Sunrise — 6:26, 6:33, 6:35.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

I've got 5 TikToks for you tonight. Some people love them.

1. The frog and the dog.

2. Minimalist hygiene for backpackers.

3. Community guidelines.

4. Everybody in the South knows the best way to drink water.

5. Son talks to his mom through the doorbell camera.

"Moscow abandoned its main bastion in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, a sudden apparent collapse of one of the war's principal front lines after Ukrainian forces moved to encircle the area in a shock advance...."

"The announcement came hours after Ukrainian troops captured the city of Kupiansk further north, the sole railway hub supplying Russia's entire frontline across northeastern Ukraine. That left thousands of Russian troops abruptly cut off from supplies across an entire stretch of front that has seen some of the most intense battles of the war. Ukrainian forces have recaptured dozens of towns and villages held by Russia for months, since bursting through the frontline earlier this week."

 
Reuters reports.

Is there really much expression of "fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others" these days?

I'm reading John McWhorter, in the NYT:

In our moment, we talk a lot about the dismaying degree of partisanship in our nation. We declare fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others. Yet [Mitchell] Jackson exemplifies a sense that when it comes to [Clarence] Thomas, none of this interest in comity applies and that it qualifies as insight to discuss him as a horrid, pathetic figure. 

McWhorter is addressing an Esquire article by Mitchell Jackson, "Looking for Clarence Thomas/He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism of the past century. What happened?"

McWhorter continues: 

Once again, apparently, there is a single Black way to think, with Black conservatism valuable only as a demonstration of what Black opinion is not supposed to be. It’s worthwhile, one would think, to assume first that people’s intentions are good ones. Writing someone off as monstrous should be a matter of last resort. To go with that immediately makes for good theater, but it’s also a kind of ritualistic hostility.  

"I was raised in an Irish family baked in bitterness about British oppression. The monarchy seems like an expensive relic to me...."

"I always thought of Queen Elizabeth as an avatar of nepotism and colonialism. But as time went on, and victimhood became the fashion, I began to have a creeping admiration for her stoicism. Then, in 2011, I covered her fraught trip to Ireland, the first by a British monarch in a century. Suddenly I understood how one small movement of her head could soothe over 800 years of bloodshed and hatred. The Irish were skeptical at first, not wanting to be treated as subjects. Gerry Adams complained the visit was too soon. (Maybe wait another century.)....  How could Queen Elizabeth move past the 1979 murder by the I.R.A. of her cousin Lord Mountbatten and his 14-year-old grandson?.... And how could the Irish move past the 1972 Bloody Sunday horror, when British forces gunned down 14 innocent civilians? The queen spoke a phrase in perfect Gaelic and offered regret about how Britain had made Ireland suffer. She said both sides needed to be 'able to bow to the past but not be bound by it.'"

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Charles in Charge" (NYT).

"There’s breaking protocol and then there’s giving the Queen Mother an unwanted kiss on the lips, which is something President Jimmy Carter inexplicably did..."

"... during his May 1977 visit to Buckingham Palace.... [T]he Queen Mother later described the incident, which she found mortifying. 'Nobody has done that since my husband died,' she said. 'I took a sharp step backwards – not quite far enough.'"

From "Queen Elizabeth’s Awkward Visits With U.S. Presidents, Ranked" (NY Magazine).

The Carter visit is ranked #12 out of 13 ranked visits. The only thing worse was the Jackie-and-Jack visit that we saw dramatized on "The Crown." We're told that Jackie said the queen was "pretty heavy going," and when Gore Vidal related Jackie's complaint to Princess Margaret, she said, "But that’s what she’s there for."

You might guess that Obama would come out at #1, but he's only #3. #1 is Eisenhower, and #2 was Harry Truman, in October 1951 and when Elizabeth was still a Princess (4 months later she would be queen):

"This is the history of the monarchy, and the queen was the head of the monarchy. Whether she was involved in day-to-day decisions or not..."

