... you can talk all night.
Pebrero 12, 2022
"Unfortunately Breyer’s book... is not a thoughtful exploration of the virtues and vices of well-meaning deception."
"In his stubborn avowal that the Court... remains an apolitical body, he perpetuates a lie that is anything but noble. I have written much that is entirely positive about his judicial opinions, so it pains me to say that his book reads as though it had been written by someone oddly unaware of the implausibility of its factual claims. Invoking Cicero, Breyer opens by noting that legal obedience, the kind a society needs if it is not to descend into chaos and what Tennyson called the law of 'tooth and claw,' requires either fear of punishment, hope of reward, or belief that the law is just even when it doesn’t deliver what you hope for. The central thesis of his book is that the reason Americans have over time abided by the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the law.... is that they have accepted the view that the justices are not acting 'politically.'... [H]e is content to express his belief that 'jurisprudential differences, not political ones, account for most, perhaps almost all, of judicial disagreements'—even while conceding that 'it is sometimes difficult to separate what counts as a jurisprudential view from what counts as political philosophy, which, in turn, can shape views of policy.' What accounts for these so-called jurisprudential differences? To what degree are they mere window dressing, attached after the fact to conclusions consciously or unconsciously reached on other grounds?"
Writes Laurence Tribe in "Politicians in Robes/Why does Stephen Breyer continue to insist that the Supreme Court is apolitical?" (NYRB).
"[F]amilies of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to."
"This is not what [the researcher Dale Farron] is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where 'teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children.'... Private preschools, even home-based day cares, tend to be laid out with little bodies in mind. There are bathrooms just off the classrooms. Children eat in, or very near, the classroom, too. And there is outdoor play space nearby with equipment suitable for short people. Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient. 'So if you're in an older elementary school, the bathroom is going to be down the hall. You've got to take your children out, line them up and then they wait,' Farran says. "And then, if you have to use the cafeteria, it's the same thing. You have to walk through the halls, you know: 'Don't touch your neighbor, don't touch the wall, put a bubble in your mouth because you have to be quiet.'... 'Whoever thought that you could provide a 4-year-old from an impoverished family with 5 1/2 hours a day, nine months a year of preschool, and close the achievement gap, and send them to college at a higher rate?' she asks. 'I mean, why? Why do we put so much pressure on our pre-K programs?' We might actually get better results, she says, from simply letting little children play."
From "A top researcher says it's time to rethink our entire approach to preschool" (NPR).
I'd never before noticed that phrase "put a bubble in your mouth." Here's an article about it. Excerpt:
"Could those who concocted this sentence ever recognize their kinship with the moral purifiers of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge? Or of Mao’s Cultural Revolution?"
"Or the Stalinist interrogator Gletkin in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel 'Darkness at Noon'? If so, would UIC’s unconscious emulators be discomfited by the resemblance? Unlikely. Today, bureaucrats parasitic off academia’s scholarly mission outnumber actual scholars. These threat-discerners, diversity-planners, bias-detectors, sensitivity-promoters, sustainability-guarantors and other beneficiaries of today’s multibillion-dollar social justice industry are doing well during the nation’s supposed apocalypse."
George Will condemns the authorities at the University of Illinois at Chicago for their treatment of lawprof Jason Kilborn after he gave a civil procedure exam with a fact pattern about a lawsuit brought by a black woman against an employer whose managers had called her — and this is how it was written on the exam — a “n_____” and a “b_____.”
Here's Will's column: "Even by today’s standard of campus cowardice and conformity, this repulsive episode is noteworthy" (WaPo).
For details about the what UI did to Kilborn, here's the complaint in his lawsuit against the university. You can see all the measures the university took and also the serious difficulty over Kilborn's statement that the dean might have thought that Kilborn would "become homicidal" if he saw the student petition criticizing him about the exam.
"Wisconsin law requires the DNR to hold a hunting season between November and February whenever the wolf is not listed as endangered, but this winter’s hunt was put on hold...."
