A San Francisco techie "randomizes" his life with an app that has him picked up, then dropped off at some public event somewhere nearby.

NPR has this story about a bespectacled, red-headed guy named Max Hawkins.

He built an app that used a Facebook search function for public events to find ones near him. Then the app would randomly choose which event Max would attend.

At first, he was nervous: What if people wouldn't let him in? But, as a kind of unassuming white guy, he actually didn't have this problem. (And Max acknowledges this privilege.) Once Max explained how and why he had arrived at these events, hosts usually welcomed him, often with only a few questions asked. Most of the time, people were taken by the idea of Max expanding his bubble.

One night, he got to drink white Russians with some Russians. Another, he attended acroyoga (as in, acrobatics + yoga). A community center pancake breakfast. A networking event for young professionals. The algorithm chose; Max attended.

Most of these events were something that the nonrandomized Max would never have thought to try. The computer was breaking him out of a life driven by his own preferences.... Would the old Max have chosen to attend a socialists' rally in Berlin? Or a meetup for bloggers of central Iowa?...

How does it work with a nonunassuming white guy or a nonwhite unassuming guy or an unassuming white woman or a nonunassuming white woman or an unassuming black woman or a nonunassuming black woman or a nonunassuming black man? I'm glad there is such an app and an idea of randomizing your life. And I'm glad Max acknowledges his privilege. You might think that an unassuming white woman (like me) would have the most privilege when arriving somewhere randomly, but I find it very difficult to go into scenes where I'm not sure my presence is welcome and virtually always err on the side of not imposing. But perhaps if an app dictated where I would go, it would get me out of that box.

ALSO: When "Max explained how and why he had arrived at these events, hosts usually welcomed him," but he's one guy, with his own new and quirky idea. If the app were to catch on, there'd be multiple Maxes, all over the place. At some point, people would feel overrun. What if you tried to set up some public event for some specific purpose and then all you got were 10 Maxes? Maybe there's a stage 2 to this social experiment.

"Two boxes today... Two boxes is likely to mean two or more opinions, depending on their length."

I'm following the live-blogging of the Supreme Court at SCOTUSblog.

Ah! We just got the first Supreme Court opinion ever by Neil Gorsuch.

It's a unanimous opinion, affirming something about Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

The court holds that a company may collect debts that it purchased for its own account... without triggering the statutory definition of "debt collector."

UPDATE: Sessions v. Morales-Santana. This is an important case on citizenship law and sex discrimination. 

This is a challenge to U.S. citizenship laws, which treats children are born overseas and have one U.S. citizen parent and one non-U.S. citizen parent differently depending on which parent is the U.S. citizen; children of U.S. citizen mothers are treated more favorably.... The court holds that the differential treatment by gender "is incompatible with teh requirement that the Government accord to all persons "the equal protection of the laws.'"

However, the court adds, it cannot convert the exception for mothers who are not married into the main rule displacing the provisions covering married couples and unwed fathers. Put another way, it can't rewrite the laws. So what it does is "leave it to Congress to select, going forward, a physical-presence requirement (ten years, one year, or some other period) uniformly applicable to all children born abroad with one U.S.-citizen parent and one alien parent, wed or unwed."

And, meanwhile, "the Government must ensure that the laws in question are administered in a manner free from gender-based discrimination."

This was a question that the court agreed to review in another case several years ago, before Scalia died, but they deadlocked 4-4 because Justice Kagan was recused.

I want to read the opinion. I'll talk about this more later.

I'm very interested to see what Justice Ginsburg has written about sex discrimination. (It's so easy to father a child! You don't even need to be within a thousand miles of the mother.) There is no dissenting opinion, however, and Roberts and Kennedy join Ginsburg's opinion. Thomas and Alito have a concurring opinion.

The Thomas opinion, joined by Alito, is easy to read and shows the problem, so I'll leave you with this:

"Why are you giving such coverage to a traitor who divulged secret military documents? As a retired military officer, I am outraged he was even pardoned."

The top-rated comment at The New York Times for "The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning/Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she talks about why she did it — and the isolation that followed."

Second highest-rated:

Manning still doesn't seem to have the slightest clue as to the impact of her stealing of this classified material. When she's drinking her Starbucks,* does she ever think about the Afghan villagers, for example, whose life she put in danger by her disclosures? Yet we're supposed to feel sorry for her for her time in prison.

