Sunrise, 5:08 a.m.

"White women love dinner parties more than anything. It’s their safe space to talk about how much they hate their husbands, how their kids are super annoying..."

"... how crazy busy they are, the latest school auction they’re raising money for. You turn the place where they typically unleash their entire sea of whiteness into somewhere where you can actually have safe, not shameful, conversations around racism.... They start recognising how they’ve been cocooned in whiteness... White people have perfected their performance. We’re watching 'White Women, the Musical' playing to a shut-down Broadway every night... They have the language. They have lots of yard signs. My God, they have so many yard signs and T-shirts and books. It’s checking boxes but what has changed? Nothing."

Said Saira Rao, quoted in "Ladies, your $5,000 ‘racism supper’ is ready — don’t choke on the guilt new/Dinner parties designed to teach white women about their privilege are serving up lessons on injustice in America" (London Times).

No topic is off limits, but crying and angry outbursts at the table are forbidden; irate diners who don’t excuse themselves will be sent off to calm down, as will anyone weeping. 

You'll be given a time out.

“We all know about white women’s tears. It has caused the death of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of black people. And it’s still a weapon,” says [Rao's Race2Dinner partner, Regina] Jackson. Crying derails the conversation, adds Rao: “White women cry, and everything stops and shifts back to your fragile white womanhood.”

Racism — it's what's for dinner.

"See-through socks?" — Joe Rogan tries to keep up with David Lee Roth and David Lee Roth just barrels along.

 

You can scroll back to the beginning to watch that whole 12-minute clip. I actually listened to the entire 3+ hours of the podcast on Spotify. Roth is such a motor mouth, but it's all pretty interesting. He did leave Rogan in the dust, though. The main thing Roth got across — if you take the 3 hours as a whole — is that he's internalized the lesson his father taught by asking — every night at the dinner table — what did you contribute? 

In case you're wondering, Roth will be getting a new tooth. I forget how he said he got that one knocked out.

Speaking of Spotify, I like that — at the age of 70 — I've been able to hear something new now and then and genuinely adopt it as a personal favorite. When I was a teenager, it was so easy to accept new musical artists and really love them — internalize them. Now, it's an amazing delight when something leaps into the place in my head that was so open when I was young. Yesterday, I clicked on this and immediately took it to heart:

That's the live version, obviously. The version on the album is what especially appealed to me.

"But anyone who has spent a small amount of time with Mr. Zuckerberg knows that he’s uncomfortable with his immense power..."

"... he agonizes deeply about his every step. In my innumerable conversations with him over many years — often late at night over a phone, giving them the feel of a college-dorm jaw session — he maintained that he trusted Facebook’s larger community to clean out the vile, often-toxic dreck that flowed over his ever-larger platform. Mr. Zuckerberg believes in the perfectibility of man. I have studied the use of propaganda in Nazi Germany and during China’s Cultural Revolution. I told him that there is no low that some people will not sink to if it is in their interests to do so. Once, when Mr. Zuckerberg was still talking to me, we argued about some much-less-serious violation of rules on Facebook, issues that now seem quaint in comparison. Trying to lighten the mood, I invoked the old journalism bromide: He should trust, yes, but always verify. 'If your mother says she loves you, check it,' I said to him, trying to convince him that he could not rely on the community or algorithms or anything else but his own decision making when push from bad actors inevitably came to shove. He did not get the joke at all. He also missed my larger point that the world was an ugly place and that he had handed some very bad people in it a potent weapon of destruction. They would take advantage of his belief that the truth will always out. Even now, I have a hard time describing the blank stare on his typically blank face. It was as if I was talking in another language to another species on another planet."

From "The Terrible Cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s Naïveté" by Kara Swisher (NYT).

Notice what she's saying — that the traditional liberal principles of freedom of speech are stupidly naive.  I think! She isn't fairly representing Z's side of the conversations (the "jaw session," as she calls it), but I think his position was the classic belief in the marketplace of ideas, where all the ideas come out and are heard and responded to and people make their choices about what to believe, rejecting what is bad and selecting what is good. That's what I'm guessing is behind Swisher's assertion "Mr. Zuckerberg believes in the perfectibility of man" and "his belief that the truth will always out." 

