February 11, 2023
"Just six miles away, across the border in Turkey, thousands of tons of relief poured in; support teams from as far away as Taiwan..."
"... answered the Turkish government’s call for help. But Syria, divided against itself and isolated from much of the world, was left to pick up the pieces alone, as it has again and again over more than a decade of war and dislocation.
In the shattered town of Jinderis, at least 850 bodies had been recovered by Friday morning. Although hundreds are still missing, few believed there were any lives left to save. 'We needed help here, we asked for help here,' said the town’s mayor, Mahmoud Hafar. 'It never came.'..."
From "In earthquake-battered Syria, a desperate wait for help that never came" (WaPo).
From "In earthquake-battered Syria, a desperate wait for help that never came" (WaPo).
"On a rare visit to this Syrian enclave, controlled by Turkish-backed armed groups, The Washington Post found communities gripped by shock and bewilderment, and very much alone. In Jinderis, fathers stood watch over the remains of their homes and told of waking up to find their wives and children dead. As hulking excavators clawed the rubble, searching for a 13-year old boy, a man asked reporters to help him contact the United Nations for help. 'Maybe they don’t know what happened in Jinderis,' he said. 'No one could see this and not come here.'"
Matt Bai knows he "should care more about Hunter Biden," but he just doesn't.
And he's telling you why in The Washington Post:
... I find it hard to get too worked up over all this, the way I did over the egregious conflicts of Donald Trump’s family during the last administration.
At least he's noticing it and admitting it publicly and feels the need to explain it (or sees some advantage in purporting to need to explain it). Whether the reasons given are sincere, we can judge for ourselves:
What's on the Disney Channel?
Here's the Rotten Tomatoes page. From the critics reviews:Oh. pic.twitter.com/Om8TZJuOxg
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 10, 2023
"Talk about Polar Vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating..."
"... in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star. Implications for understanding the Sun’s atmospheric dynamics above 55° here cannot be overstated!"
Said Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster, quoted in "Piece of sun breaks off, stuns scientists: ‘Very curious'" (NY Post).
Policing the "overcalculated playfulness" of actors wearing fashions that might not align with their sexual orientation.
I'm reading "Is Celebrity ‘Queer Baiting’ Really Such a Crime? Even as gender and masculinity are more fluid than ever, it can still rankle when male stars co-opt traditionally gay codes and styles" by Mark Harris (NYT Style Magazine).
"The Pentagon said it shot down an unidentified object over frozen waters around Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden...."
"U.S. officials said they could not immediately confirm whether the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft.... The Friday shootdown showed Mr. Biden taking direct and forceful action far more quickly than he did last week, when some Republican lawmakers criticized him for letting the spy balloon linger over the United States for several days before destroying it. But that period of observation last week allowed American officials to collect intelligence about the spy balloon, while in the episode on Friday, officials seemed unsure about what exactly they shot down."
The explanation about Balloon #1 — the "period of observation... allowed American officials to collect intelligence about the spy balloon" — is undercut by the action on Balloon/"Balloon" #2. The only difference seems to be the experience of getting criticized by "some Republican lawmakers." That shouldn't make any difference (unless the question isn't national security).
"Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty..."
"... of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.
This might be just another lament about 'woke' campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was 'Race and the Limits of Law in America.' Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization...."
From "A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell" by Vincent Lloyd (Compact). This is a long article, well worth reading.
Lloyd has a recent book, "Black Dignity" (paid link), highly recommended in by this essay in Sojourners:
February 10, 2023
"Mr. Fetterman suffers from auditory processing issues, forcing him to rely primarily on a tablet to transcribe what is being said to him."
"The hearing issues are inconsistent; they often get worse when he is in a stressful or unfamiliar situation. When it’s bad, Mr. Fetterman has described it as trying to make out the muffled voice of the teacher in the 'Peanuts' cartoon, whose words could never be deciphered. The stroke — after which he had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted — also took a less apparent but very real psychological toll on Mr. Fetterman. It has been less than a year since the stroke transformed him from someone with a large stature that suggested machismo — a central part of his political identity — into a physically altered version of himself, and he is frustrated at times that he is not yet back to the man he once was. He has had to come to terms with the fact that he may have set himself back permanently by not taking the recommended amount of rest during the campaign. And he continues to push himself in ways that people close to him worry are detrimental...."
It sounds like a heroic effort. I have great admiration for him as he steps up to this immense challenge.
With respect, I offer this example of the Peanuts teacher's voice:
"Four trans children on one block in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? I think not."
One of the commenters at a NYT column titled "The Relentless Attack on Trans People Is an Attack on All of Us":
I am a gay man, but I think there needs to be a step or two back taken from what has become the politicization of medical treatment for children who may be transgender. Several years ago, a family living on a street in my neighborhood announced by way of a transgender flag that appeared on their porch that their eight-year-old until then son had recently informed them that he is trans. Since then, children of three other families living on our block have had such an epiphany. Four trans children on one block in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? I think not.
ADDED: Is the commenter misinterpreting flags? I haven't been able to find an image of a flag that specifies that a transgender child lives in the house where the flag is displayed. There is a transgender flag. Here's a Wikipedia article about it. I would think it is used simply to support transgender people, not to identify the people living in the house. One particular block could have a bunch of flags because the people know each other and are rallying their support, perhaps for one child.
Please don't comment "meow" as some of you did on yesterday's post about what Majorie Taylor Greene wore to the SOTU.
That would be sexist.
I'm reading "Melanie Lynskey Responds to America's Next Top Model Winner Adrianne Curry's Critique of Her Body in The Last of Us/'I am supposed to be SMART, ma’am. I don’t need to be muscly,' the actor tweeted" (Vanity Fair):
On Wednesday, the America's Next Top Model cycle 1 winner responded to a photo of the actor, critiquing her appearance as not being befitting of her role in the post-apocalyptic TV series The Last of Us. She wrote in a since-deleted tweet, “her body says life of luxury...not post apocolyptic [sic] warlord.” She added, “where is Linda Hamilton when you need her?,” referring to the Terminator star. Lynskey saw the social media message before the model deleted it, screenshotting the exchange and tweeting it out with the caption, “Firstly—this is a photo from my cover shoot for InStyle magazine, not a still from HBO’s The Last Of Us.” She added, “And I’m playing a person who meticulously planned & executed an overthrow of FEDRA. I am supposed to be SMART, ma’am. I don’t need to be muscly. That’s what henchmen are for.”
"FEDRA" is an acronym. You need to know the show to get it. Or look it up.
"SMART" not an acronym. Lynskey is just yelling. I recommend not yelling that you're smart. It's too...
"It’s a real pain to carry a pad around, and I have found that once I have jotted something down I tend to relax and forget it."
"If I toss the bits into my mind, on the other hand, what needs to be remembered stays while the rest fades into oblivion. I like to leave things to this process of natural selection. This reminds me of an anecdote I’m fond of. When Paul Valéry was interviewing Albert Einstein, he asked the great scientist, 'Do you carry a notebook around to record your ideas?' Einstein was an unflappable man, but this question clearly unnerved him. 'No,' he answered. 'There’s no need for that. You see I rarely have new ideas.' Come to think of it, there have been very few situations when I wished I had a notepad on me. Something truly important is not that easy to forget once you’ve entrusted it to your memory.'"
Writes Haruki Murakami in "Novelist as a Vocation" (Amazon link).
Speaking of notebooks... my other favorite writer, David Sedaris, carries a small notebook everywhere and writes something in it about 10 times a day. In "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls," we see him explaining his practice to a 7-year-old boy. When he encounters a headline, "Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale," and writes it down in his "a small Europa-brand reporter’s notebook," the boy asks why, and he says, "It’s for your diary.... You jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out." Of course, the 7-year-old boy still asks "why?" The reader knows why!
Writes Haruki Murakami in "Novelist as a Vocation" (Amazon link).
Speaking of notebooks... my other favorite writer, David Sedaris, carries a small notebook everywhere and writes something in it about 10 times a day. In "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls," we see him explaining his practice to a 7-year-old boy. When he encounters a headline, "Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale," and writes it down in his "a small Europa-brand reporter’s notebook," the boy asks why, and he says, "It’s for your diary.... You jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out." Of course, the 7-year-old boy still asks "why?" The reader knows why!
Speaking of memory... I've been working on a Spotify playlist I named "Memory"):
ALSO: Here's the Einstein playlist I made (based on "The story of Albert Einstein and the music he loved"):
The songs need to have something to do with memory and to be things I'd enjoy listening to in sequence... in case you're thinking of making suggestions for my list, which you can see is very small.
Alternatively, tell me what you think Einstein would have on his Spotify playlist.
As for Murakami, I'm picturing this.
Einstein quote about music: "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music... I get most joy in life out of music."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
