This is a beautiful portrait. It looks very little like Michelle Obama pic.twitter.com/1CsRrWIJtN
— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) February 12, 2018
February 12, 2018
Chris Cillizza accidentally (I think) insults Michelle Obama.
"Our film should not have made light of Peter Rabbit’s archnemesis, Mr. McGregor, being allergic to blackberries, even in a cartoonish, slapstick way."
Apology of the day, from "Sony Apologizes After ‘Peter Rabbit’ Movie Exploits a Food Allergy, Upsetting Parents" (NYT). The rabbits attack a man by slingshooting a blackberry into a man's mouth.
But some people think there's something special about violence that makes use of a pre-existing health condition. The TNT in Looney Tunes could blow up anybody, but a blackberry is only dangerous to those who are already struggling with a disability. It's hard to think of other examples of children's stories like that. I thought of Captain Hook, so cruelly tormented by Peter Pan, who took advantage of the disabled man's fear of the crocodile, and yet we're all susceptible to the depredations of the crocodile.
When the rabbits fire a blackberry into Mr. McGregor’s mouth, [said Kenneth Mendez, president and chief executive of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America], “there’s a close-up of his face, and it’s him holding his neck like he’s choking.” When Mr. McGregor collapses and appears to be dead for a moment, the rabbits cheer.... “Making light of this condition hurts our members because it encourages the public not to take the risk of allergic reactions seriously, and this cavalier attitude may make them act in ways that could put an allergic person in danger.”Maybe it's time to take all the violence in cartoon/cartoony shows seriously.
But some people think there's something special about violence that makes use of a pre-existing health condition. The TNT in Looney Tunes could blow up anybody, but a blackberry is only dangerous to those who are already struggling with a disability. It's hard to think of other examples of children's stories like that. I thought of Captain Hook, so cruelly tormented by Peter Pan, who took advantage of the disabled man's fear of the crocodile, and yet we're all susceptible to the depredations of the crocodile.
The "engaged and assertive demeanor" of Obama in his portrait "contradicts — and cosmetically corrects — the impression he often made in office of being philosophically detached from what was going on around him."
"At some level, all portraits are propaganda, political or personal. And what makes this one distinctive is the personal part. [The artist Kehinde] Wiley has set Mr. Obama against — really embedded him in — a bower of what looks like ground cover. From the greenery sprout flowers that have symbolic meaning for the sitter. African blue lilies represent Kenya, his father’s birthplace; jasmine stands for Hawaii, where Mr. Obama himself was born; chrysanthemums, the official flower of Chicago, reference the city where his political career began, and where he met his wife."
Writes the art critic Holland Carter at the NYT, where you can see the portrait, which is kind of interesting, especially if you like your President well embedded in foliage.
Now, the portrait of Michelle Obama, on the other hand — by a different artist, Amy Sherald — is a lot worse. And I'm not saying that because I need a lot of leaves and flowers in official portraits or because it's mostly blue background and huge geometrically patterned skirt. It's that the face is such a small part of the thing and it doesn't look like her.
As Holland Carter puts it:
Writes the art critic Holland Carter at the NYT, where you can see the portrait, which is kind of interesting, especially if you like your President well embedded in foliage.
Now, the portrait of Michelle Obama, on the other hand — by a different artist, Amy Sherald — is a lot worse. And I'm not saying that because I need a lot of leaves and flowers in official portraits or because it's mostly blue background and huge geometrically patterned skirt. It's that the face is such a small part of the thing and it doesn't look like her.
As Holland Carter puts it:
The dress design, by Michelle Smith, is eye-teasingly complicated: mostly white interrupted by black Op Art-ish blips and patches of striped color suggestive of African textiles. The shape of the dress, rising pyramidally upward, mountain-like, feels as if it were the real subject of the portrait. Mrs. Obama’s face forms the composition’s peak, but could be almost anyone’s face, like a model’s face in a fashion spread. To be honest, I was anticipating — hoping for — a bolder, more incisive image of the strong-voiced person I imagine this former first lady to be, one for whom I could easily envision a continuing political future.
This too is misogyny: Imagining that a woman is accomplishing great things when she's just sitting there or standing there looking glam.
What else could account for articles like "Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns On the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight" (in The New York Times)?
Ingres painted that, we're told, "to show his mastery of the male nude," but the Academy in Paris deemed the figure insufficiently idealized.
ALSO: How do we even know that is Kim Jong-Un's sister? That could just be an actress.
[Kim Jong-un sent] his only sister, Kim Yo-jong, whom news outlets in the South instantly called “North Korea’s Ivanka,” likening her influence to that of Ivanka Trump on her father, President Trump....ADDED: In case you, like me, are lost in contemplation about what is a "sphinx-like smile," Here's "Oedipus and the Sphinx," by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres:
Flashing a sphinx-like smile and without ever speaking in public, Ms. Kim managed to outflank Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Olympics, Vice President Mike Pence, in the game of diplomatic image-making....
Ms. Kim, who is believed to be 30, was a natural choice for the trip to South Korea. Her clout, because of her shared bloodline, is unmistakable....
Commentators analyzed her no-nonsense hairstyle and dress, her low-key makeup and the sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks...
Ingres painted that, we're told, "to show his mastery of the male nude," but the Academy in Paris deemed the figure insufficiently idealized.
ALSO: How do we even know that is Kim Jong-Un's sister? That could just be an actress.
Ridiculous phrase with about 296,000 hits in Google.
"Memories you won't forget."
I ran across that phrase while poking around at AirBnb. Some little house promised to give me memories I won't forget. Well, what if it just so happens that I like memories I don't remember?
I ran across that phrase while poking around at AirBnb. Some little house promised to give me memories I won't forget. Well, what if it just so happens that I like memories I don't remember?
"People still love sex, sizzle and controversy — but the entertainment industry is too afraid to serve it up right now."
"It’s hard to believe, but 60 years ago entertainers had more guts. If you want proof, tune into 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' on Amazon, an excellent new show about a fictional woman named Midge — clearly based on Joan Rivers — who starts a risky career as a stand-up comedienne in Greenwich Village in 1958. On stage, Midge makes jokes about her sex life, her Jewish upbringing and even rips off her top, exposing her breasts. As the crowd laps up the routine, the police arrest Midge for breaking obscenity laws. That kind of courage, that willingness to shock and offend, is what made Rivers so exciting to watch. It’s what makes great comedy. But today’s comics are afraid to go too far, out of fear of the woke police.... Here’s another: How is show business going to survive if it suddenly censors itself?"
From "The woke police have ruined entertainment" by Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post.
Random reactions:
1. I don't remember Joan Rivers ever whipping off her shirt and exposing her breasts, nor can I even imagine such a move, given that there would have to be a layer of undergarment, not susceptible to whipping off, and I've seen "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which is, indeed, an excellent show.
2. Some people were modestly entertained over the weekend when a South Korean ice skater's costume got unclasped and threatened to fall off. "I was like, ‘Oh no!’ If that comes undone, the whole thing could just pop off. I was terrified the entire program.... I didn’t stop because you get a deduction if you stop in the middle of a program. In my head, I was thinking, 'Is it better to stop and fix it and get the deduction or keep going?'" She kept going and we kept thinking: Is that thing going to fall off? And some of us, I'm sure, will continue to watch ice skating, now thinking, will the lady's costume — the whole thing — just pop off?
3. I don't think you need to be obscene to entertain. In fact, it was much easier to be shocking with sexual things in the old days, when you could get arrested for obscenity. But half a century later, sexual frankness isn't shocking, and the "woke police" are out to ruin you not because of sex, but because they're vigilant about the subordination of women. It's not easy to figure out how to avoid committing the kind of offenses that will get the "woke police" after you, but you men who complain about it are like the Ken counterpart to the talking Barbie who said "math class is tough" — Women's Studies class is tough.
4. Hollywood entertain — and the culture of Hollywood celebrities — has been awful for a lot of reasons for a long, long time. Can't you please just continue to entertain us? is a pathetic whine.
Are you not entertained? You shouldn't be! Man, "Gladiator" is putrid. I knew it at the time and stayed away, but can anyone justify the adulation that movie received? The answer to Russell Crowe's famous question is: no!
5. Meanwhile, speaking of bared breasts and slabs of man meat, over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat says "Let’s Ban Porn."
6. You don't have to actually ban pornography. Just have angry, righteous women go public about the pornography habits various famous men and demand that they be fired from their jobs. I'm sure there are some members of Congress who can be Al-Frankened over porn. I'm sure a porn hysteria could be set in motion around various Trump men to generate an endless chain of headlines in the NYT like "Porn Claims Against Aide Further Roil White House." Could the White House be even more roiled that it already is? Yes!
From "The woke police have ruined entertainment" by Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post.
Random reactions:
1. I don't remember Joan Rivers ever whipping off her shirt and exposing her breasts, nor can I even imagine such a move, given that there would have to be a layer of undergarment, not susceptible to whipping off, and I've seen "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which is, indeed, an excellent show.
2. Some people were modestly entertained over the weekend when a South Korean ice skater's costume got unclasped and threatened to fall off. "I was like, ‘Oh no!’ If that comes undone, the whole thing could just pop off. I was terrified the entire program.... I didn’t stop because you get a deduction if you stop in the middle of a program. In my head, I was thinking, 'Is it better to stop and fix it and get the deduction or keep going?'" She kept going and we kept thinking: Is that thing going to fall off? And some of us, I'm sure, will continue to watch ice skating, now thinking, will the lady's costume — the whole thing — just pop off?
3. I don't think you need to be obscene to entertain. In fact, it was much easier to be shocking with sexual things in the old days, when you could get arrested for obscenity. But half a century later, sexual frankness isn't shocking, and the "woke police" are out to ruin you not because of sex, but because they're vigilant about the subordination of women. It's not easy to figure out how to avoid committing the kind of offenses that will get the "woke police" after you, but you men who complain about it are like the Ken counterpart to the talking Barbie who said "math class is tough" — Women's Studies class is tough.
4. Hollywood entertain — and the culture of Hollywood celebrities — has been awful for a lot of reasons for a long, long time. Can't you please just continue to entertain us? is a pathetic whine.
Are you not entertained? You shouldn't be! Man, "Gladiator" is putrid. I knew it at the time and stayed away, but can anyone justify the adulation that movie received? The answer to Russell Crowe's famous question is: no!
5. Meanwhile, speaking of bared breasts and slabs of man meat, over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat says "Let’s Ban Porn."
[W]e are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women.... It was only a generation ago that the unlikely (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation of pornography a live political debate. But between the individualistic drift of society, the invention of the internet, and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell alliance’s predictions that porn would lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn case was marginalized — with religious conservatism’s surrender to Donald Trump’s playboy candidacy a seeming coup de grace.Just when the prestige movies of Hollywood retreat from whatever entertainment they might have been providing, the social cons want to team up with the progressives — one more time, like it's the 80s — and scare you with proposals about banning pornography.
Except it doesn’t have to be. Trump’s grotesqueries have stirred up a feminist reaction that’s more moralistic and less gamely sex-positive than the Clinton-justifying variety, and there’s no necessary reason why its moralistic gaze can’t extend to our porn addiction....
In many of them, you see a kind of female revulsion, not against Harvey Weinstein-style apex predators, but against the very different sort of male personality that a pornographic education seems to produce: a breed at once entitled and resentful, angry and undermotivated, “woke” and caddish, shaped by unprecedented possibilities for sexual gratification and frustrated that real women are less available and more complicated than the version on their screen....
6. You don't have to actually ban pornography. Just have angry, righteous women go public about the pornography habits various famous men and demand that they be fired from their jobs. I'm sure there are some members of Congress who can be Al-Frankened over porn. I'm sure a porn hysteria could be set in motion around various Trump men to generate an endless chain of headlines in the NYT like "Porn Claims Against Aide Further Roil White House." Could the White House be even more roiled that it already is? Yes!
"They held a town pageant in Arden, Delaware, on September 5, 1910... One Ardenite, an anarchist shoemaker named George Brown, played a beggar."
"This annoyed some of the other players, because no such role had actually been written. But Brown decided to add it to the program anyway, so he dressed in rags, caked himself with mud, and invaded the proceedings, taunting the other characters and demanding alms from the audience. Many 'onlookers needed assurance,' The Single Tax Review reported, that Brown 'was only "part of the show."' This was a pattern: Brown liked to talk, and not everyone liked to listen to him. According to the novelist Upton Sinclair, who lived at the time in a little Arden house that his neighbors had dubbed the Jungalow, Brown insisted on 'discussing sex questions' at the Arden Economic Club. When the club asked him to cut it out, Brown declared his free-speech right to continue and kept talking until he'd broken up the meeting. He broke up the next meeting too, and finally, Sinclair wrote, 'declared it his intention to break up all future meetings.' At this point some of the locals wanted to have him arrested for disturbing the peace. But that required outside help, because the town of Arden did not have a police force. In fact, the town of Arden didn't have a government at all.... [E]veryone involved in the George Brown caper of 1911 is long dead. Yet Arden is still here, a little shire surrounded by an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape...."
I'm reading "Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia/Arden is a suburb, an artist's colony, and a radical political experiment" by Jesse Walker at Reason.com.
I'm reading about Arden — here, in pre-dawn Madison, Wisconsin — because Meade and I were talking about growing up in the early 1960s, when you saw lots of kids outside playing all the time. I was thinking about the Arden store, where I blew my allowance every week on penny candy....
... which I ate all at once on that porch. The Arden Store, on the edge of Arden, was about 3 blocks from where I lived, in what Reason called the "ordinary suburban landscape." We thought of Arden as a strange place, where the artists lived and where taxation was very different.
I'm reading "Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia/Arden is a suburb, an artist's colony, and a radical political experiment" by Jesse Walker at Reason.com.
I'm reading about Arden — here, in pre-dawn Madison, Wisconsin — because Meade and I were talking about growing up in the early 1960s, when you saw lots of kids outside playing all the time. I was thinking about the Arden store, where I blew my allowance every week on penny candy....
... which I ate all at once on that porch. The Arden Store, on the edge of Arden, was about 3 blocks from where I lived, in what Reason called the "ordinary suburban landscape." We thought of Arden as a strange place, where the artists lived and where taxation was very different.
The Single Taxers were followers of Henry George, a 19th century economist who argued that government should be financed solely by a tax on land values. No income tax, no sales tax, no tax on the improvements to a property—just one tax on land. The campaigners crisscrossed the state in armbands, knapsacks, and Union Army uniforms, delivering streetcorner speeches and singing Single Tax songs ("Get the landlords off your backs/With our little Single Tax/And there's lots of fun ahead for Delaware!").... The invasion was a flop....
February 11, 2018
The Daily Mail covers the story of a University of Wisconsin student walking outdoors in shorts and no jacket when the temperature is 17°.
It was on Twitter, tweeted by the university, which I follow. I considered retweeting or blogging it, but I didn't, because it's pretty normal around here. I see guys like this all the time, and I think they just want to be comfortable when they get where they're going, probably moving from one well-heated campus building to another. Even though I've been doing "men in shorts" posts on this blog for 14 years, this didn't cross my line for bloggable.
But others, less accustomed to Wisconsin ways, did retweet, and it was enough to pull in the grand internet monster that is The Daily Mail, which said things like:
But others, less accustomed to Wisconsin ways, did retweet, and it was enough to pull in the grand internet monster that is The Daily Mail, which said things like:
A bold Wisconsin student shocked his campus when....No, he did not shock the campus.
However the boy's unique fashion choice isn't uncommon when it comes to winters in the Midwest where boys and men alike have been spotted braving the cold in shorts, as noted by Twitter users....Yes. Now, that's true. Come to Wisconsin in the winter and learn how not to fear it. Lean in.
NBC has to apologize after Olympics announcer Joshua Cooper Ramo says something stupid about Korea, Japan, and WWII.
The NYT reports on something said during the opening ceremony:
ADDED: On reflection, I suspect that NBC hired Ramo specifically because he would say things that leaned toward globalism and connectivity and launching into a future that has nothing to do with the old political conflicts. I think he was encouraged to do exactly what he did, which is why it sounded so awkward at the opening ceremony.
Noting that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan was in attendance, Mr. Ramo described Japan as “a country which occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, but every Korean will tell you that Japan is a cultural, technological and economic example that has been so important to their own transformation.”The apology comes after an on-line petition that read:
“Any reasonable person familiar with the history of Japanese imperialism, and the atrocities it committed before and during WWII, would find such statement deeply hurtful and outrageous,” the petition read. “And no, no South Korean would attribute the rapid growth and transformation of its economy, technology, and political/cultural development to the Japanese imperialism.”I didn't listen to every word of the opening ceremony announcing, and I didn't hear that remark about Japan, but in my post yesterday about the ceremony, I had a problem with the announcers:
[I]nstead of telling us about how the various costumes, symbols, movements, and projections said something about Korea, they kept saying things like "and Asia," "and all over Asia," and "and Asian people in general." Why?! Asia's a big place, with culture and history that didn't take place in one united whole group....I went looking for reviews of the show to see if anyone else was complaining about that and found Maureen Ryan (at Variety):
... I did get tired of the endless generalities from Ramo about what constituted “Asian” culture, which felt about as deep as a Wikipedia entry.So it caught my eye when the NYT included this:
Critics also seized on other remarks made during the broadcast by Mr. Ramo... Maureen Ryan, Variety’s chief television critic, wrote in a review of NBC’s broadcast of the Olympic opening ceremony that “Ramo’s endless generalities about what constituted ‘Asian’ culture felt about as deep as a Wikipedia entry.”Where did NBC get this character Ramo? The NYT identifies him by linking to a webpage that promotes his new book, so I'm going to check Wikipedia, which goes a lot deeper (and it's undeep of Maureen Ryan to offhandedly deploy Wikipedia as shorthand for shallowneess). Excerpts from Wikipedia's Joshua Cooper Ramo article:
Ramo began his career as a journalist at Newsweek in 1993. He joined Time magazine in 1996.... Prompted by an interest in business and global affairs, Ramo moved to Beijing in 2002. He worked with John L. Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, in China from 2003-2005, when he joined Kissinger Associates as managing director. In 2011, he became vice chairman of Kissinger Associates. In 2015, he became co-chief executive officer....So Ramo, who said something so stupid and offensive when he was just chattering for the millions as we watched the Olympics, presents himself as some sort of grand sage of economics and foreign policy. Kissinger Associates? "Hard Gatekeeping"?
In 2004 he published “The Beijing Consensus,” which contrasted the Chinese model of economics and politics with western, “Washington Consensus” models. In 2007 he published “Brand China,” an analysis of China’s international image. In 2011, Ramo proposed a new model of US-China relations based on complexity theory known as “co-evolution.”...
In 2016, Little, Brown & Co. released Ramo's third book, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, which purports to identify a "new instinct" for networks that characterized new groups in politics, economics and security... [and] claims that the emergence of constant, widespread connection represents a shift in power that will... lead[] to a widespread collapse of existing institutions and the emergence of new sources of power. In the book, Ramo proposed a new idea for American grand strategy known as “Hard Gatekeeping” in which the country would develop and use platforms for the control of network topology, but would carefully limit access to those platforms.
ADDED: On reflection, I suspect that NBC hired Ramo specifically because he would say things that leaned toward globalism and connectivity and launching into a future that has nothing to do with the old political conflicts. I think he was encouraged to do exactly what he did, which is why it sounded so awkward at the opening ceremony.
What are the cheers of the North Korean cheerleaders?
WaPo translates 3 cheers: 1. "Go team," 2. "Nice to meet you," and 3. "My home town."
I also heard someone on NBC-TV explaining that one of the cheers — when the women's hockey team was losing terribly (8-0) — was "Cheer up." That makes cheerleading so literal.
"Red Gerard, a 17-year-old from Colorado, was sitting in last place heading into the third and final run."
Like many riders, he had struggled to land a clean run on his first two attempts. But when the pressure was on, he delivered. During his run, Gerard's creativity was on full display, as he repeatedly used features of the course that other riders were ignoring...."
"Snowboarder Red Gerard wins first U.S. gold medal of 2018 Winter Olympics" (NBC). Lots of video at that link.
"Snowboarder Red Gerard wins first U.S. gold medal of 2018 Winter Olympics" (NBC). Lots of video at that link.
After 4 days of avoiding Facebook altogether — my habit had been to click many times a day — I decided to drop in and see how it felt.
1. I haven't clicked yet, so my 4-day record is still intact, and I could keep going, but the purpose of avoiding Facebook hasn't been to achieve purity, but to become conscious of what was a clicking instinct that did not correspond to genuine feeling of reward. Having broken the unconscious instinct, I want to take a look — a somewhat objective look — at what I missed. I presume I'll spend about 5 minutes scanning what would have taken up much more than 5 minutes if I'd done it in little pieces across 4 days.
2. Okay. I've been there, scrolled through all the way back to where I was reading last time. Presumably, if I'd been visiting frequently, Facebook would have served up more items, but they'd have been worse things, right?, not better. I don't really know. For who has known the mind of the Facebook? I started timing myself with my iPhone stopwatch, but the insane rushing by of hundredths of a second strangled up my mind. I'll say I spent 5 to 10 minutes catching up.
3. What have I missed: cats, goats, a sloth in pajamas, a nonthreatening medical procedure, some charming kid-talk, speculation about accidental suicide from an apparently nonsuicidal person, a link to an article about cheese and drugs and the brain (which I'd already seen pointed at by Instapundit), an analogy involving relationships, and 4 things that I was moved to open in tabs.
4. The 4 things were: 1. "Cops realize tiger is stuffed animal after 45-minute standoff," 2. "Everything you should know about happiness in one infographic," 3. Something I'd already read, pretty much knew I'd already read, that I didn't need to read even the other time, and wasted 10 seconds deciding not to read again, 4. "What Would You Look Like As The Opposite Sex?"
5. #1 didn't really need a click. What Facebook displayed — the headline and a photo — was already all that you needed. It was amusing enough, but I've seen other Facebook posts about stuffed animals mistaken for real ones. #2 was the opposite of what its headline promised. The one infographic was a simple but indecipherable mess. What's the brain supposed to represent that's different from the faceless lady with a paintbrush sticking out of her head (and is that supposed to be a pregnancy bulging out of one side of her?)? #3 I already bitched about at point 4. #4 was a thing you could do if you "Login with Facebook." I was assured "We will never post without your permission." You will never post what without my permission, and why should I believe you?, and just when I thought I was out of Facebook, they pull me back in!