The most obvious response to the marketplace of ideas concept is that people are not necessarily shopping for truth and even if they are, they might be distracted into making an impulse purchase of something more exciting or soothing, like the way you go into the grocery store thinking of buying fresh fruits and vegetables and end up buying Coke and Tostitos. But that doesn't mean that everyone who's sticking with free speech and citing the marketplace of ideas theory is naive. The nonnaiveté lies in the understanding that the alternative approaches are worse. 

Swisher seems to be saying that because the world is "an ugly place" with "some very bad people," censorship is better than free speech. She's just as open to an accusation of naiveté as he is. What depth of understanding is she showing about the harms of the suppression of speech? The question isn't what's perfect, but what's better. And instead of facing that, which I would call the real world, Swisher reverts to the standard bashing of Zuckerberg: he seems like "another species on another planet." He doesn't seem normal. 

Here, there's room on the couch with these guys:

"In the late 1950s, not long after his daughter, Jennifer, was born, Arthur W. Staats turned what had been a more or less random parental punishment into a staple of behavioral psychology and a household phrase."

"He called it a 'time out.' Exhaustive experiments conducted by Dr. Staats (rhymes with 'spots') and his collaborators found that removing a child from the scene of improper behavior, and whatever had provoked it, ingrained an emotional connection with self-control and was preferable to punishment. As a bonus, it gave frustrated parents a short break. Dr. Staats emphasized that children needed to be warned of the consequences of their behavior in advance, and that the 'time out' tactic had to be applied consistently and within the context of a positive relationship between parent and child....."

From "Arthur Staats Dies at 97; Called ‘Time Out’ for Unruly Kids/A behavioral psychologist, he advised that it was more productive to briefly isolate a misbehaving child than to spank or yell. Thus a household phrase was born" (NYT).

Unique sunrise.

I've been doing my daily — almost daily — sunrise runs since September 2019, and this is the first time I've seen this:

 

ADDED: My first thought, on seeing this scene at my usual sunrise vantage point, was that — because everyone was paying attention to one woman and there were at least 2 other women off to the side — this was an example of men behaving in a shallow and unkind way. Then I noticed that one man was doing a lot of talking, toward the woman and to one of the other men, and it was hilariously obvious that I was witnessing a wedding.

"This is one of those where I read the title and went 'I can't imagine how you could not be the asshole' and then read the post and went '....oh.' "

"NTA. I am not normally a scene-making person, but this is the kind of thing that making a scene is for. I am not normally one for publicly shaming someone but this is what public shame is for. Sometimes someone's behavior is so far beyond the pale that the kindest and most righteous act for everyone else involved is to make a goddamn scene."

Top-voted comment at "AITA for telling my SIL no [one] cares that she’s pregnant" at the subreddit "Am I the Asshole?"

Pokeweed.

"He failed to keep Patty Hearst, the kidnapped publishing heiress, out of prison for her role in a bank robbery. He fell short..."

"... in his insanity defense of the confessed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, and could not save himself from contempt of court citations, humiliating handcuffs and disbarment in 2001 for misappropriating millions. By then, however, his reputation had long been secured with triumphs that began soon after his law school graduation in 1960 with the Torso Murder Case. George Edgerly, a Lowell, Mass., auto mechanic, was accused of dismembering his wife and dumping her parts in a river. He had failed a lie-detector test, complicating the defense. But when the lead lawyer had a heart attack, Mr. Bailey took over and, raising the specter of reasonable doubt, won an acquittal. (Edgerly was later convicted in another murder.)"

From "F. Lee Bailey, Lawyer for Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson, Dies at 87/With theatrical courtroom flair, he was involved in a host of notorious criminal cases, including those of the Boston Strangler and a Vietnam War massacre" (NYT).

"Kind of like Subaru. I don’t want to say it’s a cult, but Subaru people love Subarus. There’s this base of loyal customers who say, 'Wow, we’re really into this, this is our thing.' And that’s what Crocs has become."

From "Love them or hate them, Crocs are back/Sales have surged during the pandemic and the brand’s signature foam clog is turning up everywhere. 'I would wear them to the Met Gala'" (WaPo).

"[R]esidents of the John Knox Village senior community got a trip via computer to the International Space Station in the kickoff to a Stanford University study..."

