At the Whale-Vomits-Jonah Café...

... feel free to spew what you like.

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The photo is from the "Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art" exhibit at the Chazen Museum. The painting in the foreground is "Whale Fish Vomiting Jonah" (1993) by Jarinyanu David Downs.

The fish story from the Bible (KJV): "Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly, and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land."

I watched the Stormy Daniels show on "60 Minutes." Did you?

Video and transcript here, in case you need to catch up.

Anderson Cooper: He was showing you his own picture on the cover of a magazine.

Stormy Daniels: Right, right. And so I was like, "Does this-- does this normally work for you?" And he looked very taken-- taken back, like, he didn't really understand what I was saying. Like, I was-- does, just, you know, talking about yourself normally work?" And I was like, "Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it." (LAUGH) And I'll never forget the look on his face. He was like--

Anderson Cooper: What-- what was his look?

Stormy Daniels: Just, I don't think anyone's ever spoken to him like that, especially, you know, a young woman who looked like me. And I said, you know, "Give me that," and I just remember him going, "You wouldn't." "Hand it over." And-- so he did, and I was like, turn around, drop 'em."

Anderson Cooper: You-- you told Donald Trump to turn around and take off his pants.

Stormy Daniels: Yes.

Anderson Cooper: And did he?

Stormy Daniels: Yes. So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little -- you know had underwear on and stuff and I just gave him a couple swats.

Anderson Cooper: This was done in a joking manner....

When what you care about in roast chicken is "a shatteringly crispy skin," you need to use a hair dryer.

Says Helen Rosner (at the New Yorker). You don't cook it with the heat of the dryer. In fact, Rosner recommends the "cool" setting. You use the hair dryer to dry out the chicken skin. That's before you put it in the oven to roast it.

I am far from the first person to bring the device into the kitchen... [T]he legendary cookbook author Marcella Hazan calls for a six-to-eight-minute session with a handheld hair dryer in her recipe for crisp-skinned roast duck.... Skin is a matrix of water, fat, and proteins—adding heat makes the water evaporate, the fat render, and the proteins settle into the rigid structure we call “crispiness.” By removing water from the equation ahead of time, you eliminate steam that might de-crisp the crisping proteins in the oven, for one thing; and, more importantly, the rigidity caused by the dehydration helps the skin stay in place while the proteins take their time firming up.... “When the bird roasts in the oven later,” Hazan writes, “the fat melts and slowly runs off through the open pores, leaving the flesh succulent, but not greasy, while allowing the skin to become deliciously crisp.”

I'm hoping this a cure for the disappointing blobby areas that undermine my interest in taking the trouble to roast my own chicken.

I like the idea of bringing non-kitchen tools into the kitchen. Or are you repelled by the idea of getting something hair-related that close to food?

Rosner uses a Dyson hair dryer — and that's what I have too. I'm giving you an Amazon link in case you're motivated to buy one, because they're weirdly expensive, making it a good opportunity to support this blog which is part of the the Amazon Services Associates Program. The thing is excellent on hair and if it also works on chicken....

"Let us think the unthinkable. Let us imagine Donald Trump’s potential path to reelection as president of the United States."

So begins a Harper's essay by Thomas Frank (whose book "Listen, Liberal" I read and admired). He continues:

[I]magine his disastrous rule reaffirmed by an enthusiastic public, giving him four more years to insult and offend and enact even more poisonous measures. Reader, it could happen.... Imagine him, Reagan-like, lifted up on a wave of public adulation. The economy is firing on all cylinders; the ships of many nations are parading through New York Harbor; the fireworks are going off overhead and Trump is announcing that America is back, standing tall....

Skipping to the ending:

Before you close this magazine, chuckle cynically, and take a sip of gin, think for a second about the cultural and political delusions a roaring economy and rising wages would surely generate... Perhaps Donald Trump, elevated to the presidency in 2016 as an act of protest by what he called the “forgotten men and women of our country,” will actually appear to come through for them. Like Bill Clinton with his laserlike economic focus, Trump will seem to have delivered on what he promised: an economy that finally looks good for his supporters. For once, they will conclude, politics worked.

Cue the victory flotilla in New York Harbor. Cue the hundred-year night.

"I thought, 'I could simplify Miss S’s life. I could say that her suspicions of rape were fully justified..."

