"A month ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center declared Moms for Liberty an 'extremist group' devoted to spreading “messages of anti-inclusion and hate...."

"The 'extremist' label is justified, said Esther Prins, a professor at Penn State University who has studied the intersection of education advocacy and Christian nationalism in America. Prins said the activities of Moms for Liberty chapters — especially efforts to remove books nationwide, many of which are led by group members and which overwhelmingly target people of color and LGBTQ+ authors, a Post analysis found — are consistent with groups that promote a hierarchical social order in which 'men are over women, straight people over LGBTQ people.' Prins said, 'That’s why they don’t want children learning about racism or about the existence of people who are not straight or the existence of families that aren’t the heterosexual nuclear family.'..."

I'm reading "Moms for Liberty didn’t exist 3 years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker. Five GOP presidential candidates attended the group’s Philadelphia convention this weekend" (WaPo).

The post title is the first sentence of the article, and the next part I quoted is very far down in the article. The SPLC's designation takes prominence over any explanation of what this group is and why it deserves denouncement, and the explanation isn't convincing at all. These are the parents who object to sex-and-gender-themed books in schools? The article says "efforts to remove books nationwide"... remove books from where? Schools? Or more?

Near the end of the article there's a heading "What does Moms for Liberty want in the next president?" One of the founders of the group is quoted answering "much more respect for parental rights." The other founder said: "maybe not reach out to the DOJ and the FBI and collude with them." That, we're told, refers to...

... a much-decried 2022 National School Boards Association letter to Biden that stated parents and others speaking out against school board members might be committing a form of 'domestic terrorism.' Email correspondence from the time suggested the NSBA was acting at the request of the White House, although the White House said that wasn’t true. The letter led Attorney General Merrick Garland to direct the FBI to workshop strategies for meeting threats to school employees.

You know, RFK Jr. had been scheduled to speak at that Moms for Liberty summit. I think I've heard him say he'll talk to everybody. But he got slammed and he withdrew. 

Here's Vivek Ramaswamy speaking at the summit. He refers to the group as "my favorite hate group in history." That's jocose, of course, but the fact that he's being jocose about hate shows the problem with aggressively slapping on labels like "hate" — and "extremism" and "terrorism" — instead of actually debating people who challenge your ideas. You've diluted your strongest words. You've cried wolf.

Mothers and fathers are powerfully called to protect their children. Politicians — and professors and journalists — need to engage over what is genuinely best for children, not take the weak, easy route of sneering at these parents, shunning them, and, hating them, saying they hate.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about anything you want.

"The mandate for audience recognition has pushed artists to take increasingly desperate measures—including scrounging up plotlines from popular snacks."

"Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy 'Flamin’ Hot'; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on 'Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.' I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that [Greta] Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out. (One viral tweet: 'i know this is an unpopular opinion but i feel like . . . completely repelled by the barbie movie. branded content with a wink and movie stars is still branded content!') Gerwig told me that adapting Barbie felt as natural as adapting 'Little Women,' though she did use a toy metaphor to describe the process: creating 'a story where there hadn’t been a story' felt like solving 'an intellectual Rubik’s Cube.'... 'Barbie' is somehow simultaneously a critique of corporate feminism, a love letter to a doll that has been a lightning rod for more than half a century, and a sendup of the company that actively participated in the adaptation...."

From "After 'Barbie,' Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toy Box/In an era when 'pre-awareness' rules Hollywood, the company is ginning up plots for everything from Hot Wheels to UNO" (The New Yorker).

I learned the word "toyetic." Here's the Wikipedia article, "Toyetic":

Wave your arms to show that you are human.

I'm reading "Bears chased their dogs. These 60-somethings jumped in and got injured" (WaPo).

How far would you go to protect your dog? For two 60-somethings in Maine and Connecticut, doing so involved fighting a bear.... Wildlife authorities say that dog owners should walk their pets on a short leash that doesn’t retract, and that people should remove all sources of food, including bird feeders or bird seed, from outdoor spaces because they can attract bears.... According to the National Park Service, if you surprise a bear and it is not acting in a predatory way toward you, you should wave your arms to show the bear that you are human and then "slowly and calmly back away while avoiding direct eye contact."...

By the way, if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene? Keep your dog on a short leash and you won't face that test of dog love, like that 64-year-old lady who punched a bear in the nose.

ADDED: They're discussing the Maine incident at the subreddit Dogfree: "Woman has her dog off leash and it goes and harasses a bear in the woods. She then attacks the bear for chasing her dog and gets bitten. Of course now they are putting out traps for the bear."

Pay attention to what Joy Reid actually says here: It's not that she got into Harvard on lesser credentials!

I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding):

Like me, @JoyAnnReid is a kid of immigrants from a former European colony who went to Harvard. Unlike me, she benefited from affirmative action because she counts as “black” & in her own words wouldn’t have gotten in without it. She complains that her peers looked at her… pic.twitter.com/zCMbXNHwEZ

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 2, 2023

She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn't have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn't come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn't changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn't have been enough if she were not black.

"Clothes I dress my daughter in versus clothes her grandma dresses her in."

Lots of commenters over there (at TikTok) vote for "team grandma."

That video has over 5 million views, and the audio track is being used for other videos with their own variation on mother's clothes for daughter — utilitarian playclothes/tomboy style — and grandma's clothes — pink with frills.

#FranceHasFallen is trending on Twitter.

I don't want to embed anything I'm seeing here because I'm afraid of elevating something random, so go over there and scroll, but there is a good deal of calling people to nationalism and self-defense.

"The assassination was 60 years ago. What national security secrets could possibly be at risk? What are they hiding?"

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweets.

It’s not about conspiracy – it is about transparency. In a midnight Friday night announcement the White House has delivered the bad news that President Biden will be maintaining secrecy indefinitely on some JFK assassination related records.... 

Sunrise — 5:28, 5:30, 5:36.

Sunrise — 5:14.

The narrative that Asian-American students were just used by white people who wanted to end affirmative action.

NPR airs a piece about how the Asians weren’t actually being discriminated against by Harvard etc and were just being used by white people who wanted to end Affirmative Action while interviewing exactly zero people who dissent from that view https://t.co/KnN3Ik77r2

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) July 2, 2023

"In April, President Biden told a group of children that he had 'six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.'"

"But the president has not yet met or publicly mentioned his other grandchild. His White House has not answered questions about whether he will publicly acknowledge her now that the child support case is settled."

From "Hunter Biden’s Daughter and a Tale of Two Families/The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who has not yet met her father or her grandfather, is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright" (NYT).

5 out of 6 of the most popular comments over there are critical of President Biden: 

"[H]is older brother 'messed up' his university entrance exam, became depressed and as a result has never had a job."

"Then... his older sister struggled to find the right career path. When she didn’t get a job she wanted, she took her own life. Witnessing his siblings try and fail to find their place in the world of work must, I say, have informed his decision to turn his back on conventional employment. He considers this. 'I can’t quite tell myself how what happened to my siblings influenced me,' he says. 'But what happened, I think, is that they couldn’t really go into society. That’s what we say in Japan: ‘go into society’. It means that you are becoming a proper grown-up. In modern society, in Japanese society, you have to be a proper adult to be acceptable, but my brother and sister couldn’t work, so they weren’t accepted. They were rejected by society. And that just made me determined that I don’t want to be in a world where my siblings weren’t accepted... I went to university. I made a great effort... I got a job and I wanted to get on with people, and I wanted to be like other people. I tried harder and harder, but I just couldn’t do it. However hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to be like the others... [I feel] an anger... towards... the atmosphere of society, that you’re not worth anything if you don’t do anything, and that you have to be productive. And I just want to say, "No. Everybody is worth their existence."'"

From "Meet Do Nothing Rental Man, Japan’s unlikely social media star/He’ll sit with you while you eat or keep your place in a queue. How has Shoji Morimoto turned merely existing into a money-spinning phenomenon — at £165 a go?" (London Times).

I wrote about this man last year — here — but I'm calling attention to him again because he has a forthcoming memoir (paid link) and because the Times is interviewing him.

“As Rental Person, I have only the flimsiest connection with my clients,” he says in his memoir. “I am practically transparent. They have a story they have to tell and it’s my role to be there while they tell it. In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.”... 

At best, Morimoto is an impassive confessor. He does not advise or commiserate or look people in the eye and tell them he understands. Usually, he says, the people telling him things don’t even want this of him. They just need him there, doing nothing, while they speak. Those who have never used him often think he is motivated by benevolence. He wants to be clear that he is not.

There's an excerpt from his book. An excerpt of the excerpt:

We’d been chatting for quite some time when, finally, in a very off-hand way, he started talking about his hidden past. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I was a teenager,” he said. “Oh yes?” I said, nodding as I normally do. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I… er… killed someone.”... Somehow it really took me aback to think that a person who cooked so well, who gave an overall impression of competence, could have such a dark past. 

The incongruity had a real impact on me. In a way, I was very moved. Since then, I think I’ve looked at people in a different way, realizing that even the most ordinary, upright-looking people are not what they seem....

By the way, there was a blogger who heard there was an Aesop fable with a character who tells a secret to the reeds. The blogger searched the complete text of Aesop's fables for "reeds" and "secret" but found nothing. And the moral is: 

The moral is...

Don't go looking for untold secrets in nonexistent texts.

A person devoted to doing nothing may have nothing to say.

Time spent checking other people's assertions is frittered away.

A secret told to the reeds is kept very well.

You can't spell "freedom" without "reed."

 

pollcode.com free polls

"The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education."

"Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews. The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action."

From "With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores/To build a diverse class of students, the medical school at U.C. Davis ranks applicants by the disadvantages they have faced. Can it work nationally?" (NYT).

It should work better on a national scale, because the pool of applicants will be more diverse if top schools are not filtering out applicants based on race. It's very hard to predict, though, especially since we don't really know what schools were doing before this new case — surely, not simply obediently adhering to the prior caselaw — and what they will do now. It wasn't permissible before to attempt to achieve racial balance — the superficial look of a class, with the different races meeting target percentages. But to the extent that was done, affluent, privileged minority applicants were used to meet the school's goals. Those students would not get a high "adversity score" in the U.C. Davis approach... unless "taking into account their life circumstances" ends up taking account of their race.

And why wouldn't it? Those on the inside of the admissions process are outraged by the new decision and adamantly believe it's wrongly decided and actively evil. Now, they will be trusted to apply the new rules, whatever they are (and they are vague enough to manipulate). Some years down the road, we'll have the next round of litigation, and who knows who will be on the Court when that happens? It's an ongoing experiment, and it's never going to end.

"Ann! I saw video of naked bike riders down by the State Capitol bldg. True?"

Writes Dave Begley in last night's open thread. Of course, it's true. And thanks for asking. You caused me to go back into my archive to find the time I was at the Capitol, wandering around something called the "Silent Majority Walk" when the Naked Bike Ride suddenly whizzed by. That was in 2011, the year of the Wisconsin protests.

It's a long video, so I provided time stamps. Excerpt:

4:38 — "That's brand new. I'm shocked as shit," says a black man, laughing. I ask him some questions about why he's shocked [by the Silent Majority Walk] and try to find out if he might perhaps actually be a Walker supporter himself. 

5:54 — We hear a hubbub and I realize "These are the naked bike riders!" They ride by chanting "Less gas, more ass." I continue my discussion with the shocked-as-shit guy, who declares "That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

 

What a great memory! I like that I spontaneously brought up the questions people are still asking about the Naked Bike ride today: 1. What if children saw nakedness? 2. Do these people have a special privilege to be naked because they're in an organized, expressive demonstration? and 3. Is it a white thing?

If you manage to stay tuned to 8:18, you'll hear me ask the man at the Madison Objectivists table how Ayn Rand would react to the Naked Bike Ride. He thought she'd disapprove and that she was "old school" about "sexuality." Oh, yeah? That's not what I heard. Anyway, I don't think nudity is sexuality. 

"A 'Cage Match' Between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg May Be No Joke/Talks over a matchup between the two tech billionaires have progressed and the parameters of an event are taking shape."

This is an article in the NYT, and I'm annoyed at myself for spending the time to try to understand what is going on. These 2 showboats want our attention, and now I'm checking to see just how old, tall, and heavy each of them is and what that means in a "cage match."

Ugh. I don't like thinking about either of these men's bodies, but now I know Musk is 6'1.5" and Zuckerberg is only 5'7". Zuckerberg weighs 155 and Musk is anywhere from 30 to 70 pounds heavier, so he's something like 2 weight classes higher than Zuckerberg. Musk is 12 years older, and maybe Musk is less in shape: