"The ability of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to control what people see online is so potent, it is the subject of antitrust hearings...."

"But the decision by Amazon to push Parler off its dominant cloud-computing service illustrates just how powerful its content-moderation capabilities are as well.... [T]he companies that provide the technical infrastructure that powers websites and services where people express opinions have vast power as well, though they rarely use it. They include little-known companies that register website domains for customers; so-called content delivery networks, which can boost the speed at which webpages load; and Internet service providers, which connect homes and businesses to the Web.... [Amazon's] Amazon Web Services is the dominant provider of cloud infrastructure services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the Web instead of running their own data centers.... [AWS's] Trust & Safety team, which has fewer than 100 workers, acts only on complaints received. In its reply to Parler’s suit, Amazon said it received reports in mid-November that the social network was 'hosting content threatening violence.'... It accused Amazon of conspiring with Twitter to take the smaller competitor offline just as it was significantly gaining users in the wake of Twitter permanently banning Trump.... 'Without AWS, Parler is finished as it has no way to get online.'" 

WaPo reports.

Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo: "If you support a baker choosing to not selling a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, then it follows you must support a company choosing not to do business with a customer that behaves in a manner contrary to the company's known parameters. As the same-sex couple was told, go find someone else to bake your cake. Parler should do the same. If they can't, perhaps it's the 'cake' they are trying to bake."

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee takes on the cake analogy:

Parler was already on AWS. 

So the baker (aside from scale, monopoly considerations, and anti trust issues) situation would have to be more like: 

The gay couple hired the baker, paid the baker, and then on the day of the wedding the baker refused to deliver the cake. The baker, however, delivered a lot of cakes to your ex-boyfriends wedding on the same day. And then the baker announced you were dangerous.

"Contact tracing has helped Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore contain the spread of the virus, but their systems rely heavily on digital surveillance..."

"... using patients’ digital footprints to automatically alert their contacts, an intrusion that many Americans would not accept Massachusetts is opting for an old-school, labor-intensive method: people.... The idea of training a corps of contact tracers is emerging in many places at the same time, as leaders think ahead to the point when social distancing constraints will be lifted.... It is built around one-on-one telephone interviews of newly diagnosed patients and their contacts, so that subjects must answer the phone when it rings.... The downside of human contact tracing is that it is expensive, can overlook contacts a subject may not recall, and, some argue, is too slow for a fast-moving virus.... Within the next two hours, the case investigator will aim to reach the patient by phone and compile a list of every person he or she had been in close contact with for 48 hours before the onset of symptoms. The names of the contacts — the expectation is 10 people per new case — will then be passed to contact tracers, who will attempt to reach each one by telephone within 48 hours, calling back three times in succession to signal the call’s importance. For now, tracers are not leaving messages or call back numbers...."

From "An Army of Virus Tracers Takes Shape in Massachusetts/Asian countries have invested heavily in digital contact-tracing, which uses technology to warn people when they have been exposed to the coronavirus. Massachusetts is using an old-fashioned means: people" (NYT).

Reading the headline, I thought that article would be more of a pitch to go to digital surveillance, but it's promoting hiring huge numbers of contract tracers. Does that seem likely to work well in America? The Times doesn't come out and say it, but one might expect Americans to rankle at digital surveillance. The Times is politically correct enough not to lean heavily into the notion that surveillance is an "Asian" approach, but the implication seems to be there. The corollary is that the personal, individual connection is more suited to Americans.

But is it?! It's all about phone calls — phone calls from unknown numbers. Do we even answer the phone when we don't know the caller? I don't.  And what's your reaction when a call comes through without showing the caller's number — especially if they call back 3 times and never leave a message? I would never answer that call. Would you? Would the average American?

The article begins with an anecdote about a caller who not only gets the phone answered, but talks to a woman for 45 minutes. The 2 of them "giggled and commiserated." So... I'm sure some people pick up and love to talk to a stranger about their personal predicament. But I don't believe that's the way most of us Americans are using the phone these days.

The NYT should lay out the digital surveillance option and let us judge for ourselves whether it's superior to these hordes of human telephoners. If I'm protected from digital surveillance, then explain to me why the government that wants to call me on the telephone has my number? If you already can get to my number, then maybe when it's a matter of life and death, you should just go ahead and do the digital surveillance needed to trace the contagion and spare me the nonsense of a nice lady calling on the phone to giggle and commiserate with me for 45 minutes.

IN THE COMMENTS: I Have Misplaced My Pants identifies the worst flaw with the personal approach to contacts tracing:

"Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday..."

The NYT reports.

The police said that four people, including three men and one woman, had been taken into custody....

A 17-minute video posted to social media appears to show part of the attack. The clip, ... may have been taken from a helmet camera worn by a gunman.... “There wasn’t even time to aim, there was so many targets,” he says at one point...

Before the shooting, someone appearing to be the gunman posted links to a white-nationalist manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum known for extremist right-wing discussions. The 8chan post included a link to what appeared to be the gunman’s Facebook page, where he said he would also broadcast live video of the attack.....

In his manifesto, he identified himself as a 28-year-old man born in Australia and listed his white nationalist heroes. Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. “For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,” he wrote.

ADDED: Why would a right-wing fascist want to "to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms"? I understand that the man is (he says) Australian and may not understand American ideology and politics and there may be something wrong with trying to make sense of the thinking of a mass murderer, but it seems to me that discord over the Second Amendment boosts the cause of limiting the right to bear arms. When Americans are not under stress, our resting state is to accept widespread gun possession.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

Someone posted the video he took of his own shootings on a thread in Twitter. I didn't want to see it. It just started playing.

Twitter should disable autoplay.

ALSO: Daily Mail reports:

The gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, named [Candace Owens] as his biggest influence in his 74-page manifesto [posted on Twitter]. [He] said that Owens helped 'push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness' - but claimed some of the 'extreme actions' she calls for are 'too much, even for my tastes'.

Owens is getting attacked for reacting to that tweet with a laughing emoji. She also reacted in words (including "LOL"):

'I’ve never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam. The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!' she said.

She continued to tweet over the next several hours that she refused to be blamed for the massacre. When followers pointed out the impropriety of her response, she was indignant.

'Laughter is not the response one would expect after these murders,' one follower said.

Owens shot back: 'No. But a bunch of racist white liberals flooding my mentions is almost exactly what one would expect. You guys will never de-platform me.'

It's a mistake to use laughter as opposed to straight outrage.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

I actually read his screed. He's not a right winger. He's an eco-fascist. He's not a fan of capitalism or conservatives or Marxists. He wants the United States to have a civil war and thinks that will come about by provoking people to fight over the Second Amendment.

"Josh McKerrow, left, a staff photographer, and Pat Furgurson, a staff reporter, worked Thursday on the next day’s newspaper from a pickup truck in a mall parking garage in Annapolis."

Caption on a photograph at the NYT article "5 People Dead in Shooting at Maryland’s Capital Gazette Newsroom."

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

One could have walked past the pickup truck in the mall parking garage and not known what the two men had been through and what they were working on. Don't you just wonder what you walk past every day? Life is full of so many interesting things.

To live, you must walk on past infinite interesting things, but it is worth stopping to think that there is a world inside every human being. Some other 2 men in a truck in the mall parking garage might be slacking off, wasting their time, throwing their life away. You don't know what you are looking at as you go on your way.

"I'd like to read what Althouse has to say about this year, of all years, Hollywood preparing to celebrate 'Call Me By Your Name' about a 24-year old man and a 17 year old teenage boy."

Writes MayBee (in the comments to the post about James Levine).

In my pre-Meade days, I saw a lot of the end-of-the-year Oscar-bait movies, so I don't know much about things after 2008, but in December 2008, I wrote:

I'm seeing all the well-reviewed year-end movies, and there's an awful lot of wrong-age sex. "Doubt" is about a priest accused of molesting children. "Benjamin Button," with its backwards aging character, had scenes of an old man in love with a young girl and an old woman in love with a toddler. "The Reader" had a 36-year-old woman seducing a 15-year-old boy. "Milk" had a man in his 40s pursuing relationships with much younger (and more fragile) men. "Slumdog Millionaire" shows a young teenage girl being sold for sex. I say that Hollywood is delivering pedophiliac titillation with the deniability of artistic pretension.

"But David Letterman remains the man with the best timing on earth. I think they actually just did a tribute to him the other night!!"