"... and that her doubt about the events was nothing but additional evidence of her thorough and long-term victimization. I could insist that her sexual partners had a legal obligation to ensure that she was not too impaired by alcohol to give consent. I could tell her that she had indisputably been subject to violent and illicit acts, unless she had consented to each sexual move explicitly and verbally. I could tell her that she was an innocent victim.' I could have told her all that. And it would have been true. And she would have accepted it as true, and remembered it for the rest of her life. She would have been a new person, with a new history, and a new destiny. But I also thought, 'I could tell Miss S that she is a walking disaster. I could tell her that she wanders into a bar like a courtesan in a coma, that she is a danger to herself and others, that she needs to wake up, and that if she goes to singles bars and drinks too much and is taken home and has rough violent sex (or even tender caring sex), then what the hell does she expect?' In other words, I could have told her, in more philosophical terms, that she was Nietzsche’s 'pale criminal'— the person who at one moment dares to break the sacred law and at the next shrinks from paying the price. And that would have been true, too, and she would have accepted it as such, and remembered it. If I had been the adherent of a left-wing, social-justice ideology, I would have told her the first story. If I had been the adherent of a conservative ideology, I would have told her the second. And her responses after having been told either the first or the second story would have proved to my satisfaction and hers that the story I had told her was true— completely, irrefutably true. And that would have been advice. I decided instead to listen. I have learned not to steal my clients’ problems from them...."

From "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" by Jordan Peterson. That passage is from Rule 9, "Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't."

ADDED: From a Harper's essay about Nietzsche's "pale criminal":

At first blush [the passage (quoted at the link)]... seem[s] to be a glorification of the mind of a violent criminal, of the person who “rises above” social morals... But on closer inspection... this passage is an attempt to parse the mentality of a common criminal.... He commits a murder in the course of some minor crime not because he designs to murder, but because it seems expedient for the moment. Then the reality of what he has done seeps in, and he is horrified. In this sense, I think, Nietzsche uses the word “pale,” as if the blood is running from his head, as the shock of his crime sets in. He has not killed because of an animal impulse that regales in the kill—the primal Blutlust.... The sublimating force of society still has an incomplete grasp on him....

So the “pale criminal” is a study of evil latent in humankind—not the most dramatic or threatening kind of evil, but rather the sort of evil which infests the small-minded or petty thug, the creature who acts without deeper moral bearings. The “pale criminal” may well commit a deceit, a fraud, a confidence trick, without even thinking of his conduct as a crime, and may experience remorse in the wake of his actions. He is a diseased and crippled specimen.....

"Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on."

"Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted. Problem is that a new...... ....lawyer or law firm will take months to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more), which is unfair to our great country - and I am very happy with my existing team. Besides, there was NO COLLUSION with Russia, except by Crooked Hillary and the Dems!"

Trump tweets this morning, here and here — as we're hearing the news (NYT) that Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing will not be joining Trump's special counsel legal team.

That one sentence — "Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted" — makes it sound as though he knows he needs to take a legal position that challenges the limits of professional ethics! How is that smart? Whether it's true or not, why say that? Lawyers are just a bunch of money-grubbing fame-seekers! Why say that when he's going to need us to credit his lawyers? Is there some secret "genius" reason? Like... he's really casting aspersions on the lawyers who are out to get him, Mueller and company?

ADDED: I guess Trump wrote "some are conflicted" because, according to Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, quoted at the NYT link, they had "conflicts" that "prevent" them from "joining the president’s special counsel legal team." But why did he write "some [lawyers] are conflicted" instead of something more like "some lawyers have conflicts" or, better "some lawyers have conflicts of interest." To my ear, the locution to be conflicted connotes a struggle within the individual, drawn in 2 directions by competing concerns — such as, on one side, a desire for fame and money and on the other side ethical objections. The way Trump wrote, it sounds as though lawyers are feeling ambivalent about working for him, not that they have clients or business interests that present a conflict of interest.

"[Sion] Jair has heard the advice that you should test yourself mentally, do sudoku, crosswords and the like. But this doesn’t work for him."

"Not long ago, he tried to do a 'coffee time' crossword. He did it every day, in five minutes. But now he just stared blankly at the newspaper. 'Do you know, I couldn’t do two or three clues,' he says, shaking his head. 'So all that did was discourage me.' When he reads, Jair finds that he has forgotten the start of a sentence by the time he’s finished it. Nevertheless, as we wind our way up the Old Man [mountain], he has a precise recall of events that took place 50 years ago, even down to very specific details about the one-month Outward Bound course that first brought him to the Lake District. 'I had quite a good memory in the past,' he says. 'But that’s ironic, isn’t it? I can remember that my memory was good, but I can’t remember what about.' ... The future, when Jair thinks about it, can be a bit scary. He has no family, no companion (though he’d dearly like one); the one thing that’s always there for him is the Old Man of Coniston...."

From "Meet the man living with Alzheimer’s who climbs the same mountain every day/Sion Jair, 68, has climbed the Old Man of Coniston at least 5,000 times and the emerging science backs him up that regular, vigorous exercise is beneficial for those with the disease" (The Guardian).

Happiness is a warm gun.

"Sir Paul McCartney remembers Beatles icon John Lennon in New York march against gun violence."

"One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here," he said, "so it's important to me."

He added he was unsure if gun violence can be ended, adding: "But this is what we can do, so I'm here to do it."

ADDED: Perhaps you didn't know that the phrase "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was based on a headline on a gun magazine. John talks about that in the clip I've embedded, and here's Rolling Stone's description of the song (which it ranked, in 2011, as #24 on its list of "100 Greatest Beatles Songs" (personally, I ranked it #1 for a long time (and don't have any current ranking))):

The title was inspired by a headline in a gun magazine George Martin had showed Lennon that read Happiness is a Warm Gun — a variation on Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 bestseller Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. "I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon said. "A warm gun means that you just shot something."

Remember "Happiness Is a Warm Puppy"? It's kind of the worst of "Peanuts":

There were very rare moments of soft cheese in Peanuts'piquancy. For example, Lucy hugging Snoopy and declaring "Happiness is a warm puppy." That moment turned into a pioneering "book," composed of "Happiness is … " messages with accompanying drawings by Schulz, that became the No. 1 "nonfiction" work of 1963, and a prime mover in the Peanuts merchandising empire...

In the strip, Schulz would mock both merchandising and himself. When Lucy tried a second time to snatch Snoopy's warmth for her own happiness, he growled back, "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!" Schulz himself said it best: "Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy." But he also enabled the merchandising machine....

I associate that non-edgy commercialization of "Peanuts" with a lot of 1960s/1970s idiocy, especially that atrocious cartoon "Love Is..." Unless I'm mistaken, every page of "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" begins with "Happiness is..." and some other damned nice thing. I'm trying to look inside the book at Amazon, and I can't see enough pages to be sure, but I'm grossed out by the introduction: "Now more than ever, we need the simple exuberance that Charles Schulz and his gang of Peanut-sized philosophers so perfectly express."

Oh, that's a new introduction, written for the 2006 edition. I guess "Now more that ever" meant now that we've got the worst President ever, George Bush. Anyway, the original edition came out before the arrival of The Beatles and even before John F. Kennedy was — bang bang shoot shoot — shot.

When The Beatles did arrive, they sold the ultimate niceness: Love. And then we lapped up "Love is..."



Click to enlarge. Yes, adult partners are pictured as naked juveniles who have no genitalia but who are sexually attracted to each other and go to bed together, dressed, at long last, in pajamas. This one-panel comic has been running, in that mind-crushingly limited form, since 1970. I certainly haven't read even a small percentage of the panels that have run over the decades, but I'm just going to bet that neither the man nor the woman has ever said anything as rejecting as "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!"

"TNT would mean that when humans have robot partners with their own distinct personalities, they will be able to create children together."

"The personality of the robot partner, in theory, could be made into artificial chromosomes. Then, both the genetic information from the robot and the human partner could be inserted into a human embryo, via TNT [tissue nanotransfection technology]. This embryo could then be carried and given birth to by a surrogate. It may even be possible to create robot-human children at various different ages. Levy said: 'If one creates robot-human babies… you have to wait 15 years, until they are sufficiently adult-like, to see whether there are problems with the technology. I think what is likely to happen is [a research team] will try to produce robot-human children at different ages - aged 5, 10, 15 and so on.' Imagine a future where we may be able to create children that skip the teething stage and go straight to being moody teenagers."

That's at techradar by Claire Hutchinson who I don't think is taking this seriously enough. For one thing, if we had all this technology, why would we still have to exploit women to do "surrogate" work? For another thing, what's the point of having robot children if we can't picture them behaving with superhuman intelligence and ethics and kindness? Robot child is virtuous and respectful, not rude and selfish.

Emma Sulkowicz (of "Mattress Performance" fame) has a new gallery show that inquires into Asian-Amercan identity.