"... she existed because of those decisions. She never once opened her mouth to say sorry for the role of her government in the slaughter of 3 million civilians."

 Said the Carnegie Mellon linguistics professor Uju Anya, quoted in "I Won’t Cry Over the Death of a Violent Oppressor" (The Cut).

Anya wrote the much-discussed tweet: "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating."

She's not backing down.

In my tweet, I did not wish her death. I did not tell anyone to kill her. I said nothing except wishing her the pain in death that she caused for millions of people. There’s not going to be any apology from me. I stand by what I said. As a direct recipient of her governance and as the child of colonial subjects, I reserve the right to say what this woman’s life and monarchy and the history of the British monarchy as a whole means to me. 

“Speak no ill of the dead” is a weapon that’s leveled against the oppressed to silence them, to lionize oppressors, and to sanitize their history. What respect am I supposed to have for her, for her family? “Oh, well, her family is mourning her.” My family is mourning as well.

It is as if "Animal Farm" had never been written.

How many stories about politics have been told through non-human animal characters?

I want freedom of speech and abhor the prosecution described here, but the Editorial Board of The Washington Post is writing in a ludicrously ignorant style (and this is no context for intentional humor):

What is so frightening and subversive about a children’s book series featuring a flock of sheep? That is a question for Hong Kong authorities, who on Wednesday convicted the books’ creators on charges of sedition....

The picture books in question, written for children aged 4 to 7, depict sheep trying to protect their village from a pack of wolves. The series contained indirect references to social issues.... Even this implied criticism was too much for prosecutors, who claimed the books “indoctrinated” readers and disseminated “separatist” ideas.....

If there were any questions remaining about how far authorities will go to silence dissent, Wednesday’s conviction offers an ominous clue: Not even illustrated children’s books are safe.

Not even? I would think the literature given to children would be the first thing you would want to control. (It's something we fight about in America.) And if turning the characters into non-human animals got you off the hook for criminal charges, all the criminals would turn their characters into non-human animals.

The problem is the use of criminal law against political speech, and this isn't a distinctively Chinese idea:

Now, Hong Kong authorities appear to be weaponizing British-era sedition statutes to stifle criticism.

Oh! Imagine taking a statute that just happens to be on the books and enforcing it. But here in America, elite writers are deploying the word "sedition" and eyeing the sedition laws that we have on the books.

Just to look in The Washington Post, here's one of your columnists writing last June: "The sedition didn’t stop on Jan. 6. It must be stopped." And there's this article from last May: "How My Hometown Produced a Jan. 6 Sedition Suspect/One writer discovers her small Virginia town’s underside of conspiracy, guns and anti-government belief." And this, from June, about a real "seditious conspiracy" case: "Proud Boys, Tarrio blast sedition charge as politically orchestrated."

ADDED: The author of the June column "The sedition didn’t stop on Jan. 6. It must be stopped" and the first person on the list of "Members of the Editorial Board" — found at the bottom of the editorial about the Hong Kong sedition trial — are the same person: Karen Tumulty. 

It's hard to say a racist incident never happened, but why was it so easy to say that it did?

"Brigham Young University said Friday that it had completed its investigation into accusations of racial heckling and slurs at a volleyball match against Duke University last month and found no evidence to confirm that the behavior took place."

The NYT reports.

Note the careful language — "no evidence to confirm." They don't and can't say that nothing at all happened. The language in the BYU statement is: "we have not found any evidence to corroborate" ("From our extensive review, we have not found any evidence to corroborate the allegation that fans engaged in racial heckling or uttered racial slurs at the event").

Sunrise — 6:33.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Glenn Greenwald is right about free speech on Twitter.

Whatever one's view on this tweet, it very obviously violated no Twitter rules.

Its only sin was it fell outside of what was deemed to be the limits of acceptable views about an historical event.

Criticizing it was therefore insufficient. It had to be institutionally banished. https://t.co/ZVQHe5iiLE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 9, 2022

Only 3 TikToks today. I'm highly selective, you know. Some people love it.

