I've always been afraid to go for a walk alone in the woods...

... but I did it today. At Blue Mound:



I had the Indian Marker Tree Trail completely to myself. Beautiful!

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

The long view:

The point at which Brett Kavanaugh almost moves himself to tears: "I was focused on trying to be number 1 in my class and being captain of the varsity basketball team."

From the Fox News interview that aired just now.

ADDED: Kavanaugh (and his wife) gave a strong performance. He stuck to absolute denials, and he was asked the question I wanted to hear — did he ever drink to the point of a memory blackout — and he said he did not.

AND: There are so many things that might have made him cry, and clearly he didn't want to cry, but it provides an insight into his mind to see what was the thought that made it most difficult to maintain his composure. He'd been asked about partying and pursuing female companionship, and he was thinking about how he lived in those days. He was trying to be number 1 in his class. That meant a lot to him, and it took tremendous time and concentration. And then, the second thing, being captain of the varsity basketball team. What a good boy I was! All that striving, all that effort at goodness — and look what they are doing to me now!

ALSO: You'll see the whole interview. There were certain words that he repeated over and over, especially that he has always treated women with "dignity and respect" and that all he wants is "a fair process." Asked again and again to speculate about other people's motives, he always declined. He would not say anything bad about any individual. He always made it about the allegations, not the person. The person he spoke of was himself.

"Brett Kavanaugh said Monday he was a virgin in high school and college..."

The full Kavanaugh interview will air at 7 Eastern on Fox News.

And, I'm listening to Fox News now and hearing Brit Hume saying something very close to what I said this morning. I said:

The new allegations — from Avenatti and The New Yorker — are, I think, helping Kavanaugh's case.... After all the careful work creating credence and empathy for Christine Blasey Ford, we now have an onslaught, a piling on, and it's making Kavanaugh into a sort of hero, who must stand his ground. 

There was a problem when there was only Blasey's accusation, and it did seem that you'd need multiple accusations to take down Kavanaugh. Multiple accusations were needed to take down Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Alex Kozinski, etc. But this new material doesn't seem like more Blasey-like allegations, but something different and much more questionable and more noticeably unfair.

There's a real contrast to the carefully built up Blasey incident, and while the conflict with Blasey seemed to be too much of an unresolvable he said/she said, to say he said/she said was to elevate Blasey to equal status: her word against his. There was dignity in that, and Kavanaugh supporters were being circumspect and allowing that dramatic confrontation to unfold. Now, Kavanaugh antagonists have escalated the attack and seem willing — some of them, anyway — to use anything. I think more sober Kavanaugh antagonists — such as the NYT — rue this development.

ADDED: If the allegations are not true, Kavanaugh must stand his ground. If this effort to take him down works — if the allegations are not true — the same strategy will be used against the next nominee and the one after that. It will never end. If the allegations are true, he should have done something long ago. Either he should have have withdrawn, or he should have conceded his past wrongdoing, apologized sincerely, and said tactfully what he could to minimize the relevance of the incident to the question of his qualification to serve on the Court.

3 brothers demonstrate the problem of men — as opposed to boys — in shorts.

From a huge collection of adults recreating their childhood photographs (which made me laugh out loud about 20 times).

The problem of men in shorts is — as I've been saying for years — that they look like enlarged boys. It's self-infantilizing. But that's hilarious as a one-time photo prank. Not as a way of life.

Also, grabbing your crotch is cute if you're 3 years old. Hilarious as a one-time photo prank for an adult making fun of his old boy-self.

Love the socks and the way they grew up in reverse sizes. I mean the middle one stayed the same. Still the middle. But who cares about the middle child?

"These are smears, pure and simple. And they debase our public discourse ... But they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country."

"Such grotesque and obvious character assassination — if allowed to succeed — will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed."

Writes Brett Kavanaugh, quoted in the NYT. Also in the Times article is this undermining of the New Yorker's publication of a new allegation from a former Yale classmate named Deborah Ramirez:

The New York Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate Ms. Ramirez’s story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the episode and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself. The New Yorker strongly stood by its article.

The NYT also refers to Michael Avenatti's "additional salacious allegations on Twitter," and characterizes Republicans as "caught between the growing anger of many female voters over the Kavanaugh allegations and the demands of core conservative voters infuriated by what they see as a Democratic plot."

The new allegations — from Avenatti and The New Yorker — are, I think, helping Kavanaugh's case. The NYT seems to realize this.

