"Due to the coffee being extremely hot, the Trooper removed the lid from the top of the cup to cool it down," the Illinois State Police said in a statement. It was then that the officer noticed the mucus and saliva floating inside his coffee cup. The ISP immediately began an investigation into the incident which culminated just a couple of hours later with the arrest of 25-year-old Dunkin’ Donuts employee Vincent J. Sessler.Perhaps he thought it was the perfect crime — what with the lid on the coffee — the perfect underhanded, sleazy, petty way to express hatred for a person he lacked the power to confront. But, no, the cop took the lid off the coffee, and this downtrodden member of the underclass is thwarted.
August 3, 2020
Coffee is hot and mucus floats.
From "Dunkin' Donuts employee arrested after cop finds 'large, thick piece of mucus' in his coffee" (ABC News):
"The lack of health information about individual justices is a glaring problem. Declining, even incapacitated, justices hold their offices until they die."
"And because justices play politics with their departure decisions, trying to retire under a politically favorable president and Senate if possible, the court’s history has been filled with declining justices who compromised the court’s work because they refused to depart for political or personal reasons."
Said Artemus Ward — "a political scientist at Northern Illinois University who has written about the politics of court retirements" — quoted in "Ginsburg waited 4 months to say her cancer had returned/Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps the most forthcoming member of the Supreme Court when it comes to telling the public about her many health issues" (ABC News).
That quote appears near the end of an article that begins with the dubious proposition that "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps the most forthcoming member of the Supreme Court when it comes to telling the public about her many health issues." What does ABC News know about the other Justices?!
ADDED: I don't know how the political scientist Artemus Ward got his name, but if the name sounds familiar, you may be thinking of America's first stand-up comedian, who lived from 1837 to 1867. I blogged about him in 2017, here. And here's a collection of his jokes. Examples:
Said Artemus Ward — "a political scientist at Northern Illinois University who has written about the politics of court retirements" — quoted in "Ginsburg waited 4 months to say her cancer had returned/Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps the most forthcoming member of the Supreme Court when it comes to telling the public about her many health issues" (ABC News).
That quote appears near the end of an article that begins with the dubious proposition that "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps the most forthcoming member of the Supreme Court when it comes to telling the public about her many health issues." What does ABC News know about the other Justices?!
But she waited more than four months to reveal that her cancer had returned and that she was undergoing chemotherapy.Did ABC News want to make the point that this recent behavior is out of character? The next point is that because of coronavirus, the Court switched from in-person oral arguments to arguments by telephone — audio only. We couldn't see the Justices, so they had more ability than usual to hide their condition.
ADDED: I don't know how the political scientist Artemus Ward got his name, but if the name sounds familiar, you may be thinking of America's first stand-up comedian, who lived from 1837 to 1867. I blogged about him in 2017, here. And here's a collection of his jokes. Examples:
Did you ever have the measels, and if so, how many?
Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?
He is dreadfully married. "He's the most married man I ever saw in my life."
The fack can't be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us.
The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste.
August 2, 2020
At the 5:46/6:03 Café...
... go ahead and write about whatever you want.
And thanks for using the Althouse Portal when you shop at Amazon.
"The Cubans also have two medicines, one for diabetes, of which my mother died for, lung cancer, which my father died for, and I would like to have those drugs tested in the United States."
Said Karen Bass — a congresswoman on Biden's VP shortlist — on "Meet the Press" today when she was prompted by Chuck Todd to talk about what seems to have been her "celebrating" of the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba.
My bullshit detector went off at "diabetes, of which my mother died for, lung cancer, which my father died for." I don't doubt that her mother died of diabetes and her father died of lung cancer, but obviously they did not die for their disease. I don't think that's an error that arises out of ignorance of proper English. I think that's the kind of thing that gets out when you're thinking something different from what you are saying.
And what are the drugs that they have in Cuba that aren't even tested here? I'd like to know. Bass was oddly enthusiastic about Cuban medicine and purported to have expertise:
My bullshit detector went off at "diabetes, of which my mother died for, lung cancer, which my father died for." I don't doubt that her mother died of diabetes and her father died of lung cancer, but obviously they did not die for their disease. I don't think that's an error that arises out of ignorance of proper English. I think that's the kind of thing that gets out when you're thinking something different from what you are saying.
