At the Blonde Squirrel Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Hindsight is 2020."

A great 2020 slogan, but who should use it. I spotted it on a T-shirt at the Lake Mendota Bernie Sanders rally. This is my screen shot from the video of the event (linked in the previous post, where I have a wider-view screen shot with this shirt that caught my attention):

You can't see the whole slogan there, but I completed it by looking on line. I see many Bernie T-shirts with the slogan "Hindsight is 2020." The idea I'm seeing expressed is that Democrats may have thought they were being safe and sensible by picking Hillary Clinton in 2016, but you see what happened, and in retrospect, it's obvious that it would have been better to have picked the person who got people energized and came across as genuine and decent.

Bernie Sanders, yesterday, on the shore of Lake Mendota: "Today, I want to welcome you to a campaign which says, with confidence, optimism and love, that the underlying principles of our government will not be greed, kleptocracy, hatred and lies."

Screen shot. Check it out. That's my lake:



Here's the full video.

The day turned out to be cold and blustery.

Here's the full text (as shared by the campaign, with some boldface by me):

The Clintons kick off their national speaking tour, and the NY Post writer thinks it reenacted "why Hillary lost: Over-promise, under-deliver, avoid accountability, and expect the masses to nonetheless be satisfied."

Maureen Callahan says she spent $210 for a balcony seat and got "90 minutes of longtime Clinton lackey Paul Begala launching such softballs" at the Clintons:

Is the two-state solution dead?
What is happening to American politics?
How did it feel to watch the bin Laden raid?
Why are the Dems losing rural voters?
How did you raise such an amazing daughter?

I wish I were exaggerating. The only current event touched upon was that day’s arrest of Julian Assange — astonishing given the surfeit of recent headlines really worth discussing: Jussie Smollett, race relations and hate crimes; the one-percenters caught up in the college admissions scandal; the push to federally legalize marijuana and reform the criminal justice system; the role of Silicon Valley in curbing, if not eliminating, foreign governments hacking our elections [ahem]; Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up Amazon, Google and Facebook — to say nothing of the 20 or so declared Dem candidates for president....  Oh, and #MeToo.

The best part for Callahan was when a guy in the front row stood up and yelled "Bill, this is boring!" and "Why don’t you talk about... Jeffrey Epstein!"

"Ten days after my surgery, I have to go back to work. I’ve been teaching through the months of chemotherapy, but..."

"... despite this, I’ve run out of medical leave. I am driven there by my friends, many of whom have already had to make great sacrifices to help me. Some write checks, some help me drain the surgical tubes stitched to my body, others send mixtapes or cannabis popcorn. My friends carry my books into the classroom, because I can’t use my arms. Delirious from pain, I give a three-hour lecture on Walt Whitman’s poem 'The Sleepers'—'wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory'—with the drainage bags stitched to my tightly compressed chest. My students have no idea what has been done to me or how much I hurt. I have always wanted to write the most beautiful book against beauty. I’d call it 'Cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, docetaxel, carboplatin, steroids, anti-inflammatories, antipsychotic anti-nausea meds, anti-anxiety anti-nausea meds, antidepressants, sedatives, saline flushes, acid reducers, eye drops, ear drops, numbing creams, alcohol wipes, blood thinners, antihistamines, antibiotics, antifungals, antibacterials, sleep aids, D3, B12, B6, joints and oils and edibles, hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, eyebrow pencils, face creams.' Then the surgeon calls to tell me that, as far as she can tell, the drugs have worked, the cancer is gone. The surgery performed after six months of chemotherapy reveals a 'pathologic complete response,' the outcome I’ve hoped for, the one that gives me the greatest chance that, when I die, it won’t be of this. With that news, I am like a baby being born into the hands of a body made only of the grand debt of love and rage, and if I live another forty-one years to avenge what has happened it still won’t be enough."

From "What Cancer Takes Away/When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death" by Anne Boyer, a fantastically well-written essay in The New Yorker. Her book "The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care" will be out in September.

I've only copied a small extract, chosen not because it's the most impressively written part of the essay, but because: 1. The subject is teaching — the way the students don't know what is happening inside their teacher and a truly heroic carrying on would go entirely unnoticed (3 hours!), and 2. I love Walt Whitman, and I like how Boyer (a poet) follows the invocation of Whitman with a Whitmanesque list of her own.

Would you like Walt Whitman to read "The Sleepers" to you?

I'm reading "How to Resist Validating President Trump’s View of Sanctuary Cities."

By Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. Her idea is that the right response to Trump is not what Nancy Pelosi said (through a spokesperson):

Pelosi’s spokeswoman Ashley Etienne issued a standard statement: “The extent of this administration’s cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated. Using human beings—including little children—as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.” Like the media, Pelosi, whose district covers the sanctuary city of San Francisco, didn’t directly challenge the unspoken but clear premise that something terrible would happen to these cities if immigrants came to them.

Such is the framing of the issue by the White House, and the framing of the story by the media, that no one had the one right response to this idea: “But this is the very point of a sanctuary city! Immigrants, regardless of status, are safe in them. Bring them here! They are welcome.”

That's how the piece ends, and I found it a little hard to understand, but I think Gessen is seeing that the responses to Trump are reinforcing what he's saying, that it's bad to have a sudden big influx of economically needy immigrants. Trump wins if he gets the sanctuary city proponents to show that they were just posing as immigrant friendly. He called their bluff. Why did they fold so quickly? They should have kept bluffing: Bring them here! They are welcome!

I think that's what Gessen is really saying, but she's kind of hiding it, because she's part of the bluff. She thinks Trump is bluffing too. If Trump won't really dump the immigrants in San Francisco and those other virtue-signaling places, then they can continue to virtue-signal, and they should, so he doesn't win.

It's also possible that Gessen really believes that San Francisco should follow through on this conception of virtue and welcome a sudden big influx of economically needy immigrants. In that view, Bring them here! They are welcome! is not a bluff, but an authentic heartfelt wish for the future of the genuinely good places that have declared themselves a sanctuary.

Maybe my reading skills are off and I'm missing something. Help me out. I know I'm reading The New Yorker, so I'm not even considering the possibility that Gessen might mean that Trump has cleverly boxed in his antagonists.

"James struck licensing agreements for everything from 'Fifty Shades'-branded wine and lingerie to floggers, vibrators and handcuffs..."

"... and oversaw the development of many of these items herself. Perhaps most incongruously, she even licensed a 'Fifty Shades' teddy bear, who comes with mini handcuffs and a blindfold. 'We set about trademarking things just to stop people from making them,' she tells me in her office, which is festooned with 'Fifty Shades' paraphernalia... James wants to show me some nipple clamps she helped design in collaboration with the sex-toy maker Lovehoney, a British company that produced a line of Fifty Shades-themed erotic accessories. Lovehoney had first proposed some heavy, industrial-looking clamps, which James rejected. 'They looked like they could jump start Frankenstein,' James says."

From "The Evolution of E L James/James changed the literary landscape with her blockbuster erotica trilogy, 'Fifty Shades of Grey.' Now she is trying something (sort of) new" (NYT).

Jump start Frankenstein. That's good. Almost good enough to make me read EL James — not quite — who's got a new book. It's about "a wealthy British aristocrat who falls for his house cleaner, a beautiful, mysterious young woman who fled Albania." Ah, yes, Albania. The country you pick when you need a country nobody knows about.*

James worked hard to get Albania:

James traveled to Albania twice to research the novel, and collected a small library of books about the country, including an Albanian dictionary, a guide to Albanian social codes and laws, and a book about Albanian organized crime. Her husband, who’s the household cook, learned to make traditional Albanian stews.

I await Lucky James, the cultural-appropriation restaurant.

It was quite a change from the research she did for “Fifty Shades,” which involved lurking in some of the darker corners of the internet, scrolling through websites devoted to sexual bondage techniques and accessories....

Beneath the frothy fantasy, “The Mister” deals with unexpectedly weighty topics like economic inequality, the plight of undocumented workers, the oppression of women in conservative societies and the way social institutions and governments elevate the wealthy and powerful and exploit the vulnerable.

Get woke and titillated.
______________________

* Or so I learned from the movie "Wag that Dog."

A case study in the worst approach to getting away with cultural appropriation.

I'm reading "A White Restaurateur Advertised 'Clean' Chinese Food. Chinese-Americans Had Something to Say About It/The uproar over a Chinese-American restaurant that was opened in Manhattan by two white restaurateurs has become the latest front in the debate over cultural appropriation" (NYT).

It's one thing for someone who's not Chinese to open a Chinese restaurant, and whether that's okay is not the question here. They did 2 other things:

1. They didn't just offer Chinese food. They used a name — Lucky Lee's — that seemed to assert that the owner was Chinese, and they had some stereotypical Chinese design elements — bamboo. This isn't such a big deal. It's the other part:

2. They presented their food as an improvement on the Chinese food available in Chinese-owned Chinese restaurants:

Arielle Haspel, a Manhattan nutritionist with a sleek social media presence, wanted to open the kind of Chinese restaurant, she said, where she and her food-sensitive clients could eat. One where the lo mein wouldn’t make people feel “bloated and icky” the next day, or one where the food wasn’t “too oily” or salty, as she wrote in an Instagram post a few weeks ago....

