"The president of the United States is seriously, frighteningly, dangerously unstable. And he’s getting worse by the day."

Getting worse? Really? Seems to me things have calmed way down. But here comes Robert Reich (in The Guardian) to rile people back up into the hysteria we're supposed to maintain even though not much has happened. He leads with Sharpiegate, though Sharpiegate is a monument to how little can be found to throw at Trump these days.

What to do? We can vote him out of office in 14 months’ time. But he could end the world in seven and a half seconds. There’s also the question of whether he’ll willingly leave. Can you imagine the lengths he will go to win? Will he get Russia to do more dirty work? Instruct the justice department to arrest his opponent? Issue an executive order banning anyone not born in the US from voting? Start another war?

Reich's imaginationland is pretty weird. But I guess articles like this need to be written. There's a market for it. I wonder how big, though. Personally, I've never liked Trump (other than that I enjoy his humor and jolliness), but the Trumpophobes are worse — more "seriously, frighteningly, dangerously unstable." They'd do better to settle down and work on getting a Democratic Party candidate who isn't scarier than Trump.

Meanwhile, I feel like withdrawing. Maybe go play some records.

"I've got three bags [of shoes] in my closet just waiting for Genene. I've been waiting for her for years."

Said Jessica Gray, who has a size 7 left foot and size 9 right foot, upon discovering a woman with  a size 9 left foot and size 7 right foot. (Reported at CBC via my son John on Facebook.)

"I am so excited to be able to finally talk to someone with not only the same issue as me but the exact same issue as me, like the size 7 and the size 9, and like maybe we can do some online shopping together soon," said Gray.

Both women have always had to buy 2 pairs of the same shoe every time they bought shoes. The women found each other through the internet. (Here's the Facebook group: flip flopped feet.) But why doesn't the internet give us a shoe store that lets you buy shoes mixing the sizes? Why can't Zappos mix sizes?

In fact, why isn't custom-sized clothing much more of a thing on the internet? Sizing is extremely important with shoes, which are not stretchy like so many clothes and which can't be taken to a tailor for altering, but I've been wondering why the opportunity isn't seized to make perfectly fitting clothing. How many women buy poorly sized pants because their waist/hip ratio is different from what's in the conventional sizing?

"At the first Women’s March, protesters carried signs with slogans like, 'Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!' and 'The Handmaid’s Tale’s not an instruction manual!'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours" (NYT).

You could argue that all this is melodrama; living under Trump may be degrading, but American women are incomparably freer than those in, for example, Saudi Arabia, a society that seems far closer to Gilead than our own. Then again, in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” America hadn’t crumbled all at once. Recalling her old existence, the book’s heroine wondered at how normal life went on even as horrors filled the newspapers. “Nothing changes instantaneously: In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it,” she says.

And in a world of gradually heating bathtubs that boil you to death before you notice, you'd never be able to take a bath. But who sets up bathtubs to heat gradually to the boiling point?! Oh, that Margaret Atwood, she's quite the comic writer! Except that wasn't a joke. She really did take that old trope of a frog in a pot of water on the stove — a stove, which is designed to bring pots of water to a boil — and turn it into a bathtub, so it could be a boiling woman and not just a frog.

And, you know, that thing about the frog is false. The frog jumps out when it gets too hot. He doesn't just sit there in the water getting used to it while he cooks to death. So you really don't have to pre-jump based on hyped up fears. In that analogy. Assuming it's a good analogy. It's certainly a trite analogy. But so helpful in drumming up hysteria. Nothing happening yet, but we'd better act now, because otherwise if something does happen, we won't notice. So we notice the nothing now because later we won't notice the something because it will seem like nothing. So learn to think that nothing is something because future you thinks something is nothing. How crazy would life be if we used that theory?!

Anyway, Margaret Atwood has a new novel, a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale," called "The Testaments." Goldberg (with a spoiler alert) reveals the plot. I don't care about the plot or the book other than the way it's important to some people as they go able coping with the reality of Trump's presidency.

“Writing dystopias and utopias is a way of asking the reader the question, ‘Where do you want to live?’” Atwood said when I talked to her last year. “And where you end up living is going to depend partly on what you do now.” “The Testaments,” it turns out [SPOILER ALERT] isn’t a dystopian work at all. It’s utopian. By the time it’s over, Gilead is a relic, and scholars in a more enlightened time are studying the women who subverted it. Praise be! Our descendants should be so lucky.

I went to Amazon to get a link for "The Testaments," and I was amused by the collection of things Amazon suggested for me to "inspired" by my search. Which one of these things is not like the other?



What the hell, Amazon??!!

View from the boathouse.

"Flames engulfed 460 tons of lead when Notre-Dame’s roof and spire burned, scattering dangerous dust onto the streets and parks of Paris."

The NYT reports.

Five months after the fire, the French authorities have refused to fully disclose the results of their testing for lead contamination, sowing public confusion.... [I]t took a month before city officials conducted the first lead tests at a school close to Notre-Dame. Even today, city and regional health officials have not tested every school in the proximity of the cathedral.