6. Okay. I survived my dip back into Facebook, and I think I'm out.
ADDED: A poll:
2. Okay. I've been there, scrolled through all the way back to where I was reading last time. Presumably, if I'd been visiting frequently, Facebook would have served up more items, but they'd have been worse things, right?, not better. I don't really know. For who has known the mind of the Facebook? I started timing myself with my iPhone stopwatch, but the insane rushing by of hundredths of a second strangled up my mind. I'll say I spent 5 to 10 minutes catching up.
3. What have I missed: cats, goats, a sloth in pajamas, a nonthreatening medical procedure, some charming kid-talk, speculation about accidental suicide from an apparently nonsuicidal person, a link to an article about cheese and drugs and the brain (which I'd already seen pointed at by Instapundit), an analogy involving relationships, and 4 things that I was moved to open in tabs.
4. The 4 things were: 1. "Cops realize tiger is stuffed animal after 45-minute standoff," 2. "Everything you should know about happiness in one infographic," 3. Something I'd already read, pretty much knew I'd already read, that I didn't need to read even the other time, and wasted 10 seconds deciding not to read again, 4. "What Would You Look Like As The Opposite Sex?"
5. #1 didn't really need a click. What Facebook displayed — the headline and a photo — was already all that you needed. It was amusing enough, but I've seen other Facebook posts about stuffed animals mistaken for real ones. #2 was the opposite of what its headline promised. The one infographic was a simple but indecipherable mess. What's the brain supposed to represent that's different from the faceless lady with a paintbrush sticking out of her head (and is that supposed to be a pregnancy bulging out of one side of her?)? #3 I already bitched about at point 4. #4 was a thing you could do if you "Login with Facebook." I was assured "We will never post without your permission." You will never post what without my permission, and why should I believe you?, and just when I thought I was out of Facebook, they pull me back in!
6. Okay. I survived my dip back into Facebook, and I think I'm out.
ADDED: A poll:
February 10, 2018
"Had Fox News existed — and been essentially the state-run TV — during the Nixon era, there might not have been an impeachment of Richard Nixon."
Said Adam Schiff on Bill Maher's show last night.
At the Deep Snow Café..
... we weren't snowed in. We got out. Bought a pie. Listened to a folksinger play "The Wind." Discussed notNeutral cups with the café owner. It's a lovely sunny midday in deep-snow Wisconsin and a fine enough time for an open thread.
And here's the Althouse Portal to Amazon in case you need to buy something — like this nice set of 4 nonNeutral coffee mugs.
"But I’m being asked to give up on Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Louis CK and Garrison Keillor, just to name a few. In a way, I’m starting to feel violated."
From the top-rated comment on "The Smearing of Woody Allen" (NYT):
(By the way, you strike a chord, not a cord.)
Dylan Farrow’s memory could plausibly have been altered by the intense atmosphere surrounding the charges, and she may have a perfectly sincere but false memory of the events. It’s telling that her story changed during the initial investigation, but that she’s absolutely certain now, many years later.From the op-ed itself, which is by Bret Stephens:
Or maybe I’m wrong. If so, I’m deeply sorry. But I’m being asked to give up on Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Louis CK and Garrison Keillor, just to name a few. In a way, I’m starting to feel violated. I don’t want to give up on Woody Allen, and it will take more than an unsubstantiated accusation to make me do so.
Soon after Rolling Stone published a sensational — and, as it turned out, false — account of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, Richard Bradley, the editor of Worth magazine, suspected that something was amiss.... [W]hat most stirred Bradley’s doubt was how perfectly the story played “into existing biases,” especially the sorts of biases Rolling Stone readers might harbor about fraternity life at Southern universities. Since the account of the rape “felt” true, it was easy to assume it was....That makes me think of Michael Wolff. Remember him?
Michael Wolff asked on MSNBC about the factual errors in his Trump book.
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) January 8, 2018
His actual response: "If it makes sense to you, if it strikes a cord, if it rings true, it is true."
Katy Tur response: "I read it, I -- a lot of the did feel true"
This is Journalisming. pic.twitter.com/IOowlxWNvV
(By the way, you strike a chord, not a cord.)
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