"... on whether virtual reality can improve the emotional well-being of older people. Donning 1-pound (470-gram) headsets with video and sound, the four could imagine floating weightless with astronauts and get a 360-degree tour of the station. In other programs, residents can take virtual visits to Paris, Venice, Egypt or elsewhere around the globe; attend a car rally, skydive or go on a hike.... The goal is to see whether virtual reality can improve their mood, strengthen their relationships with staff and make them more receptive to technology."

 From "Can virtual reality help seniors? Study hopes to find out" (WaPo). 

I liked this comment: "VR does wonders for seniors. My friend an I spent 4 days straight protecting the world from Zombies. Felt great. We must of shot a million of 'em. And for the anxiety, the beer helped a lot."

Virtual travel sounds great to me, and not just for old people. Able-bodied, able-minded people should, perhaps, be encouraged to see the world this way. Compare the carbon footprint of real world travel and virtual travel. And with virtual travel, you're immediately transported to all the best places, with no time (and money) spent on airplanes, no exposure to disease and crime, no jet lag. And your view of the place is free of other tourists. You can have only local people there, and they can (be programmed to) enjoy meeting you and talking to you. They'll show you around and pursue subjects — history, architecture, fashion, cars, politics — geared precisely to you.

"The project at the heart of the controversy asked a fifth-grade class to write biographies from the perspective of historical figures who 'personify good or evil'..."

"Students were asked to discuss how their subject may have rationalized their actions, the board said. The short essay on Hitler was displayed in the school among others from the project for weeks, but after an image of the essay was shared online, parents and other community members expressed outrage. However, some groups, such as the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, have called for tempers to calm, saying the child and their family had no antisemitic intentions, and noted they have suffered from an outpouring of 'misdirected' vitriol, which spread on social media."

From "Tenafly teacher, principal placed on paid leave after student's controversial Hitler report" NorthJersey.com).

Here's the image — shared by one parent on Facebook — showing the essay with statements like: "My greatest accomplishment was uniting a great mass of German and Austrian people behind me," "I was pretty great, wasn't I?," and "My belif [sic] in antisemitism drove me to kill more than 6 million Jews."

Don't invite children to write from the perspective of an evil historical figure if you don't want them to compose material like this. It was dumb to print "Accomplishments" on the form and hang it on the wall where it would be seen and judged by many people who don't understand what the assignment was. It's good that no one seems to be going after the child here.

"In his classic essay, 'The Inner Ring,' C.S. Lewis warned about 'the delicious knowledge that we — we four or five all huddled beside this stove — are the people who know.'"

"Lewis lectured rising British university students that 'from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care,' that they would be driven by the desire to be within the Inner Ring. It is, of course, a fallacy; there is no special knowledge that emanates from such bonfires. Lewis went on to describe the perilous dangers such an illusion carried, dangers to the soul if not necessarily someone’s career. 'It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school,' he argued. 'But you will be a scoundrel.' 'Of all the passions,' he added, 'the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.'"

From "Opinion: The sad self-importance of journalists" by Hugh Hewitt (WaPo).

The C.S. Lewis material is good, but Hewitt doesn't do enough with it, and it's hard not to laugh along with the top-rated comment: "Self-important 'journalist' writes about self-importance of journalists..."

"Facebook plans to end its controversial policy that mostly shields politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users..."

"... a sharp reversal that could have global ramifications for how elected officials use the social network. The change, which Facebook is set to announce as soon as Friday, comes after the Oversight Board — an independent group funded by Facebook to review its thorniest content rulings — affirmed its decision to suspend former President Donald Trump but critiqued the special treatment it gives politicians, stating that the 'same rules should apply to all users.'... The changes are notable for Facebook since it historically has taken a hands-off approach to what elected officials say on its service.... For the past few years, Facebook has maintained a list of political accounts that aren’t subject to the same fact-checking or content moderation processes that apply to other users...."

The Verge reports.

They had an exception and they made an exception to the exception. The new approach is to eliminate that exception to which they succumbed to the temptation to make an exception. Same rules for everybody is the soundest approach. Everyone instinctively understands it. We can deal with exceptions too, though it takes some sophistication and trust, but when you proceed to make an exception to your exception, we're properly suspicious.

Until tomorrow.

"American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft..."

"... but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report. The report determines that the vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said. That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret. But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report, the officials said. ... [S]enior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomenon observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft."

The NYT reports.