pic.twitter.com/XrAg6hCeTfeveryone: you can’t dance to bob dylan
— rebecca ✨ (@ithrewtheglass) January 26, 2022
me: pic.twitter.com/XrAg6hCeTf
Friday, January 28, 2022
"everyone: you can’t dance to bob dylan... me:"
"' I think it’s just about finished,' he says. 'It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?' He shows me dancers doing ballet poses on green backgrounds...'"
"... a series that follows his recent 'Calvin Klein Girls' and 'Coca-Cola Girls.' The latter is a collection of blonde women in white dresses, dancing freely across cherry-red canvases and currently on view at Timothy Taylor gallery in London. Katz didn’t go to the opening. 'I’d rather stay home and paint,' he says. The thing about Alex Katz is that he never fitted in. His parents immigrated from Russia to a New York neighbourhood with just one other Jewish family; he says he was known as 'that crazy Katz kid.' When he found his style, about a decade after art school, it was also out of joint: 'I didn’t fit in with the old Realists, I didn’t fit in with the Abstract Expressionists, I didn’t fit in with Pop Art,' he says.... And while Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns introduced politics into their art, Katz painted the lake and trees around his summer home in Maine. So now, looking back, is he glad he never fitted in? 'Yeah... I think it worked out great!... I painted nice pictures in the ’50s, and people didn’t like them. So I thought, I’m going to stick a big face of my wife in your living room and it’s going to kill everything, and you’re going to have to throw out some furniture.... When I met Ada, she said something very unforgettable. She said, "You know something? You are very bright." I don’t think anyone got that about me. They knew I was bright, but not very bright.... I said, Oh. This girl’s got my number.'"
I'm reading "Artist Alex Katz: ‘I’m 91, for Chrissakes, and I’m cranking out paintings’/Over Bellinis in New York, the outsider of American art talks about screaming patrons, making masterpieces and not fitting in," a Financial Times article from November 2018 (and I checked, he's still alive).
The reason I'm reading this is that in a post this morning, I wrote about a man who's suing Madison for allegedly discriminating against him in its effort to hire a "police monitor," and I linked to an article that has a photograph of him that looks, to my eye, like an Alex Katz painting.
Blow it up 10 feet high — look! — and attach it to a museum wall.
But quite aside from that initial reason for my looking for Alex Katz, that 2018 article is just completely wonderful.
"Well, you know, he's a bland, older white guy."
Says Adam Liptak about Justice Stephen Breyer. Liptak was asked, on the NYT "Daily" podcast — at 8:48 — why it is that Breyer is the Supreme Court Justice people have the least opinion about (according to a poll).
Breyer, we're told, took into account — in deciding when to leave the Court — a desire not to have his "legacy" undone by the person who replaces him, and that raised the question what is his legacy? Maybe the podcast listeners don't know. In an effort to enlighten them, Liptak began with the notion that Breyer is "a bland, older white guy."
Now, let's be clear. Liptak didn't say that because a person is male, old, and white he's bland. He piled "bland" onto the list of things that supposedly cause people not to have an idea of what Justice Breyer is about. But the suggestion is there: to be white is to be bland. Of course, Liptak isn't saying that white people are bland, only that people, seeing a white person, may get no further than to perceive him as bland.
I can see the argument that this perception is good. Let's begin, when we see a person, with a presumption of blandness. Nothing special about this person. A blank. We'll see if he does anything to distinguish himself. Until then: bland. And don't let that be white privilege. Give everyone this privilege. Until you know something about this individual, leave an open space. If they never put anything in that space — that space in your head — let them remain an enigma, nothing but potential. You do not know them, and maybe you never will.
That conversation at Meadhouse at 5:22 a.m.
I'm downstairs about to make my second cup of coffee, and this text is the first sign that Meade is awake: 
Here's the article he was texting me about: "After failed search for police monitor, Madison oversight board opts for recruiting help" (Wisconsin State Journal).
The search for someone to fill this newly created position was deemed to have failed "after the person recruited and selected by the board, with help from the city’s Human Resources Department, took himself out of the running amid revelations that he’d discriminated against a woman he’d been having an affair with and violated state licensing requirements at a company he ran more than 15 years ago."
We're told the position will pay $125,000. I can't picture it ever being properly filled, yet apparently now we're going to pay people to try to fill it, because God knows, they can't back down.
ADDED: More about Eric A. Hill's lawsuit here.
[H]e began looking at the public social media pages of members of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board [and found]... “29 separate instances of biased, defamatory statements — occasionally containing obscene language — impugning my race, gender and former profession, among the social media accounts of seven out of the 11 voting members in charge of hiring for this position,” he says....
“As a white, male, former military policeman, I found their brazenly racist, sexist and anti-military posts not only personally demeaning, but professionally deleterious to my status as a candidate for this position, as I was additionally required — and not permitted to decline — to self-identify my race and gender to the city of Madison in its initial application form,” Hill said in a statement....
"Joseph Frank Keaton spent his youth in his parents’ knockabout vaudeville act; by the time he was eight, it basically consisted of his father, Joe, picking him up and throwing him..."
"... against the set wall. Joe would announce, 'It just breaks a father’s heart to be rough,' and he’d hurl Buster—already called this because of his stoicism—across the stage. 'Once, during a matinee performance... he innocently slammed the boy into scenery that had a brick wall directly behind it.' That 'innocently' is doing a lot of work, but all this brutality certainly conveyed a basic tenet of comedy: treating raw physical acts, like a kick in the pants, in a cerebral way is funny. 'I wait five seconds—count up to ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, holler bloody murder, and the audience is rolling in the aisles,' Keaton later recalled. 'It was The Slow Thinker. Audiences love The Slow Thinker.' A quick mind impersonating the Slow Thinker: that was key to his comic invention. The slowness was a sign of a cautious, calculating inner life. Detachment in the face of disorder remained his touchstone.... It was only when Joe started drinking too hard and got sloppy onstage that, in 1917, the fastidious Buster left him and went out on his own. It was the abuse of the art form that seemed to offend him."
From "What Made Buster Keaton’s Comedy So Modern?/Whereas Chaplin’s vision was essentially theatrical, Keaton’s was specific to the screen—he moved like the moving pictures" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).
Thursday, January 27, 2022
At the Healing-in-Progress Café...
... you can talk about whatever you want.
Yes! I was able to get out and do my sunrise run this morning. Photos taken at 7:23 and 7:25. Unfortunately, there was 100% cloud cover, but the temperature was a nicely warmed up to 20°. The next 2 days are going to be too cold again — 2 below tomorrow at sunrise and 1 below on Saturday — but then it looks like there will be a stretch of sunrise-runnable days — at least until next Thursday or Friday. By then, we'll be launched into February, and February won't be as cold as January... probably. Plus, it's short. I can already feel the spring approaching. Certainly, the darkest 20% of the year is over. We're entering the most balanced days, in terms of light and darkness, and I like that.
I'm old enough to remember....
I’m old enough to remember when people thought censorship was an inherent evil. Now censorship is the go to solution for every public ill. https://t.co/dLUKBOl89X
— Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) January 26, 2022
"If you’re in a wheelchair I get your point — ramps all round! But it is ludicrous for those voluntarily on two wheels rather than..."
"... forced to be on four to act all aggrieved. It’s pedestrians and drivers who need protection from them.... When I was growing up, bikes were for kids to play on and working-class people to get to work on. Their image was so mild that — along with cricket grounds and warm beer — John Major evoked George Orwell’s image of ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’ in a rather laughable and desperate attempt to persuade us that his Tories were a wholesome bunch, rather than sneaking around having extra-marital dalliances with each other. Or bikes were amusing things ridden by clowns.... [A]ggressive young men on two wheels would have been written off as ton-up boys in the past; but because they know how to pronounce quinoa, this new lot are planet-savers, a shining example to the rest of us gas-guzzlers...."
From "The ceaseless self-pity of cyclists" by Julie Burchill (Spectator).
It was in a 1993 speech to the Conservative Group for Europe that the prime minister, John Major said, "Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist."
The George Orwell essay is "England, Your England" (1941):
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?
Um... there's no bicycling in Orwell's essay! I can't be the first person to notice that this famous quote of Major's got the wrong impression of the old maids in the autumn mist. Come on, England! I know an "h" looks like a "b" but "hiking" isn't "biking," and when you inflate it to "bicycling," you're really drawing attention to your carelessness, there being no such thing "hicycling."
"Over the past 10 years, hundreds of thousands of men have traveled to Qatar to build these structures. Migrants from all over the world — from Mozambique to Nepal, from Egypt to the Philippines..."
"... worked hard 10-hour days, six days a week, to raise stadia out of the desert, but also to build luxury residential developments, construct museums and cultural spaces, and lay down new geometric islands in Qatar’s glistening bay. Day after hot day, scaffolders hauled tons of scaffolding pipes, planks and clamps up the lattice structures they fixed together. Cladders and rope artists craned huge panes of aluminum and glass into the air and then balanced off the edges of buildings to attach the panels. Welders torched metal to create the curved joints of buildings, wrapping their workspaces in fire retardant tarps against the desert wind and enclosing themselves in an excruciating whirlwind of fire and sparks. Workers tore up the ground to excavate deep foundations for towering high-rises or to bore tunnels for Doha’s new metro network, which aims to be the fastest driverless system in the world.... I know because I spent a year on construction projects in Qatar interviewing them and shadowing them on-site. They described the fear that stalked them as they scaled the skeletons of buildings. They spoke about the way the extreme heat — averaging highs of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months — seemed to melt the air and made them feel as if they were drowning. They recounted the rage they swallowed at being asked, under threat of deportation, to do things that violated their company’s safety regulations and that they knew would put them at risk of injury...."
From "Opinion: In Qatar’s glittery World Cup, the poor toil for the thrill of the rich" by Natasha Iskander (WaPo).
That tab was open in my browser, and it was open, unread, when, earlier today, writing a post about the new Supreme Court nomination, I needed to see the percentage of women in the American population — it's 50.5 — and I ended up on this World Bank site that shows the percentage of women in all the countries of the world. I clicked to sort the countries from the smallest to the largest percentage. How low do you imagine that percentage goes and what country do you think is at the top of this column? The country is Qatar and the percentage is 24.8.
24.8?! What could possibly be happening? Are they killing their women? Is there an insane rate of death in childbirth? The abortion of females? No, I thought, it is most likely the importation of extra men, used for work, and, seeing this article now, I think that was the right guess.
Qatar has, by far, the lowest percentage of women, and it's the only country with a number in the 20s. There are a few countries in the 30s: United Arab Emirates (30.9%), Oman (34.0%), Bahrain (35.3%), Maldives (36.6%), and Kuwait (38.8%).
An "elite destination"?
I'm trying to read Axios: "MSNBC will soon announce plans to move morning anchor Stephanie Ruhle to the 11 pm ET hour that Brian Williams turned into an elite destination, two sources familiar with the move tell Axios."
Did Brian Williams ever even achieve the comeback he needed? I didn't watch closely, but I don't even understand the claim that he created an "elite destination" out of the MSNBC 11 pm time slot.
It could mean that very few people watched. Is Axios snarky like that?
But "elite" doesn't mean just small — unless you're talking about type size. It means "exclusive, select" (OED):
1962 G. Murchie Music of Spheres ii. 24 The most elite of the elite new breeds grew powerful antigravity muscles and air gills called lungs.
1985 P. W. On & C. H. Persell in P. W. Cookson & C. H. Persell Preparing for Power i. 28 Janitors pick up the litter of the elite students and the dogs.
2014 G. Tholen Changing Nature of Graduate Labour Market ii. 45 Recruitment practices for elite graduate positions may not deliberately be unmeritocratic.
White people and men have always been represented on the Supreme Court out of proportion to their portion of the American population.
If Biden keeps his pledge and nominates a black woman, and if she is confirmed, then, for the first time, the percentage of black people on the Court (22.2%) will exceed the percentage in the population (12.1%).
Women will still be underrepresented in proportion to the population — 44.4%, instead of 50.5%.
Does 22.2% seem like too much representation for black people on the Court? Consider that there has never been even one Asian American or a Native American nominated to the Supreme Court. But also consider that many people believe that Clarence Thomas, because he is conservative, doesn't represent black people at all.
Look how clearly Thurgood Marshall stated that position as he vacated the seat Thomas took (scroll to 2:30):
See the top right corner of every page of this blog? It says "Create blog."
If there's something I'm not accepting that you want to say, you can hit that button and immediately acquire a place for yourself to say what you want.
What I'm not accepting in the comments: Things that don't fall within the scope of my post, things that I believe were written in bad faith (that is, with the purpose of harming or degrading this blog), low-effort peevish junk.... I can't complete this subjective list, but to quote the Supreme Court Justice who was my favorite back when I was in law school — I graduated in 1981 — I know it when I see it.
A blog is a triumph of subjectivity and exquisitely limited personal power, and I intend to keep it that way.
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
At the Gold Bird Café...
... you can talk all night.
That's titled "Bird Finial," and it's in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. It's from the ZenĂş culture of the "5th-10th century." I ran across it today because I was searching for finials, after the icy, snowy weather formed what looked like finials on the railing posts of the deck. Something about the birds on the deck had me looking for bird finials, and I was delighted to find this gold ornament.
"Spotify sides with Joe Rogan after Neil Young ultimatum."
Spotify is removing Neil Young’s music after the musician gave the streaming service an ultimatum, saying it could not provide a platform to both him and Joe Rogan due to the podcast host’s “fake information” on COVID-19 vaccines. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform. They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both,” Young wrote in a letter earlier this week to his record label and management team....
