"Part of the silver lining is that we have a much better view now."

Life on a landslide:

"Muzzle velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun."

"The term came from an interview that Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, gave in 2019. 'All we have to do is flood the zone,' Bannon said. 'Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.'"

Writes Ezra Klein, in "Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself" (NYT).

But has Trump "overwhelmed himself"? Listen to last night's press gaggle — all the topics he crunched through in 15 minutes. Iran. Venezuela. Cuba. China and India. Crime in Minneapolis and Chicago. ICE protests. The 250-foot arch and the ballroom, the Epstein files, suing Michael Wolff, suing the FBI. Greenland. And that "sleazebag" Don Lemon. 

He didn't seem overwhelmed at all, and that was at night, on a gruelingly noisy plane, grilled by reporters after an evening event where, as WaPo puts it, "Trump tries humor, gets some silence, at black-tie dinner with 'people I hate.'"

He seemed to be up for all of it.

Who thinks what about the Epstein files?

The Washington Post has a poll and graphics like this:

Here's a gift link.  Check it out. I think it's interesting to see who thinks what. I'd like to ask them why. Obviously, Democrats are hot to think ill of Trump. But why aren't they more concerned that there's bad stuff about Democrats in there? There needs to be some reason why the Biden administration didn't release this information when it was so desperate to stop Trump in 2024. But the way of the human mind is not reason. It is wishful thinking. We are optimists, even about scurrilous ugly things.

"My fellow professors and I are supposed to have nuggets of optimism at the ready, gauzy and gooey encomiums about infinite possibilities, the march of progress and..."

"... that apocryphal arc, the one that bends toward justice. But all I’ve got is the metastasizing pit of fear in my own gut...."

Writes Frank Bruni, in "What Do You Tell a College Student Graduating Into This America?" (NYT).

What's the point of wisdom if it doesn't apply in the bad times? 

Anyway... for the annals of Things I Asked Grok: 1. When did people stop talking about a fear that they have in the "pit of their stomach" and begin to refer to the fear as a "pit in their stomach"? 2. Am I supposed to picture the "pit in the stomach" as something like an apricot pit? 3. Aren't apricot pits poisonous... and are they more or less poisonous than the seeds of the pong-pong fruit, last seen on "White Lotus"?

"[I was] at the top of the mountain, and gradually it worked its way down. And then I looked up and life came back. I truly believe in looking up."

"You’re always in a better mood if you’re looking up. It’s one of those things you notice, walking around London, or it doesn’t matter where. They’re all looking down. There’s nothing down there."

Said Ringo Starr, quoted in "Ringo Starr: ‘I only want to be in a band. You can’t play Yesterday just on drums’/In a rare interview, the Beatle says Liverpool was always the capital of country music and reveals the lesson he learnt from Elton John’s mum" (London Times).

Don’t let anyone tell you that Starr is jumping on the country bandwagon....  he sang lead vocals on the Beatles’ version of Buck Owens’s Act Naturally on the Help! album nearly 60 years ago...“There was no plan to make a country record,” says Starr....

"Elon Musk has announced an upcoming algorithm update for X, formerly known as Twitter, intended to promote more informative and entertaining content while reducing 'negativity"

"This change aims to enhance user experience by focusing on 'unregretted user-seconds,' where engagement is meaningful rather than just extensive. The update follows public discussions about how content visibility impacts free speech and platform dynamics, with some users and commentators expressing concerns over potential censorship or the stifling of diverse viewpoints."

That's what I'm reading at X in what is billed as "a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs."

If you go to that link at a different time, will you see a different summary? Maybe! But trust me. What you see there is what I just copied, and you can see the time stamp on this post.

