Althouse

---

• "Ames was grilled about her 'ethnic background,' chastised by a colleague at a training session when she shared her grandparents’ experience during the Holocaust in Poland..."
• I finally made it out to see the sunrise once again.
• "So, Trump will easily win a congressional seat in Florida if he runs in 2022. The census update likely means the GOP picks up 5+ seats in the house..."
• I only signed up for Spotify because I wanted to hear what Joe Rogan had to say about the crisis in Texas...
• "When I’m rolling, I just want to breathe deeply and enjoy it. The simple act of breathing can be extremely pleasurable."
• Hot from the oven at 5 a.m.
• "Lindsey Graham, who says that Trump is a 'handful,' a word usually leveled at spirited women, is going to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to golf with his sovereign lord..."
• "I never would have made that Nazi comparison if I’d known everybody was going to be such a Nazi about it."
• At the Saturday Night Café...

"Ames was grilled about her 'ethnic background,' chastised by a colleague at a training session when she shared her grandparents’ experience during the Holocaust in Poland..." Posted: 21 Feb 2021 09:26 AM PST "... and 'admonished' when she declined requests at superintendents meetings to take part in the comic book movie-inspired 'Wakanda Forever' salute to 'black power,' she charges in the legal filing.... At an implicit-bias workshop where superintendents were asked to tell their personal stories, [Karen] Ames talked about her grandparents' loss of two children during the Holocaust — only to have colleague Rasheda Amon tell her, 'you better check yourself,' the lawsuit alleges. 'That is not about being Jewish! It's about black and brown boys of color only," court papers quote Amon as scolding."  From "Bronx educator claims she was fired after sharing Holocaust story, refusing 'Wakanda' salute" (NY Post). About that salute, there's also this (about a different teacher): "Veteran Bronx educator claims she was fired after refusing 'Black Panther' salute" (NY Post): At official gatherings of high-level Department of Education bosses, then-Bronx superintendent Meisha Ross Porter often asked the group to do the arms-across-the-chest gesture of solidarity from the mythical African nation of Wakanda.... When Rafaela Espinal — a Dominican-American who describes herself as Afro-Latina — declined to join in, she "was admonished and told that it was inappropriate for her not to participate," according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed Feb. 3 against the city DOE, Chancellor Richard Carranza and some of his top-ranking lieutenants.... [W]hen repeatedly asked to salute "Wakanda" at other professional meetings, Espinal felt the gesture "introduced a racial divide where there should be none," said her lawyers, Israel Goldberg, Helen Setton and Domenic Recchia. Porter would often talk about the militant civil rights group the Black Panthers when asking superintendents to do the "Wakanda" salute, noting her father was a member, the attorneys said.... The DOE insists the famous cross-arm gesture doesn't refer to "Black power," but is instead "a symbol used to represent the Bronx." Fellow DOE administrators also allegedly told Espinal she wasn't "Black enough" and she should "just learn to be quiet and look pretty," she claims in the $40 million suit....

I finally made it out to see the sunrise once again. Posted: 21 Feb 2021 09:03 AM PST   Had not made it out since February 2. Just too cold! And I only need it to be feels-like 9° to be willing to do it. I've done these sunrise runs since September 2019, and — not counting when we were out of town — I'd only ever missed an occasional day, maybe 2 days once or twice. I think I've missed more days this February than in all the other time combined.  Ah, well! I was happy to get out.

"So, Trump will easily win a congressional seat in Florida if he runs in 2022. The census update likely means the GOP picks up 5+ seats in the house..." Posted: 21 Feb 2021 07:02 AM PST "... to take control. And then the GOP makes Trump speaker. Then Trump has control over the legislative agenda and impeachment. Fun ensues."  So said Tom, commenting on the first post of the day today. I don't know if Tom is the first person to say that, but what an interesting scenario. It has happened before that a former President has gone on to serve in the House of Representatives:  [John Quincy] Adams considered permanently retiring from public life after his 1828 defeat, and he was deeply hurt by the suicide of his son, George Washington Adams, in 1829. He was appalled by many of the Jackson administration's actions... Adams grew bored of his retirement and still felt that his career was unfinished, so he ran for and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 1830 elections. His election went against the generally held opinion, shared by his own wife and youngest son, that former presidents should not run for public office. Nonetheless, he would win election to nine terms, serving from 1831 until his death in 1848. Adams and Andrew Johnson are the only former presidents to serve in Congress.... As for George Washington Adams: Adams's grandmother, Abigail Adams, was unhappy with the decision of her son to name the child after George Washington and not after her husband. She thought the decision "ill judged" and "wrong," adding that John Adams also seemed offended.... [George Washington] Adams graduated from Harvard University in the Class of 1821 and studied law. After briefly practicing as an attorney, he ran for state office. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1826 and served one year. In 1828, Adams served on the Boston City Council... Adams disappeared on April 30, 1829, while on board the steamship Benjamin Franklin in Long Island Sound during passage from Boston to Washington, D.C. He was last seen at about 2 A.M., and his hat and cloak were found on deck, leading to the conclusion that he had intentionally jumped. His body washed ashore on June 10. An alcoholic, Adams had left notes hinting that he intended to kill himself; he had appeared to be delusional while on the ship, asking the captain to return to shore and declaring that the other passengers were conspiring against him....

I only signed up for Spotify because I wanted to hear what Joe Rogan had to say about the crisis in Texas... Posted: 21 Feb 2021 06:17 AM PST ... but I keep getting this:     I was going to get interested in the other features of Spotify — maybe use it as my music source — but I'm only here because of Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan won't play.  I tried Googling for an answer, and came up with hopeless junk like this. I'm about to give up on Spotify. They're asking $9.99 for their service. That would be a great deal if it worked. But if the app is balky and malfunctioning, they ought to pay me.  ADDED: I wondered, who owns Spotify? Spotify is its own company, a Swedish company, with global headquarters are in Stockholm. "On 6 February 2019, Spotify acquired the podcast networks Gimlet Media and Anchor FM Inc., with the goal of establishing themselves as a leading figure in podcasting." It's a year later. You bought Joe Rogan. Make your podcasting work!  BUT: I am able to play this podcast using my iMac (desktop), using the Spotify app. Within 2 minutes, they're talking about Ted Cruz going to Cancun. Joe asks a good question: What could Ted Cruz do about the problem in Texas? It's bad optics, but he had no way to help, did he?

"When I’m rolling, I just want to breathe deeply and enjoy it. The simple act of breathing can be extremely pleasurable." Posted: 21 Feb 2021 04:21 AM PST Said Carl Hart, chair of the Columbia University psychology department, quoted in "Columbia professor: I do heroin regularly for 'work-life balance'" (NY Post). At 54, the married father of three has snorted small amounts of heroin for as many as 10 days in a row and enjoyed it mightily – even if, as he recalls in his new book "Drug Use for Grown-ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear" (Penguin Press), he's experienced mild withdrawal symptoms "12 to 16 hours after the last dose....  Hart, who studies the effects of psychoactive drugs on humans, finds his use of the narcotic to be "as rational as my alcohol use. Like vacation, sex and the arts, heroin is one of the tools that I use to maintain my work-life balance."  His reason for coming clean about doing opiates and the like is to advocate for decriminalizing possession of recreational drugs. The book makes the case "that the demonization of drug use – not drugs themselves – [has] been a tremendous scourge on America, not least in reinforcing this country's enduring structural racism," according to the publisher...

Hot from the oven at 5 a.m. Posted: 21 Feb 2021 03:35 AM PST   Meade made bread... for the second day in a row. He even milled the grains and seeds — wheat, oats, teff, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, sesame seeds.  Teff?! I had never heard of it. Eragrostis tef, also known as teff, Williams lovegrass or annual bunch grass, is an annual grass, a species of lovegrass native to the Horn of Africa, notably to modern-day Ethiopia. It is cultivated for its edible seeds, also known as teff.... The name teff is thought to originate from the Amharic word teffa, which means "lost". This probably refers to its tiny seeds, which have a diameter smaller than 1 mm.... So teff was one of the seeds, not one of the grains? What is the difference between a grain and a seed? I realize I don't know. From the Wikipedia article "Grain":  A grain is a small, hard, dry seed, with or without an attached hull or fruit layer, harvested for human or animal consumption.... Grains and cereal are synonymous with caryopses, the fruits of the grass family. In agronomy and commerce, seeds or fruits from other plant families are called grains if they resemble caryopses. So teff is a grain (and a seed) and wheat is a seed (and a grain). It's good to know these terms and facts. Also good: Fresh Meade-made bread in the house!

"Lindsey Graham, who says that Trump is a 'handful,' a word usually leveled at spirited women, is going to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to golf with his sovereign lord..." Posted: 21 Feb 2021 02:51 AM PST "... and try to explain the importance of the 2022 midterms to Trump's legacy. But Trump doesn't give a damn, except how he can use the midterms for revenge or self-promotion.... By coddling Trump on his election fakery, the Republicans gave it so much oxygen, it led to tragedy. Trump, the supreme ingrate, wasn't grateful for McConnell's nay vote. He promptly composed a masterpiece of spleen, a statement threatening to primary Mitch's candidates and calling him 'a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack' who lacks political wisdom, skill and personality.... Ted Cruz's truckling may be the most jarring, given Trump's attacks on Cruz's wife and father in the 2016 campaign. But I've always said the story of Washington should be titled 'Smart People Doing Dumb Things.' Cruz wouldn't even study with people from what he called 'minor Ivies' while at Harvard Law School but didn't think twice before leaving Texans starving, freezing and dying to go catch some rays in Cancun and then blaming his daughters. We'll see if Trump can sustain this king-in-exile routine without the infrastructure he once had. Consider his asinine election challenge with all those crazy lawyers. Ever the shrew, all he has left now is his forked tongue." From "The Tale of the Untamable Shrew/Republicans are still trying to muzzle a smack-talking Trump" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).  1. Dowd is comparing Trump to Kate, the shrew in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." As I've said more than once, there is something womanly about Trump. And there are times when the way people react to Trump is like the way they react to an untamed woman. Dowd talks a lot about "Shrew" but also wanders all over the place and never really explores the hypothesis that Trump's wildness is something like a nasty woman. Why do we feel this deep need to control him? What does it say about those who think that he did not belong in our serious, well-established institutions and that he spoke with shocking directness and exhibited self-dramatizing emotion? 2. Here's a whole Wikipedia article on the "nasty woman" meme that originated in the 2016 campaign. 3. Is it true that the word "handful" is usually leveled at spirited women? I'd guess it's mostly used about children — a nice way to say the kid is hard to manage. If you say it about an adult, you are loading in the concept that you are into manipulation. Both "manage" and "manipulate" are built from the Lain word for "hand" ("manus"). If you think an adult is a "handful," maybe you ought to consider why you're putting your hands on her/him. 4. Let's take a closer look at the last sentence of the column: "Ever the shrew, all he has left now is his forked tongue." I see 2 ways to go with this: a. Metaphor screw up. A forked tongue is characteristic of some reptiles, notably snakes. A shrew is a small mole-like mammal.  If you don't mean to refer to the animal, but only to the extremely irritating person, then don't bring up an animal characteristic like "forked tongue." Sharp tongue would be fine. b. Microaggression alert. Are we still using "forked tongue" to refer to lying?! I would have thought it was relegated long ago to the dustbin of potential microaggressions. Background from Wikipedia: "This phrase was... adopted by Americans around the time of the Revolution, and may be found in abundant references from the early 19th century — often reporting on American officers who sought to convince the tribal leaders with whom they negotiated that they 'spoke with a straight and not with a forked tongue' (as for example, President Andrew Jackson told the Creek Nation in 1829). According to one 1859 account, the native proverb that the 'white man spoke with a forked tongue' originated as a result of the French tactic of the 1690s, in their war with the Iroquois, of inviting their enemies to attend a Peace Conference, only to be slaughtered or captured."

"I never would have made that Nazi comparison if I’d known everybody was going to be such a Nazi about it." Posted: 21 Feb 2021 01:59 AM PST   "SNL" lampoons Britney Spears, Ted Cruz, Andrew Cuomo, and Gina Carano. There's some good enough stuff in there. The best is Pete Davidson's Andrew Cuomo impersonation.

At the Saturday Night Café... Posted: 20 Feb 2021 04:18 PM PST  ... you can talk all night.

You are subscribed to email updates from Althouse. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States