Mark Steyn goes to a Trump rally.

A nice write-up. Funny... so I'll excerpt the part about Trump's comic talent:

He's way funnier than half the stand-up acts I've seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing.

Steyn compliments Obama for his comic timing, then:

"I Tried Breadfacing — Now I Understand."

I clicked on that because I thought it said "I Tried Breastfeeding — Now I Understand," but, no, it's "I Tried Breadfacing — Now I Understand."

Have you watched the Breadface videos?... I've watched all 23 of her videos and am impressed at how satisfied she looks with this simple pleasure. I wanted to understand the experience behind her look of bliss, and to find out whether, if I tried it, breadfacing would bring me the same bliss.... I pressed my cheeks, my chin, my nose into each individual croissant.... Truthfully, I didn't understand Breadface's love of breadfacing until the Wonder Bread....

"We do know Hillary told her daughter Chelsea, well gosh, I knew it was a terrorist attack, while we were out telling the American people it wasn't."

"You know I'll tell you, in my house, if my daughter Catherine, the five-year-old, says something she knows to be false, she gets a spanking. Well, in America, the voters have a way of administering a spanking."

Said Ted Cruz, dragging his daughter into politics again, plying an icky metaphor, and striving — I suppose — to win the hearts of the corporal punishment crowd.

I wonder, what do Americans think of the corporal punishment of children these days? This was a hot question in September 2014, you may remember, when a significant pro football player, Adrian Peterson, was found to have used a "switch" on his little son and the famous former basketball player Charles Barkley said:

"I'm a black guy ... I'm from the South. Whipping — we do that all the time. Every black parent in the South is going to be in jail under those circumstances...."

NPR's Gene Demby looked at the numbers and the research:

[A] sizeable majority of people in the United States, regardless of race, look favorably on corporal punishment. Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight looked at some polling data and found that just north of 8 in 10 black people favored corporal punishment. That's higher than white people, but not by a whole lot: 7 in 10 white people favored corporal punishment. (There was a slightly larger gap on this question among people who identified as born-again Christians and those who did not. But again, strong majorities of both groups felt this way — about 80 percent and 65 percent, respectively.)...

"The hysteria is warranted: there were coordinated sexual assaults and rapes on hundreds of women in Cologne, Hamburg and a few other German towns, Salzburg, and towns in Finland."

"The media covered it all up, a shocking dereliction of duty to report the news. Why are we having a discussion about the feelings of the men who committed these crimes and whether they will be offended that we are stating the obvious, that thousands of them across Europe were of the same ethnic group? A war on women was brazenly unleashed that night around Europe. If the perps were local nationals, then throw the book at them and put them away for a long time. If the attackers were refugees and asylum seekers, then they should forfeit the right to live in the West. Those men - local or refugees - knew wrong from right but decided to prey on physically weaker victims. These were crimes of control and delight in the infliction of terror. Subjecting them to culture classes will do no more than lecturing to murderers that taking a life is wrong. It sure would be nice if the politically correct would stop throwing women as a group under the bus in the name of trying to judge these mass atrocities as some kind of balancing test. Punish the offenders and keep anyone with the mindset that women are fair game to be raped out of the West, period."

That's the top-rated comment at the NYT on an op-ed titled "Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria," by Anna Sauerbrey, who concluded "We need to regain our sense of balance — or it’s just a question of time until we hit a wall."

Mickey Kaus fears a future in which robots do all the work and we, consequently, have no basis for self-respect.

"Evolutionarily, we are designed for work. We are unhappy when we're not working. We become a sociopathic bachelor herd.... What do we do with all these people who have no productive work?"



ELSEWHERE: "Why Do Americans Work So Much?/The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn’t exactly how things have played out."

"Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face."

"Yet even the tragically email-burdened still have a weird love for this particular rabid, face-attacking bat."

Quoted in "The Triumph of Email/Why does one of the world’s most reviled technologies keep winning?" by Adrienne LaFrance, who says "That love may not be all that weird, though—especially as email’s competitors, with push notifications, become more annoying. Email works. It’s open. It’s lovely on mobile...."

Fred Armisen in his feminist bookstore persona Candace Devereaux reads "Portlandia Travelogue: The Brussels to Antwerp Express."

Downloadable free here.

A literary train journey on the Brussels to Antwerp Express through the erotic world of European train stations and mysterious faces, by Candace Devereaux (Fred Armisen) from Portland's Women and Women First Bookstore.

It's a reminder that "Portlandia" begins a new season soon.

I'd never noticed that the character had the last name Devereaux. That's significant to anyone who's read the great David Rakoff essay "The Satisfying Crunch of Dreams Underfoot" (found in the collection "Half Empty"). He tells about having to judge a best-unpublished-novel contest and plowing through 2,000 manuscripts:

For the most part we ate our sandwiches and worked silently, all the while, of course, vigilantly on Devereaux Watch. For mysterious reasons, possibly having to do with schlock auteur Aaron Spelling, in amateur writing, Devereaux is the default name for either the president, a ne’er-do-well scion of a powerful clan, an iron-willed jewel-encrusted dowager, or the family manse whose stately façade conceals many dark secrets. There was no prize for winning the Devereaux Watch. Coming upon the first—and by no means only—appearance of the name on a given day’s reading was its own reward, and finding it never took longer than seven minutes.

When did Aaron Spelling start this? I assume it was 1984, the "New Lady in Town" episode of "Dynasty":

"But the most incendiary charge against cognitive approaches, from the torchbearers of psychoanalysis, is that they might actually make things worse..."

"... that finding ways to manage your depressed or anxious thoughts, for example, may simply postpone the point at which you’re driven to take the plunge into self-understanding and lasting change. CBT’s implied promise is that there’s a relatively simple, step-by-step way to gain mastery over suffering. But perhaps there’s more to be gained from acknowledging how little control – over our lives, our emotions, and other people’s actions – we really have? The promise of mastery is seductive not just for patients but therapists, too. 'Clients are anxious about being in therapy, and inexperienced therapists are anxious because they don’t have a clue what to do,” writes the US psychologist Louis Cozolino in a new book, Why Therapy Works. 'Therefore, it is comforting for both parties to have a task they can focus on.'"

From "Therapy wars: the revenge of Freud/Cheap and effective, CBT became the dominant form of therapy, consigning Freud to psychology’s dingy basement. But new studies have cast doubt on its supremacy – and shown dramatic results for psychoanalysis. Is it time to get back on the couch?" — in The Guardian, by Oliver Burkeman.

"What’s more wholesome than reading? Yet books wield a dangerous power: the best erode self, infecting readers with ideas."

Here's an essay titled "Dark Books" by Tara Isabella Burton.

Throughout the 19th century, novels were regarded with the same suspicion with which we treat, say, Eli Roth’s ‘torture-porn’ Saw movies today. They were dangerous not simply because of the stories they might contain – the romantic expressions of wish-fulfillment, for example, that led Emma Bovary down the garden path of adultery – but also because reading itself was seen as a kind of possession: an encroachment of the ‘other’ upon the self.

In his condemnatory tract Popular Amusements (1869), the American clergyman Jonathan Townley Crane cautioned his flock against reading novels: ‘novel-readers spend many a precious hour in dreaming out clumsy little romances of their own, in which they themselves are the beautiful ladies and the gallant gentlemen who achieve impossibilities…’ only to find themselves ‘merged in the hero of the story’, losing the sense of who they really are.....

"In the Sinhala language, [trolling] is called ala kireema (අල කිරීම), which means 'Turning it into Potatoes (Sabotage).'"

"Sometimes it is used as ala vagaa kireema (අල වගා කිරීම)—'Planting Potatoes.' People/Profiles who [do] trolling often are called 'Potato Planters'—ala vagaakaruvan (අල වගාකරුවන්). This seems to be originated from university slang ala væda (අල වැඩ) which means 'Potato business' is used for breaking the laws/codes of the university."

From the Wikipedia article "Internet troll."

So there's a man in Australia who — for his signature — draws a little penis.

"Suspecting that no one at the Australian Electoral Commission would scrutinise the application to change his address, [Jared Hyams] scribbled a caricature of a penis in the box that asked for a signature. 'I thought it would be a laugh; they would approve it and next year I would sign something different,' the 33-year-old said. 'But when I did this signature all of a sudden the shit hit the fan. I was receiving letters and phone calls telling me I couldn't have it. I thought, that's interesting, why not?' And so began a five year battle with state and federal government agencies over the question of what constitutes a legitimate signature...."



"'What a signature is comes down to the function, not the actual form. Generally, it's a person putting a mark on a piece of paper by their own hand. As soon as you start defining what a signature is you run into problems - if it's meant to be someone's name how do we define that because most signatures are just illegible scribble.'"

The death of "Poor Joshua!"

Commemorated by Linda Greenhouse. 

A series of savage beatings by his father, who had obtained custody after a divorce and whose history of abuse had been reported to the local child welfare authorities to no avail, left Joshua comatose and permanently brain damaged at the age of 4.... His biological mother, acting on his behalf, sued the Winnebago County, Wis., Department of Social Services for depriving Joshua of the “liberty” protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court’s rejection of that claim, in a 1989 opinion written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, provoked Justice Harry A. Blackmun to exclaim in dissent: “Poor Joshua!”...

For readers who don’t know the case, I’ll describe it here both because it continues to define an important part of our constitutional landscape and because, as the seasonal remembrances wind down, Joshua DeShaney Braam’s unsought role in a Supreme Court decision that limited government’s obligation to its citizens shouldn’t go unmarked.....

“That the state once took temporary custody of Joshua does not alter the analysis,” Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, “for when it returned him to his father’s custody, it placed him in no worse position than that in which he would have been had it not acted at all; the state does not become the permanent guarantor of an individual’s safety by having once offered him shelter.”

I had not noticed that Joshua DeShaney (later Joshua Braam) had died last November, here in Wisconsin. A very sad story. The Supreme Court was put in the position of having to decide when we can properly say that the government has deprived a person of liberty without due process. The terrible harm came from his father, and while we can all look back and wish that social services had stepped in sooner, the Court wouldn't see a rights violation in the failure to intervene. Poor Joshua lived to be 36.

Justice Blackmun's 2-word outcry "Poor Joshua!" is a famous peak in judicial empathy.

"Actually, it’s society that’s getting a free ride on women’s unrewarded contributions to the perpetuation of the human race."

"As Marx might have said had he deemed women’s work worth including in his labor theory of value (he didn’t), 'reproductive labor' (as feminists call the creation and upkeep of families and homes) is the basis of the accumulation of human capital. I say it’s time for something like reparations."

Writes Judith Shulevitz in the NYT. The "something like reparations" is the Universal Basic Income ("UBI"), which goes to every person in the country — not just women, not just caregivers, not just to non-wage-earners. She's guessing it could be something like "$12,000 a year per citizen over 18, and $4,000 per child." She imagines the costs being paid by cutting back the military and taxing the rich (and also by saving on various anti-poverty programs that might become unnecessary).

Do you like UBI? Do you like it more with this "something like reparations" feminist argument or would some other argument work better?

"Transfer of emotion" — the "practiced salesman’s term for the magical moment when a consumer becomes one with a garment he has just met."

Experienced by Guy Trebay in "One Man, Five Designers/Theory meets practice as our men’s wear critic tries out the clothes that he has only viewed from the front row."

It would understate things to say that an emotional transfer kicked in when I put on the sleek two-button suit, whose details — pick-stitched lapels; deep double vents; waist adjusters (to eliminate a belt’s bisecting ugliness); a superfluous yet appealingly anachronistic ticket pocket — contributed to the spell.... Seldom have I felt more like money than I did while riding the R train to work on the morning I took the suit for its test ride, or when sluicing through the Times Square mobs and Elmos wearing Mr. Lauren’s $5,995 suit....

A very interesting experiment, well described. And I really loved this quote from Oscar Wilde: "Fashion is a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!"

That had me searching my Kindle version of "Complete Works of Oscar Wilde" for the word "ugliness." I happened upon this interchange in "The Picture of Dorian Gray":

“How can you say that? I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.”

“Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?” cried the Duchess....

“Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys....” 

"Bernie is my No. 1 choice, and Trump is No. 2. They’re not that different.”

Said Daniel Nadeau, 22, of St. Albans, Vt., quoted "Overflow Crowd for Donald Trump in Bernie Sanders’s Backyard," the NYT report on Trump's rally in Burlington, Vermont. There's also:

“I’m a Trump guy, but I do like Bernie,” said Peter Vincenzo, 59, who works installing hardwood floors and traveled from Ohio for the rally. “There are a lot of parallels between these two guys. There’s a populist appeal that comes with both of them.”

Are Trump and Bernie tapping the same energy?

"This article originally misidentified the bloggers Tracy of fanserviced-b and Cat Cactus of Snow White and the Asian Pear as 'self-identified feminist academics and scholars.'"

"Neither blogger self-identifies as a feminist, and Cat Cactus is not an academic. The piece also stated that Tracy and Cat Cactus are among women who 'view the elaborate [K-beauty] routine not as vanity but rather as an act of radical feminist self-care.' Both bloggers disavow this view, and neither of them were contacted for the piece."

That's one hell of a correction on a Slate article that was already whacked out on its own terms — "Radical Self-Care/Meet the feminist academics who love K-beauty," by Rebecca Schuman. I was all you've got to be kidding me long before I got to the correction. Just to give you a taste of what Schuman was dishing up raving about some 10-step Korean beauty products:

... K-beauty is... popular with self-identified feminist academics and scholars... Indeed, Stockton University English and digital humanities professor and Web designer Adeline Koh published an entire blog post on the subject.... "I’ve started to view beauty as a form of self-care, instead of a patriarchal trap. One of my deepest inspirations, the writer and activist Audre Lorde, famously declared that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.'"

Just the phrase "an entire blog post" made me laugh. 

“Self-care, especially for a woman of color, is radical,” [my colleague Dorothy Kim, a professor of medieval literature at Vassar College]  tells me. Korean beauty “is a little breath of relaxing joy and feminist community.”...

Part of why K-beauty in particular seems to have trended in academia is that... [it] can be blended fairly seamlessly with a solitary, writing-intensive profession. More than one scholar I interviewed reported dividing writing or grading goals into mask units. Several plan to incorporate group masking into informal meetings at this weekend’s Modern Languages Association conference (which makes the whole experience sound a tad less odious).

It even intersects with some scholarship—for example, Koh’s current book project, which is “a comparative study of representations of whiteness in different parts of the world.”... For example, “Korean beauty products often sell themselves as ‘whitening,’ which makes people in the U.S. think that they are bleaching their skin....  This makes for some awkward translations, though—such as the Korean brand with a product called White Power Essence....

Boldface mine. Laughter mine.