The "Mattress Performance" was so much about female identity that perhaps you did not even notice Sulkowicz's ethnic performance... or maybe you thought it would seem anti-Semitic to notice, because you think of Sulkowicz as Jewish. But you were wrong! From HuffPo:

“I realized so many things were related to being an Asian woman. I didn’t report it all because I’m Asian and told not to have emotions and just be successful,” they told HuffPost. “Now I’m having my first show that explores where race really intersects with feminism.”

Asian! It turns out Sulkowicz's mother is half Japanese and half Chinese.

One of the more commanding pieces of their exhibit showcases a banana sliced with a knife, a subversive statement on both gender and race, Sulkowicz explains. The piece is dedicated to their sister and contains a video of her cutting the banana and designating it a phallic symbol. The banana also represents the Asian-American experience.

“Banana is a term for Asians who are too Americanized. That’s a source of vulnerability,” Sulkowicz said, explaining that the knife cutting through the banana comes from a place of anger as well.

“We identify ourselves as angry Asians,” they added.

I had to stop and think about the pronouns. Did that "we" go with "they" and refer only to Sulkowicz, or is Sulkowicz speaking for Asians in general, expressing their anger via penis-cutting? I think it's the latter, because in the first quote, above, Sulkowicz uses "I" repeatedly.

Sulkowicz’s parents are represented in the exhibit, too. A suspended tea ceremony represents their mother, who is half Chinese, half Japanese.... An orb containing a bagel, fixings and iced coffee represents Sulkowicz’s Jewish father’s longstanding Sunday tradition....

Awfully stereotypical objects — tea for Chinese/Japanese and bagel for Jewish.

Sulkowicz describes a bowl containing Cheetos and chopsticks as being inspired their friend, Mae, who is half Chinese and half Japanese. “Mae eats Cheetos with chopsticks. That’s such a boiled-down example of growing up mixed-race Asian in New York. You’re eating American trash but with an Asian tool. It’s a moment I wanted to capture.”

Or Mae doesn't like getting that orange dust on her fingers. Quite sensible to eat Cheetos with chopsticks. Reminds me of how I eat a banana with a knife and fork. And I want to stress that I do that because I like to keep my hands clean, not because I'm expressing hostility toward genders and ethnicities that some people think of when they see a banana.

“It’s hard to be taken seriously as Asian woman in art world,” they said. “I feel highly sexualized. I’m so sick of men who come up to me after a performance and say, ‘Do you think anyone would care about your artwork if you weren’t pretty?’ When will you leave any room for my artwork to speak for itself?”

Sulkowicz tells us what men tell Sulkowicz,  that Sulkowicz is pretty. Why didn't Sulkowicz leave us any room to judge for ourselves — whether Sulkowicz is pretty and whether we should direct our attention to the question whether Sulkowicz is pretty? But I won't take the bait. I'll do what I would have done without being criticized for failing to do, let the artwork speak for itself. It seems to be a collection of obvious stereotypes and heavy-handed symbols that don't really say anything about the large group of individuals that are being aggressively clustered into a set called "Asians."

Has the gun-control movement overtaken the sex-control movement?

I say yes, solely on the basis of the signs I'm seeing at the protests that say "Arms Are For Hugging":



I can understand thinking of that slogan, with the obvious flipping of the meaning of "arms," but I would expect you to reject it or quickly hear from someone telling you to reject it because it is so discordant with the message of #MeToo. Just because you have arms doesn't make it self-evident that you have a right to hug me. It's saying biology is destiny, like saying "penises are for penetrating." Is that supposed to be an argument for something? The #MeToo movement has the message that your body is yours and no one else's desire for physical contact should prevail over your own idea of what is right for you. Yes, you have arms, but you don't have to hug.

And quite beyond this #MeToo discordance — arms , your flesh-and-blood arms, are useful for many things, not just hugging. Even assuming you like to hug and have someone you want to hug, there are lots of other things you can do with your arms, and you get to decide what they are "for." You might use your arms to use tools and build something, or to write or make communicative gestures (like a fist salute), or to play baseball, or to knit, or to aim a rifle (the other kind of arm) at a deer you're hunting for sport or an intruder who is breaking into your house and might otherwise rape you.

Oh! I'm back to #MeToo things again....

The Stormy Daniels lawyer tweeted that there are more details to come out and "Perfection lies within such details, and this perfection then becomes evident...."

Screenshot of my iPhone first thing this morning....