Well, of course, Spotify should side with Joe Rogan. The person who makes an ultimatum like that should lose. It's ridiculous. If that worked, there'd be an obnoxious celebrity throwing his weight around every day.
So much for "rocking in the free world," Neil, you big jerk.
"Oh? I'd forgotten that he'd pledged to choose a black woman. Isn't that inconsistent with his 3 reasons for not giving us a list?"
"There can't be that many potential choices if he's got the type of person narrowed down like that. Who are the under-60 black female federal judges appointed by Democratic Presidents? Won't they all be influenced in their decisions — reason #1, [below] — even though their names are not on a list? Aren't they all just as vulnerable to 'unrelenting political attacks' as the individuals on Trump's list (reason #2)? And are you not violating reason #3 by making this pledge? You are trying to gain favor in a partisan election campaign, and when it's over, you'll be locked into that limitation and not able to make the sober, nonpolitical analysis you want us to think you will make. And isn't your pledge to appoint a black woman — just a black woman, not the person with the greatest skill and integrity — more political than Trump's list of real people, whose skill and integrity we can investigate?"
I blogged on September 20, 2020, after Biden gave 3 reasons why he would not, like Trump, give voters a list from which he'd choose his Supreme Court nominees.
The 3 reasons were:
1. "[P]utting a judge’s name on a list like that could influence that person’s decision making as a judge, and that would be wrong, or at least create the perception that it would have influence."
2. "[A]nyone put on a list like that under these circumstances will be subject to unrelenting political attacks."
3. "[I]f I win, I’ll make my choice for the Supreme Court not based on a partisan election campaign, but on what prior presidents have done.... [A]fter consulting Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate and seeking their advice and asking for the consent... ... I’ll consult with senators in both parties about that pick, as well as the legal and civil leaders in our country...."
Breyer will retire!
Big news!
I'm reading the report in the NYT:
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the senior member of the Supreme Court’s three-member liberal wing, will retire, two people familiar with the decision said, providing President Biden a chance to make good on his pledge to name a Black woman to the court.
Oh, so there's a "pledge" and he'll need to "make good" on it.
ADDED: We've already got affirmative action on the Supreme Court's agenda this year as we move toward the elections, and if Biden fulfills this pledge, it will intensify the political theater. He already fulfilled a black-woman pledge in selecting his Vice President, and there's a fair amount of disappointment in her. (She's got worse poll numbers than he does.) But that doesn't mean he should violate his pledge. (I'm assuming it is, indeed, a pledge.) He should elevate an extraordinarily impressive black female judge, so that the political theater is highly supportive of this kind of selection process, and the resonance with the pending cases helps the pro-affirmative-action side win favor with the people.
ALSO: At WaPo, Neal Katyal, the former Solicitor General and a former law clerk to Breyer, has an op-ed that was all ready to go: "Breyer’s act of listening will pave the way to a healthier democracy." I thought the "act of listening" was going to be the act of listening to people who were telling him he needed to retire to give Biden a chance to nominate somebody before Republicans took back the Senate, but no, it's about judging cases:
A deep part of his listening practice was to pay attention to experts in the field. He often said federal judges are not experts on national security, or the environment, or the economy, and that a deep part of wisdom was deference to expertise. Breyer’s path was to triple check his personal impulses, and particularly so if they conflicted with the views of true experts on the question before him.
That's pretty sober and lofty, but here's how Katyal brings it in for a landing:
Consider just how different that is from the political debates today, where extremist ideology has attacked things that should be noncontroversial, from wearing masks to taking vaccines, from addressing global warming to protecting voting rights.
America stands at a crossroads. On one path is more toxic extremism, the culmination of which we witnessed on Jan. 6. Despite that armed insurrection, the path remains just as seductive as ever to many.
Armed insurrection?
The other path is quieter and more difficult to practice. It is a path forged by Breyer: respect for others, reverence for the law, and most of all, a commitment to listening to and learning from one another.
You know, if you want to be quieter and reverent and committed to listening to and learning from one another, you wouldn't have written "armed insurrection." Or "toxic extremism." This gets my "civility bullshit" tag.
And why shouldn't we be able to debate wearing masks and the best way to protect voting rights and whether we're getting accurate reports of the science about vaccines and global warming? We are not deciding cases and dictating what other people must do, the way the Court does. We're exchanging opinion in the public forum, debating and expressing ourselves!
That's not "toxic extremism." It's toxic extremism to say that it is!
AND: From right before the 1980 election: "Reagan Pledges He Would Name a Woman to the Supreme Court" (WaPo). In June 1981, Potter Stewart announced his retirement, and Reagan got his slot to fill. I had just graduated from law school, and I remember telling my father that I was excited about the first woman on the Supreme Court. My father scoffed and said he didn't expect Reagan to make good on his pledge. He confidently asserted that the nominee would be William French Smith.
"What is it like to be you?"
Joe Rogan does a good job with Jordan Peterson — putting on the brakes now and then and questioning assertions and checking them on the spot but mostly letting Peterson expatiate in his inimitable style I'm just putting up the longest clip currently available. The episode is over 4 hours long. I'm well past the midpoint, so I'm proud of my stamina on this one.
"They were very, very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.' You’re progressive in one way … but you’re still making that … backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave. What … are you doing, man?"
Said Peter Dinklage, on the Marc Maron podcast, quoted in "Peter Dinklage slams Disney’s plans for ‘Snow White’ remake: ‘Backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave’" (WaPo).
From the comments over there: "I listened to the podcast before reading this article. The editors that picked the title should ask themselves whether they deliberately feed th[e] media hyperventilation. Dinklage didn’t 'slam' anything. He calmly discussed the issue and critiqued it in a thoughtful way. Stop ginning up controversy where there need be none."
In any event, Disney responded: "To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period."
It seems to me that the original animated film made a big point of giving each dwarf an individualized characteristic — Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc. — so isn't that the opposite of stereotyping? Or is it stereotyping to say that in this category people have one and only one outstanding characteristic — these are a one-dimensional — or 2-dimensional, if you count dwarfism — kind of person.
"Frank Zappa once said 'the world is rudderless.' I like yours SO MUCH better."
Said RideSpaceMountain, about my phrase "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots," in the comments to this post about the outsider artist Lee Godie.
I'd wanted to embed a trailer for a documentary about the artist, and the Vimeo page gave me the HTML code, but then, on publication, it wouldn't display, and there was a reference to some privacy policy. I said: "That seems so out of keeping with the spirit of the artist, so there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots."
I was just putting up this new post — because I want to encourage the world to adopt the line, "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots" — when RideSpaceMountain re-commented: "Correction: Alan Moore made that quote, no[t] Zappa."
I was torn! I do want to popularize the expression there's "a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots" — and not just because I want to be famous but because I think it might be helpful to think in those terms. It's not that everything everywhere is screwed up and everyone is stupid, a very pessimistic view, but that maybe there's a specific problem somewhere, and maybe just one or 2 idiots. That's actually optimistic!