“Ohhhh I CANNOT with Lucky Lee’s, this new ‘clean Chinese restaurant’ that some white wellness blogger just opened in New York,” MacKenzie Fegan, a food writer, said on Twitter. “Her blog talks about how ‘Chinese food is usually doused in brown sauces’ and makes your eyes puffy. Lady, what? #luckylees”...

Ms. Haspel’s blog, and her food videos, promote something she calls “clean eating,” which to her, means things like: eating organic, avoiding additives and using olive oil instead of canola.... “I love health-ifying bad food so you can treat yourself, guilt-free,” she said in another cooking video....

“Where she is coming from is a very dark place, and it’s a very sensitive place in the hearts of Chinese people,” said Chris Cheung, the owner of East Wind Snack Shop, an acclaimed dumpling restaurant in Brooklyn....

It seems they were trying to capture the market that is people who kind of want Chinese food and like the general idea but feel that actual Chinese Chinese food is suspect — unhealthy and dirty.

You can see how that overlaps with racism, but the NYT article never uses the r-word.

ADDED: From the third-highest-rated comment at the NYT:

As a Chinese who grew up in China and have been living in NY for 8 years, I still cannot adapt myself to the oily, salty, similar-flavor, heavily-sauced American Chinese food here (the situation is definitely getting better now and I have seen so many more varieties!). Therefore, I totally understand Ms. Haspel's intention to open a restaurant for people who love American-Chinese food particularly, as well as catering to the rising demands of millennials for clean and healthy food and instagrammable decor. I mean every restaurant has the right to make their food by their own standard.

There's a lot going on there. First, an assertion that the Chinese-owned Chinese restaurants in New York are themselves inauthentic. A more authentic Chinese — someone who "grew up in China" — informs us that the people who claim to own what's being appropriated have already gone wrong. Second, there's the respect for New Yorkers who want the reinterpretation of Chinese food that Lucky Lee's offers. There are people who don't want authenticity. They prioritize "clean and healthy food and instagrammable decor." These people matter too. They get to spend their money on whatever it is they like.

At the Departing Fox Café...

... you don't have to go.

And you don't have to use the Althouse Portal to Amazon, but it would be nice if you did.

"The 60-year-old comic sat down on a stool while breathing heavily, before falling silent for five minutes during his show on Thursday...."

"[T]he crowd at the The Atic bar in Bicester had thought it was a joke, and continued to laugh, unaware something was wrong.... Cognito had even joked about his health during his set, telling the audience: 'Imagine if I died in front of you lot here.' It was Mr Bird who first went on stage to check if his fellow comedian was ok. 'Everyone in the crowd, me included, thought he was joking,' he said. 'Even when I walked on stage and touched his arm I was expecting him to say "boo."'... Audience member John Ostojak said... 'We came out feeling really sick, we just sat there for five minutes watching him, laughing at him.' Mr Bird said dying on stage would have been the way the veteran comic 'would have wanted to go... except he'd want more money and a bigger venue.'"

He'd gone to the bigger venue in the sky — "Ian Cognito: Comedian dies on stage in Bicester" (BBC).

ADDED: From Wikipedia’s long list of performers who have died on stage, here are 2 more where a comedian died and people in the audience thought it was part of the act:

Comedian Dick Shawn died on stage while performing at UC San Diego after suffering a fatal heart attack. He lay motionless on the stage for several minutes, while audience members (thinking it was part of his act) began shouting comments, such as: "Take his wallet" and "How long is this going to go on?". The stage manager came out to check on Shawn several times before realizing it was not part of the show. A doctor was called up from the audience to perform CPR on the comedian until the paramedics arrived. He was later pronounced dead at Scripps Memorial Hospital....

Magician and comedian Tommy Cooper suffered a heart attack during a performance on the TV variety show Live From Her Majesty's. Cooper was known for getting his illusions deliberately and comically wrong. After Cooper collapsed, his audience laughed for almost a minute, thinking that his stage character had swooned at the appearance of a pretty magician's assistant (even she thought Cooper was improvising a comic bit.) The TV show cut away to an unscheduled break. Efforts to revive Cooper backstage failed, and he was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

"President Donald Trump's job approval rating increased relatively sharply over the past month to 45% in an April 1-9 Gallup poll, up from 39% in March."

"This marks the third time the 45th president has reached a 45% job approval rating in Gallup trends -- his highest in the series."

This is Gallup's first measurement of presidential approval since special counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation into Russian attempts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Attorney General William Barr's synopsis of Mueller's findings reported no Russian involvement in the Trump campaign and insufficient evidence of obstruction of justice -- which Trump claims fully vindicates him....

