Sunrise — 7:26, 7:37.

"Climate change is a serious problem and tourism contributes a lot to it, but I don’t want to be flight-shamed out of my travels..."

"... because I think travel is a powerful force for peace and stability on this planet. So my company has a self-imposed carbon tax of $30 per person we take to Europe. In 2019, we gave $1 million to a portfolio of organizations that are fighting climate change. We gave half that amount in 2020, even though we stopped bringing people to Europe after the pandemic hit. It’s nothing heroic. It’s just the ethical thing to do."

 
Says Rick Steves, quoted in "Rick Steves on the Return of Travel and Why It Matters/The travel writer and TV personality is back in Europe, planning itineraries for next year. Travel, he says, can help us understand the world. Here’s how he recommends doing it" (NYT).

I say: What bullshit! He's got to know it's bullshit. It's not just nothing heroic, it's virtually nothing. He's got a business he wants to keep going, and he doesn't want to be "flight-shamed." Well, too bad. No one wants to give anything up. If you actually believe "Climate change is a serious problem and tourism contributes a lot to it" and you continue to do it and to actively facilitate others doing it, you should be ashamed! The NYT has this huge article about Steves, and the NYT profits from travel industry ads. It's absolutely ludicrous to purport to be taking climate change seriously.

And "travel is a powerful force for peace and stability on this planet" — is he a beauty pageant contestant? He should be shamed not only for his travel but also for his disgustingly lame self-justification. I've seen tourists roaming the globe. They are not stabilizing it. It would be easier to argue that they are destabilizing it. Do you have tourists who come to your town? If so, are they bringing peace and stability? If you like what they are doing, is it for any reason other than that they are dropping money before they get the hell out?

"According to a survey released Thursday by Kaiser Family Foundation, scarcely one in three parents will permit their children in this newly eligible age group to be vaccinated immediately."

"Two-thirds were either reluctant or adamantly opposed. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that 42 percent of parents of these children said they were unlikely to have their children vaccinated.... This vaccine dilemma occurs at a turbulent cultural moment for parents of young children, who are often judged harshly on social media for their decisions. The choice can appear freighted with political affiliation. A decision can signify, intentionally or not, compassion or disregard for others and a willingness to follow or ignore advice from their pediatrician.... At heart, the decision is about which unknown — Covid or the vaccine — parents fear more.... The argument that vaccinating children contributes to the community’s overall health does not get much traction.... Parents’ paramount focus is the well-being of their own child. Although health officials contend an important reason to vaccinate is to protect the child, some parents said they believed that their healthy children would be injected with a novel vaccine largely to safeguard older adults, who had already lived full lives.... Parents are siloing themselves with like-minded friends, which reinforces their thinking.... ... Abby Cooper of Bergen County, N.J., who is eager to get her five children vaccinated... has friends who refuse. 'Their kids are going to school with my kids and putting them at risk for no reason. It’s very upsetting. So, sadly, I’ve lost friends over this.'"

From "Covid Shots Are a Go for Children, but Parents Are Reluctant to Consent/Vaccinating 5- to 11-year-olds could be a big step toward returning to normal life in the U.S., but even parents who got the shot are worried about how it might affect their kids" by Jan Hoffman (NYT).

If "parents’ paramount focus is the well-being of their own child," then why is the choice seemingly "freighted with political affiliation"?

2 possible answers spring to mind:

1. Parents only openly discuss their decision if it accords with what they believe aligns with their politics. Thus, Democrats, wanting to appear supportive of the vaccine, will kept quiet about their individual decision against vaccinating their children, but Republicans who make the same anti-vaccine decision will go ahead and talk about it. That is, the truth is in the first statement only: "parents’ paramount focus is the well-being of their own child."

2. Parents believe they are individually judging the benefits to their own child, but their judgment is skewed by their political affiliation, so when the various factors are weighed, the sense of belonging to a political party causes the balance to come out the way that fits what they see people on their side doing.

"Relax, everybody, this is comedy. Everybody can be the butt of a joke. And why should it be that if we joke about you, it’s sacrilege?"

"You sit in the audience and laugh at jokes about everybody else. If we make a joke about trans [people] or gays, suddenly it’s sacrilege. And that’s what I got from that. I don’t see what’s wrong with that, with all due respect. I see it as nothing but a man saying publicly, 'This is what I do.' And if you can’t understand that this is comedy coming at you, then don’t live in a society that’s multicultural."

Said Garrett Morris, calling Dave Chappelle's show, "The Closer," "brilliant," in an interview at Hollywood Reporter. 

The interviewer says, "The reason he cited for walking away from Comedy Central is that he did a blackface sketch, and there was a white guy laughing at it too hard. And it made him uncomfortable. He was like, 'People are not understanding what I mean.' Now it seems he’s not understanding what trans people mean."

Morris's response:

"After years of hearing family members complain about sharing bedrooms in communal college dorms, Munger realized it was possible to give people their own sleeping space by sacrificing the rooms’ natural light."

"'I’m not anti-architecture,' [billionaire Charlie Munger] said. 'I just love it in a different way.'... [The architect Dennis] McFadden wrote that 'an ample body of documented evidence shows that interior environments with access to natural light, air and views to nature improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants. The Munger Hall design ignores this evidence and seems to take the position that it doesn’t matter'...."

From "Two doors, few windows and 4,500 students: Architect quits over billionaire’s mega dorm" (WaPo).

We talked about this architecture dispute here yesterday, but I'm blogging again because of the crucial argument in favor of "Charlie's vision" that was missing from the CNN article I used for that piece. That is: The student's interest in having a room of one's own, rather than the usual college experience of a roommate. I'd thought the vision was more about forcing people out into common areas, but now I'm seeing it's also about having true privacy when you are in your private space. 

A crucial factor might be whether the room is truly soundproof. Let's assume it is, that when you're in your little space you've got full personal privacy. Now answer the survey:

 

You must pick one for your college dorm experience:

A room with no window and no roommate.

A room with a window and a roommate.

 

pollcode.com free polls

For the annals of 70-year-old women.

"Alex Honnold’s mother breaks El Capitan record of her own — on her 70th birthday" (London Times).

“Climbing El Cap at 70 takes its toll, physically, mentally, emotionally,” [Dierdre Wolownick] wrote on her blog. “I’m not ‘down’ yet. Not sure I ever will be, completely.”

The ordeal began with a difficult two-hour hike through the woods, which saw her “grabbing small trees and edges of boulders” to heave herself up. She then navigated a boulder-filled river bed before climbing ropes fastened to the wall, where “only your core strength keeps you vertical as you ascend.”

The final third of the trek stretched “for what seems like miles” Wolownick wrote. “Just walk steeply uphill, endlessly, grabbing whatever tiny edges you can find.”...

ADDED: 70 is precisely my age, and I take pride in my physical accomplishments — doing the "sunrise run" (1.6 miles) and a few other things (intermediate-level mountain biking, beginner-level cross-country skiing, hikes in the 4-5 mile range, Pilates) — but I enjoy having superior examples to look up to. Really enjoyed reading about Dierdre Wolownick.

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A post shared by Dierdre Wolownick (@dierdre_wolownick_honnold)

"The Turkish government said this week that it has opened deportation proceedings against at least seven Syrian nationals accused of eating bananas in a 'provocative' way while participating in a TikTok video challenge..."

"... in a move that underscores rising hostility toward Syrians in a country with a reputation for being welcoming to refugees. The challenge was inspired by an Oct. 17 encounter on the streets of Istanbul that was captured on video, during which a man complained that he could not afford bananas, a staple that has fallen out of the reach of many consumers amid a poor economy. Turning to a female Syrian student, he alleged that refugees from Syria were buying the fruit by the 'kilos,' a reference to false rumors that displaced people were living in luxury off Turkish taxpayer largesse. In response, Syrians in Turkey and elsewhere posted videos of themselves eating bananas to poke fun at the incident. In one video, a group of young Syrians sat around the room, chuckling as they ate their fruit."

 
WaPo reports.

Skimming that, I got confused and thought the "provocative" banana-eating was something like this. You don't really need to look at that to know what it is. You know what it is. 

But it was just people engaged in typical banana-eating, like you see in that "one video" linked above. I experienced secondary confusion thinking the style — American style? — of taking a series of bites from the whole banana looks obscene in some countries. But no, it was just showing off that they had bananas and that it was absurd to think of access to bananas as a mark of a life of luxury.

"Dark academia is a broader subculture... think Gothic architecture, candlelit libraries, and dark film photos placed next to handwritten poetry on a vintage table."

"The dark academia fashion trend pulls directly from this aesthetic, both of which reference everything from Harry Potter to Hellenistic period art, explains stylist Rebecca Dennett. Dennett describes the trend as both 'deeply gothic and preppy,' with an emphasis on duller and darker color palettes. Stylist Sarah Slutsky agrees, adding that the style can be described as a 'marriage of prep school uniforms, androgyny and also traditional professionalism skewed romantic.' TikTok influencer and content creator Dana Hasson notes that the trend combines older fashion inspirations and modern styling for a chic and elegant look. A key element to dark academia is vintage clothing and thrift store dressing, explains Dennett, which makes it 'more affordable and accessible for the younger generation who have started this trend.'" 

CNN reports on something I had to convince myself was not a joke. 

There seems to be a fashion trend of wearing aggressively ordinary clothing. It's basically preppy style, declared fashionable, once again. I saw it the first time around in the 70s. Here, it seems more embedded in actually studying and reading good literature, spending time in libraries or having the feeling of yourself being the sort of person who would do such things. And it seems to have to do with the rejection of modernism and minimalism.

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Dark Academia":

The Lincoln Project inserts itself into the Virginia gubernatorial race by sending 5 demonstrators with tiki torches to a Glenn Youngkin rally.

1. Here's how the Washington Post puts it: "A group of people carrying tiki torches outside Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s tour bus in Charlottesville on Friday, which caused a stir on social media and led both political parties to blame the other for the stunt, turned out to be organized by the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group."

2. Is the Lincoln Project really/still a Republican group?

3. Did the Lincoln Project hope to keep its role secret until after the election and, if so, did it assume that the finger-pointing would hurt Youngkin more than McAuliffe? 

4. The candidates and their supporters immediately started blaming each other, and that could be inconclusive — just chaos. I think chaos — with racists in the center of the controversy — would at least shake things up and benefit McAuliffe, who's been failing lately and seeming desperate as polls have shifted toward Youngkin. But that's also a reason to implicate McAuliffe in what would be understood as a false-flag dirty trick.

5. But the Lincoln Project stepped forward and rescued McAuliffe by announcing that it was their dirty trick. And now we have to talk about them. They'd come into disrepute lately, and who knows who they really are now? But how mind-bending for them to take the spotlight in the last weekend before this crucial election! Did they decide on their own that this would be appropriate — a really strained decision — to forefront virulent racism? Or did they consult with McAuliffe? Does campaign finance law forbid them from engaging in that level of coordination?

6. Now that the Lincoln Project has taken responsibility, does that let the candidate they intended to help off the hook? You can't control what your supporters do, and this question parallels whether Trump should be responsible for the openly expressed racism of the original tiki-torch marchers in Charlottesville. But I see that Philip Klein at The National Review is saying "McAuliffe Should Be Held Responsible for Tiki Torch Stunt, Because His Campaign Thinks Candidates Are Responsible for Supporters."

7. Klein raises a very basic question that had occurred to me: Is the Lincoln project telling the truth now? The stunt itself was deceptive, so how do we know this isn't a new form of deception — "taking the heat off of somebody else given the stunt epically backfired"? I would note that there are 5 human beings who are easily identifiable, the demonstrators. Why did they do it? How much were they paid? What were they told? Is anyone talking to them?

8. Klein contends that McAuliffe is responsible even if the Lincoln Project did the whole thing independently because "the McAuliffe campaign pounced":

One McAuliffe spokesperson, Christina Freundlich, referenced the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and said, "this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are."Another McAuliffe spokesperson, Jen Goodman, claimed the image of the fake Youngkin supporters was “disgusting and disqualifying.”

9.  It becomes very easy to take that "disgusting and disqualifying" and aim it back at McAuliffe, and that is how Philip Klein ends his piece. It is "disgusting and disqualifying" to snap up whatever's available to make everything about race, and the McAuliffe campaign showed that instinct. Everybody uses everything that can be used these days, and they often have to work pretty hard to show that things are really about race — that's the Critical Race Theory method. But this thing was blatantly racial. 

10. I mean those 5 demonstrators were blatantly racial. The leap was to say "this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are." Those 5 people are (posing as) racists and what it means — in the view of at least one McAuliffe spokesperson — is that all of Youngkin supporters are racists. That readiness to besmirch the entire group — that's the problem. Ironically, it's the methodology of racists.

These men approached @GlennYoungkin’s bus as it pulled up saying what sounded like, “We’re all in for Glenn.” Here they are standing in front of the bus as his campaign event at Guadalajara started.@NBC29 pic.twitter.com/l681ejyBjc

— Elizabeth Holmes (@holmes_reports) October 29, 2021

"In his October 25 resignation letter... Dennis McFadden ― a well-respected Southern California architect with 15 years on the committee ― goes scorched earth on the radical new building concept..."

"... which calls for an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms. The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.... McFadden disagreed sharply with what the university has described as 'Charlie’s Vision'... ... '[T]he "vision" of a single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.'... The project is utterly detached from its physical setting, McFadden goes on, and has no relationship to UCSB’s 'spectacular coastal location.' It is also out of place with the scale and texture of the rest of campus, he said, 'an alien world parked at the corner of the campus, not an integrally related extension of it.'"

The Santa Barbara Independent reports.

Elsewhere, the same newspaper explains that the windowless rooms will have "artificial windows modeled after portholes on Disney cruise ships."

I see the Disney porthole combines camera views of the spaces around the outside of the ship with images of Disney characters — such as Aladdin flying on his magic carpet — popping up intermittently, maybe every 20 minutes or so:

 

So I'm thinking the Munger fake windows could have views of UCSB's spectacular coastal location and — popping up intermittently — a professor looking like he's pressing his nose up against the glass.

But, really... what do you think of the "social and psychological experiment" known as "Charlie’s Vision"? People sleep in those inside staterooms on cruise ships. If you're committed to using your room just as a place to sleep and to store your things and you'd like for yourself and others to be forced out into the common areas, it might work well!

"But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious."

"It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence. Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. 'The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,' [Buta] Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, 'He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.' The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone 'identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.'"

From "The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT).

I've avoided talking about this case until now — despite a lot of pushing from my commenters — and this is why. It was obvious to me that we did not have a good enough statement of the facts. People were making assumptions that nudged this case into serving as a great example of something they were worried about — that males would fake transgender status to victimize women and girls in bathrooms. 

"Across the country, pollsters seemed to systematically undercount GOP support [in 2020], despite the fact that they were trying very hard, after some issues in 2016, not to do that."

"But with the political world entirely focused on Virginia, looking to glean lessons about the state of the national parties, the fate of Biden’s agenda, and Americans’ hope for the future, the pollsters — the people who give us a sense of what to expect in elections — are offering a new round of projections without ever having quite figured out what went wrong last year...  In talking to a range of nonpartisan and party-affiliated pollsters in recent weeks, I found that many dismissed, but laughed nervously about, the least scientifically sound idea of all, which unfortunately would have looked on the surface like a fix in 2020: just artificially slapping four extra points of support on Trump’s side. When Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth University poll, explored his data earlier this year, he told me, he explored whether there was 'any way I could have modeled my electorate on anything other than arbitrary guesses that would have gotten me closer to the endpoint. And the answer was basically no. If I had the ability to jump ahead in time and know exactly which voters that spoke to me were going to show up to vote, we still would have been off with the Trump vote share.'...  The likely problem, in short, is that [pollsters] simply aren’t reaching a significant number of voters activated by Trump.... And if you aren’t in any kind of contact with a voter, it’s essentially impossible to figure out what’s motivating him or her, or what distinguishes them from the people who are answering you...."

From "Polling in America Is Still Broken. So Who Is Really Winning in Virginia?" (NY Magazine).

"The flight attendant apparently bumped the passenger while moving through the first-class cabin..."

"... according to Julie Hedrick, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents those who fly for American Airlines. The flight attendant apologized, but the passenger left his seat, confronted her as she stood in the aircraft’s galley, then punched her in the face, Hedrick said.... American is among several carriers that have limited alcohol sales on domestic flights. The carrier does offer alcohol in its first-class cabins.... 'It’s not just the masks,' Hedrick said. 'Our passengers have changed. Their behavior on our flights, the safety of our flight attendants, the safety of our passengers — every day is being threatened here.'"

From "Flight attendant suffers broken bones in ‘one of the worst displays of unruly behavior’ in the skies/The incident prompted the pilots to divert the flight to Denver, where a passenger was detained" (WaPo).

1. Maybe just get rid of all the alcohol. Don't give those first-class people more of a sense of privilege. They're entitled enough. Don't further inflate their attitude with alcohol — and special, elites-only alcohol at that. You're facilitating their irrationality. At some point, they believe they've got a right to beat the servants.

2. The planes now are filled with the people who feel that it's okay to pack into the sealed metal tube with everyone else's germs. There's a much higher concentration of daring risk-takers, folks who think that the world's their oyster. The cautious people are staying home. The cramped space is now elbow-to-elbow with people who want what's theirs, like that armrest, and that bit of aisle that one's meaty upper arm occupies and that the flight attendant goes ahead and pushes through. This means war! to those folks. Not all of them, but enough of them that chaos lies close to the surface.

3. The top-rated comment blames Trump: "A friend of mine has been a bartender for 10-15 years and, as you might imagine, has seen a lot bad behavior from patrons even in her upscale bar and grill. As far as I can tell, she is apolitical, but it is her firm opinion that Trump's public behavior over the last four or five years has brought these bad actors out of the woodwork. He made it okay." 

4. Here's the Trump performance that reminded me of: 

5. "Who cares? We all have a weight problem."

"The Chinese [hypersonic missile] test has nothing in common with Sputnik, and claiming that it does feeds a dangerous paranoia growing in Washington these days...."

"Coming in the wake of multiple powerful Soviet nuclear tests, Sputnik signaled that in the next frontier, space, the Soviets were ahead.... Hypersonic missiles, on the other hand, are old news. A hypersonic missile travels at five times the speed of sound or faster. Starting in 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union have deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles that travel more than 20 times the speed of sound.... For the Pentagon, it’s an opportunity: Raising fears about a huge and tech-savvy enemy is a surefire way to guarantee vast new budgets that can be spent countering the enemy’s every move, real or imagined...."

From "It’s not a ‘Sputnik moment’ and we should not feed Cold War paranoia" by Fareed Zakaria  (WaPo).

"On Twitter, the cloth has been fodder for jokes and even a parody account since Apple quietly put it on sale on Oct. 18."

"Later that week, when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted a tweet promoting a new retail store in Turkey, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, needled him by replying, 'Come see the Apple Cloth' with a trademark logo. (Mr. Musk’s company is also not shy about testing the strength of its brand and the fealty of its customers. Tesla’s website offers a company-branded 'handblown' decanter for $150 and a $60 umbrella....)"

From "Apple’s Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect/It’s a $19 cloth" (NYT).

This is an example of the use of overcharging to buy publicity, like when a restaurant has a $1,000 hamburger on the menu.

But I'm also interested in the veneration of a scrap of cloth. I'm thinking Shroud of Turin and if I could just touch the hem of Steve Jobs's garment. 

"I have no interest in litigating the specific reviews I’ve gotten or the capable writers who wrote them. My interest lies more in how segregated reviews and..."

"... by extension, a prescriptive vision about race in art, has placed an obstructive framing across the face of work by minority writers.... Is an Asian American, for example, seen as fit to review another Asian American’s book with the full assumption that those very important 'lived experiences' match up in some meaningful way?... [T]he rules of review segregation rarely ask any questions beyond 'What box did you check on the census?'... One of the first lessons a writer is taught is that the specific is the universal. We may not fully understand the filial dynamics of the 19th-century Russian households depicted in 'The Brothers Karamazov,' but we do know something about bad fathers, irredeemably broken men and undying crises of faith.... Some of the most illuminating conversations I’ve had have been with Black, South Asian, Latino and Jewish readers who take [my] book for what it is and then forcefully argue their own reads... A more sincere commitment to diversity requires a breadth of intellect not only from the editors of the review pages but also from readers in the public. Right now, the book landscape seems to have migrated into dozens of caravans plodding along on separate identity tracks. There’s a question that’s rarely asked: Where are we going?"

From "The Reductive Practice of Assigning Book Reviews by Identity" by Jay Caspian Kang.