"Your kindness, encouragement, and light-heartedness have written a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading."

Wrote Representative Chuck Edwards, quoted in "Scoop: Rep. Chuck Edwards singled out young female aides for special attention" (Axios).

I've got to give Edwards credit for writing. I like "a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading." It was enough to make me look up where he went to college. Wikipedia says he "attended" Blue Ridge Community College. I think "attended" means he did not graduate. I asked A.I. if that sentence was likely to have been written by A.I., and the answer was no. I'm told that sentence is "poetic but not overly generic or perfectly balanced like much AI romantic prose."

I wondered which party has the burden of this problematic member of Congress and it took me so long to find the answer that I assumed he was a Democrat, but no, he's a Republican. You only get the info in the second-to-last sentence, which tells us that "Edwards... is a top Democratic target in November." I misread that at first.

Edwards succeeded Madison Cawthorn. He was a complex chapter. Remember?

ADDED: I'm not making a new tag for Chuck Edwards, but I already had a tag for Madison Cawthorn. The last time I used it was October 10, 2024, and in that post, as in this one, I asked if you remember him. That was right before the last election, when Elon Musk was proclaiming "I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA!" At that time, Wikipedia said that Dark MAGA was "a belief promoted by former U.S. representative Madison Cawthorn that former president Trump would return to power 'with a vengeance.'" And: "Railing against 'the cowardly and weak members of our own party,' Cawthorn wrote [in May 2022]: 'It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command.'"

Does anyone say "Dark MAGA" anymore? Maybe our eyes have gotten used to the dark. Trump did return to power with a vengeance. 

By the way, Cawthorn is currently running to get back into Congress, but this time it's a different district, Florida's 19th congressional district. His old district was North Carolina's 11th district, so Edwards's difficulties are no help to him.

Mamdani's notion of "collectivism" as "warmth" finds its way into the WaPo editorial about Venezuela.

I'm reading "Trump’s bold capture of Maduro was a victory for America. What’s next?" by The Editorial Board of The Washington Post. That's the front page headline. Inside it's "Justice in Venezuela/The next challenge is setting the country up for long-term success."

The editorial ends: "For years, Maduro was a symbol of the false warmth of Latin American collectivism. Now he should spend the rest of his life in a humane American prison. His downfall is good news."

That can't be unrelated to Mamdani's recent assertion: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

Look for more "collectivism" as "warmth" rhetoric. I'm not making a new tag for that. Not yet. I'm sticking with the tags "socialism" and "hotness." How absurd is that?

Anyway, the WaPo editors seem rather positive about Trump's action in Venezuela. The mood at The New York Times is different: "Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise." It ends:

"There are cultural norms... Takashima said. A thunderous sneeze is a learned behavior..."

"... and 'you hardly ever hear anybody sneezing boisterously in Japan,' where [otolaryngologist] Takashima was born. 'It’s frowned upon to create such a loud noise, to bother the public' Takashima said... 'There’s nothing wrong with a loud sneeze,' [some guy] said. 'People’s perception that I, or anyone else, is a loud sneezer is entirely subjective.' But Rob Blatt, 43, the co-owner of a bar in Peekskill, New York, said he would like to be able to control his sneeze when he’s driving because he knows someone who got in a fender bender after sneezing behind the wheel. Blatt said he sneezes 'like the Tasmanian devil.... It’s a full-body experience, for better or worse.... It’s like a gunshot going off.'"

"Sneeze smarter, not louder: The science of a quieter sneeze" (WaPo).

Maybe you enjoy the kind of freely expressive sneezing that's frowned on in Japan. You have to want to change, but if you do, the advice is:

"The Natural Law Party was founded in 1992 on a platform that included promotion of transcendental meditation, responsible gun use, flat taxes and organic farming...."

"For 22 years, [Doug] Dern, a bankruptcy lawyer with a small practice outside Detroit, has almost single-handedly kept the Natural Law Party on Michigan’s ballot."Each cycle, the party runs a handful of candidates in obscure state races to meet Michigan’s minimum polling requirements for minor parties. 'Keep that ballot access,' Mr. Dern, 62, said in an interview on Friday. 'Because someday, a candidate is going to come along who’s going to be perfect for it. Someday, the third parties are going to be hot.'... "

I'm reading "How R.F.K. Jr. Got on the Michigan Ballot, With Only Two Votes/The independent candidate persuaded a tiny party to give him its line on the ballot in a key 2024 battleground state, sparing him a costly, arduous organizing effort" (NYT).

"Mr. Kennedy was formally nominated at a brief convention held Wednesday morning in Mr. Dern’s law office. The only two attendees were Mr. Dern and the party’s secretary.... Mr. Dern... has worked as a stage magician and also has a law practice for drunken-driving arrests.... 'I’ve just been plugging away, year after year, making sure there are people on the ballot,' he said."

Nothing goes together like transcendental meditation, drunk driving, and magic.

Thanks to Doug Dern for keeping the Natural Law fire burning, lending a hand to Bobby, and throwing a monkey wrench into the 2-party system.

"Perhaps the portrayal of Black idleness will always be, if not haunted, then framed by a broader context that makes it seem like an act of resistance rather than a simple fact of life."

