Trending on Twitter: #BidenMustResign.

#BidenMustResign @POTUS Remember this? https://t.co/XQ59xd2Coq

— Brad Meszaros (@taxwithbrad) August 14, 2021

#BidenMustResign after the end of his second term. pic.twitter.com/uaPZUejjgw

— Ripley (@Ripley10271143) August 14, 2021

"He was a diffident debutante with a distaste for politics. Post-presidency, he is trying too hard on things we don’t need."

"The culture is already swimming in Netflix deals, celebrity worship, ostentatious displays of wealth, not to mention podcasts. Did the world really need 'Renegades,' his duet with Bruce Springsteen? We already knew Obama gravitated to stars but it was disillusioning to see it on such a grand scale last weekend. 'I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,' said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. 'We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie-Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.' Obama was a cool cat as a candidate in 2008, but after he won, he grew increasingly lofty. Now he’s so far above the ground, he doesn’t know what’s cool...."

From "Behold Barack Antoinette" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

6:05 a.m.

 

Feel free to comment on whatever you like.

"Biden is at Camp David this weekend, not at his Delaware beach house. He can relax there, but also has full comms."

"People can come and go without detection, and he avoids the optics of a beach vacation amid a mass evacuation." 

From "Scoop: Biden braces for brutal loss" (Axios). 

The major moment to come: Lowering the American flag that flies over what is essentially sovereign U.S. territory. That's typically done by the Marine Security Guard detachment that's always on post. It's a point of honor for the ambassador or chargé d'affaires to take custody of the flag and bring it back to State or a safe haven....

One U.S. official in touch with a former contact in Kabul asked Friday morning how the locally employed staff — the Afghans working for the United States — is faring. "LES are freaking out,” the contact replied. “Everyone wants to get out of this country.” “I’m so worried about my family.”

"Recently, a welcome new development... was laid on the table while neighbors fight to save the 'historic' Wonder Bar building."

"The alleged reason? It was frequented by Chicago mobsters in the 1930s. Seriously, folks? The building, which has no particularly interesting architectural characteristics, should be preserved because murderers used to eat there?... It’s a ridiculous argument on its face. Yet, the developer will take time and spend money to try to work it out. That will only add to the cost of the project and those costs will eventually find their way into rental payments, assuming the project gets built at all... What may be behind this is Madison’s dislike for tall buildings. The proposal would be 18 stories tall... Too often, I think, the [historic preservation] movement allows itself to be captured by people who just don’t like tall and big buildings in any form. "

Writes Dave Cieslewicz (a former mayor of Madison) in Isthmus.

What counts as a tall building where you live? What counts as too tall, such that the locals resist? What does it take to unleash bullshit about historic value? 

Why do people object to tallness? I think the downtown would look better if the streets were solidly packed with tall buildings, creating urban canyons, and not just because I enjoy walking in shade.

Now, let me read Wikipedia article "High-rise Building":

"I actually thought it was all staged until the shoelace. I’ve become cynical with all the setups 🤷‍♂️"/"It was all setup... Except for the shoelace. They just got lucky on a funny accident."

Comments on a video at the subreddit "Maybe Maybe Maybe"... where I learned about the subreddit "Fake or Scripted Asian Gifs" ("For appreciating those Asian gifs that are obviously fake").

"That was his big SEO/speed secret. He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time."

Said former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski, quoted in "Snopes Retracts 60 Articles Plagiarized by Co-Founder: ‘Our Staff Are Gutted’/The fact-checking site has banned David Mikkelson, who owns half the company, from writing articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation prompted an internal review" (NYT). 

In a 2016 Slack message... Mikkelson [said]: “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up,” he wrote. “Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized.”

Even if he had rewritten the text a few minutes after publication, that would not be considered ethical under widely accepted journalistic standards. But as both the BuzzFeed investigation and Snopes’s internal investigation found, he frequently never got around to changing the sentences he had stolen....

Mikkelson still owns 50% and is the chief executive of this business that's supposed to be all about ferreting out the truth.

"I consider myself an aficionado of house numbers, and yours are the biggest I’ve ever seen. Why did you choose these truly giant house numbers?"

