What do you say when you're on camera, miked, and conscious while falling 1,600 feet in a botched skiing stunt?

It takes a long time to complete the fall, and yet no intelligible insights are shared.

"While filming for Paradise Waits up in the Neacola range of AK, [Ian McIntosh] dropped into a line he thought he had studied thoroughly enough, only to fall into an unseen five foot deep trench on one of his first turns. 'From there, my slough took over and their was no way to stop, I pulled my airbag to help prevent against any possible trauma injuries as I tumbled to the bottom,' he said. While attempting to regain his footing, Mac lost a ski and cartwheeled over 1,600 feet in under a minute."

Oh, he had an airbag. That changes the whole experience of the video, doesn't it? I was waiting for him to say something like "God help me" or "I love you Mom" or "Still alive! Still alive!" but perhaps it was rather mundane from the inside.

This gets my things are not what they seem tag.

Another debate, this time with only 3 — Democrats, scrambling to adjust their message, post Paris.

1. We shall see if anyone makes a big move.

2. My son John is live-blogging, here (and will probably have much more than I will).

3. Clinton is asked if the Obama administration underestimated ISIS.

4. Sanders still believes climate change is the greatest threat.

5. "Is the world too dangerous a place for a Governor who has no foreign policy experience?" (Dickerson's questions speak for themselves. There is no answer O'Malley can give.)

6. The seething, roiling backdrop is distracting me. I thought I saw the shadow of the land shark creeping up on Hillary.

7. Bernie Sanders says ISIS and al Qaeda want to take the world back "several thousand years," but that would be long before the birth of Mohammad.

8. Hillary made a point of repeatedly saying "jihadi."

9. "The business model of Wall Street is fraud." Bernie Sanders.

10. Debate over. My prediction at item #2 above is very apt.

11. John writes: "Sanders's closing statement is evocative of Larry David's impersonation of him: 'We need a political revolution! . . . Turn off the TV! . . . Please become a part of the revolution!'" When I heard him say "Turn off the TV," I thought it was going to continue: "So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'"

It's not the most poorly timed NYT article ever, but this David Brooks article — "My $120,000 Vacation" — was published yesterday.

"Thanks to the Four Seasons’ new 24-day, round-the-world fantasy trip, you get all the indulgences of travel without any of its hassles. But like all fantasies, is this too much of a good thing?" Ugh. How embarrassing to find yourself — you, the moralizing columnist — asking that question on the day of the Paris attacks. I'd be smacking David Brooks around anyway, even if this were not published on a day when you pretty well know that the editors must have wished they could recall this one and publish it some other time.

It got me thinking back to September 11, 2001, a day when I spent the morning reading the paper NYT delivered to my doorstep. I calmly read it for an hour or two before setting off for work, not knowing what those who used TV or radio in the morning already knew. What was in the paper that morning? Maybe you remember: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen":

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings....

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'...

Mr. Ayers has always been known as a ''rich kid radical."... Thinking back on his life, Mr. Ayers said, ''I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed.''

Terrible. Terrible beyond terrible timing, but what mind-crushingly bad timing. Brooks's bad timing is almost nothing compared to that. But still, it must pain him with a pain with which no one can sympathize that his effort traveling the world and cogitating about it appears in print at a point when no one will be enticed to share his broodings.

But so what if the Four Seasons slaps its brand on a package tour and you flit from place to place on a chartered jet? I don't see what's particularly posh about this. They keep plying him with champagne. He goes around the world stopping in Tokyo, Beijing, the Maldives, the Serengeti, St. Petersburg, Marrakesh and New York, because these are all places with Four Seasons hotels, so that's where you stay. Who are your co-travelers, these people who pay $120,000 each to be shuttled around like that and always assured of a stay in a Four Seasons hotel?

Each morning you get to choose from an array of options — a visit to a Russian ballet school? A tour of Nevsky Prospekt shopping street? An excursion to the Fabergé Museum? The people on this trip loved the experience. They were very satisfied customers.... The people on this trip were by and large on the lower end of the upper class. One had a family carpet business. Another was an I.T. executive at an insurance company. There were a few law partners....

Yes, thanks, David. This is what anyone can figure out from the description. $120,000 isn't really that much to spend for all this. It's kind of a bargain, a bargain with nice branding that effectively sends the message that one can see the world from inside a cocoon of protection. Who with $120,000 to spare falls for a pitch like that? The lower end of the upper class. Brooks is looking down on these people.

[T]hey were socially and intellectually unpretentious. They treated the crew as friends and equals and not as staff. Nobody was trying to prove they were better informed or more sophisticated than anybody else. There were times, in fact, when I almost wished there had been a little more pretense and a little more intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Almost wished? You wished it every moment, didn't you? These people were beneath you. A family carpet business. They didn't even know to treat the servants as servants. And, you, David Brooks, didn't know how to treat rather ordinary people as people.

The guests were delighted by the intricate wall carvings in the Royal Harem building in Istanbul, by the vegetables in a Turkish restaurant, by 15 minutes of opera in a Russian palace. But over dinner, they mostly spoke with their new friends about their kids and lives back home, not about the meaning and depth of what they had just seen. 

The rubes. They looked to each other for friendship and human contact. I wonder what they thought of the disapproving eminence from The New York Times. They visit the Hermitage and see Rembrandt’s "Return of the Prodigal Son" but nobody talks about the meaning of the familiar Bible story. They visit Ephesus but don't air their opinions about St. Paul, so Brooks is forced to tell us what he might have told the carpet people and their ilk:

Paul must have been regarded as an extreme religious crank, preaching a life of poverty and love. His antimaterialistic and anti-achievement message was diametrically opposed to the prevailing ethos of classical Rome, with its emphasis on wealth, power and grandeur.... It would have been nice to stand amid these ruins reading Paul, or to talk about how to reconcile material happiness with spiritual joy as we were on the very spot where Paul preached, where the ethos of Athens met the ethos of Jerusalem. But our guide never really told us Paul’s story. He spent most of his time instead taking us through the royal palaces, with the grand chambers, frescoes and meeting halls. He gave us those material facts about the place that tour guides specialize in (who built what when), but which no one remembers because they don’t really have anything to do with us emotionally. The Ephesus visit was an occasion to have a good discussion about how to live and what really lasts. But if anybody was thinking such thoughts, they went unexpressed.

And the anybodies included Brooks himself. America is full of people who would love to talk as long as you want about the meaning of Christianity. Why would "the very spot where Paul preached" get you closer to any significant meaning... especially from folks who opted into the Four-Seasons-branded package tour? But if you thought it was important — mystical? — to talk about Paul's ideas in the very place where he had them, why didn't you see fit to talk? Why didn't you think the people you were living with were worthy of conversation? Imagine what you could have said: I paid $120,000 to stand here and think about Paul, but Paul's ideas are in a book and I can read that book again, but I've read it already, and I know it's perfectly obvious that it would have been better for me to donate $120,000 to charities that serve the poor and stay in America and find the people who truly believe in Christianity and to talk about Paul with them, but I'm here now, and you are the people who are with me, and I want to hear what you think about Paul.

But Brooks keeps his opinions to himself until he gets home and puts it in writing, opening himself only to those of us who encounter him on the other side of text.

UPDATE: Here's another post, dealing with some of the ethical issues.

"Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night..."

"... including one gunman who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants," the NYT reports.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests.... The gunman with the Syrian passport — which Greek officials said had been registered at the Aegean island of Leros on Oct. 3 — was 25, and died at the stadium. Another gunman, who died at the concert hall, was 29 and a native of Courcouronnes, about 20 miles south of Paris. He had a criminal record and was known to be associated with extremist Islamic ideology, Mr. Molins said....

The possibility that one of the attackers was a migrant or had posed as one is sure to further complicate the already vexing problem for Europe of how to handle the unceasing flow of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It could also lend weight to the xenophobic arguments of right-wing populists like Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party, who on Saturday held a news conference to declare that “France and the French are no longer safe.”

At the Sun Dog Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

(And if you need to do some shopping, please consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

A Paris prayer.

(Photo taken, 10 years ago, by my son John, at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.)

There's a name for this argument Debbie Wasserman Schultz is making about Hillary Clinton's story of trying to enlist in the Marines.

It's "fake but accurate."

Watch the video of Andrea Mitchell pushing for an explanation for why Hillary is going around making this claim that's quite unlikely to be true and that WaPo's fact checker has given 2 Pinocchios. DWS begins by impugning the very asking of the question: "Why on earth are we talking about this?" Mitchell stands her ground. Obviously, we're talking about it because Hillary Clinton is using her personal story in her current campaigning for President. DWS shifts to presenting the story as illustrating something that is true (that women have struggled over the years with acceptance into the military). In that light, the details of whether the story is real doesn't matter as long as it works to understand a problem that is real.

ADDED: Here's the WaPo fact checker piece. It not only shows the fakeness of Hillary's story, but it also undermines the "fake but accurate" presentation, because it doesn't even illustrate the general problem accurately. Excerpt:

Women have been part of the Marines since 1918, and were deployed to Korea in the 1950s. “By the height of the Vietnam war... about 2,700 women Marines served... both stateside and overseas,” according to the Women Marines Association. “By 1975, the Corps approved the assignment of women to all occupational fields except infantry, artillery, armor and pilot/air crew.”

And: "A former Marine lawyer, who was actively recruiting for the JAG at the time, says it is 'ludicrous' to suggest someone with Clinton’s skills would have been rejected. Since the draft had ended, 'we were frantic for lawyers,' he said, declining to be identified. Neither age nor eyesight would have been issue, he added. Many of the newly recruited lawyers were at least 26 years old and eyesight was only an issue for pilots, he said."

"Yews are normally either male or female and in autumn and winter sexing yews is generally easy."

"Males have small spherical structures that release clouds of pollen when they mature. Females hold bright red berries from autumn into winter. It was, therefore, quite a surprise to me to find a group of three ripe red berries on the Fortingall Yew when the rest of the tree was clearly male."

The Fortingall Yew is at least 2,000 years old and possibly as old as 5,000.

"Odd as it may seem, yews, and many other conifers that have separate sexes, have been observed to switch sex. It's not fully understood - normally the switch occurs on part of the crown rather than the entire tree changing sex. In the Fortingall Yew it seems that one small branch in the outer part of the crown has switched and now behaves as female."

What if one small part of you switched and began to behave as a member of the opposite sex from what you've believed yourself to be all these years? Which part would it be, and how would you know?

I ask the questions those other blogs dare not ask.

"The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear its first major abortion case since 2007..."

"...one that has the potential to affect millions of women and to revise the constitutional principles governing abortion rights," writes Adam Liptak in the NYT.

The court’s decision will probably arrive in late June, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, thrusting the divisive issue of abortion to the forefront of public debate. Other major rulings — on affirmative action, public unions, contraception coverage and possibly immigration — are also expected to land around then.

But it is the new abortion case, however it is decided, that is likely to produce the term’s most consequential and legally significant decision....

The constitutional law doctrine, from 1992, forbids the state from imposing "unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion." Given the personnel on the Court, it doesn't seem likely at all that the doctrine will change, only that it might be somewhat hard to apply the doctrine to the regulations the state came up with:

The case concerns two parts of a state law that imposes strict requirements on abortion providers.... One part of the law requires all clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers,” including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Officials in Texas said that the contested provisions were needed to protect women’s health. Abortion providers responded that the regulations were expensive, unnecessary and intended to put many of them out of business....

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the Texas challenge, said officials in Texas had used “deceptive laws and regulatory red tape” to block access to abortion.... “There would be no licensed abortion facilities west of San Antonio,” the challengers’ brief said. The only clinic south of San Antonio, in McAllen, it added, would have “extremely limited capacity.”

I predict that the Supreme Court see an undue burden here. Isn't the law really, mostly a way to deter women from having abortions? It will be interesting to be pushed into thinking about abortion more than usual in the coming election year. Whether the abortion case is the "most consequential" case — more than "affirmative action, public unions, contraception coverage and possibly immigration" — it fits in a set of issues that are politically hot and that drive a wedge in a place that makes it hard for Republicans to keep people like me who can be won over on economic and security issues. And so, I'd say that Democrats should be happy about the line-up of politically hot cases in the Supreme Court.

Hollande: "It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France."

"It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.... France, because it was foully, disgracefully and violently attacked, will be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh... [France will act within the law but with] all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat."

From the NYT's "Hollande Blames ISIS for ‘Act of War’ on Paris."

"The story of the surgery that made Ben Carson famous — and its complicated aftermath."

In The Washington Post. Excerpt:

Their mother would later tell reporters that they came home with the hope, instilled in them by the Johns Hopkins surgeons, that the boys might soon begin crawling, and then hit other milestones.... It soon became apparent, though, that the boys were hopelessly delayed, according to a 1993 interview with the Revue. Benjamin would moan occasionally, but Patrick remained completely silent; he had had a setback in the Baltimore hospital when he choked on a piece of food, going without oxygen for a short time. Years later, neither boy could get around on his own or feed himself....

When Freizeit Revue caught up with Theresia in November 1993, she said her children’s brain damage had destroyed her marriage. “Josef has never been able to cope with this blow of fate,” she said in the little-seen interview written in German and translated into English. She said Josef, who has since died, according to Theresia’s brother, became an alcoholic, lost his job, cheated on her and spent all their money, leaving her and the children to live “from hand to mouth.”“He never touched them,” she said. “He was appalled.” Unable to care for the twins on her own, she brought them to a home for disabled children, where they became wards of the state.

“The first thing I think of every morning is ‘today I’m going to get them,’ ” she said in 1993. “But then I can’t.” She said she had lost her faith in God. She remarried and had another child, and in 1993 was pregnant with another. “When we go for a walk with the children in their wheelchair, people look at me, as if I’m a monster,” she said. “I need this child. To heal. I still have to prove to myself that I’m not a monster.”

The highest rated comment over there is:

I'm not sure why people are so negative about this article. I don't like the guy or his politics, and I think he's nuts. But this article portrays a pretty brave doctor willing to take a chance to help two babies who would otherwise have had a miserable life. He gave them a chance at a better life. That it didn't work is hardly his fault, and the article doesn't paint it as his fault. Relax.

Second:

I don't see how this story in any way reflects unfavorably on Ben Carson. Some difficult ethical and medical decisions were made and the outcome was poor. Welcome to the real world where medicine often fails to live up to expectations.  In my opinion Ben Carson's surgical successes or failures have absolutely no bearing on his fitness for office. The fact that he is a Christian fringe fanatic makes him a no go for me. Ben comes across as dangerously unhinged when he shares some of his half baked theories.

"PARIS UNDER SIEGE; MANY DEATHS."

The headline in the NYT. "Multiple Attacks Roil Paris; President Hollande Is Evacuated From Stadium."

Shootings and explosions erupted in the Paris area on Friday night, and French news services said at least 39 people were dead, dozens wounded and others taken hostage in what appeared to be coordinated militant attacks.

French television reported that one of at least two explosions had struck near Paris at the country’s main sports stadium, forcing the hasty evacuation of President François Hollande. The explosion occurred during a France-Germany soccer match.

At Drudge: "MUSLIM RAMPAGE IN PARIS/100 HOSTAGES TAKEN IN THEATER; 60+ DEAD."

And, yes, I do, see a distinctive difference between those headlines, even though when I saw the NYT headline, I thought: It looks like a Drudge headline. All caps. Shocking.

"A Utah judge reversed his decision to take a baby away from her lesbian foster parents and place her with a heterosexual couple..."

"... after the ruling led to widespread backlash."

The internet worked.

"Prince is seated at a microphone behind a keyboard, which he keeps playing. This is quite disconcerting..."

"... if he doesn’t like a question, he strikes up with the theme from The Twilight Zone and shakes his head. At one point, he presses a button on the keyboard and the intro to his legendary 1988 hit Sign o’ the Times booms out of the PA. He looks at me. 'You wanna do this?' he says."

Prince does an interview and has his fun with the interviewers, one of whom writes for The Guardian, which — I don't know, maybe it's a British thing — doesn't edit out what to my eye is the run-on sentence of the year: "As skinny as a teenager, sporting an afro and almost unnecessarily handsome at 57 years old, Prince looks flatly amazing, exuding ineffable cool and panache while wearing clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny is just one among his panoply of talents."

I diagrammed that in my head and determined that there needs to be a period after "amazing." But what is the subject of that second sentence, the one with the verb "is"? Answer: "exuding."

And what were the clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny? Mainly the white platform flip-flops with white socks.

"All of our calculations were wrong. It was like a tsunami.... For two decades, people have voted the same."

"This is an unexpected situation...The government and the military would have had Plan A, B and C, but now Plan Z has just happened.... All of their pre-election expectations went wrong."

"Calling the Islamic State an 'evil terrorist death cult,' Mr. Cameron defended the decision to target Mr. Emwazi..."

"'... who was born in Kuwait and is a naturalized British citizen, as 'an act of self-defense' and 'the right thing to do.' We have been working, with the United States, literally around the clock to track him down... This was a combined effort, and the contribution of both our countries was essential. Emwazi is a barbaric murderer.... He was ISIL’s lead executioner, and let us never forget that he killed many, many Muslims, too."

Mr. Cameron = British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Mr. Emwazi = Mohammed Emwazi, AKA Jihadi John.

A Reaper drone armed with Hellfire missiles attacked a car and, as an anonymous U.S. military official put it: "We think we got him."

AND: "Kurdish and Yazidi fighters retook Sinjar on Friday morning, on the second day of a major offensive to reclaim this city in northern Iraq, which has been under the brutal domination of the Islamic State for more than 15 months.... Members of the Yazidi religious minority, which faced rape, enslavement and death in large numbers after the Islamic State overran Sinjar in August 2014, took part in the fight."