"'When we talk about Black people and time,' [one curator] says, 'we’re talking about stolen labor, stolen time—and each of these images steals it back.'... [The curators] show that Black people around the world have been reposing, alone and in each other’s arms, for a long time...."

Writes Emily Lordi, in "The Visual Power of Black Rest/Black people are generally pictured as doing anything but relaxing—as being attacked, or agitating, or performing. The Black Rest Project aims to widen the lens" (The New Yorker).

"The show is part of a broader initiative called the Black Rest Project... [which] will explore the complexities of rest for Black people, and challenge the binary assumption that one can either slow down or make a living, can either struggle or sleep (a myth encoded in the activist mandate to 'stay woke')."

"Allegra Lorenzotti started the Send Olives Instagram account in 2020 as a way to catalogue and rank the various olives she encountered."

"She says the account is tagged 'at least ten times a day' by people who want to share photos of their 'olive porn.'... [At Café Mars, the chefs] offer theirs encased in wiggly cubes of negroni-flavored gelatin... Then, to bookend dinner, dessert features an olive-oil marble cake inspired by the black-and-white poundcakes sold at the city’s bodegas. A purée of salt-cured black olives offers the visual contrast, and a deep flavor that can trick diners into thinking they’re tasting chocolate. On Instagram, the author and recipe developer Molly Baz kicked off the summer by sharing a cake of her own with sugared Castelvetrano olives baked into the batter.... 'Olives are the new cherries,' remarked an illustrator friend who goes by Doodle Deli, and DMs me a new olive-related product almost every week: Olive lovers can buy a $68 olive-bowl tank from Lisa Says Gah, a $6,000 gold olive ring from Brent Neale, or a $60 olive pillow at Big Night.... 'Photo-dump culture and olive culture are connected,' says Dora Grossman-Weir, another charter member of the Olive Night parties...."

I clicked on this front page insanity at New York Magazine:

What is the best use of one's time? Are you always maximizing your time and doing high-quality time? Are you annoyed at other people's pastimes in proportion to how low they really are?

These are questions that occurred to me as I was participating in the comments to the last post, the one about TikTok.

Somebody compared TikTok to television and to slot machines. Then I compared it to playing video games and to "exploring" the "worlds" of Meta.

How meticulous are you about how you spend your time? How critical of others are you? And what do you think people should do with their time? What is your hierarchy of how to spend time? I'm not asking how do you spend your time. I'm asking — because I want to understand criticisms of how people spend their time — for a list — from high to low — of how people ought to spend their time.

What is the #1 best use of your time? You can make a subjective or an objective list — your time in particular or just any person's time. Categorize it any way you want — on whatever level of generality works for you. I'm assuming that making this list will be a good use of your time (and mine). The list of valuably spent time can be short or long (depending on your cleverness with the categories and your notions about the importance of length in contrast to concision).

"Internet turns on Jensen Karp, ‘manipulative’ shrimp tail cereal man."

NY Post headline.

I don't have a tag for "crustaceans." I have "lobster" and "crabs," but I don't have "shrimp." That boxes me in tag-wise. It's not as though I haven't written about shrimp before. 

There's this, in 2018: 

"Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation..."

"... according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful. John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees. His inquiry is the third known investigation focused on the opening of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign into possible ties between Russia’s election interference and Trump associates. The department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is separately examining investigators’ use of wiretap applications and informants and whether any political bias against Mr. Trump influenced investigative decisions. And John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, has been reviewing aspects of the Russia investigation. His findings have not been announced."

The NYT reports.

I'm finally making a new tag for this. My longstanding tag for the Russia investigation has been "Trump troubles," and I would be having Althouse troubles if I used it on this post.

(The tag "I am making a new tag for this" is not new.)

ADDED: The last time I made a new tag and commemorated the occasion with "I am making a new tag for this" it was "Zuckerberg rhetoric." That was back in June 2017: "I only make a special 'rhetoric' tag for a person when I'm seriously following a run for President and I expect a lot of material."

The second-to-last time I used the "I am making a new tag for this" tag was for "nervous": "I've noticed what I think may be a significant trend in reporting in the Trump era: reporting it as news that somebody is — perhaps only by slanted inference — nervous." That reporting trend was detected in May 2017. But, like the Zuckerberg candidacy, it didn't take off.

Or did I just stop noticing? Unlike a Zuckerberg candidacy, it's the kind of thing you could adjust to and accept as normal.

AND: There are only 2 other uses of the "I am making a new tag for this tag": "furry" and "artisans." Maybe some day all these tags will arise in the same post. Who knows where the origins-of-Russia-investigation investigation may lead?

IN THE COMMENTS: Nobody said:

Comey publicly stated that there was no crime. Obviously he was using his position as a former prosecutor with corrupt intent to undermine this investigation and obstruct justice. He sent Martha Stewart to prison for protesting her innocence publicly, after all, so enjoy your time on the business end of the political weapon you built, Comey! Be sure not to say or do anything in response that could conceivably be interpreted as interfering in any way with the “justice” of this investigation!

Remember too that it’s obstruction even if there really is no crime!

But don't expect a MSM report that Comey is nervous. By the way, the post where I first made the nervous tag was about Comey. The Daily Beast had reported that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was "nervous" about "a possible Comey memo," and I said: "Maybe Comey should be nervous...."

It's what you call poetic justice, and there's no obstructing that. It flows quite freely on its own.