"It's cool!"

Drawings photographed with photographs.

"I think Mr. Sterling is being tested right now by a higher power or being and I’m forced to come to his rescue because he can’t rescue himself."

Says V. Stiviano, interviewed by Barbara Walters:



ADDED: "[A] beautiful black model named Jasmine... asked Sterling if she could take a photo with him..."

... and he responded, "I'm not that popular right now. Are you sure?' Jasmine said she was game...

As for how Jasmine feels about Sterling, she says, "It's 2014. I feel that everyone is a little bit racist and comedians joke about it all the time. But yeah, I do think he's racist."

"Males relentlessly bound from partner to partner, as massive hormone releases in their bodies cause their immune systems to crash and their fur to fall out."

"They bleed internally. Some males even go blind, yet still stumble around the leaf litter hoping for one last tryst. In a few short weeks, every single male lies dead, leaving the females to raise their offspring...."

"Shand's body was carried out the church in a biodegradable coffin as 'The Elephant Song' from the film The Jungle Book played in the background."

At the conservationist's funeral.

Is "The Elephant Song" "The Jungle Book" this?

Hup 2, 3, 4
Keep it up 2, 3, 4
Company sound off!
Oh, the aim of our patrol
Is a question rather droll
For to march and drill
over field and hill
Is a military goal!
Is a military goal!

That would be an oddly funny thing to sing while carrying a coffin, even a biodegradable coffin.

"Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota."

"Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.... As the director of the largest nutrition study to date, Dr. Keys was in an excellent position to promote his idea.... Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study.... In 1961, Dr. Keys sealed saturated fat's fate by landing a position on the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association, whose dietary guidelines are considered the gold standard.... Too much institutional energy and research money had already been spent trying to prove Dr. Keys's hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense...."

Excerpts from The Wall Street Journal piece "The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease" (also titled "The Dubious Science Behind Anti-Fat Crusade"). 

Many lessons to be learned here, including: Science ≠ Scientists.

Josh Rogin explains the journalistic ethics of recording John Kerry's "apartheid" remarks at a meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week.

Here, at The Daily Beast:

If a reporter agrees that a conversation or event is off-the-record, then of course he cannot print what was said during that interchange. But the unwritten rule—the one that directly applies here—is that if a reporter enters an off-the-record event uninvited and has not agreed to the off-the-record terms, he is free to report what happens inside that event. It’s the responsibility of the event organizers to keep reporters from entering events without invitations. As long as the reporter does not misrepresent himself and does not attempt to conceal a recording device, the event is fair game. That’s the rule....

People keep saying he "sneaked in," but what does that mean? The Trilateral Commission meeting was disclosed by the State Department and marked "closed press." The location was undisclosed but Rogin had a tip that it was at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, so he went there and "walked straight to the front entrance of the room, nodded politely to the staffer at the door (she nodded back) and entered along with dozens of other people who were filing in."

Rogin says the only thing he regrets is helping himself to the pork loin, chicken, and pilaf at the lunch buffet.

What is a piece of music that gives you chills in spite of your better judgment?

Yesterday's question "What Was the Last Piece of Music that Gave You the Chills?" got a big response in the comments, and it made me want to break out a separate question. Many commenters are naming exalted, high-class pieces of music that are exactly what one rationally believes should give us chills:

rhhardin said...
Faure piano quintet 2....

Anglelyne said...
Every other piece I've got on my "walkin' around" mp3 clip does that to me. Exhausting, if I go out for too long a walk. Last chill up: Jessye Norman does Dido's Lament. (As one of the youtube commenters remarks: "pure heavenly misery".)

I'm sorry, I clicked on the "Dido's Lament" and that guy making pizza dough to an irritating drumbeat came on. Will that guy ever get his damned pizza made? That was so not sublime! It's like Rickrolling, but without the fun of getting pranked. I have had it with that man. (← Althouse's Lament.)

But this feeling we are talking about is a physical sensation, some phenomenon in the nervous system, similar to a sexual response, and everyone, I think, will concede that sexual excitement often results from the perception of something that isn't at all exalted and high-class. I'm not asking you to tell me the most embarrassing/degrading thing that has sexually aroused you. In fact, it would be more interesting to ask: What's the most exalted, high-class sight/sound that ever sexually excited you?

So... sticking to yesterday's topic of music that gives you the chills, I want to focus not on the last thing that gave you the chills, but instances of getting the chills from hearing a piece of music that at a rational level you believe is unworthy of the response. I don't want to pick on any commenter, but I thought of this question as a result of this comment:

gadfly said...
Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You

Maybe you think that song is exalted, and maybe part of the response to it now has to do with sorrow over the decline and death of a gifted singer, but I think that if that song gave me chills, my rational mind would fight my physical body. I'd be self-judgmental — not harshly, because I'm not snobby about music, but in a humorous self-deprecating way. I'm not ashamed, here:

Why my tag for mothers is "motherhood" and my tag for fathers is "fathers."

Having just said that it "means something" that The New York Times put its article about Jason Patric's fight for the rights of sperm donors in its "Fashion & Style" section, I'm sensitive to the meaning of what I've long recognized as a strange lack of parallelism in this blog's tags. I've never bothered to look up the answer before, since I know it must have to do with the first post that seemed to need a tag on the subject, but now I'm interested in the specifics.

The post that led to the creation of the "motherhood" tag was "Brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman" (May 24, 2008). Obviously, the word "motherhood" was in the quote I used as the post title, so that preempted more subtle thinking on the topic, but what got enshrined in the tags was the abstract concept "motherhood," not the collection of human individuals who are mothers.

But now I'm puzzled, because the first post with the "fathers" tag also had the pre-existing tag "motherhood": "We bad moms are happy to confess our sins because we're confident..." (May 15, 2009).

This means that my long-standing lack of curiosity over the lack of parallelism was based on an incorrect assumption. Feel free to psychoanalyze me on the subject. Options: 1. Althouse elevates mothers to an ideal realm but leaves fathers in the mundane and concrete real world (and this means all kinds of things about what she thinks about gender politics and gender difference). 2. Althouse prefers simplicity, so she picked "motherhood" because it was right there in the quote and "fathers" because it's simpler than "fatherhood" (and never changing "motherhood" to "mothers" was itself a matter of keeping it simple).

When the "sperm donor" wants the legal status of father.

The actor Jason Patric is litigating over his status, struggling with a woman he never married and with a couple of abstruse California statutes. I put "sperm donor" in quotes in the title because Patric is squarely in the gray area between the traditional father and the sort of sperm donor whom the law properly shields (and cuts off) from parental rights and responsibilities.

The latter is someone who has no relationship with the mother at all — personal or sexual — and simply provides the material that is used to inseminate a woman who wants to have a child on her own or where there is another man who will be the father (but cannot provide the biological material).

The former is a man in a complete, ongoing, stable relationship with a woman who gives birth to a child as a consequence of the sexual intercourse that is an integral part of their relationship.

The woman Patric never married is Danielle Schreiber. The two (according to the linked NYT article) dated "off and on for a decade" and he tried to get her pregnant through sexual intercourse.

They decided in 2009 (at a time when they were not romantically involved but still friendly) to pursue artificial insemination....

The baby eventually helped rekindle a romance between Ms. Schreiber and Mr. Patric, although they never formally moved in together. 

When the couple broke up, Patric sued for shared custody, there was some mediation, he continuned to see the child, but then she cut off the visits. There's a dispute about whether he was scary and threatening. So that's the struggle with the woman.

The struggle with the California statutes is:

One provides that any man can establish parentage if he “receives the child into his home and openly holds the child out as his natural child.” But another statute holds that a man who provides his sperm to a doctor for the purpose of inseminating an unmarried friend is “treated as if he were not the natural father” — unless there is a specific written agreement ahead of conception.

There is no specific written agreement, but look at that first statute about holding the child out as your own. That seems to refer to a pre-DNA era. There's no question here that Patric is the biological father. So... does that mean that the law designed to protect the standard sperm donor should determine the outcome?

Is Patric's predicament unusual? The NYT connects it to the emerging practice of men informally providing sperm to women who want to be mothers. Citing "societal shifts," the Times prompts us to think about lesbian couples and single women who want to raise a child on their own who have obliging male friends and nobody bothers with the formalities sold by doctors and lawyers.

Patric is out there in public fighting for the rights of all these men who want the right to be part of their children's life. The mother is trying to get him to stop using the boy's name (for example in the name of the foundation, Stand Up for Gus), but she's been losing out to his free-speech rights. She seems mostly to want to be left alone. Meanwhile, there are the sperm donors who want to be left alone, who were only helping out a friend. Don't some of these men remain in the picture as a sort of uncle figure, doing some things with the child, but not too much?

One conspicuous celebrity can make soft-hearted/headed people think the laws need to change (or to be interpreted) to accommodate his exquisitely specific situation. I'm skeptical. I have no idea where the line should be drawn through the gray area Patric inhabits, and it's easy to say men should not become fathers outside of the traditional role, but in the midst of these "societal shifts," there's no way to protect everyone. And the knee-jerk answer "So protect the child!" is too abstract to prevent these ugly struggles.

ADDED: The NYT put this article in its "Fashion & Style" section. That means something!

An Uneasy New York Times Juxtaposition.

Click to enlarge and fully enjoy:



Here's the actual article, "An Uneasy Inheritance of India’s Political Dynasty," published in The NYT on April 30. Thanks to RLC for noticing that and sending me the screen shot.

Fritillaria and Grape hyacinth.

"What Was the Last Piece of Music that Gave You the Chills?"

"Studies have shown that our brains tend to send us a shot of dopamine in the anticipatory seconds leading up to our favorite parts of compositions, and that we respond similarly to grand changes in pitch and melody. It's something truly great, and it just happened to me...."

Observed on Observatory.

Closeup on the window sticker:



"I Still Stand With Scott Walker."

(Of course, that's always a song cue at Meadhouse... so: here.)

"Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats?"

At FiveThirtyEight, they look at the statistics for the answer.

Also at FiveThirtyEight, "The ‘Blame Bush’ Era May Be at an End."

A poll.

The comments on this post about these James Franco selfies made me want to do a poll:

Judge the Franco photos.
	Embarrassing because he doesn't look as good as he thinks.
	Hilarious because he's satirizing the selfies of other people.
	Just some dumb, routine shots of a reasonably nice looking man.
	Cool, intimate access to a guy I like who doesn't take himself too seriously.
pollcode.com free polls

Lean out, Hillary, and just be a "post-President," urges Tina Brown... sounding post-feminist.

Check out Brown's last paragraph:

Now that Chelsea is pregnant, and life for Hillary can get so deeply familial and pleasant, she can have her glory-filled post-presidency now, without actually having to deal with the miseries of the office itself...

Go deeply familial and pleasant! Chelsea is pregnant! Yikes. Is this some kind of "reverse psychology" — as we used to say — where you try to get somebody to do something by advising them to do the opposite?

Meanwhile, here's a Politico hit piece on Tina Brown: "How to Lose $100 Million/The undoing of Tina Brown."

Here’s how Regis Philbin killed Newsweek for Tina Brown: