Sunrise — 6:47.

 

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"The Blue States are the problem."

 

Meade sent me that after seeing the link at Maggie's Farm.  

If you see The New York Times as a Democratic Party mouthpiece, that video — “Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How" — might leaven your criticism.

Who needs rational argument when you've got hashtags?

Systemic oppression is evil and destroys the world #Rittenhouse

— Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) November 20, 2021

I mean, I could just as well tweet: Brainlessness is ruining everything #LadyGaga 

Or: Logic leaps R Us #hashtags

Tulsi goes big.

 

"The jury got it right—finding Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. The fact that charges were brought before any serious investigation is evidence that the government was motivated by politics, which itself should be considered criminal."

ADDED: Gabbard has quite a different view of the Ahmaud Arbery case:

What is the meaning of "meaning"?

I don't think these answers match up with the question asked: "What Makes Life Meaningful? Views From 17 Advanced Economies/Family is preeminent for most publics but work, material well-being and health also play a key role."

"Most publics" — who talks like that?

Why would health be the meaning of life? I guess the question is interpreted to mean what is needed to have a meaningful life and health is a prerequisite to finding meaning, since illness is so distracting.

Read the article at the link, which goes to Pew Research Center. I'll just copy this handy (and puzzling) chart:

"In the new book version, Nikole Hannah-Jones... cautions that the [1619] project is 'not the only origin story of this country — there must be many.'"

"Then, in the opening chapter, Hannah-Jones repeats the text of her original magazine essay and refers to Black Americans as the country’s 'true "founding fathers,"' as deserving of that designation 'as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital.' Some 400-plus pages later, in a concluding chapter, she writes that the origin story in the 1619 Project is 'truer' than the one we’ve known. What might an assiduous reader conclude from all this? That 1619 is a thought experiment, or a metaphor, or the nation’s true origin, but definitely not its founding, yet possibly its inception, or just one origin story among many — but still the truer one? For all the controversy the project has elicited, this muddle over the starting point is an argument that the 1619 Project is also having with itself. These distinctions matter because, with this subject, framing is everything. History, Hannah-Jones writes in the new book, is not just about learning what happened. 'It is also, just as important, how we think about what happened.'... Reframing America’s start from July 1776 to August 1619 — from the 'wrong' date to the 'truer' story — and placing those landmarks in conversation with each other is what forces you to stop and think, to peer within competing frames...."

Writes Carlos Lozada in "The 1619 Project started as history. Now it’s also a political program. From magazine to book, the authors are rethinking their message" (WaP).

Remember, when you ask who are "The Founders," ask who are The Framers?

"If tomorrow, a person wears a pair of surgical gloves and feels the entire body of a woman, he won't be punished for sexual assault as per this judgment."

Said Attorney General of India KK Venugopal, arguing against a court order that limited the crime of sexual assault to situations where there is "skin-to-skin contact," quoted in "No skin-to-skin contact: 'Outrageous' India sexual assault order struck down" (BBC).

Did Joe Biden get angry over the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse? And did he refuse to take back his baseless assertion that Kyle Rittenhouse is a "white supremacist"?

I'm seeing headlines to that effect — for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse: Biden angry after teen cleared of shootings" (BBC). Biden spent part of yesterday morning under sedation, getting a colonoscopy, but he was back in the world of the conscious by the time the verdict came out, able to hear the news and fly into a seething rage or whatever happened that got reported as anger.

First, let's look at the video. Video was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and it's important now as we judge the emotional state of our President:

He's asked for a reaction to the verdict, which he says he just heard, and his first words were exactly what a calm, rational person would say if he didn't watch the trial: "I didn't watch the trial." The reporter loads in a challenge: "Do you stand by your past comment" accusing Kyle Rittenhouse of "white supremacy"?

Biden is cautious: "Well, look, I stand by what the jury concluded. The jury system works, and we have to abide by it." That is absolutely not anger. He's not losing his cool in the slightest, and he simply ignores the problem of his ignorant remark about white supremacy. And that's the end of it. Immediately, there's another question on another topic (his health). 

Second, there's a "Statement by President Biden" at the White House website. Here's the whole thing, and I've put the anger material in boldface:

Eerie early-morning happenings.

I got up just before 3 a.m. and, brushing my teeth, I dipped back into my new audiobook, "Our Country Friends: A Novel," by Gary Shteyngart.

He messed up the bed’s careful sheets as if two lovers had just enjoyed a tussle on it. He spotted two carved wooden statues of pineapples on the modernist desk... and knocked over one of them, adding some asymmetry to the deathly hospital order around him. What would his mother say from her immovable Gangnam cocoon, her throat tingling with hot barley tea? Advice she would never follow herself. Be strong for your friends. 

A woman—Masha, it would have to be—was screaming...

Her what cocoon? Cheongsam? That's a tight-fitting dress, perhaps cocoon-like, but it's a Chinese dress, and the character was born in Korea.

Settling in at my desktop, I open up the Kindle version of the book and do a word search on "screaming" to find the page and see "Gangnam cocoon." It's a place name — the mother's not trapped within her clothing, but her district of Seoul. The word is familiar to me because of that song, "Gangnam Style."

Idly, I scan book titles in my Kindle app and notice "Pain: When Will It End?" What's that? Something I added to the Kindle at Meade's request? I open it up. Oh! It's a fantastic book of cartoons. I don't recognize the artist's name — Tim Kreider — but I must have put this in the Kindle. (Yeah, I see now, that I blogged about the purchase back in 2019.)

I become completely absorbed in the brilliance of "Pain: When Will It End?" and I arrive at this cartoon:

We're so self-absorbed. I get it. But I wondered, what would happen on earth if the moon were to disappear? I click out of Kindle and over to Safari and google:

5 suggested completions and 4 of them are about the loss of the moon?! How can that happen? I was in Kindle, and I hadn't typed "moon." I hadn't even encountered "moon" in searchable text, only seen it handwritten in a drawing. 

But maybe the disappearance of the moon is the number one thing people are wondering about when they muse about what might happen on earth. Perhaps there's some movie or TV show where the moon is suddenly gone for some reason and all sorts of disasters ensued. 

But what disasters? Something about the tides? The oceans go wild? Is there some weird psychic damage that would occur if we could no longer gaze upon that big white circle in the sky?

Sunrise — 7:00.

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"Rittenhouse Jury Is Said to Reach a Decision" ... NOT GUILTY on all counts.

The NYT reports. 

"There are students and faculty who complain that they don’t want to express centrist or right-wing views because they fear being criticized or stigmatized."

"They may not see themselves as hypersensitive, but they do crave some protection from students and colleagues whom they perceive as demanding leftist ideological conformity. Those who complain of such conformity should recognize that their fear isn’t the fault of anyone’s wokeness or hostility toward free expression. It is a sign that they need more courage — for it requires courage for students, or anyone, to stay engaged with difference. Whatever your political position, embracing intellectual diversity means being brave enough to consider ideas and practices that might challenge your own beliefs or cause you to change your views, or even your life.... In the current climate of political pessimism and manufactured outrage, we can work with students to reject the tired tropes of the past and embrace what many in the older generations have forgotten: how to engage with and, yes, debate people who have a variety of points of view and who imagine the future with a mix of hopes sometimes very different from their own."

From "Anxiety About Wokeness Is Intellectual Weakness" by Michael S. Roth (NYT).  Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, wrote a book called “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses.”

This is the top-rated comment (from a reader in NYC):

When my daughter was in high school, the teacher and the students of color in her psychology class all agreed that there is no such thing as free will for young black men. That when young black men commit crimes, it is out of the desperation brought on by lack opportunity compounded over generations. My 16 year old daughter argued that individuals always have a choice and the opportunity to exert free will. She was loudly called a racist. The teacher allowed that comment and encouraged discussion of her racism. How much more courageous should she have been? How many more similar stories does this author need to hear before they're no longer dismissed as "anecdotal,["] and instead seen a portrayal of life in "progressive" institutions?

ADDED: Lots of other comments over there — the highest ranking ones all disagreeing with the op-ed. I'll give you a bunch of them:

"Internal disputes rarely come to light, employees allege, and lawsuits are uncommon because Tesla requires many workers to sign mandatory arbitration agreements..."

"... which mandate that disputes are settled outside court. Barraza’s attorneys say the agreement is 'illegal and unenforceable.' Barraza said this workplace culture is bred at the top of the company, citing a joking tweet by CEO Elon Musk referencing a university he planned to start: Texas Institute of Technology & Science. (He left readers to interpret the acronym: TITS.) 'That doesn’t set a good example for the factory — it almost gives it like an … "he’s tweeting about it, it has to be OK,"' she said. 'It’s not fair to myself, to my family to other women who are working there.'"

From "A Tesla factory worker alleges sexual harassment is rampant in a rare lawsuit. Now other women are stepping forward. Jessica Barraza said co-workers commented on her body and touched her inappropriately; supervisors and HR failed to put a stop to the behavior, she alleges" (WaPo).

"It creates a grounding feeling - a moment of stillness. I feel like our dinners at home are much better now - like, 'Now we are together, and this is what we're doing.' I mean, I'm not going to say we have Rockwellian dinners or anything."

Said one father, quoted in "Saying grace: How a moment of thanks, religious or not, adds meaning to our meals" (originally published in WaPo, but linked to Greenwich Time, where I arrived via Drudge). 

Also: "M.J. Ryan, whose books on gratitude include 'A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meals from Buddha to the Beatles,' says... 'Taking in the good is a counterbalance to that negativity bias we have in our brains... [Grace is] a built-in moment.... The food is an objective thing to look at that we have and can be grateful for.'" 

And Tim O'Malley, the academic director for Notre Dame's Center for Liturgy: "If you think about the modern household, it's efficient - we get together, we eat, we run.... It might be the most damning thing in modern culture, that receiving without gratitude...."

"What can you say about an institution that is willing to break faith with its members and engage in blackmail and the subornation of false statements to wage a political vendetta?"

"Sadly, you’d have to say that it’s pretty typical these days. As we’ve seen in the willingness of the press, with help from the FBI and other government agencies, to spread many false stories, from the Russian 'collusion' myth to the phony reports on the Covington boys in Washington to the bogus University of Virginia 'rape' case, politics trumps all in America’s elite institutions. Which, by all appearances, aren’t so elite after all. Maybe we should stop acting as if they are."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Students suing Yale Law show America’s elites have a low opinion of minorities" (NY Post).

Sunrise — 6:59:10 and 6:59:23.

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