৪ নভেম্বর, ২০২৩

Sunrise — 7:30, 7:43.

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"When, at 7, she finds her father weeping, he asks her to 'lick the tears from my eyes.'"

"The request makes her 'queasy,' but she obeys, in an act of both strange devotion and deep unease. 'I had taken something of my father’s into me, something intimate — his liquids and his lonely need,' she writes."

"... Carrière grew up shuttling back and forth between a 17,000-square-foot townhouse in New York City’s West Village and a penthouse in Paris...."

"I don’t always drink in my underwear, but when I do, I tell everyone it’s a Finnish tradition."

Said Miles Teller, an actor, quoted in "Getting Tipsy at Home in Your Underwear/A Finnish tradition known as 'pantsdrunk' is gaining favor with Americans stuck at home" (NYT)("there is a word for it, “kalsarikännit,” as well as two emojis: a man in gray underwear with pint of beer, and a woman in a polka-dot slip with a glass of red wine").

This article is from 2020 — as you may have guessed from that "stuck at home." I don't know how I missed this the first time around, but I'm seeing it this morning because it's suggested to me on the page I found by myself, "How to Drink Alone." Not that I was looking for instructions on how to do something that is perfectly easy to do, at least if you're already alone.

"Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore."


"Please, somebody stop us before we enlighten again."

"The partitioning of the region wasn't decided by Jews but by a vote of the United Nations in 1947 with everyone from Russia to Haiti voting for it. But apparently, they don't teach this at Drag Queen Story Hour anymore."

"This is not Poland or Lithuania or France, where the locals were only waiting for a Nazi invasion to sanction their existing dreams of domestic Jew-clearance. "

"This is London, where (I cannot speak of it without tears) the working people of the East End stood alongside their Jewish neighbours to fight off Mosley’s blackshirts — rather than, say, posting Instagram stories about how there are two sides to every story. Nor indeed can I pretend that I, fully secularised, church-married with a gentile wife and half-blood kids, would be in the front line, should antisemitic push (of the kind being seen in universities, at The Guardian, in graffiti on schools and Holocaust libraries, and at these almost daily demonstrations in London by the bourgeois jihaderati) come to genocidal shove. But the fact is that the world feels very dangerous at the moment. Very horrible. And in every Jewish family — every single one, mark you — there rumble tales of the prescient recent ancestor who had the sense to get out of wherever they were before it was too late, which is why we are all here, today. There are no good stories about the ones who said, 'meh, it’s all being overblown, that could never happen in Lodz, Kiev, Paris, Salonika.'..."

"She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at The Times..."

Said Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, quoted in "New York Times Writer Resigns After Signing Letter Protesting the Israel-Gaza War/The writer, Jazmine Hughes, who has won awards for her work, had signed another letter of protest this year" (NYT).

"'Worldschooling,' a loose term that refers to making travel a central part of a child’s educational experience, can involve a monthlong trip to Europe..."

"... or years spent traveling. Parents might try to stick to the curriculum of a school back home using workbooks and remote learning tools, or choose to engage in more free-form, interest-driven learning. Ms. Tolk worldschooled her daughters during their years on the road. The girls were 10 and 12 when they left, and while she and her husband initially tried to stick to a semi-strict schedule — daily math lessons, grammar exercises and spelling lists — they quickly found themselves easing up, focusing instead on the places they were exploring. 'We ended up doing a lot of family projects. All four of us would research something we were interested in and present it to each other,' she said. While they were in Egypt, one daughter did a project about ancient makeup traditions in Egypt.... 'I’ve had a life of really impactful, powerful, transformative international experiences,' Ms. Tolk said. 'I always knew that I wanted that for my children.'"

If it's "years spent traveling," then it's like home-schooling, and the parents are running the show and who knows how good or bad it is for the kids, but the article is mainly about parents taking their kids out of public school and causing them to miss days or weeks of classroom instruction and justifying it as beneficial to the child.

The top comment at the NYT:

"My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative.... I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father."

"I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why?"


The film is based on Priscilla's memoir.

RFK Jr. ... and love.

৩ নভেম্বর, ২০২৩

Sunrise — 7:25, 7:27, 7:29, 7:32, 7:34.

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"I don’t think that White authors and White characters should tell the narratives of African American people. The usefulness of the book has run its course."

Said English teacher Verena Kuzmany, quoted in "Students hated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Their teachers tried to dump it. Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce" (WaPo).

Jeff Bezo's parents recently moved to Miami, and he wants to be near them, so he's leaving Seattle and moving to Miami.

That's what it says here:

"Psychedelic medicine-assisted therapy also can support a patient in exploring the enormous and complex feelings associated with eco-anxiety and climate grief...."

"In my clinical practice, patients using oral ketamine plus psychotherapy have experienced breakthroughs and new insights when working with the intention of navigating eco-anxiety. Many patients said they felt connected to a sense of oceanic oneness, reminding them of the meaningful interconnectedness of their lives with others and offering context for their personal narrative.... Psychedelics can also teach us how to experience and hold intense emotions that feel too much to bear, allowing for the ability to observe our suffering in a new way...."


So we've worried our young people into a state of high anxiety and the next stage is to offer them psychedelic drugs.

I'm having a flashback.

"Will this scatter the Effective Altruism herd? Or will they bleat that he Did It Wrong, and the movement can never fail only be failed by the weak, &c.?"

A good question, asked in the Metafilter discussion, "Jury finds Sam Bankman-Fried guilty."

That made me notice that I hadn't heard much about effective altruism lately (but isn't it always hard to notice what is not being said?).

I went looking for recent SBF stories that talked about effective altruism. Hard to find anything — that is, I found the absence of talk — but I did find this at CoinDesk: "Sam Bankman-Fried Demonstrates Ineffective Altruism at Its Worst/The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

That sounds like it's going to be the he-did-it-wrong "bleat" that the Metafilter commenter was predicting, but it's not:

"[T]raveling from town to town and asking for votes was considered undignified for a presidential candidate."

"Abraham Lincoln had not given a single speech on his own behalf during either of his campaigns, and Rutherford B. Hayes advised [James A.] Garfield to do the same. 'Sit crosslegged,' he said, 'and look wise.' Happily left to his own devices, Garfield poured his time and energy into his farm. He worked in the fields, planting, hoeing, and harvesting crops, and swung a scythe with the confidence and steady hand he had developed as a boy. In July, he oversaw the threshing of his oats. 'Result 475 bushels,' he noted. 'No[t] so good a yield as last year.'"

I'm reading "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President" by Candice Millard. (Commission earned if you use that link.)

Sit crosslegged and look wise.

২ নভেম্বর, ২০২৩

"Sam Bankman-Fried... was found guilty on all seven charges of fraud and conspiracy."

The NYT reports.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the tousle-haired mogul who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted on Thursday of all seven charges of fraud and conspiracy after a monthlong trial that laid bare the hubris and risk-taking across the crypto industry. These charges carry a maximum sentence of 110 years....

The jury of nine men and three women began deliberating at 3:15 p.m. and was out for a little over four hours including dinner.