"U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to show wolf populations could be sustained in the Midwest and portions of the West without protection under the Endangered Species Act, so he reinstated them as an endangered species.... Permits that allowed land owners to kill wolves when experiencing conflicts with the animals are no longer valid, the [Wisconsin] DNR said.... Training dogs to track and trail wolves is also no longer allowed, the DNR said. The DNR said it 'remains committed' to helping people who have conflicts with wolves."
Random Attack on Joe Rogan of the Day.
From WaPo's regular "Date Lab" feature, an episode titled "Her roommate says her type is ‘generic.’" This was all going along very blandly sweetly until the attack on Joe Rogan sprang up:
“Every time I talk to my roommate, she says that my taste is so ‘generic,’ ” Fiona [Forrester, 23,] recalled, clarifying, “generic and boring.”...
Her No. 1 priority is just finding a “nice person.” She favors “outdoorsy” guys, she said, who “are a bit more quiet. Like a mix between Jim from ‘The Office’ and Tom Holland in ‘Spider-Man.’ ”...
"[A] big no for me [is] if someone is impolite to anyone,” she said. Then she added, “Podcasts come up quite a lot in conversations and I feel like so many guys will ask me what I like and I’ll tell them a podcast and they’ll say they just listen to Joe Rogan.”
Following the media personality is a red flag for her, as everything she’s learned about him is “some wacky stuff.”
"First off, let me take this one. Hold up. I’m Black. I can take this one. Look, there’s a lot of c*nts in this game. There are a lot of snakes in this game."
"I’ve been in this fight game since 2008. Joe Rogan is one of the nicest, coolest, humble motherf*ckers I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Understand that. F*ck the noise. You know what they’re trying to do. You can’t control the man. He’s got the biggest platform in the world right now. That’s my ***** Joe Rogan. F*ck the noise.... Just keep doing you, Joe. Have some mushrooms. Keep doing you.” 
Said the UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya at the UFC 271 pre-fight news conference, when the promotion president Dana White was asked about Rogan (including that montage of Rogan saying the "n-word" over the years).
Adesanya is quoted in "Israel Adesanya gives fired-up defense of Joe Rogan: 'F*ck the noise. You know what they're trying to do'" (UFC)
Meanwhile, the NY Post reports, "Joe Rogan won’t be on UFC 271 broadcast as controversy lingers."
Here's the Adesanya video, unbleeped:
Israel Adesanya vehemently defends @JoeRogan amid his latest controversy.
— MMA Junkie (@MMAjunkie) February 10, 2022
"Joe Rogan is one of the nicest, coolest, humble motherf*ckers I've had the pleasure of working with."#UFC271 | Full video: https://t.co/ArYOi51nJ6 pic.twitter.com/QKAVi2L4ux
By the way, Joe's lineup of guests on his podcast this week has been fantastic. Last week was an uncharacteristic drought, and I'd gotten the idea that Rogan was putting himself on suspension. There were 6 days between January 27 and February 3 when no podcasts went up, but look what happened next:
You can see that I've listened to them all. They are bold and, I think, a deliberately strong move against his critics. Look at the variety. Look at the subjects. You have to listen to see how much he is doing with these episodes. The one with the comedian Akaash Singh is notable for how many other comedians they talk about and how vigorously — yet casually and naturally — he is promoting other performers. The one with the comedian Dave Smith — who used to appear regularly on CNN — is full of critique of mainstream media.
Pebrero 11, 2022
At the Sunrise Café...
... you can talk all night.
It was a dreary day — not cold, but dreary — and I took a second walk. Here's how things looked in late morning:
Biden's mother hated the English and wrote "hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on our heads."
From "Joe Biden’s mother so disliked England she refused to sleep in bed Queen had slept in/Veep writer Georgia Pritchett reveals US president’s Irish mother wrote poems calling for God to ‘rain blood’ on the English" (The Guardian).
[Biden] also recalled how his mother, Catherine Finnegan – known as Jean – visited the UK and spent a night in a hotel where, she was told, the Queen had once stayed.
“She was so appalled that she slept on the floor all night, rather than risk sleeping on a bed that the Queen had slept on,” Pritchett wrote, adding she personally admired anyone who allowed their principles to take precedence over a comfortable bed.
What's with these stories about highly emotive reactions to beds in foreign countries that somebody once slept in? I'm thinking of the myth of Trump's procuring prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Russian hotel that Barack and Michelle Obama slept in. If beds so absorbingly retain a spiritual residue of those who've slept there, how can anyone sleep in any hotel?
"I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am."
Said Adele, accepting the Brit Award for Artist of the Year and referring to the change to gender neutrality, after years of awarding the best female and the best male, quoted in a NY Post column, "Good on Adele for celebrating female — not gender-neutral — achievement" by Maureen Callahan.
Callahan writes that Adele is being "slandered a TERF — a trans-exclusionary radical feminist." I'd like to see the wording of that "slander," because I can't even understand it. How are trans people involved in gender neutrality? It seems to me they're at the opposite extreme. Adele says "I really love being a woman," but isn't that what a trans woman would say? Gender is especially important, not neutralized.
What would be "trans-exclusionary" would be to keep the male and female categories but refuse to allow artists to compete for the award that goes with their declared gender. You could even say that switching to gender neutrality just as trans people are coming to the fore is trans-exclusionary — a bit like reacting to racial desegregation by closing the public swimming pool.
Quite aside from the TERF charge, there's the problem of excluding artists who declare themselves non-binary, notably Sam Smith. Here's an article from The Guardian from last March: "Sam Smith excluded from gendered categories at 2021 Brit awards/Solo male and solo female categories mean no room for chart-topping non-binary singer, who calls for awards to reflect society."
A Brit awards spokesperson later responded, saying: “Sam is an extraordinary British artist and we agree with what they have said today. The Brits are committed to evolving the show and the gendered categories are very much under review. But any changes made to be more inclusive need to be just that - if a change unintentionally leads to less inclusion then it risks being counterproductive to diversity and equality. We need to consult more widely before changes are made to make sure we get it right.”
There are winners and losers — in awards and in structuring and re-structuring awards — and maybe the best answer is screw awards. This is art, not sports.
It's like "Clockwork Orange" but without actual clamps holding your eyelids open.
In case you've forgotten "Clockwork Orange," you can easily get up to speed on that and other eyeball horrors in the movies at "A Clockwork Orange And 8 Other Movies With Terrifying Eye Scenes" (CinemaBlend).he knew https://t.co/AKLTm4C3zo pic.twitter.com/yJvEUzBMpY
— sarah 𐂂 (@tinygreenbug) February 10, 2022
The great Wordle freakout of February 11th.
so my streak went from messed up to now fully erased. i’m using the same browser. what did you do. pic.twitter.com/1J0gKByJcp
— with an "i" (@liawithani) February 11, 2022
"Masculinity... is always under threat and eating animals is its protection racket.... Our whiteness is part of the problem of meat-eating..."
I have been saying for years that eating meat is an act of patriarchal white supremacy.
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) February 11, 2022
This womxn is a genius…pic.twitter.com/yXWEzUBhd1
"Could the Soup Nazi have secretly been a member of the gazpacho police? We asked Larry Thomas, who played the character, for his take..."
"... on the moment as soups and Nazis march back into the headlines.... 'How in the world can a grown person, who grew up in the 20th century, not know what the word Gestapo is?' he asks. 'They say "You can’t write this shit." It’s beyond you can’t write this shit.... If she got the word wrong with a nonsensical word, it would be one thing, but I knew as soon as she actually used the name of a soup that I was in trouble... And then she turns around and makes an actual Soup Nazi reference [on Twitter], you know, the "no soup for you, and you’re gonna end up in the goulash." I’m sure somebody wrote that for her. She can’t possibly be that funny.'"
In case you missed it:Just to clear things up, @RepMTG
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) February 9, 2022
Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup
Gestapo: Nazi Germany's secret police pic.twitter.com/T9q76r706G
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