IN THE COMMENTS: I write:

What detail could there be in the Stormy Daniels story that isn't already out and about?

If it's something that wasn't in the original story that already came out, but something new AND damaging, it will raise the question why is she just putting this detail in now.

Either it's unimportant or it's going to hurt her credibility.

A Reasonable Man immediately says:

Or, she now feels that she is protected from any consequences associated with the NDA.

My response:

Seems to me she gave an interview to In Touch Weekly 6 years ago, and it wasn't published. That was long before there was an NDA. So what does the NDA have to do with the details she gave in that old interview? How could she have felt threatened by something that didn't exist.

I'm sorry, your idea just doesn't make sense to me. I'm assuming she told her story 6 years ago and it wasn't considered worth publishing. Later, it seemed worth publishing (and it did come out and an NDA was done). It might be interesting to see her tell the story now with 60-Minutes level probing and the aura of courage in standing up to the President of the United States, but what new details might there be? I stand by my original question: either the new details are not important or she will seem less credible to be telling a story that is inconsistent with her earlier story.

At the Ancestral Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want (and buy whatever you want through the Althouse Portal to Amazon).

I got my iPhone camera out at an exhibit called "Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection" at the Chazen Museum here in Madison. Australian Aboringinal artists work in what is a continuing artistic tradition going back many thousands of years— perhaps 40,000 years.



The painting that's in the center of the first photo and fills the frame in the second is by the Yuendumu Women's Collaborative and is called "Mina Mina Dreaming." The wall card says that "Mina Mina" means "home or living place," and it's a place "where ancestral women stopped to sit under desert oaks, get water, and collect snake vines to wrap around food bowls and cure headaches."

"The great Body of the People in every Free Government, must always be considered as the Husband of the Constitution thereof, and..."

"... consequently that as long as such Constitution performs the duties of Love Honor and Obedience to Her great Constituent Body, or Political Husband, She is entitled to be Kept both in sickness and in Health, with all possible Love and Fidelity by such her said Husband and that on a breach of her Duty she must expect to incur the Pains and Penalties of Divorce.”

So said William Stuart to Griffith Evans, in the debate about whether to ratify the Constitution. New York, 11 July 1788 (CC Vol. 6, p. 258).  I found that at "Constitutional Metaphors, Similes, and Analogies" at the UW's Center for the Study of the American Constitution, where there are many other fascinating metaphors, all from the debates about ratification.

But are there any metaphors in the text of the Constitution?

The question occurred to me as I was reading the comments to the post about the Seventh Circuit case rejecting an Establishment Clause challenge to a public school "Christmas Spectacular" concert. I happened to mention the metaphor of the wall that should, it is sometimes said, separate church and state. Someone appeared to observe that the constitutional text makes no mention of any wall, and it occurred to me that we really don't want any metaphor in the Constitution or in any other legally operable text.

Is there even one metaphor in the Constitution? All I could think of is "no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood" (in Article III). "Blood" refers to a person's descendants. But that scarcely counts as a metaphor. The use of the word "blood" like that goes all the way back to Old English. You might as well consider a metaphor to use "house" for the houses of Congress.

Metaphor is fine in arguments and explanations, so I think it's fine to say "wall of separation" if you want to speak of a strict interpretation of the Establishment Clause. Its absence from the Constitution doesn't mean that the strict interpretation is wrong, only that you don't put metaphors in a constitution.

But how do you like that William Stuart metaphor? The people are the husband and the Constitution is the wife and the Constitution must love, honor, and obey the people.

Are you listening to the children?

Trump wants Congress to give him a line-item veto on spending bills.

Trump tweets:

As a matter of National Security I've signed the Omnibus Spending Bill. I say to Congress: I will NEVER sign another bill like this again. To prevent this omnibus situation from ever happening again, I'm calling on Congress to give me a line-item veto for all govt spending bills!

Is there a plan for writing line-item-veto legislation in a new way that will be constitutional this time or is Trump hoping the Supreme Court will overrule Clinton v. New York or is this all just a lot of ultimately futile political theater?

The Court... explained that under the Presentment Clause, legislation that passes both Houses of Congress must either be entirely approved (i.e. signed) or rejected (i.e. vetoed) by the President. The Court held that by canceling only selected portions of the bills at issue, under authority granted him by the Act, the President in effect "amended" the laws before him. Such discretion, the Court concluded, violated the "finely wrought" legislative procedures of Article I as envisioned by the Framers.

Full text of the case here.