At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

"The President of the United States is impeachable at any time during his continuance in office."

Wrote James Madison in The Federalist Papers, Number 39.

Will Wilkinson, cancelled for tweeting, "If Biden really wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence."

If cancelling is something that is going to be done, why should Will Wilkinson be an exception? It's got to be that the attempted cancellation of Will Wilkinson reverses the course of cancel culture. 

I'm reading "Cancel Culture Comes for Will Wilkinson/The Niskanen Center fired a senior staffer for tweeting an offensive joke about Mike Pence, and hypocrisies abound" by Robby Soave (at Reason). 

Wilkinson apologized, describing his tweet as a lapse in judgment. "It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like a call for violence," said Wilkinson. "That's always wrong, even as a joke." ...

And thus a noted doubter [that cancel culture exists] has been canceled for a problematic tweet—ironic, but also regrettable, in my view. 

Both the Niskanen Center and The New York Times are private organizations and free to associate with whomever they wish, of course; a think tank that intends to influence public policy by lobbying legislators may find it inconvenient to employ someone who threatened violence against Mike Pence, even in jest.... 

By the way, I once did a Bloggingheads episode with Will Wilkinson, but I don't remember it, and now the video won't play. Here's the audio. It was July 2010, and the topics included: "Re: Shirley Sherrod, Ann defends taking things out of context" — remember Shirley Sherrod? — "Do we deserve to know what was on Journolist?," "Are ordinary people becoming savvier media consumers?," and "Ann’s and Will’s tips for summer road trips."  The road trips bit begins around the 1-hour mark.

"A son of European immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn and never went to college, Mr. King began as a local radio interviewer and sportscaster in Florida in the 1950s and ’60s, rose to prominence..."

"... with an all-night coast-to-coast radio call-in show starting in 1978, and from 1985 to 2010 anchored CNN’s highest-rated, longest-running program, reaching millions across America and around the world. With the folksy personality of a Bensonhurst schmoozer, Mr. King interviewed an estimated 50,000 people of every imaginable persuasion and claim to fame — every president since Richard M. Nixon, world leaders, royalty, religious and business figures, crime and disaster victims, pundits, swindlers, 'experts' on U.F.O.s and paranormal phenomena, and untold hosts of idiosyncratic and insomniac telephone callers.... His personal life was the stuff of supermarket tabloids — married eight times to seven women; a chronic gambler who declared bankruptcy twice; arrested on a fraud charge that derailed his career for years; and a bundle of contradictions who never quite got over his own success but gushed, star-struck, over other celebrities, exclaiming, 'Great!' 'Terrific!' 'Gee whiz!' He made no claim to being a journalist... he rarely asked anyone, let alone a politician or policy maker, a tough or technical question, preferring gentle prods to get guests to say interesting things about themselves. To former President Nixon: 'When you drive by the Watergate, do you feel weird?' To former President Ronald Reagan: 'Is it, for you, frustrating to not remember something?' To Donald J. Trump, when he was still best known as a real estate mogul: 'Does it have to be buildings?' He bragged that he almost never prepared for an interview. If his guest was an author promoting a book, he did not read it but asked simply, 'What’s it about?' or 'Why did you write this?'"

From "Larry King, Breezy Interviewer of the Famous and Infamous, Dies at 87" (NYT).

Skaters on Lake Mendota at sunrise. Temperature 8°.

I wasn't skating. Just running. Was it terribly cold? Really — no. It's crisp and lovely. There's so much difference between running and walking. 

"We all want to put this awful chapter in our nation’s history behind us. But healing and unity will only come if there is truth and accountability."

Said Chuck Schumer, quoted in "Schumer agrees to two-week delay of Trump’s impeachment trial/The ex-president's second trial is now set to begin the week of Feb. 8" (Politico). 

Is there truth in those sentences? 

"We all want to put this awful chapter in our nation’s history behind us." 

Who is "we"? The Senators or the people? I don't think he'd say "All we Senators want to put this awful chapter in our nation’s history behind us." That would be enraging. More than 74 million people voted for Trump, and the point of the impeachment, now that he is out of office, is to disqualify him from running for office again — to deprive the people of the option of ever voting for him. It's flatly wrong to assert that we all want Trump powerfully and absolutely excluded from electoral politics.

But what is "this awful chapter" that we are told we all want "to put... behind us"? The past is always behind us (assuming you use the conventional metaphor that time is a walk and we're facing forward), but there's some fuzzy idea of doing something to the past that makes it more behind us — resolved somehow or less accessible. But if the point of the trial is to bar Trump from running for office, Schumer is talking about manipulating the future, not alienating us from the past. 

What is the "awful chapter"? Is it the January 6th attack on the Capitol or is it the entire Trump presidency? We all deplore Trump and want to sever him from our understanding of ourselves? But obviously we don't all want that. Biden enters the presidency with a poll — from Rasmussen — that has the exact same percentages of approval and disapproval that Trump had on his last day — 48% approve, 45% disapprove. 

Of course, Schumer is explaining waiting until February 8th. The next sentence is: 

"But healing and unity will only come if there is truth and accountability." 

The implication is that by spending 2 weeks prepping for trial — after the House voted without taking any time at all — we'll get a proceeding that will deliver "truth and accountability." Another way to read that sentence is that there will never be healing and unity, because it will only come if there is truth and accountability, and that's not going to happen. Who believes the 2 weeks will be used to ensure that the trial is centered on the truth? 

And isn't the delay designed to give President Biden a little time to establish himself in the presidential role, to bask in the positive light the media are shining on him, before the harsh spotlight returns to Trump and it's all about "this awful chapter"?

Contempt fail: "Wasn't just a Trump thing."

Wasn't just a trump thing. pic.twitter.com/aA6K4bnAV7

— jospf (@cncnntus) January 21, 2021

"Mitch said to me he wants Trump gone. It is in his political interest to have him gone. It is in the GOP interest to have him gone. The question is, do we get there?"

Said "one Republican member of Congress," quoted in "McConnell privately says he wants Trump gone as Republicans quietly lobby him to convict" (CNN). 

The ongoing Republican whisper campaign, according to more than a dozen sources who spoke to CNN, is based on a shared belief that a successful conviction is critical for the future of the Republican party. Multiple sources describe this moment as a reckoning for the party.... 

"Trump created a cult of personality that is hard to dismantle," said a former senior Republican official. "Conviction could do that."

It could. But it could also do something else. I'm trying to picture what Trump's defense will look like and how people will react to it. "Mitch said to me he wants Trump gone," but Trump is already gone. How "gone" do you need to render him? A big show of crushing someone beyond any real need can make onlookers side with him.

ADDED QUESTIONS:

1. Is "a successful conviction... critical for the future of the Republican party"? If the answer isn't "yes," then why would there be a "shared belief that a successful conviction is critical for the future of the Republican party"? Are you dubious that this "shared belief" exists?

2. How many of these "dozen sources" are Republicans? How many are members of Congress? At least one — unless CNN is wrong — is a "Republican member of Congress," but I'll bet he's not a Senator, or CNN would have said so. It seems likely that not one of the sources is a Republican Senator.

3. A successful conviction might be "critical for the future of the Republican party," but is an unsuccessful effort to seek a conviction more useful to the Republican party than avoiding the trial on a procedural ground?

4. What do you mean by "Republican party"? These people who are saying "a successful conviction is critical for the future of the Republican party" — if they exist — aren't they elite insiders talking about preserving their hold on a party that chose Trump rather than one of them? How will the trial reach out to Trump supporters as opposed to alienating them?

"As of 1:15 p.m. on January 22, The Washington Post has updated its website and URLs to restore the original version of the Kamala Harris profile detailed in Reason's post, below."