Writes MayBee in the comments to the first post of the day, "Sexual harassment claim filed Monday night, and Wednesday morning, Matt Lauer is fired from his longtime job as co-anchor of the 'Today' show."

She's right about the tribute. Here's the announcement from the (aptly named!) Kennedy Center:

On Sunday, October 22, 2017, an outstanding lineup of entertainers gathered in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall to salute David Letterman, recipient of the 20th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The Prize, which is named to honor one of the world's greatest humorists, was given at a gala performance featuring some of the biggest names in comedy, and taped for broadcast nationwide.

Here, you can watch the whole effusive extravaganza. It was on PBS. I haven't watched it, so I don't know if there were any allusions or outright smirking about the outrageous sexual harassment story Letterman weathered in 2009, but it's all about timing in comedy, so it was very funny to see "Al Franken cut from PBS broadcast of David Letterman tribute."

Here's a Vanity Fair article from 2009, "Letterman and Me/One of the few women ever to write for Late Night with David Letterman, the author (a longtime V.F. contributor) remembers a hostile, sexually charged atmosphere. What’s to be done? Start by breaking late night’s all-male gag order," by Nell Scovell:

... Late Night was my dream job.... Without naming names or digging up decades-old dirt, let’s address the pertinent questions. Did Dave hit on me? No. Did he pay me enough extra attention that it was noted by another writer? Yes. Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.

Here’s what I did: I walked away from my dream job.... On my last day at Late Night, Dave summoned me to his office and pressed me on why I was quitting the show. I considered telling him the truth, but with Dave’s rumored mistress within earshot, I balked. Instead, I told him I missed L.A. Dave said, “You’re welcome back anytime.”

ADDED: Here's how I handled the story at the time, in 2009, "Is it really so terrible that David Letterman has a bachelor pad in the building where he tapes his show?"

"This is the second time in the past two months where a US guided-missile destroyer has been involved in a collision in the region."

"In June, the USS Fitzgerald collided with a Philippine container ship off the coast of Japan. Seven navy sailors were killed, and two senior officers and the senior enlisted sailor on the Fitzgerald were removed after the incident."

And, in the past 24 hours, "Five US Navy sailors are injured and another 10 missing after guided-missile destroyer USS John S McCain collided with an oil tanker early on Monday morning (Aug 21) off the coast of Singapore."

How are accidents like this possible? 

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

I'm worried someone is messing with our navigation systems.

etbass said:

Starting to look like the US Navy is pretty vulnerable to fairly primitive battle tactics that have been around a couple millennia.

Which seems more likely to you:

An ancient battle tactic is being used against us.

Someone is hacking our sophisticated technology.

No one is doing anything to us. These are just accidents.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: FleetUSA said:

I served in the Navy and spent many hours doing underway deck watches as an officer. I would like to know exactly what the deck watches were doing during the 30 minutes prior to the collisions. Were the watchers distracted? Internet surfing? Chatting up enlisted sea(wo)men?

Published comments after the first one gave us no information other than the heroics after the collision.

Much as we should feel concern for the personnel who are injured, missing, or killed, we should resist being manipulated by demands to pay attention only to that and not to the serious questions about why this has happened twice now.

The news for cats.

1. "They even had a cat together named Max," writes the Daily Mail in "EXCLUSIVE: 'They went back and forth having sex, screaming, yelling, having sex.' Meet the college professor who Barack Obama loved and lost because he 'wasn't black enough to have a white wife,'" where the top-rated comment is: "They 'had a cat together'? Is that even biologically possible?"

2. "Judge Posner Is Beyond Catty" is a column by Ed Whelan at National Review who is incredibly irked at 7th Circuit judge Richard A. Posner for doubting that Neil Gorsuch cried while skiing when he heard that Justice Scalia died. Posner doubts both that the news intercepted Gorsuch on a ski slope and also that the crying could ensue, given that Scalia was 80, a heavy smoker and — in Posner's un-PC words — "known to be obese." Whelan struggled to come up with mean enough words to lob at Posner. After trying "What a jerk," he ended up with Posner's own words: "I have exactly the same personality as my cat…. Cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish, and playful, but with a streak of cruelty." Poor hapless Whelan, trying to make us hate Posner and serving up one of Posner's best witty remarks. Whelan, thinking he's getting the better of Posner, follows that cool joke with a humorless "Yes, indeed. Decent human beings aim higher."

3. Howard Stern has 17 kittens.

4. "In a bizarre case that so far has police and residents stumped, at least seven cats in Waynesboro’s Tree Streets neighborhood have been shaved since December without their owners’ permission, according to Waynesboro Police," reports The News Virginian. The cats were "shaved in the underbelly, groin and leg areas" and "not otherwise harmed."

5. Evidence that cats are nowhere nearly as popular as mainstream media think. Here's a Washington Post article, titled "An artist’s best friend? Cats, a new Smithsonian exhibit claims," full of cute pictures of cats, including one holding an artist's brush and palette and — to make sure you get that the cat is an artist — wearing a beret. The article has been up for over a week, and it has zero comments.

6. That's it for the cat news. There are hundreds of recent cat stories, but they don't make the cut. They don't make the shave. I think, as I said in Item #5, people are not that interested in cats. Remember when cats ruled the internet? Bloggers did Friday Cat Blogging. Hey, wait a minute. Kevin Drum still does Friday Cat Blogging. Here's the most recent one, deploying a cat for the cause of anti-Trumpism. But even cat-anti-Trumpiana is old. Here's "These Cats Look Like Donald Trump/The Internet makes #TrumpYourCat a thing." It's from July 2015.

7. From the comments to this post, after a certain amount of discussion of crying — "What happened to Posner?" (MayBee), "I don't know, but he's 78, and if he dies, there should be no crying" (me), "There's no crying in jurisprudence – or skiing!" (Paco Wové) — campy said: "I cried because I had no cats, until I met a man who had 17."

Hey, why don't all the comments threads begin like...

... this.

The shimmy, part 2.

Earlier today, I raised the question whether that shoulder thing that Hillary Clinton did during the debate...



... is properly called the shimmy. I took the position that what makes that shoulder shake a shimmy is if you're doing it to jiggle your breasts.

In the comments, MayBee said: "Yes! That's why it was so creepy!"

Tim in vermont said: "She sort of reminds me of Ursula in The Little Mermaid as she sang 'Poor deplorable souls'":



EDH linked to a "Gilligan's Island" clip of Ginger singing "I Want to Be "Loved by You" and asks: "If Hillary is Ginger, does that make Trump MaryAnn? If so, Trump wins." But I just want to say Ginger only wishes she could shimmy like her sister Marilyn:



She couldn't aspire to anything higher... than the presidency!

Noton Yalife and Earnest Prole both say: "That's a Bingo!"

"The 2010s, in contrast [to the 1950s], are a terrible time to not be brainy."

"Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being 'stupid' has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement."

From an article in The Atlantic by David H. Freedman titled "The War on Stupid People/American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth."

I was interested to see that — linked by Instapundit — because just a couple days ago I got taunted by the NYU professor, Mark Kleiman, who wrote, "Ann Althouse teaches law at the University of Wisconsin, which implies that her IQ must be above room temperature." I said:

I was surprised to see that, because, as you know, Donald Trump has been accused of mocking the disabled, and the phrase "IQ... above room temperature" is a reference to the mentally challenged, genuinely disabled people who are not properly the subject of humor. Moreover, IQ is a touchy subject in America, as a professor of public policy should know, and I thought decent people refrained from using IQ as their go-to basis of trashing other people. Ah, well, ironically, I'm supposed to join the Trump-hating crowd because of all the indecent things he's supposedly said.

Sorry for the sudden intrusion of Trump into the subject, but Trump was the subject of Kleiman's attack on me. But notice how many Trump-haters attack his supporters — and his non-haters like me — as lacking intelligence. And consider Trump's own "I love the poorly educated!" — though to be poorly educated is not to be stupid. For example, you have to be reasonably smart to get into a school like NYU, but you might be poorly educated by a professor who devotes his class to political indoctrination and not to deep study and clear thinking.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

There is almost nothing funnier than your NY Prof complaining about room temperature IQ while also saying there's no evidence Obama exhibited bad judgement.

Perfect example of the Agree With Me = Smart mentality.

That's right. As the commenters on this earlier post noticed, Kleiman wrote — talking about our efforts to help the "rebels" in Syria and conceding that everyone knows that we were helping ISIS and al Qaeda — "Just to be clear: there’s no evidence whatsoever that Clinton and Obama had bad judgement, didn’t know what they were doing, 'or worse.'" '

AND: Why did Kleiman say "everyone knows"? To my ear, it sounds like Hillary's "What difference, at this point, does it make?" That is, it's a "shut up" delivered in the guise of impugning the questioner for dwelling on things that are no longer important instead of moving on to what supposedly matters now.

Last night, I had a dream about Hillary Clinton.

With a needle and thread, I was fixing something of mine that I needed to wear.

Hillary Clinton wanted to use my needle and thread to fix something of hers that she needed to wear.

Instead of finishing my own work, I cut the thread and offered to sew whatever it was that she needed.

She had a skirt, but the only thing it needed was a tag to be sewn on the inside. That is, the skirt was fully wearable, and no fix was really needed.

The tag said "LARGE." It was a size tag. Why would she need a size tag in a skirt she already owned? Did she resell her clothes? I asked, indicating that it was a good idea for her, with so many clothes, to have a system of passing them on to others who could use them. But why was I helping her in that enterprise, especially when I had my own sewing project?

Somehow, my needle slipped and tore into the suit jacket of another woman who was standing nearby. It was a fancy, expensive looking, patterned pink thing, and I'd made a big slash across the chest.

I effusively apologized to that woman and was quite annoyed. None of this would have happened if I'd stuck to the sewing I needed to do for myself.

This dream reminds me of an old saying that you don't hear anymore, but my mother often used: Stick to your knitting.

ADDED: Possible source material for the idea of a pink jacket:



As MayBee, in the comments remembers, I deny that Carly's jacket was pink. Also, neither of those is patterned. The jacket in my dream looked like something that, in the light of morning, calls to mind the recent Reddit post "One of these is Jupiter's moon Europa, the rest are frying pans":



As for Jackie, here's a passage from the 4th volume of Robert A. Caro's LBJ biography:

It seemed as if it was going to be a Kennedy day. As Air Force One touched down at Dallas’ Love Field at 11: 38— 12: 38 Washington time— everything seemed very bright under the brilliant Texas sun and the cloudless Texas sky: the huge plane gleaming as it taxied over closer to the crowd pressing against a fence; the waiting open presidential limousine, so highly polished that the sunlight glittered on its long midnight-blue hood that stretched forward to the two small flags fluttering on the front bumpers. There was a moment’s expectant pause while steps were wheeled up to the plane, and then the door opened, and into the sunlight came the two figures the crowd had been waiting for: Jackie first (“There is Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells!” the television commentator yelled), youthful, graceful, tanned, her wide smile, bright pink suit and pillbox hat radiant in the dazzling sun; behind her, the President, youthful, elegant (“I can see his suntan all the way from here!” the commentator shouted), with the mop of brown hair glowing, one hand checking the button on his jacket in the familiar gesture, coming down the steps just so slightly turned sideways to ease his back that it wasn’t noticeable unless you looked for it. A bouquet of bright red roses was handed to Jackie by the welcoming committee, and it set off the pink and the smile.

"Scott Walker's crisis of faith/The Wisconsin governor is racing to reassure Christian conservatives that he’s one of them."

Headline at Politico. Not much going on in the article in my view. I find this bloggable because 1. Politico is choosing this theme for its coverage (and not, say, the new John Doe documents that just came out) and 2. the absence of material is significant.

Walker tends not to talk about the social conservative issues — probably because 1. such issues are divisive and 2. he appears to be a very solidly religious man — and the social conservatives are having a meeting with him — where he'll probably explain those 2 things.

IN THE COMMENTS: I repeat my point that "Walker doesn't talk the SC issues. He is a conservative man. He comes across as sincerely religious, based on his whole life story and his behavior." I add: "That's his approach, and it's different from the approach of those who use the issues. I think it's an excellent and winning combination." And MaBee says: "Which is exactly why Politico wants to push him out of using it." Yes. And... how do we feel about a candidate winning that way? I guess it depends on whether in the end he does anything about these privately held values.

