The author of "You May Want to Marry My Husband" has died.

Here's the NYT obituary.

Here's where we talked about "You May Want to Marry My Husband" (10 days ago). I said:

An excellent title for an excellent essay (in the NYT) by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. AKR is an author who is dying of ovarian cancer after 26 years of marriage to a man she finds a bright, humorous way to tell us about.

Number of cars seen in the ditch as we drove this morning from Newton, Iowa to Dubuque: 28!

But we crossed the Mississippi and entered the snowy, rolling hills of Wisconsin, and we made it home to Madison, blissfully intact.

The indoor temperature upon arrival: 47° (which is where I set it). Now, I'm filling up a hot bath to heat up while I wait for the furnace and the boiler to get us back to our toasty normal of 62°, and I'm enjoying my first encounter with a desktop computer after 16 days of using a laptop. We got a wide view of the country, out and about driving (and walking) through 8 states, but the desktop screen is twice as big as the laptop's, so this is a nice view as well.

Back to more normal blogging (plus many photographs to shuffle through). Thanks for carrying on without me.

"I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do..."

"... and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, quoted in "Scott Pruitt’s office deluged with angry callers after he questions the science of global warming." That's at WaPo, which counters Pruitt with this quote from Gina McCarthy, the previous EPA Administrator:

"The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs.... When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.”

The McCarthy quote actually doesn't disagree with anything Pruitt said. It just models a different attitude toward the science.

WaPo chooses to forefront the anger against Pruitt. What's the journalistic theory there? I'm headed back out on the road, so I'll just give this my "emotional politics" tag and throw the discussion over to you.

IN THE COMMENTS: Many noticed what I noticed and didn't have time to say: The 2 sentences spoken by McCarthy look ridiculous side by side. They're not necessarily inconsistent. But sentence #2 cannot be taken to be within the "world of science" that's "about empirical evidence, not beliefs." However "robust and overwhelmingly clear" the evidence is, the acceptability of the cost of inaction is a matter for political debate.

Paul Zrimsek made the point first, asking snarkily:

In what units do scientists measure unacceptability?

Lewis Wetzel said:

"... evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.”

These are opinions. Being derived from "empirical evidence" does not make them statements of fact. No one can tell you with certainty what inaction will cost or what action will cost.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

The costs of climate change (and the costs of avoiding climate change) are questions science can attempt to answer.

Whether those costs are acceptable is not.

Drago quotes Paul Zrimsek's question and says:

There are multiple scales. For instance, it appears that Pruitt's comments come in at -57P (Pelosi units) for acceptability which is equivalent to -249WMOMJ (We Miss Obama: MSM "Journolists" Units).
These scales are subject to historical revisionism, altering of baselines, modifications based on public perceptions and political needs of the day, expunging of "inconvenient truths", etc.

Many more comments. Those are just a few of the early ones.

By the way, I thought it was funny that WaPo wanted both to stress the solidity and seriousness of science while making the main news about how terribly angry some people are. WaPo seems to want public emotion to drive policy but still seems to expect us to soberly submit to the pronouncements of scientists because they are scientists (even when they, like McCarthy, show us outright that they blend policy opinion into their science).

"Trump budget expected to seek historic contraction of federal workforce."

WaPo reports.

Aides say that the president sees a new Washington emerging from the budget process, one that prioritizes the military and homeland security while slashing many other areas, including housing, foreign assistance, environmental programs, public broadcasting and research. Simply put, government would be smaller and less involved in regulating life in America, with private companies and states playing a much bigger role....

Trump and his advisers have said that they believe the federal workforce is too big, and that the federal government spends — and wastes — too much money. They have said that Washington — the federal workers and contractors, among others — has benefited from government largesse while many other Americans have suffered. Federal spending, they have argued, crowds the private sector and piles regulations and bureaucracy onto companies.

We tried to make it home from Denver in one day, but Nature had other ideas.

Sure, we could have plugged on. Many others did, and this morning I counted 15 cars in the ditch as we drove about 55 miles from the Days Inn in Newton, Iowa — where we holed up to escape the treacherous I-80 — to this McDonald’s where I’m getting some black coffee and very slow wifi. I’d hang out and blog some more for you while the snow falls and Meade reminds me that he’d wanted to stay 2 more days in Moab, but… bad wifi. What can I do? I trusted McDonald’s to give me the basics: coffee, an egg biscuit, and good wifi. But this is a trifle. We could be in a ditch.

But I did get a few tabs to open before timing out, so let me give you a few ideas of things to talk about while Meade and I work our way back home:

1. "'My vulva cupcakes were confiscated' - a day in the life of an anti-FGM campaigner" (in The Guardian).

I grew up in the UK as part of the Somali diaspora, and I’d assumed the people of Jijiga would not be ready for vulva cupcakes. But Abdi, also part of the diaspora, reassured me that the Ethiopian women had requested them. “Leyla, they watched the documentary and loved the concept of using art for campaigning,” she said.

2. "Is Trump Trolling the White House Press Corps?/At daily briefings, Sean Spicer calls on young journalists from far-right sites. The mainstream media sees them as an existential threat" (in The New Yorker).

Until recently, the more established White House correspondents have regarded floaters as a harmless distraction—the equivalent of letting a batboy sit in the dugout. Now they are starting to see the floaters as an existential threat. “It’s becoming a form of court-packing,” one White House correspondent told me. Outlets that have become newly visible under the Trump Administration include One America News Network, which was founded in 2013 as a right-wing alternative to Fox News; LifeZette, a Web tabloid founded in 2015 by Laura Ingraham, the radio commentator and Trump ally; Townhall, a conservative blog started by the Heritage Foundation; the Daily Caller, co-founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, now a Fox News host; and the enormously popular and openly pro-Trump Breitbart News Network. Most of the White House correspondents from these outlets are younger than thirty. “At best, they don’t know what they’re doing,” a radio correspondent told me....

3. This looks like it might be good, but the wifi won't pull it in for me. The headline, at McClatchy, is "Trump is doing what Obama didn’t do: reach out and listen." And here's something that Kellyanne Conway said about the surveillance of the Trump campaign. And Sean Spicer got accosted at an Apple store and asked "how it feels to work for a fascist?" I'm just guessing those 3 things would be bloggable. Enough performance of my frustration with slow wifi. Time to get back on the Interstate, which will also be slow, by choice, and with all frustration suppressed as we diligently eschew the ditch.

UPDATE: WiFi reprieve! I'm in the car, parked at an I-80 rest stop. One thing I love about Iowa. Great rest stops.

The Delicate Arch.

These 2 photos are from Friday in Arches National Park, where the first thing we did was to take the big hike up to the most famous arch. I put up some of my other arch photos first. There are 3 reasons for that:

1. It's too famous. Makes the photo seem like a cliché. This is the arch on the Utah license plates. It's Arches National Park, not Arch National Park. I wanted to show you some other arches — hence the earlier posts with Sand Arch and Broken Arch.

2. It was brilliant midday light, not the best for photographs. We'd gotten there sort of early, but the hike took a while, so I wasn't that enthusiastic about the photo op. I am proud of myself for making the hike, which was tough and scary in places, but that's nothing to show you in a post.

3. It was kind of a Disneyland up there. So many people, lots of kids, lots of posing under the arch. I'd have liked a more pristine encounter with nature. This was more of a party atmosphere. That's fine, and I congratulate all the people who got up there with little kids... and the kids too if they did their own walking. There are a lot of people who are really game when it comes to taking the family on a strenuous hike. So many babies in backpacks. So many toddlers who walked part way and then had an adult willing to carry them. It's really nice, but it's not something I photograph.

"God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time."

"To the universe four days is no different than four billion light-years."

Art or literature or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of taste and reason does not recognize best-sellerism. And light year measure distance, not time. But lots of people thrill to writing like "The Bridges of Madison County," whose author Robert James Waller, has died.

"I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea."

Fly on, good peregrine!