"'We should have kept both versions of the story on the Post's site (the original and updated one), rather than redirecting to the updated version,' Kris Coratti, the Post's vice president for communications, told Reason in a statement on Friday. 'We have now done that, and you will see the link to the original at the top of the updated version.' Rason has updated the headline of this story to reflect those changes. The rest of the story remains unaltered."

From "The Washington Post Tried To Memory-Hole Kamala Harris' Bad Joke About Inmates Begging for Food and Water/At a time when legacy publications are increasingly seen as playing for one political 'team' or the other, this type of editorial decision will not do anything to fix that perception" (Reason).

Do the math.

Subheadline in the NYT: "Each additional daily cup of coffee was associated with a 1 percent decrease in the risk of prostate cancer." 

Top-rated comment: "Based on the NYT's excellent reporting, I will immediately begin drinking 100 cups per day and reduce my prostate cancer risk to 0%. What could go wrong?" 

The subheadline is ridiculous for reasons expressed in the comment, but the commenter is doing the math wrong. After each additional cup of coffee — in the mad logic of the subheadline — you have 99% of what you had before. Drink a million cups of coffee, and you still won't get to zero, just 99% of what you had before that last cup.

It's the Zeno's paradox of prostate cancer.

"CNN glowed almost as brightly about the event as a state media would have.... Biden’s perfectly fine if pedestrian speech earned instant accolades..."

"... from Wolf Blitzer, who jibbered that Biden had put 'his soul into his first address.'...  MSNBC worked from the same script, going gaga for not just Lady Gaga but the whole schmear. At day’s end, Rachel Maddow confessed to having worked her way through an entire box of Kleenex during the festivities and Joy Reid gushed like a partisan about the event.... The Washington Post got with the program, giving Biden credit for not waiting 'long to begin staffing up his administration, swearing in top White House aides,' as if previous incoming presidents had dilly-dallied about taking the reins. The New York Times swallowed whole the recent myth-making that has transformed Biden from a shifty politician into a statesman, conveying his call for civility and unity and portraying him as a disciplined, restrained character when anybody who has studied his career knows he’s anything but.... [B]y going overboard for Biden, the press was guilty of 1) hyping Joe; 2) inflating expectations to a volume he can’t possibly fulfill and 3) giving viewers and readers a reason to suspect if not distrust the gleaming Biden coverage. In an era when large portions of Americans think mainstream media is a tool of the left, a tad less bootlicking could help build trust among media skeptics.... [M]aybe we could embed a house cynic on each network and newspaper to police or at least tamp down the irrational exuberance that rains down on most inaugurations."

From "How About a Little Sobriety, Please?/At a time when large portions of the country think mainstream media is a tool of the left, perhaps it’s time to tone down the Biden adulation" by Jack Shafer (Politico).

Notice that he's only arguing about how to do propaganda well. If it worked in the stupidly gaga form we saw on Inauguration Day, he'd be okay with it.

"Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.... typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences...."

"Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life.... Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world."

From "Truth," a Wikipedia article I stumbled upon, via "The McNamara Fallacy," as I was writing the last post, which ended with my saying I needed to start this new post, because "Truth" converged with something I've been planning to write about.

But first, here is "Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy":

Now, here's the thing I'd been meaning to write about: "Joe Biden’s Love Letter to the Truth" by Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. That's about the inauguration address. It so absurd to say "the Truth" while gushing. 

And "Love Letter"? I believe that politicians position themselves somewhere in relationship to the truth, but not that they do it out of love. But then, not all love letters are sincere. Nor are all New Yorker columns, is it even true that Biden's speech professed love for the truth?

Biden spoke of unity, of national reconciliation, and also—and perhaps most important of all—of the need for leaders “to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”... 

[I]t was his love letter to the role of truth in a free society that rang loudest to me during his twenty-minute speech, which took place under a sunny Washington sky....

