I think the answer is evolution.

I wonder the same thing every time a tweet like this crosses my feed
⬇️ https://t.co/80S9mcpopm

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) September 18, 2018

The women Roberts posits did not survive to reproduce. And assuredly, much of the reproduction that did take place began with rape and many of the babies who survived to go on to reproduce had mothers who had the psychological wherewithal to go on despite rape. Women are not hotheads, freaking out about rape, attempted rape, and the burdens of avoiding rape. That's why it's taken so long to reach #TimesUp. But time is up, and it should be.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade wrote:

I don't think David Roberts was being sarcastic with his tweet but Cathy Young was with hers.

I said:

I sure thought he was, but I see he's at Vox, so.... do I need to break out my rarely used "I was wrong" tag???

Meade said:

Young was snarking on his tweet signaling how woke he is.

Christine Blasey Ford "passed a polygraph test administered by a former F.B.I. agent...."

Writes David Lat in "Delay the Vote — for Kavanaugh, for His Accuser and for the Court/Christine Blasey Ford deserves to be heard. And the judge deserves a chance to clear his name" (published yesterday in the NYT). I'm not going to talk about the entire op-ed. (Lat's main argument is that if there is no hearing, Kavanaugh will be forever "dogged by these accusations.")

We now know that Ford is scheduled to testify before the committee, so the subject of whether she should be given a chance to testify came and went yesterday. Now, the issues are whether the hearing might be averted somehow — I can think of at least 3 things that could happen — how aggressively and extensively Ford should be questioned and what Kavanaugh should do in response and how how to exploit all of this in the midterm elections. I'm just floating all those topics for now.

What I want to talk about is: "She passed a polygraph test administered by a former F.B.I. agent..."

1. Does the status "former F.B.I. agent" convey professionalism and aloofness from partisanship? That reputation has taken a big hit these days. I don't mean to say anything about the particular FBI person who did the questioning and interpreted the results (identified in the NYT as Jerry Hanafin), but I can't read "former FBI" to mean not a political partisan.

2. Does one "pass" a "polygraph test"? From the Washington Examiner (a conservative newspaper):

“The polygraph is not a lie detector,” said [Thomas Mauriello, former senior polygraph examiner who worked at the Defense Department for 30 years, current a part-time professor in the University of Maryland’s criminology and criminal justice department]. “Let’s make that clear. There is no such thing as a lie detector. It’s simply an investigative tool that will record physiological reactions when you’re asked a question and give a response.”

He said if a person being tested doesn’t have a physical response to a question, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that he or she is being truthful or honest. Mauriello said there are even medications called beta blockers that a person can take to prohibit such bodily reactions....

Experts said that the way the results of a test are assessed is largely subject to who is doing the evaluation, and that the way an examiner formulates his or her questions can produce varying results. In other words, whether a person “passes” or “fails” a polygraph test depends greatly on who conducts it.

“In cases like this, as surreal as it may sound, people can ask for second opinion,” said James Gagliano, a former FBI supervisory agent who now teaches homeland security and criminal justice leadership at St. John’s University in New York.... Polygraph administrators, he said, aim to determine a subject's physical “baseline” by asking a series of innocuous questions like their name and favorite sports teams. He said then, an administrator may ask more "uncomfortable" questions and that the test could register a physical response, such as an increase in heart rate....

At the Monday Night Cafe...

... maybe there’s still something left to talk about that hasn’t come up yet.

"It is truly the deep state house of cards collapsing — as I have been predicting — right before our very eyes."

Said Sean Hannity on Fox News just now (my transcription).

He's talking about tonight's statement from the White House press secretary:

At the request of a number of committees of Congress, and for reasons of transparency, the President has directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to provide for the immediate declassification of the following materials: (1) pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the June 2017 application to the FISA court in the matter of Carter W. Page; (2) all FBI reports of interviews with Bruce G. Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation; and (3) all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications.

In addition, President Donald J. Trump has directed the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to publicly release all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction, of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.

"I don't have any bad habits, actually" — I said a month ago.

I'm not sure why the subject came up, but someone asked me in the comments if I ever smoked, and I said, "No. I don't have any bad habits, actually."

Does that seem like an arrogant, conceited statement? Someone remembered and brought it up today, deep in the comments to "Does it smell funny in here?," the post about the accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, where I provoked some people by saying — point #4 on a 5-point list — "Why should we Americans accept this man's power over us? He's been portrayed as a super-human paragon, and I don't think that can be the standard for who can be on the Supreme Court. It's dangerous to go looking for paragons. Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works."

I don't want the judiciary limited to bizarrely squeakily clean, ultra virtuous people. Too many good candidates won't make the cut. Kavanaugh has seemed wonderfully virtuous, but I don't think all of that is necessary or even desirable in qualifying to be a judge. I want a real person, who can understand real people and make good judgments about human activities, which are full of bad behavior that a goody-2-shoes might assess priggishly. And, as that last sentence — "Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side..." — is meant to say, an overachiever might be overcompensating. I certainly didn't say Brett Kavanaugh looks so virtuous that I assume he's got a dark side. I have no idea about him specifically. I'm just not enthralled by seeming saints. We're all human.

Anyway, this comes from a commenter who calls himself Чикелит (which my translator said is "Chikelit")(scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "newer" to get to page 2 of the comments and see this):

Ann Althouse said... “Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works.”

Althouse recently stated that she has NO bad habits. Perhaps this is a lie. Perhaps she too has a dark side which has driven her to a life of saintly good blogging. For example, I’ve long suspected that there is something terribly racist in her family’s past which drives her acts of white guilt.

I get the joke. Fine. (By the way, the most racist thing in my family that I know is that my paternal grandmother, back in the 1950s, used to say to me, if I wasn't nice about appreciating something, that she "knew a little colored girl" who would like it.)

But the reason I'm blogging this is to delve into the question of habits and how easy it is to say that you have no bad habits.

By definition, a habit it something that you do compulsively/automatically and often, like every day. You don't have to look hard to see your habits. You do them all the time. It's easy to review your typical day and see what your habits are. Then, ask yourself: Are any of these things bad? I look at my day and identify the habits: getting up early, drinking coffee, blogging, eating some food, showing some affection to my husband, and going to bed early. That's about it. None of those things are bad, therefore I have no bad habits. I'm not bragging that I never do anything bad. I'm just talking about habits.

"I never take two days off in a row. Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake."

"If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work muscles the message that this is how much work they have to perform. Our muscles are very conscientious. As long as we observe the correct procedure, they won’t complain. If, however, the load halts for a few days, the muscles automatically assume they don’t have to work that hard anymore, and they lower their limits. Muscles really are like animals, and they want to take it as easy as possible; if pressure isn’t applied to them, they relax and cancel out the memory of all that work. Input this canceled memory once again, and you have to repeat the whole journey from the very beginning."

Writes Haruki Murakami in "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," which I'm listening to for a second time. (I listen to audiobooks while I'm out walking.)

I don't know if he's correct, but it's memorable, and it might stop you from taking to days in a row off, so I wanted to share it.

Good! — "Brett Kavanaugh and His Accuser Say They’re Willing to Testify."

The NYT reports.

AND: Trump is fine with it:

Mr. Trump vigorously defended his nominee, calling him an “outstanding” judge with an unblemished record, and dismissing as “ridiculous” the prospect that Judge Kavanaugh might withdraw his nomination. Still, he told reporters that he was willing to accept a delay in the judge’s path to confirmation in order to air the new information.

“He is somebody very special; at the same time, we want to go through a process, we want to make sure everything is perfect, everything is just right,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House. “If it takes a little delay, it will take a little delay — it shouldn’t certainly be very much.”

"Yet Another Worrisome Subway Statistic: More People Are Going on the Tracks"

A NYT article apparently inspired by this stunning tweet:

Dude just standing on the tracks at #42ndGrandCentral no.4 downtown train. ⁦@MTA⁩ I was going to take that train. pic.twitter.com/z8t8zPur0H

— ((((Doug Latino)))) (@DougLatino) September 6, 2018

From the article:

The episode was also far from unusual.... There were nearly 900 incidents last year...

There are many reasons people end up on the tracks: Passengers are drunk, confused or urinating, or they drop something and try to retrieve it on their own. Escaped prisoners have even climbed on the rails. In a small number of horrifying cases, someone is pushed off the platform.

Subway leaders do not know for certain why the incidents have increased, though they speculate it may be in part because of the many homeless people who frequent the system or the ubiquity of expensive smartphones that drop to the tracks. Last year, only 43 of the incidents were believed to be suicides or attempted suicides....

“I have little sympathy for those who think it’s funny to go run around the tracks or who go down to urinate,” [said Andy Byford, "the subway’s leader"]. “I have no sympathy for them because it causes huge delays.”

From the comments at the NYT:

[In] China, the subways have a wall of plexiglass between the platform riders and trains, as do airport shuttles in the US. Is it really that much of a reach for the greatest city in the world to adopt this 25-year old technology?

ADDED: In the comments, I'm seeing a lack of sympathy for the people who intentionally go down onto the tracks. But there's still a problem with the extensive delays (and the trauma to the workers who have to remove dead bodies from the tracks).

"Why did the WaPo state that the incident occurred in her 'late teens' when summarizing the therapist notes, but farther down in the story state that she was 15 and Kavenaugh was 17? Is 15 a 'late teen'?"

Asks NYC JournoList in the comments to my Kavanaugh post "Does it smell funny in here?" I just added an important 5-point statement to that post, so I hope you read that, though it's hidden away in update position on the old post. But it's this "late teens" question that I want to break out into a new post.

The term "late teens" appears in this sentence:

Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when [Christine Blasey Ford] was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.

Is that just WaPo phrase or is that the phrase in the therapist's notes? The therapist's notes — from 2012 — are presented as corroborating Ford's story, but if she's saying she was 15 and the therapist's notes say "late teens," then the answer to NYC JournoList's question may be that WaPo was allowing us to see a discrepancy in the corroborating evidence but not calling too much attention to it.

But then why isn't "late teens" in quotes (like "rape attempt")? Maybe the therapist's notes have a specific age, and it really is late teens, and if we knew the actual number, Kavanaugh wouldn't be 17 but 18 or 19 or 20. Which is it?! Kavanaugh would look worse if he were older, but he also wouldn't be in high school any longer, which would conflict with other aspects of Ford's story.

After so many years, Ford said, she does not remember some key details of the incident. She said she believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH said...

Is 15 a 'late teen'?

No. In the parlance of Roe, 'late teen' would imply the third teen trimester, 18 thru 19.

At 15, Ford was in her second teen trimester.

It's all there in the constitution, if you look hard enough at the penumbras!

"Surprise! The Toronto Film Festival audiences have voted for their favorite film. It was not Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in 'A Star is Born'..."

"... or Ryan Gosling in 'First Man' or Michael Moore’s anti Trump doc 'Fahrenheit 11-9.' The winner of the Audience Award was Peter Farrelly’s 'Green Book,' a kind of 'Driving Miss Daisy' for the new generation. Viggo Mortensen stars as an Italian bouncer in the South, circa the early 60s, who has to drive around a famous musician, played by Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. They use the 'Green Book' which is a guide to restaurants and motels were blacks were allowed... Farrelly is usually not associated with award winning films... His credits include 'Dumb and Dumber,' 'There’s Something About Mary,' and 'Shallow Hal.'"

Writes Roger Friedman at Showbiz 411.

I like the idea of rising to prestige through comedy, so good for Farrelly.

Mahershala Ali won an Oscar for "Moonlight," which I didn't see, because I hardly see anything anymore, but he was in at least one movie I've seen, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which dates back to the days when I saw almost all the movies that got excellent reviews.

Viggo Mortensen, on the other hand. I love him based on "Captain Fantastic."

Here's the trailer:



So it's a racial flip where the white character is low class and the black character is rich and polished. But as with "Driving Miss Daisy," the black character elevates the white character. What's unusual in the broad scheme of Hollywood history is that the rich character elevates the poor character.

Anyway, it looks good, even though I was disappointed to see Viggo Mortensen's sexiness submerged into a brutish character... and yet, that worked like mad for Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire." But I like my Viggo in Captain Fantastic form. Here he is talking to Conan O'Brien about my favorite movement in "Captain Fantastic," when he's completely naked and casually sipping coffee in a public campground and — to someone who stares — says "It's just a penis. Every man has one. We're all animals of the earth."

Does it smell funny in here?

When is it okay to shout "Fire!" and cause a panic? Brett looks more like he's smelling... not smoke but ... woman?!?... oh, I don't know, but now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and I see:

People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, a theater in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1884, and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede.

In contrast, in the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876, the actors initially falsely claimed that the fire was part of the performance, in an attempt to avoid a panic. However, this delayed the evacuation and made the resulting panic far more severe....

In his introductory remarks to a 2006 debate in defense of free speech, writer Christopher Hitchens parodied the Holmes judgement by opening "Fire! Fire, fire ... fire. Now you've heard it", before condemning the famous analogy as "the fatuous verdict of the greatly over-praised Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes." Hitchens argued that the socialists imprisoned by the court's decision "were the ones shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theatre indeed.... [W]ho's going to decide?"

When it's not a real fire, but a political situation, who's to say the perception of a smoldering fire is wrong? Me, I have very little sense of smell, so I've got to rely on other people to alert me about literal smells that signal danger. In the metaphorical realm, where the "smell" is of a developing political problem, those who "smell" it earliest could either be wrong or really giving us a useful early warning that we can pay attention to, contemplate, and maybe do something about before it's too late.

As for the smell of a woman — the smell I imagine Brett Kavanaugh to be screwing up his face about — I tried googling that...



"You know what's kept me goin' all these years? The thought that one day... never mind... silly. Just the thought that maybe one day, I'd -- I could have a woman's arms wrapped around me... and her legs wrapped around me.... That I could wake up in the morning and she'd still be there. Smell of her. All funky and warm. I finally gave up on it." That's the key "smell" quote from "Scent of a Woman."

These days, the idea that you'll wake up one morning with "a woman's arms wrapped around me... all funky and warm" feels metaphorical and horrible. Life was going so well. You were climbing the heights. What a good man you are, admired by all, up and up you go, and then you wake up one morning and she is "still... there..." and she's "wrapped around" you all right. Smell of her.

ADDED: What am I really saying here? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? It's my Kavanaugh gnaw.

AND: I am genuinely working my way toward what I want to say about Kavanaugh's predicament. The most straightforward thing I can say — and I have only figured this out after writing this post to pre-chew things — is:

1. This seat on the Court is especially important because of the threat to women's rights. Justice Kennedy was the 5th vote in key right-of-privacy cases, and women's continuing domain over our own bodies is at stake.

2. Kavanaugh has used his relationship to real-life women as some assurance that he will do right by women. We've heard much talk about his coaching girls' basketball and his hiring of female law clerks. He has forefronted his goodness with women, putting it in issue to meet very specific, important questions we have about him.

3. It's not a case of whether it would be fair to prosecute him for sexual assault after so many years and with this little evidence, but a question whether this person should be confirmed to take Justice Kennedy's seat on the Court and to have power for a lifetime to make decisions that will quite specifically determine the scope of women's rights. He has no right to the seat that's comparable to a right to remain free from criminal penalties.

4. Why should we Americans accept this man's power over us? He's been portrayed as a super-human paragon, and I don't think that can be the standard for who can be on the Supreme Court. It's dangerous to go looking for paragons. Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works.

5. I assume all of the Senators are thinking primarily of their own power and how all of this will play in the November elections and in future elections. They are power-seekers and Kavanaugh is a power seeker. I am not seeking power. I am wary of the people who exercise power. I don't trust any of them, and I find it very hard to decide whom to trust here. It's tempting to say, it's wrong to use this device to defeat Kavanaugh. But to say that is to join everyone who insists on thinking of this all in terms of partisan politics. I'm having flashbacks to the Bill Clinton era, when I saw so many fake feminists put party politics first. I didn't. I didn't do it then, and I'm not going to do it now.

When will people stop elbowing me about the thing everyone is looking at that I haven't blogged?

I've seen it. I saw it when I wasn't at my computer and in blogging mode, and by the time I was in that position again, the thing had been pointed out so many times that it was too late for me to have any feeling that I was showing it to you, and I wasn't going to put it up as a monument to the proposition that I have already seen it, and it wasn't the kind of thing where there should be a post where you could talk about it, because the only thing to say was ha, ha, I'm seeing that, which was only ever worth saying right at the beginning, and I missed that moment, so could we please just move on?

Everyone seems to be telling her story at long last, so here — after "decades of silence" — comes Soon-Yi Previn.

New York Magazine has the big story. The author is Daphne Merkin (her name has been commented on many times, so spare me) who has been friends with Woody Allen for 40+ years and pronounces herself "mystified" by his "almost Aspergian aloneness" and "genuine diffidence." Here's some material from the second half of the article, about the relationship between Woody and Soon-Yi. I'll get to

Both of them are vague on how and when their friendship turned sexual — “It was 25 years ago,” she says... "and to the best of my memory I came in from college on some holiday and he showed me a Bergman movie, which I believe was The Seventh Seal, but I’m not positive. We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it. We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other.”....

