I suspect Scott Adams asked this question because he believed he was actually the first, but...

2012: https://t.co/dRe28WJR6r

— Christina Martin (@CMM123) September 12, 2020

Robin Williams didn't tweet it. But he said it very well.https://t.co/PtdK8C4HV7

— L (@SomeBitchIKnow) September 12, 2020

https://t.co/SHLCTWKNDj

— L Hamlin (@walkingfree) September 12, 2020

"Back in the Jeep, struggling to navigate a road once so familiar but now shrouded by smoke-filled darkness, Chris almost ran over..."

"... what looked like a bikini-clad woman on the road. Once he was closer, he realized she was wearing underwear. Her hair was singed, her mouth looked almost black, and her bare feet were severely burned. He impatiently tried to help her into his car, explaining how he needed to find his wife and son, feeling like she was resisting. Finally, she spoke. 'I am your wife.'"

From "The desperate fight to save his family ends in tragedy" (The Oregonian).

At the Overlode Café...

... you can write about anything.

Anxious and unsettled?

I always wear a mask when I go outside. But something about it was leaving me anxious and unsettled. I thought about the problem, addressed it, and here is the solution. pic.twitter.com/aUW4jHI3dX

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) September 12, 2020

"Sometimes called paltering, the artful use of small, truthful statements to convince people of a much grander lie is a common propaganda technique..."

"... In reality, the existence of arsonists is non-controversial. To wit, arsonists do not cease committing arson simply because of naturally occurring wildfires. Indeed, while revenge, extremism, and profit are all recognized motivations for arson, other fire-setters seek 'thrills, attention and recognition,' according to FEMA.... Close to midnight on Thursday, Facebook said that its third-party fact-checkers had rated as 'false' the allegations of coordinated attacks, which had by that hour spread to hundreds of thousands of its users... Kyle Reyes, the national spokesman for Law Enforcement Today, emphasized in an email that while LET did cite a police source claiming fires may be part of a 'coordinated and planned' attack, LET did not attribute the claim to any specific group or political ideology...."

From "Debunked 'Antifa' Wildfire Rumors Spread on Facebook Overload 911, Spur Calls to Violence" (Gizmodo).

"Every passenger and crew member on the plane had a life filled with love and joy, friends and family, radiant hopes and limitless dreams."

"When the plane was hijacked, they called their families and learned that America was also under attack. Then they faced the most fateful moment of their lives. Through the heartache and the tears, they prayed to God, they placed their last calls home, they whispered the immortal words, I love you. Today, those words ring out across these sacred grounds and they shine down on us from Heaven above. When terrorists raised to destroy the seat of our democracy, the 40 of Flight 93 did the most American of things. They took a vote, and then they acted.... In the days and weeks after 9/11, citizens of all faiths, background, colors, and creeds, came together, prayed together, mourned together, and rebuilt together....We were united by our conviction that America was the world’s most exceptional country, blessed with the most incredible heroes, and that this was a land worth defending with our very last breath. It was a unity based on love for our families, care for our neighbors, loyalty to our fellow citizens, pride in our great flag, gratitude for our police and first responders, faith in God, and a refusal to bend our will to the depraved forces of violence, intimidation, oppression, and evil...."

From a transcript of President Trump's speech yesterday in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

From a transcript of Kamala Harris's speech yesterday in Virginia: "I was in California [on 9/11]. It was early in the morning there, I was actually at the gym and then the images started to come on the TVs and everyone stopped, got off their equipment, and we all stood around in utter disbelief, in utter disbelief. Strangers were hugging each other. People that had never spoken to each other before were holding each other and crying. Out of that tragedy and as we try to reconcile and understand what was happening, without any reflection, we as Americans, as our first reaction, without pause, was to hug and hold each other. Perfect strangers. Understanding at our core without reflection, without thinking about it, that we’re all in this together. We’re all in this together.... [I]n times of tragedy, in times of despair, in times of suffering and pain, we by our very nature as who we are, we stand together. We stand together, understanding we are all in this together.... What our attackers fail to understand is that the darkness they hoped would envelop us on 9/11 instead summoned our most radiant and defined human instincts. The instinct to care for one another, to transcend our divisions, and see ourselves as fellow citizens. To race toward danger and risk everything to protect each other. The instinct to unite."

"Nationwide, six teachers have died of Covid-19, reports Katie Shepherd in the Washington Post. 'It isn’t clear whether any of the teachers were infected at school,' she writes."