Dan Kois asked Caryn Wagner, as recounted in "A Q&A With the Woman Who Installed These 2-Foot-Tall Address Numbers on Her House/'The overall look is "the circus came to town"'" (Slate).

From Wagner's side of the interview:

It all started when we first moved in.... we added a bay window to the master bedroom. That’s the window over the garage... but it didn’t have anything on the bottom to balance it out.... They maybe didn’t quite have to be that big... The four digits will go across the garage, and they’ll give the house a little bit of a quirky punch, and then I won’t have to tell the Uber driver where my house is.... People take pictures, people stop and talk to me. I’ve become a kind of mini-celebrity on Yorktown Boulevard.... But you know what, these houses on Yorktown, they’re great houses, I love them, but there’s not a lot of curb appeal. I was looking for a way to give it a little personality. I go in and out of my house every day, and I see my great big numbers, and that makes me happy.

Yeah, there's a house in my neighborhood where the numbers are extra-large. Maybe every neighborhood has a house like that. Maybe in your neighborhood, it's your house. What's the big idea?

"A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay."

"Work two full-time remote jobs, don’t tell anyone and, for the most part, don’t do too much work, either. Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play 'Tetris' with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off—in some cases, unlimited—to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don’t work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don’t apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.... The pandemic has given us new opportunities to shirk and fib.... [One worker] often tells colleagues he doesn’t think their issue requires a call, and he can help them faster on Slack. 'People love it because they’re like, "This guy just gets [stuff] done. He’s not wasting his time in these meetings"'.... [One worker] unmuted his speaker too quickly before turning off the sound on the other laptop. For five seconds, Meeting One could hear Meeting Two. He cringed. No one noticed...."

From "These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. Why be good at one job, they thought, when they could be mediocre at two?" (Wall Street Journal).

I was just blogging about a similar topic last month, here. The NYT had an article about how younger workers are resisting going back to the office, and I quoted a comment : 

The dirty secret the white collar world doesn't want to admit is that most people are not working 40 hour weeks anymore, and/or are coming to the realization of how much time they were wasting doing nothing at the office. Why would anyone want to give up 10-20 more hours of their week when they are just as productive....

That seems to assume people want more personal time, but it's consistent with the idea that you could get one job done quickly and do a second job, all in a 40-hour week. I wrote:

If you're at home getting the work done, no one knows how long it took you, and the time you save by working quickly and efficiently is time you get to keep for yourself.

"It’s just frustrating. We knew that this would happen. Now, all the people who went and served, are like, 'Why did my friend die?'"

Said Army veteran John Whalen, quoted in "‘Why did my friend get blown up? For what?’: Afghanistan war veterans horrified by Taliban gains" (WaPo).

"In the pre-Taliban days of the late eighties, when I spent time with the mujahideen of Kandahar, who were then fighting the Soviets..."

"... a pair of local Islamic scholars banned music after consulting their sacred texts; this rule was added to their list of severe prohibitions, which included death for adulterers and the amputation of hands for thieves. In a court, set up in the middle of a battlefield, the two judges explained their sentencing system and told me how many murderers and adulterers they had put to death, after which one of them said, 'We adhere to the Sharia in all cases.' Patting a pile of holy tracts next to him, he added, 'All the answers are here.'... Within a couple years, they controlled most of Afghanistan, and Kabul fell to them in 1996.... Afghan women were all but excluded from public life, with many girls prohibited from attending school; the freedom to work for female teachers, doctors, and nurses was drastically circumscribed. The Taliban zealotry grew so great that children were forbidden to play with dolls or to fly kites, in favor of prayer sessions, while ethnic minorities and members of religious sects other than the extreme Sunni version of Islam that the Taliban espoused were persecuted. In one incident, it is estimated that the Taliban killed at least two thousand ethnic Hazaras, who are Shiite. Public executions became a norm, as well, often of women accused of various moral offenses. The killings were often carried out on sports fields or in stadiums, with the condemned sometimes stoned to death, or summarily shot in the head, or hanged, or, in the case of homosexuals, crushed and suffocated by mud walls toppled onto them by tanks.... The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten....."

Writes Jon Lee Anderson in "The Return of the Taliban Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition" (The New Yorker).