And what are the drugs that they have in Cuba that aren't even tested here? I'd like to know. Bass was oddly enthusiastic about Cuban medicine and purported to have expertise:
[F]or the last 20 years, I've actually been working on health care related issues in Cuba. You know, the Cubans train U.S. doctors. And I've been recruiting those doctors to work in the inner city because they come in tuition free....
"The next Lost Cause? The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same."
A column at the Washington Post by Caroline E. Janney. She's a history professor at the University of Virginia.
When Inauguration Day comes, Trump is hanging on in the White House. But his term is over, and Biden has been sworn in, so Biden is the President, and now Trump is a private citizen wrongly holding onto the place. What to do?!
Should the Secret Service firmly but gently usher him out? No, Biden says. He is my house guest! Trump stays on, sleeps in the White House, gets his meals, watches TV and tweets, and he and Biden have conversations, and they kind of enjoy each other, debate, trade presidenting tips, talk about their grandkids. America looks on, feels heart-warmed by the odd couple in the White House, and love is all around.
The original Lost Cause will never be replicated. It articulated a fully developed set of beliefs about slavery, honor and region, grounded in the experiences of a slaveholding republic. Trump and his followers do not have such a coherent ideology, nor do they enjoy the kind of geographical monopoly that the Confederates possessed. But their arguments are animated by some of the same tactics that allowed the Lost Cause to thrive for more than 150 years, which may help Trumpism, too, live on past its political moment....There's a lot of ideation about the Trump who won't go away. I've got a fantasy of my own. Want to hear it? It's a sweet little fantasy, and I hope it will make everyone feel good. So... Biden wins in November, but Trump doesn't believe the result was fair and square, just can't get his head around it.
It’s easy to imagine Trump supporters looking backward at his presidency as a golden era, touting efforts to forestall illegal immigration, protect White suburbs and battle China — not unlike the ways Lost Cause boosters reimagined the antebellum South. Just as former Confederates relied on the press and popular culture to disseminate their myths, we might expect cable news outlets and right-wing websites to perpetuate his charges of “rigged elections.” MAGA and Trump flags will fly on private property along major interstates or highways, just as Confederate battle flags do today....
When Inauguration Day comes, Trump is hanging on in the White House. But his term is over, and Biden has been sworn in, so Biden is the President, and now Trump is a private citizen wrongly holding onto the place. What to do?!
Should the Secret Service firmly but gently usher him out? No, Biden says. He is my house guest! Trump stays on, sleeps in the White House, gets his meals, watches TV and tweets, and he and Biden have conversations, and they kind of enjoy each other, debate, trade presidenting tips, talk about their grandkids. America looks on, feels heart-warmed by the odd couple in the White House, and love is all around.
"The last thing that Mayra Ramirez remembers from the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago is calling her family to say she had Covid, was about to be put on a ventilator..."
"... and needed her mother to make medical decisions for her. Ms. Ramirez, 28, did not wake up for more than six weeks. And then she learned that on June 5, she had become the first Covid patient in the United States to receive a double-lung transplant. On Wednesday, she went home from the hospital.... 'I’m pretty sure that if I had been at another center, they would have just ended care and let me die,' she said in an interview on Wednesday. The surgery is considered a desperate measure reserved for people with fatal, irreversible lung damage. Doctors do not want to remove a person’s lungs if there is any chance they will heal. Over all, only about 2,700 lung transplants were performed in the United States last year. Patients must be sick enough to need a transplant, and yet also strong enough to survive the operation, recover and get back on their feet" (NYT).
Imagine waking up to find your lungs had been taken out and replaced!
Imagine waking up to find your lungs had been taken out and replaced!
"Why Can’t We Just Have Class Outside? It might be the answer to America’s school-reopening problem."
Writes Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.
I'm thinking the entire enterprise of schoolteaching has to do with capturing young people indoors and insisting that they do indoor things, so the schoolteachers are people who've wanted to spend their lives doing that. How can they adapt to an outdoor setting? As Khazan writes, outdoor school is envisioned as the same as indoor school, just more uncomfortable! That is, these people who are the current schoolteachers will not be launching toward anything like "forest school." They'll just be tasked to get the kids to behave like the indoor kids that, until now, they've been creating and shaping in a convenient indoor setting.
Put them out in the middle of a closed road and watch the magic happen.
A small group of activists across the country are pushing for schools to consider teaching children in person, but outdoors in a park or even a parking lot....Kids should be outside most of the daytime, so it would be a great experiment in teaching them how to be outside. But are teachers prepared to be outside? Can teachers really meet the responsibility of caring for youngsters who are not walled in? I'm picturing kids getting up and running off. Isn't that what the outdoors inspires — what we hope for kids to want and love to do outdoors?
