"The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin... because he exposed himself during a Zoom call last week between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio."

"Toobin said in a statement to Motherboard: 'I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers. I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video".... 'Jeff Toobin has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted,' CNN said in a statement."

Vice reports, referring to this as the "Zoom Dick Incident."

Who believes he thought he was off camera? Even if he thought he had "muted the Zoom video," how could he not make absolutely sure before bringing his penis out and why would that be something he'd do during a Zoom call anyway?!

ADDED: The headline at The Washington Post is "The New Yorker suspends writer Jeffrey Toobin after accidental Zoom exposure," and the highest rated comment is: "How do you know it was 'accidental'? Wouldn't more neutral language be to just say he exposed himself and quote him as saying it was inadvertent? Isn't it for the investigation to determine whether it was an 'accident' or not?" 

AND: There's an update — a hell of an update — at Vice now: "This piece has been updated with more detail about the call and the headline has been updated to reflect that Toobin was masturbating."

Two people who were on the call told Motherboard separately that the call was an election simulation featuring many of the New Yorker's biggest stars: Jane Mayer was playing establishment Republicans; Evan Osnos was Joe Biden, Jelani Cobb was establishment Democrats, Masha Gessen played Donald Trump, Andrew Marantz was the far right, Sue Halpern was left wing democrats, Dexter Filkins was the military, and Jeffrey Toobin playing the courts. There were also a handful of other producers on the call from the New Yorker and WNYC. Both people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, noted that it was unclear how much each individual person on the call saw, but both of the people we spoke to said that they saw Toobin jerking off.... The sources said that when the groups returned from their break out rooms, Toobin lowered the camera. The people on the call said they could see Toobin touching his penis. Toobin then left the call. Moments later, he called back in, seemingly unaware of what his colleagues had been able to see, and the simulation continued....

And the stimulation did not continue (one presumes).

This may be the stupidest thing I have seen in 17 years of blogging.

PLUS: "seemingly unaware" is funny. I'm picturing: He realizes he's on camera, leaves the call, hoping it might work to call back and act like nothing happened. Oh, hello...

ALSO: Heh...

Crazy story, can't believe they had Jane Mayer as their stand-in for Republicans. https://t.co/b8xCNt41s6

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) October 19, 2020

"New morning."

 

A podcast in which I read the text of the blog and expand and digress. Topics: Freeway privilege, Dylan’s New Morning, a rapped confession, water for a blood bath, Trump wants suburban women, voting without cognition, voting with hatred.

"Some meaningful number of voters who are clear-eyed about Trump and his manifest failures—even those who think he is plainly doing a bad job—will stick with the president..."

"... because they believe Democrats are worse and the media aren’t to be trusted. And these aren’t voters who are glued to Fox News and reading Breitbart News. Often they don’t think about politics at all—and they certainly don’t follow the daily machinations of Washington. They’re typically not on Twitter. Instead they swim in a cultural soup of Trumpism, surrounded by friends, family, and social-media acquaintances who do live more exclusively in a right-wing-media ecosystem. Even if Biden pulls off a landslide victory, that ecosystem will remain. And so will the dislike of Democrats and distrust of the mainstream media. Getting rid of Trump won’t end the opposition’s problems."

From "Why People Who Hate Trump Stick With Him/Since 2018, I’ve conducted roughly 50 focus groups with Trump voters to understand the shifting dynamics within the Republican Party" by Sarah Longwell (in The Atlantic).

Yes, it will be interesting to see what these people do if Trump is cut off after one term. I'm thinking something like the Tea Party will reconfigure itself, but also that much less polite people — having seen how aggressively Trump was torn apart every day of his entire term — will treat Biden just as harshly. 

If you knew you had dementia, would you refrain from voting? If you were caring for a person with dementia, would you refrain from helping them vote?

I would answer yes and yes, but I'm reading "Having Dementia Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Vote/Yes, you can help a cognitively impaired person participate in the election. But heed these two guidelines" in the NYT. 

The Census Bureau has reported that more than 23 million American adults — close to 10 percent — have conditions limiting mental functioning, including learning and intellectual disabilities and Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.... Many will be effectively disenfranchised.... Workers in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, as well as family members, may refuse to assist impaired voters because they believe that dementia disqualifies them. It doesn’t. A diagnosis of cognitive impairment does not bar someone from voting. Voters need pass no cognitive tests. They don’t have to be able to name the candidates or explain the issues.

Not everything is controlled by law. There is also a realm of ethics. Getting votes from people who don't understand what they are doing is rather obviously ethically wrong. The law is the way it is to keep the authorities from unfairly excluding people in a country where tests were once used in order to exclude black people. But there are many people who don't know what they're doing and they shouldn't be urged to vote. It's ethically correct for them to take themselves out of a choice-making activity that they don't understand. And it is ethically wrong to use an older person to collect a vote for the candidate that you want to win. 

The article ends with the conclusion of one personal story:

On Oct. 8, after considerable discussion, Judith Kozlowski helped her father make his selections. He allowed her to disclose that, after a lifetime of voting Republican, this time he had voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr....

"The women come up to me, the women who they say don’t like me, they actually do like me a lot. Suburban women, please vote for me."

"I’m saving your house. I’m saving your community. I’m keeping your crime way down. I keep hearing, you know, it’s all fake stuff. Remember they said last time about women. Women will never vote.... Then the end of the evening, they’re all crying. Oh my God, what happened?...  They want to... destroy your suburbs. I say that to the women because I keep hearing. They said, 'The women from the suburbs.' No, I think the women from the suburbs are looking for a couple of things. One of them is safety. One of them is good, strong security. And one of them is they don’t want to have low-income housing built next to their house. And you know, who makes up 30% of your suburbs? Minorities. African Americans. Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, minorities. Okay? People think, 'Is it racist?' It’s not racist. It’s the opposite. I’ve had people come to me and say, 'Thank you so much.' But they keep talking about the women from the suburbs. I say, 'I think we’re going to have a big resounding, "What the hell happened with women to the suburbs? They really like Trump a lot."' Only vote for me if you’re a woman from the suburbs....But it’s interesting because I really think that women from the suburbs are going to like Trump, because it is about safety. It is about safety. And when you see what happens in our cities, where they run and ransack. They’re anarchists. And you know what? They actually say the suburbs are next. And just so you know, it’s so important. These are Democrat-run states and cities.... Biden supports cutting police funding, abolishing cash bail. You’ve got a murder. Oh, let’s let them out. Oh, let’s let them walk the street. You see what’s happening in New York? What they’re doing to New York, our governor, what he’s doing to New York is horrible. And he called law enforcement, Sleepy Joey called law enforcement, recently, 'the enemy.' No, no. Law enforcement has done an incredible job."

Said Donald Trump in Carson City, Nevada yesterday. Transcript.

"Blood bath."

I'm reading "Has Trump Drawn the Water for a ‘Republican Blood Bath’?/And if he has, what should Biden do with his first term?" (NYT), a conversation between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, which ends:

Bret: Oh, and speaking of the Senate: Did you hear Nebraska’s Ben Sasse tear into Trump during that phone call with his constituents? Too little, too late, in my view, though it’s always nice to hear what Republicans really think of their favorite president. 

Gail: Yeah, thanks to Sasse we can point to a sitting senator from his own party who accused him of screwing up the coronavirus crisis, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists and drawing the water for a “Republican blood bath.” Can’t get much better than that. Catch you again next week, Bret. God knows what will have happened by then.

I'm thinking — do you draw water for a blood bath? Just taking the metaphor seriously — and I'll put to the side the violence of the imagery — isn't the liquid for a blood bath blood? 

A "blood bath" is, in its oldest figurative meaning, according to the OED, "A battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre." Figurative in the sense of "bath." The blood is real blood. That goes back to 1843. The fully figurative meaning — "A dramatic loss or heavy defeat" — with both the bath and the blood as metaphor — is traced back only to 1967. 

Strangely enough, there is a nonmetaphorical meaning that predates all that — "A bath in warm blood taken as a tonic or form of medical treatment"! 

1834 London Med. Gaz. 22 Feb. 813 (heading) On blood-baths... According to a dark tradition,..the ancient kings of Egypt used to bathe in human blood when they were seized with leprosy. 

1895 Cincinnati Med. Jrnl. May 380/2 Although French doctors do not often prescribe these forms of treatment, ‘blood baths’ are not infrequently used....

I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can take a blood bath to cure the coronavirus. You know? If you could? And maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Again, I say maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor. Have you ever heard of that? 

"In a music video for the song 'EDD' that was posted to YouTube on Sept. 11, Mr. Baines and another rapper, Fat Wizza, boasted about getting 'rich off of E.D.D.'..."

"... an apparent reference to the Employment Development Department. The rappers brag in the video about their 'swagger for E.D.D.' while holding stacks of E.D.D. envelopes, and about getting rich by going 'to the bank with a stack of these.' A disclaimer below the video says that it was made with props 'for entertainment purposes.' It is not clear when the disclaimer was added."

From "Rapper Arrested After Bragging About Unemployment Fraud in Video/Fontrell Antonio Baines, who performs as Nuke Bizzle, illegally obtained $1.2 million in jobless benefits intended for workers idled by the coronavirus pandemic, the authorities said" (NYT).

"Some critics would find the album to be lackluster and sentimental, soft in the head. Oh well. Others would triumph it as finally the old him is back. At last."

"That wasn’t saying much either. I took it all as a good sign. To be sure, the album itself had no specific resonance to the shackles and bolts that were strapping the country down, nothing to threaten the status quo. All this was in what the critics would later refer to as my 'middle period' and in many camps this record was referred to as a comeback album—and it was. It would be the first of many."

Wrote Bob Dylan in "Chronicles: Volume One" about the album "New Morning."

"New Morning" was released 50 years ago today.

For me, "New Morning" is the soundtrack of my sophomore year in college. These songs are intimately interwoven with my memories of that time. Can't you hear that rooster crowin'?

And there was that time we listened to "New Morning" in 2011.

Boxed in on the 405.

"I could've crashed, so I'm recording myself crying, with one hand wiping my nose and my other hand holding my phone while driving to tell you about it."

— Charlie (@CharlieBayer8) October 19, 2020

At the Sunday Night Cafe...

 ... you can write about anything you want.

"Sinking giggling into the sea."

It's the podcast:

Topics: A collective American identity, glimpsing The Beatles and Margaret Thatcher, clerisy heresy, the lion and the dromedary, and why can’t the broad left of America say "freedom."

"'Freedom' belongs almost wholly to the right. They talk about it incessantly and insist on a link between economic freedom and political freedom..."

"... positing that the latter is impossible without the former.... [T]he broad left in America has let all this go unchallenged for decades, to the point that today’s right wing — and it is important to call it that and not conservative, which it is not — can defend spreading disease, potentially killing other people, as freedom. It is madness. One thing Democrats in general aren’t very good at is defending their positions on the level of philosophical principle. This has happened because they’ve been on the philosophical defensive since Ronald Reagan came along. Well, it’s high time they played some philosophical offense, especially on an issue, wearing masks, on which every poll shows broad majorities supporting their view. Say this: Freedom means the freedom not to get infected by the idiot who refuses to mask up."  

From "There’s a Word for Why We Wear Masks, and Liberals Should Say It/It’s high time Democrats played some philosophical offense on the concept of 'freedom'" by Michael Tomasky (NYT).

Does the "broad left in America" — to use Tomasky's interesting term — really value freedom? Or is he suggesting that they use it only because it may make an impact on right wingers — don't call them conservatives! — who value freedom and don't wear masks as much as it seems they should? Notice Tomasky says left-wingers ought to use the concept of freedom offensively. He seems to mean that they ought to make noise about the limits on freedom, defining "freedom" to exclude whatever hurts someone else's interests. That is showing enthusiasm for the limits on freedom, not for freedom itself. Alternatively, Tomasky might mean that left-liberals ought to use the word "freedom" when saying what they want for themselves — things like safety and peace of mind — as they limit the freedom of others. 

But I don't think left-wingers these days like to say "freedom." That's why Tomasky has to go out of his way to prod them into saying it.

By the way, I like that he's writing about masks when "mask" is part of his name — Tomasky.

And do wear your mask when you go to an indoor public places or you're in an outdoor area where you can't be sure to keep more than 6 feet from everyone else. Do it to minimize harm to others! 

They've covered the popular "Lion Attacking a Dromedary” diorama at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh — do you see why?

Here's the article in USA Today: 

The museum’s interim director says the scene... has disturbed some because it depicts violence against a man described as an Arab courier.

Wait! Is the human figure a taxidermied human being?! 

The director, Stephen Tonsor, also says recent X-rays showed that the 1860s-era taxidermy was performed with real human bones from an unknown person. Tonsor says the museum’s ethics policy requires that any human remains respect the person’s cultural traditions and be done with permission “of the people whose remains are displayed.”

I replaced the dramatically lit photo from the newspaper with the Creative Commons image at Wikipedia (by Mike Steele), which shows the human figure much more clearly. Let's read more detail at Wikipedia:

Clerisy heresy.

I'm reading "An Ex-Liberal Reluctantly Supports Trump/How historian Fred Siegel came to appreciate the president’s defense of ‘bourgeois values’ against the ‘clerisy’" by Tunku Varadarajan (WSJ). 

[Fred Siegel] sees [President Trump] as a champion of "bourgeois values," under threat from the "clerisy," Mr. Siegel's word for the dominant elites who "despise" those values. He regards Mr. Biden as a "captive" of this clerisy, and running mate Kamala Harris as the "embodiment of it."...

By 2012... Mr. Siegel had developed an exceedingly low opinion of President Obama, whom he describes as "a faux intellectual with preacher's cadences and an academic veneer." In his opinion, "the worst thing" about Mr. Obama was "his effect on race relations. We couldn't have the cold civil war we have now without Obama, because he, in a very cunning way, exacerbated all of our racial tensions." 

Under Mr. Obama, Mr. Siegel says, "racial grievance" took on a "new legitimacy, and it came from a president talking in asides, and saying things between the lines. He didn't push back against anything, not even against the idea that Michael Brown said 'Hands up, don't shoot' in Ferguson [Mo.], which was just a fabrication."... 

"Ferguson allowed Ivy League grads to assert their 'natural leadership,' in opposition to lowlife cops and guys with pickup trucks -- again, the deplorables." In Mr. Siegel's understanding, wokeism holds that "the important truths are already known, and that the American aristocracy has to impose those truths on the country." These are "given positions" -- irrefutable and sacrosanct. Wokeism, he says, is a "perilous threat" to America and particularly to the First Amendment. "It says we don't need debate. We don't need free speech. We don't need freedom of religion. We need to obey."...

Glimpsing The Beatles, Bill Maher, Margaret Thatcher, and — above all! — Craig Brown.

I read Craig Brown's "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret" — as I noted here — so the minute I see that he's got a new book, "150 Glimpses of the Beatles," I put it in my Kindle. Nothing more is needed to get me. It's Craig Brown! And The Beatles.

But I'm interested to see what Bill Maher — of all people — has to say about it in the New York Times. Let's read this:

I like the old stories — frankly, if I wanted something challenging to read, I wouldn’t be reading “150 Glimpses of the Beatles.”... Glimpse No. 53 begins: “For Christmas 1964, when I was 7, my brothers and I were given Beatles wigs by our parents.” If you change 7 to 8 and brothers to sister, I could have written the exact same sentence. So I knew I was disposed to like this book — and I did.... 

"... Biden might find a road map for national restoration, one that involves collective effort and a fostering of a collective American identity...."

Collective, collective. 

I'm reading "Could Joe Biden Actually Bring America Back Together?" by Michael Luo (in The New Yorker). Excerpt:

Twenty years ago, Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, published "Bowling Alone," which documented how Americans had become increasingly disconnected from one another; how participation in social and community organizations, from bridge clubs to churches, had plummeted; and how norms of reciprocity, honesty, and trust had steadily declined across society.... [Putnam's] new book, “The Upswing”... argues that increasing levels of social solidarity in the course of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, followed by a sharp decline at the end of it, largely track with a number of other important trends, including the country’s degree of political polarization.... Economic mobility stalled [in the 1960s], community and family ties frayed, and American culture turned inward, losing focus on the common good. He labels this pattern the “I-we-I” curve, arguing that America clambered from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” ethos, only to revert back. 

In Putnam’s work, Biden might find a road map for national restoration, one that involves collective effort and a fostering of a collective American identity. “No one party, no one policy or platform, and no one charismatic leader was responsible for bringing about America’s upswing as we entered the twentieth century,” Putnam writes. “It was, instead, countless citizens engaging in their own spheres of influence and coming together to create a vast ferment of criticism and change––a genuine shift from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Similarly, it is wishful thinking to imagine that Biden, or any single individual, could engender a movement for the common good. But, if anything has been made plain by the Trump era, it is that the Presidency offers a megaphone to shape the broader culture. A narcissistic President drives a narcissistic culture. A movement toward “We” in America could start with a President less focussed on “I.”

ADDED: Reading this out loud for the podcast, I realized I put it up because I thought it was bland and unbelievable. I don't think Trump makes people narcissistic, and he actually does "foster[] a collective American identity." He's all about the brand "America," and the people who like him seem quite happy and inspired about that.