ISIS attacks Iran.

The NYT reports.

At least 12 people were killed and 42 others wounded Wednesday morning in a pair of devastating attacks on two of Iran’s most potent symbols: the national Parliament and the mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Islamic State immediately claimed responsibility; if that is found to be true, the attacks would be the terrorist group’s first major assault within Iran’s borders. Suspicions in Tehran were also directed at Saudi Arabia, Iran’s nemesis in the region, which has been newly emboldened by a supportive visit from President Trump last month.

In the view of many in Iran, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is inextricably linked to Saudi Arabia. Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line analyst with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said, “ISIS ideologically, financially and logistically is fully supported and sponsored by Saudi Arabia. They are one and the same,” he added.

"There’s something quite youthful about socks with shorts, especially when pulled up...."

"It’s one of those things you’re not supposed to do.... As a stylist, I’m always looking for something that presents this rebellious undertone."

Pulled up black socks with shorts, cool, now, because it's so bad.

"Let’s do an IQ test," said Donald Trump...

... when Piers Morgan, on "Good Morning Britain," said that London's mayor Sadiq Khan has been "quite critical of you" and "attacked you for being ignorant."

Trump also said "When he won, I wished him well. Now I don’t care about him," and "I just think it’s very rude of him." And: "I'm not stupid OK? I can tell you that right now," and "I don't think I'm a divisive person, I'm a unifier."

Trump's Qatar tweets.

This morning:



NYT article on the subject: "Trump Takes Credit for Saudi Move Against Qatar, a U.S. Military Partner."

Qatar has long been accused of funneling arms and money to radical groups in Syria, Libya and other Arab countries. But so has Saudi Arabia. And Mr. Trump’s tweets have huge potential strategic consequences in the Middle East, where Qatar is a crucial military outpost for the United States....

It has also built deep ties to American academia, providing funding and real estate to build Middle Eastern campuses for six major universities, including Cornell, Georgetown and Northwestern.

Qatar’s financing of radical groups has long been a source of tension with Washington. But the United States has generally avoided taking sides in the regional feuds in the Persian Gulf since it has strategic ties with several of the gulf states.

Hey, man, did you notice Dylan edited out the "man" interjection from Captain Ahab's speech?

You'd think Dylan more than Ahab would drop "man" into a sentence. I hear it as beatnik style.

But Bob said — in a part of his Nobel speech I didn't talk about in my lengthy analysis yesterday — as he was going on and on about Herman Melville's "Moby Dick":

Ahab, too, is a poet of eloquence. He says, "The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run." Or these lines, "All visible objects are but pasteboard masks." Quotable poetic phrases that can't be beat.

I wanted to know more about that "visible objects are but pasteboard masks" business, so I looked it up, and I see that Melville wrote:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks."

There's that seemingly beatnik "man" popping up in Ahab's speech. I have to strain to hear it as some kind of 19th century bombast, sermonish.

Dylan also left out the "as" and thus turned a simile into a metaphor. He's praising Melville's poetry and saying it "can't be beat," and he changes the words. It's so "quotable," he misquotes it. Well, he's a poet too. He knows it — "Hope I don't blow it" — and his phrases are quotable and unbeatable too. I know I quote him. A lot more than I quote Melville (who didn't put his words into songs that I played a hundred times).

What did Melville's Ahab mean by "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks"? He continues:

But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me?

"Whisker fatigue."

I thought this NYT article was going to be about how we're tired of men with beards, but it's about cats getting their whiskers irritated by the edges of their food bowls.

When cats have to stick their faces into deep bowls and their whiskers rub up against the sides, the experience can be stressful, prompting them to paw the food onto the floor, fight with other cats or grow apprehensive at mealtimes.

Some companies have begun to advertise their food bowls as “whisker friendly.” One of them is Hepper, which makes whisker-conscious Nom Nom bowls ($39.99, or $71.99 for two), which are one inch deep and four-inches by five-inches wide. They are made of stainless steel, which — unlike plastic — will not harbor the bacteria that can lead to chin acne (known colloquially as “catne”).

Is this a promo for a company that makes insanely expensive cat bowls? I don't know but I think Dr. Catsby's Food Bowl for Whisker Relief looks pretty nice, and if you buy it using my link, you'll be helping the cause of the Althouse blog, which dogs the NYT daily, giving you your feed, and rubbing your whiskers just the right wrong way.

"Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not."

"The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish. And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men."

From "The dark side of Guardian comments."

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

They have a section where you mark comments as Allow or Block to see how your moderating would compare to theirs.