Third:

Chelsea Manning was a traitor to the United States. It's not just that she leaked classified documents by the hundreds of thousands. It was that she was totally indiscriminate in doing so, taking no care to redact names to protect people's lives, and including tens of thousands of State Department documents which had nothing to do with the Iraq War but simply because she happened to get her hands on them. (That said, as a former Foreign Service Officer, I think the documents put what the State Department does in a pretty good light for the public, even if their release did cause us some problems.)

She was rightfully sentenced to a very long jail term, then pardoned by Barrack Obama in his 11th hour exit which, alas, was hardly less dignified by this pardon than Bill Clinton's pardon of a couple high-contributor convicted felons (Mark Rich comes to mind).

I saw a TV interview with her. And its ALL ABOUT ME: first Chelsea's private moral code which led to her betrayal of our country. And then, asking that the US taxpayers while she was in jail pay to help her change sexual identity from boy to girl. Fine if she wishes that, but not on my nickel, thank you.

That we coddle and pardon such a person is a true signal of moral collapse and a refusal to set a standard (and yes, standards are tough) that members of our society obey if they are to be true to each other.

She may be free from jail, but hopefully she will never be free of the social stigma of her deed.

And fourth, the kicker:

Glad the New York Times was not around 250 years ago, or you would be braying about "Benedict Arnold: Misunderstood Patriot."

______________________

* The article does in fact begin with Manning going to Starbucks. The chosen drink is, we're told, a white-chocolate mocha.

New York's Public Theater does Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" with a Trump lookalike playing JC and getting stabbed to death on stage.

"Criticism of the play reached a fever pitch on Sunday when Fox News reported that it 'appears to depict President Trump being brutally stabbed to death by women and minorities.'" And now sponsors are withdrawing, the NYT reports:

“No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of ‘Julius Caesar’ at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values,”* the company said in a statement on Sunday night.

“Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste,” the company said. “We have notified them of our decision to end our sponsorship as the official airline of the Public Theater effective immediately.”

Bank of America followed hours later, saying it would withdraw financial support from the production of “Julius Caesar” but would not end its financial relationship with the theater, which a spokeswoman, Susan Atran, said had lasted for 11 years.

The NYT itself is a sponsor of the play, and the article reports pressure on the Times to withdraw. Its position, however, is: "As an institution that believes in free speech for the arts as well as the media, we support the right of the Public Theater to stage the production as they chose."

This conception of the play pre-dated the Kathy Griffin incident:

Performances at Central Park's Delacorte Theater began in late May, just days before comedian Kathy Griffin was widely condemned for posing for a photograph in which she gripped a bloodied rendering of Trump's head.

If the producers had had a chance to see how Kathy's tribulations unfurled, they'd probably have done the show another way. But they committed to their idea back when it was harder to see through the shell of the bubble. And now they're losing money over it.

The show runs until June 18th, and the show must go on. What else can they do? Change the makeup, wig, and costume of the lead actor? Send some weasel out to do a faux Shakespearean we-mean-no-harm prologue, some sort of "If we shadows have offended/Think but this, and all is mended" bullshit...



____________________

* "United couldn't have said that" (says rhhardin in the comments.)

Melania and Barron — AKA "The Expert" — move into the White House.

Lots of photographs at The Daily Mail.

Included in the group: Melania's parents, the Knavs, who've been living with Melania and Barron at Trump Tower and will be living some of the time at the White House. Imagine being Trump, 70 years old, billionaire and President of the United States, and having a mother-in-law and father-in-law living with you. I assume that a big part of the idea is to have a feeling of family around Melania and Barron. He must be a native speaker of Slovenian.

Yes, I see he has a fidget spinner. I have nothing to say about this toy, which is very popular for some mysterious reason....

As you can see, the fidget spinner is not exactly the most complex of inventions, although it gives a whirring sound while it spins. And fidgeting certainly is not a new human behavior. Find someone who doesn't fidget at all and you've probably found someone who's gotten full-body Botox. Therefore, the fidget spinner's price premium ($15 on Amazon) over other common fidget objects such as pens, pencils, balls and coins probably isn't due to massive research and development costs. Nonetheless, some retailers have made claims that the fidget spinner has health benefits such as easing stress, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). How legitimate are these claims?...

Anyway, it says nothing about Barron that he is playing with something a lot of other people are playing with. The t-shirt is more interesting. Is "The Expert" the name of some show or a character on a show? Did Barron alone chose what he would wear? No one stopped him from wearing that. I assume it invites all sorts of joking about the non-experts Donald Trump is relying on for advice. Maybe it's a deliberate trap. If there's any humor at the expense of the child, it will be condemned.

Finally, Trump is getting a real expert in the White House. His son Barron, expert on fake marriages & abandonment.
pic.twitter.com/7uvFy8wKtE

— Your Comic Muse (@YourComicMuse) June 12, 2017

"For the first time, Jamie’s getting irrational criticism from her fellow liberals, who think that if you represent anyone associated with the other side, you must be a Republican in hiding."

"Jamie is obviously a liberal Democrat, but this is not a betrayal. Jamie is being patriotic and heroic and consistent with the best traditions of the bar. We have to resist zealotry on both sides."

Said Alan Dershowitz about Jamie Gorelick, quoted in "When a liberal power lawyer represents the Trump family, things can get ugly" in The Washington Post. Gorelick took on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner as clients.

How did "things... get ugly"? Well, obviously, it's people who are being ugly. Here are the 3 examples of ugliness given in the article:

In the most public slap, Hilary Rosen, a prominent Democratic strategist and lobbyist, tweeted, “Hey Jamie Gorelick, you’ve just poured that ‘Complicit’ perfume on yourself,” a reference to a “Saturday Night Live” parody ad that imagined an Ivanka Trump-branded scent. (Rosen declined to elaborate on the tweet, saying only, “It is what it is.”)

“Representing Jared and Ivanka is a case of pushing the ethical envelope, helping a wealthy family on the brink of using the presidency to further enrich themselves,” said David Halperin, a speechwriter in the Clinton White House and former counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Gorelick is a Clinton supporter embracing the family that wanted to put Hillary Clinton in jail. People in Washington are all too willing to forgive that.”

This being Washington, some of Gorelick’s critics tuck their attacks behind the cloak of anonymity. “Do you want to be seen as a fixer available to all or a fixer for principles you believe in?” said a lawyer who has worked with Gorelick on campaigns since the Clinton and Gore era. “One probably pays better than the other, but every step you take has consequences.”

Here's that parody ad, which I'd known about but never watched before just now:



Speaking of ugliness, what dominates that SNL clip is beauty. You get completely caught up in the beauty of Scarlett Johansson (as Ivanka Trump). That makes it very funny when she glamorously puts on her lipstick and the reflected image in her mirror is Alec Baldwin (as Donald Trump). So, suddenly ugliness. You think you're pretty but you are really ugly.

Interesting that another woman, Hilary Rosen, chose that idea to discipline Gorelick, the metaphor of outward physical beauty to represent inner virtue.

ADDED: Hilary Rosen... why did I already have a tag for her? Ah, yes! It was back in 2012: Rosengate. Remember that?

"Adviser to Obama, DNC Attacks Ann Romney"... DNC advisor Hilary Rosen, trying to say that Mitt Romney "doesn't connect" on the issue of women struggling economically: He's "running around the country, saying, well, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing." She pauses, then blurts out the unfortunate line, which she clearly thinks is a great zinger: "Guess what? His wife has actually not worked a day in her life."...

Women attacking women. Ha. I heard about a special place in hell...

Mistrusting Mueller.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, first, there was Newt Gingrich:

CHRIS WALLACE: Speaker Gingrich, I want... to start with the - your tweet... "Republicans need to focus on closing down independent counsel because it clearly isn't independent." What's your reasoning and wouldn't that really look like an obstruction of justice?

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, first of all, look at what Comey said. Comey said, I deliberately leaked, through an intermediary, to create this counsel, who happens to be one of his closest friends. Then look at who Mueller's starting to hire. I mean these are people that, frankly, look - look to me like they're - they're setting up to go after Trump. They've - including people, by the way, who have been reprimanded for hiding from the defense information into major cases. I think this - this is going to be a witch hunt. I think that Comey himself, by his own testimony, tainted this particular process. You have a director of the FBI deliberately leaking in order to create a special counsel, who we're now supposed to believe is going to be this neutral figure. I think that's just nonsense....

