2 choices: "step aside" or "step the f*** up and show the world how Madison..."

"... has consistently earned our spot in the top five party schools while continuing to excel academically."

University of Wisconsin students have been protesting for a long time. Is this too not an issue of freedom?

"We still have rights; we have a house on Mifflin... Long live Mifflin."

Should they not fight for their right to party... especially on Mifflin Street? The history:

The Mifflin Street Block Party began in 1969 as a street protest, which involved dancing in protest against the Vietnam War. Its original date, May 3, was set to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the French student rebellion. Anti-war sentiments had accelerated in Madison since the 1967 Dow Chemical protest in which thousands of students occupied and were violently expelled from Ingraham Hall. The original event arose as part of a continuing conflict between students and police in the "Miffland" area, centered on Mifflin Street. Police refused to allow permission for the street dance and when they entered the area in response to a noise complaint, a confrontation ensued that lasted three nights and spread into the surrounding student areas. Students threw stones at the police and constructed barricades to defend themselves. The police responded with tear gas and billy clubs. At the end, 70 people were injured and more than 100 arrested, including future and current mayor, Paul Soglin.

Baby Veronica "deserves to be treated as a unique, multiethnic individual..."

"... whose best interests are not inexorably dictated by her blood connection to a tribal member."

The [Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl] case has set off alarms among the tribes, and some child welfare experts, who consider the law the “gold standard” in attempting to keep children with their biological parents. Nineteen states and the United States have filed briefs defending the law.

"We're all trolls."

Writes Meade (at the Isthmus forum): "This very thread, started by someone who hides behind his troll name, fisticuffs, is an example of spiteful trollery. The question is: do you want to be an affable interesting troll - like Meade - or do you want to be a grumpy old ill-humored boring troll? Like Galoot or fisticuffs."

Will Elizabeth Warren challenge Hillary for the 2016 Democratic Party nomination?

The Boston Herald tells us she's "generating increasing support among liberals."

... Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who helped draft Warren to run for U.S. Senate against GOP incumbent Scott Brown... said Warren already has won huge support from progressives for her recent bold questioning of financial regulators who she said are protecting big banks over families. Her rapid opposition to Obama’s proposed cuts only added to her star power.

“If Hillary Clinton or others don’t firmly oppose these cuts, they open up a huge amount of political space for an insurgent to run and win,” Green said.

Pressure on Hillary to go liberal. Clearly, it works best if the pressure comes from another woman.

How will all these aging boomer women who've been hoping to see a female President feel about the younger woman getting the edge? Perhaps it's just the thing to bring out the empathy for the Hillary. There's always a younger woman!

"Trayvon Martin targets were not for target practice but were a 'no-shoot training tool'..."

"... says the Florida cop who was fired Friday for showing them to colleagues."

There are millions of mammoth tusks in that Arctic ice that is melting.

And they're worth good money as a substituted for elephant ivory, which, unlike mammoth ivory, is illegal to buy and sell.

At the link, a picture of a man posing with a mammoth tusk — it's huge — that might be "worth $80,000 to $100,000 or even more."

[S]ome scientists lament the tusk hunting and trade. "Each of these tusks is kind of like a tree, which has rings," he says. "The tusks themselves can kind of carry information about the climate, the diet — that would be valuable data. On the other hand, if they find mammoth hair, or an intact mammoth, they're the first ones that tell the scientists."

Why we should leave Justin Bieber alone about what he wrote in the guestbook at the Anne Frank Museum.

He wrote: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

Writing about this causes him to be the main/first thing millions of young people think of when they hear her name. There are, I'm sure, many kids who are hearing about her for the first time in connection with their pop idol, and it's the only thing they know about her. These 2 characters shouldn't have this bond in the mental space of those who don't know much about history. Don't lock in that link!

ADDED: How outrageous is it for Bieber to imagine her as a fan? Have you been to the Anne Frank house? I have. Preserved behind plexiglas on her bedroom wall are pictures of movie stars. (I remember Greta Garbo and Ray Milland.) Based on seeing her room, it was entirely rational for Bieber to think, if we had been contemporaries, she'd love me. Teenage girls do love their pop idols, and remembering the living, not-yet-captured girl does honor her.

"Judge holds self in contempt for his phone ringing in court, pays $25 fine."

"He says if he can't live by the rules he enforces he has no business enforcing the rules."

"We are not going to recognize the result until every vote is counted, one by one."

Said Henrique Capriles Radonski, as the Venezuelan electoral votes came in very close. "The big loser today is you, you and what you represent," he added, referring to Nicolás Maduro, whom Hugo Chávez chose as his successor.

Maduro, for his part, said "We have a just, legal, constitutional and popular electoral victory."

Thinking about George W. Bush.

1. He just became a granddad.

2. A Guantanamo detainee is railing against the President on the op-ed page of the NYT: "Gitmo Is Killing Me."

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago... The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

Where golf meets football.

Masters on tv makes me want to golf. When does winter end in wisconsin??#globalwarming

— Aaron Rodgers (@AaronRodgers12) April 14, 2013

If you had to generate all the electricity you needed by pedaling a stationary bike...

... and your car was an electric car, how many stationary bike miles would you have to pedal to power the car for 1 mile?

A question that occurred to me after Mr Evilwrench mentioned the idea of making everyone generate their own electricity through stationary biking (in the post about weight-loss contraptions).

"But since my cancer diagnosis, I’m beginning to empathize with Jesus at Gethsemane..."

"... Just as he’d gotten his life’s work going, just as he was planting the seeds of a new society, just as he was gaining followers willing to give up everything for justice and love, he found out he was probably going to die, at the age of 33...."

When has your life experience caused you to change which character you identify with in an old story?

Or is this a big sermon cliché? First, we identify with the sleeping disciples because blah blah blah but then etc. etc....

Eh. Maybe it's a big but great cliché. Let's have your examples.

I can't offhand think of any of my own, but I think of that mother in the BBC documentary we were watching last night who described her son as always identifying with the villain in the story and who gives — as her one example — Cruella De Vil. It's a power fantasy, and he doesn't seem to mind — mom says — that the character loses in the end. She probably thinks the BBC documentary viewer identifies with her, the devoted mother of a difficult child. Why would she have invited the documentarians into her home otherwise?

It's a cliché of documentaries to lure us into identifying with one character and then tempting, then forcing us to switch to another character. How else are you going to build narrative energy? And yet you invite these devils into your home. They seem so empathetic as you open up not just your house but your soul.

I said I couldn't  offhand think of any examples of my own, shifting from empathizing with one character to another. But now, in the context of that BBC documentary, I realize I do it all the time in blog posts. I get interested in one person, and I start writing, and I find — make?! — a narrative thread that ends up turning my empathy around. I'll bet there are over 1,000 examples of my doing that in this archive.

Perhaps you should turn against me. Perhaps I am the devil you've let into your house.

Purchase of the day.

From the April 13, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Searching For Sugar Man
Rodriguez | Format: MP3 Music

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you sing like a canary will we know it's you.

The Althouse Amazon portal: where, from the gutter, anyone who chooses to, can look at the stars and, like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through.

Because, when you wish upon the Althouse Amazon portal, your search for sugar man can come true.

"Check out this 'solution' to the obesity epidemic, a contraption called the 'Slow Bite.'"

"It limits the degree to which users can open their mouths while eating, so they consume less. But if you have enough self-control to wire your jaw nearly shut every time you eat, don’t you also have enough self-control to not eat more than you should?"

Althousian free association goes from that to this — published on the same day, in the same place (the NYT) — from the obituary of Mickey Rose, who co-wrote "Bananas" and "Take the Money and Run" the 2 movies that "established [Woody Allen] as a filmmaker" and made him "popular enough to continue to do whatever he wanted to do," according to Eric Lax, who wrote “Woody Allen: A Biography."

In a remembrance e-mailed to Mr. Lax, Mr. Allen recalled what Mr. Rose had told him was the inescapable meaning of death: “No more malteds.”

Key word: Malteds.

Anagram: Sad Melt.

"Yawn, and then some. Will we never be rid of the snobby blight of the Bloomsberries?"

Terry Teachout, bemoaning the "2 entire walls... devoted to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant" at the "Inventing Abstraction" show at the MoMa.

One of the many things triumphantly demonstrated by "Inventing Abstraction" is the sheer volume of second- and third-rate art... that was generated by the rise of the abstractionists. The imitability of so many key figures of the movement never ceases to fascinate me.

If I were in NYC today, I would scamper over to see the big show before it closes. But I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, where the corresponding spectacle is "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Chazen Museum. Here's the museum's propaganda:

During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Realizing that Americans needed not only employment but also the inspiration art could provide, the administration created the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal program to support the arts. Although short-lived, the PWAP employed thousands of artists to paint regional, recognizable subjects—from portraits to cityscapes and street scenes to landscapes and rural life. These artworks were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums, and government buildings, vividly capturing the realities and ideals of the era. 1934: A New Deal for Artists celebrates the 75th anniversary of the PWAP, presenting 56 vibrant paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection.

"Vividly" and "vibrant" are words. So are "dully" and "dreary." The one painting you can see at the link is far better than nearly everything else in the show, and I can only imagine the looks of the thousands of other paintings that were cranked out in this government jobs program and foisted on the schoolkids and library-goers of America. I moved quickly from one painting to the next, and — unfortunately or fortunately — I was alone, because much cynical mockery went unsaid.

I realize only now that I could have worn my iPhone with its headset and a recording app running and muttered my lines as if talking to someone by phone. Would that be wrong?

What would you prefer to have inflicted on you in the form of way too many paintings — New York City's snobbish adoration of the Bloombury Group or Madison, Wisconsin's politically medicinal devotion to FDR?