"Folks, we need a center-right political party in this country. Yet today’s Republican Party isn’t the steadying force of the past..."

"... but is rather a blood-and-soil movement that stands for nothing larger than one bombastic hothead."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in "The G.O.P. Is Now a Personality Cult/The party no longer stands for much of anything" (NYT), which I'm quoting as an example of the kind of thing I am seeing but not reading anymore. I made an exception for this one — after passing over many similar but slightly less tantalizing headlines — and I cherry-picked one line — mainly because I want to talk about how unreadably predictable this sort of material has become, but I do have one thing to say: If we need a center-right political party in this country, how about if the Democrats be that party?

At least be the center-center party. The whole center is gapingly open for anyone sensible and normal to step into it. I'm suspicious of one-sided demands for one party to forgo the thrills of extremism, to just calm down and be dull.

Is this a racial joke (about a little girl's dog)?

I think these folks are taking this White House thing a little too literally. https://t.co/2HRPEYhoQz

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) July 21, 2019

Neal Katyal was Acting Solicitor General of United States under Barack Obama.

In the conversation at Twitter, somebody writes: "They are so white on the outside, even Arabella s dog is white. Yet they are so dark inside so dark."

That sounds tantalizingly close to the old joke, "Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read" (attributed to Groucho Marx).

Jokes have changed!

IN THE COMMENTS: gilbar asks: "I wonder what they would have complained about, if they'd gotten a black lab?"

The jokes write themselves, don't they? A black dog is the only black creature that will go anywhere near them. What did they name him, Token? Etc.

AND: I wouldn't rule out the possibility that somewhere in the process of choosing that white dog, the Kushners realized their antagonists would make racial jokes and decided that would be a plus. What kind of jerks say racial things about a little girl's dog?

And look, there's Neal Katyal, scampering right into the trap! And there's Ann Althouse, kicking him around for being so rash and out of control.

ALSO: Isn't it time we stopped calling the White House the White House? The place was called the "Executive Mansion" until the racist Theodore Roosevelt took the trouble to change the official name to "The White House." There should be a movement to change the name back to "Executive Mansion." Repaint it too — not white and not any monochrome either. I recommend earth tones.

At the Saturday Night Cafe...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

"Anyone old enough to remember the moon landing, fifty years ago today, is also old enough to remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening."

"At the time—the very height of the Vietnam War, when the establishment that had sent up the rocket faced a kind of daily full-court-press rebellion, from what had only just been dubbed the 'counterculture'—the act of sending three very white guys to the moon seemed, as Norman Mailer wrote at the time, like the final, futile triumph of Wasp culture... Mailer’s book on the topic, 'Of a Fire on the Moon'... was the usual mid-period Mailer mix of eight parts bullshit to two parts very shrewd observation... The Apollo 11 mission was, he insisted, chilling in its self-evident futility, its enormous orchestrated energy, and its ultimate pointlessness. We went there because we could go there, with the strong implication that this was also, to borrow the title of another Mailer book, why we were in Vietnam; the Wasp establishment had been restless since it got off the Mayflower, and was always seeking new worlds to conquer for no reason. What is easy to forget now is that it was a summer balanced between two equally potent national events: the Wasp triumph of the moon landing, answered, almost exactly a month later, by the counterculture triumph of Woodstock...."

From "Between the Moon and Woodstock" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

I'm old enough to remember the moon landing and not only do I remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening, I remember having the same opinion as Norman Mailer.



From a review by Steven Achilles Brown (at Medium):

Throughout ["Of a Fire on the Moon,"] Mailer returns to a recurring question: is the moon landing a good and noble achievement of America, or is it an errand of the Devil?... ... Mailer seems ambivalent until the very end, when he writes

the expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us . . . probably we had to explore into outer space, for technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of that world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness — yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who know that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.

This quotation discloses much about Norman Mailer. He had a degree from Harvard in aeronautical engineering, yet as a writer in this technological age, had roots in 19th-century romanticism; he wished that all men, including astronauts, be poets and philosophers. Throughout the book, indeed throughout most of his career, Mailer was preoccupied with one central theme, that God was an embattled vision: good and evil fight each other for possession of the souls of humankind....

"When I’m alone late at night on a deserted road, I like to walk on the double yellow lines. One time I decided to stop and lie down..."

"... right there in the middle of the road. I kept myself narrow, arms pinned, so cars could pass on either side. But I wasn’t invisible, and I alarmed a kind policeman who happened to drive by me. After determining that I was not dead, drunk or high, he concluded I was suicidal. We had a long talk. It didn’t help for me to explain that if I had wanted to be run over I would’ve moved several feet in one direction or the other. And picked a busier road. He wanted to know, why, if I didn’t want to be run over, was I lying in the middle of the road? There were so many reasons. I wanted to see the night sky from the perspective of the road; I wanted to be in this secret spot that always got passed by and never occupied..."

From "Unruliness" by Agnes Callard, a 2018 blog post, which is discussed in a new New Yorker article by Paul Bloom, "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions/Why do we enjoy doing things for no good reason?" Callard is a philosopher, Bloom a psychology professor.

Bloom writes:

Callard is careful to distinguish unruliness from rebellion. By lying down in the road, she wasn’t critiquing the status quo or sticking it to the Man. Unruly people might flatter themselves as rebels, but unruliness is nothing so determinate—it’s just an unwillingness to play by the rules. It’s a near-neighbor, therefore, to perversity, a topic long central to theology and philosophy...

Perverse actors—I won’t call them “perverts,” since that word evokes distracting connotations—can also be creative or funny.... The blogger Scott Alexander points out that four per cent of Americans tell pollsters that they think reptilian aliens rule the Earth....

Unruliness, perversity, pigheadedness—psychologists have long been interested in this bestiary of paradoxical thought and action. Perversity is a puzzle. It’s hard to explain, scientifically, what Edgar Allan Poe described as “the imp of the perverse.”...

A friend of mine tells how his family made him a pie on his birthday, as a surprise. His young niece was repeatedly instructed not to reveal the secret, and she solemnly agreed. But, when he came into the house, she suddenly screamed, “There is no pie!”...

Much more to this article — I'm skipping over a lot of good stuff — but it, perversely/harmoniously, ends with pie:

It’s said that a waitress once asked [the Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] what he wanted for dessert—apple pie or blueberry pie. He chose the apple pie. Then she returned with news: there was also cherry pie. “In that case,” Morgenbesser said, “I’ll have the blueberry.”

"... and while she endures their pranks and shares meals with them, she invents a secret friend. This friend is, curiously, distant and hidden..."

"... a friend who she hopes will be revealed to her one day. She has made up a friend who won’t keep her company."

Imagine being snubbed by your friends, creating an imaginary friend, and being snubbed by your imaginary friend! (Or is that easy to imagine: It's religion.)

I'm reading "The Weil Conjectures" by Karen Olsson.

I noticed that book because of "Two Brilliant Siblings and the Curious Consolations of Math," a review in the NYT. Excerpt:

The precocity of the Weil siblings is the stuff of legend. At 9 years old, André was tinkering with doctoral-level math. By 12, he had taught himself Sanskrit, become a proficient violinist and taken his younger sister’s education in hand. The pair spoke to each other in rhyming couplets and Ancient Greek....

“The Weil Conjectures” takes its title from a series of propositions written by André that led to the development of modern algebraic geometry. “The word ‘conjecture’ derives from a root notion of throwing or casting things together,” Olsson writes. To the story of the Weil siblings, she adds her own infatuation with mathematics, which she studied briefly in college before turning to fiction...

The book advances in fragments, historical divagations that drift by, smoothly as clouds: Hippasus of Metapontum supposedly flung off a ship for his discovery of irrational numbers, or the unearthing of the Rhind papyrus of 1700 B.C., one of the oldest mathematical documents, with an insuperable opening line: “Directions for Attaining the Knowledge of All Dark Things.” Olsson is drawn to anecdotes that emphasize the role of beauty and chance. Why do we represent the unknown with x? Credit René Descartes’s printer, who was running out of letters while producing copies of the treatise “La Géométrie.” X, y and z remained, and the printer settled on x, the least used letter in French....

For all of Olsson’s skill at untangling knotty mathematics, she is baffled by Simone.... The issue of Weil’s mental state has long preoccupied and divided her biographers. She died at 34, from tuberculosis, aggravated, it is said, by prolonged malnutrition from restricting herself to children’s wartime rations....

At the Succulent Café...

... luxuriate in all-night conversation.

"But Mr. Trump’s approval rating has been stable even after seemingly big missteps."

"And if it improves by a modest amount — not unusual for incumbents with a strong economy — he could have a distinct chance to win re-election while losing the popular vote by more than he did in 2016, when he lost it by 2.1 percentage points. The president’s relative advantage in the Electoral College could grow even further in a high-turnout election, which could pad Democratic margins nationwide while doing little to help them in the Northern battleground states. It is even possible that Mr. Trump could win while losing the national vote by as much as five percentage points.... Many assume that the huge turnout expected in 2020 will benefit Democrats, but it’s not so straightforward. It could conceivably work to the advantage of either party, and either way, higher turnout could widen the gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote. That’s because the major Democratic opportunity — to mobilize nonwhite and young voters on the periphery of politics — would disproportionately help Democrats in diverse, often noncompetitive states. The major Republican opportunity — to mobilize less educated white voters, particularly those who voted in 2016 but sat out 2018 — would disproportionately help them in white, working-class areas overrepresented in the Northern battleground states...."

Writes Nate Cohn in "Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign/Re-election looks plausible even with a bigger loss in the national popular vote" (NYT).

That's all very interesting about the Electoral College, and if you read the whole article, you'll see a lot about polls about "approval" of Trump, which are used as a proxy for how people will vote. But in an election, you have to vote for one or another candidate (or abstain), and you might disapprove of all of them.

That is, withholding approval doesn't mean you won't vote for Trump. It's hard to approve of Trump. He's not exactly approval-seeking. You might like the results he's getting and still feel you want distance from him. You might vote for him because you want more of the same or because you think his opponent will take away some of the things you like and still be able to say that you "disapprove" of the person known as Trump.

A conscious sense of disapproval may even facilitate a vote for Trump. People who seek approval for themselves may find it expedient to express disapproval of Trump — to be free of the onus and stigma of approving of him — but when the time comes to answer the question whether they want 4 more years of his work, they might also find it expedient to say "yes."

"Wearing matching 'Squad' pajamas with 11 bridesmaids I’d never met, for the sake of a perfectly filtered, faux candid photo of us throwing our heads back and laughing..."

"... didn’t seem worth what the room would cost. So how could I say no to a friend I’ve known since we were 16, without becoming persona non grata?... I was uninvited to the long bachelorette weekend in Spain, and told, via WhatsApp, that I was no longer a bridesmaid. This left me $675 in the hole for what I had already spent on a trip I was now banned from, including a nonrefundable airline ticket...."

From "Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties/What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost? Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises. Instagram wedding envy wins the day" by Rhiannon Picton-James, published in the NYT on July 16th.

Interesting to see the disparaging use of "Squad." On July 15th, I was asking about the origin of the term "squad" to refer to the set of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley. It had popped into the national discourse through Nancy Pelosi, who'd seemed to be trying to get the group under control. In my effort to understand the term, I checked out Urban Dictionary and found 2 definitions that help understand the disparagement intended by Nancy Pelosi and Rhiannon Picton-James:

"Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."

And here's a piece from Vox on July 17th, "How 4 congresswomen came to be called 'the Squad'/The term is making headlines, but Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib have their own definition."

"For a left magazine to remove a classic gay-left essay is close to unheard of. But the remnants of The New Republic did exactly that last week..."

"... after publishing an article by Dale Peck on the candidacy and character of Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate for president in American history.... At the heart of the essay is a point that could, in someone else’s hands, have yielded a potentially nuanced insight into Buttigieg’s psyche. Buttigieg only came out four years ago; it seems his first serious relationship was and is with the man he married. Buttigieg is thereby more a homosexual than an acculturated 'gay.'... Like many others over the centuries, Buttigieg channeled this repression into becoming a classic example of 'the best little boy in the world'.... Peck tells us: Buttigieg is the gay equivalent of an 'Uncle Tom,' and he coins the term 'Mary Pete' to smear him as such.... [Peck's] 'gayer-than-thou' act is a classic of identity politics.... The point of the gay-rights movement for the left was to join other oppressed groups in overturning the entire liberal democratic and capitalist system. The point of the gay-rights movement for those of us on the right was to expand the space in which gay people can simply be themselves. That may mean embracing the identity of queer nonbinary whatever, or it may mean simply getting on with life as an individual who happens to be gay. No one is wrong to be the person they want to be. There is no right way or wrong way to be gay. I thought of Peck’s argument when confronted this week by a speech by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.... 'We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.' That’s why the hard left hates Buttigieg. Because he is a gay man who does not have what they believe is the correct 'queer voice.'"

Writes Andrew Sullivan (in NY Magazine).

Any moment now... Celebrate the moon landing with President Trump.

"He has an enormous amount of chutzpah to attack me and challenge my perfect, perfect sex life...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, antagonized by David Boies, "who is representing Virginia Roberts Giuffre [who] claims Dershowitz had sex with her while she was a minor after being recruited by Epstein" (Washington Examiner).



"I have had sex with one woman since the day I met Jeffrey Epstein. I challenge David Boies to say under oath that he's only had sex with one woman ... He has an enormous amount of chutzpah to attack me and challenge my perfect, perfect sex life during the relevant period of time."

"If you touch me/You'll understand what happiness is..."

Happiness or horrowshow... you decide:



ADDED: I think what's disconcerting here is that they are naked and yet not naked.

Why are 2 power stations in Madison burning?

WTF is going on in #madison ? Two power station fires at the same time?! #fire pic.twitter.com/cdTesMJdGG

— Justin Sieglaff (@jmsieglaff) July 19, 2019

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Two fires burning at Madison Gas and Electric substations in downtown Madison."

The first and larger of the two fires appears to be at the MG&E property on East Washington Avenue. A second fire could be seen at the substation behind Ogg Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus....

FIRE at Madison Gas and Electric. Very loud explosion at 7:30, fire is still burning #Madison pic.twitter.com/v1dtpfhwP1

— Pat 👨🏻‍💻 (@patcheszzz) July 19, 2019

ADDED: "Update: MGE explosion shot flames 150 feet high, thousands still without power Downtown" (Wisconsin State Journal). Video at the link. ALSO: here:

"Put your money on someone who energizes and excites you rather than someone who appeals to a voter in a diner in rural Michigan who you invited in your head."

Said Adam Jentleson, "a Democratic strategist working for a group focused on suing Mr. Trump," quoted in the last line of a NYT article titled, "Why 2020 Democrats Won’t Stop Talking About Wisconsin."

Seems to me Jentleson stopped talking about Wisconsin. He talked about a guy in a diner in rural Michigan. It's just mythology, these flyover people. Once upon a time in a faraway land — Michigan, Wisconsin — what's the difference?

The point is, apparently, Democrats are sick of thinking about that guy, the "guy in a diner in rural" whatever. Once they were safely stowed in a basket — a basket of deplorables — and that worked out so disastrously that the reaction could be to obsess over these imaginary people. Are Democratic Party candidates expected to actually venture into the hinterlands? No, they'll just worry about those people, and then they come to Madison (where I live) or Milwaukee to try to score enough votes to outnumber those diner people. That's what Democrats do to win Wisconsin.

“We have created an electorate full of pundits and strategists, and the result is that we’re puzzling through not who we like but who we imagine someone else will like,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. “It’s a fool’s errand to imagine who will be appealing to someone else.”

Yeah, it's a fool’s errand to imagine... Stop imagining what other people are like inside, and just say what you want. Says the man from Hawaii, which is 4,000 miles away from Wisconsin. I can imagine — no, I can't — what people way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean think of the opinions of people up there in that part of Wisconsin where at some point it turns into Michigan.



What is that stuff? Watersmeet? Iron Belt? It'll make you crazy if you think about who lives there and what they want.

“There’s something fundamental about the fact that Trump presented himself as a noxious human and still won that is disconcerting and unsettling about America,” said Adam Jentleson.... “But the why, we don’t know. It depends who you talk to.”

Who should be President of the Disconcerting and Unsettling States of American?

"They stole my ideas"/"They copied my novel"/"They ripped me off"/"Since [the studio] stole my novel, I poured out the liquid and set it ablaze."

Statements allegedly made by Shinji Aoba, arrested for killing 33 persons at Kyoto Animation in Japan (reported in Variety).

Since its founding in 1981, Kyoto Animation has regularly adapted novels into anime series....

Local authorities said two bodies were found on the first floor of the burned-out building and eleven others on the second floor. Another body was discovered in a stairwell leading from the first to second floors. The remaining 19 bodies were found in a stairwell leading from the third floor to the roof, whose door was closed but which could have been opened from the roof.