Then, Karl Rove:

The Chicago "jailhouse strip club" that's been going on for decades.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports on the shows on the rooftop of a parking garage across the street from The Metropolitan Correctional Center (a 27-story jail run by the federal Bureau of Prisons). Prisoners have narrow windows that look out on the rooftop, where they can see women who put on performances for them.

Prison authorities say they can’t do anything about what’s going on at the parking garage. An executive for the company that runs the garage says he doesn’t know anything about the nude displays...

Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez, a well-known Chicago gang leader who was held at the federal jail downtown, says some of the garage-top shows were for him.

In a brief interview, Jimenez says he didn’t pay for the dances. A woman stripping on the roof for him was simply “showing her love,” according to Jimenez, who says she sometimes would stand on the roof of the garage holding a sign that said “Free T.J.”

Jimenez won $25 million from the city of Chicago in 2012 in a wrongful-conviction lawsuit, then showered millions of his winnings on expanding his gang, the Sun-Times has reported....

Bernie Sanders grills a Trump nominee about his statement that "Muslims... have rejected Jesus Christ... and they stand condemned."

The nominee, Russell Vought (up for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget) made the statement in the context of defending his alma mater Wheaton College, which was under attack because, enforcing its "Statement of Faith," it had suspended a professor for saying that Muslims and Christians "worship the same God." In a blog post, Vought elaborated "the theological issue":

Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God who is fully divine (and became fully human). This matters immensely for our salvation. If Christ is not God, he cannot be the necessary substitute on our behalf for the divine retribution that we deserve....

The suspended professor had quoted a theologian whom Vought also quotes:

I see this as a sign that the Comey testimony fizzled: The Daily Beast has a headline: "James Comey Is The Sex Symbol America Needs Right Now."

That's by Lizzie Crocker and published today. Excerpt:

And so the 56-year-old, fired FBI director became a very unlikely sex symbol. Sure, he has a somewhat peaked complexion and under-eye bags that look like half-inflated tubular balloons. But he's handsome, and as with all sex symbols--both the unlikely ones and the obvious ones--he embodies certain qualities in society that we all lust after: integrity, emotional complexity, and quiet but certain confidence.

That combined with his imposing physical stature gives him the same alluring masculinity as sex symbols like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (particularly Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice).

In Italy on Friday, my Daily Beast colleague Barbie Latza Nadeau reports that there was "a ten-minute segment on Italian prime time TV about whether Comey would be a good lover because of the “length of his digits.”...

[Comey's] charisma and acclaimed public behavior makes you look at him afresh. After all, Comey most definitely wasn't seen as a sex symbol when he helped torpedo Hillary Clinton's election chances just a few days before the election. The public winds of approval--the perception of heroism or doing good or speaking truth to power--must be blowing in the right direction for a moment to erupt as it did on Thursday, when suddenly all the feels were for Comey....

Well, why not? Politics is all about "the feels." Let's be honest. Henry Kissinger famously said "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," but Crocker's not saying that. For her, it's not power per se. The power must be exercised in proper direction. It wasn't sexy to — trigger warning — "torpedo" Hillary. But it is sexy to aim the lengthy projectile at the notoriously short-fingered Trump.

And yet, that's what you say, but what about your closely held secret thoughts, your dreams? How well I remember, back in May 2012, a woman who called herself "Violated" wrote in to the the Isthmus advice columnist:

I'm a public employee, a liberal and a volunteer for Democrat Tom Barrett in the upcoming recall election. But here's my problem: I've been having sexual dreams about Gov. Scott Walker. Help!

I should mention that I'm happily married, with an attractive husband. In my waking life, I do not consider our extreme right-wing governor physically attractive. On the contrary, I recoil from the sight of him, with his politician's haircut and blank expression. During last year's protests at the Capitol, however, I woke up one morning from a dream in which the governor and I were...well, you know. It was hot, but it was also disturbing. I took an extra-long shower that morning to wash away the sensation.

