At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Again, no sunrise picture. It was cold and overcast. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, I hope you'll still support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

As long as I'm talking about apologies...

"George Stephanopoulos and ABC apologize to Trump, are forced to pay $15 million to settle defamation suit/ABC News will pay $15 million as a charitable contribution to a Trump presidential foundation and museum" (Fox News).

The defamation had to do with the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. Stephanopoulos incorrectly asserted "Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury."

"This is unacceptable and disturbing. The DMV is taking swift action to recall these shocking plates..."

"We sincerely apologize that these personalized plates were not properly rejected during our review process. The use of hateful language is not only a clear violation of our policies but also a violation of our core values to proudly serve the public."

Wrote the California Department of Motor Vehicles, quoted in "Family that owns Tesla Cybertruck with ‘LOLOCT7’ plate says its meaning was misconstrued" (Washington Times).

"How GOP Senators Are Secretly Getting Ready to Surrender to Trump."

Headline at The New Republic. Article by Greg Sargent. Subheadline: "Trump wants to turn the FBI into something so draconian that the political press many not grasp it until it’s too late. And Republican senators are already giving themselves cover to go along with all of it."

Is it "surrender" if you're on his side?

I see I have an old tag "Trump's swamp draining." I'll use that for this. I created it in 2016 but never really used it in the first Trump administration.

"If you think of the United States as a football field, all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line."

Said John Tierney, quoted in "No, Recycling Will Not Save the Environment/Despite what you may have heard, many 'recyclables' sent to recycling plants are never recycled at all" (Reason).

The article is from 2 years ago, but it presents a video that I've been seeing tweeted and blogged this week, and I didn't remember seeing it before. That one-inch line visual really stuck with me. If it's correct, the answer is so obviously landfills, and people who think we're running out of space to just pile up our trash have been wildly misled.

"The comment from the Feds is absurd. These are car-sized drones that have flown over New Jersey, New York, and military bases in Virginia."

"If the Feds know who is doing this, they should say so. If they don't know, they should say that. To say that they 'pose no threat,' but we can't tell you what they are is the height of bureaucratic arrogance."

That's the most sensible comment at the WaPo column "New Jersey needs to get a grip. But our drone defenses need work. There’s no need to panic about drones." The column — not the comment, the column — is by Max Boot.

And here's the statement from the Feds the commenter is reacting to: "We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus."

And then there's this:

Yes father, use grok to generate an image of the New Jersey drones delivering McDonalds to that fat slob Chris Christie.

Perfect, now post it on 𝕏 https://t.co/gvnetk4faA pic.twitter.com/JbRCvjRgDo

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) December 14, 2024

"The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation."

Tweets Trump.

"I love Italy."

Me after my 4th breadbasket at Olive Garden pic.twitter.com/zHrF2iJv1d

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 13, 2024

"But what is lost in this lionization of one of the most notorious terrorists in American history is that for Mr. Kaczynski..."

"... the desire to kill came first, and the ideological justifications followed. Lonely rage defined him, and he spent far more time tormenting his neighbors than he did on his grandiose plans to bring down industrial society. He killed dogs for their barking, strung razor wire across dirt bike paths and fantasized about murdering a neighboring toddler. The manifesto and its carefully constructed veneer of Luddite and anarchist philosophies were a con to lure others into his world of despair and hatred.... He callously identified the environmental movement as being the most socially acceptable justification for his crimes, even though he privately denigrated environmentalists in his journals, and proudly littered, poached and illegally logged on national forest land around his cabin."

From "What Do You Say to a Young Person Who Admires the Unabomber?" by Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote a novel about Ted Kaczynski, "Old King."

In the future, evildoers will be able to use A.I. to produce a carefully-constructed-looking manifesto that organizes their chaotic facts into what seems to be a coherent philosophy.

The answer to the question in the column title is tell these students...

"Before I read 'The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins,' it hadn’t occurred to me that saxophonists must watch what they eat so as not to have 'an accidental elimination' while playing."

"Before I read Robert Hilburn’s biography of Randy Newman, I didn’t know Newman was kind of lying in interviews when he said his song 'Short People' was about prejudice. 'I just thought it was funny,' he said. 'The Art of Dying,' a posthumous collection of writings by the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, came out this year. He was ill with cancer when he compiled it. He wrote: 'I swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, the NYT book critic and my favorite garner, in "Our Book Critics on Their Year in Reading/Jennifer Szalai, Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs look back at the books that 'offered refuge from the wheels grinding in our heads'" (NYT).

"I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme..."

"... but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’s villainous Harry Lime in 'The Third Man,' is supposed to be cultural ferment: 'In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.' There are certainly signs of ferment out there, in technology, religion and intellectual life. But I’m worried about pop culture — worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?" (NYT).

I got totally sidetracked by "dispensation." Here's my interaction with Grok that convinced me that Douthat didn't make a weird word choice. It's an excellent word choice, and I enjoyed reading about the religious meanings of "dispensation," including

What the NYT is saying today under the heading "Trump Transition."

On the front page of the NYT website right now:

 

1. "Trump’s Night-Owl Tendencies Set Stage for After-Hours Diplomacy." When you click through, the  headline becomes "Trump’s Transition Business Largely Happens After Night Falls." I prefer the front-page headline because it focuses on Trump, the person.

Headline writers blithely omit "a" and "the," but there's a big difference between "the polio vaccine" and "a polio vaccine."

The Washington Post splashes this in our face: "RFK Jr. ally filed petition to revoke FDA approval for polio vaccine."

I suspect that many readers experience alarm — Oh, no, it's crazy to take away the polio vaccine! — and read no further.

But it's not the polio vaccine. It's a polio vaccine. From the text of the article:

An ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. petitioned the government in 2022 to reconsider its approval of a widely used polio vaccine, which is credited with staving off a debilitating virus that can result in permanent paralysis.

The petition is about one polio vaccine, not all polio vaccines. 

Aaron Siri — a lawyer with a history of seeking to expand exemptions to vaccines — asked the Food and Drug Administration to suspend or withdraw approval of Sanofi’s polio vaccine for children.... In the 2022 petition, [Siri] raised questions about the safety of the polio vaccine and argued for more studies to be conducted.

I've added the boldface. That "the" in "the polio vaccine" refers to Sanofi's vaccine, and if you go to the link on "petitioned the government" you'll see Sanofi's vaccine distinguished from other polio vaccines.

The Washington Post has a subheadline with the word "the":

At the Friday Night Café...

You can talk about whatever you want.

No sunrise picture today. Too cold! But I hope you'll still support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage."

 Said JD Vance, quoted in "Daniel Penny accepts VP-elect JD Vance's invite to be his 'personal guest' at the Army-Navy game Saturday. "

Peter Thiel talks to Piers Morgan about Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione.

It's an interesting discussion, but many people are getting hung up on Thiel's very awkward, disfluent manner of speaking:

Morgan shows Thiel a clip that Luigi Mangione shared on social media. It's a clip of Thiel himself, and Thiel says it's the first time he's heard about the alleged killer's interest in him. In that clip, Thiel says: