You can see an image of outrage....

... if you go to Memeorandum right now, but I've saved it for you:

How I made a Walt Whitman essay from 1856-57 look as though it was the talk of the internet yesterday.

I'm not referring to "Manly Health and Training," the set of essays, published under a pseudonym and revealed to the world last month, a genuinely a newsworthy matter, which really did belong on Memeorandum, the website that — through some mysterious automated process — presents a one-page picture of what articles and items are getting linked to and discussed.

I'm talking about "An American Primer," a long known, long available essay by Walt Whitman, which was reprinted in the April 1904 issue of The Atlantic. It's about one of my favorite topics, blunt speech — blunt speech, as opposed "delicate lady-words" and "gloved gentlemen words." Whitman — touting America and liberty — comes out for "coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance." I love that sort of thing, and I think most of America — not the elite, not the civility bullshitters, but most of America — loves it.

So I was moved to blog about it yesterday, after I ran across it by chance, not in anything current, but in an old acrostic puzzle in the New York Times archive, way back in October 2011. I don't think anyone else was looking at "An American Primer" yesterday and getting excited about it and linking to the old April 1904 issue of The Atlantic.

But it popped up on Memerandum:



I guess it was a slow Saturday. But thanks, Memeorandum. Thanks for weighting me however much that was in your algorithm. And thanks for nudging whomever you may have nudged to see what all the buzz is about, whatever it was that Walt Whitman wrote back in 1856-57. I know what it was. I read the whole 6,000-word essay. Out loud. To Meade. And we talked about it for a long time, connected it to the Donald Trump phenomenon, etc. etc. So there were the 2 of us. But I just find it so delightful to think that — via the magic of Memeorandum — somebody else got the idea that "An American Primer" was the thing to talk about and got to reading and talking about it too.

And then there's the little corner of the internet that was my blog last night, and maybe — without the nudge of Memeorandum's absurdly false impression that "An American Primer" was a Topic of the Day — you read it or at least the snippet of it that I posted, and maybe you were hanging out at Althouse on Saturday night, talking with other people about the distaste for delicate lady-words and gloved-gentlemen words and a love for epithets, expletives, and words of opprobrium.

There was BDNYC, who said: "Unreadable." And kentuckyliz, who said: "I found it quite readable once I found the sweet spot in my bifocals." And Paul Zrimsek, who said: "I am yuge, I contain multitudes." And traditionalguy:

Whitman spoke like an earlier version of Trump because Whitman was also giving voice to an implacable will to be strong and free men. That is what made America Great the first time.

It started with Andrew Jackson defeating the murderous British in the West to save the Mississippi River Valley, and then took off with Robert Fulton building his steamboats and DeWit Clinton building his canal locks to go over the Niagara Escarpment at Lockport, NY to complete a transportation circle from New York City to the Great lakes and then down the Mighty Mississippi to New Orleans. And which soon saw Robert Morse building his single wire telegraph to carry the news.

Trump is a messenger and a builder. And nobody cares if he says bad words in his battle to make America Great Again.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ngtrains said: "Robert Morse? how about Samuel?" And I said: "Mm. Yeah. Should I fix that for him. Robert Morse... was he the actor in 'How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying'?" I look it up. And it's just so damned Trumpian....

The 4 a.m. screen shot puts everything into proportion.

Here's the Phys.org article that went up on Memeorandum at 5:55 ET on Tuesday morning, where it got my attention 5 45 minutes later as I checked my iPhone for the news before I got out of bed. I captured the screen shot and imagined that would make a good blog post. Is our world about to get shaken up? Will presidential candidates be asked if they are comfortable with a universe that's been around forever?

But the first blog post on Tuesday didn't go up until 7:56, and it was about a WaPo columnist's abstruse effort to support his assertion that it's "'trivial to compare' Roy Moore's trying to stop gay marriage in Alabama to George Wallace's blocking the door to racial integration at the University of Alabama." (The columnist thought what Roy Moore was doing is a much bigger deal.)

I'm seeing the old screen shot at 6 a.m. this morning because I plugged my iPhone into my computer just now. I'm remembering what I didn't blog on Tuesday and remembering what I saw on my iPhone this morning as I scanned the latest news from my supine position under the comforter. David Carr has died! He was only 58. He collapsed in the newsroom at the New York Times. Will I blog about his death when I did not blog the death of Bob Simon, reported on Memeorandum at 12:25 a.m. on February 10, whence it was read out loud from across the room by my husband Meade, causing me to ask: "Who's Bob Simon?"?