Trump's previous 45% readings were recorded in his first week in office in January 2017, and again in June 2018 after his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

They say there's a black hole out in space, but what about the black hole of your mind?

1) If this is the worst problem brilliant young women face, hallelujah
2) Several people have pointed out the comment comes from a woman. Yet here's this tweet a day last, unchanged https://t.co/GQlC0W1NBN

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) April 12, 2019

UPDATE: Naomi Wolf has now deleted the tweet that used to display along with Young's ridicule of it. Wolf had shown the picture of the young woman whose work led to what is presented as a picture of a black hole along with comments that included "That's so cool" and something like "She's so cute." Wolf asserted that the "That's so cool" comments were from women and show how women react and "She's so cute" came from a man and that's a problem. It turns out the "She's so cute" commenter, with the first name Shaun, actually was a woman, the Wolf premise of Wolf's expansive generalization was embarrassingly wrong. Wolf subsequently put this up, so you can see she doesn't accept the push-back about the generalization:

Crazy eyes.

This is a great example of "crazy eyes" associated with delusional policies. I dare you to propose something this crazy in public without your eyes bugging out this way. https://t.co/g3uYmWpplm

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 12, 2019

A big fox in our yard this morning.

He's walking on the path Meade created for people to walk and mountain bike. I was just calling it "The Bunny Trail" — the place referenced in the old song "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" — because I saw a big rabbit using it. And — as if on cue, to top my joke — a big fox takes the same route. I had a dramatic reaction, but no camera at hand. Five minutes later, the fox was back, and he stopped right in the middle of the yard, as if he knew I'd wanted to get a shot of him. Actually, he seemed a little slow and confused, and we worried that he was sick. Then he ducked down the alleyway between the two garages.

"The Trump administration pressured the Department of Homeland Security to release immigrants detained at the southern border into so-called sanctuary cities in part to retaliate..."

"... against Democrats who oppose President Donald Trump's plans for a border wall, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN on Thursday. Trump personally pushed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to follow through on the plan, the source said. Nielsen resisted and the DHS legal team eventually produced an analysis that killed the plan, which was first reported by The Washington Post. The proposal is another example of Trump's willingness to enact hardline immigration policies to deliver on border security.... White House senior adviser Stephen Miller urged senior DHS officials to make the plan a reality, the source said. The plan finally died after Miller and other White House officials pushed it in February, according to the source. Miller was angered that DHS lawyers refused to produce legal guidance that would make the plan viable, saying the proposal would likely be illegal.... 'Sanctuary city' is a broad term applied to jurisdictions that have policies in place designed to limit cooperation with or involvement in federal immigration enforcement actions.... 'The extent of this administration's cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated,' [a spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi] said in a statement. 'Using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable, and in some cases, criminal. The American people have resoundingly rejected this Administration's toxic anti-immigrant policies, and Democrats will continue to advance immigration policies that keep us safe and honor our values.'"

CNN reports.

I don't think it's true that the American people have "resoundingly rejected" the Trump administration's approach to immigration, but it does seem obvious that this policy — was it seriously proposed? — would have upset and offended a lot of people. I wonder who wanted this story out and how accurate it is. People say a lot of things when they are brainstorming behind closed doors. But this supposedly reached the stage where DHS "produced an analysis." An analysis of what? Of "the plan"? What plan? Was there an idea that might have been worked into a plan that was analyzed and found unworkable? Who knows? This report on a phantom plan seems like a platform for denouncing the desire to enforce immigration law as "despicable" and "toxic."

UPDATE: Trump has now tweeted about this:

Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only....

....The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy – so this should make them very happy!

"Trump on Show" — the opera, in Cantonese — opens today in Hong Kong.

I love the poster:



The story — as recounted in WaPo — "revolves around Trump’s fictional twin brother (inspired by Barack Obama’s real-life half brother, Mark Obama Ndesandjo, who lives in China). The Trump twin in the opera grew up in China after being separated from his wet nurse on a trip during World War II, ending up in an orphanage and eventually living through the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. 'Growing up, he was constantly being discriminated against because he was blond, a foreigner,' [the opera's creator Li Kui-ming] said of Trump’s fictitious twin brother. 'But he speaks Cantonese. So through him, we can bring out the modern history of China.' Eventually, Trump and his twin brother are able to reunite. At one point in the opera, Kim Jong Un visits the United States and meets with Trump, who teaches the North Korean leader how to turn his country’s economy around overnight by partnering with Coca-Cola to develop a Coke brand infused with ginseng."