It might sound crazy, but kids learn outside all the time, and did so even before the pandemic. About 250 “forest schools” exist in the U.S., in which younger kids spend much of their time in nature... In the early 1900s, during a tuberculosis outbreak in Rhode Island, kids attended a school with the windows always open, even in the winter. They sat in sleeping-bag-like blankets and had heated soapstones placed at their feet, The New York Times reported. Eventually, there were 65 such “open air” schools around the country....
Outdoor school would look like an extremely low-tech, mildly uncomfortable version of a regular school day, though perhaps with more sunscreen. Kids would be at a soccer field, in a park, or on another patch of green, advocates told me, or even in the middle of a closed road, if the school lacks green space. They’d sit under a tree or portable shade structure or simply wear sun hats.... [K]ids would wear jackets or head for the gym or cafeteria on rainy or cold days....
I'm thinking the entire enterprise of schoolteaching has to do with capturing young people indoors and insisting that they do indoor things, so the schoolteachers are people who've wanted to spend their lives doing that. How can they adapt to an outdoor setting? As Khazan writes, outdoor school is envisioned as the same as indoor school, just more uncomfortable! That is, these people who are the current schoolteachers will not be launching toward anything like "forest school." They'll just be tasked to get the kids to behave like the indoor kids that, until now, they've been creating and shaping in a convenient indoor setting.
Put them out in the middle of a closed road and watch the magic happen.
August 1, 2020
At the Saturday Night Café...
... you can write about whatever you want, but I wanted to show you these 3 pictures of this morning's sunrise, taken at 5:45, 5:48, and 5:51. The actual sunrise time was 5:48.
The Lincoln Project indulges in fat shaming, color shaming, and the depreciating of masculinity in this tone-deaf attack on Trump.
I only got half way through this before clicking it off. It might be funnier to fans of David Attenborough nature programs, but to me the reliance on an English-accented supercilious male voice was just embarrassingly out of touch with present-day America:
I found that video via "Lincoln Project Gets Personal In New Ad, Mocking ‘Impotus Americanus’ Trump’s Weight and ‘Ruddy Orange’ Color" (Mediaite). Excerpt:
ADDED: Quite aside from the collateral bullying of men who have the same physical deficiencies as those that are attributed to Trump, many women — including me — don't like to hear judgment of men that is based on their ability to have sexual intercourse with women. We're sympathetic to men who have problems finding a woman or performing sexually, and we think publicly mocking them is jackassery. And I know Trump speaks crudely and tauntingly at times, but if you do the same thing, you sacrifice your power to criticize him on that ground.
I found that video via "Lincoln Project Gets Personal In New Ad, Mocking ‘Impotus Americanus’ Trump’s Weight and ‘Ruddy Orange’ Color" (Mediaite). Excerpt:
In an online town hall with supporters Thursday night, Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson discussed the philosophy behind ads like this.So, they are choosing to bully him, and they don't mind collateral damage to the many Americans who are fat, who have light pigmentation, and who worry about the vigor of their masculinity. The Lincoln Project doesn't do it "just for fun or to amuse ourselves" — but the "just" implies that they are enjoying themselves taunting Trump. So here's a picture of Rick Wilson. He has liberated you to say anything you want to roast him based on his appearance:
“When you see the ads talking about Trump’s personal weaknesses, physical, mental, what have you, those are targeting one voter: Donald Trump,” said Wilson. “Now, we don’t troll Trump just for fun or to amuse ourselves — God knows, that would be a great job all day, ok? Trolling him would be a fabulous job, but we don’t do it just to troll him.”
“We do it,” Wilson continued, “because every second Trump is distracted by a Lincoln Project ad, that is playing with his psychological weaknesses, that is playing with his mental frailties, that is playing with his weird ego problems — every moment he’s focused on us, he’s not campaigning against Joe Biden.”
ADDED: Quite aside from the collateral bullying of men who have the same physical deficiencies as those that are attributed to Trump, many women — including me — don't like to hear judgment of men that is based on their ability to have sexual intercourse with women. We're sympathetic to men who have problems finding a woman or performing sexually, and we think publicly mocking them is jackassery. And I know Trump speaks crudely and tauntingly at times, but if you do the same thing, you sacrifice your power to criticize him on that ground.
"I believe in free speech but more so in good editing. This piece is unintelligible."
The top-rated comment at an article that I was going to blog, tried to blog, but gave up on blogging... until I saw that the way to blog it was to blog that comment: "The 'cancel culture' debate gets the fight for free speech entirely wrong" by Eve Fairbanks (WaPo).
Here's a quote from the article that I'd picked out, then gave up on: "A robust defense of free speech sounds impossible to dislike. But if you interrogate it, you somehow end up proving the absolutists’ point: that they cannot voice 'anodyne' opinions, as they’ve characterized them, without attracting accusations of bad faith."
Here's a quote from the article that I'd picked out, then gave up on: "A robust defense of free speech sounds impossible to dislike. But if you interrogate it, you somehow end up proving the absolutists’ point: that they cannot voice 'anodyne' opinions, as they’ve characterized them, without attracting accusations of bad faith."
Eminently guessable: What did this fisherman say to me?
Photo taken at 5:30 this morning. Meade took this picture from the car:
Kamala Harris allies do a conference call with Joe Biden campaign staff and we get to read about it...
... at Politico. So embarrassing! Can't he at least look like he's in command, seeing what's good and bad in the people he knows, making his own decision? Why am I able to see that there's a "vetting unit" that includes Christopher Dodd, who's said something about Harris having "no remorse" for her "little girl was me" remark at a debate last year? I'm seeing the names of all these people on the conference call who were pitching Kamala Harris to Biden's people:
Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, Dana Milbank is doing all he can to stomp on Susan Rice: "Why would Biden pick a human lightning rod as VP?"
The conference call included several of the state’s highest-ranking elected officials and labor and business leaders, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Secretary of State Alex Padilla, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, state schools chief Tony Thurmond, state Treasurer Fiona Ma and Chad Griffin, a Democratic consultant and former head of Human Rights campaign, according to organizers. Representing the Biden campaign were the four main members of his vetting team: Dodd, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; and Biden's former White House and Senate counsel, Cynthia Hogan....Somebody leaked all that. How messy!
A person on the call said Harris’ allies wanted the campaign to hear from people who know her best.... "This was about us sharing how much Kamala would be a stellar vice president," said one official who participated on the call, referencing Dodd’s earlier remarks. 'He spoke at length about her and said very nice things," the person said of Dodd’s comments about Harris on the conference call.... Dodd said “very supportive things” about Harris during the call, according to Kounalakis.... Critics suggested that Dodd was questioning a woman for being ambitious....I don't think hearing about this call helps Harris! The call was intended to help Harris, and the leaker seems to want to help Harris, but now I'd be surprised if it's Harris.
Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, Dana Milbank is doing all he can to stomp on Susan Rice: "Why would Biden pick a human lightning rod as VP?"
Systemic racism at TikTok?
My TikTok isn't being promoted to the top of people's feeds either. This is outrageous. I mean, I don't even have one, but why am I not getting more attention. It's obviously systemic prejudice against me. https://t.co/zDa9OeKrI8
— James Lindsay, if that's my real name (@ConceptualJames) July 31, 2020
Problems with TikTok may be so yesterday, because today is the day Trump said he was banning TikTok. Interesting to see him getting ahead of The Woke, who were coming for TikTok anyway.
Keep an eye on James Lindsay. He's the author of that excellent essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" that we were talking about yesterday, here. He's got a book coming out, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody," which is going to be a big deal. And look at the high-level attention he's getting:
The Roots Of Wokeness: Insightful review by @sullydish of Pluckrose & Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories,” on the philosophical foundations of “social justice” warfare. https://t.co/dK9LV49eWW
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 1, 2020
"As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States... Soon, immediately. I mean essentially immediately.... I will sign the document tomorrow."
Said Donald Trump last night, Bloomberg reports.
Maybe you heard that Bill Gates was buying TikTok. From the Bloomberg article:
Trump said he had the authority to ban the app, owned by ByteDance Ltd., one of China’s biggest tech companies, a move he could make by executive order or under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.On Twitter, the name Sarah Cooper is trending. She's on the case:
How to tick tack pic.twitter.com/1Mn8nk363f— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) July 31, 2020
Maybe you heard that Bill Gates was buying TikTok. From the Bloomberg article:
Trump’s move could upend a potential bid from Microsoft Corp., which was exploring an acquisition, according to a people familiar with the matter. The president downplayed that idea Friday. He said it’s “not the deal that you have been hearing about, that they are going to buy and sell, and this and that. And Microsoft and another one. We’re not an M&A company.” Microsoft declined to comment.
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