I had to be told he's one of the "60 Minutes" people. I don't watch "60 Minutes," but I do read the NYT, and I've read and enjoyed David Carr many times. Here's his 2008 article about his life as a crackhead:

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

That's a journalist reporting on the mind of an addict: an addict spreads around versions on the truth depending on what you think anyone listening to you seems to need. And isn't that what we've come to feel the journalists seem to be doing? [Insert reference to Brian Williams.] And isn't that what we expect the politicians to do, for example, when they are asked, as Scott Walker was the other day, about whether they are comfortable with evolution?

At the Facebook post where we have a long thread about Scott Walker's response — saying he needed to "punt" on that question and that it's not the sort of thing politicians should have to talk about —Annie Gottlieb says:

Why do we say we "believe in" evolution? That gives away the fact that "science" is our modern religion, the thing we look to for an explanation of our existence and a hope of defeating death. (The third thing religion supplies, meaning, science is not so good at, although it does somewhat justify social Darwinism if that's your cup of tea.) What's funny about it is that science itself, without the scare quotes, is exposing the fact that we don't yet understand evolution very well at all.

And I say:

Yes, this is something I notice all the time. And people are pressured to believe because of the prevalence of believers -- their domination in positions of authority -- and not because we understand and see the reasoning of the science. So it's not just like religion. It's like authoritarian religion. By the way, some physicists are casting doubt on the Big Bang theory. Will they move into the position of authority at some point? Why does it even matter whether we agree or not? We can't check their work. We can't have an independent position. We're just called upon to be sheep for the Good Shepherd. Might as well go with Jesus. He's pretty good.

Nothing to see here! Move along! That Obamacare case is nothing — nothing, I tell you!

At the top of Memeorandum — which collects trending news and opinion pieces — the flop sweat shows:



(Click to enlarge.)

ADDED: It's funny, these websites are obviously trying to draw traffic, so they are imagining a need and serving it. These writers — especially the headline writers — must think there are a lot of potential readers who are upset and in need of soothing. The writers themselves may not be experiencing any sort of panic or anxiety. They may simply be grinding out the next damn thing that one does in the daily enterprise of grabbing eyeballs. The shamefully dishonest!!!! enterprise of grabbing eyeballs.

Juxtaposition highlights the politics of distraction.

Captured just now at Memeorandum (which auto-aggregates news and opinion pieces based on what's being written about right now by "experts and pundits, insiders and outsiders, media professionals and amateur bloggers"):



Here's "White House Had Advance Notice on Heathrow Detention," implicating the Obama administration in the British government's 9-hour detention of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the most conspicuous journalist dealing with Edward Snowden.

But, look, a puppy!!! The Obamas got another dog, a girl puppy this time. Isn't she cute? She's named Sunny. Aw, doesn't that make you feel sunny? Sunny, thank you for the truth you've let me see. Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to Z. My life was torn like a windblown sand, then a rock was formed when we held hands. Sunny one so true, I love you.

Obama's 1979 prom photos.

Here.

ADDED: At the top of Memeorandum right now, we see this snapshot of what America is paying attention to:

BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski is at it again, providing yummy tidbits for lefties.

I'm not linking to BuzzFeed — no links for you! — but to Memeorandum.

"Romney book: Britain is a tiny island that makes stuff nobody wants."

That's the headline in Foreign Policy, which is getting attention (according to Memeorandum), especially after Romney supposedly said something that upset the Brits today. (Surveying the London Olympics, Romney saw "a few things that were disconcerting." The Brits are keen to mock, and the mockery is magnified here in the U.S., because American media is inclined to boost Obama whenever the opportunity arises.)

Let's look at the paragraph Foreign Policy highlighted:

England [sic/[FP's sic]] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth's land and a quarter of the earth's population.

Oh, there's where they cut it off? Well, obviously he was in the middle of making a point. But you know the rule in journalism: Taking things out of context is okay when you do it to hurt conservatives. But I happen to have my Kindle copy of Romney's book "No Apology: Believe in America," so it's easy for me to give you the context. Here are the next 4 paragraphs:

2 things about the impending government takeover of medicine.

These items are side-by-side at Memeorandum:

1. In the Boston Globe, a Harvard nanophysics researcher named Mike Stopa says the term "death panels" "persists... because it denotes, in a pithy way, the economic realities of scarcity inherent in nationalizing a rapidly developing, high-technology industry on which people’s lives depend in a rather immediate way."

2. The NYT reports that "The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines."

Life and death — it's economics, and the government is here to help.

Does Katrina vanden Heuvel have a Joe Biden sock-puppet?

Memeorandum — a fabulously useful starting point for blog-reading — automatically aggregates items based on a secret algorithm.


At the top, right now, is this:



Look closer:



I clicked, because I wanted to see what Joe Biden had to say under the snazzy headline "Obama: On the way to a failed presidency?" The link goes to a Washington Post column with that headline — but it's by Katrina vanden Heuvel ("editor and publisher of the Nation" who "writes a weekly online column for The Post").

Can anyone explain why the automatic aggregator Memeorandum would have picked up that column and attached Biden's name to it? I'm guessing the answer is pretty boring: "Joe Biden" appears in a line above the column, near the top of the page, that begins "Hot Topics." That does give rise to a new puzzle: What's hot about Biden? Clicking on his name, I see that he "heads to the Hill to talk taxes" today.  Sizzling!

"Rosie O'Donnell Reveals Motivation Behind Her Own Lesbian Wedding."

Memeorandum features this purported revelation from Brian Maloney.

Oh, spare me. Rosie was utterly clear at the time, as I blogged on February 27, 2004 — 2004!

"Vile and vicious and hateful." Rosie O'Donnell gives this reason for going to San Francisco to marry her female partner:

"We were both just trying to come here after the sitting president said the vile and vicious and hateful comments he did on Tuesday and inspired myself and my brand-new wife to fly here this morning."

Quite aside from how it sounds to cite hostility to President Bush as your reason to marry or, more specifically, whether the gay marriage cause is helped by presenting it as a political protest, is it really necessary to tar supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment this way? It was only two years ago that O'Donnell first publicly said that she was gay. How fast can you expect social progress to take place? Only last summer, the Supreme Court withdrew the power to make homosexual sodomy a crime, and now, already, we are asked to think people are "vile and vicious and hateful" because they want to restrict marriage to different sex couples?...

Supporters of gay marriage would do well to show some understanding for the feelings and beliefs of the people they are trying to persuade. The sense of alarm about the proposed amendment is understandable, though unwarranted, but it is counterproductive to become overheated and engage in this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. The light of reason is on your side: why act as if you don't think it is?

By the same token, if you opponents of same-sex marriage believe the light of reason is on your side, why don't you act as if you think it is and leave Rosie O'Donnell out of it.

"We in Britain are rightly proud of our toilets, and the onus is on people who come to this country to appreciate them for what they are."

"It's absolutely ludicrous - Thomas Crapper would be turning in his grave!"

Ha. I love the way The Daily Mail — stirring the shit — illustrates this article with a photograph of a
not-clean toilet.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Why are people acting surprised by this NYT article about law schools adjusting student grade point averages upward?

Here's the Times article. Memeorandum collects the reactions.

I saw the NYT article yesterday and decided it wasn't worth blogging, but I'm blogging it now because it's getting blogged and only to say that I consider this news a huge bore in light of the fact that law students' grades are always adjusted on a curve.

It's not as if the students previously got the grades they deserved and now the grades are phony. When  lawprofs grade law school exams, we may start with raw scores that represent what we really think of them, but the final grades are determined by the school's predetermined goals for averages and percentages at the various grade levels. If the school thinks those averages and percentages are set in the wrong place and it can reset them.

It never had to do with the actual performance of the students. It was always about where the school, as a matter of policy, decided the grades ought to be. It was always about communicating with law firms and other employers in the hope of advantaging our graduates in comparison to other law schools' graduates. We're all lawyers here. This is all advocacy. Are you actually surprised?

Visualizing political bias.

An extension that color-codes the blogs at Memeorandum.

Memeorandum is my favorite place to start when looking for political stories to blog about. It's a (somewhat lazy) way to see what everybody's talking about at the moment. With this extension you can see... well, what exactly are you seeing?

The colors don’t necessarily represent each blogger’s personal views or biases. It’s a reflection of their linking activity. The algorithm looks at the stories that blogger’s linked to before, relative to all other bloggers, and groups them accordingly. People that link to things that only conservatives find interesting will be classified as bright red, even if they are personally moderate or liberal, and vice-versa. The algorithm can't read minds, so don't be offended if you feel misrepresented. It's only looking at the data.

The Moderate Voice notes its dark blue identification. And I come out bright red. [CORRECTION: I'm merely pink. I MEAN: I'm at the mid-level of redness.] So, what to do with this information? Maybe I'll try, when I go to Memeorandum, to pick more "blue" stories...