"I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster. He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors."

Said Theodore Roosevelt, recounting a conversation he'd had with presidential candidate William Howard Taft, quoted in "Theodore Rex."

I earn a commission if you use that link, which goes to Amazon. I'm just finishing the book this morning. It's the second in a trilogy. Volume 1, "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," is much more fun to read, and I think that says something about how impoverished we are for staring constantly at the presidency.

Seen from the perspective of a President, we, "the political audience," are stupefyingly shallow, come to see "a poster," not "an etching," looking for garish colors and bright lines.

ODDLY ENOUGH: I've already blogged about a Taft campaign poster, here.

"There is an obvious case to be made against Trump being seen as a 2023 winner. On Jan. 1, he faced no criminal charges."

"Now he stands indicted in four cases on 91 charges. His attempts so far to evade a moment of truth — asserting his immunity, seeking to run out the clock and riling up his base with verbal attacks on prosecutors and judges — are far from guaranteed to succeed. Meanwhile, Trump is ratcheting up his incendiary rhetoric, lambasting opponents as 'vermin,' threatening to use the justice system to go after political foes and accusing unauthorized immigrants of 'poisoning the blood of our country.' But Trump emerges as a winner from the year simply because he is in a far stronger position at its close than he was at the start."

Writes Niall Stanage, in "The political winners and losers of 2023" (The Hill). 

Back then, he seemed vulnerable even within the GOP after several of his key endorsees in the 2022 midterms were defeated. The DeSantis threat loomed large. But the Trump Teflon proved more resilient than his detractors expected. On Dec. 30, Trump was more than 50 points ahead of DeSantis in the national polling average.... [G]iven Biden’s low approval ratings, it would be reckless to bet against Trump taking back the White House.

As for the other "winners" — there are only Mike Johnson and Nikki Haley. Though there is a "mixed" category, Biden is relegated to "loser" — "If a Biden-Trump general election were held today, Biden would almost certainly be defeated...."

It hasn't worked for the Democrats to demonize Trump. Biden must try to win on his own merit, not Trump's lack of merit. 

Sunrise — 7:30.

"Law professors report with both awe and angst that A.I. apparently can earn B’s on law school assignments and even pass the bar exam."

"Legal research may soon be unimaginable without it. A.I. obviously has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for lawyers and nonlawyers alike. But just as obviously it risks invading privacy interests and dehumanizing the law.... At least at present, studies show a persistent public perception of a 'human-A.I. fairness gap,' reflecting the view that human adjudications, for all of their flaws, are fairer than whatever the machine spits out.... Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of a defendant’s allocution at sentencing. Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.... Many appellate decisions turn on whether a lower court has abused its discretion, a standard that by its nature involves fact-specific gray areas. Others focus on open questions about how the law should develop in new areas. A.I. is based largely on existing information, which can inform but not make such decisions...."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, quoted in "Chief Justice Roberts Sees Promise and Danger of A.I. in the Courts/In his year-end report, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. focused on the new technology while steering clear of Supreme Court ethics and Donald J. Trump’s criminal cases" (NYT).

Speaking of humanity, remember when Senator Barack Obama voted against the confirmation of Justice John Roberts because Roberts said "he saw himself just as an umpire"?: "But the issues that come before the court are not sports; they’re life and death. We need somebody who’s got the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.... In... 5 percent of cases, you’ve got to look at what is in the justice’s heart, what’s their broader vision of what America should be."

By the way, in literal, as opposed to figurative, baseball, A.I. does a better job of calling balls and strikes.

"I was one of those people that caused the state to be weakened, that harmed people. I created a split, I created a rift, and I created tension. And this tension brought weakness. And this weakness, in many ways, brought massacre."

Said Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud Party,  quoted in "In rare apology, Israeli minister says she ‘sinned’ for her role in reforms that tore country apart/Distel Atbaryan appeared to accept the argument that the internal divisions created perceptions of weakness that encouraged Hamas to attack" (Politico).

ADDED: Atbaryan seems to be relying on the proposition those who criticize the government are aiding the enemy.

Did Mickey Mouse just enter the public domain?

"An early Walt Disney movie featuring the first appearance of Mickey Mouse is among the copyrighted works from 1928 moving into the public domain on Jan. 1, 2024....  'What is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film,' [says Kembrew McLeod, a communications professor and intellectual property scholar]. That means people can creatively reuse only the Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie. Not the Mickey Mouse in the 1940 movie Fantasia. Nor the one on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.... New versions of Mickey Mouse remain under copyright. Copyright applies to creative characters, movies, books, plays, songs and more. And as it happens, Mickey Mouse is also trademarked.... 'And of course, trademark law has no end, adds Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji.... As long as the mark remains distinctive in the supply of goods and services, the owner of the trademark gets to protect that trademark. 'It's something copyright scholars like myself have been concerned about.... This effective undermining of the public domain by allowing trademark law to effectively extend the life of a copyrighted work.....'"

From "'Steamboat Willie' is now in the public domain. What does that mean for Mickey Mouse?" (NPR).

The most NPR part of that article is telling us that in "Steamboat Willie," as opposed to later versions of Mickey, "his roots in the blackface minstrel shows of the time are more apparent."

ADDED: From a 2019 Snopes article, "Was Mickey Mouse Modeled After a Racist Caricature Named 'Jigaboo'? Mickey Mouse may have a connection to minstrel shows, but he wasn't based on a racist 'Jigaboo' character":

"If it were badly written how could it be a great book?" — said David Mamet, answering the question "Can a great book be badly written?"

"Perhaps if it contained Great Ideas? According to whom? The writer? Who died and left him boss? In the estimation of the reader? If I am he, nope, for why should I credit any ideas of a lox who didn’t realize he couldn’t write? Reading great prose is one of my chiefest joys. When I find myself rewriting the book I’m reading, I not only throw it away, I do not recycle it."

From an interview in The New York Times.

Is reading great prose one of your chiefest joys?

Do you credit any ideas of a lox?

Do you infuse your recycling decisions with considerations irrelevant to the process of recycling?

It's a new year.

What are you going to do about it?

CORRECTION: This post title was originally "It a new year." Yes, I started the new year of blogging with an error. The very first word, too. Glad I got that out of the way. What was your first mistake?

That was your first mistake/You took your lucky break and broke it in two/Now what can be done for you?/You broke it in two....

Sunrise — 7:25.

"There are implications for the wider culture in derogating our appetites. We are effectively telling people... not to trust their bodies..."

"... in ways that smack of gaslighting. Imagine a world where we could override our need to sleep with a medication far more powerful and long-lasting than caffeine: a new class of amphetamines, say, that could suppress the need to sleep for days if not weeks. And so we come to pronounce ourselves afflicted with 

'sleep noise,' rather than simple human tiredness — thereby depicting normal bodily need as weakness and the drugs to treat such weariness as a solution to this non-problem. The idea of billing our body’s pleas for rest as mere noise — and hence as something that ought not be listened to — borders on dystopian...."

Writes Kate Manne, in "What if 'Food Noise' Is Just … Hunger?" (NYT). 

"Food noise" is current slang for thinking about food — for "hearing" food calling out to you.

"You won’t hear President Biden talking about it much, but a key record has been broken during his watch."

"The United States is producing more oil than any country ever has. The flow of huge amounts of crude from American producers is playing a big role in keeping prices down at the pump, diminishing the geopolitical power of OPEC, and taming inflation.... The politics of oil are particularly tricky for Democrats, whose chances for victory in the 2024 elections could hinge on whether young, climate-conscious voters come out in big numbers. Many of those voters want to hear that Biden is doing everything in his power to keep oil in the ground.... Trump recently told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that he would act as a dictator only on the first day of his presidency in 2025, in part because he wanted to 'drill, drill, drill' for more oil. The former president has constantly attacked Biden’s clean energy agenda and accused him of squandering America’s prior 'energy independence' because of allegiance to 'environmental lunatics.'"

WaPo reports.

"A girl being like, 'Um this guy didn’t report.' Is the most female ref way to ruin a game."

A tweet I found after Meade put some time into trying to explain what happened in that Lions game, but I got tired of the explanation. First time I'd ever heard of this "report" concept. In any event, I'd seen this headline earlier this morning — "Lions rip refs for penalizing first 2-point try: 'don’t want to talk about it'" — and got excited reading the first 2 words, then realized it was about football and got bored.

"What’s in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail that continues to divide our country."

"What's in the best interest of our country is to pardon him so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him."

Said Nikki Haley, quoted in "Nikki Haley says pardoning Trump is in the country's 'best interest'/Haley has often been accused of flip-flopping when it comes to Trump. Her comments about pardoning him have opened her up to further criticism" (MSNBC)

The day 123123 is here at last.

"[T]he one class I hated was hula. It was mostly because the instructor was a flamboyant gay man and it scared me. That was my own internalized homophobia."

Said Patrick Makuakān, describing the "cultural exploration camp" he attended when he was 10.

He's quoted in "'Hula is my church': how Patrick Makuakāne is reinvigorating Hawaii’s traditional dance/Winner of the MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2023 has forged his own style in San Francisco while often subverting stereotypes of hula itself" (The Guardian).

"Some New Yorkers harbor fantasies that instead of building more, we can meet our housing needs through more rent control, against the advice of most economists..."

"... or by banning pieds-à-terre or by converting all vacant office towers into residential buildings, despite the expense and complexity. Given the enormity of the crisis, such measures would all be drops in the bucket, leading many to worry that if we were to actually build the hundreds of thousands of homes New Yorkers need, we would end up transforming the city into an unrecognizable forest of skyscrapers... New York could add dwellings for well over a million people — homes most New Yorkers could afford — without substantially changing the look and feel of the city."

Writes Vishaan Chakrabarti, "founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York City architecture firm, and the former director of planning for Manhattan," in "How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers" (NYT).

Click through to see visualizations of architecture projects that add housing without "substantially changing" the various locations. Some are improvements. At least one is an atrocity. I like a parking lot replaced by a mid-sized building, but loathe the low-rise apartment building stuck in the one empty lot in a neighborhood of single-family houses.

Chakrabarti's firm has identified over half a million locations for new apartments in New York City.