“I know this is no justification,” she goes on, sitting across from me, her back ramrod straight. (“Posture,” she says quietly to Allen whenever he begins to slump. “I married her for her posture,” he quips.) “But Mia was never kind to me, never civil. And here was a chance for someone showing me affection and being nice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I’d be a moron and an idiot, retarded” — she pauses here, mindful that this is one of her mother’s words for her — “if I’d stayed with Mia.” She adds, as if to set the record straight, “I wasn’t the one who went after Woody — where would I get the nerve? He pursued me. That’s why the relationship has worked: I felt valued. It’s quite flattering for me. He’s usually a meek person, and he took a big leap.”....

“I was madly in love with him,” she announces. It sounds completely heartfelt and as though it just happened yesterday. “Completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he’d said that I’d meet someone in college, but I’d already decided. I came to realize how understanding he was and what a sweet person he was. He grew on me.” In an email she sends me, she slightly revises the scenario, showing a different side of herself, one in which she comes across less as the vulnerable, virginal girl she was than as a charming flirt: “I think Woody liked the fact that I had chutzpah when he first kissed me and I said, ‘I wondered how long it was going to take you to make a move.’ From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him.”...

The couple have two adopted children (two judges investigated each adoption, as is routinely done, and okayed them) because of Soon-Yi’s strong convictions about the narcissism inherent in having biological children. “I could definitely have children,” she says, “but I was never interested. I find it the height of vanity and very egocentric. I don’t need kids out there who have similar traits to me and look similar to me and Woody. Why is one’s DNA so special? Why would one keep on breeding when there are so many kids out there who need a loving home?”...

Now that the girls are grown... the couple are more close-knit — you might call it symbiotic — than ever. Allen describes how they spend their time together as “parallel play,” which makes Soon-Yi laugh. “Parallel play,” she repeats. “Yes, I think you’re right..."

... I ask Soon-Yi whether she thinks she’s been reshaped by her husband. “Reshaped?” she asks. “I mean, he’s given me a whole world, a whole world that I wouldn’t have had access to. So if you mean that way, then yes.”...

Lots more in the article. I've skipped most of it. I'll go back to the get-Mia things later.

ADDED: Maybe I'll stick with my original skipping of the get-Mia stuff. I'm seeing this:

My statement on New York Magazine: pic.twitter.com/xml6pdaZqb

— Dylan Farrow (@RealDylanFarrow) September 17, 2018

At the Cold Pastry Café...

... bring the warmth.

And think of doing your on-line shopping through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

There's no "rage" in "outrage" and "courage."

I'm reading "The Freedom Trail in Mississippi Is a Chronicle of Outrage and Courage," which I recommend but won't summarize. I want to talk about a language matter, the "rage" in "outrage" and "courage." You probably already realize that there's no "rage" in "courage," that it's a combination of "cour" (which means heart) and "-age" (which is a standard way to make a noun "denoting something belonging or functionally related to what is denoted by the first element" (OED)). But you probably, like me, think "rage" is the foundation of the word "outrage" and "out" is a prefix, such as in "outside" or "outlaw." I was surprised to see that "outrage," like "courage," is using the "-age" ending, and the "r" is part of the root of the word, "outr-." It comes from the Latin ("ultra") and the French ("outre") for "beyond," signifying transgression. The OED acknowledges, "In English often reanalysed as out- prefix + rage n., a notion which affected the sense development." That is, there is no "rage" in "outrage," but we see it there anyway and it affects how we understand the word. I don't think we see "rage" in "courage," though. I'm only seeing it now because of that headline, putting "outrage" and "courage" side by side, so I don't think our understanding of "courage" is affected by the unseen "rage."

"I operate as if he is a two-term Trump. I have to. If you think any other way..."

"... you are guaranteeing that whoever is going to run against him will lose.... I think the man is an evil genius and he was able to outsmart the smartest person ever to run for president... He figured out how to win by losing the election. How did that happen? Historians are going to deal with this for years to come."

Says Michael Moore (who predicted in 2016 that Trump would win). Moore also said he thinks Trump is the author of that anonymous NYT op-ed: "Trump wrote it. Trump or one of his minions wrote it.... He's the master distractor. He's the king of the misdirect. If we have learned anything by now, it's that he does things to get people to turn away. Let me give you the line in there that is most identifiable that he wants the public to believe. It's the line that says, 'Don't worry, adults are in the room.' That's the idea, to get us to calm down and look away from what he's really doing."