At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want. 

"In the debate about whether to take the woke version of progressivism seriously as a revolutionary ideology or whether to regard it primarily as a kind of performative intra-elite signaling..."

"... the 'land acknowledgment' phenomenon has always loomed as the strongest exhibit for the it’s-all-just-performance case.... For instance, the Harvard Art Museums, their priceless collections attached to the country’s richest university, want you to know that they are 'located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge.' Also, they 'pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present.' A form of respect paying that leaves the obvious corollary unsaid: They have no intention of giving the land back! But now that comedy has been undermined, just a bit...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "When ‘Decolonization’ Isn’t Just Academic Rhetoric" (NYT).

"This concern about public panic has been a leitmotif of the Covid-19 pandemic, even earning itself a name ('elite panic') among some scholars...."

"[R]epeated assurances against panic have arguably also preempted a more vigorous and urgent public health response—as well as perversely increasing public acceptance of the risks posed by coronavirus infection and the unchecked transmission of the virus. This 'moral calm'—a sort of manufactured consent—impedes risk mitigation by promoting the underestimation of a threat.... [S]ome experts and public figures have uncritically advanced the idea that if the public appears to be tired, bored, or noncompliant with public health measures, then the pandemic must be over. But pandemics are impervious to ratings; they cannot be canceled or publicly shamed. History is replete with examples of pandemics that blazed for decades, sometimes smoldering for years before flaring up again into catastrophe. The Black Death (1346–1353 AD), the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD), and the Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD), pandemics all, lacked the quick resolution of the 1918 influenza pandemic.... Conflating the spread of a disease with the way people feel about responding to that spread is deeply illogical—yet a great deal of the Biden administration’s management of Covid-19 has rested on this confusion...."

From "The Coronavirus Still Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings The Covid-19 pandemic is not a state of mind—and telling us not to panic isn’t healthcare" (The Nation).

"To best support wildlife and soil health, experts say leaves should be left where they fall. A hearty leaf cover provides a habitat..."

"... during the cold winter months for critical pollinating species such as bees, butterflies and moths. Other critters including amphibians and small mammals like chipmunks can also benefit from shelter provided by leaves.... If you don’t want leaves all over your yard, experts suggest getting out the rake and moving them into garden beds, piles or to the edges of your property.... Leaves can act as mulch and a springtime weed suppressant.... If you’re concerned about leaves blowing back out into your yard, try wetting them down a little. If you have too many leaves, one option is to use a mulching mower to chop them up.... Experts said taking steps to leave leaves around your yard in the fall is just one part of a larger effort to move away from manicured lawns that are dead zones for many species, providing little to no habitat or nutrients for wildlife...."

From "Do less this fall and leave those leaves on your lawn" (WaPo).

I think you already know all this, but I like to restate it, because I look around my own neighborhood, which is full of very progressive people, and I still see many piles of leaves moved out to the terrace for pickup by the city's bulky collection vehicles. 

"An instructor at Stanford University.... asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves... told [them to] stand in a corner, and said, 'This is what Israel does to the Palestinians'..."

"The instructor then asked, 'How many people died in the Holocaust?' When a student answered, 'Six million,' the lecturer said, 'Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.'... The teacher 'didn’t say anything that happened to the Israelis.... He ignored that. He said, "Hamas is a legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. They are not a terrorist group. They are freedom fighters. Their actions are legitimate."... He’s saying Israel is worse than the Nazis and Hamas is innocent. This is what Jewish students face at Stanford and other places. They’re feeling isolated, under attack and threatened.'"

From "Stanford instructor removed for targeting Jewish students as ‘colonizers’ after Hamas attack on Israel/Stanford officials were also criticized for neutral language in initially failing to unambiguously condemn Hamas" (Forward)(quoting Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, who was relaying what he heard from 3 students).

"I feel like people younger than I am have an idea of what [the] 90s were like that increasingly has little to do with..."

"... my actual lived experience of being a teenager/twenty-some[t]hing in the 90s. This clip in all of its awkward, heartbreaking, briefly, inexplicably lovely 'how did all of these people end up here together?' energy is exactly it for me"/"It’s remarkable how the vibe of everyone on-set changes when Elliott Smith starts playing the song, they all seem like people who’ve all fled their god’s command to seek truth and beauty, and then that song rises from the deep and swallows them all, even the puppet."

2 comments at Metafilter, reacting to this 1995 clip from the FX show "Breakfast Time."

Hosting the show are: 1. Tom Bergeron (later of "America’s Funniest Home Videos" and "Dancing With The Stars"), 2. Laurie Hibberd (AKA Laurie Gelman, who published a 2022 novel titled "Smells Like Tween Spirit"), and 3. Bob (a puppet):

Elliott Smith died, in 2003, of 2 stab wounds to the chest. He left a note: "I'm so sorry—love, Elliott. God forgive me.

"... Israel’s last two major wars... were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories."

"And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers. That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region. And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.... Since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet.... And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped. Hamas must have missed that lesson...."

Writes Thomas Friedman, in "Why Israel Is Acting This Way" (NYT).

If Friedman's use of the word crazy bothers you, you should read the whole column. He uses the word crazy (or a variation on crazy) 10 times.

As Friedman imagines it, Hamas, seeing Israel's increased acceptance in the Arab world, thought: "OK, Jews,

Given a new 4-3 liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, "a liberal-backed legal complaint alleges Wisconsin’s decades-old school choice program violates the state Constitution and has created a 'funding death spiral' for public schools."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

The lawsuit, which was filed directly in the state supreme court, argues that the program violates the Public-Purpose Requirement and Uniform Taxation Clause.

"The college kids in America went full Trump and said there's very fine people on both sides."

The good news was that the far-left and the far-right in this country have found common ground. The bad news is it’s that they both hate the Jews. pic.twitter.com/7mgVXS6JmN

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) October 14, 2023

"When I was a small child of, I think, about five or six, I staged a competition in my head, a contest to decide the greatest poem in the world."

"There were two finalists: Blake’s 'The Little Black Boy' and Stephen Foster’s 'Swanee River.' I paced up and down the second bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore of Long Island, reciting, in my head as I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s unforgettable poem, and singing, also in my head, the haunting, desolate Foster song. How I came to have read Blake is a mystery. I think there were a few poetry anthologies in my parents’ house among the more common books on politics and history and the many novels. But I associate Blake with my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was not a bookish woman. But there was Blake, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and also a tiny book of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, many of which I memorized. I particularly loved the song from Cymbeline, understanding probably not a word but hearing the tone, the cadences, the ringing imperatives, thrilling to a very timid, fearful child. 'And renownèd be thy grave.' I hoped so."

That is the first paragraph of the Nobel Prize acceptance lecture given by Louise Glück, which I am reading this morning because I'm seeing the obituary for her in the NYT.

At the Red Leaf Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"House Republicans on Friday nominated Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the hard-right chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to be their next speaker..."

"... but quickly postponed a floor vote to elect him as scores of their members refused to commit to backing him.... After a week of turmoil and disarray, Republicans sent their members home for the weekend late Friday afternoon with no resolution and no sense of when the feuding might end...."

The NYT reports.

"People moved by donkey carts, auto rickshaws, and cars, loaded with bags of clothing, mattresses, even a pair of cows."

"'A tuk-tuk would be carrying 15 people,' she said. “People are running red lights, no one is stopping.' Eventually, they reached Khan Yunis, taking refuge in a two-story house with more than 30 other people.... The cars that were on the road were completely full, some packed so tight that thin mattresses hung out of windows and blankets were wedged up against back windows. Some families were leaving on foot, calling out for cars to give them a ride.... 'There are no cars to take us anywhere,' [one woman] said. 'There is no gas in cars. Cab companies don’t have cars anymore. The streets are so, so, so, so crowded, it’s like it’s the Day of Judgement.'"

From "Evacuation order sets off chaotic scramble as Gazans run for their lives" (WaPo).

"There is also a peculiar effect whereby different books read by the same narrator can seem to agglutinate into a single mongrel super-book."

"The audiobooks of Norman Mailer’s 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago,' Steven Pinker’s 'The Sense of Style,' and Nabokov’s epic 'Ada' are all read by Arthur Morey, and I’ve begun to hear his circumspect and world-weary enunciation meld into an imaginary work in which the 1968 Republican convention is satirized between bouts of hectoring the reader about sentence construction, all in Nabokov’s wildly over-frosted late prose. Many of my beloved science-fiction audiobooks are read by Robertson Dean, whose voice sounds like a glob of pomegranate molasses falling off the edge of a spoon. It’s a good fit for techy near-future dystopias, at once hal-ishly flat and resonantly mellow, saying things like, '[she] lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche' (that’s from William Gibson’s 'Zero History')."

Writes Paul Grimstad, in "Confessions of an Audiobook Addict/It’s both strange and enlightening to move through the world with an author’s voice filling your ears" (The New Yorker).

"President Biden’s reelection effort will launch a pilot test of its 2024 organizing strategy... that aims to directly leverage the personal relationships of volunteers."

"The moves come as the Democratic National Committee has redirected its organizing efforts to a new smartphone app that encourages supporters to communicate with people in their own friend, family and community circles and then report those contacts back to the party’s voter file. This 'relational organizing' has become a growing part of Democratic campaigns for several cycles, outperforming traditional door-knocking and call sheet lists that volunteers have long used to contact strangers during campaigns...."

From "Biden team launches organizing pilot project in Wisconsin and Arizona/The reelection effort is focused on recruiting large numbers of volunteers to use their own relationships to spread the Biden message directly" (WaPo).

"But Obama is Biden’s boss. Guess you didn’t really know that... I think Obama is calling these shots..."

"There’s no question about that. No, I think Obama and Obama’s people certainly are calling the shots, not Biden."

Said Donald Trump, in an interview with Brian Kilmeade.

It had seemed that Trump had just misspoken and said Obama when he meant Biden, as he was discussing Iran and Hamas: "It’s all coming through Iran. And Obama wants to he doesn’t want to talk about it."

But questioned by Kilmeade — "You mean Biden" — Trump said: "I also mean Obama... You know Obama and Biden. But Obama is Biden’s boss. Guess you didn’t really know that."