"Before the calls, we were advised to keep conversations short because, we were told, Trump will not be interested in the details of the call and does not have a long attention span..."

"... so it would be pointless to have a long call. However, we were pleasantly surprised at how much time President Trump spent asking very informed questions. The first time the presidents spoke, the questions Trump asked impressed us. 'How can you win in this fight [against terrorism]?' he asked. 'What do you need to become financially independent?' and 'How can American business invest in Afghanistan? How can we develop businesses and mining in your country?' Trump would listen intently after each question, often asking follow-ups. Trump's second call with our president was even longer than the first. Asking these types of questions for our country is something the Obama administration never did. The Obama administration was the most academic administration we have ever had to deal with but the Trump administration has been the most thoughtful and intelligent."

From "I Had Dinner With the Afghan Ambassador. What He Said About the Differences Between Trump, Obama Is Stunning" in Independent Business Review.

ADDED: Interesting to think about the contrast between "academic" and "thoughtful and intelligent." The ambassador seems to set them up almost as opposites.

Somewhere in Iowa.

We thought we could make the big leap home from Denver in one day, but the weather got a little pesky. It wouldn't have been so bad if other drivers all slowed down, but an awful lot of people seem to go on the theory that if I'm not using my brakes right now, the capacity to brake is irrelevant. We found an exit with 3 motels and picked the nicest looking of the lot, a Days Inn. In my opinion, it's great. Quiet. Clean. And the wifi works.

At the Posing-Like-a-Petroglyph Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Only Meade and I were at Broken Arch (in Arches National Park) just before sundown 2 days ago, so his standing under the arch wasn't intruding on anyone else's photography. I like the way his tiny figure gives the arch grand scale, and I chose the photo where he looked most like one of the pictograms and petroglyphs we'd been seeing in Utah.

We're zooming toward home today, so keep up the conversation.

And consider using the Althouse Amazon Portal.

"Trump Has Radically Transformed the GOP/The party has already given up on five of its core issues."

Writes Shikha Dalmia in Reason.

(I've got exactly the tag for this one: what Trump did to the GOP.)

Not noticing daylight savings.

I'm just noticing that we sprang ahead last night. Using my digital devices for time awareness has made me oblivious to something that used to call for special paying of attention.

And here we are in Colorado, poised to spring forward another hour on the same day as we cross back into the Central Time Zone.

"In the Netherlands, the termination rate for Down babies is between 74% and 94%. In Denmark, the termination rate is 98%. In Iceland, the termination rate is 100%."

From "Abortion Has All But Eliminated Down Syndrome Babies in This Country. One Photographer's Powerful Quest to Fight It."

The percentage in the U.S. is thought to be 67 to 85.

Lots of photos at the link.

Whatever happened to the narrative that a few billionaires control everything?

I'm asking myself this morning as I read "The Future of Politics is Grassroots" in The Hill.

My answer to the question whatever happened to the narrative that a few billionaires control everything is:

One billionaire happened.

“The influx has been too much. The borders should close. If this continues, our culture will cease to exist.”

Says a resident of Amsterdam, quoted in "Anti-immigrant anger threatens to remake the liberal Netherlands" (in WaPo).

In interviews across the Netherlands in recent days, far-right voters expressed stridently nationalist, anti-immigrant views that were long considered fringe but that have now entered the Dutch mainstream.

Voters young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural said they would back the Geert Wilders-led Freedom Party — no longer the preserve of the “left-behinds” — which promises to solve the country’s problems by shutting borders, closing mosques and helping to dismantle the European Union.

"Ruling that Republicans redrew the Texas congressional map to intentionally discriminate against Latino and black voters..."

"... a federal court panel invalidated three districts, including one in Travis County, in an order issued late Friday...."

The 2-1 ruling described a chaotic, hurried process that led to the 2011 congressional maps, redrawn to add four new districts, thanks to the state’s rapid population growth.

It was a time of “strong racial tension and heated debate about Latinos, Spanish-speaking people, undocumented immigration and sanctuary cities, and the contentious voter ID law,” the court said....