"Cats and dogs have an outsize carbon footprint, mostly because of their carnivorous diet."

"If the pet food industry, which mainly feeds dogs and cats, were a country, it would rank as the 60th-highest greenhouse gas emitter, equivalent to the Philippines. Rabbits, by contrast, leave a minimal pawprint. They eat small amounts of hay and otherwise discarded vegetables. Their waste can be used as fertilizer in gardens...."

From "Why you should consider bunnies as your next pet/'It’s like having a vegan cat'" (WaPo).

From the comments, from someone who said she had a rabbit as a pet:

"Finally, a novel about the travails of a successful White guy! What could pull the heartstrings of our afflicted nation tighter than a story of brief, emotional setback suffered by a handsome movie star?"

The first 2 sentences of "Ethan Hawke turns his acting experience — and past infidelities — into brilliant fiction" (WaPo). 

The reviewer, Ron Charles, also seems to be a white male, so his sarcasm may reflect his own anguish at elite America's languishing interest in how white men think and feel. 

... Hawke is... known as the man who cheated on Uma Thurman and offered loutish excuses about the sexual needs of great men like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and him. 

Now, some 15 years after all that cosmic embarrassment, Hawke has published a novel called “A Bright Ray of Darkness.” It’s about a young movie star who got caught cheating on his stunningly gorgeous wife. This recycled gossip is tiresome, but what’s most irritating about “A Bright Ray of Darkness” is that it’s really good. If you can ignore the author’s motive for creating such a sensitive and endearing cad, you’ll find here a novel that explores the demands of acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and insight.

That title!  "A Bright Ray of Darkness" — seems like a teenager's idea of profundity, and yet this guy gets his novel published by Knopf and praised like mad in The Washington Post. Clicking to Amazon, I see he got a blurb from Patti Smith. She called it "riveting." Riveting! This towering achievement comes in spite of the burden of being a handsome, rich, white man in America today. 

Amazon does not allow us to look inside the book, so I have no opportunity to see what kind of writing is drawing this attention. I search the review for an example of the author's prose. Here: "My life as a performer is at the absolute core of my sense of self-worth. Inside the play it felt possible that I was not a person defined by his adultery, or his unloving parents, or his lies, his failure as a father." You tell me: Is this man held back or pushed ahead by his status as a handsome white male?

"A Bright Ray of Darkness" makes me think of that old song. We were listening to this yesterday: "Darkness, Darkness"...

 

You know me. If there's one topic I've been avoiding in crazy present-day America, it's the "My Pillow Guy." But jokes were made on hearing that first line: "Darkness, Darkness/Be my pillow...."

ADDED: Speaking of Ron Charles and highly praised white male novelists...

AND: In the comments, John Henry reminds me that Amazon lets you download the first 20 pages, so I did that and came up with this extract. I'll let you judge the possible brilliance for yourself. Is this Knopf-level fiction-writing?

The end of art: "We have so many mentally deranged people out there. We do not want a movie that will give them any ideas."

I respectully disagree. We have so many mentally deranged people out there. We do not want a movie that will give them any ideas. I'm happy that they decided to pull it. If that makes me stupid....so be it.

— Trudy (@trudy_lecein) August 10, 2019

I'm objecting to the big proposition: There are so many mentally deranged people out there, so let's censor anything that will give them any ideas.

I wish people would listen to what they are saying.

Now, maybe there's a nuanced smaller proposition that isn't the antithesis of freedom of speech. Is there a very particular sort of person (as opposed to the "mentally deranged people," which could be millions of us) and a very particular sort of graphic presentation (as opposed to whatever gives "any ideas")?

This reminds me of the anti-pornography movement of the late 80s and early 90s. The assertion was: Ban all graphic depiction of sex because it is causally connected to rape:

Robin Morgan summarizes this idea with her often-quoted statement, "Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice."

Anti-pornography feminists charge that pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, and reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment. [Catharine] MacKinnon argued that pornography leads to an increase in sexual violence against women through fostering rape myths. Such rape myths include the belief that women really want to be raped and that they mean yes when they say no. Additionally, according to MacKinnon, pornography desensitizes viewers to violence against women, and this leads to a progressive need to see more violence in order to become sexually aroused, an effect she claims is well documented.

There's very little enthusiasm today about banning pornography, even with a heightened awareness and activism about rape. Why? I'd guess it's because pornography is so important to the people who consume it, because it's so widely and easily available that it can't be stopped, and because real-life experience doesn't seem to bear out the the causal connection. But it's possible that we actually care about freedom of speech.

These days, the issue is violence, specifically gun violence, and the would-be censors are talking about movies and video games. But they haven't been talking about government regulation. They're just using speech against speech. And that's how free-speech works. There's outrage expressed in social media, and the big corporation voluntarily withdraws the film: "Universal Scraps 'The Hunt' Release Following Gun Violence Uproar."

The studio's decision came a day after President Trump took aim at the film, saying it was "made to inflame and cause chaos." The story follows a group of elites hunting "deplorables" for sport.

The studio's Saturday announcement came a day after President Donald Trump took aim at the film — though he didn't name its title — and Hollywood, saying on Twitter, "Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves “Elite,” but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!"

Now, many people speak against Trump's speech, and they argue a causal connection to violence. They would like him to voluntarily shut up. But he won't.

To state the obvious: The speech we hear is the speech of those who speak. Silence only creates better conditions for the speech of those who speak to be heard.

Just last night, Meade and I were talking about the old adage, "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." You don't hear that one too much anymore, perhaps because all the people who live by that rule are invisible.

IN THE COMMENTS: John Henry quotes something that I brought up in the conversation Meade and I had last night — the famous counter-aphorism attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, "If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit next to me." I said it was something she had emblazoned on a throw pillow. So let's read what Quote Investigator has to say about it:

Wearisome headline of the day: "How gender bias is shaping the 2020 Democratic primary."

The article is in The Washington Post and is by Amber Phillips. I will read it so you don't have to.

Summary:  Hillary lost in 2016, and she blamed misogyny. If a woman is the Democratic Party nominee in 2020, she might lose too, and it might be because of misogyny. Therefore people might worry that the candidate shouldn't be a woman, because she might lose because of misogyny.

There's some evidence some people support Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren but worry that she can't win against Trump, and that translates to: "I’d vote for a woman for president, but I’m not sure my neighbor would."

So how is gender bias shaping the 2020 Democratic primary? The theory is that Democrats deciding which candidate to support consider electability and factor in the misogyny they think other people will bring to their decisionmaking.

I wonder if articles like "How gender bias is shaping the 2020 Democratic primary" are shaping the Democratic primary. What if the problem Harris and Warren are having is not so much that anyone is actually biased against them because they are women but that we've heard so much about bias against women that we're imagining the bias of other people and holding it against them?

But don't look for the wearisome flow of articles about gender bias to stop. And that's how you get more Biden. And Sanders. And Beto. And Buttigieg. It's the devious cycle of male supremacy! Detect it, talk about, and you'll help it work. Just a theory — skewed by weariness.

IN THE COMMENTS: John Henry writes:

I don't see why electability is an issue at all for the Demmies.

Unless something unforseeable happens, they seem to have no chance at all to beat PDJT in 2020.

They might as well go bold and make a statement.

Or, they can just figure it is Sleepy's turn and nominate him warts and all.

I agree that Trump is on track to win, but that's a reason not to nominate a woman. If a woman is the candidate and she loses, then you have 2 female candidates in a row who lost. That will reinforce the belief that women are hard to elect. Pick a man, so when he loses, it will facilitate the rise of women in the future. And Sleepy gets his turn.

Beto O'Rourke's anti-Wall ad reframes the question around upscale American interests.

It's not about the longings of poverty-stricken outsiders anymore. Look!

pic.twitter.com/XONeh8HUf1

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) December 28, 2018

It's about the aesthetics of the environment, Big Bend National Park-type vistas of the Rio Grande, the seizing of property from Americans through eminent domain, the "exile" of American land on the Mexican side, and the sealing off of corridors used by animals.

It's like that ad were made precisely for me. Here's what I blogged in February 2016:

Why aren't we talking about the environmental impact of the wall Trump says he will build?

I raised the subject in the comments to the earlier post about the wall. I said: "Am I the only one who worries about the wall as aesthetically and ecologically troubling?" John Henry said:

Why aesthetically troubling? You have no idea yet what it will look like, do you? I suspect that in some placed it may be a wall, in others a fence, in others natural barriers. No wall is needed when the border is at the base of a 100' cliff, for example.

Ecologically troubling? You are the first person I have ever heard ask that. Could you elaborate?

I think you are the first person I've seen have trouble with the what the wall looks like, too.

I said that I was concerned about "a wall slicing through such a long huge length of" of America, "imping[ing] on nature so brutally" and that I worried about "the plants and animals that flow back and forth within those areas." I didn't remember hearing anyone else bring this up, but I had no trouble finding this Newsweek article from a few days ago: "THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER WALL." There's a photograph with the caption: "Javelina (Pecari tajacu) turn away after looking for 100 yards for a place to cross the U.S.-Mexico border fence near the San Pedro river corridor in Arizona in July 2008."...

ADDED: This is the greatest American presidential ad ever made:



Here's some of the competition. Beto O'Rourke is in the game, and you are a fool if you underestimate what he is doing with this ad. Right now is the time to take him seriously. I can see the impulse in the comments section is to deny the seriousness of the power of this message. You are losing right now.

"I felt very awkward and uncomfortable. Being in between general anesthesia and awake and hearing the sounds of a blow torch inside your brain... it’s very difficult to concentrate."

Said the jazz musician who played guitar during brain surgery (not because he wanted the musical diversion but so the surgeons could see and preserve the music-playing parts of his brain).



IN THE COMMENTS: John Henry say: "A couple years ago banjoist Eddie Adcock had brain surgery while playing a banjo. I believe you blogged it...." Ah, yes. Here. In 2008. Let's watch that again:

Isn't it nice that the Germans can feel comfortable portraying the American President as a monkey?

So much freedom.

Feuer. I know it means fire. But when I try to say it out loud....

Anyway, speaking of making America great again or, I should say getting back to where we were before, I remember spending the Bush years seeing this set of images posted on the door of the office of one of my law school colleagues:



But of course there was no way at all that President Obama could be depicted as any sort of a nonhuman primate (or even any animal at all). Here's the NPR explanation from 2011: "Portraying Obama As Chimp Not Like Showing Bush As One."

But now we've got Trump, the man who will "take all the heat you want to give" him. And even the Germans — who I would have thought would self-censor forever — relax into the freedom of depicting the President as an ape.



IN THE COMMENTS: John Henry says (referring to the Spiegel cover):

I look at the picture and see a progression from glorious manhood (Clinton. He got blown in the oval office! What a man!) to slightly cromagnon (Bush. Kinda stupid but looking better as time passes) to almost Monkey (Obama. How is this not racist?) To full on monkey (Trump. Why?)

Forget it Jake. It's Germany. Racism is baked in.

Trump asked.

Here's John Henry in the comments to the post on Trump's interview transcript:

I sold machinery for 22 years and now sell myself as a consultant. I used to read a lot of books and listen to a lot of motivational tapes on how to be a better salesman. They really do work. They helped me a lot.

If I had to pick one thing that a successful salesperson does and that the moderately or un-successful person doesn't do, it's this: ASK FOR THE ORDER!!!!!

A lot of different ways to do this and phrase this but it is amazing how many times salespeople fail to do this and then can't understand why they didn't close the sale.

So something that jumped out at me from the interview was this:

AP: Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

TRUMP: No, just — you know, I asked the government to let her out. …

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

AP: How did you hear about this story?

TRUMP: Many people, human rights people, are talking about it. It’s an incredible thing, especially when you meet her. You realize — I mean, she was in a rough place.

AP: Did you have to strike a deal with (Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah) el-Sissi over this?

TRUMP: No. No deal. He was here. He — I said, “I really would appreciate it if you would look into this and let her out.” And as you know, she went through a trial. And anyway, she was let go. And not only she, it was a total of eight people.

And there was this with the Italian Primo:

TRUMP: He’s going to end up paying. But you know, nobody ever asked the question. Nobody asked. Nobody ever asked him to pay up. So it’s a different kind of a presidency.

President Trump has been a salesman all his life. You may or may not like what he is selling but he has been a master of it. He knows that the most important part of the sales process is knowing to ask for the order. Knowing how and when is important but the most important is asking.

We saw that in his campaigning style. He went out among the people and asked for the order (their vote) Loser-loser Hillary couln't be bothered. She could have had Wisconsin for the asking, probably. She didn't ask.

Ya don't ask, ya don't get.

"His office conversation was permeated by sexual imagery. 'Take that tie off,' he would tell one of his male staffers. 'That knot looks like a limp prick.'"

"Standing in the middle of the outer-office desks, he retied the tie in the Windsor knot, wider and more shaped than the traditional four-in-hand, which was becoming fashionable in 1949, and then stepped back to admire his handiwork. 'Look at that!' he said. 'He’s got a man’s knot now, not a limp one.' And assignments to his staff were sometimes made in the same tone. When, during his presidency, a woman reporter wrote critical articles about him, he would tell White House counsel Harry McPherson, 'What that woman needs is you. Take her out. Give her a good dinner and a good fuck.' And, McPherson would learn, the President wasn’t kidding. Joseph A. Califano Jr., to whom McPherson related the incident, writes that 'Periodically the President would ask McPherson if he’d taken care of the reporter. Every time she took even the slightest shot at the President, he’d call Harry and tell him to go to work on her.' Lyndon Johnson was never kidding when he gave such instructions."

From "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III" by Robert A. Caro, quoted at the suggestion of John Henry in the comments to my post about the NYT op-ed about Donald Trump's necktie.

Imagine if Donald Trump had talked about female journalists like that. 

Trump has cued up the new distraction.

I have made my decision on who I will nominate for The United States Supreme Court. It will be announced live on Tuesday at 8:00 P.M. (W.H.)

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017

ADDED: Last week he told us he'd make the announcement on Thursday. He moved it up 2 days.

AND: Can we talk about the Supreme Court nominee and immigration at the same time? I'm picturing anti-Trumpists thinking they can make the 2 things into one combo-topic. And I predict that will not work well at all.

As Scott Adams says: Outrage Dilution.

If you try to do multiple outrages, it will dilute. If you stick to one at a time, he can always dump a new one on top of the old one. Will you drop the old topic and play catch up? Or will you stick to the old topic and let him get away with doing this new thing? Or will you waste energy in confusion about what to do?

ADDED: John Henry asks "Was that a poll, Ann?," and I say "It's funny how this post is like the previous post: Can we do more than one thing at a time?" The previous post has a poll, so here's the poll for this one:

How should Trump opponents fight when they see one outrage after another?

Jump on the new outrage immediately and concentrate on denouncing him for that.

Don't get distracted by a new outrage unless it is clearly more outrageous.

Keep adding outrages together and cry out over the terrible mass of outrages.

Mix up those 3 approaches. Don't let Trump predict how you will react.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Why aren't we talking about the environmental impact of the wall Trump says he will build?

I raised the subject in the comments to the earlier post about the wall. I said: "Am I the only one who worries about the wall as aesthetically and ecologically troubling?" John Henry said:

Why aesthetically troubling? You have no idea yet what it will look like, do you? I suspect that in some placed it may be a wall, in others a fence, in others natural barriers. No wall is needed when the border is at the base of a 100' cliff, for example.

Ecologically troubling? You are the first person I have ever heard ask that. Could you elaborate?

I think you are the first person I've seen have trouble with the what the wall looks like, too.

