At the Saturday Night Café...

 ... you can talk all night.

"Weathering is associated with accelerated aging of the body and is thought to be one of the reasons that Black Americans develop certain chronic medical conditions..."

"... at much younger ages than their White counterparts. Studies have also found that the average Black American, compared with their White peers, has a much higher 'allostatic load,' which is a measurement for lifelong cumulative stress on the body. Using data from a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected from 1999 to 2002, Geronimus found that when measuring the allostatic load of Americans, the score 'for Black Americans was roughly comparable to that for Whites who were 10 years older.'...  Removing or lowering age cutoffs for Black Americans could go a long way toward increasing access to one of the most impacted communities and accounting for structural racism’s toll on Black lives."

 From "Opinion: Black Americans should face lower age cutoffs to qualify for a vaccine" (WaPo). 

The authors, Oni Blackstock and Uché Blackstock, are physicians. They define "weathering" as the "physiologic effect of these persistent social and environmental stressors" and relate it to the term "John Henryism."

The comments at WaPo are calling the column "racist" and "insane."

"Ollie says one of the 'rules' of the experiment is that he and Zoe, both bisexual, will only hook up with same-sex partners."

"But whoops, Zoe replies, she already broke that rule by sleeping with a man. Later, Ollie is dating and sleeping with a woman. We don’t see them discussing their rules, why they exist, why they might change, how they talk about the ones they’ve broken. Ollie’s narration adds no clarity.... While Ollie and Zoe are just kind of irritating—we’re treated to long sequences of them frolicking naked in fields; Ollie waxes poetic about how he loves Zoe for being such an 'adult,' because she soaks her oats overnight—what’s hardest to watch is how they’re hurting each other because they don’t communicate with specificity or empathy, or even agree why they’re doing this in the first place.... Zoe, Tom, and the other non-Ollie characters are played by actors, and the film is a re-creation of Ollie’s experience with the real Zoe.... Ollie and Real Zoe did try an open relationship and were documenting it, and Real Zoe really did end their relationship to be with another man, but what we see on screen here is not a documentary of an experiment in real time so much as Ollie’s on-screen memoir, starring himself...."

From "What HBO’s New Documentary Gets Wrong About Open Relationships/I’ve been in a nonmonogamous relationship for six years, and I’m tired of movies like There’s No 'I' in Threesome" (Slate).

I'm almost tempted to watch this just to see how terrible it is. It  might be funny.... oh, no.... I just looked at the trailer, here. I was thinking of embedding it. But watching it, I had to force myself, and by 0:34, I had to turn it off. The visuals are very unappealing.

"Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin."

"I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world. Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College. The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said 'I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.' I was the only person in the room to abstain. Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of 'white fragility.' They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a 'power play.' In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues." 

Writes Jodi Shaw, resigning from her staff position at Smith College, quoted at "Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism Jodi Shaw made less in a year than the cost of tuition. She was offered a settlement, but turned it down. Here's why" (bariweiss.substack).

"A senior No 10 source said that male primogeniture was 'a nonsense.' Scrapping it was 'being looked at,' along with 'three or four other things.'"

Ha ha. It's nonsense, but they're only up to the point of looking at it and still considering several other options. 

The quote is from "Ladies first in Tory plan to abolish male primogeniture/Daughters may take hereditary peerages under new bill" (The London Times). 

After seven miscarriages and two rounds of IVF Charlotte Carew Pole was “absolutely thrilled” when she gave birth to her daughter, Jemima.... “‘Congratulations, what a shame it wasn’t a boy’, or ‘How quickly can you have another?’” were some of the comments she received.

“There was a general expectation that I must keep pumping them out until a boy arrived. And all because I married a man who will inherit a title.... He doesn’t care about it, and neither did his parents. But the more I thought about it, the angrier it made me. I was outraged that this was still happening. Why should you look at a scan and be disappointed it’s a girl?”....

Male primogeniture – inheritance by the eldest son - is a feudal relic, designed to ensure that estates remain undivided on the deaths of their owners, and kept out of the hands of women too weak to fight off predators.... Britain and Lesotho are the only two democracies with reserved seats in parliament for hereditaries.... The reservation of seats in parliament for men almost certainly contravenes Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights, prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sex....

"I had to isolate, using Being Famous as an immense excuse for never facing anything. Because I was Famous, therefore I can’t go to the movies."

"I can’t go to the theater. But then sitting in this [Hong Kong hotel] room, taking baths, which I noticed Yoko did, every time I got nervous — I must have had about 40 baths — I’m looking out over the Hong Kong Bay, and there’s something ringing a bell. It’s like, what is it? And then I just got very, very relaxed. And it was like a recognition: this is me! This relaxed person is me!.... I rediscovered [in Hong Kong], the feeling I used to have as a youngster, walking in the mountains of Scotland with an auntie. You know, you’re walking and the ground starts going beneath you, and the heather, and the clouds moving above you, and you think, Ah, this is the feeling they’re always talking about, the one that makes you paint or put it into poetry because you can’t describe it any other way. I recognized that that feeling had been with me all my life. The feeling was with me before the Beatles. So this period was to re-establish me, as me, for myself.... So here I am, right? It’s beautiful, you know. It’s just like walking those hills."

From a December 2020 article in the NYT, "For John Lennon, Isolation Had a Silver Lining/Forty years after the musician’s death, a writer revisits conversations with the former Beatle about the long period of seclusion and self-reflection that inspired his breakthrough as a solo artist, and as a human being." 

I was reading that after listening to John's song "Isolation," which I embedded in a post yesterday, in a discussion of the use of the noun "isolate" to describe a type of person. Obviously, the NYT publishes things about John Lennon every December, memorializing his murder, but this article connected to the coronavirus lockdown, in that Lennon imposed a lockdown on himself (from 1976 to 1980). 

There's a suggestion that we might take something from his experience and turn the negative of the lockdown positive. He was, though, recovering from the distortions of life as a very famous person, so it's hard to adapt that to your own life, especially if you have aspirations to accomplish things out in the world of your fellow humans or if you were already in touch with the real you.

But one thing that might be useful is Lennon's assertion that recorded music — which you can so easily experience alone and at home (or walking along the purple heather) — is preferable to going out to concerts: "All the performers I ever saw, from Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis, I was always disappointed. I preferred the record."

At the Snowman's Café...

.

... enjoy the conversation.

Rush Limbaugh, the "isolate."

From "Rush Limbaugh’s Complicated Legacy/He was a gifted entertainer and advocate, but in his later years certain flaws became more evident" by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: 

To create a community of tens of millions of people in fractured, incoherent America was an astounding feat. To pretty much sustain it over 30 years was equally astounding. 

It is perhaps ironic but probably inevitable that that community was created by a man whom one of his closest friends this week called “an isolate.” Knowing him slightly over a few decades, I believe the most important thing to him was his profession, his show—three hours a day, five days a week, unscripted, with sound elements and callers....

He wasn't just isolated, he was an isolate. Isolation wasn't just a characteristic of his, in this formulation, it was what he himself was. 

I've never noticed "isolate" — the noun — used to mean a type of person. Of course, people are often referred to as "isolated," but "isolate"? It seems like "introvert" or "incel." It's all the way deep into your being. 

Yet somehow you have close friends, close enough that one of them can be referred to as "one of his closest friends." Do you have enough close friends that there's someone who'd refer to himself as "one of" your "closest friends"?! Maybe your "closest friends" are fairly distant. A person with no truly close friends still has his "closest friends." These people might not even know him well at all, just well enough to observe that he is isolated, and coldly enough to call him "an isolate." 

The noun "isolate" is a term in social psychology: "A person who, either from choice or through separation or rejection, is isolated from normal social interaction; also occasionally an animal separated from its kind" (OED).

 

People say we've got it made/Don't they know we're so afraid?

"A single shot of the [Pfizer] vaccine is 85% effective in preventing symptomatic disease 15 to 28 days after being administered..."

"... according to a peer-reviewed study conducted by the Israeli government-owned Sheba Medical Center and published in the Lancet medical journal. Pfizer and BioNTech recommend that a second dose is administered 21 days after the first. The finding is a vindication of the approach taken by the U.K. government to delay a second dose by up to 12 weeks so it could use limited supplies to deliver a single dose to more people, and could encourage others to follow suit.... "

The Wall Street Journal reports.

"Supplied with Cruz’s address by a knowledgeable friend, I drove the fifteen minutes from my Houston apartment to the uber-rich River Oaks neighborhood where Cruz lives."

"From the street, Cruz’s white, Colonial Revival-style mansion looked dark and uninhabited.... [T]hen I heard barking and noticed a small, white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senator’s front door.... As I approached to knock, a man stepped out of the Suburban parked in Cruz’s driveway. 'Is this Senator Cruz’s house?' I asked. He said it was, that Cruz wasn’t home, and identified himself as a security guard. When asked who was taking care of the dog, the guard volunteered that he was.... I took a photo.... Some on Twitter have questioned whether the dog is in fact a poodle, suggesting alternative breeds such as a Bichon Frise. I couldn’t get close enough to tell, and I’m no canine expert, but 'Ted Cruz’s poodle' just sounds funny. As soon as I posted the photo on Twitter, noting that Cruz 'appears to have left behind the family poodle,' all hell broke loose...."

From "Ted Cruz Abandons Millions of Freezing Texans and His Poodle, Snowflake" (NY Magazine).

It's creepy going to someone's house like that, and the dog is clearly better off at home with a trusted person taking care of him, but Ted Cruz's trip to Cancún at this time when his state is in crisis has been deemed the top story of the day, and everybody always wants to hear about dogs. 

Dogs are at the top of the list of things deemed newsworthy that are not in fact newsworthy. Get dogs in your story and you'll have masses of readers. It's especially good if a dog saves a child, but the very best is when a Republican does something that can be presented as hurting a dog, like when Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car and when mean old Trump offended all of dogdom by failing to own a dog. 

Now, we have Ted Cruz not bothering his dog with needless plane trips and confinement in hotel rooms. The heartless wretch!

ADDD: "'Ted Cruz’s poodle' just sounds funny." That is a microaggression! It is an old stereotype that a gay man would have a poodle. "'Ted Cruz’s poodle' just sounds funny" is a homophobic microaggression. 

Here's a 2014 article in the Village Voice, "Fifi or Fido? New York’s Gay Men Defy Worn-Out Canine Stereotypes": "The old stereotype held that like attracts like: the prissy hairdresser with a pampered, manicured poodle or Chihuahua; the growly muscle bear controlling a giant, ultra-butch Great Dane or mastiff...."

And years ago, Dan Savage, who is gay, told a story on "This American Life" about his anxiety about being seen with a poodle:

It will be hard for the WaPo "fact checker" to give 4 Pinocchios to Joe Biden. He has to back off one Pinocchio because... well, why exactly?

Here's Biden repeatedly asserting that "he's traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jingping": 

 

Biden is making a lot of misstatements of fact. The WaPo fact checker, Glenn Kessler, writes:

During his recent town hall on CNN, President Biden made a number of mistaken claims and assertions. He suggested racehorse owners receive tax breaks worth $9 billion, almost enough to pay for free attendance at community college — a claim that left tax experts scratching their heads. He said that the $7.25 minimum wage set in 2009 would be worth $20 if indexed for inflation, a statement that only makes sense if you are measuring from 1968. He wrongly stated that “vast majority” of undocumented immigrants were not Hispanic.

No Pinocchios assigned for any of that. It's all so obviously wrong that maybe it's not worth bothering to investigate. But Kessler's approach in these columns is, I think, to isolate one thing and figure out where it stands on the continuum from utter truth to bald-faced lie. Here, he's chosen the 17,000 with Xi Jingping assertion. 

The first time Kessler heard it, he says, it "seemed like a typical Biden malaprop." See? Biden gets graded on a curve. Unlike Trump, whose misstatements were judged against a stereotype that he's a huge liar, Biden gets the benefit of a presumption that he's always getting words wrong — as though it's some sort of disability, like his stuttering, and we ought to be charitable.

But Biden has repeated the assertion, as you see in the video clip, so the standard charitable allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the Biden brain was hard to use, and the fact checker has to fact-check at least some of the new President's statements. The feast on Trump is over, and the fact-checking enterprise must go on or at least seem to go on.

Here's Kessler:

Is it finally warm enough to go outside?

 

I wonder. But inside there is conversation. You start...

BACK FROM A HIKE: The temperature got up to 24° and that felt really warm. By the end, I had my hat and mittens off and my jacket unzipped.

"Yesterday I posted a tweet in response to a post that dealt with the issue of racism. While not intending the post to be interpreted as racist, the post was itself insensitive and so I shut my account down and removed the comment."

So says Wisconsin superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr, quoted in "State superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr apologizes for racially insensitive tweet" (Wisconsin State Journal). 

This woman apologized and deleted herself from Twitter just because she was criticized for an inept contribution to a discussion about race. I think the state school superintendent needs a lot more gumption than that. 

Her tweet was dumb. Someone on Twitter had put up the question "When was the first time someone called you the n-word. I was 18." And Kerr, who is white, wrote: "I was 16 in high school and white — my lips were bigger than most and that was the reference given to me."

The person who had asked the question said: "When I read [Kerr's] statement, I was livid. There are communities where we are the only person of color in that community, so Twitter and social media have become spaces of healing. [Kerr’s statement)] is insensitive. She was not able to read the room, or understand the technology and how people understand these spaces as sacred, even though it is a public medium." 

And somebody else tweeted: "As someone who has been bullied relentlessly and called a monkey and a (N-word) for having big lips — this is just not the level of Karen I wanted to see the day after your primary win." 

A Madison School Board member tweeted: "This makes me profoundly sad and angry tho. Perfect example of white educators profound failures to understand the isolation, alienation, and disenfranchisement our Black & Brown students experience in our education system — public & private. Microaggressions from staff and peers."

Fine. Kerr was right to take down the tweet and apologize. But to delete herself from Twitter? How is that consistent with leadership? The big issue in the campaign for superintendent has been the school choice program, and Kerr advanced in the primary because she supports it. Her opponent does not. It takes courage in the face of accusations of racism to support school choice.

"Due to shortfalls in the vaccine supply we received from the state this week, your COVID-19 vaccine appointment has been rescheduled to a different date."

Unsurprising email received this morning. This is the second time my scheduled appointment has been changed. Originally, I had a February 14th appointment. I had to reschedule and got March 1st, and now, today, I see I am bumped to March 29th.

I don't like this, but I do think I'm in a better position to weather the delay than a lot of other people. I only have priority because of age, and I'm not that old. I'm 70. I don't have any conditions that are causing me to worry, and I'm retired and easily able to avoid contact with other people. I want us all to get vaccinated, and my getting the vaccination is important to me, but it's also important to me that other people get vaccinated. 

I'd like to see the world get going again, and that has more to do with people other than me getting their protection.

ADDED: Here's Anthony Fauci: "It may take until June, July and August to finally get everybody vaccinated. So when you hear about how long it’s going to take to get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated, I don’t think anybody disagrees that that’s going to be well to the end of the summer and we get into the early fall."

They're managing our expectations with something approaching double talk. It may take until June... but everyone agrees that it won't be until the end of the summer and let me just float the phrase early fall.

"People don’t experience an addictive behavioral response to naturally occurring foods that are good for our health, like strawberries."

"It’s this subset of highly processed foods that are engineered in a way that’s so similar to how we create other addictive substances. These are the foods that can trigger a loss of control and compulsive, problematic behaviors that parallel what we see with alcohol and cigarettes." 

Said Ashley Gearhardt, associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Michigan, director of the Food and Addiction Science and Treatment lab at the University of Michigan, quoted in "Are Addictive Foods Making Us Fat?/Food researchers debate whether highly processed foods like potato chips and ice cream are addictive, triggering our brains to overeat" (NYT). 

The other side of the debate is Johannes Hebebrand, head of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatics and psychotherapy at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany: "You can take any addictive drug, and it’s always the same story that almost everyone will have an altered state of mind after ingesting it. That indicates that the substance is having an effect on your central nervous system. But we are all ingesting highly processed foods, and none of us is experiencing this altered state of mind because there’s no direct hit of a substance in the brain.... It’s the diversity of foods that is so appealing and causing the problem, not a single substance in these foods."

What do you think? Is it that some foods are just so appealing that you want to eat a lot or that some foods have a certain something that hooks you? Maybe these 2 experts could get along if they looked more philosophically at what wanting is. 

Also, I get the feeling that there's a somewhat political urge to blame big corporations for manufacturing tasty food. And a snobbish aesthetic preference for the idea of the "natural." Are the strawberries in the supermarket "naturally occurring foods"? That seems like a rather silly assertion. Strawberries make a visual argument for themselves... or do they?

At the Wednesday Night Cafe...

 .... you can talk about whatever you want.