"Oh brother, it will be great when reunification happens. Let reunification happen, and let’s live together for even just one minute before we die."

Said Kim Soon Ok, 81, who was able to spend 11 hours with her brother Kim Byung-oh, 88, after the two were selected as part of a reunification of 90 families who had been separated in the Korean War nearly seven decades ago. She is quoted in "Tears, hugs, arguments as Korean families reunite seven decades after division" (WaPo).

"Asia Argento, a #MeToo Leader, Made a Deal With Her Own Accuser"

The NYT reports.

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18....

The documents, which were sent to The New York Times through encrypted email by an unidentified party, include a selfie dated May 9, 2013, of the two lying in bed. As part of the agreement, Mr. Bennett, who is now 22, gave the photograph and its copyright to Ms. Argento, now 42. Three people familiar with the case said the documents were authentic.

Bennett was a child actor, and he had played Argento's son in a movie.

Ms. Argento, who is divorced and has two children, was both a mentor and a mother figure to Mr. Bennett, the document says, and the two were intermittently in contact as he grew up. “Jimmy’s impression of this situation was that a mother-son relationship had blossomed from their experience on set together,” [Bennett's lawyer] wrote....

The script, based on a book by the pseudonymous writer JT LeRoy, depicts the grim relationship between a drug-addicted prostitute played by Ms. Argento and her son, played by Mr. Bennett and two other young actors. Ms. Argento’s character dresses her son as a girl to lure men, and the boy is ultimately raped.

In interviews and subsequent social media posts between the two over the years, they referred to each other as mother and son.

On May 9, 2013, the day they met for a reunion in her room at a Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, Calif., she posted on Instagram: “Waiting for my long lost son my love @jimmymbennett in trepidation #marinadelrey smoking cigarettes like there was no next week.”

What depths of evil. I think it was child abuse just to use the boy in a movie with that story.

Facebook "mistakenly removed" videos from Prager University’s Facebook page and says it's "continuing to look into what happened."

"We mistakenly removed these videos and have restored them because they don't break our standards. This will reverse any reduction in content distribution you’ve experienced. We’re very sorry and are continuing to look into what happened with your Page."

That's the Facebook tweet, reported at "Facebook Apologizes for Removing Conservative Site’s Posts" (Mediate).

I'm fascinated by the phrase "continuing to look into what happened." I got this link from my son John (at Facebook, a public post), where I wrote:

"continuing to look into" doesn't mean they have no idea what happened and I think (without more) kind of admits they do know but realize they need to look more deeply into what they are doing because it's not working. That's great, though, because it shows at least that the victims of censorship can make enough noise and create enough pressure to force Facebook to consider behaving better.

F s a s y a o f b f o t c, a n n, c i L, a d t t p t a m a c e. N w a e i a g c w, t w t n, o a n s c a s d, c l e...

"How to Memorize Verbatim Text."

I'm reading about this subject because I've long been interested in paraphrasing, and, writing the previous post, I encountered one of those "quotes" that are virtually always remembered in paraphrase form. You know, like "Play it again, Sam" (For "Play it, Sam"). Why do we do that? Does it happen when there's something off about the verbatim quote, and we're really fixing it, making it what it would be if we were writing the screenplay and expecting an actor to say it?

The misremembered quote I ran into this morning is "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" I can tell you for a fact, based on watching the video about 25 times just now, that the verbatim quote is: "I was wondering why it is that, like, I can't just eat my waffle. Just gonna eat my waffle right now."

Why did I watch 25 times? Because I found myself forgetting the word order almost as soon as I heard it even when I was trying to get it verbatim. It was incredibly hard to remember exactly where Obama said "like." Also, the first 3 words are garbled... because he is literally eating the waffle. That's why the word "just" is so important. He's not wondering why he can't eat his waffle. He is eating his waffle. He wants to eat his waffle without having to do something else at the same time.

The difficulty of discerning "I was wondering" might cause listeners to begin the sentence with "why it is that," which sounds odd. I myself, trying to get a verbatim quote, kept switching to "why is it that." There seems to be a strong instinct to switch words into a more natural order, which might say a lot about how language develops and how babies learn to speak in a way that follows established rules (and long before they have any awareness that there are rules that many adults believe in and take pains to enforce).

So if you're looking to memorize verbatim text, it will be easier, I think, if the text you choose follows the natural pattern of speech. And — to continue in the same line of thinking — if you find a particular text strangely hard to memorize, you might want to think about why it was put in that form. Is the speaker/writer hiding something or trying to affect an elevated style? Is there something humorous? Something meant to exclude less intelligent listeners? What's going on?

Did you understand the post title? You will if you read the linked article... the linked... link... ... linc...

That's a technique for memorization. I remember reading, long ago, about papers left by an old woman who couldn't talk and who was assumed to have lost her language ability. It was considered sad that her notes looked like this: o f w a i h h b t n t k c t w b d o e a i i i h....

