At the Pink Cake Café...

... the late-night conversation is sweet.

And show some love for the Althouse blog by using this link — which is always in the sidebar — when you shop at Amazon. Here's something we bought, loved, and just bought more of: Tiny But Mighty Heirloom Popcorn.

"Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken."

From Michael Ian Black (whom I follow on Twitter)(click to enlarge and read):



The last line there is: "Even talking about this topic invites ridicule because it’s so scary for most men (and women). Men are adrift and nobody is talking about it and nobody’s doing anything about it and it’s killing us."

And in fact people are ridiculing him.

I found MIB's tweets via The Washington Examiner, "When it comes to boys, Michael Ian Black is kind of right, but mostly wrong."

"It’s striking to me how many of the architects of [libertarianism] seem to be on the autism spectrum — you know, people who don’t feel solidarity or empathy with others, and who have difficult human relationships sometimes."

Said Duke history professor Nancy MacLean, quoted in "Duke students rebuke prof for saying libertarians are autistic" at Campus Reform. MacLean, who has written a book on the libertarian economist James Buchanan, was giving a long lecture when she was asked if she thought Buchanan was motivated by “personal greed” or “malevolence.” She gave what might have sounded, in context, like an empathetic understanding of his sort of mind — that he, like other libertarians she's observed — seems to be somewhere on the autism spectrum.

“My initial response was that I wanted her to be punished,” said Hunter Michielson, president of the school’s Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) chapter. Michielson realized that punishing the professor was "hypocritical for him as a libertarian," but he decided to do something else that I'll call hypocritical, petition the university to put out an official statement:

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the university stand with conservative, libertarian, and autistic students and community members and say that just because you are a libertarian doesn’t mean you are autistic and just because you are autistic doesn’t mean you lack empathy,” Michielson remarked. “College should be a place where you confront difficult opinions,” he added, saying that despite experiencing classroom discrimination for his views, having liberal-leaning professors has been a welcome component of his education given his conservative background.

I'd say, forget the petitions and the official statements and set up a debate or a panel discussion on politics and empathy or human psychology and political preferences. Let's get deep and scientific on what's really going on, rather than take offense and try to scare the person into shutting up.

It seems to me that MacLean is contributing to the marketplace of ideas. It's awkward to drag people with autism in as if you are disrespecting them, but some of that disrespect is coming from Michielson, who says: “I struggle to accept that she actually believes libertarianism or conservatism is the result of autism."

First, MacLean said "seem to be on the autism spectrum." A lot of people — including people we encounter in everyday life who are not overwhelmingly disabled — seem to be on the autism spectrum. It may be a bit offensive to say that, mostly because it sounds disparaging toward people with autism. But MacLean was not "speculating that support for individual liberty might actually be the result of a mental disorder" — as Campus Reform puts it. She was trying to understand Buchanan, after somebody else speculated that he was afflicted by “personal greed” or “malevolence.”

And, frankly, I suspect that libertarians are reacting out of recognition that — however possibly offensively MacLean put it — there is some truth to her observation.

Note: I've incurred the wrath of libertarians for daring to talk about their psychology. Here's a good starting point if you want to examine my motivations.

"The ultrasound shows no cysts, no free fluid, and certainly no baby. But that doesn’t help the fact that it hurts so bad that the human voices around me have become a sort of nonsense Teletubbies singsong."

"With pain like this, I will never be able to be anyone’s mother. Even if I could get pregnant, there’s nothing I can offer.... From August to November I try desperately to manage this new level of pain. I try so hard it becomes a second job. I go to pelvic-floor therapy, massage therapy, pain therapy, color therapy, acupuncture, yoga, and a brief yet horrifying foray into vaginal massage from a stranger.... Finally I ask my doctor if my uterus needs to come out. She says, 'Let’s wait and see.' Two days later (which has always been my definition of 'wait and see'; I am not a patient girl) I check myself into the hospital and announce I am not leaving until they stop this pain or take my uterus. No, really, take her."

From "In Her Own Words: Lena Dunham on Her Decision to Have a Hysterectomy at 31" (Vogue).

"We gave a rubber band and a helmet to the woman"/"I do not know the quality of the rubber band and the helmet given to my wife."

"My wife and I were enjoying the ride on the go-kart. Suddenly, my wife's hair got loose and I heard her scream."

From "India woman dies after hair caught in go-kart wheel" (BBC).

ADDED: This makes me think of the poem "Amelia," by Charles Reznikoff, which is based on the facts of a real legal case:

Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her first job—
in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma’am, oh, so anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blonde hair hanging about her shoulders,
“knocking up” for Mary and Sadie, the stitchers....

Continue reading here.

"So while filing an appeal [in the DACA case] to the Ninth Circuit, the administration’s lawyers also went to the Supreme Court with a 'petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment'..."

"... a request to the justices to hear the case this spring without waiting. The Supreme Court’s rules reserve this court-jumping procedure for cases of 'imperative public importance.' Only a handful of cases has cleared that bar, including the Nixon tapes case, which effectively forced the president’s resignation and the 1981 case that ratified the agreement that ended the Iran hostage crisis. Invoking those cases, Solicitor General Francisco insists to the court that “that standard has been met here,” an assertion the plaintiffs vigorously dispute...."

Writes Linda Greenhouse in the NYT. She ends with this point, which might cut the other way:

Even if the justices find Judge Alsup’s analysis questionable and the case surpassingly important, there is an obvious reason for the court to stay its hand: the possibility, however remote, of congressional action during the months it would surely take the court to issue a decision. Recruited to a walk-on role in the other branches’ drama, the justices could well find themselves exposed on an empty stage. At least this is how it looks to me, from the outside. Will it look that way from inside the justices’ private conference? I don’t know, but I’m sure of this: The future of more than the Dreamers is at stake.

I don't see the problem of taking a case and then getting superseded by legislative action. Solving this problem with new legislation is the best solution, and the Court's expedited attention to the case might pressure Congress to get its work done more quickly. If it did, would the Justices suffer some loss of prestige — finding themselves exposed on an empty stage?

I don't see the problem. The Court wouldn't be grabbing the case because it wants to glory in the spotlight, but because the case is of "imperative public importance." If it ceases to be a case, because the dispute is resolved by actions taken in political branches, the Court would bow out.

It would not be that the Court embarrassed itself by seeing a matter of imperative public importance when there wasn't one, but that the Congress  — also concerned with matters of imperative public importance  — exercised its own power. At that point, the judicial power would play out in a normal way, applying the law to the changed facts and acknowledging whatever power Congress has.

The Solicitor General, seeking to skip over the intermediate appellate court, is perhaps overdramatizing the need for quick action, but Greenhouse is overdramatizing the consequence for the Court if the supposedly big-deal case turns into nothing.

I think she knows this, as she asks: "Will it look that way from inside the justices’ private conference?" She says she doesn't know, but I think it's pretty clear the answer is no. She purports to be sure that "The future of more than the Dreamers is at stake." That's the last line of the column. It's clear that she means that the future of the Court is at stake, but in what way?

In some utterly banal way, the future for everyone and everything is always at stake. But I guess she's warning the Court that she and the rest of the Court-following mainstream media stand ready to criticize. That shouldn't affect anyone on the Court, but it could.

"A lot of people were saying that it would be him. They would say he would be the one to shoot up the school. Everyone predicted it."

Said one of the students of Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students were shot to death yesterday, about the suspect, Nikolas Cruz (NYT.)

Is Trump's "Harvest Box" program serious or is he trolling us?

I can't believe this! Look, it's Glenn Thrush — remember him?¹ — at the NYT:

Under a proposal in the president’s budget many participants in the program would be given half their benefits in the form of a “Harvest Box” full of food preselected for nutritional value and economic benefit to American farmers. The cache of cheaper peanut butter, canned goods, pasta, cereal, “shelf stable” milk and other products would now be selected by the federal government, not by the people actually eating it.

Peanut butter?! Isn't that the tell? If there's one thing some people can't eat, it's peanuts. But Thrush isn't quoting from the proposal. He may have come up with the idea of leading the list with peanut butter — cheaper peanut butter — as a way to nudge us to think the idea is — figuratively and literally — nuts.²

Democrats claimed the plan shackled the poor while business groups, led by big food retailers, would stand to lose billions of dollars in lost SNAP business. ...

In reality, administration officials on Tuesday admitted that the food-box plan — which the president’s budget director Mick Mulvaney compared to the Blue Apron grocery delivery service — had virtually no chance of being implemented anytime soon....

You've got to give them some credit for thinking outside the box and coming up with the idea of a box. There's something charming about that.

And I kind of love the optimism in thinking you could solve all the logistical problems: who's allergic to what, who's on a weight-loss diet, who's lactose intolerant, who's incapable of cooking, what to do when people are away from home (or homeless), how to teach people to go through the steps of cooking oatmeal or beans.

Can't computers be programmed to know what everyone needs and wants? Can people be programmed to want and need what the government puts in boxes? Will the Russians hack the computers? Who needs the Russians when our own government is this creepy?

Creepy?! No! It's wholesome as hell! It's like some 19th century charity mission, like: Beth quietly... filled her basket with odds and ends for the poor children, and went out into the chilly air with a heavy head and a grieved look in her patient eyes....

“I don’t think there’s really any support for their box plan. And, I worry that it’s a distraction from the budget’s proposal to cut SNAP by some 30 percent. That’s the real battle,” said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive Washington think tank. “The dangers are these other proposals to cut benefits. But all anyone is talking about today are the boxes.”

It is distracting! He knows how to flummox with a box...

_________________

¹ As The Hill reported last month: "Former New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush on Tuesday will return to the newspaper after a two-month suspension... to cover 'the social safety net in the age of Trump'.... Thrush, 50, was suspended as the Times investigated allegations of sexual misconduct by four women as young as 23, including claims of groping and kissing."

² Yeah, I know. Legumes. So, what do you want — to ding me for misusing "literally"? You annoying pedant. You belong in Footnote 2.

At the Cherry Heart Café...

... it's a nice place for Valentines.

Too late to buy any Valentine a Valentine's Day gift, but it's nice to get things for no special occasion and to show a little love for the Althouse blog by using the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"Republicans have erased the Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot in a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll..."

"Fully 39 percent of registered voters say they would support the GOP candidate for Congress in their district, while 38 percent would back the Democratic candidate.... And while House Democrats have pledged to yoke GOP candidates to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the poll suggests that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will be a more effective foil for Republicans than Ryan will be for Democrats.Voters are split on their perceptions of Ryan: 36 percent view him favorably, and 40 percent have an unfavorable opinion. But Pelosi’s numbers are more negative: Only 28 percent of voters have a favorable impression of her, while nearly half, 49 percent, view her unfavorably."

Politico reports.

"Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom President Donald Trump’s personal attorney acknowledged paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss her alleged sexual encounter with Trump...."

AP reports.

[Her manager Gina] Rodriguez Rodriguez said her client will soon announce how and when she will tell her story publicly.

How and when, eh? I guess a deal needs to be made... artfully.

"But [Susan] Rice did not write her email to cover Barack Obama’s rear end."

"If she or anyone else had wanted to document the claim that Obama said to proceed 'by the book,' the appropriate course would have been an official memo that copied others who were present and would have gone into the file... [S]he was C’ing her own A. Rice was nervous about the fact that, at the president’s direction, she had failed to 'share information fully as it relates to Russia' with President Trump’s incoming national security team. This violated longstanding American tradition. Outgoing administrations have always cooperated in the transition to a new administration, whether of the same or the opposing party, especially on matters relating to national security....  CYA memos are rarely a good idea. Most often, they reveal what the author was trying to conceal...."

From "Why Susan Rice Wrote and Email to Herself" by John Hinderaker at Power Line.

"The mostly male, mostly white, mostly straight world of technology and digital-culture journalism is in the midst of a cultural realignment about how it views the sort of 'ironic' political incorrectness..."

"... (and outright Nazism) prevalent in online spaces like 4chan and its orbit. What was once permissible among hacktivists and their observers and hangers-on — hobnobbing with white supremacists, even if you disagreed — no longer is in an America where white supremacists are particularly emboldened, and when that movement has literally been stoked on 4chan. A decade ago, it was much easier to shrug off explicit invocations of Nazism and white supremacy online. For a certain type of reporter hanging out in transgressive parts of the internet, putting up with these shenanigans was par for the course. But that attitude — that it’s just trolling, that it’s ironic, that you don’t know the context — has provided cover for hundreds of acts of genuine hate and violence over the last two years. The idea that because a person leans left in their politics, they can comfortably associate with white supremacists and not be guilty by association is outdated for a lot of people, and the Times apparently heard from enough of them."

From "The Saga of Quinn Norton’s 7-Hour Times Career, Explained" by Brian Feldman in New York Magazine.

"But not all ugliness is created equal, Donald Trump is not Kim Jong-un, the United States is nothing like North Korea..."