"The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters and millions of dollars of American-supplied equipment paraded by the Taliban on grainy cellphone videos."

"In some cities, heavy fighting had been underway for weeks on their outskirts, but the Taliban ultimately overtook their defensive lines and then walked in with little or no resistance. This implosion comes despite the United States having poured more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment and training into the country’s security forces over two decades. Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key parts of the Obama administration’s strategy as it sought to find a way to hand over security and leave nearly a decade ago. These efforts produced an army modeled in the image of the United States’ military, an Afghan institution that was supposed to outlast the American war.... How the Afghan military came to disintegrate first became apparent not last week but months ago in an accumulation of losses... [beginning] with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.... And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment...."

From "The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?/The Taliban’s rapid advance has made clear that U.S. efforts to turn Afghanistan’s military into a robust, independent fighting force have failed, with its soldiers feeling abandoned by inept leaders" (NYT).

Sunrise — 6:00 and 6:03.

 

Please use the comments section to talk about whatever you want. I'm moderating all the comments these days and I'm pretty strict about comments needing to follow from the post, but the sunrise photo posts are not intended to establish a topic. No need to address the beauty/dullness of a particular sunrise. These photos are part of what is a ritual for me, getting out to experience the sunrise. I'm happy if you enjoy the photographs and completely uninterested in your nonenjoyment of them.

"Right, I love floating heads. Some of my favorite posters are floating heads."

"I’ve spent a good deal of time talking to people about where the design comes from. There’s a 1908 [William Howard] Taft; they show up in Lyndon Johnson for Senate posters, one shows up in 1940, and then by 1944 and on, they sort of become the wave, and in the 1950s, and up to about 1968, floating heads—I mean, no collar at all, just totally floating heads—are everywhere. And then they just disappear. The working theory right now is that jobbers just decided to do it that way. It wasn’t a grand design-school concept."

From "THE ART HISTORY OF PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN POSTERS/Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them" (Gagosian). 

 I got there as I was researching posters from around 1900 that were characterized by Andrew Cuomo as trying "to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper." I like the old-time-y posters that do that, but it would be wrong to think that extremely simple posters weren't around back then. I mean, this Taft poster is hilariously simple (and fantastic):

"Why does this poster exist?"

The question in the post title comes from "The 8 Weirdest Unsolved Andrew Cuomo Mysteries" (New York Magazine). The article considers the poster a mystery that remains unsolved even though Cuomo gave an explanation back when he introduced the poster in July 2020: 

"I love history. I love poster art. Poster art is something they did in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when they had to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper. Over the past few years I’ve done my own posters that capture that feeling. I did a new one for what we went through with COVID and I think the general shape is familiar to you. We went up the mountain, we curved the mountain, we came down the other side and these are little telltale signs that, to me, represent what was going on."

What "early 1900s, late 1800s" posters did he have in mind? I found this one:

And I wanted to show you this one too, even though it's not trying "to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper":

"Biden himself, normally the most empathetic of politicians, did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy that his April decision to withdraw..."

"... the roughly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan has now unleashed. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, followed his comments by blaming the Afghan military, which the U.S. funded, trained, equipped, and built over twenty years, for its fate. 'They have what they need,' she said. 'What they need to determine is if they have the political will to fight back.'... There is, quite obviously, a calculation behind all this, which is that, after all this time and with more than enough blame to go around in both parties, Biden will not suffer politically from leaving behind an unwinnable war. Put bluntly, there is a strongly held belief in Washington that Americans simply do not care what happens in Afghanistan...."

From "'Not Our Tragedy': the Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving/President Biden made it very clear this week that we’re out of Afghanistan, no matter what" by Susan B. Glasser (The New Yorker).

The phrase "the most empathetic of politicians" draws a scoff from me. Why not write "the most political of empathizers"? Clearly, the empathy is not empathy for its own stake, but a political commodity to be spent where you get good political value. Americans simply do not care what happens in Afghanistan, so Biden did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy.

I'd like to edit out the "normally" in "normally the most empathetic of politicians." The omission of any empathy — or theatrical performance of empathy — when the subject is something Americans don't care about is exactly normal in political empathy. We're just seeing a clear example of what it means to be an empathetic politician.