Zeus and Meade on frozen Lake Mendota.

About an hour ago. Notice the Wisconsin Capitol building on the far shore.

It was almost Old Testament God day on the blog, but doughnuts edged Him out.

It's strange the way the blog plays out sometimes. When the first 2 posts by chance have a common element, you think a theme is striking. Old Testament God appeared in Post #1 today, and then, damned if the Old Testament didn't rear its head in Post #2. But a tiny frog rode into town on a beetle, and things were never the same. Next thing you know, Scott Walker was walkin' here, and we were ass-deep in doughnuts. And so doughnuts it was. I spent my afternoon pulling doughnuts out of the hot fat that is my Kindle collection. So here's the Krispy Kreme of my Kindle:

David Foster Wallace, "Up, Simba" (an essay about following the 2000 John McCain campaign, in "Consider the Lobster"):

About two-thirds of the way down the aisle is a little area that has the bus’s refrigerator and the liquor cabinets... and the bathroom.... There’s also a little counter area piled with Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes, and a sink whose water nobody ever uses.... Krispy Kremes are sort of the Deep South equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, ubiquitous and cheap and great in a sort of what-am-I-doing-eating-dessert-for-breakfast way, and are a cornerstone of what Jim C. calls the Campaign Diet.

Hunter S. Thompson, "The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies" (an essay in "The Great Shark Hunt"):

A 22-year-old student was recently sentenced to two years in prison for telling an undercover narcotics agent where to buy some marijuana. “Love” is the password in the Haight-Ashbury, but paranoia is the style. Nobody wants to go to jail.

At the same time, marijuana is everywhere. People smoke it on the sidewalks, in doughnut shops, sitting in parked cars or lounging on the grass in Golden Gate Park. Nearly everyone on the streets between 20 and 30 is a “head,” a user, either of marijuana, LSD, or both. To refuse a proffered “joint” is to risk being labeled a “nark”—narcotics agent— a threat and a menace to almost everybody. With a few loud exceptions, it is only the younger hippies who see themselves as a new breed. “A completely new thing in this world, man.” The ex-beatniks among them, many of whom are now making money off the new scene, incline to the view that hippies are, in fact, second-generation beatniks and that everything genuine in the Haight-Ashbury is about to be swallowed— like North Beach and the Village— in a wave of publicity and commercialism.

Mary Karr, "The Liars' Club: A Memoir":

The next day right after dawn, I pulled down my BB gun from the top bookshelf and went on a rampage that prefigured what Charles Whitman — the guy who shot and killed thirteen people from the tower at the University of Texas — would do a few years later. I stuck a can of hot tamales with a can opener in a paper bag and fixed myself a jelly jar of tea. While all the other kids were still sitting around in their pajamas eating their doughnuts with powdered sugar and watching cartoons, I was sneaking across the blackberry field behind our house . There was a lone chinaberry tree at the field’s center, and I shinnied up it, then pulled my BB gun after me to wait for the Carter kids. They’d planned to berrypick that morning so their mama could make a cobbler. I’d overheard talk about it.

Mary Roach, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal":

To experience taste, the molecules of the tastant— the thing one is tasting— need to dissolve in liquid. Liquid flows into the microscopic canyons of the tongue’s papillae, coming into contact with the “buds” of taste receptor cells that cover them. That’s one reason to be grateful for saliva. Additionally, it explains the appeal of dunking one’s doughnuts.

 J. Maarten Troost, "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story":

I had always imagined your typical twelve-step meeting as occurring in some grim, darkened chamber full of cigarette smoke, bad coffee, and doughnuts, filled with fat, spiteful old men telling you to take the cotton out of your ears and stuff it into your mouth and listen for a change, why don’tcha, but these days, you’re more likely to find a meeting in a smoke-free hall serving herbal tea, filled with people discussing Bikram Yoga and their latest marathon time. This made sense to me, of course. Try as we might, the word moderation leaves many of us scratching our heads. Why run one mile when you can run ten? Why do half an hour of sun salutations when you can do ninety minutes of pretzel-like contortions in a 105 degree sauna? More is better. Always.