"Even as a child, I didn't understand why Darren was so against using the magic."

Wrote MayBee in the comments to last night's post marking the 50th anniversary of the premiere of "Bewitched." I answered:

It's an allegory of relations between the sexes. Darren wants to provide for his wife and protect her. He can't do that if she has powers, or so he thinks. Instead of working together to find a new way to live in which the woman can use her full powers and the man can still feel empowered, he forbade her to use them and she tried to live like that, but she nevertheless acted out on her frustration from time to time, though only to help make their traditional life together work out.

"Jill Abramson lost her job, but so far she's winning the press relations war."

"In the 24 hours since she was fired from The New York Times, her downfall has become a flashpoint for a national conversation about gender and inequality that is all but eclipsing what sources cite as the reasons for her termination."

Why didn't the Times get out in front with its first-ever! black executive editor story?

Far from celebrating Baquet, the Times leadership instead finds itself scrambling to deflect charges of sexism surrounding the termination of its first-ever female executive editor.

Race can trump gender. "Trump" is a card-game word, and we're talking about race and gender cards. But in a card game, you have to play the card to win. And in the race-and-gender card game, you lose if you look like you are playing. In this race-and-gender game, it's not the NYT or Jill Abramson who is out there playing the cards. Others are doing the commentary, and there are so many writers — especially female journalists — who are ready to play, as I noted a couple posts down, quoting "The fury of women journalists who identify with Abramson stems from what we know: that excellent performances are not enough."

Commenter MayBee said "The fury of women journalists" sounded like one of those old "terms of venery" like "a murder of crows" and "a crash of rhinos."

So beware. Don't assume race beats sex. Obama beat Hillary, but it's a little more complicated than a generic approval of first black over first female. There's an elaborate political/PR game to be played, and the winners and losers are determined subjectively within human minds, those minds are affected by what is written, and, for things to be written, there must be writers.

And — look out!!! — there's a fury of females.

Obama's annual reunion with the group that still calls itself "The Choom Gang."

The NYT reports:

For a reputed loner, Mr. Obama has remained remarkably close to a trio he met as a teenager at Honolulu’s prestigious Punahou School — boys of Hawaii’s year-round summer with whom he played basketball, bodysurfed, drank beer and, like so many other young islanders in the 1970s, smoked pot, the “choom” of that long-ago nickname....

The annual gatherings perhaps speak to Mr. Obama’s greater need for their connection now that he has what is called the loneliest job in the world...

That first year, [Mike] Ramos said, “I remember coming home from a golf outing and literally starting to cry,” so emotional was the contrast he felt between their friendships and the “transactional” ones he said he had since formed as a businessman. “For me it’s the unconditional love, it’s the nontransactional nature of the relationship — that enduring quality — that is something that I really value,” he said.

Are your friendships so transactional you could cry?

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

They didn't start meeting annually unti 2004, when Obama decided to run for Senate and he needed a fresh group of friends for his biography....

It says something pretty funny about politics when an article about the Presidents's friends has a quote about the importance of friends from the "long time" political strategist. And yes, Axelrod was Obama's strategist when Obama decided to start the annual get together with them.

Doesn't that just scream "these friends are part of a political strategy! This article is part of that strategy!" 

The transactionality of nontransactional friends.

"Plans by three Catholic hospital systems in Wisconsin to deny admitting privileges to doctors who perform abortions would 'be in active violation of federal law'..."

"Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen's Department of Justice said in a court filing last week."

Federal law "provides that hospitals accepting federal funds may not discriminate against a physician because that physician has participated in or refused to participate in abortions," the state Justice Department said in its filing in federal court....

There's a new Wisconsin law that requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital with 30 miles of their clinics.  That law is being challenged in federal court, as an undue burden on abortion rights. And now the state law — oriented toward religious (and moral) objections to abortion — is having this side effect of burdening religious hospitals.

Seven doctors who provide abortions in the state lack privileges, and at least four are applying for them at religiously affiliated hospitals, according to their employer, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.

Is Planned Parenthood targeting the religious hospitals? Its lawyers observe that many Wisconsin hospitals have religious affiliations, so this is what they law has driven them into doing.

Note that Van Hollen isn't arguing that federal law requires that the abortions be performed in religious hospitals. It doesn't. He's only saying that the hospitals can't refuse admitting privileges to doctors on the ground that they perform abortions elsewhere.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee asks some key questions:

What are the admitting privileges for? To admit a patient in the midst of a botched abortion?

Will a hospital that does so be forced, then, to participate in an abortion? Can they ensure the baby will be saved if the mother is brought in during an abortion that is going wrong? Or will the doctor have the "right" to complete the abortion? 

"Eleven years after she vanished without a trace, Brenda Heist approached police in Florida last week..."

"... to explain that she had abandoned her two children on the spur of the moment, leaving behind her old life in central Pennsylvania to become a vagrant."

"Everybody that knew Brenda told us there was absolutely no way Brenda would leave her children," said Lititz Borough Police Detective John Schofield, who suspected for years she may have been killed. "She explained to me that she just snapped," said Schofield, who met with her Monday in Florida. "She turned her back on her family, she turned her back on her friends, her co-workers."...

Her husband, Lee Heist, who was investigated and then cleared as a suspect, struggled to raise their children. By 2010, he was able to get the courts to declare her legally dead and collected on a life insurance policy. He has remarried. He's angry because of the effect their mother's disappearance had on the children, but he also said he has forgiven her.

"There were people in the neighborhood who would not allow their children to play with my children" because he had been a suspect, he said.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

She leaned away.

Gerry said:

Is fugue state still a psychological malady?

Yes, it is:

A fugue state, formally dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue (DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders 300.13[1]), is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (ranging from hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity....

Agatha Christie disappeared on 3 December 1926 only to reappear eleven days later in a hotel in Harrogate, apparently with no memory of the events which happened during that time span.

"Why Thatcher Wouldn’t Succeed in Our ‘Lean In’ Culture."

By Amity Shlaes.

As [Sheryl] Sandberg laboriously notes [in her bestseller "Lean In"], Harvard Business School, which already famously focused on teamwork and consensus, has lately emphasized teamwork even more. It’s hard to imagine Thatcher (“Defeat? I do not recognize the word”) thriving at HBS.

The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race. The great victory with which future Thatcher biographers are likely to open their accounts is her winning back the Falkland Islands from the Argentine junta. The great victory with which Sandberg opens her book was getting Google Inc. (GOOG) to establish reserved parking for pregnant women.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee asks: "What is with this annoying attempt to get people to use the phrase 'lean in'?" I've been irked by this too. Obviously, Sandberg was trying to sell her book and came up with something she wanted to make into a meme, but how did she get so many media people to adopt it?

Why does the meme seem useful? Is it some subliminal effect? I see the connotations of slimming down and also being lazy (like when you're leanin' on the shovel/mop instead of working).

I suspect that media people are mostly just lamely grasping at ways to make the same old material seem new. I'm guilty of spreading the meme too, since I put this post up, but I have actually been avoiding "Lean In" stuff. I fell for it this time because of the Margaret Thatcher + Amity Shlaes prod.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: "I enjoy watching a woman 'lean in.'" And: "Lean In while wearing a low cut blouse, and you're sure to get a promotion." Is that the subliminal sustenance people are receiving?!

As expected, I got some pushback for saying "I hope the Supreme Court blesses us with" a right to same-sex marriage.

That was a provocative way to say that it will be a blessing if the upcoming Supreme Court cases resolve this issue that is dogging and distorting the political discourse in our country.

Even to say "it will be a blessing" would have been provocative, since it seems to give God credit for whatever good happens. But that usage of "blessing" has constitutional text to support it:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. 

Liberty is a set of blessings, our Founders told us. The human task is to secure the blessings. If the Supreme Court says it has found a liberty — let's say a right to same-sex marriage — we may say that it is securing a liberty that is already there. When someone says "bless you," that doesn't mean that the blessing emanates from the speaker. It's short for "God bless you." It's asking God to deliver a blessing. In the Constitution, what we see is that the Framers believed that God had blessed us with liberty.

So to say "I hope the Supreme Court blesses us" is to identify the Court as the source of the blessing, to put the Court in the place of God, and to prompt and tease those who think the Court improperly makes up rights. That was deliberate and devilish temptation. Thanks for succumbing!

Below the fold are the comments that inspired this post: