At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk all night.

Fungus of the Day.

American/British royalty. Ours is better, right?

Happy Bday M8! London shows are off to a splendid start 🇬🇧🇺🇸🤝 @KensingtonRoyal pic.twitter.com/VlD6V0PiEL

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) June 22, 2024

Wow. Whose side is Andrew Cuomo on? Or is the point so clear, it doesn't matter? Or he's laying the groundwork for 2028?

BREAKING: The former Democrat Governor of New York just admitted live on air that the Trump case would've never been brought if Trump wasn't running for President

"I'm telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that's what's offensive to people. And it should be."… pic.twitter.com/KHrq7asKNh

— George (@BehizyTweets) June 22, 2024

What I hear him saying between the lines: I was the one with good sense, and you made me cede the ground to these clowns. Look what they've done. Don't you miss me?

"Gen Z may like crew socks, but they’ve remained relatively silent on the issue on TikTok, and don’t seem to care..."

"... when asked on other parts of social media. Meanwhile, the most popular TikToks on the trend war are explainer videos and millennials on the defensive. “This country is in a crisis,” wrote menswear writer and commentator Derek Guy on X after a poll from the sportswear company Bennetts revealed 50.3 percent of its voters preferred 'normal' crew socks. Other videos showed Generation Y bravely wearing hidden socks in public, reluctantly wearing taller socks to stay on trend, or, like Spence, creating makeshift ankle socks by folding longer socks under their heels."

I'm reading "Your socks are showing your age/Millennials have cutthroat defenses of their low-cut socks as Gen Z embraces crew socks" (WaPo)(free access link, in case you need pictures).

It's interesting, from my perspective, to watch millennials facing up to a younger generation that regards them as old, especially when the focus is something that — unlike the inevitable decline toward death — is completely trivial — here, the height of the tops of your socks. 

My advice, from the advanced age of 73, is:

Winning a coin flip, Biden's people chose to place him on right side of the screen at the debate...

... when they could have chosen the advantage of going second in the closing arguments. It's easy to see why it's good to go second in the closing arguments, but the Biden people ceded that advantage to Trump, because they saw a stronger advantage in appearing on the right side. What's so great about the right side?

I found this answer in the Times of India:

"The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case grilled special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors Friday on how closely Attorney General Merrick Garland oversees their work."

"Under persistent questioning from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the prosecutors declined to divulge details and seemed caught off-guard by the inquiries. At one point, Smith deputy James Pearce said he was 'not authorized' to discuss the level of communication that occurred between the attorney general and the special counsel. 'I don’t want to make it seem like I’m hiding something,' Pearce then said."

Politico reports.

The degree of Smith's independence is crucially at issue. If he's too independent — that is, if he's not an "inferior" officer within the meaning of the Constitution — he needs to have been appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. He was not.

The judge’s intense dive into an issue that has been brushed aside by most other courts has caused head-scratching in the legal community and drawn renewed criticism of her handling of the sensitive case.

Head-scratching, eh? It's a perfectly comprehensible issue to anyone who's been through the first semester of Constitutional Law in law school. If anyone in that category is looking puzzled, I think they're engaging in mime. Don't be conned.

And Pearce does look like he's hiding something. And that's not a mimed argument. That's a slip that he feels bad about. How cornered was he to have blurted out "I don’t want to make it seem like I’m hiding something"?

Sunrise — 5:23.

"... Miri Sakai, 24, a graduate student in sociology, testified that she had no interest in either sexual or romantic relationships or in having children."

"Although women have made some progress in the workplace in Japan, cultural expectations for their family duties are much as they have always been. 'The lifestyle of not getting married or having children is still rejected in society,' Ms. Sakai said. 'Is it natural to have children for the sake of the country?' she asked. 'Are women who do not give birth to children themselves unnecessary for society?'... Kazane Kajiya, 27, testified last week that her desire not to have children was 'a part of my innate values.' 'It is precisely because these feelings cannot be changed that I just want to live, easing as much of the discomfort and psychological distress I feel about my body as possible,' she said.... At one point, Ms. Kajiya, who is married, considered whether she was actually a transgender man. But she decided that she was 'totally fine with being a woman, and I love it. I just don’t like having the fertility that enables me to have babies with men.'"