Mark Twain, "At the Appetite Cure":

"My system disguised—covert starvation.  Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-cure—it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work— the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours—at both ends of the day—now consider what he has to do at a health resort. He gets up at 6 in the morning. Eats one egg. Tramps up and down a promenade two hours with the other fools. Eats a butterfly. Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's breath. Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says anxiously, "My water!—I am walking off my water!—please don't interrupt," and goes stumping along again. Eats a candied roseleaf. Lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn't read, mustn't smoke. The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and his pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and listens for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man's bath—half a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday. After the bath another egg. A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and promenade solemnly with the other freaks. Dinner at 6—half a doughnut and a cup of tea. Walk again. Half-past 8, supper—more butterfly; at 9, to bed. Six weeks of this regime—think of it. It starves a man out and puts him in splendid condition. It would have the same effect in London, New York, Jericho—anywhere."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five":

“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. “Go take a flying fuck at the moon.”

Lena Dunham, "Not That Kind of Girl":

Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke. I had waited a long time to be a woman, a long time to venture away from my parents, and now I had sex, once with two guys in a week, and bragged about it like a divorcée who was getting back in the game.

Thomas Sowell, "The Thomas Sowell Reader":

At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence—or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.

Robert M. Gates,  "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War":

When I walked in and saw coffee and doughnuts, I thought I would get along just fine with these folks. The traffic coming in from Midway Airport was awful, and Hillary Clinton was late. She had dispensed with a police escort complete with lights and sirens, clearly having an elected official’s sensitivity to ticking off everyone on the road. I did not have that sensitivity....

Andy Warhol, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

I asked Reese how he started in crystals and he said that when he was little, “Mr. Morning” came to see him. When he was a baby. He saw “Mr. Morning,” but nobody else did. And then in the army he got interested in electricity and the body and all this stuff. Reese was talking about his trip where he went around sticking crystals all over the pyramids and the Wailing Wall. And he eats things like coffee and doughnuts. But he cures the coffee by passing the crystal over it ten times.... Reese is Episcopalian, so I feel better with him than with the Jewish crystal people, somehow, because knowing he believes in Christ I don’t have to worry that crystals might be somehow against Christ.

Tom Wolfe, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers":

Sixty strong, sixty loud, sixty wild, they come swinging into the great plush gold-and-marble lobby of the San Francisco City Hall with their hot dogs, tacos, Whammies, Frostees, Fudgsicles, french fries, Eskimo Pies, Awful-Awfuls, Sugar-Daddies, Sugar-Mommies, Sugar-Babies, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, malted milks, Yoo-Hoos, berry pies, bubble gums, cotton candy, Space Food sticks, Frescas, Baskin-Robbins boysenberry-cheesecake ice-cream cones, Milky Ways, M&Ms, Tootsie Pops, Slurpees, Drumsticks, jelly doughnuts, taffy apples, buttered Karamel Korn, root-beer floats, Hi-C punches, large Cokes, 7UPs, 3 Musketeer bars, frozen Kool-Aids—with the Dashiki Chief in the vanguard....

The young guy from the Mayor’s office retreats... Much consternation and concern in the lobby of City Hall... the hurricane could get worse. The little devils could start screaming, wailing, ululating, belching, moaning, giggling, making spook-show sounds... filling the very air with a hurricane of malted milk, an orange blizzard of crushed ice from the Slurpees, with acid red horrors like the red from the taffy apples and the jelly from the jelly doughnuts, with globs of ice cream in purple sheets of root beer, with plastic straws and huge bilious waxed cups and punch cans and sprinkles of Winkles, with mustard from off the hot dogs and little lettuce shreds from off the tacos, with things that splash and things that plop and things that ooze and stick, that filthy sugar moss from off the cotton candy, and the Karamel Korn and the butterscotch daddy figures from off the Sugar-Daddies and the butterscotch babies from off the Sugar-Babies, sugar, water, goo, fried fat, droplets, driplets, shreds, bits, lumps, gums, gobs, smears, from the most itchy molecular Winkle to the most warm moist emetic mass of 3 Musketeers bar and every gradation of solubility and liquidity known to syrup—filling the air, choking it, getting trapped gurgling and spluttering in every glottis— 

And it was here that Bill Jackson proved himself to be a brilliant man and a true artist, a rare artist, of the mau-mau....

 Barack Obama, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance":

“We’re interested in the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts.

“We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We need answers.”

John Steinbeck, "The Red Pony":

“There’s two doughnuts in the kitchen for you,” she said. Jody slid to the kitchen, and returned with half of one of the doughnuts already eaten and his mouth full. His mother asked him what he had learned in school that day, but she didn’t listen to his doughnut-muffled answer. She interrupted, “Jody, tonight see you fill the wood-box clear full. Last night you crossed the sticks and it wasn’t only about half full. Lay the sticks flat tonight. And Jody , some of the hens are hiding eggs, or else the dogs are eating them. Look about in the grass and see if you can find any nests.”

James Thurber, "Writings & Drawings":

I got back to New York in early June, 1926, with ten dollars, borrowed enough to hold on until July in a rented room on West 13th Street, and began sending short pieces to the New Yorker, eating in doughnut shops, occasionally pilfering canapés at cocktail parties (anchovies, in case you don’t know, are not good for breakfast). My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine.

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States":

At Boston University, a thousand students kept vigil for five days and nights in the chapel, supporting an eighteen-year-old deserter, Ray Kroll....

On a Sunday morning, federal agents showed up at the Boston University chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he wrote back to friends: “I ain’t gonna kill; it’s against my will. . . .” A friend he had made at the chapel brought him books, and he noted a saying he had found in one of them: “What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.”

The GI antiwar movement became more organized. Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first “GI coffeehouse” was set up, a place where soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk freely with others....

David Sedaris, "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls":

I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?

Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness":

Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. At one extreme are what might be called investment goods, such as exercise, flossing, and dieting....

At the other extreme are what might be called sinful goods: smoking, alcohol, and jumbo chocolate doughnuts are in this category. We get the pleasure now and suffer the consequences later. Again we can use the New Year’s resolution test: how many people vow to smoke more cigarettes, drink more martinis, or have more chocolate donuts in the morning next year? Both investment goods and sinful goods are prime candidates for nudges. Most (nonanorexic) people do not need any special encouragement to eat another brownie, but they could use some help exercising more.

And then there's the choice of how to spell doughnut/donut. Isn’t the failure to pick one spelling and stick to it a way of saying "fuck you"? That question is me nudging Cass Sunstein. We'll see if he does better in the future.

And that's all the Krispy Kindle Kremes for now, so — as they say in the azure nest — Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

"We were in [Jony] Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be."

"The hood barely sloped, and it met the car's front end at a tightly curved corner that mirrored the iPhone 6 in Ive’s left hand... Ive would prefer an unobserved life, but he likes nice things. He also has an Aston Martin DB4. He acquired his first Bentley, a two-door model, ten years ago, after an inner zigzag between doubt and self-justification. 'I’ve always loved the big old-school square Bentleys,' he said. 'The reasons are entirely design-based. But because of the other connotations I resisted and resisted, and then I thought, This is the most bizarre vanity, because I’m concerned that people will perceive me to be this way—I’m not. So I’m going to—' A pause. 'And so I am uncomfortable about it.' Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice-president of operations, drives an old Toyota Camry. Ive’s verdict, according to Williams, is 'Oh, God.'"

From "The Shape of Things to Come/How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product" by Ian Parker in The New Yorker.

Ive would prefer an unobserved life, but he likes nice things. Ha ha. Don't we all? Except that senior vice-president of operations with his.. Oh, God... Camry.

I had previously asked Ive about the rounded corners and edges that have long helped distinguish an Apple product from a ThinkPad or a book.... For each product, Jobs and Ive would discuss corners “for hours and hours.” [Laurene Powell Jobs] later noted that she and Ive share a taste for Josef Frank, the Austrian-Swedish designer of rounded furniture and floral fabrics, who once announced, in a lecture, "No hard corners: humans are soft and shapes should be, too."

50 years ago today: Malcolm X was shot dead.

As Time Magazine put it:

Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: "Your little babies will get polio!" he cried to the "white devils." His creed was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will."

Non-Wisconsinites, I need to explain something about Scott Walker to you that you are missing.

Those of you who think that he's a neophyte, that he hasn't yet learned how to step up to answering a question. You don't get it. You are a neophyte. You haven't yet learned how to step up to understanding Scott Walker.

I'm talking to people like WaPo's Dana Milbank, who wrote a column called "Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him," based on Scott Walker's response to Rudy Giulian'is "I do not believe that the president loves America."

And Walker, just a few seats away, said... nothing. Asked the next morning on CNBC about Giuliani’s words, the Republican presidential aspirant was spineless: "The mayor can speak for himself. I’m not going to comment on what the president thinks or not. He can speak for himself as well. I’ll tell you, I love America, and I think there are plenty of people — Democrat, Republican, independent, everyone in between — who love this country."

But did he agree with Giuliani? "I’m in New York," Walker demurred. "I’m used to people saying things that are aggressive out there."

It's interesting that Walker was right there when Giuliani said that, yet he didn't rise to the bait, but it's exactly what I'm used to seeing in the doggedly on-message Walker. He's rock-solidly used to this sort of situation. I think back to the debates he had with Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor who was his opponent in the 2012 recall election.

In the first debate, Barrett, standing right next to Walker, did all he could to turn up the heat, saying Walker "tore this state apart" and started "a political civil war." Walker never quarreled over these inflammatory characterizations. He'd go straight to his message: This is "about our reforms, which are working."

In the second debate, the 2 men were sitting next to each other at a table, and the candidates were encouraged to talk to each other. I said:

This is a great format with the men sitting side by side. Barrett — a larger man — leans toward the governor and speaks with urgency and stress. Walker seems more relaxed. He's earnest, gesturing and explaining. Walker's theme is: the taxpayers.

As in the first debates, Barrett kept calling Governor Walker "Scott," and Walker steadfastly called Mayor Barrett "the mayor." Barrett kept up with the inflammatory tone, at one point accusing Walker of "ripping my face off." As one of my commenters said:

What struck me most was the imperious yet at the same time perplexed look Barrett directed at Walker almost constantly. A combination of ridiculous pomposity and pathetic passivity. Amazing he could pull off such a combo. A talent of sorts, I guess -- for doing himself in. Walker looked relaxed and human and never once reciprocated with any form of rudeness such as he was getting.

Go to 31:33 to 32:00 in the video to see what "ridiculous pomposity and pathetic passivity" looks like.

After all of that, do you really think Walker would feel compelled to weigh in on what the former mayor of New York City spouts off about Obama? Absolutely not. Giuliani was deploying some colorful New-York-City-style rhetoric and purporting to know the emotional contents of the President's heart. There's nothing worth responding to, and the no response is the Wisconsin man's response to nothing. He was "in New York" and "used to people saying things that are aggressive out there."

Implicit in that is: That's not Wisconsin style. Get used to it, coasties.

ADDED: I'M WALKER HERE!

A link to an article titled "How to Stay Married to an Attorney" seems to be the best answer to the question...

... whether a doughnut is dessert if you eat it for breakfast and it's all you eat. 

ADDED: Commenters say they can't get to the Facebook post I'm linking, so I'll copy a few things. First, David Lat writes:

My latest debate with Zach Shemtob: is a doughnut a dessert? Zach's position: a doughnut is always and inherently a dessert. My position: a doughnut eaten in the morning is breakfast; a doughnut eaten later in the day is a dessert. (This issue is the subject of heated debate on Yahoo! Answers and elsewhere on the web.)

There are many answers, including my "It depends on whether you spell it 'donut' or 'doughnut'" — linking to my old post "Such proper ideas of doughnuts" —  and the one I thought most apt was just a link to a Wikihow piece titled "How to Stay Married to an Attorney."

"Almost all furries have a fursona, but only a small proportion wear a fur suit. Many furries feel that, in everyday life, we are all forced to adopt personas..."

"... their fursona allows them to be their true selves. The one message that was consistent across my conversations was that each member of the community felt they had something that made them different and ill fitting in mainstream society, such as Asperger syndrome or a facial tic. The fandom gave them a safe venue in which to express themselves.... Furries are well aware that the public perceives their community and lifestyle as primarily motivated by sex. From my conversations that day, I got the sense that there are layers behind the decision to become a furry, and that sex and furry pornography are only one aspect of their lifestyle... [E]veryone was too busy making new friends and having fun."

Fron "A Peek Inside a Furry Convention," from a letter sent by Debra W. Soh to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, published in the February issue of Harper's Magazine under the title "Below the Pelt." You need a subscription to Harper's for the link to work).

A question I have about this (and about some similar things) is whether we are grouping together people who belong in 3 different categories: 1. Those who want to have fun and are just playing, 2. Those who are mentally disordered and hurling themselves toward greater chaos and feelings of turbulence, and 3. Those who only want to feel normal.

"ISIS is talking online about jars of Nutella, pictures of kittens and emojis."

"These three images are in part helping ISIS recruiters lure westerners into their fight because they want people to believe their life on the battlefield isn't so different than yours. They actually eat Nutella, and I guess they have pet kittens..."

I don't know about all of that, but here's a tiny frog riding a beetle...



Have you ever heard of insect and frog politics? Neither have I. Insects and frogs ... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise, no Nutella. We can't trust the insect... or the frog... or the kittens...

ADDED: That's not my photograph, but I don't know where the original credit should go.

"I'm glad I've started a conversation. But why are the people on the other side of the conversation so boring?"

"All they say is that I'm 'stupid' or my comment is 'nonsense.' What I said is apparently interesting enough to respond to, but you don't say anything interesting in response. Say something about art! Say something new and unusual about why I'm so wrong! Dammit! I can see people are talking about me, and I go over to hear what they are saying, and it's a thuddingly dull remark."

That's something I said back in '05, and I'm reading it this morning as a result of this morning's first post — about Will Butler and Bob Dylan — which brought up my old aphorism — "To be a great artist is inherently right wing" — which was the topic of that '05 post.

That made me think of something I heard in the middle of the night on the audiobook I had playing through my under-pillow speaker, "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story" by J. Maarten Troost:

"What will happen to me — an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child — if I let myself float..."

"... into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin’s troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane?"

From "'Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth'/What I learned from watching a week of Russian TV," by Gary Shteyngartfeb in the NYT Magazine.

(Oh, no. The words "Old Testament" have now appeared in the first 2 posts of the day. That was not intentional, but now I feel challenged, and it will be difficult to step up to the challenge given the subject matter of the next post, already half-drafted.)

Arcade Fire's Will Butler adopts the blogging method of songwriting.

He's not saying it's like blogging. I am. He's saying it's like Bob Dylan:

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler will be writing a song a day based upon a news story in the Guardian for a week from 23 February. Each original track will premiere on the Guardian’s website.

“It was partly inspired by Bob Dylan, who used to announce that certain songs were based on headlines,” Butler says of the project. “It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”

Yeah, William Zantzinger could have sued Bob Dylan for the defamation in that song:

"The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" got famous
And Bob Dylan became the most honored of rock stars
Zantzinger kept quiet and wouldn't talk to the press
He just lived through the decades with that song on his head
And he probably cried for himself and for Hattie
And what did he think of that songster Bob Dylan?
"I should have sued him," he finally said later...

Back to Will Butler:

“I’ve been reading the Guardian every day, perusing the different sections."

Oh, perusing! I've been perusing and excusing and infusing and accusing. Overusing. Now, I'm oozing, all while you sing. (All I really want to do is be friends with Will Butler.)

"Some of them possibly lend themselves to songs. It’s a cruel thing..."

An uncool thing... a damned fool thing....

"... but sometimes you read something and think, ‘Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that.’"

Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that. Uh oh. You could make something really cool and cruel out of "Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that." Perhaps"Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town" infused (and confused) with "Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy." I'm thinking of a graffiti entreaty in Tahiti, sweetie.

"Something like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial – my God, that’s the gnarliest story in the world, but it’s interesting."

See? It's like blogging. The standard is that standard of standards: interestingness. Back to Butler:

"Or you might read a science headline and think, 'The universe is so much bigger than I thought it was.' There’s something really beautiful in that."

"Big and small" is one of my favorite tags, and it's because — and I cannot figure out why — I invariably visualize everything smaller — often far smaller — than it really is. I'm a minimizer. A minimalist. So I'm with Butler, except no mere science headline can correct my mind's distortion. The universe will always be much bigger than I think it is. And "always" will always be far longer.

So, anyway, Will Butler is interested in politics, interested enough to have applied to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He got in, but he didn't go. Which says something about where he was in the development of political sophistication — a process that began when he was a teenager, when he read Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Bob Dylan has no songs with Dostoevsky and Kafka (though he does have Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower and he sneers at a man who thinks he's something for having been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books). It's hard to rhyme Kafka, who drinks vodka with his latka, not to mention Dostoevsky (are you kidding me?).

Will Butler says:

"On the one hand, the government is – in a country like America or Canada or the UK – the expression of the people. It’s not freedom from things but its freedom to govern, which is a beautiful concept. But there’s a sense that modern government almost takes the place of the Old Testament God. Things happen because governments cause them to, but people are like, 'No. This is how the world is. It’s a world of pain.' There’s something very Old Testament about that – yet we’re on our knees to them about policy as well."

After that quote, The Guardian scurries to tell us that Butler is "an Obama fan." You could write a song about the lefty newspaper's need to assure its larval readers that the artist they've been reading about and whose music they're getting primed to receive is properly on the left even though he just said that modern government almost takes the place of the Old Testament God.

"Why Are So Many Toddlers Taking Psychiatric Drugs?"

"An analysis of 2013 IMS Data, found that over 274,000 infants (0-1 year olds) and some 370,000 toddlers (1-3 years age) in the U.S. were on antianxiety (e.g. Xanax) and antidepressant (e.g. Prozac) drugs. This report also found over 1,400 infants were on ADHD drugs."

"The coldest day ever! Temperature records broken across the country by the 'Siberian Express' cold snap as Manhattan hits..."

"... 1F."

LOL, from Madison, Wisconsin.

"The power to require permits is the power to prevent something from ever existing."

"This lovely movement would've never begun or spread if everyone who wanted to build a Little Free Library recognized a need to apply and pay for a permit. Instead they did good and asked permission never."

"After saying in his re-election bid that he wouldn't push so-called right-to-work legislation, Gov. Scott Walker voiced support for it Friday and committed to signing it..."

"... acting after GOP leaders fast-tracked the proposal for a Senate vote next week....".

"I've never said that I didn't think it was a good idea. I've just questioned the timing in the past and whether it was right at that time," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an interview at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C.

"In using the term 'gender theory,' [Pope] Francis is denouncing the academic perspective that sees gender identities as a spectrum rather than as binaries."

"Gender theorists argue that the way people identify themselves is the result of social and cultural constructions of gender...."

In the interview, Francis recalled how a public education minister was given funding for new schools for the poor only on the condition that school textbooks taught gender theory. Francis described this as “ideological colonization” and added that “the same was done by the dictators of the last century. … think of Hitler Youth.”