"Imagine creating the best work of your life, some of the best music of its day, and no one cares."

"Now imagine playing those songs 47 years later to a screaming and loving bunch of fans and getting what seems like a hero's welcome. That's part of the story of The Zombies, who played the classic 1968 album Odessey and Oracle, along with a set of other hits and brand new songs, live in Washington, D.C. last month. Now we have their nearly note-for-note live reproduction of Odessey and Oracle for you here."

"Why is US death rate rising for white, middle-aged?"

"National data sets from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... show that middle-aged whites are committing suicide at an unrivalled rate... But why are whites so much more likely to commit suicide than other demographic groups?"

... [R]esearchers found increased numbers of declining self-reported health, mental health and ability to work. Middle-aged whites reported problems with walking a quarter of a mile, climbing 10 steps, standing or sitting for two hours, shopping and socialising — some of which are risk factors for suicide."

"I’ve also never Googled myself. It wouldn’t occur to me to do so. It’s the same reason I don’t watch pornography."

"It’s not that I occupy some moral high ground. I just think: Down that road lies madness."

Says the memoirist Mary Karr, who also says "Narcissism is the bacterium infecting all bad writing."

A vision of more wondrously beautiful air travel... the windowless passenger compartment.

Fabulous... or hellish? To me, it's hellish.

"Sometimes, on the internet, text and images get mixed up."

Email from Meade, with this attachment:



That came up on some news site that aggregates automatically. It's not a conscious human mind joking. (Meade touched up the photo to eliminate the images that appeared in the top left and bottom right corners.)

ADDED: This was the news site, ZergNet.

"Ben Carson Vaults to Lead in Latest Journal/NBC Poll."

"The result marks the first time since June that the Journal/NBC News poll has found a Republican other than Mr. Trump to be leading the GOP field. Some 29% of GOP primary voters rank Mr. Carson as their top choice, while 23% favor Mr. Trump. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rank third and fourth as the top pick of 11% and 10% of Republican primary voters, respectively. Some 8% prefer former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. No other Republican garners more than 3% support."

The WSJ reports. Since the poll was both before and after last week's debate, we can't really tell what the effect of the debate was. But what surprises me — looking at the charts at the link — is that Marco Rubio declined a percentage point. And Bush stayed in the same place.

It's the way Justice Kennedy expressed his hate for the term "swing vote" that's so revealing.

"I hate that term... I get this visual image of spatial gyrations. The cases swing; I don’t."

The most revealing thing is not that he hates the term "swing vote." That's not surprising. He wants to be thought of as serious and consistent. The term impugns.

The most revealing thing is that in thinking about an abstraction, he gets a visual image and his thinking about an abstraction is, it seems, influenced by the way that abstraction-made-concrete looks in his mind.

This is useful for lawyers who are trying to figure out how to tip Kennedy one way or the other. Did "tip" just give you a visual image? If not, then you don't have the kind of mind that Kennedy seems to have.

Personally, I have this kind of mind, and I know very well how thought is influenced by language that generates images. The word "swing" makes Justice Kennedy picture a swing — picture himself as a swing, suspended, ungrounded, susceptible to pushes — and he hates (strong word!) how he looks in that image. Perhaps he sees himself as a child on a swing. Perhaps he sees himself as the bad guy in a western who's going to swing in a hangman's noose.

Stressing the vividness of the image as it appears in his mind, he indulges — even as he's speaking with notable concision — in a redundancy, adding the unnecessary adjective "visual" to "images."

So it seems that Justice Kennedy is one of these people for whom the metaphors within words feel alive. George Orwell wrote about dying metaphors in "Politics and the English Language":

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

What Orwell didn't say was that the effect of language varies from person to person. There is no objectivity to the perception whether a metaphor is fully alive, totally dead, or somewhere in the gray area between life and death.

The life of a metaphor is a subtle matter that belongs within the realm of the individual mind, including the mind of the man who (co)wrote: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Did he get a visual image of a heart, a beating heart of liberty? Did he see, within that heart, the universe? Did the image of the universe inside a heart blur into a mystery as he compared the universe inside a heart with the unborn baby inside a womb — two bodily organs containing — who's to say? — everything?

You may think the life of that baby is undeniably, concretely real, but do you understand how real liberty might look in the mind of a man who gets visual images?

ADDED: The Orwell quote contains the very phrase I marked as a redundancy: "A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image..."

"Federal education authorities found on Monday that an Illinois school district had violated anti-discrimination laws..."

"... when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates in athletics to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions."

“All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities — this is a basic civil right,” Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Township High School District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room.”

"Some speculate that this adaptability to city life is because coywolves’ dog DNA has made them more tolerant of people and noise..."

"... perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—an animal that dislikes humans. And interbreeding may have helped coywolves urbanise in another way, too, by broadening the animals’ diet. Having versatile tastes is handy for city living. Coywolves eat pumpkins, watermelons and other garden produce, as well as discarded food. They also eat rodents and other smallish mammals. Many lawns and parks are kept clear of thick underbrush, so catching squirrels and pets is easy. Cats are typically eaten skull and all, with clues left only in the droppings."

From an Economist article, "Greater than the sum of its parts/It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America."

Is there something quite different about the Ohio experiment in marijuana legalization — something wrong?

If the ballot initiative wins:

Issue 3 expressly states that commercial cultivation of marijuana in Ohio will be limited to 10 separate properties, whose addresses have already been determined. And just who owns the land that will be granted exclusive rights to what is projected to be a billion dollar industry? The same investment groups, organized by James, that are financing the ResponsibleOhio campaign to legalize marijuana in the state....

ResponsibleOhio projects that there will be an estimated 300 employees per facility, which is astronomical when compared with Colorado commercial growers like Medicine Man, which operates one of the state’s largest cultivation centers—40,000 square feet—and needs only 32 employees to run it. James says that Ohio’s cultivation centers will be up to 300,000 square feet. The imagery of Smithsonian-size grow-houses and multibillion-dollar sales plays into the Big Cannabis narrative that marijuana prohibitionists (and now some legalizers) have rallied around....

No matter what happens, with recreational marijuana having already proved itself as an endeavor worthy of Big Business attention, it’s certain that we’re going to see large influxes of cash into future campaigns by investors looking for a stake in the coming green rush.

Promoting a business but only if it's small makes little sense. But is there something wrong with designating the 10 properties? If producing marijuana is to be legal, the state will have to control it, and limiting the production to 10 big places instead of allowing lots of little places to operate is perhaps a creditable idea about how to keep tabs on this business. Doesn't it make sense to want fewer bigger grow houses? I'm just asking questions. I don't have a policy position here.

"Good. You just can't run for president based on a fantasy that there's only one issue that matters."

"In the real world, there's no way around the fact that the president has to deal with multiple issues every day, and the people won't accept a president who doesn't take the whole job seriously."

Says my son John, commenting on the news that Lawrence Lessig has dropped out of the presidential race. The reason Lessig gives is not, however, that people won't accept a candidate with a single-issue campaign, but that he never became well-known enough, and he blames the Democratic Party for excluding him from the debates.

But I wouldn't criticize the Party for failing to open up the debates for the purpose of helping advocates of single issues. And my reason is precisely what John is talking about: I don't take this person seriously as a real candidate.

"The Slow-Motion Implosion of ObamaCare."

"I see firsthand in my company why not enough people are signing up and premiums are rising."

"We love the land, but the land doesn’t love us."

Christians in Iraq.

More than a year after IS swept across northern Iraq, capturing the historic heartland of Iraq’s Assyrian Christians and driving out more than 100,000, many of the displaced say they no longer see a future for Christians here. Thousands have already emigrated, and many others are planning or hoping to follow....

50 years ago today: "War Critic Burns Himself To Death Outside Pentagon."

The NYT reported on the shocking protest by Norman Morrison:



Here's the Wikipedia article on Norman Morrison:

Filmmaker Errol Morris interviewed Secretary McNamara at length on camera in his documentary film, The Fog of War, in which McNamara says, "[Morrison] came to the Pentagon, doused himself with gasoline. Burned himself to death below my office ... his wife issued a very moving statement - 'human beings must stop killing other human beings' - and that's a belief that I shared, I shared it then, I believe it even more strongly today". McNamara then posits, "How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it."

"On Tuesday, Achan, joined by Aicheria Bell, another African-style hair braider, and the Institute for Justice, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Iowa Board of Cosmetology Arts & Sciences."

"Their complaint asserts that the state’s licensing laws are 'burdensome and arbitrary…causing great and irreparable harm' and violate their rights as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."

... Iowa’s cosmetologist license is more burdensome than the training requirements for dental assistants, bus drivers, emergency medical technicians, animal control officers, child care workers, security guards, pest control applicators and animal breeders—combined. 

"Everyone else can barbeque but us - and we're a barbecue restaurant."

"Our business model is based on BBQ, and [they're] constraining my business."

The Plan Commission will decide the smoker's fate at a Monday night meeting - but many in the Monroe-Vilas community... say a smoker would impact their quality of living. The Vilas Neighborhood Association declined an interview but said in a statement it opposed a conditional use permit "for numerous reasons that are incongruent with the neighborhood and the close proximity... to the surrounding residential neighborhood."