#LambeauLeap.

You earned 'em, boys. #LambeauLeap time 👐 https://t.co/R2vd7mkgIL

— UW-Madison (@UWMadison) September 3, 2016

RedState, sneering at a man for failing to sway properly in church.

"Look at the robotic swaying.  His awkward arms.  The look on his face.  Everything about this is perfect. Donald Trump: winning minorities over one by one with his sick moves and uncomfortable smile."

I don't know why Trump haters think they will get somewhere by expressing this kind of contempt. It feels utterly repellent to me. How on earth do you want to see a white man act in a black church? Is it supposed to be simply impossible?

By the way, only a few weeks ago, George W. Bush was criticized for improper church swaying:



What I said at the time: "The reason George Bush swayed and smiled during 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' is that he actually believes his religion."

Trump speaks in a black church in Detroit and Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild makes a "nice night" for Hillary Clinton on the lawn of her Martha’s Vineyard estate.

This undercuts those who've been saying Trump says he's reaching out to black people, but he's not appearing before a black audience. And it shows that Trump is actively campaigning, making himself the news of the day, every day, even the especially obscure day that is the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.

What is Hillary doing? The NYT, on its front page, puts a Hillary story above the Donald-goes-to-black-church story, but look at it:



That's just about the worst news about Hillary to juxtapose with Trump's Detroit outreach. Clicking through, I see an even worse headline: "Where Has Hillary Clinton Been? Ask the Ultrarich." Excerpt:

The public has gotten used to seeing Mrs. Clinton’s carefully choreographed appearances and her somewhat halting speeches and TV interviews over the course of the long — and sometimes seemingly joyless — campaign, but donors this summer have glimpsed an entirely different person....

Another advantage to choosing private fund-raisers over town halls or other public events is that Mrs. Clinton can bask in an affectionate embrace as hosts try to limit confrontational engagements.

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a backer of Democrats and a friend of the Clintons’, made sure attendees did not grill Mrs. Clinton at the $100,000-per-couple lamb dinner Mrs. Forester de Rothschild hosted under a tent on the lawn of her oceanfront Martha’s Vineyard mansion.

“I said, ‘Let’s make it a nice night for her and show her our love,’” Mrs. Forester de Rothschild said.

"Better than nothing! Is it possible?"

At the theater last night. I was stunned to hear the line "Better than nothing is impossible" — so close to my oft-re-self-quoted "Better than nothing is a high standard." Had I nicked my line from Samuel Beckett?

In the cold light of morning, I buy the text on Kindle, do a search, and find that the line is: "Better than nothing! Is it possible?" That is, to one way of looking, farther from my line. The structure is different. 2 sentences. An exclamation and then a question. No flat assertion. But from another point of view, it's closer. It's got hope — hope for better things than nothing.

In spite of everything you were able to get on with it!

Oh not very far, you know, not very far, but nevertheless, better than nothing.

Better than nothing! Is it possible?

This election is pathological. Path-o-logical.

"Clinton’s advisers tell her to prep for a landslide Displaying unchecked confidence, the Democrat’s paid consultants see plenty of paths to the White House." So they say, according to Politico.

“Hillary Clinton has many paths to 270 electoral votes, more than any candidate in a generation,” said Jeff Berman, a paid consultant to her campaign....

Meanwhile, also according to Politico, "Inside Trump Tower: Facing grim reality/Three weeks until early voting, the campaign scrambles to pick a path and stay on it."

So, let me get this straight: Hillary has "plenty of paths," but Trump is struggling to "pick a path and stay on it."

Is it good to have different paths or is it bad? Good for Hillary, bad for Trump? Would it be pathological to want some logic in all this talk of paths?



I'm thinking the Hillary side figures it serves their cause to make people feel that it's all over, that there's no way to fight them off, because they've got another way and another way. It's like how you can't build a wall, because if you build a wall, they'll dig a tunnel and then another tunnel, and you'll never find all the tunnels. Ha ha! Give up! 

From the Trump article:

Late last week... Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Republican National Committee brass... Those present for the meeting... said Kushner’s questions reflected a growing realization within Trump’s team that for all the party’s talk about implementing a major swing-state deployment plan, it hasn’t yet materialized.... The absence of a clear plan has spread to something even more fundamental — the campaign’s path to 270 electoral votes....

Making matters tough for Trump has been the ongoing reluctance of the party’s biggest contributors to open their wallets.... The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch also have refused to come around.