"Actually, it is clear that only one of the six had any contact with students before becoming sick. In Mississippi, Nacoma James, 42, coached football over the summer till he developed coronavirus-like symptoms and went into quarantine. It’s not known how he was infected. Some of the others had attended a teacher work day at school or visited their classroom, but none had taught students face to face...."

Writes Joanne Jacobs (on her education blog).

Here's the WaPo article: "As students return, the deaths of at least six teachers from covid-19 renew pandemic fears."

Do you think WaPo readers were deceived into thinking going back to classroom teaching is killing teachers? Well, let's just check out the highest rated comments over there. Highest rated: "Trump fans sure picked a funny time to start pretending that they think it’s super important to attend school." Third highest rated: "The blood of teachers, staff, students, parents, and relatives are on the hands of Donald Trump...."

ADDED: That "blood" commenter gets the grammar wrong: "blood... are..."

Life in New Hampshire.

The Merrimack Police Department in New Hampshire is asking for residents to look out for a missing forty pound, four year old African Serval named Spartacus that is a family pet and legally owned and permitted. pic.twitter.com/6Qexuv8cuf

— Only In Boston (@OnlyInBOS) September 11, 2020

Note: The serval has been found.

For more on servals, here's the Wikipedia article. I see: "The association of servals with human beings dates to the time of Ancient Egypt. Servals are depicted as gifts or traded objects from Nubia in Egyptian art. Like many other species of felid, servals are occasionally kept as pets, although their wild nature means that ownership of servals is regulated in most countries."

"Whether the director (who is a woman) intends to or not, she has made a film that serves to accustom us to the sexualization of children."

"Cuties is dramatically quite bland; if it weren’t for the controversy, there would be nothing to recommend it. There’s no subtlety in it. If you wanted to make a movie or TV show that appealed to illicit prurience among the audience, you would have to make it with the pretense of condemning the thing you’re exploring in it. If you are the sort of person who finds long scenes of twerking pre-teens to be revolting, then Cuties is going to be hard to get through. If you find it exciting, well, perv, this is the movie for you. I’m not saying that this is what the filmmaker set out to do here, but I am saying that this will be the effect. It will be the effect because the director’s aesthetic failure is a moral failure. And it’s a failure by the Netflix brass too, which tipped its hand with the botched initial marketing. It is plainly only interested in Cuties because it wanted a succès de scandale of a movie about twerking Lolitas. It has no interest at all in condemning a Kardashianized society that produces twerking Lolitas.... I find the traditional Islamic society depicted in Cuties to be unjust towards women, and not one in which I would want to live, or would want by daughter to grow up in. But I would prefer that to the Cuties society of sluttified children, and it’s not even close."

Writes Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. Dreher actually watched the movie. There's a clip of one of the dance scenes embedded at the link. I attempted to watch it, and you can see from my screen shot where I gave up forcing myself:

Joe Rogan and Tim Kennedy analyze the danger of protests.

The first few minutes of this is about the stupidity of open carrying at a protest. At around 5 minutes, Kennedy begins discussing his experience in the military dealing with insurgents in foreign countries, and he compares the American protesters/rioters to insurgents.

At around 10 minutes, Kennedy talks about how perverse it is to defund the police. What is needed is more police, with more funding.

"We are preparing for a mass fatality incident based on what we know and the numbers of structures that have been lost."

Said Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, quoted in "A Line of Fire South of Portland and a Yearslong Recovery Ahead/Firefighters continued to battle blazes along the West Coast that have now charred nearly five million acres. At least 17 people are dead, with dozens still missing" (NYT).

Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes have been lost, most of them in Oregon, where an estimated 40,000 people have been evacuated and as many as 500,000 live in evacuation alert zones, poised to flee with a change in the winds. Tens of thousands of people have sought refuge in shelters, with friends and in parking lots up and down Interstate 5 — with emergency responders struggling to create safe shelter for all of them in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. On the outskirts of Portland, a site set up to shelter evacuees had to be evacuated itself as the fire line continued expanding toward suburban towns south of the city. State fire officials said winds had pressed a 36-mile-wide wildfire front toward those outlying Portland suburbs on Thursday, with fire jumping over the community of Estacada and threatening others around the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.... As residents flee fire-ravaged communities, officials have struggled to manage a series of migrations reminiscent of a war zone, with distraught families showing up with little in hand beyond an overwhelming fear that their homes have been lost for good. Emergency responders have only begun to get a sense of how many victims they have and the grueling effort to rebuild that will lie ahead.... On Thursday night, about 2,300 people slept in emergency accommodations provided by the American Red Cross and its partners — 520 of them in traditional mass shelters. Tens of thousands more were crashing with friends or family members. Others were pitching tents in high school football fields or sleeping in shopping mall parking lots — many of them unsure whether they would be displaced for days, or weeks, or more.