But then it was understood, and they realized what they were seeing and felt overwhelmed by their failure to understand her.

WaPo provides "Perspective/Barack Obama’s summer reading list is everything we need right now."

I've heard about the "blue wave." This seems to have us lolling about on the beach. What does it mean to say "Barack Obama’s summer reading list is everything we need right now"? I hear: Remember the good old days? Wasn't Barack Obama great? It's okay to disengage from all the craziness of today and lean back and read some books.

But let's see what the books are. Maybe they're all about riling us up about today. Oh. Wait. There's this introductory material from WaPo.

It’s the classiest, most passive-aggressive move Barack Obama could make: He posted a list of books he’s been reading on ­Facebook...

The WaPo book editor (Ron Charles) is trying to deflect the message I heard. He's seeing AGGRESSION! in Obama's amiable communication. Classy aggression.

Obama didn’t rage against his enemies or attack the pillars of our democracy. He didn’t call anybody a “dog.” He didn’t brag about his own bestsellers — or the size of his book-reading hands.

Instead, he just presented a small window into the mind of a man who appreciates how books can alter the pace of our lives and illuminate the world.

“One of my favorite parts of summer is deciding what to read when things slow down just a bit,” Obama wrote, “whether it’s on a vacation with family or just a quiet afternoon.”

For a nation showered by the sputtering rage of his replacement, Obama’s implicit reminder of how incurious and aliterate the Oval Office has become is almost cruel.

La la la. Isn't he wonderful? And isn't his wonderfulness all we really need to make the argument that Trump is intolerably horrible?

Credit to Ron Charles for deploying the word "aliterate." It's different from "illiterate." It means "unwilling to read, although able to do so; disinclined to read" (OED).

ADDED: This post made me think of Obama and the waffle. Remember? "I was wondering why it is that, like, I can't just eat my waffle. Just gonna eat my waffle right now." (By the way, have you ever noticed that the waffle quote is virtually always remembered in paraphrase form, as "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" Go ahead, Google the verbatim quote, which I've provided, and you'll get lots of hits, all substituting the paraphrase.)

ALSO: Althouse on Facebook (but don't try to friend me)(click to enlarge):

I'll link to this in case you want to talk about it, but I'm not in the mood to have my agenda set.

"Trump Lawyers’ Sudden Realization: They Don’t Know What Don McGahn Told Mueller’s Team" (NYT).

That expands on this, published by the NYT on Friday (and not yet blogged by me), "White House Counsel, Don McGahn, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry."

And the new article dredges up something from last fall:

Last fall, Mr. McGahn believed that he was being set up to be blamed for any wrongdoing by the president in part because of an article published in The Times in September, which described a conversation that a reporter had overheard between Mr. Dowd and Mr. Cobb.

In the conversation — which occurred over lunch at a table on the sidewalk outside the Washington steakhouse B.L.T. — Mr. Cobb discussed the White House’s production of documents to Mr. Mueller’s office. Mr. Cobb talked about how Mr. McGahn was opposed to cooperation and had documents locked in his safe.

Does the Times ever consider that Dowd and Cobb intended to be overheard? They were speaking loudly, next to a NYT reporter.

I don't like being nudged to get excited about this — sudden realization, etc. etc. Is something specific and important happening here or is the NYT serving its own interests? Without looking more deeply into this, I'm inclined to assume McGahn did what he was asked to do and operated within his role as White House Counsel of protecting the institution of the presidency. That's different from Trump's own lawyers, who focus on this particular problem. And the longterm interest of the presidency is in preserving confidentiality and executive privilege. Trump with his lawyers wanted to cooperate with Mueller (or at least appear to be doing so unless and until Mueller goes too far). What is the sudden crisis?

And, yes, I know that Trump's lawyer Giuliani said "Truth isn’t truth." It's a fantastic quote for Trump haters to use to the hilt, but I'm not getting excited about it. In context:

“It’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth,” Mr. Giuliani said of any statements by the president in such an interview.

“Truth is truth,” the show’s host, Chuck Todd, answered.

“No, it isn’t truth,” Mr. Giuliani replied. “Truth isn’t truth.”

Giuliani was obviously repeating his point that it's "somebody's version of the truth" and not the truth. He's not saying truth isn't truth or there is no truth. He's saying what Chuck Todd called "truth" isn't truth.

ADDED: At Facebook, my son John links to "Giuliani walks back 'truth isn't truth' comment" (Politico) and I say:

Politico spins by saying he's walking it back. If you understood the line they way I did (see above), it's not a walk-back but a confirmation. What Giuliani said was, "My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic 'he said,she said' puzzle. Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn’t." I understood it that way all along. No walk back. Just more spin from the anti-Trump press.

Credit to Politico for choosing a great photo of Giuliani (in support of its spin).

"It's The Freeze!"

Said Meade, watching this:

No idea who that cop is but if a NFL team doesn’t sign him this week they’re idiots pic.twitter.com/DqquziInup

— Denlesks (@Denlesks) August 19, 2018

If you don't know who The Freeze is: "Big chill: The Freeze blazes path to stardom/Braves' in-game attraction is hit with MLB fans, players." Great video here:

ICYMI: It ain’t over till it’s … OVER. pic.twitter.com/45fyiVQ2Vx

— MLB (@MLB) June 10, 2017

At the Nullification Café...

... you can use your own judgment.

(The image is "The Jury" (1861) by John Morgan, which I found at the Wikipedia article "Jury Nullification," a topic that's been on my mind. I like the detail to the characterization of the various jurors. Each one's a different type.)

"My kitten is purring so loudly that it hurts my ears, and the neighbors are already complaining. What should I do?"

A Quora question I love.

Who needs answers when there are questions like that? (Stop! Don't answer!)

This is the minister for women of New Zealand, who bicycled to the hospital to give birth.

Beautiful Sunday morning for a bike ride, to the hospital, for an induction to finally have this baby. This is it, wish us luck! (My partner and I cycled because there wasn’t enough room in the car for the support crew... but it also put me in the best possible mood!) #42weekspregnant #cycling #bicyclesarethebest

A post shared by Julie Anne Genter (@julieannegenter) on Aug 18, 2018 at 3:42pm PDT

Via "Pregnant Minister Cycles to Hospital to Give Birth" (NYT), which includes this info:

[Julie Anne] Genter, who was born in Minnesota and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, joined the left-leaning Green Party as a volunteer shortly after migrating to New Zealand in 2006, and she has represented the party in Parliament since 2011....

On its Twitter account, the Green Party declared Ms. Genter’s bicycle journey to the hospital “the most #onbrand thing ever.”

ADDED: That's an e-bike.

CORRECTION: She's not the prime minister (as I originally had in the post title). She's the minister for women and associate minister for health and transport. (The first paragraph of the article is about the prime minister, a bit confusingly.)

"We have two 'selves.' The experiencing self and the remembered self. In the midst of vacation stresses..."

"... we may be stressed and annoyed by family and children and the indignities of bureaucratic travel, but the remembered self easily turns nausea into nostalgia.... We tend to think of these kinds of experiences on the pleasure/pain level, but really, giving a child the gift of a vacation is more on the meaning/moral plane."

Said Harvard psychiatrist Omar Sultan Haque, quoted in "How Your Brain Morphs Stressful Family Vacations Into Pleasant Memories/There may be a lot of bickering, but your memory creates a nostalgia-inducing highlight reel that makes you want to plan the next trip" (NYT).

ADDED: I was drawn to blog this article because of the "2 selves" idea, which appeared in a post 2 days ago. There, the 2 selves were not the experiencing self and the remembered self (that is, the self at 2 different points in time), but the observer self and the acting-in-the-world self (that is, the social, outward self existing at the same time as the self observing itself).

In the situation where you are acting/perceiving at the same time, you might want to get the 2 selves to feel more unified, because you might want to feel/be more genuine and directly expressive or because you're too inhibited and not getting enough of what you want or stopping other people from hurting you.

When the 2 selves are in different points in time, merging the two isn't possible, but you might want to be more conscious of the difference between the two so you can endure the present. And you might choose to do difficult or unpleasant things because it will benefit the future you to have this experience in the past. So, to focus on travel, you might think it's a lot of trouble and you don't know if the good will outweigh the bad, but you'll be making a distinct memory, because you're seeing and doing some new things. Of course, if you travel, you'll be spending some time planning and getting to the place, and that probably won't be a significant memory (and there's potential for a very bad memory, since you could have an accident). So maybe you come out of 10 days of planning and traveling with 5 days of relatively unusual experiences that, from the point of view of the future, will be memories of some substance that benefit Future You.

And yet, if you don't travel, you do something with your time, and that too might benefit Future You, and it will be 10 full days, none spent on the hassles of planning and getting there, and perhaps all of it will be more pleasurable and rewarding than the experience of being in the traveled-to place.

To get back to the article, the fact that Future You will look back on travel days and see them in the golden light of memory doesn't mean you should travel. It's just a perspective on travel, that you probably won't remember the unpleasantness. But you'll still have the unpleasantness. And the Future You who will be doing the remembering will also remember the things you did on days when you did not travel, and those things too will be seen in the golden light of memory.

Finally, you have to factor in the possibility that something terrible will happen, beyond the power of the filter of memory to correct, and I do think that traveling increases the likelihood of a terrible thing happening and that terrible things are worse when they happen away from home. The terrible things I'm thinking of are getting physically injured, medical problems, being a crime victim, getting accused of a crime, and having relationship trouble.

"I've just been trying to get into a little bit of reading. I've got a few books from Camus I want to get to. I always liked his writing style. I want to start cracking away at those."

I've selected these 15 seconds from a 2-hour "Reviewbrah Friday Live Stream and Eating Show!" — in response to a question about what video games he plays:



In case you're wondering why this young man has a million subscribers on YouTube, the answer might be he reads... and he reads Camus. So get cracking away. Read your Camus. He's got a good writing style. And maybe you'll pick up some language that will enrich your conversational style and cause a million people to love you. Maybe those million people are playing video games, drifting along in a nonverbal visual world, getting hungrier and hungrier for somebody who can talk.

***

"I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't." — Albert Camus, "The Plague."

Twitter needs "to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is...is more left-leaning."

"But the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? And we are not. Period."

Said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, quoted in "Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: I 'fully admit' our bias is 'more left-leaning.'" (The Hill).

Here, watch the video. Dorsey's key distinction is between viewpoint and what he calls "behavior." Now, if it's on Twitter, it's speech, but there's this idea that sometimes speech is behavior, but when? It could be limited the way it is in First Amendment law to things like "true threats," but it could be extended to insults or stereotyping. It depends on what the meaning of "behavior" is.

"We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology," @Jack told me. But he knows some people do not believe him. "I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning," he says... pic.twitter.com/1i8jJunhfz

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 18, 2018

Dorsey is a good spokesperson, and I like that he's taking free speech ideas seriously in the abstract and asking for trust as he applies these principles. He's got to be watched and pressured to handle his power according to the principles he says he's following. It's fine that he's up front about the left-wing bias of his organization. That's good for putting him to the test.

"The mountains of studies Partridge cites place the scientific consensus about the lack of a link between glyphosate and cancer on par with the vast evidence demonstrating the safety of GMOs generally and with the overwhelming consensus that manmade factors cause climate change."

From "Rounding Up the Science Behind the Monsanto Glyphosate Ruling/'Irrational and even hysterical' reporting about glyphosate has served to poison the well of public opinion, says one researcher" (Reason).

"Late last month, [Rand] Paul wrote on Twitter that 'Brennan and other partisans' should be stripped of their security clearances."

"He suggested Brennan has leveraged his clearance into gigs as a cable news talking head. So it came as no surprise that Paul lauded Trump for taking away Brennan's security clearance. 'I urged the President to do this. I filibustered Brennan's nomination to head the CIA in 2013, and his behavior in government and out of it demonstrate why he should not be allowed near classified information,' Paul said in a statement. 'He participated in a shredding of constitutional rights, lied to Congress, and has been monetizing and making partisan political use of his clearance since his departure.' In an interview yesterday with WKU Public Radio, Paul said he wants other ex-Obama administration intelligence officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, to lose their clearances as well...."

From "Rand Paul: Trump Should Keep Revoking Ex-Obama Officials’ Security Clearances/The Kentucky Republican is glad Trump stripped ex-CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance. But Trump shouldn’t stop there, Paul says" (Reason).

"I understand why my school has a dresscode, but what about the boys who wear shorts..."

Today my school was shown this video. So sad how ONLY girls are shown as the violators. I understand why my school has a dresscode, but what about the boys who wear shorts, or show their shoulders? It’s 2018...Why are we still over-sexualizing teen girls? pic.twitter.com/fCXymYAIEG

— cat (@catmoring) August 16, 2018

Via "Texas high school causes outrage with dress code video targeting female students in athletic shorts."

1. Were any boys in the school wearing "athletic shorts" (that is, tight, very short shorts)? I'm picturing boys wearing exactly the opposite type of shorts — long and baggy.

2. The school probably thought it was being lighthearted and cool about it — what with the music, the teacher playing a parody of an old school marm, and the emphasis on just not wearing this sort of thing in school.

3. Was the video shown in an all-girls environment? If not, then there is a problem of deploying girls' bodies for the entertainment of boys. If it was just for girls, it might be construed as an attempt at saying something like:  You're just fine, you're as cute as you think you are, but please understand that we can't have that in school. And yet, that's still a problem. It's saying: We have a dress code because you're so sexy, please see yourself as sexy so that you will agree with us about the importance of this dress code.

4. Back in 1965, I got sent to the vice-principal for wearing miniskirts. Eventually, they got tough and sent me to the principal, who, unlike the vice-principal, made an argument about the boys: It wasn't fair to the boys. It made school difficult for the boys. I took great offense at this, because he was raising the topic of sex as if I had implicitly made it the subject simply by wearing an article of clothing that was precisely the fashion. In an embarrassing display of how his thinking was grounded in sex, he posed the hypothetical: What if I had come to school in a bikini?

5. But I didn't have Twitter. In the actual Texas case, after the Twitter exposure, the school apologized.

6. The Twitter exposure...