"North Korea dangled a meeting in hopes of the vice president softening his message, which would have ceded the world stage for their propaganda during the Olympics."

"North ­Korea would have strongly ­preferred the vice president not use the world stage to call attention to those absolute facts or to display our strong alliance with those committed to the ­maximum-pressure campaign. But as we’ve said from Day One about the trip: This administration will stand in the way of Kim’s desire to whitewash their murderous regime with nice photo ops at the Olympics."

Said Nick Ayers, chief of staff to Mike Pence, quoted in WaPo in "Pence was set to meet with North Korean officials during the Olympics before last-minute cancellation."

Speaking of nice photo ops at the Olympics, how about those cheerleaders? "EXCLUSIVE: Exposed – the sinister masked minders watching every step of the North Korean cheerleaders as they try to turn Winter Olympics into propaganda victory for Kim Jong-Un" (Daily Mail):

CNN called them 'weirdly mesmerizing' and Vox described them as 'social media stars.' The Wall Street Journal called them 'weapons of mass distraction.' In reality, however, their every move is guarded carefully by a group of guards who wear masks in an apparent attempt to keep their identities shielded....

[I]n 2006, 21 members of North Korean cheering squads who traveled to South Korea for sports events were sent to a prison camp for talking about what they saw in the South....

CPAC wants nothing but distance between itself and Dinesh D’Souza.

Via Mediaite:

At the Tuesday Night Cafe...

... you can talk about anything you like.

"I have seen representations of Roman boxing gloves depicted on bronze statues, paintings and sculptures, but to have the privilege of finding two real leather examples is exceptionally special."

"The hairs stand up on the back of your neck when you realise you have discovered something as astonishing as these boxing gloves" (BBC).

"The dimensions of American office paper are standardized so thoroughly, they seem almost naturally occurring — something inherent in the idea of office paper (that is, until you go to Europe, where letter paper is longer and narrower)."

I'm reading "Just-So Tech Stories: How the 8.5" x 11" Piece of Paper Got Its Size/The unfortunate size of office paper is why we double-space our documents" (in The Atlantic) because I bought a made-in-France Clairefontaine spiral notebook and wondered why it wasn't 8 1/2 by 11 inches — it's 8 1/4 by 11 3/4. I felt so awkward with it. It seemed perverse. I really did have that sense that 8 1/2 by 11 is "naturally occurring."

But — according to this article —  8 1/2 by 11 really isn't naturally good for reading. A magazine that wide would use 2 or 3 columns per page to help the eye get from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line. And that's why we double space, to make the beginning of the next line easier to see.

Why do we use a paper size that is so unfriendly for the basic task of reading? According to a very interesting post by Paul Stanley, the rough dimensions of office paper evolved to accommodate handwriting and typewriters with monospaced fonts, both of which rendered many fewer characters per line. "Typewriters," he explains, "produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving ... around 65 to 78 characters." This, he says, is "pretty close to ideal."

Of course, I'm using my spiral notebook for handwriting, and I produce about 30 characters per line. That should be perfectly easy to read, but I'm less interested in how easy it is to read than in whether my arm feels normal when I'm reaching up to the top lines. That suggests that notebooks should come in different sizes the way men's shirts come with different sleeve lengths.

MORE: Wikipedia has an article "Letter (paper size)." Excerpt:

Ronald Reagan made this the paper size for U.S. federal forms in the early 1980s; previously, the smaller "official" Government letter size, 8.0 by 10.5 inches... was used in government, while standard 8.5 × 11 inch paper was used by most other offices....

The precise origins of the dimensions of US letter size paper (8.5 × 11 in) are not known. The American Forest & Paper Association says that the standard US dimensions have their origin in the days of manual paper making, the 11" length of the standard paper being about a quarter of "the average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms."

Ah! So it is about arms! An experienced vatman's arms. You can see why that extra 3/4 of an inch feels awkward to me, since I am not an experienced vatman.

That time I didn't violate a rule but I also didn't "feel free."

I think this can be regarded as a photograph of the First Amendment concept known as "the chilling effect."

ADDED: This is why it's good for law to be negative. Let the government say what it's forbidding me to do. Don't tell me what I'm permitted to do. It gives the impression that I need affirmative permission for everything.

"A woman I don’t know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet)..."

"... in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago. Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security... cameras running. Another False Accusation. Why doesn’t @washingtonpost report the story of the women taking money to make up stories about me? One had her home mortgage paid off. Only @FoxNews so reported...doesn’t fit the Mainstream Media narrative."

2 tweets by Trump — here and here — published within the last hour. The piece looks like this in the middle of the front page of The Washington Post right now:



From the article, recounting something Rachel Crooks said happened Jan. 11, 2006:

“He was waiting for the elevator outside our office when I got up the nerve to introduce myself,” she said now, remembering that day when she was 22 years old and Trump was 59. “It’s not like I was trying to upset the apple cart. I don’t know. Maybe I was being naive.... He took hold of my hand and held me in place like this,” she said, squeezing the sides of the water glass, shaking it gently from side to side. “He started kissing me on one cheek, then the other cheek. He was talking to me in between kisses, asking where I was from, or if I wanted to be a model. He wouldn’t let go of my hand, and then he went right in and started kissing me on the lips.”

She shook the water glass one final time and set it down. “It felt like a long kiss,” she said. “The whole thing probably lasted two minutes, maybe less.”

“Like you were another piece of his property,” the hostess said.

“And with those orange lips!” another woman said.

"Thirty-two years ago I, too, fell in love with a man I worked with. It started the way so many office romances start..."

"... with common interests and a sense of shared purpose, but that isn’t where it stopped. All these years later... I still remember the way the temperature in that tiny grad-school office changed when he walked in the door, the way the heat radiating from him charged every atom in my body with desire, the way I thought I would not survive another second if I couldn’t touch his skin. We all know this heat. It can reduce people to ashes. It can make us take incredibly stupid risks and give no thought at all to the consequences. Wise people know better than to put themselves in circumstances that would allow an illicit desire to flower, but people aren’t always wise. And sometimes it is when we are least wise that we are also most human."

So concludes Margaret Renkl in "Nashville’s Mayor Has Stumbled. Who Will Cast the First Stone?" in the New York Times, which I'm reading because Instapundit blogged:

#METOO, NASHVILLE EDITION: Megan Barry’s lover Sgt Rob Forrest paid $53K more than other bodyguards combined. To be fair, he was providing more services.

The nice thing is, when you’re a female Democrat you can have an affair like this — at taxpayer expense — and a female columnist in the New York Times will womansplain how you’re the real victim here.

Who are the good trolls?

You can Google that...



You can do a poll...

Who are the good trolls? Check as many answers as you want.

All trolls are bad.

All trolls are bad once you give an appropriately narrow meaning to the word.

A good troll has a good cause.

A good troll does no damage other than confusing and flummoxing.

A good troll challenges us to maintain skepticism and a good sense of humor.

A good troll trips up the pompous, uptight people who want to control everything.

A good troll reminds us of the value of rebellion and refusing to submit to authority.

A good troll sets traps for the unwary and clears the field of people too dumb to be trusted.

A good troll is Althouse.

A good troll knows how to take the bait Althouse serves and whip it into a delightful new concoction.

 

pollcode.com free polls

And you can discuss it in the comments...

ADDED: Poll results:

Feel the Burns.

The UW is pushing student turnout on this dark rainy morning...

Polls are officially open in #MadisonWI for the Wisconsin Spring Primary Election. Find your polling place at https://t.co/PZq43IBZZl#BadgersVote from 7 AM to 8 PM today. pic.twitter.com/08rdxb3rW1

— UW-Madison (@UWMadison) February 20, 2018

For discussion of the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary (and a basis for understanding this post's title), go to last night's post, here. It's a real puzzle who to vote for, especially if you're a political hack.

A shameful political framing.

Unwittingly!

"Michael Moore participated in anti-Trump rally allegedly organized by Russians" (Fox News).

(If that link fails, I'm going to have to stop linking to Fox News.)

The post title is a witting allusion to the latest indictment in the Mueller investigation.

And let me quote Trump's best tweet one more time: Get smart America!

Aw, no one's that mean!

Waking up a bunny with an air horn pic.twitter.com/f5e5KbigcZ

— bunnies (@jumpFloofs) February 18, 2018

ADDED: Via Drudge, at the L.A. Times, "Fake videos are on the rise. As they become more realistic, seeing shouldn't always be believing."

Trump said it all in 3 words: "Get smart America!"

ADDED: This...



Made me think of this...



He didn't do it. But he thought it was funny to photograph looking like he was about to do it.

6 minutes ago Trump tweeted this quote, without attribution, but an ellipsis suggesting more to come.

“There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, there’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time, and so I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and make his case to get votes.” .....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018

I haven't Googled yet, but I think that was Obama, some time during the 2016 campaign.

UPDATE, 1 minute later: Yep.



UPDATE, 3 minutes ago:

....The President Obama quote just before election. That’s because he thought Crooked Hillary was going to win and he didn’t want to “rock the boat.” When I easily won the Electoral College, the whole game changed and the Russian excuse became the narrative of the Dems.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018

Delaware man — at an after-hours ugly-sweater party at a Philadelphia museum — posed for a selfie with a terra-cotta warrior statue and broke off and stole its thumb.

The sculpture was part of a temporary exhibit of 10 statues, on loan from China, where "[t]housands of the life-size statues, each unique" were buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, who died in 210 B.C., the NYT reports.

“We call on the American side to severely punish the person who committed this destruction and theft of mankind’s cultural heritage,” the unidentified [Chinese] official told the Beijing Youth Daily, a Communist Party affiliated newspaper, on Sunday.

After-hours ugly-sweater partiers were allowed to mingle with these statues?

The Franklin Institute said in a statement that a security contractor had not followed “standard closing procedures” the night of the party. “As a result of this incident, we have thoroughly reviewed our security protocol and procedures, and have taken appropriate action where needed,” it said, adding that it had cooperated with the F.B.I. Calling the theft “a deplorable act,” the institute said it would push “to ensure that justice for the individual responsible is served.”

You mean the individual who didn't secure the area or just the idiot from Delaware who behaved like a moron at an ugly-sweater party?

"my dog hates his nails getting clipped so my dad literally bought a purse & cut holes in it"

my dog hates his nails getting clipped so my dad literally bought a purse & cut holes in it pic.twitter.com/PWnsUBiiZT

— Kendal Peifer (@KendalPeifer) February 11, 2018