"Any pretense of seriousness evaporated last week with the New York Times's expose of the Alitos' breach of flag etiquette...."

"While Justice Alito has stated that he had nothing to do with this flag hoisting, the incident, we are told, somehow amounts to evidence that the Alitos supported Donald Trump's 'stop the steal' campaign. Where does that connection come from? A search of the Factiva news database turns up no articles containing the phrases 'stop the steal' and 'upside down flag' before the Times report on May 16. Rather than retreat in humiliation, the Times doubled down this week with a follow-up report of yet another flag... spotted at the Alitos' vacation home in New Jersey. The left tells us that the 1775 Pine Tree flag was spotted among Jan. 6 protesters! And moreover, that its catch phrase, 'an appeal to heaven,' derives from a radical character —John Locke. The Times somehow fails to let readers know that the flag is a longtime symbol of independence; that it was designed by George Washington's secretary; was flown on ships commissioned by Washington; has been honored, commemorated and flown over state capitols; and is the official maritime flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts...."

Writes Kimberley A. Strassel, in "A Flagging Campaign Against Justice Alito/The ‘ethics’ attack having failed, the left turns to flag etiquette" (Wall Street Journal).

"Locke makes the very good point that 'most children’s constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by cockering and tenderness.'"

"That lovely seventeenth century word ‘cockering’ means ‘to indulge or spoil.' Locke goes on to recommend that children are not too warmly wrapped up in winter, in order that they learn to endure the cold, in the manner of the Spartans. He also reckons that the shoes of children should be made deliberately leaky in order to toughen up the feet. Certainly my third son Henry, more ignored than the other two, has tough feet, and spent whole summers shoeless. Henry maintained when nine years old that ‘shoes were prisons for the feet.'... Our youngest, Henry, was born in the house with two lovely midwives, and he has grown into a solid, healthy lad. He spent his first eight years roaming the fields and rocky coves, and even from an early age he was a fast runner and a confident climber.... Henry would disappear for hours with his friend Gilbert doing God knows what in the fields. The key here was lack of parental supervision. When parents supervise, they are at some level imposing their own ideology or fantasy of country life or wild life on to their children. That’s why I have always recoiled from those adventure holidays and back-to-nature holidays for children. children. There is some damn theory or other underpinning the whole thing, like a Steineresque philosophy. They remind me of the Hitler Youth. This is what D. H. Lawrence is getting at when he says that children should be left with a lazy woman who can’t be bothered with them. Leave them alone!"

From "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting," Tom Hodgkinson.

Locke is the philosopher John Locke. The quote is from "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" (1690).

"Cockering" — do you like that word? Can you use it? Maybe not. The OED calls it "Now English regional."  The historical examples include this from the King James version of the Bible (1611): "Cocker thy childe, and hee shall make thee afraid." And let me give you this quote too:

1682 T. Shadwell Lancashire-witches i. 7 Dost thou think, because thy foolish Mother has Cocker d thee with morning Cawdles and afternoons Luncheons, thou art fit to make Love?

I presumed that "cawdle" was an old spelling of "cuddle," but no, it's an alternative spelling of "caudle," which is "A warm drink consisting of thin gruel, mixed with wine or ale, sweetened and spiced, given chiefly to sick people."

As for "Steineresque philosophy," there's nothing else in the book about it. I googled and guess it refers to this person — Rudolf Steiner — whose ideas are listed as "Anthroposophy, anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, spiritual science, Waldorf education, holism in science."  He died in 1925 and wasn't connected to the Hitler Youth. Indeed: "In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews... In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door.... The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin..."

Front-paged at the NYT: How to eat lunch at your "luxurious" company.

In case this has never occurred to you, snack items can be lunch.

Inside, the article is "How to Make Meals From Office Snacks/At start-ups and luxurious companies, the free lunch is for the taking, if you’re bold enough." I look forward to more NYT articles about things that are "free... for the taking, if you’re bold enough."

How to Stock Your Home Office... supplies are free, if you're bold enough! 

For Shoppers at Department Stores: The clothes and makeup you need for your big date are free for the taking, if you're bold enough. 

For Diners at Middling Restaurants: Your home supply of sugar and ketchup is free, if you're bold enough.

