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"I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!"

Trump tweets.

It's enemy territory.

"Look at how beefed up she is. It’s because she’s taking an enhancement. Whether she’s a boy, girl, wants to be purple or blue it doesn’t matter."

"When you’re using a drug and you’re 10 times stronger than the person you’re wrestling because of that drug, that shouldn’t be allowed."

While Beggs has said he’d prefer to wrestle against boys, University Interscholastic League rules force Beggs to compete as a girl. The UIL uses an athletes birth certificate to determine gender, a measure overwhelmingly approved by the state’s school superintendents a year ago.

The rule prohibits girls from wrestling in the boys division and vice versa.

UIL provides an exception for a steroid that is prescribed by a medical practitioner for a valid medical purpose. The UIL has reviewed Beggs’ medical records and granted him permission to compete while taking testosterone.

Mack Beggs is 55-0.

"Nearly 150,000 American teenagers from 13 to 17 years old — or one out of every 137 — would identify as transgender if survey takers asked..."

"... according to an analysis of state and federal data that offers an answer to a question that has long eluded researchers."

That mysterious sentence begins a NYT article.

What kind of analysis sees the answer to a question that is not asked?

The analysis, an extrapolation based on adult responses to a federal survey, represents an indirect way of arriving at a figure that many advocates consider to be of crucial importance.

So if you really, really want a number badly enough, a number can be derived?

[T]he researchers applied an advanced statistical technique regarded by some academics as an emerging gold standard for making state estimates using national data, based on well-worn demographic and geographic patterns...

An emerging gold standard.  Some academics.

Pick the option that is closest to what you think of the news story:

It's important demographic information.

It's an accurate report of a fact at the level of accuracy that is currently possible.

It's fake news, made up out of essentially nothing for a political purpose.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Law professors seek to have Kellyanne Conway disbarred for bringing 'shame upon the legal profession.'"

"Here’s the actual letter, complete with the names of the law professors who have disgraced themselves. But if you want to establish a rule like this for all lawyers in the public eye, well, enjoy it. Sauce for the goose, and all that."

"Perez came very close to winning DNC chair on the first ballot. There were 427 votes cast, making the threshold for victory 214.5 votes."

"Perez received 213.5 votes. Ellison got 200. The crowd is stunned. A second round of balloting is about to get underway...."

UPDATE: "With 235 votes, former Labor secretary Tom Perez wins the DNC chairmanship on the second ballot. Ellison received 200 votes."

ADDED: Meade is laughing over the "Breaking News" headline at the NYT: "Democrats elected former Labor Secretary Thomas Perez as party chairman over Keith Ellison, a liberal from Minnesota." Do you see what's so funny? Why is Ellison referred to as "a liberal from Minnesota"? Yeah, where's Tom Perez from? Ah. New York. Why isn't he called "a liberal from New York"?

Commenter — without realizing it — takes my side in what has been a 2-day debate between me and Meade.

In the comments to yesterday's post about "Captain Fantastic," robother said:

I read the end of the movie as pure fantasy in his head after leaving Albuquerque. If not, The Man is far more benign and forgiving than Chomsky, Mortenson's character or even I imagine.

Thank you! And spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the movie. (You can stream it from Amazon, here. Please do that first, then join this discussion.)

"There was a moment, sometime between 2008 and 2010, when a woman’s insides — her exploits, her eating habits, her feelings, her sex life — became a lucrative internet product."

"Women, of course, have been writing about such things for years, including on the internet, but commodifying that writing had proven fraught. Marketing the entirety of the self through a personal blog — like Heather Armstrong’s Dooce, or Emily Gould’s iteration of Gawker — led to writer burnout and reader disillusionment. A better, more sustainable way to commodify the self was to do so piecemeal. For female authors, this meant writing personal essays on the most sensational slivers of their lives. For websites, this meant paying those authors — hundreds of them, the supply was nearly unlimited — somewhere between $0 and $100 for each sliver. I know about this economy because, for about four years, I was part of it...."

So begins "Tales From the Personal Essay Industrial Complex" by Anne Helen Petersen (a NYT book review, covering "How to Murder Your Life" by Cat Marnell and "All the Lives I Want/Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers" by Alana Massey).

Word that I'm glad to see doesn't appear in this article: Feminism.

Why I'm glad: I don't see how this sort of self-exploitation by young women counts as feminism.

ADDED: "I am myself the matter of my book. You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject."

The disruption of people who won't accept disruption: Those terrible "legacy customers."

At WaPo, Larry Downes, co-author of "Big Bang Disruption," takes aim at people who "who simply refuse to migrate to disruptive innovations even after they’ve become both better and cheaper, and even after almost everyone else has made the shift."

[T]he real holdup is that non-adopters — mostly older, rural and less-educated — just aren’t interested in Internet access, at any price.... [T]he resisters are wrong....

[N]on-adopters ultimately cost more to serve. Printing information is increasingly a waste of scarce resources as digital alternatives continue to get better and cheaper. And all of us pay for the waste...

To overcome the inertia of legacy customers, it may be appropriate for governments to step in....

[S]ome technology dinosaurs need help being euthanized. Here, regulators can serve as a catalyst, providing the final nudge for legacy customers. Once it was clear that smart LEDs would become better and cheaper than inefficient incandescent lightbulbs, for example, governments around the world began passing laws banning production of the older technology.

And while things got a little messy at the end, in 2009 Congress succeeded in turning off analog TV, switching the few remaining holdouts over to digital. To ensure no one had to go without “Let’s Make a Deal,” lower-income families were given converter boxes for older tube TVs.

What about hipsters who insist on old-fashioned turntables and vinyl record albums? How come they're not in the article? I don't have to answer the question. To ask it is to have the answer jump off the page: older, rural, less-educated, Let’s Make a Deal....

And by the way, what's newer is not necessarily better. Consider: "The TV Is Hard to Hear... Flat-screen TVs, inconsistent streaming boxes and cinematic series have many asking, ‘What did they say?’"

IN THE COMMENTS: rehajm said: "Isn't the WaPoasaurus calling for its own death here?"

"Video captures mouse walking on baby’s crib in Kushner-owned Brooklyn home."

But why is the mouse there? I'm reading all the way to the end of that Daily News article:

Some in the building said video and the complaints stemmed from a rent dispute.

“This is a small group of people who have been here from the beginning and have stopped paying rent,” one resident said. “They haven’t paid rent in about eight months and they don’t want to pay.”

But others say they have complained about many issues, to no avail.

“There have been vermin, and the mouse video is crazy,” said another tenant. “We’re all paying about $4,000 a month — that’s a great deal of money to put up with all of this.”

When we see video, what do we know?

Tricking CPAC Trumpers to wave the Russian flag — What are the lessons?

Social media had great fun with something that happened yesterday at CPAC:

Jason Charter, 22, and Ryan Clayton, 36, passed out roughly 1,000 red, white, and blue flags, each bearing a gold-emblazoned “TRUMP” in the center, to an auditorium full of attendees waiting for President Trump to address the conference. Audience members waved the pennants—and took pictures with them—until CPAC staffers realized the trick: They were Russian flags.

What are the lessons?

1. There are lots of people out there who are not on your side. Withhold your trust until you know who you're dealing with. There are endless scams. Don't be a soft touch.

2. Young guys and their pranks lighten the grind of politics. It was fun back in the 60s when Yippies found cool ways to put across what were weighty political opinions, and it's fun now. We need our clowns, including the pranksters who figure out ways to offload the clownery onto others.

3. Don't pass on messages that others have handed you. Think of your own ideas. Let the words of your mouth and the gestures of your body come in a form shaped by your mind. Be original. Be yourself. Have a self that's worth being.

"Reporters from The Times, CNN and Politico were not allowed to enter the West Wing office of the press secretary, Sean M. Spicer, for the scheduled briefing."

"Aides to Mr. Spicer allowed in reporters from only a handpicked group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed to attend."

Organizations allowed in included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Fox News also attended....

“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”

How bad is this? Pick the closest to your opinion:

Completely unacceptable.

Concerning, but only 3 were kept out and ABC and CBS got in, so... let's see what happens.

Trump should exclude these 3. What they've been doing to him really is fake news.

pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: The sentence quoted in the post title later included the names of more news organizations. I'm cutting and pasting this at 7:45 CT on February 25th: "Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing." There's no notation at the article that it was updated, but the sentence just quoted is the only sentence in the article with the word "Politico" in it, so clearly the article was updated.

Here are the results on the poll (possibly skewed by my emphasis on the apparently false fact that only 3 organizations were excluded):

"Well @realDonaldTrump, from one Republican to another, this is a disaster. You made a promise to protect the LGBTQ community. Call me."

Well @realDonaldTrump, from one Republican to another, this is a disaster. You made a promise to protect the LGBTQ community. Call me. pic.twitter.com/XwYe0LNUOq

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) February 24, 2017

"What kind of a crazy person celebrates Noam Chomsky's birthday like it's some kind of official holiday?"

Just one of the many great scenes in "Captain Fantastic," which Meade and I watched on streaming video last night. I give it the Althouse seal of approval. You can stream it here. And let's talk about it!

I enjoyed listening to Tom & Lorenzo talk about that movie in this podcast. Tom was outraged at the Viggo Mortenson character, calling his treatment of his children "child abuse" and said that because the man was inculcating left-wing politics in his children, viewers were not going to be able to detect the badness of his fathering.

That resonates with something I said to Meade immediately after watching the movie (and before listening to Tom & Lorenzo): This movie would be experienced very differently by someone with left-wing politics, someone who actually thought Noam Chomsky was great. Things we found hilarious — and also painful — would read entirely differently. I think this was Tom's problem, but it forced Tom to see that there's something abusive about inculcating children with politics (he just thought the common people needed clearer instruction, which would have been there if the father's politics were right-wing or Christian fundamentalist).

The movie is complicated, hilarious and dramatic. A father is sort of leading his band of 6 children against the world. He's both good and bad. And the grandfather who disapproves — played by Frank Langella — is also good and bad, even though he's in the position that would normally be The Villain. (He's trying to take the children away.) There's a great dinner-table scene where the 6 children try to relate to their cousins, and it's complex to think about. There's some of the feeling Meade and I remember from many movies circa 1970 where the people who reject American society are morally and intellectually better, but that's also challenged as one of the boys yells at his father for making them into "freaks."

And I just want to say: Viggo Mortenson is 58 years old. He looks great. And we got a comprehensive look at him at one point.

It was horrible of that CNN editor to say it's the role of journalists to "aid the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

Good thing James O'Keefe smoked out that horror (spoken by Richard T. Griffiths, vice president and editorial director at CNN, when he thought he was off microphone).

It was horrible of Griffiths to mangle the great old aphorism, which is usually phrased "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" and which was originally written — in the kind of dialect people don't find too amusing anymore — in the 1902 book "Observations by Mr. Dooley":

“Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.”

(Mr. Dooley, an Irish bartender, is the fictional creation of the newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne.)

How can Griffiths be a media editor and so lacking of an ear for language? What makes the saying great is the flipping of the 2 words, comfort and afflict.  In the first phrase, comfort is the verb and the noun is formed out of the word afflict. In the second phrase, afflict is the verb and the noun is formed out of the word comfort. That's some beautiful humor, full of meaning and poetry.

Then along comes this lummox Griffiths and he botches the first word, instead of beginning with comfort — the word upon which you're then supposed to cleverly end (in its variation comfortable) — he begins with aid, which never appears again in his clunky non-aphorism.

It's like saying: It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the amount of the fight in the dog.

"What do you think happens to the political sensibilities of young people watching a political discourse like that?'

It's 1992 and Bill Moyers asking his his intellectual panel about the remix video made from George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes." You can watch the video, followed — beginning at 2:11 — by the egg-headed discussion:



I got that over at Reason.com, where Jesse Walker writes:

The publisher of The Hotline replies that the video "debases the process"; the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication calls it an "invitation to cynicism that I think is very unhealthy." And they both go on from there, condemning in advance the entire media landscape of 2017. I'm not sure 1992 has ever felt as distant as it does while I'm watching this.