The tests showed levels of lead dust above the French regulatory standard for buildings hosting children in at least 18 day care centers, preschools and primary schools. In dozens of other public spaces, like plazas and streets, authorities found lead levels up to 60 times over the safety standard. Soil contamination in public parks may be among the biggest concerns....

Some French officials and lead experts have cautioned against ‘‘paranoia’’ and argued that in a city as old as Paris, not all of the high lead levels can be attributed to the Notre-Dame fire.... “The state was afraid to make people afraid,” said Anne Souyris, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of health....

"Searching a room for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at last month's G7 summit in France... President Trump called out: 'Where’s my favorite dictator?'"

"Sisi really is a dictator, and he really is closely allied with the Trump administration...." Axios explains.

"In essence, drag queens are clowns. They are not transgender (or haven’t been until very, very recently). They are men, mainly gay..."

"... who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play; their clothes and hair are exaggerated, over-the-top parodies of women’s appearance; their makeup is often cray-cray, their wigs absurd. They also reinforce, rather than undermine, gender norms in a weird, over-the-top way...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, opposing the opposition to the Drag Queen Story Hour some libraries have for children.

Children love drag queens the way they love clowns or circuses or Halloween or live Disney characters in Disney World. It’s dress-up fun.... And yes, Dave Chappelle, the sanest man in America at the moment, is right. Men dressed obviously as women are first and foremost funny.... These clowns read children’s stories to kids and their parents, and encourage young children to read books. This is the work of the devil? Please.

Anyway... bypassing most of that controversy (which I've passed on blogging many times), I just want to cherry-pick one issue out of that: Is it good to "reinforce, rather than undermine, gender norms"? And by good, I mean not anti-feminist.

"Is this really true? Did you really pack up your mother-in-law's things and lock her out after she gave you the house? Umm yeah, YTA."

A clear response at r/AmItheAsshole.

I'm a big fan of r/AmItheAsshole and have read all the entries for the last few weeks. Usually, it's more of a conundrum or it's somebody who needs and deserves assurance that they are not the asshole. But this one takes the cake. I kind of especially enjoy when a true asshole posts with what looks like the expectation that they are not the asshole. I have a natural inclination to defend the absent party, so I like when someone who thinks they're right is met with a response that understands the other perspective and represents it well.

UPDATE: Reddit moderators have taken the post down and locked the comments over there. They explain:

You want assholes to post on this subreddit? How about next time you don't eviscerate OP in the comments. I don't care how much you think they're the worst, be fucking civil on this sub.

And in case you're one of those people wondering, "Why am I suppose to be civil in a sub about assholes?!" Read this.

From that:

I’m supposed to “Be Civil” in a sub about “assholes”?

• Yes. For the purposes of this subreddit, “asshole” is not a bad word or an insult.
• The purpose of this subreddit has always been to help people see where they may have been in the wrong. It’s not about calling someone “an asshole” it’s about finding who “the asshole” is in a situation.
• The title of this subreddit is not an invitation for you to be cruel. Treat others with respect, no matter how big of an asshole they may be.
• We are ALL "The Asshole" at one point or another in this lifetime. Please remember this when you comment here.

"In my youth and still somewhat to this date, I learned to view my body as a threat, both to myself and to others."

"Taking care to cover those bits that act as a sexual signal felt like a necessary step to de-weaponize my body....  Just as heavier women are assumed to be 'unhealthy,' and skinny women are evaluated as 'needing a sandwich,' you are cast as a harlot; a man-eater. A simple T-shirt over an ample bosom is rendered obscene, and you mustn’t be too tempting.... [S]chools and sports teams should be mindful that they aren’t ostracizing girls based on arbitrary modesty codes that have the effect of penalizing certain body types. When they do this, they are not only participating in the oversexualization of these girls, but they give power to the negative attitudes toward curvier body types by turning them into policy."

Writes Amanda MacLean in "The Obscenity of Curves/Oversexualizing female athletes is dangerous" (NYT)(writing in reaction to that story about the high school competitive swimmer who was disqualified for her too-revealing bathing suit).

"If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping..."

"... that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope," writes the novelist Jonathan Franzen in a The New Yorker article that I've noticed and avoided, perhaps because the title is warding me off — "What If We Stopped Pretending?/The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it."

ADDED: I'm reading comments and seeing that a lot of you are reflexively blowing off Franzen as going along with the left. You need to read, "The controversy over Jonathan Franzen’s climate change opinions, explained/Scientists are pissed at the novelist — and at the New Yorker for publishing him" (Vox):

Immediately after the essay went live Sunday, people began to express their ire online. Climate scientists and activists were especially pissed — at the author, and also at the magazine that published him.... The critics’ anger seemed to coalesce around four main complaints, three of them empirical in nature: Franzen is wrong on the science, on the politics, and on the psychology of human behavior as it pertains to climate change.

