outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity" (the post title is a quote from the letter writer to "The Sugars," who write a "radically empathic advice column" at the NYT).

I assumed the NYT would check out a thing that reads like a parody before presenting it as real, but commenters immediately jumped on it. The second comment, from David Begley, is "Fake letter published by the Fake News."

And Amadeus 48 wrote:

This letter is a send-up all the way. It is masterful trolling that exposes the idiocy of the Sugars and their phony empathy shop. The right answer is always vote Dem and feel guity. Boo-hoo, poor little you.

This morning, I'm seeing Instapundit links to Tom Maguire, "Is this letter – the wokest letter ever – for real, or just something I read it in the flailing NY Times?" In the Instapundit comments, the top-rated comment is, "Yeah. Troll level Galactic Overlord." And then: "If you have to bust your ass trying to figure out if something is a parody, it's the real thing that has the problem."

I check back to the original column to see if the NYT has backed off on the authenticity of the letter. No. The thing is still sitting there in its apparently serious form that was enough to cause me to set my suspicion to the side. I've been asked a hundred times on this blog, why are you still reading the NYT? The idea is that I should have at long last had enough, that I should have by now experienced a definitive enlightenment and cried out that's it and thrown the thing aside never to pick it up again.

But without the NYT where would I go? I need a normal newspaper, and this is as close as I can get. There is no steppingstone to leap to. I need an American newspaper that covers the news comprehensively and in depth and has at least something to do with the ideals of professional journalism. I deal with the limitations by blogging, and blogging keeps me looking for and at the limitations.

What's the alternative? I can only see going into full abstention mode, like the man described in the wonderful NYT article, "The Man Who Knew Too Little" (but he did it because Donald Trump became President; I'd be doing it because the news is too tainted to read anymore).

The Russian government-affiliated troll farm was "sophisticated" enough to Facebook-target Ferguson and Baltimore with a "Black Lives Matter" ad.

CNN reports.

"This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West," Steve Hall, the former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst, said. "It shows they the [sic] level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues."...

[Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos] said, "the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum -- touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights."

Sowing racial discord — that's what we do for ourselves. How dare the Russians get in on the action! But if they did, were they trying to defeat Hillary and elect Trump or just screwing with us more generically?

In the end, we might think that Hillary lost because not enough black people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin felt like coming out and voting, so maybe there was some effect, but why would just a little more racial discord make a difference?

I'd like to see these ads, but if somehow the Russians figured out how to make a devastating race-based ad, I think there would have been Americans copying that message and running it on their own and we'd have been seeing it going viral on YouTube. If it were so powerful, it would not have remained targeted to Ferguson and Baltimore. It would have broken loose and gone national, and we'd all have been talking about it.

I found that article after encountering the Pajamas Media presentation of the issue, which was linked by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. Pajamas Media says — inaccurately, I think — "Narrative Fail: Russia Facebook Ads Showed Support for Black Lives Matter, Clinton." Here's a screenshot that sums up why I can't stand to read Pajamas Media:

It was Hall, who's not a Senator, who talked about "the level of sophistication of [the] targeting." The only quoted Senator is Burr, a Republican. So who was absurd? I don't know, but it seems that there was some sophistication — enough to know that you can screw with Americans by stirring us up about race and perhaps to see the potential to stoke cynicism about voting among black people.  I guess it is absurd to infer that Russians couldn't reach that modest level of sophistication on their own and another huge leap to get to the idea that Trump must have helped them. But what Democratic Senator suggested that?

The most interesting part of this to me is: If it really is so horrible to stir up racial discord and cynicism about voting, why is it done by so many Americans — Americans who present themselves as virtuous? You can't say those Russians are outrageous if they're just spreading the same message that you yourself have been spreading.

And now, I can see that I'm caught up in a paradox. I seem to be saying that the Democrats have been spreading a message that is damaging to their cause. But the paradox is avoided if you see that the left isn't monolithic. There are people the Democrats would like to think they own, but they don't. If the Russians helped deactivate these would-be Hillary voters, they colluded with Bernie Sanders, not Trump.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 informs me that the greenish text does not relate to the article where it appears. It's a teaser hotlinked to another article! That is, it's not a highlight meant to draw me into the text where it is embedded, but the sort of thing that I'm used to seeing over in a sidebar. Ridiculous! What a stupid squandering of the reader's time and good will.

Okay, here's the other article, which has the title you see in the greenish writing in my screen grab. The Democratic Senator is Richard Blumenthal:

"This micro-targeting required sophistication, knowledge, and a great deal of data and research," Blumenthal told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "And the real question, as you've just asked it, is how did they know how to micro-target?.... There is speculation, to be absolutely blunt, that they received that help from the Trump campaign, which had a great deal of digital information to enable its own targeting," Blumenthal said. "So the question is, was there collusion between this Russian internet agency, a St. Petersburg firm of trolls, and the Trump campaign?"

That is pretty pathetic. I love the way "speculation" simply exists, as if it were an entity, living and breathing and able to concoct conspiracy theories without any human... collusion. And I love the jackassery of claiming to be "absolutely blunt" while avoiding saying who is doing the speculating. Is it him, right there, on Wolf's show?

Why would you need a "great deal of digital information" to find black people in Ferguson and Baltimore? Even if it weren't a matter of common knowledge, isn't Facebook designed to do the targeting for anyone who ponies up the cash to advertise?

"Speaking of Trump, I notice he has been channeling Tom Waits."

Writes Amadeus 48 (in the comments, here). He quotes this Tom Waits song:

He's got the fire and the fury at his command
But you don't have to worry, just hold onto Jesus' hand.
We'll all be safe from Satan when the thunder rolls.
We just gotta help me keep the devil way down in the hole.

I think both men were channeling the Old Testament:

Isaiah 42:25 So he poured upon him the heat of his anger and the fury of war; it set him on fire all around, but he did not understand; it burned him, but he did not take it to heart.

Isaiah 66:15 For the Lord will come in fire, and his chariots like the whirlwind, to pay back his anger in fury, and his rebuke in flames of fire.

Lamentations 2:4 He has bent his bow like an enemy, with his right hand set like a foe; he has killed all in whom we took pride in the tent of daughter Zion; he has poured out his fury like fire.

Ezekiel 19:12 But it was plucked up in fury, cast down to the ground; the east wind dried it up; its fruit was stripped off, its strong stem was withered; the fire consumed it.

Ezekiel 23:25 I will direct my indignation against you, in order that they may deal with you in fury. They shall cut off your nose and your ears, and your survivors shall fall by the sword. They shall seize your sons and your daughters, and your survivors shall be devoured by fire.

And the New Testament:

Hebrews 10:26-37 For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.... For we know the one who said, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.”

ADDED: Possibly related: An op-ed in today's NYT titled "Christianity Does Not Justify Trump’s ‘Fire and Fury.'" I didn't realize anyone had been arguing that, and I'd just noticed that "fury of fire" in the New Testament. The author, Steven Paulikas, is an Episcopal priest in Park Slope (Brooklyn, NY).

Apparently, a Baptist minister (Robert Jeffress) had asserted that God gave Trump the power to "take out" Kim Jong-Un. Paulikas finds that "shockingly uninformed and dangerous." Jeffress stressed Paul's statement (in Romans 13) that existing governmental authorities are instituted by God. Paulikas stresses the next thing Paul says: "love one another" and "the one who loves another has fulfilled the law."

There has been discussion about whether the president’s bold words on Kim were improvised or part of a strategy to push China into cracking down on North Korea. Jeffress’s comments reveal a third dimension: a corrupted theology that could supply a misguided moral thrust to the president’s potential course of action. Seen in this light, the vision of “fire and fury” should be taken very seriously and at face value, an apocalyptic statement resulting from a highly unorthodox theology with no basis in the Bible.

"When we found this house, it became, like, the clubhouse, where guys would go every day and hang out... like a street gang."

"And it was a place to go, like a workshop... And this had been a dream of mine: If we could only have the clubhouse, where we could go every day, and we could lock ourselves away from the world and create something that we are meant to do, that we are on a mission to do."

I'll leave that quote unattributed for while. I didn't transcribe it to make a guessing game, but apart from the context, it's some fascinating psychology, perhaps distinctly masculine.

ADDED: Meade read this post and, without reading any comments, immediately gave the right answer: "He's talking about Big Pink."

Earnest Prole, at 7:30 a.m., gives a wrong answer that I believe is a humorous way to reveal he knows the right answer:

Obviously you’re referring to Hell House, an old cabin with a tin roof located in the Florida woods where the band One Percent wrote and perfected their music in the blazing Southern heat. You may know One Percent as the band later called Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sadly, Hell House and Lynyrd Skynyrd took the night train to the big adios, as we all shortly will.

3 minutes later, perhaps taking Earnest Prole's comments as a prompt, Amadeus 48 spells out the correct answer:

Robbie Robertson talking about "The Band" and music from Big Pink?

Here's Robbie Robertson on the Marc Maron podcast that went up this morning.