I can see I need to learn the term "unregretted user-seconds"! How does the machine know about regret?! Of course, I ask the machine for help. Oh! The answer is so different from my guess! I thought "user-seconds" might be the number of times users seconded a post — expressed agreement with it — by liking it or retweeting it. And I thought these reactions could be counted as "unregretted" if they were not subsequently deleted. But I see that "seconds" refers to the unit of time:

"Everybody says this who meets with him, but like, he's, he's an incredible host. So we, we met with him at Bedminster Golf Club in, in New Jersey...

"... which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful, you know, we had a great time.... [What did Trump serve at dinner?] Oh, he said, he said what do you guys want to eat? And I, I just, I, for some reason I was just like, I, I, I, I know exactly what to say and I'm like, meat, I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. And, and by the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. [There were no sides?] There were no sides.... It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don't think there was room on the table for sides. [Were there drinks or no alcohol?] There? It was a diet coke. He, he, he, he mainlines diet coke. And I was mainlining it right next to him."

Said Marc Andreessen — with questions from Bari Weiss in brackets — in this "Honestly" podcast episode. This is a great podcast. (Andreessen, to quote Weiss, "got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser... He then co-founded Netscape... [and] now runs a venture capital firm... [that] invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft and Oculus to name just a few.")

There's a nice "lightning round" at the end of the podcast. After asking about the food Trump, the "incredible host," served at Bedminster, Weiss asks: "Tomorrow you wake up and you're the DNC chair, what's the first thing you would do?"

"Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral controversies over whether emotional-support animals belong on airplanes..."

"... in the recent, charged debate over whether Israeli or Lebanese people invented hummus; in Disney’s 'remixing' of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unifies these phenomena, he thinks, is that they unfold in a cultural vacuum. In the past, a society could rely on 'a shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on' to govern all sorts of situations. Today, in the absence of that shared background, we must constantly renegotiate what’s normal, acceptable, and part of 'us.' ... [Roy writes] 'Here we are on a terrain in which culture has no positive aspect, since the old culture has been delegitimized and the new one does not meet the necessary condition of any culture, which is the presence of implicit, shared understandings'.... Around the world, cultures aren’t being replaced by other cultures; the idea of 'Westernization' is a red herring, he suggests, because, despite the worldwide popularity of pizza and 'Succession,' what’s actually ascendant are 'weak identities' constructed through that 'collection of tokens.' It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to a faceless suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions, if they have any, but they don’t—they’re just a random collection of people who happen to live near one another. 'You do you,' they say...."

From "Is Culture Dying? The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that 'deculturation' is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences." The article, by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker, reviews Oliver Roy's book "The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms."

Rothman writes "I’m one of those people who is 'spiritual, but not religious'" — people who is?!! I'm one of those people who remember when The New Yorker had a noble tradition of meticulous editing. Has that degenerated into a nonculture of if it sounds good, write it? But we've already analyzed this grammar issue and come up with the answer. It's a rule. If you don't follow it, your venerable institution is crumbling. You're just a random collection of scribblers who happen to publish under the same cover.

Rothman's last paragraph gestures at the struggle over immigration that's roiled American politics:

"A campaign has been constructed around a mood, rather than the other way around. The mood is Obamacore..."

"... the outburst of brightness and positivity that took over pop culture upon the election of our first Black president in 2008, and that continued until the wheels fell off eight years later. This was the age of Glee, Taylor Swift’s 1989, and Hamilton, seemingly disparate art born out of the same impulse: the feeling of a new dawn, a generational shift, a national redemption.... ... Obamacore positioned itself as sensitive, non-threatening, and relatable. It was Aziz Ansari writing a book on modern dating alongside a Berkeley-trained sociologist, porn star James Deen talking about bacon, Louis C.K. playing a cop on Parks and Recreation.... The fandom that had sprung up around Obama’s presidential campaign expanded to embrace New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and later, Hillary Clinton. For a moment, bodies as hidebound as the Supreme Court and the papacy looked as if they might be rehabbed into vehicles for social justice.... This summer’s sudden reappearance of hope and positivity has spurred split reactions. Do you embrace your inner cringe, or try to tamp it down?... The optimistic case is that, against all odds, we seem to have heeded the lessons of Obamacore. Generation Z is willingly climbing the coconut tree."

Writes Nate Jones, in "That Feeling You Recognize? Obamacore. The 2008 election sparked a surge of positivity across pop culture. Now hindsight (and cringe) is setting in" (NY Magazine).

See also "100 Pieces of Pop Culture That Defined Obamacore/You know them when you see them — whether they were genius or, well, not," by Nate Jones (in NY Magazine). Just to select one:

"Yeah, well, you know, maybe like, I think it's part of what people in America wanna, you know, people in America wanna feel excited and inspired about the future."

Said Elon Musk — here, in the transcript at TurboScribe — at 1:36:27 in his conversation last night with Donald Trump. He continues with this very generic, very sunny vision:

MUSK: They wanna feel like the future is gonna be better than the past and that America is gonna do things that are greater than we've done in the past, reach new heights that make you proud to be an American and excited about the future. They want the American dream back.

Trump responds echoically, then darkly: 

"One day I opened my eyes from a deep sleep and looked around for something, anything, familiar. Everywhere I looked was all very strange."

"Little did I know that each new day my life was unavoidably set on a path that would become unimaginably strange and more challenging."

Wrote Paul Alexander, with a pencil (or pen) in his mouth, quoted in his obituary, "Lawyer, Author and TikTok Star Spent 72 Years in an Iron Lung/Paul Alexander, who died at 78, was paralyzed with polio at age 6 and relied on the machine to breathe. Still, he was able to earn a law degree, write a book and, late in life, build a following on TikTok" (NYT).

"Even though it's hard, you're never alone."

I know how hard it is some days to sweep the clouds away and get to sunnier days.

Our friend Elmo is right: We have to be there for each other, offer our help to a neighbor in need, and above all else, ask for help when we need it.

Even though it's hard, you're never alone. https://t.co/ffMJekbowo

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 31, 2024

When Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 — "It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America."

"How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one? Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened.... Trump has played on that resentment.... Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley 'Birdbrain.'... Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity...."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her column this week, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman" (NYT).

To repeat the question: "How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?" Does Dowd really believe it's all Trump's fault? Couldn't Obama himself have used his presidency more effectively and built American optimism? He promised hope, but why didn't he deliver more of it? Why did we end the Obama years with so much division and strife? Dowd puts no responsibility on Obama. It's all about the reactionaries — the countermovement that automatically follows any movement. It happens "every time." Dowd chooses to portray the American people as a machine, behaving mechanically — and perversely. And yet somehow it is Trump who is devoted to "tearing down faith in humanity." 

"Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future...."

"It’s easy to see what various parts of the left want to dismantle — capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family — and much harder to find a realistic conception of what comes next.... The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return.... To compete with them, the left needs beautiful dreams of its own."

Michelle Goldberg writes, in "What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?" (NYT).

So the advice to the left is: Find some "beautiful dreams" to replace all that you are trying to destroy or people aren't going to find all that destruction too appealing. 

"Try a week of 'age belief journaling,' in which you write down every portrayal of an older person — whether in a movie, on social media or in a conversation."

"Then question if that portrayal was negative or positive, and whether the person could have been presented differently. Simply identifying the sources of your conceptions about aging can help you gain some distance from negative ideas.... [T]ry to look at the honest reality with optimism. If you’re feeling deflated that your tennis game isn’t as strong in your 70s as it once was... remind yourself: 'No, I can’t play tennis like I did when I was 50, and I can only play for 10 minutes. But I can still play.'"

From "How to Change Your Mind-Set About Aging/People who think positively about getting older often live longer, healthier lives. Here is how to reconsider your perspective" (NYT).

"In the original... the couple’s teenage son... seems standoffish, and like his mother, pessimistic about the future."

"The new song flips the sentiment of moody adolescence entirely, instead exalting a city working hard and 'living up to its prime years.'... [T]he two versions end in completely different places. One is bleak and despondent. The other, overflowing with optimism.... A music video that the Communist Youth League made to accompany the new song features glossy shots of saluting schoolchildren and smiling workers."

From "Rock ’n’ Roll According to the Chinese Communist Party" (NYT).

"I was trying not to think about bad stuff, like 'Twister,' the movie, and I was trying to think about happy stuff."

Said the boy saved from the dust devil.

"I once felt that I would rather die than go blind. Now I feel the opposite. Daily life has a renewed delight and vigor."

"I am learning new things constantly. The most ordinary tasks, like going to the post office, have become terrifically interesting. In terms of everyday life, I feel that I am finally in there, more mindful and alert, more fully present. I have chosen curiosity over despair. When my disability was invisible, I irritated strangers constantly — they thought I was rude or dithering or both. People are impatient when they don’t know why you’re holding up the line. Now that I signal my disability with a white cane, I find that I have tapped a well of visible kindness.... Like a Buster Keaton film, my life is full of mishaps and averted disasters...."

Writes Edward Hirsch, who has been going blind for 20 years, in "I Am Going Blind, and I Now Find It Strangely Exhilarating" (NYT).

Beautiful! And I like that he brought up Buster Keaton. I've watched 3 short Buster Keaton movies in the last month — "Neighbors," "The Goat," and "Playhouse":

"We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness, we’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT..."

"... telling some children they’re not equal to others, and they’re the cause of other people’s problems. I think CRT has been going on under the radar for quite some time as well. Wokeness has been. Liberal indoctrination has been. This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law is gonna – it’s not gonna solve it. It’s not gonna solve it."

Said Ron Johnson, quoted by Chris Cillizza, in "This Republican senator thinks ‘wokeness’ is the cause of mass shootings" (CNN).

I don't like the headline, because Johnson didn't say "wokeness is the cause of mass shootings." He said there's a failure to teach "values." Values have been supplanted by these other things. The word "values" is vague, but I think it at least conveys the desire to accentuate the positive. A problem with teaching the lessons of CRT is that you're inculcating children with negativity: It's a bad old world, kids — hatred larded into everything. That might explain why some of them hit the chaos of adolescence and veer into nihilism.

But Cillizza might not have written the headline. He riffs a few lines. Let's read:

"The Hillsdale charter schools are neither owned nor managed by Hillsdale. Instead, the schools enter agreements to use the Hillsdale curriculum..."

"... and the college provides training for faculty and staff, as well as other assistance — all free of charge. By offering these services, Hillsdale seems to be trying to thread a needle — creating a vast K-12 network that embraces its pedagogy and conservative philosophy, in many cases taught by its graduates, while tapping into government money to run the schools.... While many educators applaud the phonics and rigor, they question the infusion of conservative politics into the curriculum, particularly in history. Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum... appears to be partly an outgrowth of President Donald J. Trump’s 1776 Commission.... Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton who was one of the chief critics of The Times’s 1619 Project, also criticized the 1776 Curriculum, calling it overly positive. 'It talks about the enormity of slavery, but in almost every case, everything that’s bad about America will be undone by what is good,' Dr. Wilentz said. 'Almost, literally, that American ideals will overcome whatever evils may be there.' Hillsdale’s history curriculum also appears to take on the modern liberal state. A school curriculum guide posted in one school’s charter lists the book 'New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.'...."

From "A College Fights ‘Leftist Academics’ by Expanding Into Charter Schools/Hillsdale College is building a national charter school network. Tennessee invited the college to start 50 of them, using public funds" (NYT).

Why shouldn't parents have the choice to place their children in either a 1619 or a 1776 school? Is one more truly history than the other? I doubt it. It does seem unfair to the children to feed them propaganda — either way — but if the only choices are propaganda, why not let the parents decide which form of inculcation they want? Vote with your children.