The sunrise sequence.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"She is our indomitable, irreplaceable, unsinkable Liz."

Effuses Michael Gerson, in the final sentence "History will accept only one Jan. 6 narrative. This committee has it" (WaPo).

I'm reading that only because the headline bothered me so much that I felt that I needed to know how any educated, intelligent person could say such a thing. What a static, impoverished view of history! He seems to have it mixed up with propaganda — specifically, the propaganda of a totalitarian state. 

But I got distracted by the gooey fawning over Cheney. "She was calm, methodical, factual and morally grounded...." 

Anyway... here's what Gerson says about history: "There is only one narrative about Jan. 6 that history will accept: the evidence meticulously gathered and presented by the House select committee." Huh?

We will see what historians will write when they have the long perspective, see a fuller context, and it no longer has to do with the outcome of elections. What is being written now is not history. Not that history itself isn't biased, distorted, and incomplete. But it's got to be far superior to what the "select" committee is piecing together.

"Peter Lamborn Wilson, a counterculture intellectual, anarchist, poet, musicologist and utopian who coined the term 'temporary autonomous zone'... died on May 23...."

"["T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism" argued] that one could create one’s own stateless society — the goal of anarchy — with simple and poetic acts like creating public art and communal exercises like dinner parties.... When, in the fall of 2011, a crowd of protesters decrying the country’s financial system built an encampment inside Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and declared a movement they called Occupy Wall Street, 'T.A.Z.' was in many of the organizers’ backpacks.... Temporary autonomous zones have continued to flourish....

"If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics...."

"I know a person when I talk to it. It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person."

 Said Google engineer Blake Lemoine, about LaMDA, an artificially intelligent chatbot generator, quoted in "The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life/AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google’s own thinks there’s a ghost in the machine" (WaPo). 

"What is Ramsay Hunt syndrome, the condition affecting Justin Bieber?"

WaPo explains:

Ramsay Hunt syndrome is a rare neurological disorder that can occur in people who were previously infected with chickenpox. If the dormant varicella-zoster virus is reactivated, leading to shingles, it can affect the facial nerve and may lead to facial paralysis and hearing loss.... [P]rompt treatment can make a significant difference to a patient’s outcome, with about 70 percent of those who receive antiviral medication within three days of developing symptoms making a full recovery... Mild cases can resolve within a few weeks... but more severe damage to the nerve leads to a longer recovery time and lower chances of a complete return to health. 

Justin calmly explains his condition:

"The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue."

Said David Axelrod, with a distinctively clever way to state the numerical fact, quoted in "Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise. In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president’s ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans" (NYT). 

Another quote from Axelrod: "Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House. And part of the reason he doesn’t is performative. He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality."

I should make a tag for "performative." It's a buzz word these days, I believe, and I'd like to keep track of it. 

"Britons should eat meat-like proteins developed from algae, wild venison and homegrown cucumbers cultivated in carbon-neutral greenhouses..."

"... ministers will recommend next week. In a blueprint for a sustainable food system, the government will ... pledge to cut the UK’s reliance on seasonal imports of fruit and vegetables by backing new factory greenhouses that can operate all year round. It will suggest promoting wild venison as a low-carbon substitute for beef and lamb as less productive farmland is rewilded. The strategy was produced in response to a government-commissioned report by Henry Dimbleby, the founder of the Leon restaurant chain, who called last year for a rethink of how the country is fed.... [The recommendation of] prescriptions of fruit and vegetables by GPs [has] been delayed...."

The London Times reports.

Dimbleby... an interesting name. I see "The Dimbleby family is an English family of journalists" (Wikipedia). Henry's great-grandfather was Frederick Jabez George Dimbleby (1876-1943), journalist for the Richmond and Twickenham Times. I wonder what he ate.

Isn't it strange that Henry Dimbleby — a "businessman and cookery writer" — was put in charge of deciding how the whole country should eat?

"During his most fertile years, Faulkner wrote at a frenetic pace. He once wrote to his mother that he wrote 10,000 words a day..."

"... working from ten in the morning to midnight. 'I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.'"

 From "10 Legendary Writers & Their Daily Word Counts/Is there a perfect amount of words to write every day?" (Writing Cooperative).

"Maybe we’re getting to [new support for freedom of speech] in the broader culture, but in academia, I’m pessimistic."

"We’ve always had more people on the left than on the right in academia, and I’m not sure the ratio has changed much since I was in college or law school. But what’s happening now is different from what we’ve seen in decades past. We’re seeing a rigid ideology being put into place, subversions of free speech and due process, administrators kowtowing to activists, and illiberal trends that administrators are humoring and placating.... I’ve been in a lot of media cycles through this whole process, from my initial tweet to my suspension to my being shouted down at UC Hastings, and the current one is by far my favorite media cycle. It’s good to finally be driving the narrative. I hope that my 'lived experience,' so to speak, can in some measure advance the ball in exposing and perhaps even fixing the rot at the heart of academia."

Said Ilya Shapiro, interviewed by David Lat in "Constructive Cancellation: An Interview With Ilya Shapiro/What explains Shapiro's abrupt about-face in deciding to leave Georgetown Law?" (Substack).

"In 2020, Fern Steficek set out to raise sheep and grow plants for natural dyes in the Hudson Valley."

"She began searching for land, visiting one property that had recently been acquired by Brooklyn transplants. But when she described rotational grazing practices to the owners, which involve moving clusters of animals around the pasture using portable fencing, they were put off by the idea, saying they preferred for the livestock to dot the landscape. 'We walked around the property, and they were talking about their vision of, basically, a petting zoo,' Ms. Steficek said. They also objected to any of the animals’ being slaughtered for meat, she said. 'It was frustrating and unrealistic, and not trusting me to know how to process animals humanely, but wanting a fairy tale idea of what farming is.'... If farmers could afford their land to begin with, these alliances might not be so necessary...."

From "How 'Fairy Tale' Farms Are Ruining Hudson Valley Agriculture Farmers are losing properties to wealthy buyers from the city, while leasing land from the new owners can feel like a 'modern-day feudal system'" (NYT).

"I’m a tomboy who is happily married to an effeminate man."

"I suppose it’s only a matter of time until this type of relationship has its own designation and advocacy group. Binary gender labels have always encompassed a wide variety of preferences and experiences. I’m glad to have grown up in a time before gender was identity and sexuality was personality. I’m also glad that I was allowed to go fishing, play baseball, and wear boys’ clothes without any suggestion that my body might need to be altered to fit my interests."

Writes Amanda, in Nashville, in the comments to "Report Reveals Sharp Rise in Transgender Young/People in the U.S. New estimates based on C.D.C. health surveys point to a stark generational shift in the growth of the transgender population of the United States" (NYT). 

The article says: "The number of young people who identify as transgender has nearly doubled in recent years...." 

"[W]e were betrayed into thinking we were legalising something and we are legalising something else."

"I’m not concerned about legalisation per se, I’m concerned about legalisation without regulations that curb the development of a product into something different. It concerns me a lot. It’s like you voted for legalising X and it later becomes 100X. So it was not what you voted for."

Said Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, quoted in From "Potent cannabis strain ‘causing psychosis time bomb’ in US" (London Times). 

What's available now has a THC level "as high as 90 per cent." What people were thinking about when they voted for legalization had something more like 5 per cent.

When I started reading this article, I was expecting to see some impressive evidence connecting high-potency cannabis to psychosis, so I was dismayed to encounter low-potency stuff like: "[E]xperts have warned of a possible mental health crisis after the emergence of super-strength marijuana products and states are scrambling to study a link between heavy use and psychosis."

ADDED: "As we cruise into the 1980s... 1978, going on 1981, what you see before you is a 10...  no, wait... 12! — 12-foot-long, burning [indecipherable] of marijuana..."

Sunrise — 5:17, 5:20, 5:38.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

Here are my TikTok selections of the day. 8 of them. Let me know what you like best.

1. A demonstration of skill.

2. Sister Monica — an Episcopal nun — describes her mother's Southernisms.

3. He's got a message for architects.

4. The paradise that was high school in the 80s.

5. When a Gen Z person is kidnapped.

6. "If you're not in medicine: Try reading this...."

7. A straight man who just wants to wear high heels and a skirt.

8. "Hey, bear. It's okay."

About 20 million people watched last night's prime-time January 6th hearing.

That "pales next to presidential debates (63 million to 73 million) or this year’s State of the Union address (38 million)," but "it’s still much larger than the audience that would normally watch a daytime congressional hearing. And it’s in the ballpark of television events like a big 'Sunday Night Football' game or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade."

That's how the NYT puts it.

I wonder how many of them already agreed with the Committee's findings and how many were the target audience of people who needed convincing.

Judy Garland is 100.