"Going more negative while increasing the raw amount of attention — 'copious coverage and aggressive coverage' — allowed networks to retain or even increase the monster ratings Trump offered..."

"... without earning the social opprobrium that came with giving him softball coverage. [CNN president Jeff] Zucker loved Trump for the same reason baseball owners once loved the juiced-up homers hit by Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire: he put butts in seats. He just can’t afford to be seen loving Trump. In another part of the tape, Zucker tried to explain to Cohen the facts of life. One can almost see him wrapping a fatherly arm around [Michael] Cohen’s shoulder: 'Here’s the thing… you cannot be elected president of the United States without CNN. Fox and MSNBC are irrelevant — irrelevant — in electing a general election candidate. You guys have had great instincts, great guts and great understanding of everything... But you're missing the boat on how it works going forward.' Zucker here was trying to play kingmaker, and doing it for real, not as an act of sabotage....  The irony is Trump won in spite of CNN, and it was CNN that ended up changing its tune, not Trump. There may be some genuine political belief behind CNN’s drift in the direction of 'irrelevant' MSNBC, but don’t be fooled into thinking that’s the whole story.... Does CNN feel guilty about the record ratings and billions in revenue the Trump era’s earned them? Just listen to the tape. As a business, they’re more than fond of 'the boss.' They just can’t have us knowing it."

From "Tape shows: ethically, CNN chief a little shaky/A conversation between Jeff Zucker and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen removes all doubt: our hated president is a beloved commodity to network executives" by Matt Taibbi.

"If I constructed a grid and ended up with 'whites' as one of the entries, I’m really not sure how I would clue it."

CrossBoss muses... but don't click through unless or until you don't care about spoilers to today's NYT crossword.

6:33 a.m..

Actual sunrise time: 6:33.

A new dimension of Portland woe: "The mayor of Portland declared a state of emergency as fires burned toward the city."

NYT reports.

The wildfire crisis on the West Coast grew to a staggering scale on Friday, as huge fires merged and bore down on towns and suburbs, state leaders pleaded for firefighting help from neighbors, and hundreds of thousands of people were told to evacuate, including about one of every 10 Oregon residents....

“We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state,” said Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon, where the Beachie Creek and Riverside fires threatened to merge near Portland’s suburbs. Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland declared a state of emergency on Thursday night, and residents of Molalla, about 30 miles to the south, packed highways as they fled from the approaching fires....

Several law enforcement agencies in Oregon said they had been flooded with inquiries about rumors that activists were responsible.

"Hite did not create the clitoris or discover the female orgasm, but she pointed a lot of women — and men — in the right direction."

"The Hite Report, published in 1976, examined surveys completed by 3,000 women and concluded that, for most women, conventional sexual intercourse was an ineffective means of achieving orgasm and that they did not need men and penetrative sex to find sexual satisfaction. For many women, her findings were a comfort and a potential liberation; for many men, they were shocking and outrageous. Inevitably her report was compared with other landmark sex studies, such as those by Kinsey or Masters and Johnson, although some saw little new in her findings.... Hite was inevitably criticised by male, moral-majority America, which always had a problem with her message. Some declared that her work did not survive serious scrutiny.... She then turned her attention to men, with The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981), featuring an analysis of responses from 7,239 men to questions about rape, pornography, homosexuality, adultery and male-female relations. The answers led her to conclude that repressed anger and infidelity were common characteristics of American marriage. 'There is a gut feeling that something is wrong — that although there are beautiful elements to sex as we know it, somehow there are unnecessary problems, too,' she wrote, blaming 'patriarchal culture” as the root of the problem.... She was born Shirley Diana Gregory in St Louis, Missouri, in 1942... She died from complications of dementia on September 9, 2020, aged 77."

From "Shere Hite obituary/Groundbreaking if controversial sexologist and feminist who shed new light on the female orgasm and once posed for Playboy" (London Times).

I was one of the women who completed the original Hite Report survey! I don't know why the survey got to me, but it did. I was living and working in NYC in the early 70s. I thought I wrote a lot of interesting things, and I read "The Hite Report" very carefully hoping to find something of mine, but no, I'm not in the book, other than as part of the statistics. I didn't feel much connection to the findings in the report, and the failure to use any of what I thought were my excellent quotes made me suspect that the quotes that were used were picked to fit a preexisting framework. The book certainly made a big splash back in the 70s.

Here's Hite exploring male sexuality with Mike Douglas and David Hasselhoff in 1982:



Wait. This is better, with Geraldo Rivera in 1977: