The NYT makes its 2020 presidential choice obvious.

On the front page:



Inside, the text is clear. There's Kamala Harris and there are 3 other decent choices... and those 3 other guys need to step back and get out of the way:

Senator Kamala Harris of California.... Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator... Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey... And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.... These four high-profile Democratic senators are poised to enter the 2020 presidential race in the next several weeks...

The speed of the senators’ efforts reflects intense political pressure to establish themselves as leading candidates in a Democratic field that could get crowded, fast.... and they don’t want to lose a step to a rival fresh face, such as Representative Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas Senate candidate who has been the focus of intense speculation in recent weeks as a potential presidential candidate....

For the Senate foursome, moving quickly into the race is also a pre-emptive effort to undercut the early advantages of a duo of universally known contenders, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who may enter the race in the coming months. Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders would start off with important advantages, including existing networks of support among early-state activists and party donors, and the stature to generate impressive displays of support at early rallies.

But as white men, Mr. Biden, Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Rourke do not reflect the gender and racial diversity of many Democratic candidates and swaths of the electorate that dominated the 2018 midterms. Ms. Harris, Ms. Warren, Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Booker, by contrast, would instantly make the 2020 Democratic field the most diverse array of presidential candidates in history. And they might well scramble the early polling leads held by Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders, who benefit from strong name recognition but would be in their late 70s by Election Day 2020, at a moment when some in the party are agitating for generational change....

The number of male operatives under consideration for campaign manager posts has raised concerns among some female Democratic strategists who hoped the diversity of the 2020 field would prompt more hiring of female and minority staffers for senior roles.... The focus on staff diversity reflects not only the influence of the #MeToo movement on Democratic politics but the demands of a party that has shifted to the left during the Trump era....

What does "you do you" really mean?

That's a question I had to google after reading "The Thinnest Skins In Media In 2018/Their diapers runneth over" (HuffPo). The first entry on the list is "Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor And Respecter Of Troops." And this exchange is presented as evidence:



See the relevant line, in the middle? "I'm not mad. You misquoted me, I pointed it out, and instead of correcting yourself you reacted like a child. You do you."

My Google search turned up "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture" (NYT, March 2015). Excerpt:

Haters hate; that’s them doing them. No matter how saintly you are, the kittens rescued and orphanages saved from demolition, people yearn to bring you down. Classify your antagonists as haters, however, and your flaws are absolved by their greater sin of envy. Obviously, the haters have other qualities apart from their hatred, but such thinking goes against the very nature of the hermetic tautophrase, which refuses intrusion into the bubble of its logic. The hated-­upon must resist lines of inquiry, like “Haters are inclined to hate, but perhaps I have contributed to this situation somehow by frustrating that natural impulse in all human beings, that of empathy, however submerged that impulse is in this deadened, modern world.” To do otherwise would be to acknowledge your own monstrosity....

And if you're wondering why the thin-skinned media people are depicted as corn in that HuffPo article, the answer is here, at Know Your Meme. The meme goes back to some tweet in 2011, but:

Discourse around the term grew popular again in the beginning of August of 2017. On August 2nd, journalist Yashar Ali tweeted an image of Kamala Harris, a rumored democratic candidate for the 2020 Presidential Election, that called her the "Centrist Corncob" candidate. Ali noted how it was remarkable how the "Bernie Sanders Crew" had mobilized against Harris.... Centrist pundit Al Giordano quoted the tweet stated that the term had homophobic and rape culture origins.... The same day, Neera Tanden, a chief strategist on the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 United States Presidential Election did the same. Both were mocked for misunderstanding the term.

References were different in the old days. If you didn't get them, you had to wonder if you weren't in the know... and how badly out of the know you were. Today, you can instantly become in the know and form a judgment about how out of the know you were. In the case of corncob, it's mindbogglingly insubstantial, but I'm glad to be forewarned against making any precipitous rape-culture allegations.

"TSA to deploy more floppy-ear dogs because they're less scary than pointy-ear dogs."

The LA Times reports.

But TSA Administrator David Pekoske said... “We find the passenger acceptance of floppy-ear dogs is just better,” he said. “It presents just a little bit less of a concern. Doesn’t scare children.”

Had you ever noticed the floppy-ears/pointy-ears difference in scariness? I don't know about the ears per se — clearly a German Shepherd is scarier than a Labrador Retriever. But...



Come on!

AND: Consider the lop-eared cat...



Less scary than an up-eared cat? I think not!

"Now do : large female doctor pushing a stroller with a cat in it."

Link to tweet.

Beto O'Rourke's anti-Wall ad reframes the question around upscale American interests.

It's not about the longings of poverty-stricken outsiders anymore. Look!

pic.twitter.com/XONeh8HUf1

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) December 28, 2018

It's about the aesthetics of the environment, Big Bend National Park-type vistas of the Rio Grande, the seizing of property from Americans through eminent domain, the "exile" of American land on the Mexican side, and the sealing off of corridors used by animals.

It's like that ad were made precisely for me. Here's what I blogged in February 2016:

Why aren't we talking about the environmental impact of the wall Trump says he will build?

I raised the subject in the comments to the earlier post about the wall. I said: "Am I the only one who worries about the wall as aesthetically and ecologically troubling?" John Henry said:

Why aesthetically troubling? You have no idea yet what it will look like, do you? I suspect that in some placed it may be a wall, in others a fence, in others natural barriers. No wall is needed when the border is at the base of a 100' cliff, for example.

Ecologically troubling? You are the first person I have ever heard ask that. Could you elaborate?

I think you are the first person I've seen have trouble with the what the wall looks like, too.

I said that I was concerned about "a wall slicing through such a long huge length of" of America, "imping[ing] on nature so brutally" and that I worried about "the plants and animals that flow back and forth within those areas." I didn't remember hearing anyone else bring this up, but I had no trouble finding this Newsweek article from a few days ago: "THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER WALL." There's a photograph with the caption: "Javelina (Pecari tajacu) turn away after looking for 100 yards for a place to cross the U.S.-Mexico border fence near the San Pedro river corridor in Arizona in July 2008."...

ADDED: This is the greatest American presidential ad ever made:



Here's some of the competition. Beto O'Rourke is in the game, and you are a fool if you underestimate what he is doing with this ad. Right now is the time to take him seriously. I can see the impulse in the comments section is to deny the seriousness of the power of this message. You are losing right now.

One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

It's too *late* to wonder if O'Rourke is running, because he's already running. https://t.co/SKwrazTnMj

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 29, 2018

Twitter visibility.

This account's visibility on Twitter is down 50-70% in a month though supposed followers are up by several thousand. I can't explain it. Thanks for hanging in there and checking back! https://t.co/tWkSrBFB9k

— Sharyl Attkisson🕵️‍♂️ (@SharylAttkisson) December 29, 2018

"People are tired of having their compassion weaponized and used against them."

Says Glenn Reynolds (quoting something I wrote yesterday).

ADDED: The soundness of what I wrote yesterday is evidenced by Beto O'Rourke's brilliant shift to a new approach to attacking the the wall.

At the Friday Night Café...

... talk about whatever you like.

"Just in case everyone is getting too carried away with the apparent wonders of the computer age..."

"... Clifford Stoll is here with a warning in 'Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.' There may be roadblocks up ahead," cautions Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in a 1995 NYT book review, "Feeling Hornswoggled By the Computer Age," which I stumbled into — I kid you not — because I was searching for the word "hornswoggle" in the NYT archive. Hey, you have your research projects, and I have mine.

Anyway, I was up for reading and blogging the review because — 1995! I want to see how people were casting doubt on the internet in 1995. I remember the dubiousness about the internet in the early-to-mid 90s. (I even had a letter to the editor on the subject published in the NYT in 1993 — here.)

Back to Mr. Lehmann-Haupt:

As [Stoll] tells it, his misgivings began on a vacation, when he found himself on a Connecticut farm, "bathed in the cold glow of my cathode-ray tube, answering E-mail." A sense of disorientation set in, a disconnection from the physical world. He felt virtually unreal.

So he begins his book by deploring the lack of physical sensation in cyberspace. The game of Adventure is no substitute for actual spelunking, he reminds us. People won't shop by computer; they prefer real money and flesh-and-blood salespeople.

Ha ha ha.

Children need human teachers, not video screens. E-mail's all right when you've just got something to say, but E-mail's not right when you're trying to get people's attention; the Postal Service is more reliable, he insists, and far more forgiving of mistaken addresses. Besides, real letters have stamps on them, and unique handwriting, which has declined because of computers, like everyone's prose style despite the belief that computers would inspire better writing. And a compact disk is no substitute for a book. 

A compact disc? I think he's talking about music.

Goaded by this enmity toward the abstractness of computing, Mr. Stoll proceeds to a general attack on hardware, software and their various interfaces....  In the electronic library of the future, you won't be able to browse through the stacks, although, he adds, given the immensity of the task, the prospect of digitizing all books is probably beyond realization. The flow of bits can be surprisingly slow under certain circumstances. Even the dream of video on demand is unrealizable, he writes. "It's a surprisingly tough engineering job, keeping a thousand movies ready for instant retrieval."...

Look out for The Past's Future. It's terrible!

I'm surprised by the readers of The Washington Post — they're so Trumpian on illegal immigration.

I'm reading "Father whose son died in custody knew bringing him would ease entry into U.S." in The Washington Post.

Agustin Gomez Perez was 47 and in debt, and that path would only deepen his obligations.... He and his wife chose 8-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo for the journey because he was one of three sons, and the couple had only one daughter together....

Federal officials say they must screen migrants before releasing them, and have been overwhelmed by a record surge of adults crossing with children....

Smugglers often charge less than half the price if a child goes along, knowing that migrants can turn themselves in to border agents and will soon be released....

Gomez Perez was in debt from a long-unpaid electric bill and other expenses. Add in the smuggler’s fee, and he owed more than $6,500. He expected that he’d pay it off after working in the United States....

[The sister] said her father told her Felipe suddenly worsened. His “stomach hurt, that he couldn’t breathe.” “My father started to cry,” she said, recalling his words. “It can’t be. Don’t abandon me here. We have a dream to fulfill.”...

She said the family would ask the U.S. government for two things: Return Felipe’s body so that they can bury him in Guatemala, and let his father work in the United States so that “my brother’s death won’t be in vain.”

I've excerpted the parts of the article that might make a reader want to blame the father. Was the boy exploited? Was he regarded as expendable? There's plenty else in the article that might make you want to blame the U.S. government (mainly for not giving quicker medical treatments). I would also think many readers would mostly feel sad that a boy died and bemoan poverty generally. So I was surprised at how harsh the comments were against the father. I didn't expect this at The Washington Post. This is the most liked comment:

This child's siblings in Guatemala are alive and well. The child was dragged to the US using money that could have paid the father's overdue electric bill, which is not a reason to grant asylum.

That is responded to by another well-liked comment:

Thank you. I am liberal myself but I get tired of people who shut off their critical thinking when it comes to brown people. This guy made a spectacularly risky decision, and his child paid the price. It's on his head. This is, of course, on the assumption that the U.S. wasn't negligent in the kid's care - which is certainly possible. Nonetheless it's his father who endangered him.

The second most well liked comment is:

This is human trafficking with children being used as pawns. Our charity is being abused. We're being scammed.

A well-liked response to that is:

The father refused medical treatment. And dragging that kid all those miles is child abuse. I blame the father and the smugglers.

The third most well-liked comment is:

As much as I disagree with Trump on pretty much everything, you can not pin that on the US government. It is the parents who endanger their children bringing them on a hazardous trip. Just as you cannot hold Europe responsible for the drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. That's confusing cause and effect.

Also:

If we are responsible for the child's death it is because past administrations created the expectation that children are the golden ticket at the border.

And:

So there was no asylum claim. The kid was literally a human shield.

Reading these comments, I believe the American culture has changed radically since the fall of 2016, when Trump was painted as a racist for saying the situation at the border had to change. I think, for all the press resistance to Trump's fight against illegal immigration, minds have changed. It seems that Democrats are no longer using the idea that it's racist and hateful to want to control immigration. I feel there's been much less talk about the suffering of the children, but when a child dies, like this poor boy, it will be reported, and it gives us an opportunity to see how Americans are reacting to a sad story about a child. I'm amazed at the reaction in The Washington Post. It's so Trumpian!

Strange blue light.

"A transformer fire in Queens sent an eerie blue light flooding the nighttime sky Thursday night as electricity flickered in homes and an airport was plunged into darkness."

Finishing this post I thought I might have a tag for "strangeness." Here are the suggestions I saw as I started to type the word:



So I could see that I don't have a "strangeness" tag (or "label" as Blogger calls it), but I do have 2 tags for "Dr. Strangelove" (the second one created after the software started blocking apostrophes in the tags). And I see the old "written strangely early in the morning" tag. I don't think of using that anymore, because I'm often up and posting before 5.

"We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall..."

"...  & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with. Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!"

Tweets Trump this morning.

And here's a related tweet I'm noticing this morning:

This is outrageous. Federal employees don’t go to work wearing red or blue jerseys. They’re public servants. And the President is treating them like poker chips at one of his failed casinos. https://t.co/bxkt67E9Bq

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) December 27, 2018

"[S]uch gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word."

Writes the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal.

They are talking about the first 2 paragraphs of the Washington Post's report on Trump's trip to Iraq:

President Trump touched down Wednesday in Iraq in his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief, a week after announcing a victory over the Islamic State that his own Pentagon and State Department days earlier said remained incomplete.

The president’s visit to Al Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, which was shrouded in secrecy, follows months of public pressure for him to spend time with troops deployed to conflicts in the Middle East and punctuates the biggest week of turmoil the Pentagon has faced during his presidency.

In the words of the WSJ: "[C]an anyone reading those opening two sentences wonder why millions of Americans believe Donald Trump when he tells them that he can’t get a fair shake from the press?"

I'll just add that I can barely read the news these days (and I absolutely cannot watch it on TV). The negativity toward Trump is so relentless, cluttering up everything. It's crying wolf times a thousand. If anything is worth taking seriously, I'm afraid I won't be able to notice.

Must everything be about Trump?

Here's a story in The Washington Post, "2018 will be the first year with no violent tornadoes in the United States." A "violent tornado" is at the EF4 or EF5 level, and the modern record-keeping began in 1950, so this is interesting good news. There's nothing in the article about global warming or climate change to make the good news seem more like bad news. We're told there are "many causes" for the lack of violent tornados, but the only one mentioned is the unusually high pressure last spring.

Trump arrived first from someone who was trying to mock the way other people always bring in Trump:

AIEEE!!!!

Global warming is destroying our violent tornados! Oh the humanity!

(Maybe it's Trump's fault, too.)

That guy gets a grim talking-to:

I see from this comment that you are as dull and childish as I thought from a different series of comments. Again you demonstrate the regressive's inability to tell make believe from reality. Child, you cannot criticize others for something that does not exist (duh!). The only reference here to climate change or your savior is in your imagination. Intellectually, you are still in diapers.

The first commenter replied:

Sorry. I'm just trying to fit in at Post-land, where everything is the fault of global warming, Donald Trump, or both.

Speaking of childish and on the anti-Trump front, CadetBoneSpurs wrote:

There has been a F-5 (highest level on the Fart scale) in DC all year.

ADDED: Here's another example from The Washington Post: "More science than you think is retracted. Even more should be." It is what the headline suggests, an article about published scientific papers that have to be retracted. It's not about Trump in any way. But in the comments, we get:

Can you imagine Fox News or Trump ever retracting anything? I can't.

I've seen the Post do it but Trump say he was wrong? No way...

God, Donny, can never be wrong for he is the second coming. I do not know however what sewer he is coming from.

A commenter gets a NYT obituary — because he commented in limerick form in the NYT 13,000 times...

... and as you might guess, many of the comments on the obituary — "Larry Eisenberg, 99, Dead; His Limericks Were Very Well Read" — are in limerick form.

Here's one of the limericks Eisenberg wrote. This is from 2016, after the election:

A mauler, a grabber, abuser,
A do whatever you chooser
Non-thinker, non-reader,
A spoiled-children breeder
An every trick-in-the-book user.