... you can talk all night.
7 નવેમ્બર, 2020
"Weasels and chainsaws distracted me."
It's a podcast.
Topics: "Mutated minks in Denmark, Chainsaw Gordy, Biden’s speech, chanting at the sun, a gracious concession, the cookie crumbles, tracking down fake ballots, irrational faith in Biden’s laying on of hands."
"As a young widower, he drove them to school, blasting Elton John’s 'Crocodile Rock' from the car radio, willing normalcy’s return."
"In an effort to heal, he rushed to wrap himself around others in mourning. Like Steven Spielberg’s E.T., he seems to instinctually believe in the healing power of physical connection—even if that intimacy can sometimes feel a bit too close. As the Irish literary critic Fintan O’Toole has written of Biden’s grasp, 'There is something religious in this laying-on of hands. It is an act of communion.'
After the destruction of the Trump era, the nation is desperate for a parental figure to cultivate renewal amid ruin; shattered institutions will require an almost irrational faith in healing."
From "Winning Was the Easy Part/Now Joe Biden needs to repair a badly broken country" by Franklin Foer (in The Atlantic).
"Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center may have believed fake ballots were being counted there..."
"'According to our information at this very early stage of investigation, it appears these individuals were operating under the belief that 'fake ballots' are being counted at the Convention Center — a completely unsupported claim -- and that belief may have been what drew their attention to Philadelphia.' [Philadelphia District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Jane Roh emailed CNN].
CNN affiliate KYW had earlier reported that the men were 'coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots' to the city, citing prosecutors....Antonio LaMotta, 61, and Joshua Macias, 42, both of Chesapeake, Virginia, were arrested Thursday night outside the center on suspicion of carrying handguns in Pennsylvania without permits, authorities said.
Philadelphia police said they found the men Thursday night after receiving a tip that people with firearms were heading to the Pennsylvania Convention Center in a silver Hummer truck."
"That’s the way the cookie crumbles and that’s the way the ball bounces are... the two commonest of a score of variant [catchphrases] for That’s fate–that’s the way things go..."
According to Eric Partridge's "Dictionary of Catch Phrases":
that’s the way (or that’s how) the cookie crumbles ... It has been a frequent c.p. in the US since the 1950s and in UK since the middle 1960s... in 1975, Prof. Emeritus F.E.L. Priestley spoke of ‘the now happily obsolete “that’s the way the cookie crumbles”’ and referred to ‘the lovely take-off line in the movie The Apartment [1960] when Jack Lemmon says, “That’s the way it crumbles cookiewise” ’–when he is also deriding ‘the horrible “-wise” jargon of about ten years ago’ (F.E.L.P.).
Continuing with the catchphrase dictionary:
In The Zoo Story, prod. in Berlin 1959, in New York 1960, and pub’d in 1960, Edward Albee employs the more usual form thus:
"To clarify, President Trump's press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping- no relation with the hotel."
Tweeted the Four Seasons hotel, quoted in "Watch Live: Trump election press conference held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia" (CBS News).
Bizarre. Almost... deplorable.
"The vote counting in Arizona and Georgia has seemed professional and transparent. The same can’t be said of Philadelphia..."
"... where the Trump campaign had to go to court so its poll-watchers could observe vote counting. Incredibly, Democratic lawyers opposed that Trump request. This is exactly the wrong way for Democrats to behave, feeding GOP suspicions.... The Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court also contributed to the mistrust by rewriting state election law to let mailed ballots be counted until Nov. 6. We warned multiple times that this mess could happen, and the U.S. Supreme Court could have helped by intervening. Chief Justice John Roberts refused.
But it’s also important to note that Pat Toomey, the GOP Senator from the Keystone State, says he has seen no evidence of fraud in his state’s counting. We’ve also seen no concrete evidence. The delivery of a batch of votes all for Mr. Biden at one time can be explained by the practice of some jurisdictions to divide and report the votes of each candidate at different times.... Mr. Trump hates to lose, and no doubt he will fight to the end. But if defeat comes, he will serve himself and his country best by honoring America’s democratic traditions and leaving office with dignity."
From "The Presidential Endgame" by the editors of The Wall Street Journal (no pay wall). They want a gracious concession — after the counting and litigation — but they never mention how ungracious the Democrats were when Trump won in 2016. Did they ever concede that Trump won and stand back and acknowledge that he legitimately held the power of the presidency?
Sun! Sun! Sun!
Young people assembled to watch the sun rise suddenly notice the sun has come into view. A woman shouts "Oh, my God!" and the group begins to chant...
A few seconds after that, they were playing The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun."
The sun was first visible to me at 6:42:33: I started the video at 6:43:00, a couple seconds after the "Oh, my God!" While I was out there, I believed that they'd gotten distracted talking to each other and missed the first break of the sun, but putting this post together, I'm thinking that I had a higher vantage point, so my line of sight made the sun visible slightly earlier.
I enjoyed the congregation of young people openly expressing delight at the sun... and The Beatles.