Ha ha. That reminds me of the lesson in spotting propaganda that I received in my high school class — a class where we were required to subscribe to and read The New York Times. The object of study was a news report on Nixon's inauguration. There was a description of the "gloomy drizzle" of the day....

... and here's how the NYT covered the weather on John F. Kennedy's inaugural day, which the teacher must have reported on from memory:

Isn't that hilarious?! I never forgot that lesson, the seed, perhaps, of 80% of my blogging. 

Must I go back to Susan Glasser, or can I simply end with that light-hearted lesson, which I will now place in the #1 position on my ranking of Things I Learned in School?

I'll just quote Glasser's last line:

Never have the old patriotic clichés about America sounded so good. May their words matter and their aspirations turn into reality. Is this what optimism feels like?

But old patriotic clichés, aspirations, and optimism are not truth — "the property of being in accord with fact or reality." Glasser loathes Trump, but Trump was full of old patriotic clichés, aspirations, and optimism are not truth. They just sounded bad to her when they came from Trump. It sounds good coming from Biden because she's rid of Trump and is in the mood to feel optimistic. 

The snow glistens for the President of your heart.

"Fixating on the R number isn’t real science/The pandemic response should be based on judgment, not a figure that’s only an educated guess."

Writes Ed Conway at The London Times. 

Science is a discipline predicated on constant doubt and reassessment and contemplating the evidence through alternate prisms...Taking a number, stripping it of context and uncertainty and using it to justify policy is something else altogether. 

The economist Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”, a kind of bastardisation of science which amounted to “the pretence of knowledge”. He was writing in the mid-20th century about socialist governments attempting to engineer economic planning by assuming complex society could be distilled into a few key metrics, but since then scientism has only grown. 

It came of age with Robert McNamara, US secretary of defence under Kennedy, whose data obsession meant the White House paid far more attention to the body count in Vietnam than more subjective questions like: have we any chance of winning this war? But, as the American historian Jerry Muller wrote in The Tyranny of Metrics, McNamara was only bringing to the Oval Office what had long been the mantra at business schools and management consultancies: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”...

Wikipedia has an article, "The McNamara Fallacy." It features this quote from Daniel Yankelovich, "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business" (1972):

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. 

That article has a great "See also" list: Allegory of the cave. Goodhart's law, Newton's flaming laser sword, Occam's razor, Streetlight effect, Truth, Verificationism, Verisimilitude. I can't read — or even link — all of that right now, but I am interested in Newton's Flaming Laser Sword:

In its weakest form it says that we should not dispute propositions unless they can be shown by precise logic and/or mathematics to have observable consequences. In its strongest form it demands a list of observable consequences and a formal demonstration that they are indeed consequences of the proposition claimed.

And who even thought about looking up "Truth" in Wikipedia? But that's a subject for a separate post, because it charmingly converges with something else I've been planning to blog about.

Ella Emhoff, the style icon.

I totally approve. The best of the inauguration (Daily Mail).

So grimly fun and playfully in-your-face. I feel resonance with the old hippie movement.

Emhoff is a design student at Parsons so it must be presumed that this is all quite intentional, not just something she geekily stumbled into. Ah, yes:

Speaking to Vogue, Ella, who is in her final year at the Parsons School of Design in New York, explained how she had the bespoke look made. 'My mood board was very “little girl,” in a sense, a lot of scalloped collars and big silhouette shoulders and small buttons. 'I was going for something girlier, to embrace my feminine side — especially after that suit that I felt so great in — because, like, how many times do you prepare yourself to attend an inauguration? This momentous of an event deserves a momentous outfit,' she said.

She's studying textiles, specifically knitwear, and wants to have her own knitwear business. Great! I wish her big success.

Here's her Instagram page, for lots more pictures. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ella emhoff (@ellaemhoff)

The Bidenification of the Oval Office.

 

And now I have the answer to the question we had when we watched him sign those executive orders on Day 1: Who's that a bust of in the most prominent place right behind the desk, looming amongst the family photographs?

Answer: Cesar Chavez!

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.