I read between the lines that NYT would not itself have published the Ramirez allegations. It had the story and tried unsuccessfully to corroborate it. And it won't even repeat the "salacious" allegations Avenatti dumped on Twitter. After all the careful work creating credence and empathy for Christine Blasey Ford, we now have an onslaught, a piling on, and it's making Kavanaugh into a sort of hero, who must stand his ground. It's no longer just about the fulfillment of his own aspirations to power and prestige and his own good name. He's now the champion of everyone in the future who — if he fails — will reject the call to public service.

ADDED: A preview of Kavanaugh on FOX News at 7 Eastern:

"I'm not going to let false accusations drive us out of this process." —Brett Kavanaugh

Watch @MarthaMacCallum's full interview with Judge Kavanaugh and his wife Ashley tonight on Fox News Channel at 7p ET. https://t.co/QFmLfIwW4R pic.twitter.com/r8J2TUYQDj

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 24, 2018

Rosenstein resigns.

Axios.

I know, Kavanaugh and sex sex sex are so distracting that this big story will just waft by unnoticed....

ADDED: Everything is spinning out of control...



(Image is what you see at Axios, displaying from the next story down after the one I link to.)

AND: The post title is inaccurate. I'm seeing now that he's only considering resigning and that Rosenstein is currently at the White House and we're waiting to hear more.

MORE: WaPo is saying that R has offered to resign.

PLUS: "With Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s ouster, Solicitor General Noel Francisco is slated to oversee the Robert Mueller probe under the Justice Department’s succession plan" (Washington Times).

Vox: "Meet Noel Francisco, the man who will oversee the Mueller probe if Trump fires Rosenstein":

"I'm a sentimental sap, that's all/What's the use of trying not to fall?/I have no will, you've made your kill/'Cause you took advantage of me!"

That's a 1928 song with lyrics by Lorenz Hart.

I'm thinking about it this morning after reading the questions Michael Avenatti proposed that the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Brett Kavanaugh: "Did you ever witness a line of men outside a bedroom at any house party where you understood a woman was in the bedroom being raped or taken advantage of?” and whether "he ever tried to prevent men from raping or taking advantage of women at any house party." I called "taken advantage of" a "strange locution." You're inquiring about rape, but you're lumping it together with sex where there's "taking advantage."

I'm so hot and bothered that I don't know
My elbow from my ear...

Or — to read Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker — you're so drunk you don't know a plastic penis from a fleshly one.

Here I am with all my bridges burned
Just a babe in arms where you're concerned
So lock the doors and call me yours
'Cause you took advantage of me

The Wikipedia article about the song says it "can be sung by either gender, but has traditionally been sung by women." Here. Check out the feeling when a man sings it (and here's my 2005 post "Songs transformed with the sex of the singer"):



I have no will, you've made your kill...

What's the use of Brett Kavanaugh trying not to fall?

I'm just like an apple on a bough/And you're gonna shake me down somehow...

With the devious use of the disjunctive "or," Michael Avenatti raises a cloud of "gang rape" suspicion around Brett Kavanaugh.

I'm reading the shockingly titled Daily News article "Brett Kavanaugh and pals accused of gang rapes in high school, says lawyer Michael Avenatti."

“We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and others would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them,” Avenatti said in an email to Mike Davis, chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Gang rape??!!!

Yes, Avenatti wrote "gang rape" in his email to the Committee. And not just one gang rape — multiple gang rapes. What is the sudden, breakout hysteria?!

Avenatti did not disclose any details or identities of his witnesses.

All eyes on Avenatti. What a trickster this man is! Let's look at what he dropped on the public last night, just as we were hearing the weird new allegation that came out in The New Yorker. We'd barely had the chance to begin to process the story of a Yale college woman who, while seemingly too drunk to be sure if she was looking at a real penis or a fake one, saw Brett Kavanaugh pulling up his pants and heard — as she remembers it — somebody say his name. And then along came Avenatti to waggle his teaser at us. Boldface added:

Avenatti hinted at the nature of his allegations when he suggested to the Senate Judiciary Committee a series of questions to ask Kavanaugh.

One of his questions: “Did you ever target one or more women for sex or rape at a house party? Did you ever assist Mark Judge or others in doing so?”

Also, Avenatti suggested asking Kavanaugh: “Did you ever attend any house party during which a woman was gang raped or used for sex by multiple men?”

And: “Did you ever witness a line of men outside a bedroom at any house party where you understood a woman was in the bedroom being raped or taken advantage of?”

Avenatti also said Kavanaugh should be asked if he ever tried to prevent men from raping or taking advantage of women at any house party....

Are those the questions Avenatti used when collecting his witnesses — with "rape" never asked about independently from "sex" (or the strange locution "taken advantage of")?

Should Kavanaugh opponents welcome Avenatti's entrance onto this scene? I hear in him the echoes of a longstanding fight against fraternities and the accusation that they are a conspiracy of rapists. We got deeply into this issue back when Rolling Stone published its piece on the University of Virginia which turned out into a fiasco for those who sprung at an opportunity to describe a specific incident to stand in for all the bad behavior they wanted to alarm us about. Here we go again. I assume — but what do I know? — that there is horrible sex going on in the context of college drinking parties. I assume a lot of young women and men get hurt. They are used for sex and taken advantage of and — especially if you broadly define the word — raped.

You could cast aspersions on every man who ever belonged to a fraternity that held drinking parties. But should that serious problem be suddenly dumped on Brett Kavanaugh?

What Avenatti is doing resonates with something I wrote on September 18th: "The question that can destroy Brett Kavanaugh: Have you ever been so drunk you could not remember what happened?"

College happened. There is a drinking culture. It's tied to cheap, drunken sex. Can Kavanaugh assure us that he was never anywhere close to that?

Are you and everyone you care about free of the fraternity gang rape stink? If Kavanaugh falls, are you ready for the fall of every man who had drunken sex in college?

The effort to lure white South African farmers to Russia — which offers "abundant farmland, relative safety and a country that holds tight to traditional Christian values."

"What is not said — but clearly understood — is how this fits neatly into the identity politics of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin," WaPo reports.

The West may view Putin largely as a strategic and military adversary. Yet inside Russia, much of his support grows from the idea of Russia as the caretaker for a white, Christian and old-style order — rejecting “so-called tolerance, genderless and infertile,” in Putin’s own words in 2013....

There is Russia’s declining population and fresh ambitions to protect fellow Christians. Add to that the unease among some white South African farmers as the country debates possible land redistribution to redress racial imbalances during apartheid.... South Africa's land expropriation debate and the myth of "white genocide" have been a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world for years....

“I want them to know that Russia can be their mother country, too,” said [Victor] Poluboyarenko, who assists the human rights ombudsman in the agricultural heartland of Stavropol....

“We understand that our government must listen to the majority of the people,” said Johannes du Toit.... “But we don’t want our children to suffer from the roll of the dice.”....

“In Russia I enjoyed the freedom of just driving about, anywhere you want to go, between fields and into forests,” said 60-year-old Jan Geldenhuys....

"Conservative actor James Woods tweeted a hoax meme in July. Twitter just locked him out of his account."

WaPo reports.

An account belonging to a woman named Sara Miller, who identified herself as Woods’s girlfriend, first tweeted the news early Friday morning with images of the email Woods received from Twitter. The email stated the July tweet “includes text and imagery that has the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election,” and instructed Woods to delete the tweet before he can use his account again, according to Miller’s tweet....

The meme that Twitter appears to have taken issue with is a photo of three men with exaggerated smiles alongside the text, “We’re making a Woman’s Vote Worth more by staying home.” It also used the hashtags #LetWomenDecide and #NoMenMidterm. In his tweet, Woods wrote, “Pretty scary there is a distinct possibility this could be real,” referencing the meme. “Not likely, but in this day and age of absolute liberal insanity, it is at least possible…”

This gets the "Era of That's Not Funny" tag.

Twitter murders humor. But Twitter without humor is dead.

Trump at the U.N. — live now:

(You can scroll back to the beginning if it begins in the middle. This is live.)

"If someone had told me, if anyone had told me, there is a specific law that says this is a crime."

"I did not know. I’ve said this over and over again. Had I’d known, if anyone knows my personality. Just the idea, this would count as a crime."

Said Mary Kay Letourneau, who had an affair with a 12-year-old boy whom she met when he was 8 and she was a schoolteacher.

As for the boy, Vili Fualaau, who is now 36, he says that for him it all got started when he was "showing off to a cousin of mine, betting because we used to brag about girls when we were young." He made a bet with his cousin that he could "get" Letourneau, and he pursued her, they "became really close and then I forgot about the bet."

“‘But we were in love. It’s love. I didn’t make him do anything. If anything, he was wanting it. He was pushing for it. We were in love. How can it be a crime?,’” he claims she said. “I had to repeat many times in many different ways why it’s a crime.”

The children of Letourneau and Fualaau — Audrey and Georgia — are now grown up, 21 and 19. Audrey says "It doesn’t feel any different" to have a life with such a notorious beginning. "It’s not really brought to our attention. We grew up with it so we’re adapted to it, I guess." It's the only life you could possibly have, and you're alive. What can you say about that?

"[He] said he had been scared and often cried while adrift... Every time he saw a large ship..."

"... he said, he was hopeful, but more than 10 ships had sailed past him. None of them stopped or saw [him]."

From "Indonesian teenager survives 49 days adrift at sea in 'fishing hut'" (BBC). The "fishing hut" is "a 'rompong' - a floating fish trap without any paddles or engine... which... floats in the middle of the sea but is anchored to the seabed by ropes." Before the ropes snapped, the 19-year-old Aldi Novel Adilang lived alone out there, visited once a week by "someone from his company who would come to collect the fish" and give him food and water. It's a hard, lonely life even when you are not adrift.

ADDED: If isolated, floating rompongs are a common sight, why would anyone on a passing ship notice that one was no longer properly anchored?

"And so, 50 years after Dylan wrote it, 'The Times They Are a-Changin' ' vibrates with new meaning."

"Perhaps that's because the song itself doesn't look to the past — rather, it's an anthem of hope for a future where change is always possible," concludes NPR in "'The Times They Are A-Changin'' Still Speaks To Our Changing Times." Excerpt:

As the 1960s faded into the '70s, the urgency of the song faded, too. Bob Dylan moved on to other things, and the generation he first sang for grew up and...

I'll complete that sentence more bluntly: ... turned into the people who needed to get out of the way because their time was up.

The article goes on to describe the use of the old song, which anchors Bob Dylan in his political protest time, from which he changed. But Baby Boomer politicos have always harked back to it, and it serves them — I'm not including me — right to have that song sung in their face now that they are old and not ready to roll over for whatever advancement the young people think is due.

I don't include myself because I've never liked the forefronting of Protest Bob. "The Times They Are a-Changin'" is the song picked out from all the others by people who don't really know and love Bob. I don't like seeing him used this way, restricted to this narrow version.

And the words are too cruel and anti-inclusive to use generally (outside of the literal blocking of doorways in the desegregation era).

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

NPR calls particular attention to that verse, the third of five verses, because, I assume, calling out to authority figures and telling them what they need to do is more popular with protesters these days than speaking imploringly to "people" (verse 1), "writers and critics" (verse 2), "mothers and fathers" (verse 4), and the elite ("the first ones," verse 5).

And look at the threats of violence if you don't get up to the speed the singer is demanding: if you don't swim, you will "sink like a stone" (verse 1) and if you stall, you will get hurt (verse 3). Think what it means to revel in this song today: Accept my characterization that this is a fast-developing emergency, and if you don't do what I say, you're going to suffer terribly.

There are little spots where the song warns its singers not to be too smug and aggressive:

And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win

That's addressed to "writers and critics," so maybe that includes bloggers, even though Dylan's "writers and critics" are the ones who "prophesize with your pen" (and we're all typing now). He says "the wheel's still in spin," and you don't know who will win and lose over time. So be cautious, observant, and keep thinking clearly. Don't just jump onto the side you think is the winning side. It keeps changing.

At the Jagged Edge Café...

... the conversation is as sharp as you can make it.

"Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Brett Kavanaugh’s, has described a dormitory party gone awry and a drunken incident that she wants the F.B.I. to investigate."

A new article by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

The woman at the center of the story, Deborah Ramirez, who is fifty-three, attended Yale with Kavanaugh.... The New Yorker contacted Ramirez after learning of her possible involvement in an incident involving Kavanaugh.... She was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections....

“We were sitting in a circle,” she said. “People would pick who drank.” Ramirez was chosen repeatedly, she said, and quickly became inebriated. At one point, she said, a male student pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction. Later, she said, she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words, as that male student and another stood nearby...

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.”... She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”...

[A]fter several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, “I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.” Ramirez said that what has stayed with her most forcefully is the memory of laughter at her expense from Kavanaugh and the other students. “It was kind of a joke,” she recalled. “And now it’s clear to me it wasn’t a joke.”