But maybe this isn't bloggable without the folk hero Zappa. Better than Zappa! What an accolade! And who's Alan Moore? That's quite a plunge, from the Maunaloaesque height of Zappa to whoever this Alan Moore character is. Okay, I looked it up. Maybe he means a lot to you. Maybe better than Alan Moore is bloggable. Sorry, I don't read that sort of comic book (though I am a big fan of a certain sort of comic book).
I'm glad Frank Zappa isn't the source of the quote "the world is rudderless." I just don't imagine Zappa going in for the metaphor the world is a boat. And, Frankly, if the world were a boat, I'd want it to be rudderless — like Noah's ark — because who wants the whole world with a destination and all of us stuck going there?
ADDED: I looked to see whether Frank Zappa had ever used a ship or boat in his lyrics. The answer — if I can trust Genius.com with the lyrics of the lyricist often called a Genius — no.
On my search for "boat," Genius, apparently grasping at straws, served up things with "beat" (or, desperately, "botulism"):
I clicked through to "Beatles Medley" and read the lyrics while listening on Spotify:
Jim... once had a girl, or should we say, she once had he
She... showed him her room, isn't it swell, Texas Motel...
Ha ha. Very funny. Speaking of The Beatles, Meade said, "We all live in a rudderless submarine."
Yes, The Beatles had the idea of the world as a sea-going vessel, and they liked it.Isn't it wonderful?
I'm seeing a rudder though... and I know that thing had a destination, Pepperland... if you can ever get past the Foothills of the Headlands and the Sea of Holes.
"Do they really believe that the Black voters who formed the base of the Democratic Party think like Ibram X. Kendi, or the leaders of BLM? Are they crazy?"
"I mean, how can they not understand there’s enormous sort of diversity among the worldviews of people within the Black community? They vary by class, they vary by age, they vary in all kinds of ways. And the idea that they are sort of all on board with this crusade against the superficial aspects of so-called systemic racism, that that’s really what they care about, is fanciful, really."
Said Ruy Teixeira, quoted in "Confessions of a Liberal Heretic/Ruy Teixeira was co-author of one of the most influential political books of the 21st century. Now, he says, Democrats are getting its lessons all wrong" (NYT).
Teixeira's influential book was "The Emerging Democratic Majority," predicting, in 2002, that the process of demographic change would pile up votes on the side of the Democratic Party.
Interviewed about that idea now, he says that even back then he (and his co-author) "very specifically said — and this is widely ignored — that for this majority to attain and exercise political power, you have to retain a significant fraction of the white working class." And he admits that they didn't recognize how much the "professional-class hegemony in the Democratic Party... would tilt the Democrats so far to the left on sociocultural issues" and lead to positions on immigration and crime and systemic racism that are alienating to many white working class voters.
"For almost 25 years, Godie lived mostly outdoors and slept on park benches, even during subzero temperatures. She stashed her possessions..."
"... in rented lockers around the city. Her studio was wherever she happened to be — an alley, a bridge, atop a deli counter.... In the 1970s, she took hundreds of self-portraits in photo booths at the Greyhound bus terminal and in the train station. In these black-and-white snapshots — which she often embellished with paint or a ballpoint pen — she portrayed her many sides: a coquette; a Katharine Hepburn look-alike; a rich lady flashing a wad of cash; and above all an uncompromising artist whose work can be found today in American museums.... [A]t 60, [Godie] suddenly appeared on the steps of the majestic Art Institute of Chicago, declaring herself a French Impressionist who was 'much better than CĂ©zanne.'... 'She lived in a fantasy world... In her mind she was a world-famous artist. And everything was about France.'... There were recurrent figures, including a woman in left profile with a topknot and bared teeth, the so-called Gibson Girl...; Prince Charming, or Prince of the City, a patrician figure with a bow tie and parted hair, often portrayed in front of Chicago’s John Hancock Center; and a waiter, a mustachioed man with sideburns, based on a real waiter whom Godie found handsome. Some of her female figures resembled the actress Joan Crawford. Other common motifs were birds, leaves, insects, grape clusters and hands playing piano. Godie sometimes wrote on her canvases too: 'Staying Alive' and 'Chicago — we own it!' appear with the frequency of personal mottos.... She reportedly earned as much as a thousand dollars a day, which she squirreled away in her shoes, underwear and hidden pockets of her coat. On brutally cold nights, she splurged for a $10 room at a flophouse."
The tallest mountain in the world — most of which is underwater — has been ascended — bottom to top — for the first time.
SF Gate reports on the climbing of Maunakea, which is 33,500 feet tall, with 19,698 feet of that underwater.
Mountain climber and underwater explorer Victor Vescovo teamed up with Native Hawaiian scientist Cliff Kapono to scale Maunakea Volcano from its base at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to its peak.... The historic voyage included descending to the bottom of the ocean, kayaking to shore, then biking and hiking to the peak.
Oh, this isn't what it sounded like from the headline. They didn't go up the mountain in some underwater trek. Then went straight down to the starting point but then came straight up and kayaked over to the starting point on land:
They... floated back up and transferred to a kayak, with the help of expert canoeist Chad Cabral, and all three paddled the arduous 27 miles to shore, reaching Hilo Harbor just before dark, where they spent the night. The next morning, Vescovo and Kapono mounted bikes and cycled 37 miles from Hilo to Maunakea’s slopes.
Since Maunakea is Hawaii’s most sacred mountain, it was important for Vescovo and Kapono to follow Native Hawaiian protocol during this expedition. Cultural practitioner Tom “Pohaku” Stone advised the pair and conducted ceremonies at Puuhuluhulu, a volcanic cone where Saddle Road meets Mauna Kea Access Road, before they continued up the mountain....
And I will leave them there. My main question is answered, to my disappointment, and now I can see I have new questions and I assume these will not be answered. I mean, what ceremonies? What is a "cultural practitioner"? How does a Tom Stone become a Pohaku, a Pohaku in Puuhuluhulu?
Big and small headlines at WaPo on crypto.
2. "Melania Trump auctions off her hat, and has become the latest victim of the cryptocurrency crash."
I'm glad to see that on the "most read" list in the sidebar, the big story is ranking above the big hat story:
Actually, it's the Melania story I choose to read, because it's hard to understand how accepting cryptocurrency hurts her. It's only a hat she doesn't want that's going out in the world. What difference does it make to her — the "I really don't care, do u?" lady — how the cryptocurrency bids translate into dollar amounts? She restricted the bids to cryptocurrency — for whatever reason — but since there are different cryptocurrencies, aren't all the bids presented at the bidding site in dollar amounts? No, she's only accepting one cryptocurrencies — Solana — so that simplifies things. Its value has fallen 40% in the last week, but wouldn't that cause people with Solana who want the hat to pour a lot more of this declining stuff into the quest for the hat? How is Melania a victim?
Oh, I'm sure people could put together a list of ways in which Melania is a victim. Make a list and rank it, with the Solana-for-a-hat problem on it. If it ranks high, then good for Melania. But I'm laughing at the Washington Post readers who are drooling over the news that Melania is suffering.
WaPo snatches the hat and runs with it:
Although they’re under no obligation to do so, typically, first ladies donate iconic items either the Smithsonian’s First Ladies collection, or to their husband’s libraries and museums, as a way of preserving history for the public. The hat was custom-made for the occasion [of meeting the French president] by HervĂ© Pierre, the French-born, New York-based designer who became her White House stylist after making her inaugural gown. (That one is in the Smithsonian.) ...
Certainly, other first ladies and presidents have engaged in for-profit activities, particularly the large advances many of them receive to write their memoirs and for speaking engagements. “But that doesn’t take up nearly as much time as their not-for-profit activities,” [says Lauren A. Wright, a political scientist who studies first ladies at Princeton University]. “That’s most of what they spend time on when they leave office.”
Time? Did it take Melania any time to auction the hat? And I like how Wright lets it slip that the ex-First Ladies don't put much time into writing these memoirs for which they receive lavish pay-outs.
I'm reading this whole long article so you don't have to, and this, near the end is the most interesting thing to me:
[A] mid-December sale of an NFT featuring a watercolor painting of her eyes, called “Melania’s Vision,” by French artist Marc-Antoine Coulon.... Unlimited quantities of that NFT sold for one SOL, which was worth around $185 at the time. Each came with an audio message from Trump: “My vision is: Look forward with inspiration, strength and courage.”
Try to imagine just how banal and awful that painting of Melania's eyes must be, then look to see the actual thing: here. It was quite a bit worse than I'd pictured, and I was expect something atrocious.
Be best!
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
"Adele described the pool as a 'baggy old pond' and refused, point blank, to stand in the middle of it. The intention was to fill it with water on the set as she was lifted up on a crane-type mechanism, creating the illusion she was floating on water."
From "ROLLING IN THE DEEP END/Adele cancelled her Las Vegas residency after furious rant over swimming pool stunt" (The Sun).
She was set up to do a 3-month residency, with "tickets selling for up to £9,000 a ticket." But she didn't like the design for a publicity video.
When you’re a diva, you can do that. You can do anything.
CORRECTION: I thought the design was for a publicity video, but I believe it was the set design, and she didn't want to perform in that environment. That's much less diva, more a realistic expectation for a supportive workplace. The word "stunt" in the headline made me think it was a one-time publicity stunt.
"What the Trump Documents Might Tell the Jan. 6 Committee/Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, the House panel has received material that it hopes could flesh out how the attack on the Capitol came about."
This is an article in the NYT, which I'm reading because what I hope is that the material will show that Trump wasn't involved in planning or promoting breaking into the Capitol or committing any illegal acts. And isn't that what everyone should hope?
So I'm reading this article and setting to the side everything that is about Trump's belief that he really did win the election, his search for a legal path to victory, and his desire for a big, exciting rally showing strong support for this cause.
So, what does the NYT list? I've copied and pasted the whole text into my compose window, and I will now cut out everything I just said I was setting to the side:
Okay. Now that I've done that... feel free to check my work. Maybe you'll say that the talk of seizing voting machines indicated a willingness to pursue a path that wasn't clearly legal, but it was only considered and then not done. Wasn't it part of brainstorming about what could be done if an election actually were being stolen?
Let's consider the question hypothetically: What if an American presidential election were stolen? What could be done? What if it looked about like the 2020 election, but it really was a fraud?
One answer might be: In the event of such a calamity, it would be best to go forward and treat the ostensible winner as the winner in order to maintain confidence in the system and to avoid the trauma of revealing and delving into the chaos beneath the surface. The true winner of the election should see the profound national interest in moving forward with a new President in office and fully in power — free of any cloud of uncertainty. The true winner should do nothing more than to offer strong support to his erstwhile opponent and to celebrate the beauty of democracy.
"My first thought was 'wow.' My second thought was 'what a clever way for someone to acquire things over the objections of their partner -- get it all set up and let the toddler hit 'place order.'"
Writes one commenter, on "A New Jersey toddler spent nearly $1,800 using his mom’s phone. She didn’t know until packages started arriving" (WaPo).
From the article:
Although she’d loaded the items into her online Walmart shopping cart while browsing for the family’s new home in Monmouth Junction, Kumar knew she hadn’t purchased any of them.... While playing on his mom’s phone, the 22-month-old had gone rogue, buying nearly $1,800 of furniture that was in the cart. When the Kumars realized what had happened, they tried to cancel the remaining orders but were too late....
"When the court considers the Harvard and UNC cases, it would do well to reject the 'diversity' rationale entirely, or at least subject it to much tougher standards of review...."
"As one expert in an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs pointed out, the 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' category lumps together such varied groups as Argentinians, Cubans, Mexicans and immigrants from Spain. 'Asian Americans'' include racial and ethnic groups that cover more than half the world’s population, such as Chinese people, Indians and Filipinos, among others. Such distinct groups as Arab Americans, native-born white Protestants and recent immigrants from Bulgaria are all classified as 'white.' 'African American' combines native-born Black Americans with immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Needless to say, these groups have vastly different histories. Lumping them into a few crudely defined categories makes a mockery of the idea that universities are genuinely pursuing diversity as opposed to engaging in gross stereotyping. Perhaps even worse, the diversity rationale could be used to justify all kinds of racial and ethnic preferences.... For many schools, however, the diversity rationale for racial preferences is likely a smokescreen for the real purpose: compensating minority groups that are victims of long-standing discrimination, particularly African Americans. This justification, which has largely been rejected by the Supreme Court, is much more logically compelling than the diversity theory."
Writes Ilya Somin at "Supreme Court affirmative action cases challenging Harvard, UNC policies are overdue/The Harvard suit features extensive evidence that the school’s admissions system discriminates against Asian American applicants" (NBC News).
Somin says he has has "considerable sympathy" for the alternative rationale, but it's hard to imagine the Supreme Court switching from diversity to compensation for past discrimination, which it rejected as a basis for affirmative action long ago (in the 1970s).
[T]o my knowledge I was the only Russian Jewish immigrant in my class at Yale Law School. Would 'diversity' justify Yale using ethnic preferences to make sure there was another the following year?
The words "make sure" load that question, but I think — as someone who has served on my law school's admissions committee many times — that it would be perfectly fine to read an applicant's file, find yourself on the line between yes and no, see that this person is a Russian Jewish immigrant, and go with yes. And that yes would be based on what the current doctrine requires — a prediction that this person's contributions will be beneficial to the class as a whole. It would not be based on the idea that Russian Jewish immigrants have been discriminated against in the past.
How could I possibly assess all the various harms of the past and funnel the urge to compensate into this one applicant? There's no expertise to defer to. With diversity, there is a notion, however hazy, that the school's file-readers have some special intuition about putting together a good student body and making the classroom lively and full of challenging viewpoints. There's a mystique, a magic, a black box that the Court can decide to leave closed. I know many of you are scoffing at that box. But the easiest answer is to leave it closed, not to move to another rationale for affirmative action.
"Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?"/"It’s a great asset. More inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch."
The conversation everyone's talking about. A question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, and an answer from President of the United States Joe Biden.
Do you have a problem with any of it? It all makes sense to me. All I can see is that if anybody has a problem with it, but they also called out Donald Trump, in his presidential days, for his lack of "civility" when he made equivalently rough statements, then it's an occasion for my "civility bullshit" tag. Otherwise it's idle chitchat. Don't be distracted.
I need to give a link for the statement. I saw it yesterday multiple places, but I'm reviewing it at 4:45 in the morning at "Caught on a Hot Mic: Biden Uses a Vulgarity to Insult a Fox News ReporterThe president later called Peter Doocy and 'cleared the air,' Mr. Doocy said" (NYT).
Doocy didn't need an answer to that question. He was just publicizing an issue that obviously hurts Biden. Biden was presidential enough not to say "Fuck you," which would have been a completely justified and normal response. And if I am to believe the NYT, both men are engaged in a lengthy political dance:
Mr. Doocy is a reliable needler of Mr. Biden, although the president often appears more amused than angered by their jousts. Their sometimes spiky exchanges have become a regular feature of Mr. Biden’s public appearances.
Here's the video:
Monday, January 24, 2022
"The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear challenges to the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina..."
"... presenting the most serious threat in decades to the use of affirmative action by the nation's public and private colleges and universities.... In the latest case, groups backed by a longtime opponent of affirmative action, Edward Blum of Maine, sued Harvard and UNC in federal court, claiming that Harvard's undergraduate admissions system discriminated against Asian American students and that UNC's discriminated against both Asian American and white students.... The challengers in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, urged the justices to overrule the court’s 2003 decision on affirmative action, which upheld the University of Michigan's use of race as a plus factor and served as a model for similar admissions programs nationwide...."
"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
I'm reading that this morning because it popped up in the end of a New Yorker article about — of all things — Led Zeppelin:
If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don’t have to do it themselves—which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract—then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony.... [S]urely all kinds of demonic and powerful art, including many varieties of music, both classical and popular, have been created by people who didn’t live demonically. What about Flaubert’s mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art? In Led Zeppelin’s case, the great music, the stuff that is still violently radical, was made early in the band’s career, when its members were most sober. The closer the band got to actual violence, the tamer the music became.
Yes but who is the "famous fictional atheist" and how can I reverse the paraphrase "atrocious human deeds are... the manure for our future harmony"? Oh, I managed to do that.
It's from "The Brothers Karamazov," spoken by Ivan, who's famously atheist:“Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. I have believed, and I want to see for myself, and if I am dead by that time, let them resurrect me, because it will be too unfair if it all takes place without me. Is it possible that I've suffered so that I, together with my evil deeds and sufferings, should be manure for someone's future harmony? I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for.”
The NYT tries hard to get Temple Grandin to talk about vaccines and the fear of autism, but she won't go there.
They get an interesting interview out of her anyway — "Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently" — but it starts off incredibly awkwardly:
During the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about who’s vaccinated and who’s not, and historically, a fear of autism is one of the things that antivaxxers — I will make only one comment: I have two Pfizers and a booster and a flu shot. That’s all I’m going to say.
Well, if it’s OK, I have another couple of questions about vaccines and autism, and you can choose if you’ll answer or not. That’s a subject where that’s pretty much all I’m going to say. I am glad that I have my vaccinations. I don’t have to worry about going to the hospital. I’ll leave it at that.
In the past, you’ve expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines because of — No comment.
Is it your understanding that the concern that certain parents have with vaccines is — No comment.
OK, I’ll move on for now...
There's a footnote at "In the past, you’ve expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines":
In a 2013 interview with The Times, when Grandin was asked about mothers of autistic children who suspect links between vaccines and autism, she replied, “I have talked to maybe five or six of those mothers, and that’s the reason I don’t pooh-pooh it.”
The interviewer David Marchese moves on to some other things, but comes back to what I assume is the whole reason for choosing to interview this well-known public figure now:
There are specific studies debunking the idea that vaccines have a causal relation to autism, A 2011 analysis of more than 1,000 research articles concluded that there are no links between immunization and autism, right? No comment. No comment. No comment.
You don’t think it could be useful for people to hear your opinion? No comment. No comment.
I got it. You better get it. Because I’m not discussing it.
Have you gotten in trouble for talking about this subject before? No comment. I’ve had my two Pfizer shots and my booster. If they require a fourth shot, I’ll be first in line, thank you.
Again Marchese retreats into other material, and after a while — showing amazing doggedness — he tries again:
I realize that maybe earlier I should have just asked this question bluntly: Do you believe vaccines can cause autism? I’m not discussing that. I will give you one thing about vaccinations: I listened to the news, and a doctor was complaining about having heart-attack patients die because they could not get into the emergency room because the hospital was so full of unvaccinated Covid people. And then I talked to this person that was not vaccinated about, you know, maybe all these people filling up this hospital killed some heart-attack patients. He said, I never thought about that. That I will talk about.
But why not vaccines and autism? I don’t want to talk about that.
I’m curious about your reluctance. I’m not discussing it. OK. There are certain things I don’t talk about because it interferes with stuff I care about. It’s that simple.
He really wanted her to get into that. I am going to guess that he had an idea for an article that it might be possible to write: Maybe Grandin would give people reason not to dread autism and perhaps to advise us that it ought to be understood in a positive light, as part of the rainbow of human diversity.
But, good lord, how many times should a reporter pressure the interviewee to talk about a subject she's put off limits? It's interesting to print the entire sequence, so that we, the readers, live through the experience of a reporter not taking no for an answer.
I've been interviewed a few times by a reporter who kept coming back to something he seemed to already believe and wanted me to say, so I like the transparency! And Marchese never comes out and states what — if anything — he's trying to get her to say, so this interview is much better than what I've gone through.
"When the snow melts in the spring, fields can get so muddy in the plains of Eastern Europe that Russians have a word for it: Rasputitsa, or 'the season of bad roads.'..."
"If Russian President Vladimir Putin orders his forces to invade, analysts believe it would come before the spring thaw. 'The best time to do it is winter because it's going to be a mechanized advance and the mechanized divisions need hard frozen ground'... At a news conference Wednesday marking his first year in office, President Joe Biden warned Putin against an invasion, threatening a strong response by the US and NATO, but waffled over what would happen if Russia made a 'minor incursion,' in an awkward statement he sought to clarify afterward. 'The Russian dictator has not been subtle or secretive about what he wants. He might as well make the national anthem the Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R.,"' wrote Max Boot, in the Washington Post. 'He definitely wants to resurrect the Soviet empire, thereby undoing what he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. And that requires bringing back into the fold the second-largest former Soviet republic (by population) — the independent state of Ukraine.'"
From "Putin confronts the mud of Ukraine" (CNN).
***
From a 2011 post of mine, collecting mud quotes:
"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev
"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau
"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf
Russian, French, American, British.
Sunday, January 23, 2022
"What's Up With The Ignorant Tattoo Style?"
I learned a lot from this fascinating video:
I became aware of this phenomenon yesterday, when I saw this and this at the subreddit r/shittytattoos.
Here's video of the "[c]reator of the famed Ignorant Style tattoo style, Fuzi... a street art legend."
And here's an Instagram collection of Ignorant Style tattoos.
I'm pretty amused by the concept and, especially, the name — though I think most examples of this sort of thing are a mistake. Many years ago, probably in the 1990s, I saw a young woman on campus that had a tattoo of a bathtub on her neck. Just a dark line drawing of an old-time claw-footed bathtub with the pipe extending upward for the shower head. I felt so bad about it. And I love bathtubs. But now I can see that it was an early example of the Ignorant Style!
ADDED: Back in 2009, I blogged about a tattoo artist that did things that he might characterize as Ignorant Style. It's at least adjacent to Ignorant Style. I said "I love these scribbly tattoos!" You can see a lot of his things at Instagram, here.
"Could we have had a more unsuitable man in charge? Sloppy, lusty, blind to details..."
"... just look at the piteous footage of Boris Johnson as he apologised to the Queen last week, nearly weeping, entirely out of self-pity. Nobody, he moaned, told him the massive party he had personally attended was 'against the rules.' If it wasn’t a 'work event,' he said, he couldn’t 'imagine why on earth it would have gone ahead.' I can tell him why: it went ahead because no one at Downing Street ever gave a toss about the rules. Not a single one of the scores of entitled, cashmere-hoodie-toting Tinder-swiping gin-in-a-tin-chugging junior staffers who flocked to the basement disco gimpfest the night before Prince Philip’s funeral gave a second thought about what was happening in the rest of the country. It says everything that even when Johnson came out of hospital, one of the earliest things he did wasn’t to tell Carrie to tone down the fire-pit heart-to-hearts; he went to what one MP described as a 'welcome back' party in his garden. He ignored Covid and nearly died from it but came back and still ignored it and licked everything. Who does that?"
From "Keeping up with the Johnsons is exhausting — life is lived at 10,000 miles a minute" by Camilla Long (London Times).
I do enjoy reading The London Times. The writing is different from what we get here in America. Apparently, in the U.K., a classy paper will print the word "gimpfest." And every other sentence makes me want to diagram.
"To celebrate his birthday, he had also brought along his mandolin, foie gras and champagne...."
From "French adventurer, 75, dies in attempt to row across the Atlantic/Jean-Jacques Savin, a former paratrooper, wanted ‘to laugh at old age’ but got into difficulties off the Azores" (The Guardian).
I don't much celebrate birthdays — do you? — but I don't think I'd even consider celebrating my birthday while alone, and if I did, I might come up with the idea of champagne and some special food, but not of picking up a musical instrument and serenading myself.
It's so charming — don't you think? — that mandolin, foie gras, and champagne. I look to see — when was his birthday? Did he get to that birthday before the deathday popped up in the timeline of fate? Yes, he did. His birthday was January 14th. He died on the 21st.
"Some senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it."
"Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming. Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological. Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy."
Writes Robert Reich in "Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts" (The Guardian).
Is it "whacky" or "wacky"? The author of "Common Errors in English Usage" says:
Although the original spelling of this word meaning “crazy” was “whacky,” the current dominant spelling is “wacky.” If you use the older form, some readers will think you’ve made a spelling error.
But the OED has the oldest example as "wacky," in 1935, though "whacky" also appears early on, in 1938. "Wacky" looks predominant, but "whacky" is also good. Still, a "whack" is a hard hit, so you might think about whether you want that image infecting the meaning which is just "Crazy, mad; odd, peculiar."
The OED tips me off that "wackier" appears in John Irving's "World According to Garp." I'm printing it here because to me it's much more interesting than Reich's going on about the mental aberrations of Sinema and Manchin:
There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed [spoiler deleted] by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King, and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader. And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.
I like the phrase "drive [them] even wackier or simply away." There must be a Greek word for that structure, the intentional and surprising lack of parallelism ("wackier" being an adjective and "away" an adverb).
"Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools."
The ACLU tweets, quoted in "The ACLU Suddenly Reverses Its Support For Transparency/The long-time civil liberties organization continues its partisan transformation" (Inquire).
The ACLU tweet links to this NBC News article, "They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.' Conservative activists want schools to post lesson plans online, but free speech advocates warn such policies could lead to more censorship in K-12 schools." From that article:
[T]eachers, their unions and free speech advocates say the proposals would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and would lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism....
“It’s important we call this out,” said Jon Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America, a nonprofit group that promotes free speech. “It’s a shift toward more neutral-sounding language, but it’s something that is potentially just as censorious.”
"But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion..."
"... the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."
From "Does 'Mein Kampf' Remain a Dangerous Book?" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).
In this short article, Gopnik uses variations on the word "creepy" 5 times: "not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy.... The creepiness extends toward his fanatical fear of impurity.... Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now.... Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone.... it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."
That suggests that, if we readi the book, we will feel an instinctive revulsion against the writer, even as the writer was endeavoring to inspire revulsion against designated others. Is it good to rely on this instinct to deliver us from evil?
"The indictment [for seditious conspiracy] describes some Oath Keepers’ belief that 'the federal government has been coopted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights.'"
"That [Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers], the leading defendant, graduated from one of the country’s most Ă©lite law schools, Yale, is more than just a fun fact. He developed his views on the Constitution as a law student eighteen years ago, and won a school prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. His paper argued that the Bush Administration’s treatment of 'enemy-combatants' in the war on terror was unconstitutional. Rhodes wrote that 'terrorism is a vague concept,' and that 'we need to follow our Constitution’s narrow definition of war and the enemy.' The argument would have found much support in liberal legal-Ă©lite and civil-liberties circles.... [I]n order to convict the defendants of seditious conspiracy, the government will have to prove that they planned their storming of the Capitol with the purpose of opposing the lawful transfer of Presidential power.... Rhodes’s seeming belief that his plan for January 6th was resistance to an unconstitutional process may seem wholly unreasonable.... But, if the case goes to trial... [s]ome jurors may find it difficult to convict Rhodes and others of seditious conspiracy if they find that sincere views about reality informed the defendants’ purpose.... Such an outcome might have the effect of adding legal legitimacy to the big lie.... Now that talk of potential 'civil war' occurs not only among extremist groups but in the mainstream press, a public trial of alleged seditionists will showcase the central fissure that could lead us there."
Writes Jeannie Suk Gersen in "The Case Against the Oath Keepers/Members of the group face seditious-conspiracy charges for their roles in the January 6th insurrection. Can a sincere belief that the election was stolen protect them?" (The New Yorker).