This revealed, in my opinion, that their methodology is flawed. Take this for example, which they mark as "sexist" and block worthy:

“THERE IS NO GENDER PAY GAP! Just more feminist crap portraying women as victims and men as perpetrators. Even worse is the lie we live in a rape culture with one in five women raped over a lifetime. Sure if you re-define what constitutes a rape including a drunk girl gives consent but regrets it next day.”

It may be be wrong. It may be off topic. It is not, however, sexist.

They did this study by tallying up comments they blocked. If they're blocking that kind of thing, I'm not sure that their data is particularly meaningful.

The study might ironically show that The Guardian is sexist. It may be that The Guardian thinks it's necessary to protect female writers from vigorous pushback but sees the male writers as able to sustain attacks and defend themselves. 

"Second, we need to ban taxpayer-funded air travel to conferences."

"State legislatures could ban reimbursement for travel outside their states; Congress could require that no federal grant money be spent on air travel to conferences and similar events. A lot of academic conferences would fail, but that’s a small price to pay for saving the planet. And besides, it will encourage the development of Internet-based conference alternatives. A whole new industry might result: Green jobs!"

From a list of 4 climate-change proposals that Glenn Reynolds says ought to come first, from the elite, to show they really believe what they want ordinary people to believe.

And don't let these people buy their way out of the carbon sins, in the manner preened about by Al Gore, here:



"And what carbon emissions come from my trips... are offset. I live a carbon-free lifestyle, to the maximum extent possible."

Gore's idea of what is possible is so ludicrously crabbed that I don't know why he has any hope of solving any problems at all. He's already hit the maximum by buying carbon offsets?!! Well, he's got the money. And by the way, doesn't Al Gore make money from people buying carbon offsets??

"It could’ve been handled in the most amazing, loving way. Talk about your journey and keep it to that."

"That I would’ve had great respect for. Don't talk about — in a real negative way — like everything was like I'm such a bad person. There’s lies that are printed in a book that lives there for the end of time, so your children are going to read this book about their grandparents and have a story that’s fabricated, that’s in print, and is a fabrication."

Who knows what's fabricated? I can't keep up.

It's entirely possible that Caitlyn Jenner wrote a book trashing the Kardashians with the collusion, acceptance, and encouragement of the rest of the family in the pursuit of the shared goal of setting up reality-show scenes like the one I'm quoting above.

It does make a pretty great scene:



That's acting to some extent, but who can tell? I have no base line to know what these people would be like in a completely unscripted setting.

Can you imagine having your most gripping emotional moment in lighting that fabulous, with your makeup done that flawlessly?

It's hard to get past that name — Reality Winner....

But this is, I presume, serious.

On Monday evening, the Intercept published what appears to be a May 5 intelligence report from the National Security Agency that describes two cyberattacks carried out by Russian government hackers against employees of a company that provides technical support to state voting agencies, which occurred shortly before the 2016 election. (The Intercept’s Sam Biddle noted, “There’s nothing in the NSA report indicating the actual voting machines or vote tabulations were compromised” — though this certainly opens up a whole new dimension in the ongoing investigation into Russia’s election meddling and potential contact with the Trump campaign.)

About an hour after the report was published, the Justice Department announced that 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, a government contractor, has been charged with taking classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.....

Line in the NY Post article about opening statements in the Cosby trial that made me realize Bill Cosby will be acquitted.

"After the so-called paralyzation and drugging and assault, there were 72 phone calls. She called him 53 times. She called him continuously. They spoke, at times, for 30 or 40 minutes at a pop."

And, apparently, there are phone records showing this.

I'm not saying he didn't commit a sexual assault or that a victim of a real sexual assault can't remain or become a good friend of his (or hers) after the crime, only that I don't think the jury will find that the prosecution has met its burden of proof.

The garden view.

The deck and the backyard garden, photographed by Meade from the third floor:



I like where he moved the edibles. It was fun eating skewers of grilled steak on the deck tonight and picking the red speckled lettuce as a leaf-by-leaf impromptu side dish.

Anyway, talk about whatever you want in the comments. This is an open thread.

And think about shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

Bob Dylan finally delivers his Nobel Prize lecture...

... just in time to collect the $900,000, the NYT tells us.

Here's the audio:



Text here. I haven't listened/read yet, but I'm going to do both right now and I'll add to this post as I do.

ADDED: In the first sentence, Bob accepts that task implied by the prize, "wondering exactly how my songs related to literature." He shows his wondering, "in a roundabout way."

