"We've created government systems that maintain human beings in poverty and ignorance so that politicians can count on their votes."

"And that is a crime against morality.... Blame is assessed and pressed like hot iron into the flanks of the rich, or of 'corporations,' and others with means, a moronic and frightening misunderstanding of how jobs are created. It is as if 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain' has become economic policy. And by such logic all we must do is lower the rich into a giant cauldron, add salt and bay leaves and boil them down for soup to soothe the neighborhoods on fire... What isn't discussed enough when riots happen and neighborhoods burn is the one thing most common to all these decaying urban tinderboxes. They're run by Democrats. Baltimore is a Democratic city, Milwaukee is a Democratic city, Chicago, Detroit, and on and on. This is a most inconvenient truth. This is what binds them."

From "Road to urban despair paved by Democrats," by John Kass in The Chicago Tribune.

"As for the pasta, Lader admits to putting a colander in her roommate's bedsheets but insists it contained no noodles."

"Her act of protest, she maintains, was to draw attention to the fact that Brownstein wasn't pulling her fair share of the housework around the apartment."

From "Roommate drama lands Penn State sorority sisters in federal court."

The NYT goes for balance, with Sunday articles about "Trump's Empire" and the Clinton Foundation.

Let's take a look at that balance. Here's how the articles are stacked up right now on the home page:



Putting the articles together makes an implicit statement that the NYT is applying its investigative powers in a professional journalistic fashion to both candidates and delving into the questions about the nature of their wealth and their financial dealings. Putting the Trump article in larger print and on top conveys the impression that the investigation into him turned up more serious problems.

So does the language used.

The words "Trump's Empire" parallel "Foundation Donor's." It doesn't even say "Clinton Foundation." The name "Clinton" is used in "Clinton's Candidacy," which faces "obstacles." The active characters are the donors, raising obstacles for her candidacy (not even directly for her, but for the abstraction that is her candidacy). See all that distancing? She's essentially the hero of that headline, with a worthy goal and facing obstacles from other characters. Read the finer print too. See how she's the hero? A classic hero is even named: Achilles! And speaking of names, none of the donors are named. You have to click through to find the worrisome list: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.

But Trump has an "empire" — that doesn't sound American — and his empire has "hazy ties" — sounds spurious! — and $650 million in debt. That sounds like a lot of money! No dollar amount is specified in the headline or the squib about the Clinton foundation. The Trump debt is presumably owed to banks as part of a huge, ongoing real estate enterprise, so I don't know what's nefarious about that, but I guess something is "hazy," and it looks like he might have grossly misstated the debt in the federal electing filing, though the use of the word "apparent" — in "nearly twice the amount apparent in his federal election filing" — makes me (a detector of semantic hijinks) suspect semantic hijinks.

So, let's finally click through and see how these 2 stories compare. The one on Hillary is called "Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign." This is by Amy Chozick and Steve Eder.

"As I learned more about the legal profession, I realized it wasn’t a good fit for my personality."

"I’m not the sort of person who feels comfortable winning when it means the other side loses something of equal or greater value. I’d feel even worse if I were to win a victory for my client that was ill deserved and accomplished only through my weasel-tastic skills. I had been raised to decline offers of candy from family friends under the theory that I had done nothing to deserve it. I was the kind of person who needed a job that made other people happy, ideally with a side benefit of making me rich and famous too."

From Scott Adams, "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life" (p. 39).

"An 'introvert' hangover is a pretty terrible thing to experience. It starts with an actual physical reaction to overstimulation."

"Your ears might ring, your eyes start to blur, and you feel like you’re going to hyperventilate. Maybe your palms sweat. And then your mind feels like it kind of shuts down, building barriers around itself as if you had been driving on a wide open road, and now you’re suddenly driving in a narrow tunnel. All you want is to be at home, alone, where it’s quiet...."

"He said people who are here is the toughest part of the immigration debate, that it must be something that respects border security..."

"... but deals with this in a humane and efficient manner... The idea is we’re not getting someone in front of the line, we’re doing it in a legal way, but he wants to hear ideas of how we deal with 11 million people that are here with no documents."

He's full of surprises. Watch out for Nice Trump. What will Hillary do if Nice Trump arrives on the scene?

Cyclist's wildlife encounter...

"What do you have to lose?"

Trump argument in the form of a question to black voters.

It's memorable and outrageous and irritating enough to tempt opponents into a place they may end up not liking.

The problem of using material from "Idiocracy" in an anti-Trump ad.

Yes, the Donald Trump phenomenon feels like "Idiocracy" to a lot of people, but who owns that material? Not Etan Cohen, who wrote it, or his collaborator Mike Judge, and not Terry Crews, the actor who plays the President in the movie, but 20th Century Fox.

If you were the decisionmaker at 20th Century Fox, would you agree to letting that material be used in a partisan political ad? Even if you were opposed to Trump, it's not a good idea. Who are the continuing fans of that movie? I'll bet a lot of them are Trump supporters. And the movie stands on its own as a timeless critique of American culture and politics. It's bad to capture that value and channel it into something transitory and partisan.

Anyway, The Daily Beast quotes Mike Judge complaining:

“It kind of fell apart.... It was announced that [the ads] were anti-Trump, and I would’ve preferred to make them and then have the people decide. Terry Crews had wanted to just make some funny Camacho ads, and Etan [Cohen] and I had written a few that I thought were pretty funny, and it just fell apart. I wanted to put them out a little more quietly and let them go viral, rather than people announcing we’re making anti-Trump ads. Just let them be funny first. Doing something satirical like that is better if you just don’t say, ‘Here we come with the anti-Trump ads!’ Also, when Terry heard that announcement he wasn’t happy about it."

Of course, talking to The Daily Beast is creating virality. This ad is available there. I've watched it.

By the way, the text at The Daily Beast does not support its headline: "‘Idiocracy’ Director Mike Judge: Fox Killed Our Anti-Trump Camacho Ads." Judge doesn't say that! And Fox — the movie division (not even Fox News) — didn't nix the ads.

Judge is only saying they gave up when the viral approach was blown by an open announcement that they are anti-Trump. I wonder what really happened. He seems to still be trying to get the ad in circulation, so respect for rights owned by 20th Century Fox doesn't seem to be such a big consideration. Talking about the rights may be a device to give 20th Century Fox separation from the ad project. And that announcement Judge purports to be upset about: Maybe he chose to do that to make sure no one would misread it as pro-Trump. Once that's nailed down, it's time to send this thing out into the world with Judge, Cohen, and Crews sort of posing as victims — or so I suspect.

The fact is that the ad isn't really that good. What does it really say about Trump? If you don't know the movie too well, the use of a very buffoonish black man to make a statement is open to all sorts of interpretation and the potential for offense is great. Are they trying to say Trump is bad because he reminds them of a clownish, hyper-masculine black man? And why is the black man getting used as a means to an end?

How will you celebrate...

... Bill Clinton's 70th birthday?

"All I feel is myself annoying myself because I'm breathing on myself."

Testing the "Aluminum Spa for Face":



The product exists and can be bought right now on Amazon, either for $12.58 or $76.00. Bunny said she paid something like $26. Maybe it's Japanese currency manipulation. I don't know how that works. But does Aluminum Spa for Face work? Watch the video!

"2 cheers for all the tears of my manservants."

"NPR Deletes Comments, Says Commenters Are Too Old And Male."

That is about the angle I was thinking of taking if I could ever slog through NPR's lengthy explanation. I was, essentially, bored out of critiquing NPR.

"Hillary Clinton talks more like a man than she used to."

Headline at the Washington Post (illustrated by a photo of Hillary doing that gaping maw laugh, which men don't do). From the article:

Women rarely act “like women” to achieve power and influence in politics. Women aspiring toward political leadership are more often expected to adopt masculine styles of behavior in order to get their points across...

My analysis of Clinton’s rhetoric draws on research conducted by psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker and his colleagues have discovered that men and women tend to speak differently — not necessarily in the content or topics of their conversations, but in the use of seemingly unremarkable “function words,” such as pronouns and prepositions...

In general, women tend to use pronouns (you, theirs), and especially first-person singular pronouns (I, me), more frequently than men. They also use common verbs and auxiliary verbs (is, has, be, go), social (friend, talk), emotional (relieved, safe, kind), cognitive (think, because), and tentative (guess, maybe) words at higher rates than men.

Men, on the other hand, tend to use first-person plural words (the royal “we”), articles (a, an, the), prepositions (of, to, under), big words (over six letters), words associated with anger (destroy, kill), and swear words ([redacted]) more frequently than women....

Well, fuck.

"I really like humble Trump, and that’s what I saw last night. That’s the father I know. And here’s a man who’s not a politician..."

"... he’s not a PC guy either, and he has run on not being politically correct and every single day he’s out there giving speeches. He has strayed, and he admitted it last night. When he said it last night, the audience went crazy. It’s cool that he toned it back. It was really neat that he did that.”

Said Eric Trump.

"When future historians write about us... we will undoubtedly stand alone among nations and be known forevermore as 'THOSE WHO CHOSE CHEESE.'"

"Our mental health has been in a semi-wretched condition for quite some time now. One of the reasons for this distress, aside from CHOOSING CHEESE as a way of life, is the fact that we have (against some incredibly stiff competition) emerged victorious as the biggest bunch of liars on the face of the planet. No society has managed to invest more time and energy in the perpetuation of the fiction that it is moral, sane, and wholesome than our current crop of Modern Americans. This same delusion is the Mysterious Force behind our national desire to avoid behaving in any way that might be construed as INTELLIGENT. Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. To cosmeticize it, many otherwise normal citizens attempt a peculiar type of self-inflicted homemade mental nose-job (designed to lower the recipient's socio-intellectual profile to the point where the ability to communicate on the most mongolian level provides the necessary certification to become ONE OF THE GUYS). Let's face it... nobody wants to hang out with someone who is smarter than they are. This is not FUN."

From an essay for Newsweek magazine, written by Frank Zappa, that became liner notes on the album "You Are What You Is" after Newsweek rejected it as too "idiosyncratic," and that I became aware of when it was quoted in the movie "Eat That Question," which I saw last night. I took notes so I could remember a few bloggable things, and my note for this just says "Cheese as a way of life." You can find the whole essay here.

I feel powerfully motivated to censor the word "mongolian" from that passage or cut it short before getting to that, but instead I'll embed this incredibly politically incorrect song — also featured in the movie (we're told it was a big hit in Norway) — "Bobby Brown Goes Down":



(Lyrics here, in case you don't believe your ears or don't want to trouble yourself with listening.)