The antipathy has had far-reaching consequences....

That's it. Antipathy! The opposition to paths.

The FBI releases the text of its interview with Hillary Clinton.

Just in time for Labor Day weekend.

Read it here.

That reality show that Donald Trump made with Omarosa.

Watch the trailer, here. I only made it halfway through (and I was trying).

Back in the earliest months of this blog, I blogged "The Apprentice." It was the season with Omarosa. I said: 

Meanwhile, I keep finding people coming to my blog after Googling "Omarosa + suing," so I guess I better find out what that's all about so as not to disappoint people. Especially, now that writing that will cause my site to come up even higher when they Google that. I'm thinking she's trying to sue her way back on the show or collect some cash on the theory that they aggravated her concussion by pressuring her to work for 48 hours straight without a sit-down lunch break. She shouldn't sue though. Omarosa don't sue! Don't you realize millions of people find you immensely entertaining? You could have a whole reality show built around you--I'd call it "Drama Queen"--but who will want to deal with you if you show yourself to be all litigious?

ADDED: The show was not called "Drama Queen." It was called "The Ultimate Merger." It was one of those find-a-husband shows.

The 4 beards of Tom Wolfe's "Kingdom of Speech," ranked in order of the prominence of the bearded one.

1. Charles Darwin's beard — which appears twice in Wolfe's delightful new book about the politics of linguistic science. First, when Darwin is 54: "[H]e had cultivated a so-called philosopher’s beard of the sort that had been the philosopher’s status symbol since the days of Roman glory. Darwin was forever pictured sitting slightly slumped in an easy chair… his philosopher’s beard lying on his chest all the way from his jaws to his sternum… like a big old hairy gray bib." And second, when Darwin is 60: "Vomiting three or four times a day had become the usual. His eyes watered and dripped on his old gray philosopher’s beard. The chances of his leaving his desk in Down House and going out into the world looking for evidence, as he had on the Beagle, were zero. Instead he chained himself to his desk and forced himself to write... So he wound his imagination up to the maximum and herded all the animals together in his head, like some Noah the Naturalist...." (I'm picturing Noah's beard now too, but Wolfe didn't mention that.)

2. The beard of the Creator: In Apache myth, there's a void and then a disk. "Curled up inside the disk is a little old man with a long white beard. He sticks his head out and finds himself utterly alone. So he creates another little man, much like himself... Somehow, up in the void, they take to playing with a ball of dirt. A scorpion appears from nowhere and starts pulling at it. He pulls whole strands of dirt out of the ball. Longer and longer he pulls them, farther farther farther they extend, until he has created earth, sun, moon, and all the stars.... The big bang theory desperately needs someone like the scorpion or the little man with a long white beard curled up inside a disk." (You might question my ranking the Creator of the Universe second, after Darwin, but Darwin is ultra prominent, and the Creator in question is not the God of the Bible or the Quran but a little tiny man who needs not only another tiny man but a scorpion to pull off the big creation trick.)

3. Alfred Wallace's beard: "Our story begins inside the aching, splitting head of Alfred Wallace, a thirty-five-year-old, tall, lanky, long-bearded, barely grade-school-educated, self-taught British naturalist who was off— alone— studying the flora and the fauna of a volcanic island off the Malay Archipelago near the equator…." (Alfred Wallace, do you even know who he is? He's the man you would know about if Darwin hadn't worked to eclipse him.)

4. The beard of  Daniel L. Everett (Everett is to Wallace as Noam Chomsky is to Darwin): "Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair.... He was an old-fashioned flycatcher inexplicably here in the midst of modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts. They never left the computer, much less the building." Later we see Everett's beard in a scene of terrible squalor, tending to his his suffering wife and daughter on a miserable boat: "The Brazilians couldn’t keep their eyes off the gringos who were gushing gringo misery out of their hindsides... The redheaded, red-bearded gringo kept taking the pot of sloshing diarrheic rot through crowds of passengers, constantly bending way down with his reeking pot to pass under the hammocks...."

Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace.

"Mr. Holt, the anchor of the 'NBC Nightly News,' will moderate the first debate on Sept. 26; Ms. Raddatz of ABC and Mr. Cooper of CNN will moderate the town hall debate on Oct. 9; and Mr. Wallace of Fox News will handle the final debate on Oct. 19. All are first-time presidential debate moderators."

The NYT reports.

Looks like they took one from each network... except CBS. But: " the CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano will moderate the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 4."

Did Donald Trump describe an America of "lockups and surveillance and fugitive-hunting squads" hunting down "hotel maids and landscapers"?

"It was a mass-deportation speech, even if he avoided that phrase. Its intent was hard to miss," say the editors of the NYT, claiming that Donald Trump had previously stated a "promise to make 11 million unauthorized immigrants targets for deportation" and — even though his 10-point speech made no mention of deporting these people — that's what he means to do:

The entire speech, in fact, imagines that government at all levels will be used to hunt down and remove immigrants from their homes, families and jobs. Mr. Trump was describing a world of lockups and surveillance and fugitive-hunting squads, a vast system of indiscriminate catch-and-punish that works as hard to catch hotel maids and landscapers as it does gang members and terrorists.

What does that mean? How does the speech "imagine" something that he never said? Now, as I've been saying lately, I find it very hard to see where he ever said specifically that he wanted to deport anyone other than those who were convicted of crimes (or who were caught crossing the border). And clearly — the NYT admits it — his speech this week never said anything about rounding up the millions and deporting them. He did say he'd take back the "amnesty" Obama gave "to approximately five million illegal immigrants." And he didn't specifically refute the image some people have of what he will do.

Many people, myself included, do not believe he every envisioned deporting peaceful, well-settled, productive immigrants. But he obviously knows many people — his supporters and opponents — think or want to encourage others to think that he will do that — hunt down and remove immigrants from their homes, families and jobs. He is choosing not to state very clearly that's absolutely not his plan. But in leaving that subject unexplored, is he "imagining" and "describing" an America of "lockups and surveillance and fugitive-hunting squads" hunting down "hotel maids and landscapers"?

The NYT is imagining and describing that. Trump didn't do it. I don't like the NYT engaging in that kind of distortion and exaggeration and scaring readers. But Trump — knowing the media hate him and will distort and exaggerate — has responsibility for declining to disavow that plan. He must be charged with actively choosing to leave this empty place in his plan that people will fill with their hopes and fears.

He had 10 points in his plan. 10! 10 says: I'm covering this very comprehensively. And yet there is this very well known subject and somehow it didn't get a point.

Oh, but 10! 10 sounds so complete.

Yeah, well, this one goes to 11. The 11th point is unstated, and that's what's so beautiful/horrible about it. It's whatever you want it to be.

Watch out for scientific studies that read the evidence to support the belief that what is true of the male is superior.

Says the Vatican, saying something that's the reverse of something I've said so often other people have taken to calling it the "Althouse Rule."

Here I am, back in 2005:

I've said it before, and I must repeat, the rule is: If you do scientific research into the differences between men and women, you must portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. And when you read reports about scientific research into the differences between men and women, use the hypothesis that the scientists are following that rule. It makes reading the reports quite humorous.

Here's the above-linked article about a piece called "History of Biological Difference" in L'Osservatore Romano:

Be cautious about scientific data that offer to be the sole basis and single explanation for the differences between men and women, the Vatican newspaper said. Different eras have produced different scientific conclusions about sex differences, it said, in part because assumptions were built on the knowledge available at the time.

But past scientific views were also inspired by the particular social concepts in force and were "marked, in general, by a strong 'male-centric' ideological slant, aimed at scientifically establishing female inferiority," the newspaper article said....

The article presented a rundown of different findings, spanning from the 1800s to present day, by scientists in explaining why men and women are different....

Biological views of the difference between the sexes, therefore, "have changed over time, according to the theories and dominant ideologies in each historical context, and the interests of medical research," it said.

Articulating what I might comically call The Reverse Althouse Rule, the Vatican is not disagreeing with what I've been saying. I've been writing about media reports in present-day America, where the bias is toward framing the scientific news as evidence of female superiority. But in times and places where people want to present and promote an ideology of male superiority, one ought to expect the same process to yield science that supposedly finds what people want to find.

I said that back in 2005:

To test my theory about whether scientists are following my rule, try rewriting their conclusions as if they were following the opposite rule. That is, take the same basic data, and write their statements as if they were leaning exactly as much toward portraying what is true of the male as superior.

I remember the days when people would routinely and openly characterize whatever was true of the male as superior, and I'm glad those days are over (at least in the U.S.)....

If we build a wall, we need to defend against tunnels.

The NYT article has an article today: "As Donald Trump Calls for Wall on Mexican Border, Smugglers Dig Tunnels." But Trump's speech last night did address the tunnel problem:

On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable physical wall on the southern border. We will use the best technology, including above-and below-ground sensors, towers, aerial surveillance and manpower to supplement the wall, find and dislocate tunnels, and keep out the criminal cartels, and Mexico will pay for the wall.

The Times article acknowledges this part of the speech, but says that "no technology exists to reliably detect the tunnels, and experts say it may be years before such a system is developed."

Technological advances such as ground radar to detect movement, hundreds of high-tech cameras with night-vision lenses and drones flying overhead have drastically transformed border security.... The American government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into research in hopes of finding a way to detect tunnels, but most of these efforts have ended in disappointment....

Part of the problem in detecting tunnels, say experts like Paul Bauman, a Canadian geophysicist, is the ground itself.... With underground cracks, water tables, tree roots and caves, it is hard to tell what is and is not a tunnel, he said....

“For every tunnel we find, we feel they’re building another one somewhere, and they might get more creative in concealing it,” he said. “Next year, I could find 10. Until there is some device on the market to help us accurately detect them, we just won’t know.”

Tunnel detection is something we need to do — whatever you think of Trump's wall. I don't like the tone of defeatism, if that's what this is. You might be politically opposed to Trump and want to say his wall won't work because there will be tunnels, but whatever you think of illegal immigration, there's a drug crime problem that must be dealt with.

Here's an article in The New Yorker from last year about the building of tunnels: "UNDERWORLD: How the Sinaloa drug cartel digs its tunnels." Excerpt:

"Get hard! Whatever you do, make it sound scientific. Get out from under the stigma of studying a 'social science'!"

"By now 'social' meant soft in the brainpan. Sociologists, for example, were to observe and record hour-by-hour conversations, meetings, correspondence, objective manifestations of status concerns, and make the information really hard by converting it into algorithms full of calculus symbols that gave it the look of mathematical certainty— and they failed totally. Only Chomsky, in linguistics, managed to pull it off and turn all— or almost all— the pillow heads in the field rock-hard. Even before receiving his PhD, he was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and Yale, where he introduced a radically new theory of language. Language was not something you learned. You were born with a built-in 'language organ.' It is functioning the moment you come into the world, just the way your heart and your kidneys are already pumping and filtering and excreting away."

From Tom Wolfe's new "Kingdom of Speech," which I've been audiobooking around town this week.

I also liked this passage, which is also about Chomsky (but made me think about Donald Trump):

Charismatic leaders radiate more than simple confidence. They radiate authority. They don’t tell jokes or speak ironically, except to rebuke— as in “Kindly spare me your ‘originality.’” Irony, like plain humor, invariably turns upon some indulgence of human weakness. Charismatic figures show only strength. They refuse to buckle under in the face of threats, including physical threats. They are usually prophets of some new idea or cause.

What it made me think about Trump was: By that description, Trump is not a charismatic leader. 

Trump has a 10-point plan.

It's a plan. And it has 10-points.

I'll let Roger L. Simon go into the weeds.

Here's the text of the whole speech. I'll just focus on:

End Catch-And-Release....

At Meadhouse, the dialogue was something like:

MEADE: Catch and release?! It's not called "catch and release."

ME: Oh? Hmm. You mean, catch and release is what you do with fish.

Calling it "catch and release" puts it in an interesting light — as if we're catching human beings for sport.

Did you notice that Hillary Clinton gave a speech on "American exceptionalism" yesterday?

"I don't like the term. I'll be honest with you....  I don't think it's a very nice term. We're exceptional; you're not.... I never liked the term. And perhaps that's because I don't have a very big ego and I don't need terms like that. Honestly.... I watch Obama every once in a while saying 'American exceptionalism.' it's [makes a face]. I don't like the term. Because... I want to take everything back from the world that we've given them. We've given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don't want to say, 'We're exceptional. We're more exceptional.' Because essentially we're saying we're more outstanding than you. 'By the way, you've been eating our lunch for the last 20 years, but we're more exceptional than you.' I don't like the term. I never liked it. When I see these politicians get up [and say], 'the American exceptionalism'... I think you're insulting the world. And you, know... if you're German, or you're from Japan, or you're from China, you don't want to have people saying that. I never liked the expression. And I see a lot of good patriots get up and talk about Amer—you can think it, but I don't think we should say it. We may have a chance to say it in the not-too-distant future. But even the, I wouldn't say it because when I take back the jobs, and when I take back all that money and we get all our stuff, I'm not going to rub it in. Let's not rub it in. Let's not rub it in. But I never liked that term."