1. A simple harmonious tribute to the Queen.

2. The baby with a gangster demeanor.

3. The story arc of the Mac startup tone. 

"The ’90s are infectious. The decade was so colorful with neon colors. Nothing was that serious."

"It was, 'Let’s enjoy life, let’s make friends.' We had Beavis and Butt-Head, we had block parties, we had fanny packs.... The ’90s was the last of the great decades, because after that, computers killed the world. We were excited about things like floppy disks. Now there are so many channels that divide everybody and try to control your thoughts. In the ’90s they reported the news. It wasn’t this side or that side. I have fans on every side of everything...."

Said Vanilla Ice, quoted in "Ice, Ice Baby/The 1990s rapper known as Vanilla Ice is back, performing concerts, opening a museum and hawking a namesake energy drink" (NYT).

The Times interviewer pokes him with: "You performed at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve in 2020, to a maskless crowd during a height of the pandemic. How is that not political?"

"Iced coffee is... used as an amusing identifier among L.G.B.T.Q. people, with viral videos depicting their cultural claim to the drink."

"In 2019, a tweet from the City of New York went viral with a photo of a man making his way through a snowstorm with a Starbucks iced coffee in his hand. While many wondered why he — or anyone — would weather such conditions for the beverage, others offered variations of the same joking explanation: He’s gay. Sam Stryker, a 31-year-old copywriter in Los Angeles, is firmly in the iced coffee camp.... 'It’s like sort of my gay Gatorade,' he said. A Starbucks regular, he never drinks his coffee hot, stating that he doesn’t like the taste and neither does he want to wait for his drink to cool down. 'Iced coffee tastes like jet fuel to me,' he said, quickly noting that he meant that in 'a really positive way.'... While the hashtag #hotcoffee has more than 60 million views on TikTok, #icedcoffee has about six billion on the app and is full of videos of users sharing their complicated iced coffee orders."

From "Does Anyone Drink Hot Coffee Anymore? Even in the dead of winter, cold drinks account for 60 percent of Starbucks beverage sales. Is the hot cup of joe on its way out?" (NYT).

Maybe there's not so much #hotcoffee because people are still calling hot coffee "coffee." It's the original term and it hasn't gone through the process that leads to expressions like "snail mail" and "acoustic guitar." That is, "hot coffee" is a retronym that has yet to take hold. All my life, I've heard "iced coffee" specified if that's what you want, and "coffee" is presumed to be hot coffee. Has that changed?

"Unlike the much-maligned fax machine — frequently trotted out as evidence of Japan’s stubborn resistance to the digital age — the telegram..."

"... is a symbol of the nation’s love of propriety. (Yes, it’s possible to fax a telegram request.) For many Japanese of a certain age, the medium — extravagant, formal and nostalgic — is the message. Kaoru Matsuda, a political consultant, said he believed that telegrams had stayed in use because they made a 'more polite impression.' In business and politics, 'a fax is used very casually and feels businesslike,' he said. 'When it comes to things like condolences, telegrams are it.'...  Japan is far from the only country where telegrams still exist."

 
From "How Do Japanese Show They Care? By Sending a Telegram. Millions of the messages still crisscross Japan each year, offering congratulations or condolences in a way that more modern communications cannot" (NYT).

But Japan is only the third largest market for telegrams. Ahead of Japan are Russia and Italy.

The North Korean Supreme People's Assembly met to pass laws to "spruce up the country into a beautiful and civilized socialist fairyland."

Reuters reports, quoting the North Korean state news agency.

ADDED: "Fairyland" strikes us as absurd, but it must be a translation. What perhaps they didn't notice is that it doesn't simply mean a beautiful place. It means — when it's not literally the realm of the fairies — a place that is beautiful and insubstantial. 

By the way, there's a place in Wisconsin, in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, called Fairyland. It's an "old growth hemlock hardwood forest situated on the shore of Lake Namekagon at the foot of a prominent interlobate moraine."