Gersen highlights the risk the government is taking, forcing public attention onto the seditious conspiracy charge: Americans will put effort into understanding the defendants' arguments, some unknown segment of us will agree with them, and many more will think the government has overreached because it cannot prove that they were insincere.
Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading "Sports."
I thought this was odd:
But I clicked through and saw that it was no mistake:
Yes, I blogged Aaron's bookshelf gesturing — back on January 4th... in happier days....
Aaron Rodgers points out his copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand to Eli and Peyton Manning during Monday Night Football. pic.twitter.com/2qSOcSSb3m
— The Recount (@therecount) January 4, 2022
Saturday, January 22, 2022
"[S]ince around 1980, English speakers have been more given to writing about feelings than writing from a more scientific perspective."
"From around 1850 on, [researchers] found, the frequency of words such as 'technology,' 'result,' 'assuming,' 'pressure,' 'math,' 'medicine,' 'percent,' 'unit' and 'fact' has gone down while the frequency of words such as 'spirit,' 'imagine,' 'hunch,' 'smell,' 'soul,' 'believe,' 'feel,' 'fear' and 'sense' has gone up. The authors associate their observations with what Daniel Kahneman has labeled the intuition-reliant 'thinking fast' as opposed to the more deliberative 'thinking slow.' In a parallel development, the authors show that the use of plural pronouns such as 'we' and 'they' has dropped somewhat since 1980 while the use of singular pronouns has gone up. They see this as evidence that more of us are about ourselves and how we feel as individuals — the subjective — than having the more collective orientation that earlier English seemed to reflect."
Writes John McWhorter, in "Don’t, Like, Overanalyze Language" (NYT), discussing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purported to detect a "surge of post-truth political argumentation" and a "historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and — inextricably linked — between the rational and the emotional.”
McWhorter thinks the authors of the study are overdoing it, because, he says, often "the process by which language changes is that something starts out being about objective observation and drifts into being, as it were, all about me." He focuses on the question: "Why would this have happened to such an unusual extent since 1980?"
And he guesses that it's a matter of increasing informality, which naturally entails being "more open about the self, less withholding about the personal, more inclined to the intimate." In that light, it's hard to believe the researchers think they've shown a move from individualism to collectivism.
Something McWhorter doesn't talk about is that some people adopt a rationalistic tone for rhetorical purposes. They're not actually more rational, just trying persuade other people by posing as reasonable and unemotional. Ironically, that's an emotional move, and it can work if we respect the speaker's sincerity and good will, but it can stimulate wariness and irritation if we mistrust the speaker. And it's entirely rational to mistrust all speakers in the American political discourse that's developed in the last 40 years. In that light, it's not surprising that speakers have been abandoning the less effective rhetorical strategy.
"One of the first killer jokes in the stand-up act of Louie Anderson was about the meanness of older brothers."
"Imitating one of his own in an intimidating voice, he warned that there was a monster in a swamp nearby. With childlike fear in his eyes, Anderson reported that he avoided that area 'until I got a little older and a little smarter and a little brother.' Pivoting to the future in an instant, he adopted the older brother voice, pointing to the swamp and telling his sibling: 'That’s where your real parents live.'"
From "Louie Anderson and the Compassion of America’s Eternal Kid/He displayed an empathetic humanity that he shared offstage with his friend Bob Saget. The loss of both comics represents the end of an era" by Jason Zinoman (NYT).
When you think of the 1980s comedy boom, the first artist that comes to mind for many is Jerry Seinfeld and his clinically observational brand of humor. For others, it might be the rock-star flamboyance of Eddie Murphy or Andrew Dice Clay. But in the days of three major networks, the culture incentivized a warmly inclusive, rigorously relatable comedy that could appeal to a broad mainstream and, at its best and most resonant, had an empathetic humanity.
The outpouring of love for Bob Saget... was in part... because of a vast audience that saw him as the friendly paternal face on “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”... Anderson fit seamlessly into an equally idealized role as our culture’s eternal kid. There was a boyish innocence and sweetness to Anderson that never left him, even when he was playing a mother on “Baskets,” a remarkable and sincere performance....
I haven't kept up with network sitcoms, so "Baskets" was news to me. I enjoyed this, showing clips from the show, him getting made up as Christine Baskets, and his very sweet account of how he's bringing his own mother back to life:
And here are Saget and Anderson in a podcast conversation (recorded last May).
ADDED:
What is the controversy about this magazine cover at British Vogue?
Consider the question for yourself before reading the criticisms. 
At Instagram, British Vogue says: "The nine models gracing the cover are representative of an ongoing seismic shift that became more pronounced on the SS22 runways; awash with dark-skinned models whose African heritage stretched from Senegal to Rwanda to South Sudan to Nigeria to Ethiopia. For an industry long criticized for its lack of diversity, as well as for perpetuating beauty standards seen through a Eurocentric lens, this change is momentous."
At CNN, a writer based in Nigeria says:
Why are the models depicted in a dark and ominous tableau, the lighting so obscure to the point they are almost indistinguishable on a cover meant to celebrate their individuality? Why were they dressed all in black, giving a funereal air, and an almost ghoulish, otherworldly appearance?
Why were they sporting strangely-coiffed wigs? Many of these women wear their natural hair normally and it would have been great to see that reflected on a cover celebrating African beauty. Additionally, on the cover, the models' skin color appeared to be several shades darker than their normal skin tone.
The photographs were taken by Afro-Brazilian photographer Rafael Pavarotti, and the images -- published in numerous glossy magazines over the years -- are consistent with his visual style of presenting Black skin in an ultra-dark manner....
But the lighting, styling, and makeup, which purposefully exaggerated the models' already dark skin tones, reduced their distinguishing features and presented a homogenized look. Was this the best way to celebrate Black beauty?...
Should we ask what's the best way to celebrate black beauty or what's the vision of the artist/photographer? Pavarotti is black, so to push him back and say he's doing it wrong is to reject a black vision, to put him in a lower position than all the photographers whose vision is respected. And yet, the artist and model relationship has long been a matter of critique, and Pavorotti shouldn't get special immunity from criticism.
Many online critics felt the images were fetishized and pandering to a White gaze, ironic, considering the editorial team behind them consisted almost entirely of people of African descent.
Ghanaian writer Natasha Akua wrote in a private message on Instagram: "When I saw it I immediately was shocked ... I feel like I know what statement he was trying to make visually but turning these black models into this strange tableau straight out of a horror movie just felt instinctively wrong."
"Why darken their skin beyond recognition?" she asked. "To make some statement about being unapologetically black? Unapologetically black means being who you are and does not require this manner of hyperbole."
"I find the lighting and tones beautiful," Daniel Emuna wrote. "But my personal complaint is that publications and brands are constantly communicating that the deepest darkest hue in complexion represents the truest essence of Blackness or even Africanness. This is clearly a mark of the white gaze."
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