From "In Japan, These Women Want to Opt Out of Motherhood More Easily/A lawsuit challenges the onerous requirements for getting sterilized, calling the regulations paternalistic and a violation of women’s constitutional rights" (NYT).

I wonder how common it is for a young woman to mistake her desire not to have a baby for transgenderism. Imagine going to the extreme of transitioning when all you really wanted was sterilization. 

"Richard Hofstadter identified a paranoid style of American politics in the 1960s. His student, Christopher Lasch..."

"... called out the narcissism of American society in the 1970s and ’80s that we now know metastasized into Trump. As a card-carrying historian (who studied under Lasch), I am going to give it shot. The contemporary Republican Party acts as if it has a histrionic personality disorder. Their election playbook speaks directly to type: create a straw man/woman of your opponent, throw corrupt corporate and big PAC money to attack it, and then lie, fearmonger and, well, be histrionic to win votes. Nothing about the truth matters. If the opponent has nothing to distort or take out of context, make something up. Act on rash decisions. Rationalize your choices, no matter how mistaken. Above all, play the victim and win at all costs."

Wrote Tracy Mitrano, last July, in "The Republican Party Has a Histrionic Personality Disorder/And the impact on national security is serious" (Inside Higher Ed). Here's Mitrano's Ballotpedia page. She's a Democrat, so she's not explicitly making the larger point like Hofstadter and her mentor Lasch. But it seems obvious to me: We see histrionics across the board in American politics.

I found that year-old piece after wondering why people diagnose Trump with narcissism, when his personality seems much more like what the DSM calls "histrionic personality disorder." 

Here's what the NIH has to say about HPD:

"When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment."

The Supreme Court rules in United States v. Rahimi. 

The opinion is written by the Chief Justice, joined by everyone except Thomas, who dissents. There are also concurring opinions by Sotomayor (joined by Kagan) and by Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson. That's a lot to sort through.

"A citizen does not have a fundamental liberty interest in her noncitizen spouse being admitted to the country."

The Supreme Court rules, in Department of State v. Muñoz, a 6-3 decision written by Barrett. 

There's a concurring opinion by Gorsuch.

The dissenting opinion by Justice Sotomayor begins:

"When my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger.... At the time, I was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as 'worship pastor bro.'"

"My Christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. I could begin to imagine a life without God, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, I struggled to imagine a career without Him. By contrast, Corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful.... Corrie started identifying as bisexual, then pansexual, then queer. It was hard to know how to feel about her transformation. On the one hand, it became harder to place myself and our heterosexual marriage on the new map of her sexual interests...."

Writes Jason Bilbrey, in "I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been. Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?" (NYT)(free access link).

"Donors channeled tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee immediately following his May 30 conviction..."

"... all but erasing the massive fundraising advantage that President Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee once held.... The Biden campaign’s long-standing fundraising lead allowed his campaign to build a much larger footprint than Trump’s and to significantly outspend Trump’s effort on the airwaves.... But at the end of May, the Trump campaign and the RNC had a combined $171 million in cash on hand, surpassing the Biden campaign and the DNC’s combined total of $157 million, according to reports filed late Thursday."

I'm reading "Trump’s convictions fueled donation surge that could reshape contest/The Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and an allied super PAC raised more than $170 million in May, including tens of millions that came in after Trump’s May 30 conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records" (WaPo).

The Democrats tried too hard. It backfired. 

Philippe Reines did not call Joe Biden a "malfunctioning appliance."

I'm trying to read "Debate advice from the man who played Trump for Clinton’s prep" (WaPo)(free access link).

Phillippe Reines, the "longtime aid [sic] to Hillary Clinton" asked whether, in the debate, Joe Biden should "appeal to persuadable voters or engage his base." He says:

You can’t think in those terms. You’re just onstage with a malfunctioning appliance. I mean, you can’t. You can’t assume that you’re going to get done what you want to get done unless you do it in the context of using the malfunctioning appliance to make your point.

I know Joe Biden has had trouble walking and talking lately, but that's nasty. I mean, it's too true and put too humorously. I mean, I know the "malfunctioning appliance" must be the debate. Right? I hope! If Joe Biden is a malfunctioning appliance that must mean he's been a tool all along. That's not something Phillippe Reines would say.

At the Summer Solstice Café...

... you can talk all night.

(No sunrise picture: It was raining.)