THIS WAS IN THE ORIGINAL POST: An excerpt from Franzen:

"The promise of kiteboarding is that a wind strong enough to draw small whitecaps from the water can take you on a magic-carpet ride."

"But the same wind can be dangerously uncontrollable.... If you swoop too aggressively and lose control of the kite, it can start spinning. In a 'death loop,' the spins become unstoppable; the kite gathers speed, pulling you along with it.... Feeling its pull, I was reminded of riding a horse: each of the kite’s small motions suggested irresistible strength, and pretending to control it was hubris. Whenever I lost focus, the kite swooped and pulled me downwind. I watched the lines: if my fingers got caught in them, the kite could rip them off.... If the wind is good, a light pull on the control bar will start the bow-shaped kite on a turn toward its apex, into the full force of the wind. At the right moment, you turn the board hard upwind and pull the bar: a surge of power lifts you skyward. A beginner might hop a foot above the water, abs tight with effort, then lose the board and crash. But the best riders can rise dozens of feet in the air, then ride away after a soft landing."

From "How Hackers Invented Kiteboarding/An unusual design process combining recklessness, imagination, and computers created one of the fastest-growing sports in history" by James Somers (in The New Yorker).

"Sim-me may live in sim-Manhattan with other uploaded minds, but with my personality and memories, he will love my family just as I do and will want to interact with them."

"Sim-me will have the same political views and want to vote; he will have the same intellectual interests and want to return to the job he remembers and still loves. He'll want to be part of the world. And what would stop him? He may live in the cloud, with a simulated instead of a physical body, but his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else's. We already live in a world where almost everything we do flows through cyberspace. We keep up with friends and family through text and Twitter, Facebook and Skype. We keep informed about the world through social media and internet news. Even our jobs, some of them at least, increasingly exist in an electronic space.... [W]ho would accumulate the most power? One possible answer is the people who live in the simulated world. They've already built a lifetime of political and economic connections.... Biological people would become a larval stage of human, each of them aspiring to be among the lucky few who are allowed to metamorphose into the immortal elites who own the world.... [T]he most powerful people [might] be those who control access to the simulated world. Think about how religions work. People at the top tell you that if you behave well, you'll enter heaven, and if you behave badly, you may end up in eternal punishment.... [R]eligious demagogues offer an afterlife that can't be objectively confirmed.... Imagine the coercive power of an afterlife that is directly confirmable. The public could Skype with people who are in a digital heaven and (if the technology turns very dark) in a digital hell...."

From "Will Your Uploaded Mind Still Be You?/The day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer. How will we coexist with our digital replicas?" by Michael S.A. Graziano (in the WSJ).

Graziano has an upcoming book, "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience." I don't know if the book has anything on the subject of law, but the column doesn't. It's a very interesting column, but I can't read things like "his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else's" without thinking about law. I suspect that experts on the brain and consciousness will see many other problems with what he's saying. One of the commenters at the link brings up hormones. I don't see how copying all the connections in the brain would produce a consciousness that's the same as what a mind in an entire body experiences.

"LOL white men putting [SPOILER DELETED] in the grid (10D: Sharing of a moral viewpoint to gain social approval)."

Rex Parker rails against today's NYT crossword, which features a 15-letter expression that I'll hide until the jump:

This puzzle is so on-brand. I mean, this is exactly the kind of term I'd expect to find in a puzzle that just this week was reminding us all of the glory of Confederate monuments. That's a term used predominantly by those who are real mad that they can't be as openly racist and homophobic as they used to be in the good ol' days. People who use that term also use terms like "P.C." and "SJW" [and the word that's in the puzzle at 41D]. Super-popular term with right-wing "thought" "leaders." Aggrieved white men love the term. And it's rich coming from an editor who has struggled to keep racism / sexism / classism out of his puzzles. I say "struggled," but that implies he cares or is trying, so maybe not. Anyway, you can dodge criticism of your terrible behavior by calling the criticism [SPOILER DELETED], but your behavior won't be any less terrible. I'm not [a variation on the spoiler] for pointing this out. Just a sentient person with a capacity for empathy. It's fun! Costs nothing! Try it out!

The #SexSoBadThat tag that's trending on Twitter is so bad that I couldn't read my way into understanding it.

Go here to read it yourself.

Is there an actual trend in noticing that bad sex is bad or are people having fun with the idea that sex is generally bad or is it a way to express annoyance at some specific sex that you yourself experienced?

My usual Mendota lakeshore walk takes me into a Bucky Badger photoshoot.

Today at the Union Terrace:

Can we start trying to make Amy happen?

Matt Drudge takes the lead:

My favorite part was when there was all this crosstalk and she busted out with: "A house divided cannot stand!"

I'm thinking, come on, Amy! That can be your trademark! When other people are talking, you just call out an old Lincoln quote: "My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read!" "I am a slow walker, but I never walk back!" "There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes!" You get the idea.

(I said this first over at Facebook, in a comment on a post by my son John. And I also put it on Twitter.)