"A British swimmer sustained by bananas and painkillers has become the first person to circumnavigate Hong Kong’s largest island..."

"... a distance equivalent to swimming across the Channel and back again. Simon Holliday, 46, from Ashford in Kent, completed the 40.3-mile circuit of Lantau Island on Friday in 20 hours 57 minutes. Half an hour later, he was followed by Edie Hu of the United States, the first woman to make the swim. They did not wear wetsuits — marathon swim rules mean they are not allowed in waters above 20C — so the chill was one of their biggest challenges.... The three swimmers were followed by a support team in two boats and two kayaks. They were fed in the water every 45 minutes with snacks such as chocolate, jelly babies and bananas."

From "British man is first to swim round Hong Kong’s biggest island/Simon Holliday won the 40-mile race round Lantau — the equivalent of swimming the Channel and back — as competitors battled tides, hallucinations and cramp" (London Times).

20C = 68° Fahrenheit.

A quote from Hu (the woman): "I started getting a little loopy. I was getting sleepy and actually dozing off [in the water].

"[Mike Johnson] has argued that the House... has no reason to meet as long as Senate Democrats are blocking a bill to reopen the government...."

"His strategy of indefinite hiatus means that Mr. Johnson has not engaged in the typical political theater that speakers often employ during shutdown fights to jam the party out of power: scheduling tricky votes on bills to reopen parks or pay certain categories of federal workers.... Democrats had been bracing for him to do so. But instead, he has spent much of the shutdown appearing daily at news conferences at the Capitol, hammering them for refusing to fund the government and making the case that Republicans need not negotiate. He is insistent that the House has nothing to do but wait for the stalemate to end...."

From "Keeping the House Absent, Johnson Marginalizes Congress and Himself/The speaker’s decision to hold the House in an indefinite hiatus during the shutdown is his latest move to diminish the role of the legislative branch — and his own post" (NYT).

He's right, isn't he? It's the Senate that needs to move, and the House has nothing to do but wait. If you don't have anything better than nothing to do, do nothing.

"Late last year, Arthur Juliani, a 32-year-old research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, was decidedly not taking ibogaine..."

"... but was ingesting something similar. He had obtained tabernanthalog, a research molecule designed to mimic ibogaine’s chemical structure and potential effects on neuroplasticity, but not cause any hallucinations. About 45 minutes after he swallowed his dose, Juliani started to feel a kind of 'spacious attention,' he told me. On a walk outside, he found that anywhere he looked appeared like a 'perfectly framed photograph, distinct and standing on its own.' When he went home for lunch, he ate a bell pepper 'in the slowest and most intentional manner I had ever eaten a vegetable in my life.'... If novel psychedelics and 'pseudo-delics' tickle brain receptors in a way that changes people’s subjective experience... can one confidently say that the people who take them aren’t tripping? As the pursuit of non-hallucinogenic psychedelics advances, the definition of a trip as something induced by a discrete set of substances is set to evolve alongside them. These days, the hottest new psychedelic drugs might be the ones that feel as close to nothing as possible...."

From "Tripping on Nothing New, non-hallucinogenic versions of psychedelics are blurring the boundaries of the drug trip" (The Atlantic).

My first reaction: We're just talking about paying attention. Why can't you find a way to pay attention on your own, using the natural resources of your magnificent human body? Why add drugs? Americans and their pills. Just stop!

My second reaction: This is the diet drug we've been waiting for! It will make you eat a vegetable — one vegetable! — slowly and with pleasure. This too, one might do without drugs — recall Fletcherism — but these are people who are already resorting to worse drugs, and — who knows? — at some point maybe you could internalize the capacity to call any vegetable and respond with cosmic joy.

My third reaction: This is how "they" turn us into the bleak, insignificant half-humans of the future: You will do nothing and you will be happy. (See "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better")

Mainstream media helps Kamala Harris maintain the nothingness.

This isn't the first time I'm noting that the Kamala Harris campaign seems to have chosen a no-substance strategy — a campaign about nothing. See here and here, for example.

This post is just to collect 2 new examples of elite media helping the Harris campaign disserve the electorate by withholding substantive content:

1. "Kamala Harris Doesn’t Need Policy to Win/In fact, a detailed platform will hurt her campaign more than it will help" by Peter Rothpletz in The New Republic: "Harris’s vibes-based, personality-based approach to the first six weeks of this mad dash of a campaign is clearly working.... Harris should hang out in the coconut tree and not release any economic plans that can’t fit within a Venn diagram. To win, Harris doesn’t need policy. She just needs vibes."

2. "How Harris Wins (and Trump and the Republicans Blow It)" by Ross Douthat in The New York Times": "[Y]ou have to think about Marie Kondo, the Japanese style guru famous for her ruthless minimalism, whose prescription for a cluttered home is to remove any object that doesn’t immediately 'spark joy.' The progressivism that infuses the contemporary Democratic Party can be a cluttered, claustrophobic worldview.... Her convention speech was especially Kondo-ist: Short, sparse, and nonspecific about virtually everything....  [W]inning on the most limited agenda and by the narrowest of margins is still winning...."

I didn't go looking for more things to put on this list. These are just 2 things I casually ran across this morning. I'm guessing there's more of the same out there, whether it's this explicitly stated or not.

This reminds me: The debate date is coming up soon. I'm guessing it won't happen. Kamala Harris will drop out and blame Trump. Here's what I said on this topic a month ago. Excerpt: "She's already avoiding speaking on substance. She's following something like Biden's old Covid-era 'basement strategy.' To avoid any debate would be consistent with her overall campaign strategy."

"It's not the economy, stupid: Why Kamala Harris should focus on everything else."

 A headline over at Salon. The piece is by Joe Tauke. Excerpt:

[R]egardless of whatever economic statistics Harris or Biden or any other Democrat might throw out there... [polls] strongly imply that no amount of attempted persuasion will convince voters that they feel better about the economy now than they did during the Trump administration — because, well, they don’t. It’s not even close.... Moreover, real-time economic conditions (other than inflation) for the country appear to be deteriorating just as the campaign enters its most intense phase.... If voters in [swing] states are thinking about the economy when casting their ballots, Trump will win. If Harris can get them to think about virtually anything else (other than immigration), she’ll win. In 1992, during Bill Clinton’s winning effort against George H.W. Bush, “It’s the economy, stupid” was the best advice a Democratic campaign could follow. In 2024, it’s the best way for the latest Democratic nominee to lose.

Okay, but "virtually anything else"? Immigration? Endless wars? Going toe-to-toe with Putin? The Covid lockdown? Guns? Gender affirmation treatments? DEI? Rather than "anything else," the best advice — the advice she seems to be taking — is that nothing else is better. Kamala Harris is running as representing no issue at all. They say you can't beat something with nothing, but they are trying, and they think — I believe — it's their best hope... because the something (Donald Trump) is so monstrously, calamitously bad.

ADDED: I think the phrase "You can't beat something with nothing" originated with Will Rogers, and he was talking, in 1934, about Republicans running on nothing but the horribleness of their opponent — FDR:

BUT: I see I blogged about Will Rogers and the phrase "You can't beat something with nothing" last January, here. At the time, "I wanted to critique the Biden campaign strategy." Ha ha. Anyway, I determined last January that "Will Rogers didn't invent 'You can't beat something with nothing.' Even back then, it was an 'old saying.'"

"Kamala is throwing a party. She doesn't believe in anything. Well, she's flip-flopped. It's not flip-flop."

"She doesn't believe... She wasn't for it before she was against.... It's nothing. It has no foundation in reality. None of it matters. The Democrats are living in a post-reality world of parties. People are twerking. People are singing. There's Yas queening. It it has nothing to do with anything.... You can't touch it it's The Sphere...."

Says Tim Dillon, a third of the way into his podcast that began with a description of his visit to The Sphere in Las Vegas. 

 

"Do you see? The people come in. They herd them in. Come in, fatty, sit in your seat and look: It's pretty colors. It's things that are flying by a mile a minute.... Yes,  play this, play this.... [Plays clip of women twerking at a Harris rally]... That's right, this is the campaign. These are the policies.... This is what you're going to get. These are the policies. This is what you're voting for... and by the way this is brilliant.... If Kamala Harris did not exist, billionaires would have to invent her.... She is hollow in in the best way...."

Dillon takes the position that the candidate that throws the best party will win, and he weaves that into a critique of the inane Sphere and the awful Darren Aronofsky movie — "Postcard from Earth" — he paid $300 to see there.

Dillon's comic rant merged with my own thinking on the subject — about why Kamala Harris avoids any substantive interactions with anyone. The lack of substance is her substance, and it is exactly what will work. America wants a show about nothing — to use the old "Seinfeld" phrase. Or... as I've said a few times around here: Better than nothing is a high standard. 

Nothing is a good bet. Stick to nothing. Trump has a lot of baggage. Kamala is unburdened by what has been.

People think they're attacking her when they put up a montage like that, but it is a testament to genius.

"There's nothing beyond our capacity when we act together. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Remember who the hell we are. We are the United States of America."

Said President Biden, next to the plane out of which emerged those freed by Russia in the prisoner exchange.

I'm glad the erstwhile prisoners are home, and I'm glad Joe Biden still walks and talks among the living, but I don't believe "There's nothing beyond our capacity when we act together," I don't believe we are "working together," I think it's interesting that a President said "Nothing. Nothing. Nothing," and I don't approve of the intensifier "the hell" on this occasion.

Most importantly, I want to muse over the announcement "We are the United States of America." It's not just a Bidenism. It's very widespread. It's "American exceptionalism." But the Russians got their prisoners back too. Is Putin out there saying «Мы — Россия»?

I get a Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair vibe. But what is grand about a prisoner exchange?

"No music, no streaming, no snacking, no sleep."

"'Raw-dogging' has become the buzziest travel trend of the summer, seeing stealth plane passengers forgo the modern comforts of flying to stare at either the in-flight map or nothing at all during lengthy trips."

From "Men are ‘raw dogging’ it on flights — here’s what the weird travel trend means" (NY Post).

This gets my "meditation" tag.

"I’ve been reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius’s 'Meditations' book... And the funny thing about that book is..."

"... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book.... I really have adopted the Marcus Aurelius philosophy, which is that everything I’ve done means nothing. I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead...."

Says Jerry Seinfeld, interviewed by David Remnick, in "The Scholar of Comedy/Jerry Seinfeld on how to write jokes, the ending of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' and the world-historical struggle to invent the Pop-Tart" (The New Yorker).

That movie about inventing the Pop-Tart was not sponsored by the company that makes Pop-Tarts, so it's not like the Barbie movie. I was glad to see that, so let me show you the trailer:

Nice effort at setting things in 1963 — including a scene in the Oval Office with JFK — so why use the David Bowie recording of "Rebel, Rebel," which came out in 1974? Is everything on the top 100 for 1963 not Pop-Tarty enough? Couldn't get the rights for "My Boyfriend's Back" or "Walk Like a Man" or "Easier Said Than Done" or "Da Doo Ron Ron"?

The nothing that happened.

The most surprising part about this is that you uploaded it. Nothing happened. Nobody even reacted. Your provocation failed. This demonstrates that you are not unsafe among supporters of Palestinian liberation.

— Daniel Baryon (@AnarkYouTube) April 22, 2024

ADDED: I suspect that the person who posted the video actually wanted to show that the protesters were not accosting those they identified as Jews. In that light, here's a NYT article: "A Night Different From Others as Campus Protests Break for Seder/Pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom are Jewish, prepared Seder dinners at college protest encampments, even as other Jewish students sought community in more traditional settings":

"This is people taking it upon themselves to use a space that in many ways was abandoned by people with money and power."

"In the 1990s, there was this moral panic about graffiti being linked to gangs, but times have changed... Even if people don’t like it — and they’re entitled not to like it — they understand that graffiti is not connected to violence."

Said Stefano Bloch, "a cultural geographer, a professor at the University of Arizona and a former graffiti artist," quoted in "Multiple Floors of Los Angeles Skyscrapers Are Covered in Graffiti/The graffiti has brought attention to the empty buildings, which have been abandoned since 2019 and are across from the venue where the Grammy Awards will be hosted on Sunday" (NYT).

Human activity flows into unused spaces. It's the story of civilization. But is that unlinked to gangs? Don't gangs come into existence where there is emptiness in the social order?

Nature abhors a vacuum.

"Haaning's new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system..."

"... that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions. Even the missing money in the work has a monetary value when it is called art and thus shows how the value of money is an abstract quantity. Haaning's new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions."

Said the Kunsten Museum's exhibition guide, about the 2 completely blank canvases it chose to display, quoted in "A Danish artist has been ordered to repay a museum after delivering blank canvases" (NPR).

The museum had advanced Jens Haaning over $75,000 so that he could recreate an earlier work of his in which he attached actual cash to the canvas. In that earlier work, the money was supposed to represent the wage gap between Danish workers and Austrian workers. Haaning is considered a "conceptual artist," and the new work expresses a concept that the museum made a show of understanding (or pretending to understand).

"[H]is older brother 'messed up' his university entrance exam, became depressed and as a result has never had a job."

"Then... his older sister struggled to find the right career path. When she didn’t get a job she wanted, she took her own life. Witnessing his siblings try and fail to find their place in the world of work must, I say, have informed his decision to turn his back on conventional employment. He considers this. 'I can’t quite tell myself how what happened to my siblings influenced me,' he says. 'But what happened, I think, is that they couldn’t really go into society. That’s what we say in Japan: ‘go into society’. It means that you are becoming a proper grown-up. In modern society, in Japanese society, you have to be a proper adult to be acceptable, but my brother and sister couldn’t work, so they weren’t accepted. They were rejected by society. And that just made me determined that I don’t want to be in a world where my siblings weren’t accepted... I went to university. I made a great effort... I got a job and I wanted to get on with people, and I wanted to be like other people. I tried harder and harder, but I just couldn’t do it. However hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to be like the others... [I feel] an anger... towards... the atmosphere of society, that you’re not worth anything if you don’t do anything, and that you have to be productive. And I just want to say, "No. Everybody is worth their existence."'"

From "Meet Do Nothing Rental Man, Japan’s unlikely social media star/He’ll sit with you while you eat or keep your place in a queue. How has Shoji Morimoto turned merely existing into a money-spinning phenomenon — at £165 a go?" (London Times).

I wrote about this man last year — here — but I'm calling attention to him again because he has a forthcoming memoir (paid link) and because the Times is interviewing him.

“As Rental Person, I have only the flimsiest connection with my clients,” he says in his memoir. “I am practically transparent. They have a story they have to tell and it’s my role to be there while they tell it. In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.”... 

At best, Morimoto is an impassive confessor. He does not advise or commiserate or look people in the eye and tell them he understands. Usually, he says, the people telling him things don’t even want this of him. They just need him there, doing nothing, while they speak. Those who have never used him often think he is motivated by benevolence. He wants to be clear that he is not.

There's an excerpt from his book. An excerpt of the excerpt:

We’d been chatting for quite some time when, finally, in a very off-hand way, he started talking about his hidden past. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I was a teenager,” he said. “Oh yes?” I said, nodding as I normally do. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I… er… killed someone.”... Somehow it really took me aback to think that a person who cooked so well, who gave an overall impression of competence, could have such a dark past. 

The incongruity had a real impact on me. In a way, I was very moved. Since then, I think I’ve looked at people in a different way, realizing that even the most ordinary, upright-looking people are not what they seem....

By the way, there was a blogger who heard there was an Aesop fable with a character who tells a secret to the reeds. The blogger searched the complete text of Aesop's fables for "reeds" and "secret" but found nothing. And the moral is: 

The moral is...

Don't go looking for untold secrets in nonexistent texts.

A person devoted to doing nothing may have nothing to say.

Time spent checking other people's assertions is frittered away.

A secret told to the reeds is kept very well.

You can't spell "freedom" without "reed."

 

pollcode.com free polls

"I don’t know what it is about photos of red wine paired with sullen captions about cancer season that irritate me..."

"... they just do. Same with those that veer toward the needlessly inspirational and/or sentimental... Maybe if I just relaxed and supported people regardless of their content, I might free myself from this prison of my own making. I recently tested out the 'post liking = better person' theory: The image was a beautiful fall landscape somewhere upstate followed by a photo of the poster’s beautiful face drenched in sunlight with a caption about 'healing' and the 'precious ephemerality of golden hour' (!). I fought my instinct to ignore it and went ahead and hit 'Like.' And you know what? It took nothing. I felt nothing. Except for a little glimmer of positive self-regard. Maybe being a little nicer, a little more generous...."

From "Fine, I’ll Just Like the Instagram Post Portrait" by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz (The Cut).

Oh, let's just stop at "I felt nothing." It made me think of this old song:

 

Sometimes nothing is the right level of feeling. You don't have to jazz it up to a spicy self-regard.

I've curated 5 TikTok videos for you tonight. Let me know what you like.

1. Awaiting the first sunset since April.

2. A wasp cut of a cold cut.

3. "No, it's Baron of Bad News."

4. Baron Ryan on the age-old subject, Nothing is something.

5. "Be absolutely miserable, but change nothing...."

I've got 7 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like.

1. If "Seinfeld" were on today and George used the wrong pronouns.

2. The most disorienting thing about being alive today.

3. The best father-playing-guitar-for-baby video ever.

4. How to act when you see an attractive person.

5. How to kiss a girl.

5. Living conditions inside a truck.

6. "Oh, I'm so sorry. We're actually out of nothing."

7. What does she want?

ADDED: Looking at this at 6:22 the next morning, I see there are two 5s, for a total of 8. Too late to change all that now.

"I was surprised that the dissenters never tried to defend the right to abortion and never try and offer an alternative ground. They relied entirely on stare decisis."

Said Larry Kramer, in "Liberals Need a Clearer Vision of the Constitution. Here’s What It Could Look Like. The legal scholar Larry Kramer on why the left’s embrace of judicial supremacy was a mistake" (NYT). 

"Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier..."

"... for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect.... The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable. There are some politicians of that middle generation... They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation’s political imagination. A middle-aged mentality traditionally has its own vices. It can lack urgency, and at its worst it can be maddeningly immune to both hope and fear, which are essential spurs to action. But if our lot is always to choose among vices, wouldn’t the temperate sins of midlife serve us well just now?"

Writes Yuval Levin, in "Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?" (NYT).

This gets my "gerontocracy" tag, which you can click to read what I've said about it. Hint: I don't like it. But Levin is making the additional point: It's not just that the old Boomers are clinging to power. It's that the generation after them is terribly weak and empty: "The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."

I was sad but also amused by the notion of a palpable vacuum. Can you palpate a vacuum? It reminds me of the old childhood revelation: Nothing... is... something.

"I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf, "Waves" (1931).

"I was often told that I wasn’t doing enough, or that I wasn’t doing anything, so this became a complex for me. I decided to take advantage of this and make it into a business."

Said Shoji Morimoto, 38, quoted in "Rent-a-stranger: This Japanese man makes a living showing up and doing nothing" (WaPo). 

He charges 10,000 yen (about $85) per session.... Morimoto often finds that his clients don’t want to burden people they care about with their needs.

“I think when people are feeling vulnerable or are in their intimate moments, they become more sensitive toward people that are close to them, like how they will be perceived, or the kind of actions they will take for them,” he said. “So I think they want to just reach out to a stranger without any strings attached.”...

The lifestyle works well for Morimoto, who is not that talkative or expressive even when he’s not working. He wears his signature blue hat and a hoodie — and a blank stare — so that clients can easily recognize him, but dresses up when the situation requires him to be more formal.

I like this a lot. It seems that Morimoto is sincere in his orientation as a person who performs nothingness. I'm sure this quip has already been quipped: He has nothing to give. And I think there are people who need and benefit from this service, especially if it comes with high-quality assurance that the service-provider is fulfilling his mission in life as he understands it.

"As South Koreans enter the living-with-corona phase of the pandemic, some are easing back into social life by visiting public spaces where they can be alone and do very little."

"Nothing is the new something in South Korea as people desperately seek refuge from the pressures of living as functioning adults in a global pandemic in a high-stress and fast-paced society with soaring real estate prices and often-grueling work schedules. At a Space Out Competition this year, competitors sought to achieve the lowest heart rate possible while sitting in a 'healing forest' on the southern island of Jeju....Spacing out is known in Korean as 'hitting mung,' a slang usage of the word 'mung' to describe a state of being totally zoned out.... With the weather change this fall, now popular are the terms 'forest mung' and 'foliage mung,' meaning spacing out while looking at trees or foliage. There’s 'fire mung,' or spacing out while watching logs burn, and 'water mung,' being meditative near bodies of water.... On Ganghwa Island, off South Korea’s west coast, a cafe named Mung Hit also offers no-activity relaxation areas. In one section is a single chair facing a mirror for anyone who wants to sit and stare. There are nooks for meditating, reading, sitting by a pond or the garden, or enjoying mountain views. No pets or children are allowed.... '"Hitting mung" is a concept of emptying your heart and your brain so that you can fill them with new ideas and thoughts. We opened because we wanted to create a space for people to do just that'...."

From "‘Hitting mung’: In stressed-out South Korea, people are paying to stare at clouds and trees" (WaPo).