Oh, that was Trump, of course. How far did you get before it became obvious? He said that back in April 2015.

Why am I quoting this now instead of quoting Hillary Clinton gave a speech on "American exceptionalism" in Cincinnati yesterday? Because all the news today is about Donald Trump. I know Hillary gave that "American exceptionalism" speech yesterday, but can you find a news story about it?

I'm looking at the front page of the NYT and there's nothing about Hillary — and plenty about Trump — in the whole top screen. I do a search-the-page for "Hillary" to find something, anything, and I find, down at the bottom, in tiny print: "News Analysis: Trailing Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Turns to Political Gymnastics." That's about Donald Trump! Further down: "The 2016 Race: Could ‘a Better Trump’ Be Leading Hillary Clinton Right Now?" That's about Donald Trump!

There's only one other thing, in the "Recommended for You" list at #5: "ON THE RUNWAY/Fashion Extends Its Support for Hillary Clinton." Ugh! She gave a speech on "American Exceptionalism" and the only news on the front page of nytimes.com is non-news from 2 days ago about how people in the fashion industry are doing something utterly predictable. And some fashion designer opines about Hillary's clothes: "She’s very tailored now. But I think she could go more feminine, and flowy."

Oh, yeah, well, how about some feminine and flowy American exceptionalism?

Did Hillary say anything in Cincinnati? Is it too boring to memorialize in a brief squib of a news article? Was it embarrassing or off-the-mark in some way?

I searched the NYT website for Hillary Clinton American exceptionalism, and I came up with an article, published yesterday: "Hillary Clinton, Swiping at Donald Trump, Argues U.S. Is Vital World Leader." It's off the website front page already, but it does exist. And yet the main point seems to be about Donald Trump. Maybe that's why it's not on the front page. The front page is already overloaded with Donald Trump material.

Here's the Hillary quote about American exceptionalism the NYT puts in paragraph #3:

"If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this: The United States is an exceptional nation."

Why does everything sound like a lie? Compare the Donald Trump quote that begins this post. The words do seem to be coming unfiltered from his brain.

That's... exceptional.

IN THE COMMENTS: The very first comment comes from Rob:

Hillary chose her words carefully: "if there's one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way . . . ." In fact, there is not one core belief that has guided her--unless you count ambition as a core belief.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: So I answer Rob: "Rob, are you a lawyer? Good catch!"

And Rob says: "Ann, I knew Hillary at Yale Law. We go way back."

David Begley erupts: "As a classmate of Hillary's you can't leave it at that! Throw us a bone."

Rob says: "I was a year ahead of her, David. She was fine at law school, and far less militant and angry than several of the women there. Subsequent developments like her reported behavior on the impeachment staff, her commodities trading, her role in quashing bimbo eruptions and of course her private server have all seemed unlike the person I thought I knew, and apparently didn't know very well."

"I especially hate seeing a man drinking from a straw."

I said, responding to Brando, in the Coca-Cola post, who said "[Coca-Cola] is an intellectual beverage, if you sip it in a tall glass with a bit of ice and a straw, and wear a monocle. It's all in the presentation." My reaction was: "I absolutely loathe straws. The only reason for them is to pierce those plastic lids on take out cups. I especially hate seeing a man drinking from a straw."

Is this some weird quirk of mine or do I have support? I have support:

1. "After ordering a drink, do you take the straw out?"

I'd get a good chuckle out of seeing a man drinking his hard liquor through a tiny mixing straw.

2. "Real Men Don't Use Straws," by Malcolm Freberg:

I want you to think about the most macho movie characters imaginable. The ones who define hero, the ones your dad hero worships. James Bond. Indiana Jones. John McLane. Now think about any scene in which they drink anything, be it water or alcohol or exotic space poison. I bet your Luminosity-trained brain couldn't insert a straw into that scene if it tried.

Harry Stamper does not suck Sprite through a bendy straw. Bruce Wayne does not drink pina coladas with a crazy straw. Real men don't use straws.... Hollywood and society had a meeting in our collective subconscious and decided that straws are for sissies. Obviously no one's going to see you sipping a gin and tonic through a cocktail straw and yell, "Hey Sally, that guy looks like he's sucking a tiny dick!" You may not have even considered that straws look like penises until you read that. I'm sorry -- but knowing is better than not knowing.

3. "Why Men Hate Straws":