Oh, now, I'm going too far! The NYT is talking about the conditions at "start-ups and luxurious companies." It's okay to take advantage of them, just like it's okay — even a great idea — to tax the rich to pay for things you want for the poor. Well, the workers at start-ups and luxurious companies aren't exactly poor, but they are young and hip and — I'm sure — socialist. So it's not petty theft or bad faith. It's cool, cool enough to be front-paged in the NYT.

Now, why do we need a 2,000-word article about how to grab office snacks for lunch. Is it about the moral question? The legal details? Is it about the office culture — what other employees and your superiors think of the worker who raids the shared snacks to assemble a meal? Is it about the nutritional details of a fruit and cheese (and whether Steve Jobs sort of died of being a fruitatarian)?

It's about the cuisine — the "scrappy new cuisine." And the makers of this new cuisine are stepping up to preen about it and the NYT is printing their names:

“I literally never go out and buy lunch,” said Rebecca Jennings, a culture reporter at Vox Media.... Her signature dish? The personal “work pizza,” which makes use of complimentary bread, sriracha and Babybel. Jennings bakes these ingredients in the toaster oven for about four and a half minutes, until the cheese begins to brown. After that, she adds a special touch. “We have this drawer that I don’t think a lot of the people at the office know about, with leftover Parmesan cheese packets from when big teams order pizza,” she said. “I’ll sprinkle that on top.”

They know now! And what do they think of you? The NYT doesn't seem to have asked anyone. They present Jennings's pridefulness as if everyone will admire her for her ingeniousness and her can-do spirit. There's no one to say she's using too much of the best items or that she's stinking up the place cooking cheeses that they'd only presume to eat cold.

No, it's on to the next person whose snacking gets called not only "lunch" but "cuisine." It's "Kira Fisher, who has worked for several social media companies, including Tumblr...." Wait. Are Vox and Tumblr "luxurious companies"? They're not "startups," are they? Aren't media companies struggling these days?

“One thing I really like to do is make a cheese plate,” [Fisher] said. “Getting all the fruit we have in the office and cutting it — cutting the apples, having grapes, finding whatever cheese they have — and making a little spread, a little office mezze platter.”

Having grapes?  Based on the photograph, I think they meant "halving grapes." And did she really cut  grapes apples with that little plastic knife? This lady is munching on fruit and cheese and taking enough to feel all right without more. But she's calling it "a little office mezze platter." So that makes it cuisine... or bullshit. Take your pick. And maybe it is what media companies deserve. Why is Kira Fisher working at Tumblr? She got her start at "the food blog Sad Desk Lunch, where she cataloged user-submitted photos of bleak workday meals."

Elsewhere online, lists of so-called “D.I.Y. office snacks” and “office snack hacks” recommend unofficial uses of office kitchen appliances, such as using a Keurig coffee maker to cook ramen. 

And the point there was humor. Office snack lunches are depressing. But the NYT is presenting this as a jaunty lifestyle.

According to Ms. Fisher, the great challenge of office cooking is overcoming the sweetness of snack food. She sometimes makes yogurt feel more lunch-like by adding a handful of crushed-up potato chips, or a salty “new wave snack” like Biena roasted chickpeas.

Is that an embedded ad for Biena? Here, buy some of that "new wave snack" through my Amazon portal. You can pay $1 an ounce for chickpeas — or let your "luxurious" company pay — and feel free to put them on yogurt (in your heroic struggle to overcome the sweetness).

A "sales manager" named Michael Sztanski is quoted enthusing about "a make-your-own-bowl-type thing":

“I’ll take the hard-boiled eggs and chop them up to make egg salad with mayo, pepper and salt. That’ll be one part of the bowl. Then I’ll crush up Doritos, or any chip — most recently, I’ve been using Sun Chips. I’ll crush them up as another part of the bowl. Then I get mozzarella balls, which I’ll throw in there as well. And a jerky stick.” 

I'm doing a make-your-own-blog-post-type thing, and yet I will pass on Sztanski's jerky stick.

The NYT does get to some other issues. There are a few words about nutrition. There's taxation: Employers have been deducting the cost of snacks, and it hasn't been taxed as income to the employees. Then there's the question whether you could "get fired for abusing workplace food privileges." A lawprof is quoting speculating that "maybe the employer is going to start saying that this is a crime, like embezzlement or theft." And Jennings is quoted feeling "embarrassment." But:

She probably should not be concerned. “Vox Media’s office cafes make for great spots to gather, have serendipitous run-ins and host creative brainstorms,” a spokeswoman for the company wrote in an email. “It’s no surprise our employees have grown as clever with the snacks as we are with our work.”

That's the right answer for PR and tax purposes. And I believe it, actually. The company is keeping you on campus and basically still working. I've worked in places that serve outright lunches, and it was obvious that the point was to keep you on site and in work mode.

Ah! Finally, we get to "the ethics of snacks." A philosophy professor is consulted:

“Are they an unpaid intern or an underpaid employee suffering from broader social injustices?” [Brookes Brown, an assistant professor of philosophy at Clemson University]. “Or are they the C.E.O. who wants to make a higher rung on the Forbes wealthiest people list?”

I'd like a little detail on the philosophy of that. What is the ethical principle that authorizes readjusting your pay? What's the point of talking to a philosophy professor if you're going to get an answer that sounds like the first thing an employee caught stealing would blurt out?!

There's a second philosophy professor:

“It definitely matters whether the snacks show up in an endless supply or whether there’s a limited amount put out each day,” said Karen Stohr, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. “The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke put this in terms of an obligation to leave ‘enough, and as good’ for other people,” she said. “That seems to apply to employer-provided snacks.”

That's the Lockean proviso. Read about it here. Locke was talking about taking land from the natural world and making it private property, so I think you need to do some philosophizing to get from nature to an employer and from a human being working on land to an employee eating snacks, but — what the hell? — the article is getting long, we were just pausing to snack on philosophy, and it's time to get back to Kira Fisher. She says the snacks at Vox Media "are restocked daily."

“There’s always plenty left over, so I don’t feel bad at all,” she said. “But if you are the type to go in really early in the morning and take all of the most desired thing, like the cups of guacamole or the hard-boiled eggs, that’s extremely un-chill.”

And that's how it ends, with imagining somebody else who's doing the same thing but they're doing more, and when you think about them, they seem gross. They're un-chill. Hey, Kira, look at Michael, he's taking the hard-boiled eggs and chopping them up with mayonnaise to make egg salad as one part of a bowl and then crushing up Doritos. Should he be ashamed?

"Mary Burke is winning... Based on a complex statistical model developed for the Capital Times..."

Lefty newspaper does "complex" stuff.

ADDED: "Complex" was a big hippie word. Wow, man, that's so complex. I remember. Meade remembers. That's all the verification I need for that proposition. Back me up, oldies.

So, then I looked up "complex" in the Oxford English Dictionary, because that's usually what I do when I fixate on a word. One of the oldest uses appears in John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding"(1690)(boldface indicates the part quoted in the OED):

We have hitherto considered those ideas, in the reception whereof the mind is only passive, which are those simple ones received from sensation and reflection before mentioned, whereof the mind cannot make one to itself, nor have any idea which does not wholly consist of them. As simple ideas are observed to exist in several combinations united together, so the mind has a power to consider several of them united together as one idea; and that not only as they are united in external objects, but as itself has joined them together. Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call COMPLEX;—such as are beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe; which, though complicated of various simple ideas, or complex ideas made up of simple ones, yet are, when the mind pleases, considered each by itself, as one entire thing, signified by one name.

Stephen King weighs in on Dylan Farrow's statement: "There’s an element of palpable bitchery there."

Full quote: "Boy, I’m stumped on that one. I don’t like to think it’s true, and there’s an element of palpable bitchery there, but...."

Palpate any bitches lately, Steve?

What does "palpable" add? Is it just verbiage — meaningless padding — or is it a way to say that he feels it — he senses it? (It's his truth.) Or does it mean there's some substantial bitchery?

And what's with "bitchery" and "element... of bitchery"? That seems like a way to avoid saying that the woman is a bitch. There's some bitchery in the letter she wrote.

The ethnic studies requirement.

We've had if for years at the University of Wisconsin. Here's an upcoming event:

The roundtable will include a presentation on the history of the requirement, an open-mic portion where attendees will be asked to share experiences with classes and make suggestions, and smaller discussions led by ASM Diversity Committee members. Attendees will also be provided note cards on which they can leave comments about their class experiences.

The committee is considering whether the requirement should be able to be satisfied with classes that "incorporate facets of personal identity beyond race and ethnicity, such as sexual orientation" and whether students should be required to take their ethnic studies class in their first 2 years of undergraduate study to enable them "to apply knowledge from the class to their educational experience." There's an idea of "revamp[ing the] requirement to make the classes a 'game-changer' for students, providing them with greater insight into their identities."

That made me want to look up the word "identity." There are lots of different meanings, but one is (from the OED):

The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition of being a single individual; the fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.

Another is:

Who or what a person or thing is; a distinct impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others; a set of characteristics or a description that distinguishes a person or thing from others.

Among the early quotes the OED uses to exemplify the meaning of "identity," we have 2 of history's greatest philosophers:

1694   J. Locke Ess. Humane Understanding (new ed.) ii. xxvii. 180   The Identity of the same Man consists... in nothing but a participation of the same continued Life, by constantly fleeting Particles of Matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized Body.

1739   D. Hume Treat. Human Nature I. i. 34   Of all relations the most universal is that of identity, being common to every being, whose existence has any duration.

If only a philosophy course could fulfill the requirement that has to do with gaining greater insight into one's identity! But perhaps students arrive at the university with a sense of identity that suggests different building blocks at the foundation of their higher education. Or perhaps — in the future — they have such as sense of their own identity that they do not arrive at all.

Constitutional thrills. For me, apparently, daylight savings means waking up in the middle of the night and seeing that the time is close enough to a reasonable hour to go ahead and get up. The NYT is here, I can check out the overnight activity on my blog. Hmm... someone came here after doing a Yahoo search for "this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing," a phrase Justice Breyer used to refer to God in the Newdow oral argument. This entry of mine is one of only three results for that. I'm surprised more people haven't commented on Breyer's striking locution.

One of the search results is just a reprint of Leon Wieseltier's article in The New Republic, "What America Can Learn From Its Atheists."

Citing United States v. Seeger from 1965, though he might have illustrated his speculation more vividly with the historical precedent of the Cult of the Supreme Being in revolutionary Paris, Breyer proposed that such a faith "in any ordinary person's life fills the same place as belief in God fills in the life of an orthodox religionist," and so "it's reaching out to be inclusive"--so inclusive, in fact, that it may satisfy a non-believer such as Newdow. Breyer suggested that the God in "under God" is "this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." And he posed an extraordinary question to Newdow: "So do you think that God is so generic in this context that it could be that inclusive, and if it is, then does your objection disappear?"

Oh, yes, life would be so much more vivid if Supreme Court Justice's would stop being so stodgy as to prefer references to their own old cases! Please cite more foreign sources, Justices, because that is way more fun ... and it gets a rise out of Scalia.

Anyway, the only thing extraordinary about Breyer's statement is the idiosyncratic syntax. The idea itself is straight out of ... oh, how tedious ... some old Supreme Court cases. But Wieseltier is jazzed up by the way Newdow did not back down, even though, obviously, since he's trying to win his case, he wouldn't. Breyer was just asking for a response to the utterly predictable argument that generic ceremonial deism doesn't violate the Establishment Clause.

Newdow's objection did not disappear, because it is one of the admirable features of atheism to take God seriously. Newdow's reply was unforgettable: "I don't think that I can include 'under God' to mean 'no God,' which is exactly what I think. I deny the existence of God." The sound of those words in that room gave me what I can only call a constitutional thrill. This is freedom.

If only more ideologues could get the opportunity to do Supreme Court arguments, more constitutional thrills could be had by all. According to Wieseltier:

Breyer was advocating the Lockean variety of toleration, according to which it would be based on a convergence of conviction, a consensus about the truth, among the overwhelming majority of the members of a society. The problem with such an arrangement is that the convergence is never complete and the consensus is never perfect. Locke himself instructed that "those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God." The universal absolute is never quite universal. And there is another problem. It is that nobody worships a "very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." Such a level of generality, a "generic" God, is religiously senseless.

Except that Breyer wasn't invoking Locke's idea about freeing up the discourse so the individual can search for the true answer. Breyer was talking about an invocation of God that is too bland and generic to warrant judicial intervention. What Wiesentier is calling a "problem" is the central point Breyer's argument makes: no one's version of God is being preferred. And it isn't fair to Locke either, again quite obviously. Is the person who makes the first big step toward freedom and away from repression to be raked over the coals because his step was not big enough? Should we impute a blindspot that existed in 1689 to Locke's intellectual descendants of today? That's just sophistry. The ceremonial deism idea--even though it can be criticized as encouraging the ennervation of serious religion--is valuable because it allows courts to avoid excessive intervention in small matters. That ideologues can pump up small things and make them seem all-important is very old news.