What movie did I watch?

 

ADDED: Marcus Carman identified the actor: "That's Cornel Wilde."

That caused Yancey Ward to guess: "Well, if that is Cornel Wilde, then a clown makes me think 'Greatest Show on Earth.'"

Ha ha. Does that look like a circus setting? Does Wilde seem like a circus person there?

Then Quaestor got it right: "Leave Her to Heaven."

Think what you will about this movie, but here's my description: A woman marries a man because he looks like her father, and though she's incredibly beautiful, the new husband would rather sit around typing novels and go swimming with his much younger brother and sing folk songs with the hired man than have sex with his wife. It's not a comedy.

"For those that look at a gym as a selfie opportunity, a place solely dedicated to performance-oriented training or a workout that needs to be done, you can probably find a gym that’s more affordable..."

"... that can deliver those things. We are not looking to bring in people who keep to themselves and don’t see the value of mingling with like-minded people."

Said Sebastian Schoepe, an executive at a fitness outfit called Heimat, quoted in "Think Getting Into College Is Hard? Try Applying for These Gyms. A new crop of luxury gyms requires referrals, interviews and even, in some cases, medical evaluations. And that’s before paying a monthly fee of up to $2,750" (NYT). 

So... they discriminate fiercely, but against whom? Is it too subtle to puzzle out — too hard to identify as something known to be wrong, like the admissions process at an elite law school? 

I thought maybe the name was a signal. What's "heimat"? Sounds German. Oh! It's the German word for "homeland"! Here's the Wikipedia page, "Heimat":

Why I put AdSense ads back on the blog — self-defense.

Last October, after years of taking offense at Google for sending me email telling me I had offensive material on this blog, I discontinued my participation in Google Adsense. That is, I opted out of using advertising to monetize this blog. At the time, I wrote: 

I'm tired of checking to see what's supposedly a violation. I get so many of these and they're often posts that are nothing but a quote from a commentator in the NYT. But to see that the review didn't okay these pages... it's just mind-bending. I can't waste my energy dealing with this bullshit. In every case, I'm told that I've violated their policy with "Dangerous or derogatory content," which I find insulting. Here are recent posts that have been found in violation of that policy — even after review... 

Click through to see what I'd written, but suffice it to say that there was nothing that could possibly be considered "dangerous" or "derogatory." I said:

How did these articles get flagged? By robots or by opponents of this blog? What kind of review does Google have that would reinforce the idea that this is "Dangerous or derogatory content"?! Review by robots or by opponents of this blog? I can't imagine an unbiased human being finding all — or any — of these posts to have "Dangerous or derogatory content." It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments.... 

I'm not dealing with it any more. So enjoy ad-free Althouse.

Well, I am going to deal with it now and in the future.  I just turned AdSense ads back on. At least, Google was nice enough to offer me cake....

... yeah, Google, your AI did a nice job of knowing what I like. Cake. I like cake. But it's not yummy cake that has me coming back. And it's not the income from the ads. I realized I can use AdSense in self-defense. Google has the power to delete this blog. Whatever force caused those exasperating notifications is still out there, exerting pressure, whether I'm getting notifications or not.

As I noted in that October post, "It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments." In the comments there, Yancey Ward said: 

It isn't your content that is getting flagged, Ms. Althouse, it is what we commenters are saying - they are flagging the separate blog post which contains all of the comments at the end. You just have too many of us deplorables.

I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and I gave up ads because it seemed like too much work to go searching for what might be the problem in the comments. But the mechanism for reporting abuse to Google remains. This presents a risk to me, and I think the risk has increased in the past week. So I want those notifications. I'm worried not only that Google will overdo its censorship but also that haters of this blog — of the comments section of this blog — will come in here with pseudonyms and write violent threats and racist crap for the purpose of drawing censorship down upon me. 

There are various ways to deal with the problem of commenters who are here to hurt me, and some of them are too labor intensive. Some of them would diminish (or destroy) the flow of the comments. The comments at their best are phenomenal, and I'm very happy with the good commenters and have greatly appreciated their company these last 17 years. (Bloggiversary #17 is tomorrow.) But one thing I can do is to put the ads back up and then use the notifications to identify the comment threads that have something Google sees as a problem. Then it's a limited task to look for what needs to be deleted.

I delete comments without prodding from Google when I see threats of violence. I delete comments with the "n-word." I probably have a standard that's close to what Google is identifying, so I'm going to accept the help from Google now. I can't read every comment on every post — there are close to 4 million comments on this blog — but I can comb through the comments sections on posts where I get a Google notification. Google is getting vigilant about material that I don't want either — and, of course, I don't want a festering problem that I cannot see and that is undermining the existence of this blog. 

And that's why there are ads on this blog.

"Carter Page on Sunday called the accusations against him detailed in the foreign surveillance warrant application released by the FBI 'so ridiculous.'"

"'You talk about misleading the courts, it's just so misleading... It's literally a complete joke.'"

CNN reports on the interview that was on CNN's "State of the Union."

I have not attempted to read the long document that was released, but one of the commenters in last night café, Yancey Ward, did:

Believe it or not, I read the FISA applications in less than an hour. It is 90%+ redacted, so there are about 40 pages of actual material. The bulk of the material that is redacted appears to be nothing related to Page at all — it appears in procedures, minimization, and is connect otherwise to general descriptions of what Russia is thought to do in such areas- in other words, classified means and methods. Indeed, the only portions that are unredacted are the parts related to Page.

Here is the absolute truth — all of the applications rely on the Steele Dossier and the Isikoff story from September 2016 — a story that Steele himself was the source for. Those are the only two pieces of "evidence" the FBI supplied to the FISA court that could reasonably be inferred to assign probable cause that Page was a knowing Russian agent. The only other things mentioned in regards to Page are that he lived in Russia for a time, travels there sometimes as an energy consultant, and was approached by Russian agents in the past, one of whom Page himself helped to trap and convict by serving as a willing FBI informant. That last part is incongruous with designating him as a Russian agent, but is included any way as an attempt, not to exonerate him, but to tar him.

Also, if you do a page by page comparison of all four applications, there is little material added from one to the other —if you compared the applications side by side, practically every redacted section is identical in shape and length and page designations. In other words, in each of the renewals, it is apparent that the FBI got jackshit from the surveillance — there was nothing they could add to each application, and so just mostly copied the first application serially.

In addition, none of the applications told the court that the Clinton Campaign is the one who paid Steele and FusionGPS — not a single time. Indeed, the only mention in all the applications of "Candidate 2" is in the very last renewal, and that section wasn't discussing who hired the law firm, but was instead discussing some letters Page wrote criticizing the Clinton Campaign. The FBI knew who hired the law firm — they knew Steele (Source 1) was hired by Glenn Simpson (aka US citizen), and they knew Simpson was hired by a law firm- i.e. the FBI knew which law firm and thus it was the Clinton Campaign. The applications studiously avoid mentioning "Candidate 2" at every point they describe the chain of cutouts- always ending with "law firm".

Finally, it clear the FBI confirmed nothing of the Steele Dossier. At no point does it appear that Steele revealed his sources to the FBI- they are always described as "subsources"- this is FBI legalese for "we don't even know the name so that we can designate them by number".

The House Intelligence Republican memo was correct on all counts. The Democrat memo was extremely misleading — there is nothing else other than the Steele Dossier and the story Steele sourced to Isikoff.

I don't have the patience to read the thing myself, but that shows why government officials may chose to write long, evasive documents. Let me know if there's anything about Yancey Ward's description that you think is wrong and tell me exactly why. And don't be verbose! I'm suspicious of verbosity. It makes me feel that you are hiding something.

"Lazy Meade bastard’s turkey."

That's video by Meade and title by Meade (based on the comment by Yancey Ward, here, "That Meade is a lazy bastard").

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan spoke at the University of Wisconsin–Madison yesterday.

I didn't attend. In fact, I was only reminded that the talk occurred yesterday when I was idly checking Facebook this morning and it told me "We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 1 year ago." The post, exactly a year ago, said:

Justice Sotomayor came to the law school to give the Kastenmeier Lecture yesterday. (It seems to have been a question-and-answer session rather than a lecture.) I didn't attend. There were limited tickets and I feel sure whoever got the ticket I would have taken got more out of it than I would. Nothing against Sotomayor specifically, but being in the presence of someone who will be saying things that I know or can read about doesn't do anything for me emotionally, and it's not as though I would be contributing something by my presence. Everyone's time is precious. I spent my time between 4 and 6 yesterday in prime experience, and it was not in that auditorium, and I hope the person sitting in the seat that was not taken up by me had a prime life experience too.

And that pretty much also explains why I didn't occupy a seat at the Kagan event. Here's a local newspaper story about it, "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan highlights importance of compromise at UW-Madison discussion":

With an even-numbered court prior to Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch filling the ninth seat on the bench, accepting 4-4 ties on cases would make the court seem divided and incapable of getting its work done, Kagan said.

“I think we all made a very serious effort to try to find common ground, even where we thought we couldn’t,” Kagan said. “It sort of forced us to keep talking with each other.... I’m actually hopeful that the effects of it will continue now that we have a nine-person court in the sense that all of us will remember not to stop the conversation too soon,” she said. “All of us will remember the value of trying to find a place where we can agree, where more of us can agree."

IN THE COMMENTS: Yancey Ward asks if Kagan would say the same thing if Hillary Clinton had won the power to pick the replacement for Scalia. I think maybe she would. What does it cost to speak of the value of continuing conversation and working seriously to find common ground? She might be even more inclined to say it if she intended to take full, confident advantage of a 5-person liberal majority.

A conversation about the politics of the commenters on the Althouse blog.

There was an open thread on this blog last night, and while many of the comments were about the Super Bowl...

Patriots getting schlonged.

Bigly.

Coin toss wins. What a rip.

Like Hillary beating Bernie in Iowa caucuses.

Cubs... Trump... Pats... I'm liking the way things are going.

... there was some interesting talk about the politics of the Althouse commenters.

Jack Wayne said:

I think everyone that reads this blog has noticed the increased number of lefty commenters. It started about 6 months ago. At first I thought it was a paid Soros performance trying to sway the election. Find a moderate blog and swamp it with lefty sentiments. It kept up after the election and now we see a determined effort to bring down Trump. What I'm having trouble understanding is the end game and why pick on Althouse? The end game is Pence followed by Ryan. Is that a reasonable goal? I think not but lefties are acting nutty right now. The other question of Althouse is more opaque. The best I can come up with is that the lefties feel the need to herd Althouse back into the fold. But I think that effort is doomed. Any lefties in the know are welcome to tell us what you are trying to accomplish.

Henry responded with:

What I've wondered for a long time is why the comments section has so many social conservatives in it, ranging from instapundit-style libertarians to outright misogynists. The question in my mind isn't why so many lefties, but why the balance has always been against them.

Jack Wayne said:

Henry, my POV is that lefties are not rational, hence they are the target in a blog that does not delete comments like so many lefty sites do.

Yancey Ward said:

Henry asked why Althouse draws so many from the right side of the political divide?

The explanation is fairly easy — she pulls no punches for the most part. I know from her writing that she leans left, but she almost never tolerates bullshit from either side — so there is something here for people from both sides to both agree with and disagree with. However, the main reason the commentators here lean right more than left is simply this — she doesn't delete their comments for simply disagreeing with her — a very rare thing for bloggers who are to the left.

Since I won't generally even read a blogger who practices such censorship, I noticed about a year ago that I was suddenly down to just Althouse who could be identified as a liberal, and who had a comments section. I have lost some bloggers on the right, too, who do this, but nowhere near the percentage. My theory is simply that liberals and progressives are just less tolerant of differing opinions, and the commenters from the left are less likely to frequent a comments section where they might encounter an actual opponent.

And you know what — I think her commenters have probably had an effect on Ms. Althouse — she definitely has drifted to the center in the last 4 years.

Of course, we could all just be commenters paid by Putin.

Trump protesters take Trump bait.

"Protesters burned the United States flag outside of Trump International Hotel in New York City Tuesday, following President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that flag burners be jailed or lose their citizenship."

Isn't that why he said that — to get his haters burning flags, making themselves look bad? When I blogged Trump's tweet about flag burning, Yancey Ward commented: "And this is the explanation for his tweet about burning the American flag. Just watch what happens at every stop he makes."

ADDED: My more substantial blog post about the flag-burning tweet is actually here: "Trump flaunts disrespect for American freedom of speech."

Trump is going out on what he's calling a "Thank You Tour."

Beginning in Cincinnati on Thursday evening.

IN THE COMMENTS: Yancey Ward says:

And this is the explanation for his tweet about burning the American flag. Just watch what happens at every stop he makes.