At the Saturday Night Café...

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period."

"If we’re viewed as illegitimate, then disregard of our decisions becomes more acceptable and more popular."

Said Justice Alito, quoted in "Congressional Dems pile on Alito after he says SCOTUS ethics can’t be regulated/Democrats — especially progressives — have increasingly expressed more anger at the high court in recent years" (Politico).

The anger is, as Politico puts it, expressed "on X" — in other words on Twitter. We're supposed to say "on X" now? I view that as illegitimate and will disregard it.

What's the relationship between those 2 sentences of Alito's?

I get the first sentence. It's the simple point that the third branch of government is separate from the other branches except when particular checks and balances are provided for. It would violate separation of powers for Congress to impose a code of ethics on the Court. Let them stick to voting not to confirm nominees who lack good ethics and just impeach and remove Justices who don't measure up to Congress's idea of proper ethics.

But does the second sentence mean that if there were a code of ethics imposed by Congress, then violations of that code would cause people to view the Court as illegitimate, and then it might become acceptable and popular to flout the Court's decisions, which would undermine the rule of law? Or does that second sentence mean there can be no code of ethics, but there's a check on the Court in that the Justices know that if they are unethical, they will be viewed as illegitimate, in which case it would become acceptable and popular to disregard the Court's decisions, and the Justices, aware of this threat, feel pressure to adhere to ethical behavior?

Never heard of? He's been my favorite of the GOP candidates since he started.

I clicked to read George Will's column, "Meet the unusually qualified presidential candidate you’ve never heard of" (WaPo), and while he's wrong about my never having heard of him, I'm thrilled to see some high-level attention to the worthy contender, Doug Burgum.

Snippet:

If wokeness survives Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hourly onslaughts (which DeSantis might not survive; talking smack about Bud Light is unpresidential), a President Burgum would not regard fighting it as part of his job description. He would be a presidential rarity, acknowledging the 10th Amendment. (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”) Cultural issues are, he says, irrelevant to presidential duties

"This is not a political issue, it’s a family matter. Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy."

Said a statement from President Biden, quoted in "President Biden Speaks Out on Hunter’s Daughter, 4, with Ark. Woman: ‘Jill and I Only Want What’s Best’ (Exclusive)/'Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter,' the president said in an exclusive statement to PEOPLE" (People).

But, of course, it's a political issue. The child is 4 years old, and we're only getting this acknowledgement now. Obviously, his people have read the criticism, notably the criticism from Maureen Dowd (which I blogged about here), and they see that pretending the child doesn't exist is not going to work.

And whatever happened to "The personal is political"? You've acknowledged the child, but now you want your privacy, you want us to trust you to work it out appropriately, but you haven't been fair to this mother and child over the years, and how men treat the women they've impregnated has long been deeply politicized. Your party flaunts its (supposed) concern for impregnated women. You don't get to privatize it when the woman is inconvenient to you. 

"In its marketing materials, Sur-ron describes one model, the Light Bee Electric Bike, as 'easy to maneuver like a bicycle, with the torque and power of an off-road motorcycle.'"

"Its operating manual cautions the owner to 'please follow the traffic rules and with the safe speed (the top speed for this electric vehicle is 20 km/h).' But the speed restraint — equivalent to about 12 m.p.h. — can be removed by simply clipping a wire, a procedure that is widely shared in online videos, and which law enforcement officials said appeared to be there by design. 'There are all kinds of videos on how to jailbreak your Sur-ron,' said Capt. Christopher McDonald of the Sheriff’s Department in Orange County, Calif., where e-bike accidents and injuries are rising. With the speed wire clipped, the vehicle can approach 70 miles per hour, he said."

From "‘A Dangerous Combination’: Teenagers’ Accidents Expose E-Bike Risks/The e-bike iniadustry is booming, but many vehicles are not legal for teenagers, and accidents are on the rise" (NYT).

This article — which focuses on the harm to the teenagers who ride e-bikes — has no comments section and no mention of the danger to pedestrians.

At the Lakeshore Café...

... you can talk all night.

"Yes, phones — and dogs! Both have an outsized role in the lives of many these days. Why? They're less messy than people."

"Why bother dealing directly with all of these people around me and all of the challenging negotiations required to compromise, to build bonds, etc? And we wonder why we're increasingly polarized."

That's the top-rated comment on the NYT article, "The Insidious Habit That Can Hurt Your Relationship/Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone, or 'phubbing,' can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. Here’s how to stop."

The article doesn't mention dogs. The commenter widened the subject matter quite interestingly, don't you think? 

Is the NYT promoting a new word in "phubbing" or is it real slang that already part of the culture and I just never noticed? I see from the "Phubbing" article in  Wikipedia that it's a word an advertising agency tried to make happen a decade ago:

A problem with X.

I'm noticing the X in the upper corner of the "tweet" I embedded in something I posted yesterday:

When I see an "X" in the corner of an image I see on screen, it feels as though clicking on it will make it go away. Now, clicking on an "X" is supposed to feel like a way to take me onto The Website Formerly Known as Twitter. But my instinct is to click when something is annoying me, not to click when I want more. 

A vogue word, rejected.

You don't need to care about the NYT crossword to be interested in what follows — it discusses a current buzzword — but it does reveal a couple answers. 

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle:

Sunrise — 5:45, 5:47.

Gerontocracy update.

Asked to vote on the defense appropriations bill, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) begins giving a speech: “I would like to support a ‘yes’ vote on this. It provides …”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA): “Just say aye.” pic.twitter.com/Gw2eZ9rEMv

— The Recount (@therecount) July 27, 2023

"Can you read anything at all from start to finish, ie. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?"

"Without your seeking distraction as a form of entertainment, or entertainment as a form of distraction? Or is all of this just ordinary life in the internet era, with your every thought and feeling and perception being diverted or fractured or dissolved or reiterated endlessly with utter normality in a digitalized world to which nearly all of us are fixated, or might we say, addicted? Did you ever even know a different world?..."

 
Writes Will Blythe, in "The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction/In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?" (Esquire).

"Oh, dear literature! Will you die or shrink or practically disappear into a tiny, elitist realm like opera has into Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, has only owned a smart phone for the past year. And yet his literary life has radically altered. 'Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us.... I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.'"

"Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content."

Writes Adam Kotsko, in "Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism/The left has embraced an approach long favored by the evangelical right" (The Atlantic).

And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism.... By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.... 

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences.... Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics.....

"Firstly, Prince didn’t like people covering his songs. Secondly, he had all these female protégées and he was annoyed I wasn’t one of them."

"Thirdly, my manager Steve Fargnoli has been his manager and they were involved in a legal case. On top of all this he was a woman-beating c***.  I’m certainly not the only woman he laid a hand on."

Said Sinéad O’Connor, describing her meeting with Prince, quoted in "Nothing could compare to Sinéad O’Connor’s bravery and will/Singer rowed with Prince over her cover of Nothing Compares 2 U" (London Times).

She said Prince invited her to have pillow fight and then used a pillow with something hard hidden inside it.

"She thought she was protecting her son and our sister... because she didn’t want them to get wrapped up in what the world was coming to, in her eyes."

Said a sister, quoted in "Family living off grid found dead in Colorado forest/The bodies of two women and a 14-year-old boy were discovered in the Gunnison National Forest near Ohio City" (London Times).

At the campsite, alongside the bodies, were empty food cans, a single packet of ramen noodles, books on wilderness survival and a lavatory area, alongside what appeared to be the start of a lean-to shelter. 

“I wonder if winter came on quickly, and suddenly they were just in survival mode in the tent,” said [the coroner]. “They had a lot of literature with them about outdoor survival and foraging and stuff like that. But it looked like they [bought supplies] at a grocery store.”

Sunrise — 5:39, 5:41, 6:01, 6:03.