"... and to come anywhere near that suggestion is nuts. Be outraged about what’s going on in America. Don’t be ridiculous. In doing her father’s bidding, Ivanka Trump is trying to tell the world that a sexist really wants to empower women, that a racist really cares about equal opportunity and that a narcissistic plutocrat is acting in the high-minded interests of the little people. She’s willfully delusional, totally complicit and compiling one hell of an Instagram feed, which is what she’s ultimately all about. In doing her brother’s bidding, Kim Yo-jong is airbrushing a dictator who authorizes public executions that, according to defectors, must be watched by all adult citizens, so that they can savor the wages of disobedience. She is diverting attention from his roles in the murders of his half brother, who was smeared with a fatal toxin while walking through an airport, and of many senior government officials, slaughtered in grotesque ways. Is it any wonder that she’s making the effort? The alternative, apparently, is being drawn and quartered."

From "The Ivanka Trump of North Korea? Oh, Please" by Frank Bruni in the NYT.

The top-rated comment at the NYT, with 586 up-votes, is:

Trump is as evil as Kim, he just hasn't had as much opportunity to exercise it. But every opportunity he has to show his evil, he has enthusiastically embraced. No doubt he would execute his perceived enemies if he thought he could get away with it. I'm sure he's jealous of Kim's military parades and complete control over his citizens. It's perfectly fair to compare the two. Ivanka and Yo-jong have nothing to do with it.

ADDED: What's unusual about "trying to tell the world that a sexist really wants to empower women, that a racist really cares about equal opportunity and that a narcissistic plutocrat is acting in the high-minded interests of the little people"? Let me propose that exactly that could be said about virtually every American politician. I think it's to the credit of all the sexist, racist, narcissistic plutocrats in government that they can occasionally manage to do something that helps women, minorities, and the little people. It's normal to expect the champions of these politicians to point out these positive efforts. That the doers of these good deeds were hampered by their deeply embedded and not-pretty human impulses could be pointed out as a reason to be impressed by their accomplishments, but their champions choose to keep quiet about such things. That's also not surprising.

"A woman stabbed and left for dead named her killers in her last moments, police say."

WaPo reports.

“Her internal fortitude, to stay alive and to fight, is pretty remarkable,” Sgt. Ray Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office told the San Francisco Chronicle. “This young woman clung to life when she was left for dead and was able to live for another couple hours and get us that information. Ultimately that led us to these arrests.”...

Lizette Andrea Cuesta of Tracy, Calif.... had crawled nearly 100 yards... to get to the road, where she had some chance of being seen by people in passing cars....

“You could tell it was so bad to where you just had to give her comfort,” Richard Loadholt, one of the UPS employees who had been riding with three other men on Tesla Road in Livermore around 2 a.m., told Sacramento Fox affiliate KTXL. Initially, he said he and his workmates thought she was missing an arm. “She fought like a soldier. Like a warrior.”...

"Dying declaration" is a technical term in law. It's an exception to the rule against hearsay. In the California code:

Evidence of a statement made by a dying person respecting the cause and circumstances of his death is not made inadmissible by the hearsay rule if the statement was made upon his personal knowledge and under a sense of immediately impending death.

Cattily titled WaPo article about the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is deflated by an embarrassing correction.

Emily Heil* writes "8 times Louise Linton tried to be relatable in her Elle interview." The correction is: "An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the magazine Louise Linton spoke with. It was Elle, not Vanity Fair."

I understand the urge to take a shot at Louise Linton....

“I’m just a regular girl, and I’m not perfect, but I’m trying my best,” insists Linton, a sorta-actress who grew up in a castle in Scotland and who has heretofore crafted a public persona that has been likened to definitely-not-average figures like Marie Antoinette and Cruella de Vil. (Her sins of public excess include tagging an Instagram picture of herself with an array of designer-label hashtags, then lashing out against a critic in a condescending rant. In another iconic photo op, she posed in designer duds alongside Mnuchin at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, flaunting a newly printed sheet of dollar bills with his name on them.)

So in this interview, Linton was clearly trying verrry hard to course-correct and convince people she is much more down-to-earth than she has previously indicated....

...  but you've got to make it look as though you're reading carefully and not just flailing impulsively.
_______________

* I had to squint at the third letter of the last name to make sure it wasn't an "L," which would have been funny. And it's not entirely impossible. I think it would be cool for an opinionated journalist to be named Emily Hell. And don't tell me "Hell" can't be a last name. There's Richard Hell.