1. When he was 18, he saw Buddy Holly in concert, and he saw in Buddy "[e]verything I wasn't and wanted to be." The in-concert feeling was "electrifying." It wasn't just the words but the entire "presence" of the man and the music. Buddy "looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something." Buddy passed on his powers, and then Buddy passed on out of this world.

2. Bob got a copy of a Leadbelly recording of "Cottonfields," and that "transported" him, as if he'd been "walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me." He doesn't say religion, but he uses the language of religion. He's a convert to folk music. It's "more vibrant and truthful to life" than the "radio songs" he grew up with.  He starts to play: "By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it." You get to "know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl." Bob absorbed "all the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries" and, as he wrote songs, figured out how to "make it all connect and move with the current of the day."

3. He credits "typical grammar school reading" for giving him "principals [sic!] and sensibilities and an informed view of the world."  He lists Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and Tale of Two Cities, but he wants to talk in depth about 3 works of literature, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey.

4. Moby Dick—"Everything is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo Christian bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they're all whalers. Greek mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of facts in this book, geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for coronation of royalty – noble families in the whaling industry... We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit." What's that Bob Dylan song with Captain Ahab, I start wondering, but it's hard to search for at bobdylan.com because in the song — "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" — it's Captain Arab (but I called it up by searching for "collateral," remembering, as I did, the line "They asked me for some collateral/And I pulled down my pants").

5. All Quiet on the Western Front — "You don't understand why the war isn't over. The army is so strapped for replacement troops that they're drafting young boys who are of little military use, but they're draftin' ‘em anyway because they're running out of men. Sickness and humiliation have broken your heart. You were betrayed by your parents, your schoolmasters, your ministers, and even your own government.... You've come to despise that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this torture chamber.... Then a piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you're dead. You've been ruled out, crossed out. You've been exterminated. I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did." Bob doesn't come out and say, and that's where I got my protest music. He says: "Charlie Poole from North Carolina had a song that connected to all this. It's called 'You Ain't Talkin' to Me,'" and he quotes those lyrics, protest song lyrics.

6.  The Odyssey — the story of "a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war." "He's a travelin' man, but he's making a lot of stops," says Bob, gesturing at but not naming Ricky Nelson, whose song "Travelin' Man" begins "I'm a travelin' man, I've made a lot of stops, all over the world." Bob talked about that song in his memoir "Chronicles: Volume One": "One afternoon I was... pouring Coke into a glass from a milk pitcher when I heard a voice coming cool through the screen of the radio speaker. Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, 'Travelin’ Man.' Ricky had a smooth touch... He sang his songs calm and steady like he was in the middle of a storm... I had been a big fan of Ricky’s and still liked him, but that type of music was on its way out. It had no chance of meaning anything. There’d be no future for that stuff in the future." Ricky sang those "radio songs" (see #2, above). Bob identifies with the travelin' man Odysseus. He speaks of himself in the second person: "You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies... You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. "

7. Bob asks: "So what does it all mean?" But he won't say what it means: "I've written all kinds of things into my songs. And I'm not going to worry about it – what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don't think he would have worried about it either – what it all means."

8. Bob just wants to be alive, like Achilles, who told Odysseus that it's no good being dead: "And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place." Bob doesn't mention it, but he's got a song called "Temporary Like Achilles." ("Achilles is in your alleyway/He don’t want me here, he does brag/He’s pointing to the sky/And he’s hungry, like a man in drag...").

9. Bob began "wondering exactly how my songs related to literature," and he ends saying "songs are unlike literature." "They're meant to be sung, not read." They're "alive in the land of the living."

A tweet-heavy Monday morning for the President of the United States.

Click to enlarge. Originals here.

"Harvard Rescinds Acceptances for At Least Ten Students for Obscene Memes."

Harvard Crimson reports:

A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen. In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.”...

Cassandra Luca ’21, who joined the first meme group but not the second... said the founders of the “dark” group chat... "were like, ‘Oh, you have to send a meme to the original group to prove that you could get into the new one’... This was a just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-have-fun kind of thing... I don’t think the school should have gone in and rescinded some offers because it wasn’t Harvard-affiliated, it was people doing stupid stuff."...

[Jessica Zhang ’21, an incoming freshman who joined both chats, said] “I appreciate humor, but there are so many topics that just should not be joked about... I respect the decision of the admissions officers to rescind the offers because those actions really spoke about the students’ true characters.”...

The lack of human agency in this WaPo headline is a pretty good clue about whether it was the left or the right side of the Portland protests that got violent.

"In Portland, images of knives, brass knuckles, bricks show viciousness of protests."