Weasels and chainsaws distracted me from getting to the obvious first thing I feel I'm supposed to blog this morning. That's how dull it is.
Biden tottered out onto the national stage last night and said some words. I was asleep, so good for him. The old man stayed up late. Or got up early, maybe. Ha ha. What was it, 11 p.m.?
I'll just read the transcript. Excerpts:
Good evening, my fellow Americans. We don’t have a final declaration of victory yet but the numbers tell us it’s clear. They tell us a clear and convincing story we’re going to win this race....
So he came out, not to prematurely declare victory, but to tell us he sees it in the future. He uses the legal phrase "clear and convincing" — which is a standard of proof more than "preponderance of the evidence" and less than "beyond a reasonable doubt." He's assessing evidence and essentially asserting that if he had to decide whether he'd won based on the evidence before us right now, he'd say he did, and that he's telling us this opinion because the standard "clear and convincing" is good enough for the purpose of when it's a good idea to come out on the national stage and assert your opinion.
The evidence is still dribbling in, however, so he also could have waited. There must be some political advantage to claiming the stage and expecting us to listen to his prediction. I'm just guessing the reasoning had something to do with its being Friday. We need something semi-tangible to end Election Week.
And what’s becoming clear each hour is that a record number of Americans of all races, faiths religions chose change over more of the same. They’ve given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.
Oh, now that's a stretch. He's barely won, if indeed he's won. We still don't know. But if he's won, he wants you to know, that there's the mysterious thing called "a mandate." And he specifies the components of the mandate — "a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism." Wasn't it more of a vote just to be rid of Donald Trump? But that's the claim, the 4 elements of what we supposedly want — do something about COVID, the economy, climate change, and systemic racism.
I say "we," but I see that Biden called us "they" — "They’ve given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism." They've given us. I take it "us" is the Democratic Party, and "they" is the people. They the People of the United States...
They made it clear they want the country to come together not continue to pull apart.
Yeah, he meant to "they" us. And he pictures us agglomerating into a more perfectly manipulable blob. Don't pull apart! Get together so that We the Democratic Party can take action on the Big 4 — COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism. I'll call it "CECS" to be snazzy.
The people spoke, more than 74 million Americans and they spoke loudly for our ticket....
It was so loud we're still straining to hear it after 4 days.
"Chainsaw Gordy."
That's from one of our favorite TV shows, "Wisconsin Life." I love the sculptural outdoor display of the chainsaw collection... not to be confused with chainsaw sculptures where chainsaws are the tools used to sculpt things out of tree stumps.
Denmark will kill its 15 million caged minks — and not save the furs — because it's found a mutated version of the coronavirus.
The coronavirus evolves constantly and, to date, there is no evidence that any of the mutations pose an increased danger to people. But Danish authorities were not taking any chances. “Instead of waiting for evidence, it is better to act quickly,” said Tyra Grove Krause, head department at Statens Serum Institut, a government agency that maps the spread of the coronavirus in Denmark....
Instead of waiting for evidence, it is better to act quickly. A scary adage, but probably the right attitude for this specific problem. You can't individually test 15 million Danish minks and wait for the results. By the way, there are 5.8 human beings in Denmark, so there are nearly 3 minks per person.
The pelts of the mink will be destroyed and Danish fur farmers have said the cull, which is estimated to cost up to 5 billion kroner ($785 million), may spell the end of the industry in the country.
Speaking of weasels, the NYT reports: "A nasal spray that blocks the absorption of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has completely protected ferrets it was tested on, according to a small study released on Thursday by an international team of scientists." It's the animals that might infect us that are useful for tests.
The nasal spray science is interesting:
6 નવેમ્બર, 2020
"Wild accusations."
It's a podcast.
Topics: "Trump’s speech — live and by transcript, praying to the government, the wretched decline of journalism, seeing your fellow citizens as toxic, and the belly-up elephant and donkey."
Glenn Reynolds says he's quit writing a column for USA Today.
He doesn't give the details, only directs us to a new column at the NY Post and says:
The left is again showing that it can’t stand anyone who disagrees. “Moral superiority is an addictive drug, and perhaps the most unfortunate legacy of the Civil Rights era is that it got people on the left dependent on moral superiority for their self-esteem.”
Are we supposed to read that as a statement why he's quit USA Today? The indented material above is all from the NY Post column, which isn't about leaving USA Today, of course. I'm just saying that, as it appears at Instapundit, with the news that he's quitting USA Today, it reads like a statement about why.
Here's the NY Post column. Excerpt:
This year’s presidential election hasn’t provided the catharsis that many on the left were awaiting. Instead of the hoped-for “Blue Wave,” we have a still-too-close-to-call presidential election, while Republicans picked up House seats and appear to have held on to the Senate. One response might be self-criticism: to wonder how, after four years of single-mindedly trying to get rid of Trump and marginalize his followers, things didn’t go better. Instead, Democrats’ thinkers seem to be asking themselves variations on “How can I live in a country where half the people supported Donald Trump?”...
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