"Justice Scalia... could not have been clearer in the closing passage of Heller that 'the problem of handgun violence in this country' is serious..."

"... and that the Constitution leaves the government with 'a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns.' Heller merely established the constitutional baseline that the government may not disarm citizens in their homes. The opinion expressly recognized 'presumptively lawful' regulations such as 'laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,' as well as bans on carrying weapons in 'sensitive places,' like schools, and it noted with approval the 'historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons."' Heller also recognized the immense public interest in 'prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.'... Heller [does not] prohibit giving law enforcement officers more effective tools and greater resources to disarm people who have proved themselves to be violent or mentally ill, as long as due process is observed.... Most of the obstacles to gun regulations are political and policy based, not legal; it’s laws that never get enacted, rather than ones that are struck down, because of an unduly expansive reading of Heller.... As the nation enters yet another agonizing conversation about gun regulation in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy, all sides should focus on the value judgments and empirical assumptions at the heart of the policy debate, and they should take moral ownership of their positions."

From "We Clerked for Justices Scalia and Stevens. America Is Getting Heller Wrong" by Kate Shaw and John Bash (NYT).

Biden's in trouble, and the solution could be... Anita Dunn!

I'm reading "Inside a Biden White House adrift/Amid a rolling series of calamities and sinking approval ratings, the president’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break — and that angst is rippling through his party" (NBC News):

Speculation is churning that Biden could shake up the West Wing staff, although that’s not about to happen right away. Multiple people close to the White House said they’ve heard that chief of staff Ron Klain will depart at some point after the midterms, and one has heard him discuss leaving. Should Klain go, a potential successor is Anita Dunn, a White House adviser and Biden confidant whom he often turns to when his fortunes look bleak. Dunn began working at the White House at the start of the term, then left and returned in early May at Biden’s specific request. No woman or person of color has ever been the White House chief of staff since the position was created after World War II.

Anita Dunn. What I remember about her is that in 2009, she got into trouble for quoting Chairman Mao: "You know, you fight your war, and I'll fight mine." And in 2011, it was revealed that she said that the Obama White House "actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."

The idea that women will rescue Joe Biden is persistent and strange.

"She remains her husband’s fiercest defender—something voters glimpsed in March 2020 when she was likened to a linebacker for tackling a protester who rushed him onstage...."

"'I try to be a support for Joe, because I don’t know how many people are saying to him, "That was great. That was brilliant." I try to be that person for him,' she says. 'Some days, I see Joe and I’m just like, "I don’t know how you’re doing it." It’s the pandemic and then it’s the war and then it’s the economy and then it’s the gas prices. You feel like you’re being slammed.' Which is not to say that she holds back when he frustrates her. The president does not get a pass. During the Obama years, they took to hashing out their occasional spats over text to avoid fighting in front of the Secret Service. (They christened it 'fexting.') Not so long ago, she tapped out a message to him in a fit of pique. 'Joe said, "You realize that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that."' She grins. 'I won’t tell you what I called him that time.'"

From "A First Lady Undeterred/A pandemic. A war. A country at its breaking point. Dr. Jill Biden has faced it all with the grace and conviction that has guided her all her life—showing up for her students, her friends and family, the American people, her husband, and herself" (Harper's Bazaar).

Have you ever fexted?

ADDED: So they are in the same room and could talk out loud, but they don't want the Secret Service to hear it, and they just type out things? I've texted with someone who's in the same room and could be talked to. Haven't fexted though. I think if I just wanted to call my partner a "fucking idiot" — which I'm just going to assume is was Jill called Joe that time — I could do it just by thinking it and making eye contact. 

What's Elon talking about now?

Literally … pic.twitter.com/DWKI71Wk9Z

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2022

"The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They... lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world."

"And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump's arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else. The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could. And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking ‘why is that happening’ they're getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid -- for thinking the economy's bad when it's actually good." 

Said Glenn Greenwald, quoted at Real Clear Politics.

I remember when the incumbent President lost to a Democrat who said "It's the economy, stupid."

Now, apparently, the message is: If you think it's the economy, you're stupid.

By the way, who was getting called stupid in the 1992 Clinton slogan "It's the economy, stupid"?

It is often quoted from a televised quip by [Bill Clinton's strategist James] Carville as "It’s the economy, stupid."... His phrase was directed at the campaign's workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. The others were "Change vs. more of the same" and "Don't forget health care."

Was he calling the campaign workers "stupid"? It seems as though he was compelling them to focus on the economy by internalizing the taunt "Stupid!" — to be triggered if they ever stray into any other topic. It might have been heard as an insult to the President George H.W. Bush. He's so out of touch, he doesn't know the people are hurting. He's stupid. It can't be that they were calling us, the People, stupid. That wouldn't work. 

Anyway, right now, the Democrats aren't blatantly labeling us stupid. That's Greenwald's rhetoric. He's saying the Democrats are telling the People they are stupid if they think the economy is bad. So, I would add, that means the Democrats are taking the George H.W. Bush position and are vulnerable to the attack that brought down Bush: "It's the economy, stupid." 

***

In giving this post my "stupid" tag, I see an old tag I'd forgotten about: "the stupid party." I need to publish this post so I can click on it to refresh my memory of what that was about. I think it has to do with the way each party characterizes the other as the "stupid" one. Or maybe it was about how the 2 parties vie for the honor of being the "stupid" one.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"As one of the nation’s leading proponents of the insurrection hoax, Liz Cheney has pushed a grotesquely false, fabricated, hysterical partisan narrative. Look at the so-called word insurrection, January 6 – what a lot of crap."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump calls Capitol attack an ‘insurrection hoax’ as public hearings set to begin/Former president intensifies attacks on Liz Cheney at Wyoming rally and endorses her Republican primary challenger in midterm elections" (The Guardian).

I believe what he was calling a hoax was the "insurrection" characterization. That's why he said "the so-called word insurrection." Now, that's a bit inarticulate. Obviously, "insurrection" is really a word. The point is that entry into the Capitol doesn't fit the definition of an "insurrection," which isn't a surprising assertion. Trump gets back at his accusers by calling the "insurrection" characterization "a grotesquely false, fabricated, hysterical partisan narrative."

Has anyone on the Cheney side ever explained how it could be possible to think that overrunning the building could overthrow the government? I wish people on both sides would use accurate language, but of course, they won't.

"The mathematics books published by the People’s Education Press contain illustrations of people with distorted faces and bulging pants. Boys are seen grabbing girls’ skirts..."

and one child appears to have a leg tattoo. The books are reportedly used in elementary schools across the country, from Shandong province in the north-east to Yunnan in the south.... Some social media users came to the conclusion that the artwork was deliberately bad and provocative, noting a backwards Chinese flag in one instance and some clothing in the colour combination of the US flag... One commenter described the illustrations as 'evil' and warned of a 'worrying' future where 'the education department is infiltrated by the west, and the textbooks are manipulated by the people who have infiltrated the system.'"

From "'Tragically ugly’ school textbook causes social media outcry in China/Education ministry orders publisher to rectify illustrations of children deemed inappropriate" (The Guardian).

"I’m beginning to question the idea of sex segregation in sport. We need to learn to sit with discomfort."

Said Anna Posbergh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, "a former pole-vaulter who studies the mechanics of human movement and gender and athletes [who] sees notions of gender disadvantage in sports as rooted in culture and an outdated view of what women can achieve."

Quoted in "What Lia Thomas Could Mean for Women’s Elite Sports/Although the number of top transgender athletes is small, the disagreements are profound, cutting to the core of the debate around gender identity and biological sex" (NYT).

What do you do with discomfort? Sit with it?

Ah! I see it's mental health jargon:

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"This reminds me of a question I used for years in interviewing potential assistants: Do you know how to drive a manual transmission?"

"If you said no, you didn’t get hired. I know that sounds terribly arbitrary. But here’s my reasoning. It is not necessary to know how to drive a stick in the 21st century—particularly if you’re 22 years old. So the only people who do are those who are willing to take the time to master a marginally useful skill. Now why would a 22-year-old do that? One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.... I think, in no small part, human happiness is a numbers game. The more small things in your life that you can turn from negative to neutral, or neutral to positive, the happier you are. The people who bother to learn how to drive a manual understand this. Like I said, these are the people I like to have working with me."

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "Do You Know How to Drive a Manual Transmission? My reasoning behind the seemingly arbitrary interview question I used for years..."

Every car I've bought, up through the 2005 Audi TT that is still my main car, has had a manual transmission. I keep getting a manual transmission because it's more fun, and I like maintaining my skills. But I must say that I did not originally learn to drive a manual transmission for the fun of it. We needed to buy a car, and it was 1976, and a manual transmission was not only cheaper to buy in the first place, it got better gas mileage in those days, and we were in the midst of the damned energy crisis. Gas zoomed up to $1.20 at one point. It felt crazy and out of control. That was not fun at all.

"Modern American culture has a way of transforming nearly every philosophical and spiritual tradition... into an anodyne pop-culture analogue."

"But contemporary iterations of Stoicism... may win the prize for reducing complex ideas to shallow, if marketable, sound bites.... At its best, Stoicism challenges us to tame our selfish passions and trains us to accept injustice, failure and death. Contemporary pop-Stoicism, however, treats this idea of self-control as... a useful 'life hack': individualistic, capitalist-friendly self-help... For [writers such as Jordan Peterson], Stoicism can often be boiled down to therapeutic platitudes: work hard, push through pain, reframe toxic narratives. But pop-Stoicism doesn’t ask one of philosophy’s most important questions: What does it mean to live a good life?... [G]oodness, unlike productivity, is something we can’t 'hack' our way toward achieving."

Writes Tara Isabella Burton under the heading "Stoicism" in a collection of short essays, "Spring Cleaning 2022," at WaPo. She's the writer of novels and also the nonfiction works "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" and "Self-Made: Curating Our Image From da Vinci to the Kardashians."

The "Spring Cleaning" title refers to the prompt given to the various writers — "what all of us should toss."

I don't think Burton has established a reason to throw out Stoicism. Ironically, she wants people not to use this philosophy in a shallow way, but her rejection of today's efforts at Stoicism seems shallow too. She's certainly capsulized Jordan Peterson in an aggressively pat way.

"Though prostitution is legal in India, those who practice it have long faced marginalization, violence and police harassment..."

"[T]he Indian Supreme Court... identified two categories: consenting adults voluntarily employed in prostitution; and minors, trafficking victims and those eager to leave the industry. For consenting adults, the court said, the police must refrain from arrests and other forms of harassment.... 'It is as if they are a class whose rights are not recognized,' the court [wrote]. 'The police and other law enforcement agencies should be sensitized to the rights of sex workers who also enjoy all basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all citizens. Police should treat all sex workers with dignity.'... Rights groups estimate that India has about 900,000 prostitutes. Most, they say, have been pushed into the work by crushing poverty and sometimes forced into it by human traffickers. Others have chosen it over other informal employment opportunities, researchers have found.... [D]ecriminalizing sex work is, alone, not enough to improve conditions for workers in the industry."

From "India’s Supreme Court Orders Police to Respect Prostitutes’ Rights/Though sex work is legal in the country, those who practice it often endure harassment and abuse. The justices urged the authorities to employ a more nuanced and humane approach" (NYT).

The Loch Mendota Monster.

Photographed by me, this morning at 5:32 a.m.

"Here's your opportunity... you're all about to graduate... .. is there an unpopular opinion you'd like to share with us?"/"Jesus is Lord!"

"Its title is a glancing reference to a Bob Dylan song called 'Visions of Johanna,' which has variously been described as a song about how one man is being pushed to the brink and about to burst emotionally."

"I am no Bob Dylan aficionado, but this strikes me as being a potent metaphor for what this country is going through."

Writes Kenneth Dickerman in "'Infinity Goes Up on Trial': A personal exploration of U.S. turmoil" (WaPo). The book he's talking about, “Infinity Goes Up on Trial,” by Alan Chin, is a collection of photographs that show the United States as a "powder keg" of "white supremacism, misogyny and the increasing gap between the have and have-nots."  

A glancing reference? The title is entirely composed of a quote from the song. It's nice of Dickerman to inform readers who might be puzzled by the otherwise weird title, and as someone who'd had the words of that song seared in my brain for more than half a century, I don't mind seeing it explained for other people, but it's irritating to see it declared "a potent metaphor" for what's in this book, which doesn't seem to have the slightest connection to the what's in "Visions of Johanna." 

What would it mean for infinity to go up on trial? Dylan fans have contemplated that mystery for many decades. The trial of infinity, in the song, is something that happens not on violent streets but inside the museums: