And there's this, from Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party: "Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate."
But he won the primary. Shouldn't that at least mean that someone with the same political orientation should replace him? Otherwise, it seems as though the part of the Democratic Party that lost in the primary process is stealing the nomination. That means the only way Platner’s team can have any role in determining the nominee is for Platner to hang onto the nomination he won. Unfortunately for the Party, it has no role in stopping him.
He wants to hold on? He can hold on. The dream is dead? Hold onto that dream.
UPDATE: Platner abandons his dream. He’s out. Watch his video here.
From the NYT article: "Once considered a favorite, Mr. Schlossberg, 33, landed in third place in a Democratic primary in one of the nation’s most liberal districts, now held by Representative Jerrold Nadler, the veteran Democrat, who is retiring. Micah Lasher, an assemblyman who had been endorsed by Mr. Nadler, won the primary....Schlossberg poured at least $1 million of his own into the campaign, and had tried to press his case in its closing weeks, including in a lengthy interview with The New Yorker.... “I’m running because I want to pass laws,” he told David Remnick, the magazine’s editor. “I want to pass laws that help the people in this district and in our country.”
Pass laws that help the people... Ever since Ted Kennedy's famous screwup, everyone running for office has known that the one thing you've got to have ready to go is an answer to the question why are you running. And that's his answer, a child's answer: I want to pass laws that help the people.
"'Sleep has its own universe, and we should better use that moment for what it’s good for,' [one neuroscientist said]... Dreams are not some barren landscape waiting to be populated,... they follow their own rules and presumably serve their own inexplicable aims. 'We should care about them, promote them, and nurture them, rather than trying to replace them,' [he] said.... [Another dream researcher] discussed the dangers of trying to 'colonize' sleep with what she called 'wake-centric values.' In her own life, she might prefer to learn from sleep than learn during sleep."
Perhaps this graph will make the concept more concrete for you:
In case you're having trouble discerning the year when that peak of excellence occurred, the text pinpoints it at 1976. Perhaps you remember. It was 50 years ago. The Bicentennial. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford. Karen Ann Quinlan was disconnected from her ventilator. A school bus full of children was buried in the ground but the kids dug themselves free, in 16 hours. Jenner won the Decathlon. Apple and Microsoft sprang into being. How could you not feel that happy days were here again?
Writes Justice Gorsuch, concurring, alone, in William Trevor Case v. Montana, issued this morning, which held that "police officers generally do not violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights when they enter his house without a warrant, but with an 'objectively reasonable basis' for believing someone inside is in physical danger and in need of immediate aid."
Does the Fourth Amendment tolerate this limited emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement just because five or more Justices of this Court happen to believe that such entries are “reasonable”? Or is this exception more directly “tied to the law”? Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 397 (2018) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting). The answer, I believe, is the latter.
That's what I texted Meade just now, so then I pasted the statement in Grok. Didn't ask Grok to do anything with it, certainly not to write it up into a short short story, but that's what it did:
The car rattled along the elevated track, fluorescent lights flickering like a bad motel sign. I was wedged between a guy scrolling TikTok and a woman clutching a bag of oranges. Across from me sat Donald Trump—orange as the fruit, hair defying gravity, suit somehow unwrinkled despite the heat. No Secret Service. No crowd. Just him, me, and the Address.
Trebay writes: "In his 20s, when he sought a life beyond the straitened circumstances of his upbringing, he became a favorite of the London tabloids that relentlessly chronicled his relationships with the model Jean Shrimpton and the actress Julie Christie. His romantic life was at one point so well known that he and Ms. Christie inspired the 'Terry and Julie' in the Kinks song 'Waterloo Sunset,' released at the height of the mid-1960s music and fashion scene known as Swinging London."
If we go over to Genius.com to find the lyrics, we see:
For years, YouTube has removed videos with derogatory slurs, misinformation about Covid vaccines and election falsehoods, saying the content violated the platform’s rules. But since President Trump’s return to the White House, YouTube has encouraged its content moderators to leave up videos with content that may break the platform’s rules rather than remove them, as long as the videos are considered to be in the public interest. Those would include discussions of political, social and cultural issues....
[U]nlike Meta and X, YouTube has not made public statements about relaxing its content moderation. The online video service introduced its new policy in mid-December in training material that was reviewed by The New York Times....
My post title says "once again," because I thanked Trump before, in a dream I had in 2015, recounted here: "Last night, I dreamed that I was talking to someone about Trump.... And then I look over and see that Donald Trump has been eavesdropping.... I thanked him, effusively, for teaching us to have the courage to speak freely." Teaching by example, I believe it was.
"And they're panicked. They have no idea why people like Donald Trump, and their first theory was, well, Donald Trump is evil, so half the country is evil.... How much easier would it have been just to pause for 20 minutes and ask yourself honestly, in some silent place: Why do people like Donald Trump? And if they had been honest enough... they would have come up with the two main reasons.... The first reason that people like Donald Trump is because he likes them.... Affection is something you can't fake.... And the second reason that people love Trump... is because he's liberated us in the deepest and truest sense. And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies.... If you want to enslave people — if you want to degrade them — force them to tell lies. And they have: They forced us to lie about everything at gunpoint, effectively they put people in prison, for refusing to lie...."
Said Tucker Carlson... and to my ear, this was the best speech at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally yesterday:
ADDED: This had a big impact on me because — as I told you many years ago — I had a dream about Trump in 2015, "long before I had any idea he'd become President... in which I was talking about Trump, then saw that he was there listening in on me," and I hugged him and "thanked him, effusively, for teaching us to have the courage to speak freely.... At the time I had that dream I wasn't consciously aware of liking Trump at all, so the dream made a big impression on me. There was something about Trump that I thought was tremendously helpful, and I really wanted to tell him."
I didn't watch it live for the same reason I didn't watch "Dragnet" when it was on at 9 p.m. on Thursdays in 1954. It was past my bedtime. I was 3.
I'm 73 — 8 years younger than Biden — and I'm in the Central Time Zone. He gave that speech at age 81 at 10 p.m. at night and went on until midnight, and I see he was feisty....
I wasn't feisty. I was lying down in my sleep position — a complicated arrangement involving 4 down pillows — and planning to more or less listen, listen until I entered the world of dreams — a place not necessarily more pleasant that the House chamber (last night I woke up screaming at nonexistent crocodiles) — but a place where I sojourn for 7 hours rebuilding the strength of a body that naturally rises at 4 a.m., maybe 3.
As I say, I am 73. I am not feisty at 9 at night and certainly not at midnight. If something were important enough though — stand here in front of millions and read this teleprompter in a dramatic, masterful style — I'd do it properly. I wouldn't yell irascibly. You wouldn't have to shoot me with drugs. In fact, that would be dangerously risky. I might behave erratically. I might yell irascibly. Yell irascibly for 2 hours? What would people think? Is the press on my side? Give me the drugs then! The press is on my side! They'll say I was "feisty."
Calling an old person "feisty" is like calling an African American person "articulate"....
We know what you mean. You're revealing that you have a stereotype and you're giving this person credit for setting himself apart from it.
But I was embracing the old-person stereotype, embracing my pillows, drifting off to sleep, and not really appreciating the irascible tone of voice. But I got to sleep. I've slept through the night. I did not wake up screaming. I'm well rested and perfectly lucid — I think! — composing these remarks before setting out to commune with the sunrise.
I knew I would have the video of the full speech. What's so special about watching it live? Looking up what was on TV on Thursday at 9 in 1954 — so I could write "Dragnet" in the first sentence of this post — I happened upon this:
Despite hit filmed programs such as I Love Lucy, both William S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC were said to be determined to keep most programming on their networks live. Filmed programs were said to be inferior to the spontaneous nature of live television.
Take away the magic of live television, and what is the State of the Union address? We are perfectly free to watch the entire thing on YouTube the next day. Or never. Or in sliced out snippets — a highlight reel or a collection of verbal slips or biggest applause lines. Or we can just read about it. Did anything happen? Did some grieving mother hear her daughter's name said aloud? Was the name precisely correctly pronounced? Did the President hold up a button? Did he recharge his campaign?
Was he feisty?
***
"Feisty," the OED tells us, is based on the familiar word "fist." It's a punch-in-the-nose concept. Fisty. Definition: "Aggressive, excitable, touchy." We're told it's American slang, originally dialect, and the OED has the quotes to prove it:
1913 Feisty means when a feller's allers wigglin' about, wantin' ever'body to see him, like a kid when the preacher comes.
H. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders 94
1926
That-there feisty bay mare jumped straight upwards and broke the tongue outen the plow.
E. M. Roberts, Time of Man 152
1965
Luther gets a little feisty after a few drinks, and he began to argue with him.
‘D. Shannon’, Death-bringers (1966) xiii. 162
1968
He couldn't shake her loose—she hung on to his arm, feisty as a terrier.
J. Potts, Trash Stealer xiii. 148
***
Post-sunrise opinion: The morning after, it is possible to see that the SOTU was a campaign speech. Every morning, there was a campaign speech yesterday.
In the comments: I'm getting a lot of pushback on the etymology of "feisty." It's not the fist that is the hand in an aggressive clench? It's a dog, you say? Well, let's go back to the OED. I see I made an assumption. What I was seeing at the OED entry "feisty" was:
I had not clicked on the boldface "fist." But if I had, I would not have gone to the entry for the kind of "fist" that is the clenched hand. I'd have gone to a separate entry, with 3 things together: a fart, a puffball fungus, and a dog:
1. A breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obsolete....
2. The fungus usually known as puff-ball.... Obsolete....
3. U.S. dialect. A small dog....
The etymology pointed us to #3, so — no matter how much we might enjoy thinking "feisty" means farty — we must accept that the comparison is to a small dog. Yappy, hopping around, over-excited. Still farty though. You see the connection. It's always the dog.
I know what it's like to want ideas for paintings and not to be able to think of any, and at first, this lucid dreaming idea seems fantastic. But then I thought I wouldn't like it at all, because my waking self, who would do all the work of brushing the paint on the canvas, would be a slave to the dreamer. The dreamer — admittedly, also me — would have effortlessly seen the finished work, seen it as if somebody else had done it. That would leave me, the real-life, hard-working painter, two steps removed from the deep and meaningful creative work.
My last post linked to my "I'm for Boring" tag, and I clicked on it and read a bunch of old posts. The ones from the last few years are nearly all about Biden.
Feel free to check them out. I just wanted to quote one thing I wrote in a post on March 3, 2020:
By the way, I had a dream about Donald Trump last night. I was at some sort of artsy song and spoken-word performance, in an intimate pink room with long comfy sofas. There were several polar bears reclining on a sofa, along with Donald Trump. This was right next to me, and I wanted to get some personal conversation with Trump, something I could remember and talk about. He was enjoying the show and singing along, being quite charming and talking to everyone. I leaned over and asked him, "Are the Secret Service okay with the polar bears?"
"... the British author Will Self wrote in [a review of the 1994 memoir, 'A Father’s Story']. 'Throughout, the sense of someone constitutionally ill-equipped for introspection of any kind groping toward a vile realization is gripping.'... [H]e wrote vividly about the uncanniness of seeing Jeffrey’s face, which looked so much like his own, staring at him from the front page of a newspaper, and about revisiting old memories. 'As I recall him in his infancy, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of helpless dread,' Mr. Dahmer wrote. 'I dwell on the small, pink hands, and in my mind I watch them grow larger and darker as I think about all that they will later do, of how stained they will become with the blood of others.'"
"Basically, I would have to struggle to keep my dream eyelids open, and would generally pass out randomly etc. The sleepiness is very extreme, far more sleepy than I've ever experienced in waking life. It's so bad that it's basically my reality check: if you're super sleepy, you're probably dreaming.
This is affecting my lucid dreaming. The sleepiness generally becomes worse when I'm lucid, so I'll easily 'fall asleep' into non-dreaming sleep. Even if this doesn't happen, the sleepiness is extremely distracting.... I tried to do things like drink imaginary coffee, but it doesn't really work...."
A Reddit post from 8 years ago, read this morning because I had one of those dreams within which I'm incredibly sleepy. Within the dream I am trying to stay awake, but in reality, I'm trying to stay asleep (to continue the dream). Or is falling asleep in a dream the real-world experience of waking up?
... Emerson told police officers that he thought he might’ve been having a “nervous breakdown” and disclosed that he hadn’t slept in more than 40 hours and had consumed psychedelic mushrooms for the first time....
One more reason to adhere to your ethics even when you are having a lucid dream.
"... he ate a brief lunch, and retired to his room, took a large draft of laudanum, and, presumably high as a kite, spent the next three days and nights penning what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, finishing it in a state of exhausted triumph. Here, the author—this one, me—would like to interject. Sixty thousand words in three days! Good God. Where, exactly, does one procure this laudanum? It sounds like a downer, and yet . . . did I read that cocaine was involved? So it’s an upper, mellowed by morphine? Can it be synthesized? Is it smokeable? Injected? Why aren’t we making this stuff now? . . . Ahem. What’s really remarkable is what happened afterward. Stevenson gathered [his wife] Fanny and [his stepson] Lloyd around him and proceeded to read his tale.... Fanny... insisted that Stevenson had... failed to see the essential allegory of the tale. Furious, Stevenson tossed the manuscript into the fireplace."
"He raged at her myopic imbecility. They had a colossal argument, and then, pointing to the ashes of his work, he conceded that, well, perhaps on second thought, she’d been right after all, and he returned to his room, to his laudanum, and wrote a new draft, again in three days. I have a special affection for Dr. Jekyll, of course. I think anyone who has engaged in a course of action that violated their moral code, and did so not with remorse but rather great enthusiasm, will empathize with the tale. That it was written during the height of the Victorian era, with its buoyant belief in the inevitability of progress and rectitude, makes it all the more remarkable. Stevenson, clearly, had a dark side, and perhaps this too explains his wandering ways. The contented stay put. The disaffected always have one foot out the door...."
I read Troost's book a while ago, but I'm rereading that part because I just watched the 1931 movie — part of the Criterion Channel's "Pre-Code Horror" collection — starring Fredric March. Highly recommended. Excerpt:
"His right side was weak, and a whirlwind spun him violently on his left foot; he limped past a man whom he suddenly realized he knew, then turned to speak to a different man, who told him to go see Monsieur N., who had something to give him. Descartes knew what it was: a melon.
A lesser thinker might have seen in this dream a craving for cantaloupe. But, to Descartes, its vividness seemed to suggest a clear disjunction between the body and the mind: in dreams the body lies dormant while the mind runs free...."
"We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling. If this is the case, how can a simple account of such imaginings communicate the dread and the thrills, the adventure, anxieties, and joys conjured by last night's dream? I am going to attempt to do this all the same.... It took place in the Humanities Building, at dusk.... We were electing people to committees... Suddenly we were assaulted by the racket of a street band or a demonstration.... A voice cried: 'Here they come!' then: 'It's the Gods!'..."
I'm reading that this morning because it's in an Ask Metafilter discussion about something that happened to me last night: dreaming that you are very sleepy, struggling with sleepiness within the story that is the dream.
I'm blogging it because I find it very cool when a subject recurs within a blogging session, and I had already blogged about Coleridge this morning.
Have you ever dreamed of clothing/accessories and then adopted what you saw in the dream as your new style? I might do that but I can only think of one instance in my entire life when I have dreamed of clothes. If I did have a vivid dream about clothing, I think I would make an effort to find clothing like that and wear it — sport it.
Maybe I'll wake up one morning and find I've turned into someone like this:
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