At the Central Park Café...

... with your very best friends.

I told you about my "imaginary movie project."

Here.

And I even watched the first movie, from the first year, 1960, and wrote a post about it, here.

Since then, I've watched the next 2 movies. Remember, the idea is to rewatch a movie that I originally saw in the theater in the year that it came out, one movie for each year. I'm choosing movies that I think will be fun to watch now and to see how my present-day reaction compares to what I thought and felt at the time. And I want to be inspired to blog about it.

But I didn't blog about the 1961 movie when I watched it a week ago, and now that I've watched the 1962 movie, I have a backlog — a blog backlog. That's uncharacteristic of me, so maybe I'm telling myself: Don't do it! Or maybe I just need you to encourage me. You saw what I did with the 1960 movie, "Please Don't Eat the Daisies."

I'll reveal the titles of the 1961 and the 1962 movies, in case you want to take that into account in encouraging me: "The Absent-Minded Professor" and "The Music Man." And I'll just say that these movies are both, in my 2019 view, essentially entirely about overcoming sexual inhibition. There will be more sex than you could possibly imagine, or, I mean, there was more sex than I could possibly imagine when I was 10 and 11, as I was in 1961 and 1962.

Next up, for 1963: "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World."

"I like the concept of red, white and blue. The baby blue doesn’t fit with us."

Said President Trump about his choice of a new color scheme for the Air Force One planes (that will be delivered in 2024, after he's gone from office (unless he does that thing some people furiously ideate about and stays though his term is up)).

I'm reading the quote in the NYT, which adds:

The current plane’s design is closely associated with John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, who chose the colors in consultation with the famed French designer Raymond Loewy.

The Kennedys both disliked the look of the plane under President Eisenhower, changing the paint scheme from orange to a lighter blue. They took care with the design because they wanted to present a less militaristic image to the rest of the world.

In their reimagining, “The United States of America” was emblazoned on the side of the plane, the font a close match to one used in the printing of the United States Constitution. The plane’s new look was unveiled in 1962....

And here's some classic Trump provocation:

“People get used to something,” Mr. Trump said, “and it was Jackie O.,” referring to Onassis, the last name Mrs. Kennedy took during her second marriage. “And that’s good,” Mr. Trump continued, “but we have our own Jackie O. today. It’s called Melania. We’ll call it Melania T.”

"Friendship these days is more like polyamory. We start aligning with people in early childhood, and our collections only grow."

"As we move through life we make friends for every occasion — college friends, work friends, mom friends, climbing-gym friends, divorce friends. We are told to nurture old relationships even — maybe especially — when new ones are formed, to 'be there,' no matter how busy, or uninterested, we find ourselves... There are scandalous transgressions or betrayals that can kill a friendship. But more often, there’s no accounting for a friendship’s demise. The atmosphere changes; a sense of duty creeps in. Conversations that were once freewheeling shift into that less than enjoyable territory of 'catching up.'... My old friend eventually reached out to me, several months after she’d disappeared. She said she didn’t know why she needed space, but she did, and she was sorry. I told her that it had been painful but I understood. We saw each other a few times after that, but it was different; we’d come apart. Out of respect for friendship’s sanctity, when the magic dims, the best thing to do is let go...."

Writes Lauren Mechling in "How to End a Friendship/The rules governing romantic love are clearer. But few relationships are meant to last forever" (NYT).

A comment at the NYT:

The loss of a friendship, whether it ends abruptly or just fades away, is always disappointing and disconcerting. It inevitably leads to feelings of self-doubt and alienation. I have suffered through this condition, as we all have, my share and have found neither a cure nor a prophylactic. My only advice is this: avoid if possible the desire to force-maintain a dying friendship, or to imagine that you can mount some kind of argument for the relationship. Nothing will add to your misery more than grasping after something which you can no longer possess. If you can simply let the friendship go, it sometimes returns in surprising and often quite meaningful ways. Some friendships do really die. Others are just in a coma.

"Germany Joins Chorus Casting Doubt on Trump Administration Claim that Iran Was Behind Attack on Oil Tankers."

Newsweek headline.

"The video is not enough. We can understand what is being shown, sure, but to make a final assessment, this is not enough for me," [Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko] Maas told reporters during a press conference on Friday. The boat's Japanese owner also cast doubt on the theory that a mine had been used to attack the ship, telling journalists that members of his crew had witnessed a flying object.

Iran has denied any role in the event, and some observers have raised questions about whether the intelligence was being used as a pretext for the U.S. to escalate conflict with the country.

"But now my students watch as senators hold their tongues, terrified of being ridiculed on the president’s Twitter feed or angering Trump’s base."

Writes polisci prof David Lay Williams "Trump has made my political science students skeptical — of the Constitution/They used to love the Federalist Papers. Now they see holes in the essays’ arguments" (WaPo).

The sentence quoted above follows this: "The authors of 'The Federalist' also thought that Congress — particularly the Senate — would tamp down the passionate excesses of the people, should they be stimulated by 'artful misrepresentations' from any source (Federalist 63)."

Are Senators really self-censoring more than they used to and is it from a terror of being ridiculed* by the President or angering his fans? If the Senators are so sensitive to popular passions and terrified of voters, it's because they worry about reelection, and that's not a problem with the Federalist Papers, which discuss a constitutional plan in which the Senators were chosen by state legislatures.

Williams asserts that "Trump is eroding" the "'veneration' that successful constitutions require" and that if "people lose faith in the constitutional order, politics can... spiral out of control." What to do? Impeachment!

_______________________

*

At the Beribboned Café...

... you can talk all night.

The Democratic candidates have been divided up into 2 groups, for debates on successive nights.

NBC has announced.

June 26th:

... Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), former Rep. John Delaney (D-MD), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), former HUD Sec. Julian Castro, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA).

June 27th:

... former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), author Marianne Williamson, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper...

The second debate seems to have the stronger set of candidates, but that might not hurt the candidates in the first debate. People will be excited about the first debate, just because it's first, and without Biden and Sanders to draw attention, they have a chance to shine. I expect Elizabeth Warren to dominate, but everyone has a chance to stick out. On day 2, I expect Gillibrand and Harris to suffer in contrast to Sanders, Biden, and Buttigieg. I think those 2 women are bland.

That's just my guess.

"You might assume that someone would have thought of this perfect Venn diagram of social media, beauty pageant, puppy adoration, grinning female empowerment, and Gilded Age excess by now."

"But in fact, this was the first ever Miss Dog Mom USA pageant....  The dogs, it would be fair to say, had no real agenda for the evening. But the women were there to win, to walk away with $1,000 and the sateen sash and a yearlong contract to wave from parade floats and officiate at canine weddings (yes, they exist) as Miss Dog Mom 2019.... Desh Valcin, 31, a tall, elegant woman with close-cropped hair and nerd-chic black plastic glasses, first came up with the idea for Miss Dog Mom a few years ago, when she was telling a friend how happy she was when she was 16 and competing in Miss Teen USA. From that moment, Ms. Valcin fixated on how to fuse her love of beauty pageants with her passion for her pets. Then, last summer, while strolling with her two dogs, it hit her: all you needed to turn a routine dog walk into a glamorous catwalk is a ball gown and an audience... Ms. Riddle, first up, was asked if pageants are degrading to women. 'How can this be degrading when we are raising money for all these great animals?' she asked, to cheers from the crowd. Then, a little flustered, she added, 'Nothing’s degrading, right?' before handing the microphone back the judges. One contestant fielded a question about pit bull discrimination (her take: pit bulls deserve equal rights)."

From "The Real Dog Moms of New York City/Inside the chaos, glitter and absolute furry cuteness of a puppy pageant" (NYT).

"Countless workout fads have come along since the heyday of Jazzercise: Tae Bo, Pilates, Zumba, boxing, spinning, pole dancing."

"And yet Jazzercise persists: today, according to the company, there are more than seven thousand franchises, serving roughly two hundred and fifty thousand customers in twenty-five countries and grossing somewhere between ninety-five million and a hundred million dollars per year.... Back in 1969, [Judi Sheppard] Missett was a twenty-five-year-old jazz dancer living in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband, who was working as a TV-news reporter, and her one-year-old daughter. A dancer since girlhood—in Iowa, in 1961, she’d been crowned America’s Most Beautiful Majorette, after impressing the judges by twirling a baton festooned with corn cobs—she had studied at Northwestern University, helping to pay her way through college by dancing at industrial theatre shows for Admiral appliances and Philco TV sets. She continued dancing with Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago and planned to pursue a career on the stage. At Giordano’s studios, she taught a morning class called Jazz Dance for Adult Beginners. But her students, mostly stay-at-home mothers, kept dropping out. 'It bugged me,' she recalled. 'I said, "How come you didn’t come back? How can I improve?" And they said, "Well, you’re teaching the class like we’re going to go on and become professional dancers, when in fact we don’t want to be professional dancers. We want to look like one."'... She retitled her class Jazz Dance for Fun and Fitness, teaching simple routines to jazz and Top Forty hits... She turned Jazzercise classes into commercial franchises... As the fitness craze grew, Missett faced new competitors, such as Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. But, unlike them, she didn’t market herself as a celebrity trainer. The brand was the star...."

From "Born Before the Fitness Industry, Jazzercise Turns Fifty" (The New Yorker).

"Snatched from their families at a young and vulnerable age, these [Yazidi] children now must undergo the trauma of new separations and new adjustments..."

"... after spending some of the most formative years of their lives with the militants.... [One kidnapped Yazidi girl, speaking about Umm Ali, the woman she had lived with, said"] 'I love her more than my own mother.... She treated me better than my original mother. My mother and father divorced and they didn’t care about me. Umm Ali really cared for me, as if I were her own daughter.'... [A 15-year-old Yazidi boy said this about going back to his people:] 'Maybe there’s a lot of things I won’t like... The women where I am going don’t cover their hair. It will be very hard for me if someone comes to my house and sees my mother and my sister not covered. Or if I go to my uncle’s house and see the faces of his daughters. I can’t force them to do something they don’t want. But when I get married I will not allow anyone to see the face of my wife.' The 14-year-old girl nodded and said...  'Dressed like this now, I’m not comfortable. I feel naked... If I am pretty, men will look at me and it will cause strife... I’m confused. There they tell you to do one thing. Here they tell you another. When I was there I was told to wear abaya and cover my face. Here they tell me not to cover. In my mind it’s chaos.'"

From "The kidnapped Yazidi children who don’t want to be rescued from ISIS" (WaPo).

"Look, George, you’re being a little wise guy, okay, which is typical for you. Just so you understand, very simple, it is very simple, there was no crime."

Said Trump to George Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos is 5'5", so I take "little wise guy" as a personal insult.

Here's the clip:

"You can hear a pin drop in the WaPo editorial room this evening, as eight people try hard not to think about '8-digit punitive damages for libel.'"

So says the highest-rated comment on "Market awarded $44M in racism dispute with Oberlin College" an AP story that ran in The Washington Post, and the only WaPo story about the jury's award of punitive damages. The same AP story is also the only coverage of the news in the NYT.

I wanted to post on this news and just wanted something factual and journalistic, and I was disappointed that the 2 main newspapers I read just put up this rather thin AP story:

A jury in Lorain County awarded David Gibson, son Allyn Gibson and Gibson’s Bakery, of Oberlin, $33 million in punitive damages Thursday. That comes on top of an award a day earlier of $11 million in compensatory damages.

Problems between the Gibsons, their once-beloved bakery and the college began in November 2016 after Allyn Gibson, who is white, confronted a black Oberlin student who had shoplifted wine. Two other black students joined in and assaulted Gibson, police said.

The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery .

The extra space between "bakery" and the period is present at both the WaPo and the NYT. That's how little attention they paid to this story — not even rudimentary copy editing.

Members of Oberlin College’s student senate published a resolution saying Gibson’s had “a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment.”

When news of the protests spread online, bikers and counterprotesters soon converged on the town to jeer students and make purchases from Gibson’s. Conservatives derided the students on social media as coddled “snowflakes” with a mob mentality, while students attacked the store as a symbol of systemic racism....

A direct quote — "snowflakes" — for those "conservatives." Which conservatives? Who? Did they all say the word "snowflakes"? Were they all taking a derisive tone? This is a story about the seriousness of damage caused by free-swinging attacks, so you might want to rein it in. Notice the students were concerned about "systemic racism" and their tone isn't characterized nastily, but they were involved in causing harm that the jury soberly examined and found deserving of a $33 million punitive damages award. And conservatives are casually smeared, made to look like they get on social media and jeer and name-call.

The AP article ends with a grab-bag of factoids:

Oberlin has long been a bastion of liberalism. During the 1830s, it became one of the first colleges to admit blacks and women. During the 1850s, it became a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Today, about 15% of Oberlin’s 8,300 residents are black.

More recently, news articles quoted students decrying the school dining hall’s sushi and Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches as cultural appropriation.

The Gibsons’ attorneys said the college, which charges $70,000 a year for tuition and room and board, has an $887 million endowment and can easily afford to pay the family what they are owed.

Oberlin’s tree-lined campus is roughly 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest of downtown Cleveland.

And there's your NYT and WaPo coverage of this story. Thin, undigested AP material. And you won't find it on the home page. I had to do a search to find it.