I didn't tell my husband or my friends about the dream, because I didn't want to gross them out. I also didn't want them to think less of me. But since then, I've had two more such dreams. I finally fessed up, hoping to get some advice. First, why am I having sexual dreams about someone I can't stand and don't find attractive in the slightest? And second, how can I get my brain to stop playing this horrible trick on me?

The advice columnist suggested that the woman look at pictures of Tom Barrett to try to fixate on him...



... and we had some fun with that here at Meadhouse.

"Why do millennials keep leaking government secrets?"

By Malcolm Harris — author of “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials" — in WaPo.

Without intending to, employers and policymakers have engineered a cohort of workers that is bound to yield leakers. An important part of our training for the 21st-century labor market has been an emphasis on taking initiative, hustling, finding ways to be useful, not waiting around for someone in charge to tell us what to do....

Since we can’t get too attached to particular employers, millennials are encouraged by baby-boomer-run institutions to find internal motivation, to live out our values through our frequent employment choices, and we’ve heard them loud and clear....

Lots of firms try to look like they’re doing good in the world, in line with millennial values. Facebook isn’t an ad company; it connects the world! Uber isn’t a cab company; it liberates moms to make money in their off hours! But when firms act contrary to their rosy recruiting copy, workers who weren’t disposed to be loyal in the first place might find another way to live out their values...

We hardly invented leaking, but millennials are especially well-suited to the tactic. It’s a squirt gun we can use on our leaders when they’ve stepped out of line. I don’t imagine that employers — public or private — are going to start inspiring loyalty or stop abusing power anytime soon....

In the Semi-Circle Café...

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(And we'd like you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal if you have any shopping to do. Maybe you need an aesthetically pleasing lawn mower like Meade's.)

Not a design flaw.

3 of 14 tweets by J.K. Rowling, apparently provoked by somebody who called Theresa May a whore.

"Oh! Oh! Oh, no!" gasps a young woman on State Street this morning in Madison, Wisconsin.

She's wearing a tight black dress that's heavily embroidered in metallic gold in the 80° heat, and she looking at her iPhone and pausing to give her girlfriends time to strain to see what has happened.

She relieves their anxiety: "Batman's dead!"

(The actor, Adam West, TV's Batman, has died at the age of 88.)

Picturing the surface of the moon in 1879.

From the book Recreations in Astronomy by H. D. Warren D. D. (1879), from the Wikipedia page "Selenography." Selenography is the study of the surface of the moon.

The idea that the Moon was not perfectly smooth can be traced as far back as approximately 450 BC, when Democritus believed that there were "lofty mountains and hollow valleys" on the Moon. However, it was not until the end of the 15th century when serious study of selenography began... The systematic mapping of the Moon officially began in 1779 when Johann Schröter started making meticulous observations and measurements of the lunar features. The first published large map of the Moon, four sheets in size, was published in 1834... All measurements were done by direct observation until March 1840, when J.W. Draper, using a five-inch reflector, produced a daguerreotype of the Moon....

Here's that daguerreotype:

"Comey confirms that I'm right — and all the Democratic commentators are wrong."

Writes Alan Dershowitz.

Now that even former Director Comey has acknowledged that the Constitution would permit the president to direct the Justice Department and the FBI in this matter, let us put the issue of obstruction of justice behind us once and for all and focus on the political, moral, and other non-criminal aspects of President Trump’s conduct.

Comey’s testimony was devastating with regard to President Trump’s credibility – at least as Comey sees it. He was also critical of President Trump’s failure to observe the recent tradition of FBI independence from presidential influence. These are issues worth discussing but they have been distorted by the insistence of Democratic pundits that Trump must have committed a crime because they disagree with what he did politically.

ADDED: What's so good about that is not the legal analysis but the recognition of the priority of political analysis. I'm seeing way too much "legal" analysis that follows political opinion, and I believe that the political analysis is, for nearly everyone, prior to the legal analysis. So let's increase the chances of accuracy, honesty, and persuasiveness, by talking about what we are probably really thinking about: the politics. And I don't mean are we pro- or anti-Trump. If that's all it is, there's nothing special to talk about here. I mean the positive value and the risks of an independent FBI and positive value and the risks of a President influencing, exerting pressure on, or overriding the FBI. In that light, did Trump do something wrong?