I said that I was concerned about "a wall slicing through such a long huge length of" of America, "imping[ing] on nature so brutally" and that I worried about "the plants and animals that flow back and forth within those areas." I didn't remember hearing anyone else bring this up, but I had no trouble finding this Newsweek article from a few days ago: "THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER WALL." There's a photograph with the caption: "Javelina (Pecari tajacu) turn away after looking for 100 yards for a place to cross the U.S.-Mexico border fence near the San Pedro river corridor in Arizona in July 2008."

[T]he Rio Grande Valley [is] one of the most biodiverse places in North America, with more than 700 species of vertebrates alone. It sits at the convergence of two major flyways for migratory birds... some 500 different bird species.

Before construction of the fence began in 2009, a list of species likely to be affected was prepared by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. It included 10 plants and animals on federal and state endangered lists, 23 on Texas’s threatened list and dozens of species of concern. But the wall went up anyway.

Species with small populations and specialized habitats have suffered the most from the disruption, says Jesse Lasky, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State. He co-authored a 2011 study reporting that the barrier reduced the range for some species by as much as 75 percent. Small range size is associated with a higher risk of extinction, and, according to the study, the wall puts additional stress on Arroyo toads, California red-legged frogs, black-spotted newts and Pacific pond turtles—all listed as endangered or threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—and the jaguarondi, a small wildcat endangered in the U.S. and threatened in Mexico.

Other research concluded that the barrier disrupts movements and distribution of the ferruginous pygmy-owl and bighorn sheep and could isolate small populations of large mammals in Arizona’s Sky Island region, including black bears and pumas. Such isolation reduces exchange of genetic material and makes the animals more vulnerable to disease.

Barrier posts cross the Nature Conservancy’s Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve near Brownsville, and staffers there have seen increasing numbers of white-tailed deer and javelina on the property. That isn’t a good thing; it likely means, says Laura Huffman, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Texas branch, that wildlife squeezed out of its natural habitat is forced onto the preserve—and not that the overall number of these animals has increased.

“The fence is the very definition of habitat fragmentation, the very definition of what inhibits free movement of wildlife within its natural habitat,” Huffman says.

Much more at the link.

"What is it with the giggling about Trump saying 'Two Corinthians' instead of 'Second Corinthians'? Either one sounds fine to me."

Says John Henry in the comments 2 posts down and referring to the nontroversy of the day.

I know. It's like laughing at somebody for saying a date as 19 January instead of the 19th of January. Who the hell cares?

Feels like the beginning of a joke....

Two Corinthians walk into a bar. The first Corinthian says "Boy, do I need some spirit." And the second Corinthian says "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." And the first Corinthian "Okay, make mine the Lord."

"I first ran into the term 'Politically correct' in '67 in San Francisco. It was a leftist term then as now."

Writes John Henry in the comments to "Why Jonathan Chait thinks political correctness 'went into a long remission' and now has returned." Henry continues:

For example: "It is not politically correct to mention that the Viet Cong are murdering villagers who take US medical aid." It may have been factually correct, but since it harmed the cause, it was not "politically" correct to mention it.

I later, reading Lenin, found that he used something very like the term. For example: "It is not correct to say that people are dying of starvation in Moscow." He admitted that it was factually true but it should not be said because it made the party look bad.

When something is "politically incorrect", it generally is also factually correct.

I did not realize that the term ever went out of fashion.The concept certainly never has.

And then there was the time the U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson said "This is not politically correct" back in 1793:

The states, rather than the people, for whose sakes the states exist, are frequently the objects which attract and arrest our principal attention.... Sentiments and expressions of this inaccurate kind prevail in our common, even in our convivial, language. Is a toast asked? "The United states," instead of the "People of the United states," is the toast given. This is not politically correct. The toast is meant to present to view the first great object in the Union: it presents only the second. It presents only the artificial person, instead of the natural persons who spoke it into existence. A state I cheerfully fully  admit, is the noblest work of Man. But, Man himself, free and honest, is, I speak as to this world, the noblest work of God.