IN THE COMMENTS: wendybar said:

The best coverage anywhere was from Professor William A. Jacobson @ Legal Insurrection!! The Main Stream Media is the propaganda arm of the Democrats so of course this doesn't fit the agenda.

Here's the Legal Insurrection post about the punitive damages verdict. Excerpt:

“We never wanted any of this to go to court and have to spend all this time in litigation,” David Gibson said exclusively to the Legal Insurrection. David Gibson is the lead plaintiff in the case and is the principal owner of the business.

“People have no idea on how much stress this has had on our family and business for almost three years. But from the beginning, we just didn’t understand why they were punishing us for something we had nothing to do with.”

“We appreciate that the jury understood what we had gone through, and I think they were saying to the entire country that we can’t allow this to happen to hard-working, small business people whose lives are defined by their business, their family, and their community,” he said.” What the college was doing was trying to take away all those things from us, and we fought hard against that.”

Left Bank of the Charles said:

Here’s some better reporting. The college seems to have thought that claims of poverty would work in its defense against the punitive damages.

He links to "Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College: Plaintiffs rest in second day of punitive phase (UPDATED)" (Houston Chronicle):

With its endowment as it is now," [Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar] said the college can survive, but “survival isn’t sustainability”.... Of that $1.4 billion, the college has an $887 million endowment — more than two-thirds of which can’t be spent by the college because of the wishes of the donors who provided it... The largest check the college could write if it had to would be for $49.1 million from its unrestricted endowment funds....

[Lee Plakas, the lead attorney for the Gibsons] told jurors that “defamatory words in our country have become weapons as damaging as guns that shoot bullets”... “More damaging than bullets once you’re defamed... There is no procedure to remove those words.”...

He recalled for jurors how Oberlin College administrators labeled the Gibsons and their supporters “idiots,” discussed in internal texts and emails how they wanted to “unleash the students” or “rain fire and brimstone” on Gibson’s and how Meredith Raimondo, the college’s vice president and dean of students, referred to the college’s business with Gibson’s as the “stupid bakery order.”...

“Let’s teach the institution not to put gas on the fires,” Plakas told the jury, also asking them to consider recommending Miraldi award the Gibsons money to cover attorney fees. “They’re not above the law. They can’t make up their own rules.”...

"As Trump told Stephanopoulos, there is nothing wrong with listening to information that anyone, foreign or domestic, might have that is relevant to a presidential candidate."

"But what is blindingly obvious, yet absent from every Democratic Party news account feigning horror at the ABC interview, is that the Hillary Clinton campaign didn’t just receive 'foreign dirt' on the Trump campaign. It paid for foreign sources to fabricate lies about Trump, which it then disseminated to the press. Listen to 'foreign dirt'? The Clinton [campaign] paid for it!"

Writes John Hinderaker (at Power Line).

At the Fearless/Honest/Able Café...

... you can talk all night.

The photo is a detail from the "America Today" mural at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Sanders’s Speech About Socialism Was Deeply Unserious/In the senator’s view, the threat of autocracy comes exclusively from the right."

Writes Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic:

If Sanders was coy about the details of a “socialist” economy, he was downright disdainful of the notion that a speech on socialism and authoritarianism should seriously grapple with the long history of socialist movements that have ended in dictatorship. In his view, the threat of autocracy comes exclusively from the right. Just as in the 1930s, “America and the world are once again moving towards authoritarianism.” This danger is driven by “right-wing forces of oligarchy, corporatism, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia.” The only answer that will stave off fascism is, you guessed it, “democratic socialism.”

Thus Sanders name-checked Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but remained silent about Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. And while he rightly decried the autocratic tendencies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he neglected to mention leftist autocrats such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, or North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. Indeed, the only connection between socialism and autocracy that Sanders was willing to acknowledge is the one that exists in the feverish imagination of the ignorant right: He decried the “red-baiting” in which Republicans have long engaged.

The implication was obvious. Anybody who was hoping for a clear account of the differences between Sanders’s political ambitions and those of autocratic socialist regimes is a fellow traveler of Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Donald Trump, and the Heritage Foundation....

The speech Sanders gave was not serious.

It's enough (and it's better) to say "not serious." The headline writer came up with "deeply unserious," and you may know I have a thing about the word "deeply" (click the tag). The headline writer must have felt pressure to bump it up to "deeply unserious," which seems snazzy and contemporary and (ironically) less serious. "Deeply" especially annoys when it modifies something that lacks depth — unless humor is intended, but this isn't a subject for humor. We're talking about the oppression and murder of millions. To deploy humor would be... deeply shallow. See what I mean?