The figurative and literal rabbit hole.

Inside the wonderful apartment of Amy Sedaris:

"You couldn’t create a creepier Yuletide scene if you tried" — says The Guardian about Trump and Melania's Christmas portrait.

Here's the photograph:

Merry Christmas from President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. @POTUS & @FLOTUS are seen Saturday, December 15, in their official 2018 Christmas portrait, in the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks) pic.twitter.com/nIuplZSDBe

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) December 18, 2018

This, from Jonathan Jones seems ludicrously subjective. He just hates Trump. I get that.

Multiple Christmas trees are currently a status symbol for the wealthy, but this picture shows the risks. Instead of a homely symbol of midwinter cheer, these disciplined arboreal ranks with their uniform decorations are arrayed like massed soldiers or colossal columns designed by Albert Speer.... Everything here communicates cold, empty magnificence. Tree lights that are as frigid as icicles are mirrored in a cold polished floor.

The reflections of light on the floor are bothering him? Having more than one tree is a Nazi-ish thing? Aren't there always multiple trees in the White House at Christmas?

Equally frosty illuminations are projected on the ceiling. Instead of twinkling fairy magic, this lifeless lighting creates a sterile, inhuman atmosphere.... It suggests the micromanaged, corporate Christmas of a Citizen Kane who has long since lost touch with the ordinary, warm pleasures of real life.

In the centre of this disturbing piece of conceptual art stand Donald and Melania Trump. He’s in a tuxedo, she’s wearing white – and not a woolly hat in sight. Their formal smartness adds to the emotional numbness of the scene.

Trump’s shark-like grin has nothing generous or friendly about it. He seems to want to show off his beautiful wife and his fantastic home rather than any of the cuddly holiday spirit a conventional politician might strive to share at this time....

Are we to believe Jones would be calmed and cheered by Trump as "a conventional politician" in a woolly hat striving for cuddliness and using colored rather than white lights on the trees and projecting "twinkling fairy magic" on the ceiling?

"Unlike my colleagues, I’ve been a bemused spectator during this week’s Syria follies."

Writes Andrew C. McCarthy at The National Review.

When ISIS arose and gobbled up territory, beheading some inhabitants and enslaving the rest, Obama began sending in small increments of troops to help our “moderate” allies fend them off. But the moderates are mostly impotent; they need the jihadists, whether they are fighting rival jihadists or Assad. Syria remains a multi-front conflict in which one “axis” of America’s enemies, Assad-Iran-Russia, is pitted against another cabal of America’s enemies, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda factions; both sides flit between fighting against and attempting to co-opt ISIS, another U.S. enemy. The fighting may go on for years; the prize the winner gets is . . . Syria (if it’s the Russians, they’ll wish they were back in Afghanistan)....

If we stayed out of the way, America’s enemies would continue killing each other. That’s fine by me. I am not indifferent to collateral human suffering, but it is a staple of sharia-supremacist societies.... We should hit terrorist sanctuaries wherever we find them, but it is not necessary to have thousands of American troops on the ground everyplace such sanctuaries might take root....

When we look a little deeper, though, we see why Americans will no longer support Washington’s incoherent Middle East adventurism. When we made our arrangements with the Kurds, we knew the backbone of their fighting forces was the PKK, which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization....

I hold no brief for Trump on Syria... But I find it remarkable that... congressional critics never paused, ever so slightly, over the fact that the troops they want the president to keep in Syria were never authorized by Congress to be in Syria....  Obama did not seek congressional authorization for combat operations in Syria because Congress would have refused. And Congress does not want any president to ask for authorization because members do not want to be accountable — they want to go on cable TV and whine that whoever is president has been heedless, whether for going in or for pulling out....

ADDED: Here's "Good Riddance to America’s Syria Policy/As usual, Donald Trump has done the right thing in the wrong way" by Harvard international relations professor Stephen M. Walt (in Foreign Policy).

Instead of obsessing about who is supposedly “winning” and who is supposedly “losing,” the United States should start by identifying its core strategic interests....

What if the remnants of the Islamic State manage to reconstitute themselves, regain some territory, and sponsor new terrorist attacks abroad? Such a development is obviously undesirable, but the danger does not justify keeping U.S. troops in Syria for another one, two, or five years. The ideology of a group like the Islamic State is not eradicated by bombs, drones, artillery shells, or bullets, and the idea of violent resistance can live on even if every member alive today is killed or captured. The ultimate protection against such groups is not an open-ended American commitment but rather the creation of effective local governments and institutions. Legitimate and effective local authority is not something the United States can provide, however; its presence in such places may even be counterproductive. After all, the Islamic State’s ideological message rests in part on opposition to foreign interference, and it has long used the U.S. presence in the region as a recruiting tool. Getting out of Syria won’t neutralize that message right away, but it could make the group less persuasive over time.

Moreover, despite its fearsome image and the hype its brutal tactics have received, the Islamic State was never an existential threat to the United States....

Living off the grid in northern Wyoming.

A charmingly practical view of what it takes:

"If estrogen modulates psychosis, it might explain why schizophrenic symptoms in menstruating women were less severe than those in men..."

"... and why these women needed lower doses of antipsychotics to control them. It might even be protective enough to delay onset for a number of years. Sudden, dramatic fluctuations in estrogen during perimenopause, the months or years before a woman stops menstruating, might explain why a woman with no previous history of mental illness might suddenly come down with a bad case of psychosis. And the absence of estrogen after menopause might explain why a woman’s psychotic symptoms could suddenly resemble those of a very young man.... Researchers around the world began to explore the connections between psychosis and estrogen at every phase of a woman’s life.... In 2013, premenstrual dysphoric disorder became an official diagnosis in the new revision of the DSM, an acknowledgment that for 5.5 percent of women, the phase usually known as PMS can be debilitating, contributing to severe depression, lost days of work, dangerous ruptures in relationships, and even suicide. Older feminists opposed the classification, arguing that it made a pathology of being female, but younger feminists disagreed...."

From "Listening to Estrogen Hormones have always been a third rail in female mental health. They may also be a skeleton key" (New York Magazine).

"Not one cent of our taxpayer money should be wasted on this absurd monument to Trump's racism and ignorance. It's revolting..."

"... to think that House Republicans can pull $5 billion out of thin air for this hateful vanity project, but immediately turn into hard-nosed misers should we dare to spend our money on something that actually matters and helps Americans, such as healthcare, education, or infrastructure. Go ahead, Donald, shut it down. You own it."

Writes a commenter with over 3,000 up-votes on the NYT article "Government Shuts Down as Talks Fail to Break Impasse."

From the article:

While the president has been unwilling to consider dropping his demand to fund his signature campaign promise, Mr. Pence and other White House officials were discussing a number of potential compromises that would force him to do just that, omitting spending on a wall and instead adding money for other security measures at the border, according to several officials with knowledge of the talks.

Late Friday, as his budget director ordered the carrying out of shutdown plans, President Trump told the country in a video on Twitter that “we’re going to have a shutdown.”

Here's that video:

OUR GREAT COUNTRY MUST HAVE BORDER SECURITY! pic.twitter.com/ZGcYygMf3a

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2018

"The risky white male hypothesis!" — I say out loud as I'm writing the last post.

"Did you see the video I just sent you?" is Meade's response.

Women are generally more liberal than men, so why is there a "reverse gender gap" on marijuana legalization?

2 polisci profs — Laurel Elder and Steven Greene — analyze (at WaPo) why only 49% of women support legalization when 59% percent of men do.

One factor that didn’t matter was parenthood... But neither mothers nor fathers were more likely to oppose marijuana legalization than people without children.

One factor that did matter was women’s greater religiosity... Because religious people are more opposed to marijuana legalization, factoring in religiosity narrows but does not eliminate the reverse gender gap.....

A second factor is what’s known as the “risky white men hypothesis.” Researchers have shown that men, and white men in particular, tend to accept risk more than others. This helps explain the gender gap on a number of environmental, health, science, and technology-related issues. For example, white women and men and women of color worry more about the consequences of global warming and nuclear power...Still, taking account of race and gender did not eliminate the reverse gender gap, either.

The risky white men hypothesis!

Ultimately, what best explains the gender gap in marijuana attitudes is the gender gap in marijuana use. Men (all men, not just white men) report using marijuana more often than women. Once marijuana use is taken into account, there is no gender gap in attitudes toward gender gap in marijuana legalization.

So it's good old self-interest. But what is it about being male that makes you more likely to use marijuana? I would have connected this to willingness to take risk: Is the male/female gap in marijuana use greater in places where it is illegal? Elder and Greene say:

Research in sociology and psychology has found that men are more likely to engage in deviant and risk-taking behavior, although scholars debate why this is — whether biology, peer influence, different conceptions of morality, or something else.

This might be a reason for women to support legalization. We risk-averse women might avoid using marijuana because we won't commit crimes. That would make legalization more important to us if we also want to use marijuana. Also we may worry about people we care about getting into trouble.

Elder and Green predict that the gender gap will close as marijuana become legal in more states, because when it's legal, it seems "less risky or deviant and also less immoral" and because "as Democratic elites increasingly favor more liberal marijuana policies, this will help push Democrats in the electorate, who are disproportionately women, toward greater support as well." That is, women will follow along once the "Democratic elite" position becomes clear.

I've observed over the years that researchers tend to explain any gender difference in a way that makes whatever is true of women good. This is an interesting example of that. You can see that they're presenting the independence and courage of men as "risk taking," "deviance," and insensitivity to "morality." I'm intrigued by the presentation of women as pushed by the Democratic elite. Is being a follower regarded as a positive quality (when you follow the Democratic elite)?

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin says:

Women are smart enough to know this isn’t going to put more smart, hard-working, marriage and family-focused men into the dating pool.

At the Solstice...

... shine your light here.

Speaking of points...

A design of our Steel Slat Barrier which is totally effective while at the same time beautiful! pic.twitter.com/sGltXh0cu9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018

There's your answer to ladders.

Trump the Impaler?

Is that "beautiful"?

ADDED: When people get skewered will they just leave them up there as an example?

AND: Protesters should catapult effigies up there and try to get them stuck.

Kisses are missing their point.

A candy mystery.

"The Supreme Court says Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery to remove two malignant growths from her left lung."

"The court says doctors found 'no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body.'"

ADDED: Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009 and was treated successfully. She is 85 years old.

Glenn Greenwald calls Rachel Maddow on her hypocrisy.

The most bizarre aspect of Rachel @Maddow's deep anger over troop withdrawal from Syria is that she wrote an entire book in 2012 denouncing illegal US Endless War without congressional approval - exactly what Syria is. I interviewed her about it here: https://t.co/Zg7K1a3bUy https://t.co/js74z4iGUN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 21, 2018

"It’s lonely to be reminded a thousand times every winter that the dominant American cultural event occurs without me."

Lonely!

That's Julia Ioffe, providing seasonal fodder for The Washington Post, in "Please don’t wish me ‘Merry Christmas’/It’s impolite and alienating to assume I follow your religion."

My initial reaction was oh, jeez, must we do this every year?, but it meets my standard of bloggable because of the word "lonely" and because I wanted to let you know that the WaPo commenters are heavily against her. Here's the highest rated comment:

Oh, for heaven's sake! I can understand a Jewish person being sensitive in the current climate, but this sort of "everyone stop what they're doing because it's all about me" wears people out. This is why people hate the left, and I'm a leftie! As an atheist, Ms Ioffe, I typically wish people Happy Holidays, but if they wish me a Merry Christmas, I respond with the same with a warm heart. Not for the holiday, which I dislike more for its retail nature than its religious nature, but for the warm wishes they are extending me. Did your parents never teach you "When in Rome..."? If I were in Israel, I'd do my best to revel in the holidays celebrated there, or at least to tolerate them with a smile. Same thing if I were in Pakistan (and don't get me started on my views of Islam - I'm a feminist for crying out loud and no fan of any religion). I want to sympathize, I really do, but you are not winning friends or influencing people here. Would you have all the world be drab, with no one celebrating anything because, well, someone somewhere won't be into that? Focus on taking tax breaks away from churches to make the separation of church and State more meaningful. But being wished a Merry Christmas? (and really, you had to bring this up just as the right was starting to realize their war on Christmas stuff was nonsense?) Being wished a Merry Christmas is a mind over matter problem - if you don't mind, it don't matter. Get over yourself!

As for "lonely" — how can you ask other people not to do the things that make you feel lonely? No one would ever hold hands or kiss on the street. We'd all need to shut up about it if our adult children ever visited us or called us on the telephone. There could be no mention of parties and dates.

Out of empathy for the lonely, if anyone loves you, you'd better keep it to yourself.

"Turkey will delay a planned offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria's northeast, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday, citing talks with the U.S. president and other officials."

WaPo reports this morning.

“We decided last week to launch a military incursion into the east of the Euphrates River and shared that information with the public,” Erdogan said at a meeting of the Turkish Exporters Assembly in Istanbul.

“Our phone call with President Trump, along with contacts between our diplomats and security officials and statements by the United States, have led us to wait a little longer,” he said, referring to a phone call between the two leaders last Friday.

Still, he said, Turkey's military is planning to launch the offensive in several months, with the aim of “eliminating” both the Kurdish YPG, or People's Protection Units, and Islamic State remnants.

"New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet."

"However, ensuring she does not offend users has been a challenge for the world’s largest online retailer.... Amazon customers can participate by saying 'let’s chat' to their devices. Alexa then tells users that one of the bots will take over, unshackling the voice aide’s normal constraints.... Amazon has been willing to accept the risk of public blunders to stress-test the technology in real life and move Alexa faster up the learning curve, the person said.... But Alexa’s gaffes are alienating others, and Bezos on occasion has ordered staff to shut down a bot, three people familiar with the matter said. The user who was told to whack his foster parents wrote a harsh review on Amazon’s website, calling the situation 'a whole new level of creepy.' A probe into the incident found the bot had quoted a post without context from Reddit.... The privacy implications may be even messier. Consumers might not realize that some of their most sensitive conversations are being recorded by Amazon’s devices.... The next challenge for social bots is figuring out how to respond appropriately to their human chat buddies.... One bot described sexual intercourse using words such as 'deeper,' which on its own is not offensive, but was vulgar in this particular context...."

From "'Kill your foster parents': Amazon's Alexa talks murder, sex in AI experiment" (Reuters).