Let's look at Trump's now-infamous question, "Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."

It is a question, isn't it? There's no question mark. That makes it feel more like an imperative. It reminds me of the saying I remember from the Vietnam Era, "America, love it or leave it."

Here's the entire statement — a tripartite tweet (1, 2, 3):

So interesting to see 'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly........and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how.... ....it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

That's from 22 hours ago. He got a lot of pushback — including Power Line's "A Blunder of Epic Proportions" — but he didn't walk it back. He's Donald Trump; he doubled down. From 11 hours ago — a 2-part tweet (1, 2):

So sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion. Whenever confronted, they call their adversaries, including Nancy Pelosi, “RACIST.” Their disgusting language..... ....and the many terrible things they say about the United States must not be allowed to go unchallenged. If the Democrat Party wants to continue to condone such disgraceful behavior, then we look even more forward to seeing you at the ballot box in 2020!

1. Who is he talking about? He doesn't name names, so it's an invitation for others to do the defining. I see many people talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and expressing outrage that Trump would speak of her as an immigrant when she was born in the United States. But he didn't name her. His words exclude her. She's really got a hold on people's mind!

2. What, exactly, is supposed to be racist here? Clearly, these tweets cause some readers to feel that racism is being expressed, but it's hard to find it in these words. I see "RACIST" but that's in the context of ostensibly sticking up for Nancy Pelosi. Some Democrats are calling her racist, and that shows how unfairly quick they are to see racism. Defending Pelosi, he implicitly defends himself.

3. Is it xenophobia? He's not saying get out and stay out. He's saying don't criticize the United States if you immigrated from a worse country. Go back to that place, fix it, and "The come back and show us... how it is done." He's welcoming the immigrant back, after these steps are taken. Of course, it's unrealistic to expect someone to return to a place they left and become involved in changing that place, but it's a figure of speech. He seems to be saying that those who were not born here, who chose to move here, have a special obligation to express love for America, that they should tone down their criticism of America.

4. If telling these Congresswomen to tone it down is wrong, Nancy Pelosi was wrong too. (See "Tensions Between Pelosi and Progressive Democrats of ‘the Squad’ Burst Into Flame" (NYT).) So, again, Trump lines himself up with Pelosi. How do you defend Pelosi without defending Trump? In this view, it's a clever (and cruel) rhetorical move by Trump.

5. Here's Ernest Tubb in 1965:



Well, I'm gettin' mighty tired of seein' hippies runnin' wild... It's kinda hard to understand when you read about a man/That's talkin' 'bout love and knockin' the place he was born/If things don't go their way, they could always move away/That's what democracy means anyway....

The asserted requirement that your "voice" must align with the color of your skin.

When stereotyping is not just okay but mandatory:

Rep Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice” pic.twitter.com/2NIj5Vvcor

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 15, 2019

"You know, I've been told to go back to where I came from"/"What? Indiana?"

Overheard at Meadhouse.

At the Bee Balm Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"After years of neglect and boomer dominance in popular culture, someone had finally noticed us, in the sweetest way... 'Friends' was comfy, adorable, yet sharp."

"The hate-watch became a secret pleasure and, soon enough, we all had their haircuts... What nobody could have envisioned in the 1990s was the way children in the 2010s and '20s — born after 'Friends" first started to wear off — would form their own fixation on the show... My nearest frame of reference to this sort of cultural inertia would have to be 'The Brady Bunch,' the 1970s sitcom that, in reruns and brief revivals, acted as Gen X’s security blanket.... Irony was the key to it all.... But irony seems to have no place when it comes to the nonstop streaming of 'Friends'... [It is] slavishly re-watched with what appears to be an authentic and uncomplicated sincerity. Nobody watches [it] to make fun of the clothes or mock the message.... 'Friends'... acts as a soothing gateway to a time when people aren’t constantly looking at their phones. They sit on their Central Perk sofas and just talk, maintaining eye-contact. They listen to one another. They hilariously relate, in a constant state of mutual care. Their idea of stress is almost touchingly benign. No wonder people still want to hang out with them.... As the 'Friends' theme song goes, 'I’ll be there for you.' But those words referred to the bond among its characters. They were not an eternal promise to generations yet to come, and they should not have to be your friends forever. Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else."

From "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" by Hank Stuever, the WaPo TV critic.

Stuever is over 50, a Gen Xer. He thinks irony is key and these kids today are making a big mistake longing for sincerity and friendship. Something a quarter century old feels too "eternal" for him, and whoever wrote the headline for his column turned his dictate — "Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else" — into a question — "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" The market always answers that question. These shows are phenomenally valuable commercially. "Valuable" isn't really what's nagging at Stuever. He's objecting to the feelings and longings of younger people. They're not thinking right. The question — if you want to rephrase Stuever's opinion as a question — should be:  "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most emotionally rewarding shows?" And then it becomes easy to see that it makes little sense to tell young people to watch something else on television. The problem is in the real world, which is wearing on people in such a way that "Friends" feels restorative.

Morning walk...

... schoolyard sunflowers...



... frontyard sign...

Inspiring!

The only 10x engineer pic.twitter.com/hSOhP1gvzL

— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) July 13, 2019

ADDED: A "10x Engineer" is — per svd:

A concept sometimes used in Silicon Valley to describe an engineer that is 10x more productive than an average engineer although the 10x metric is figurative. Sometimes referred to as "Ninjas", these engineers are highly sought after by all tech companies.

Jim: You gave me 100 resumes but none of these guys are 10x engineers. Why hire a few of these guys to slow us down when a 10x engineer is so much more productive?

"Of course, it is possible that recent liberal praise for constitutional constraints on federal power will prove to be an example of 'fair-weather federalism'..."

"... the tendency of both left and right to rely on federalism whenever their opponents control the White House, only to jettison it when they themselves are in power. Conservatives, for instance, used constitutional federalism as a tool against the Obama administration but often ignore it under Trump. But there may be a trend here that goes beyond short-term partisanship. Liberals and conservatives alike can benefit from stronger constraints on federal power. Each party can gain from protecting local diversity and experimentation, and from the insurance federalism provides in times when its opponent hold the reins of power in Washington. Left and right can agree on the need for substantial constitutional limits on federal power, even if they differ on exactly how tight those limits should be."

Writes Ilya Somin in "How liberals learned to love federalism/The left was skeptical of giving power to the states. Until the Trump era" (WaPo).

This is the subject I wrote about for 30 years when I was in the law professor game.

Things you can see from Iowa.

"Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was in Iowa campaigning for his presidential bid, ruled out terrorism or criminal activity" — from "Power Restored to Manhattan’s West Side After Major Blackout" (NYT).

"I learned many things from Mad: who Spiro Agnew was, the plots of R-rated movies like 'Coma' and show tunes like 'I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin''..."

"... which the writers of Mad evidently assumed would be familiar enough to 10-year-olds of the ’70s to parody — 'I Got Plenty of Muslims,' sung by a black militant. I also learned about black militants. I also learned from Mad that politicians were corrupt and deceitful, that Hollywood and Madison Avenue pushed insulting junk, that religion was more invested in respectability than compassion, that school was mostly about teaching you to obey arbitrary rules and submit to dingbats and martinets — that it was, in short, all BS. Grown-ups who worried that Mad was a subversive influence, undermining the youth of America’s respect for their elders and faith in our hallowed institutions, were 100 percent correct."

From "The World According to Mad Magazine/Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America’s youth were 100 percent correct" by Tim Kreider (NYT)(Kreider is a cartoonist and essayist).

ADDED: Here's an example of a cartoon by Kreider: "Male Anorexia." If you like that, consider buying "The Pain: When Will It End?" I did. The back cover has a high-level blurb — from David Foster Wallace:

“I have had the cartoon ‘Male Anorexia’ on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis–you’d (almost) have to see it to believe it.”

AND: The cartoon "Male Anorexia" is cited at the beginning of an article by Jennifer Finn Boylan, "What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003" (2015):

At the Sunbath Café...

... feel free to sprawl out here.

Freckles, the manta ray, asks for help...

Don't let it be forgot/That once — in 1967 — there was a spot/For one brief shining moment/That was known as that ridiculous movie I saw back then and rewatched now, "Camelot."

Camelot! Camelot!/I know it sounds a bit bizarre/But in Camelot — Camelot! — King Arthur is a clueless hippie and Guenevere is Vanessa Redgrave, a groupie in search of a rock star — That's how conditions are.

Well, I learned my lesson rewatching "Dr. Zhivago" (the 1965 entry in my "imaginary movie project"): A beauteous movie-star woman in a dramatic geographic location is just necessarily going to have hot sex with the best-looking man.

It doesn't matter that Guenevere is married to the king, and he's pretty nice and means well and all and he's not horrible looking (though what's up with the eyeliner?)...



Franco Nero comes to town...



... and sex must be had with that guy. Not just flirting and teasing, as you might think as things crank up in the first hour of this 3-hour monstrosity, when hordes of extras are cavorting and frolicking about how it's "the lusty month of May... when everyone goes blissfully astray" and "tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear" and "When every maiden prays that her lad will be a cad"...

Old-lady road rage... "Sorry, darling."

Nicest roadrage ever; it helps to be older and clearer about whats really important in life from r/PublicFreakout

You have to click the title to get through for the audio. It's worth it!

"It's somebody with a vendetta, someone who has something against we assume mountain bikers or riders - but the things they're putting out do not discriminate. It's an incredibly dangerous and reckless thing to do."

From "Peak District cycle paths sabotaged with 'dangerous' traps" (BBC).

Also: "Hidden nail trap found at Blorenge mountain in Abergavenny" (BBC)("It's about a metre long, has 200 nails in it it's pretty heavy... It's also got legs on it, so if you rode over it would not tip up but would stay in the ground. Someone has gone to a lot of work").

"If I say I want to sail a small boat all the way around the world and it will take me two years, everyone says, 'Oh how exciting!' If I say I want to go and sit in my house..."

"... and not talk to anyone for two years, they say 'Have you got mental health issues?' or 'Why are you so selfish?'... I joke that wanting to be solitary is bad, sad and mad. It's immoral because it's selfish. It's sad because it'll make you miserable and it's mad because you must be a nutcase.... Silence is a place in which I can find ecstasy. I only get it in silence and most people I know only get it in silence. It is just a fabulous feeling. You know, you're walking along and quite suddenly you just say, 'Yes!' It's an extraordinarily intense response. Totally joyful.... I'm trying to position myself so the gift of mystical prayer is available to me, because actually the presence of God is a terrifically nice experience. I think it's heaven! Literally. I think that is what it will be like in heaven, that extraordinary sense of fulfilled intimacy - that feeling that one desires from sex, which is of both being completely yourself and completely with another person, is I think, what prayer does for me. It's a very particular form of intimate conversation with another, and it just so happens the other is God.... Food just tasted fabulous. But it wasn't it tasted particularly fabulous in any mysterious sense it just tasted MORE. So porridge tasted of PORRIDGE. But it also affected things like how strongly you experience physical things, like baths. Baths were fabulous - they weren't just some warm water, they became a completely luxurious experience. When you got cold, you got incredibly incredibly cold, or incredibly wet and just FELT it."

Said Sarah Maitland, quoted in "Why this man became a hermit at 20" (BBC). For some reason, the article's headline only refers to Christopher Knight, whose story is told in "The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit." Maitland's book is "A Book Of Silence."