Thursday, March 11, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

Boy George's newest tweet about the Meghan-and-Oprah interview.

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 07:10 AM PST

I'll just quote his previous tweets on the subject, oldest to newest: 

1. "I found the big @oprah interview to be hugely dull. Is there more? I pray not!" 

2. "The one person not mentioned in any of this Harry & Meghan saga is the little boy Archie. If they had left the royals without creating a shit storm (it could have been done easily) he would still be an important future member of our royal family. I hope he still can and will be. I feel neither family deserves applause."

3. "You'd think they would have in house therapists at Buckingham Palace and if they don't, now is the time."

4. Responding to someone who said Harry needed to protect his family from the pararazzi: "You are talking to someone who knows more about the press than you could imagine? Harry, has slagged this country for years, long before Meghan. Fighting the press, then embracing the press because it tells you what you want to hear? It's a mugs game!"

"I have been painting tabletops, flowers, still lifes and figures, boomeranging to earlier themes. And tennis balls. I have painted tennis balls for at least five years."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 06:35 AM PST

"I don't think I ever paint the color accurately. It's a funky color. There is a whole debate over the color of tennis balls. Are they yellow or are they green? I think that every tennis ball shifts between that range in the course of their life. They start off neon, like a toxic sludge, but once a ball starts to lose its fuzz and pick up the residue of whatever surface you're playing on, they get dull. I would say they start off neon green and go more toward yellow over time." 

Said Eddie Martinez, quoted in "7 Questions/75 Artists/1 Very Bad Year" (NYT). 

Lots of pictures at the link but none of Martinez's tennis balls! I went looking and found this video of him painting:

"The Army in particular has an obsession with physical fitness. We hold firm that everyone going into combat arms should be held to a high standard..."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 06:23 AM PST

".... but why does someone working on cyberlogistics have to even take the same test? We should be trying to support people on a fitness journey." 

Said Emma Moore, a research associate for the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security, quoted in "Where Fitness Is the Job, Army Struggles to Be a Fair Boss With Female Troops/As the Army revises its physical test and otherwise rethinks fitness, it faces difficult questions: Do current requirements penalize women? Do they overshadow expertise and intellectual preparation?" (NYT). 

The new 120-minute test, known as the Army Combat Fitness Test, features six events that cover speed, endurance and strength. The standards to pass are identical for men and women, and for all ages. A soldier must achieve 360 points out of a maximum 600 to pass, and greater scores have historically greatly increased chances for promotion.....

Women are expected to weigh less than men... but need to gain quite a bit of muscle weight to do the heavy dead-lift that the new test requires.... "Fitness in the Army is so integral to your job," said Captain Griest, adding that she wrote her piece* because "women in combat arms are pretty underrepresented." She wanted to give them a voice.

The Army needs to determine "what is needed on a battlefield and just hold everyone to that standard," she said. "For instance, I want a soldier to be able to pull their body over an obstacle in the infantry."

She said she learned to dead-lift far more weight than she ever imagined she could when properly coached. "I have heard people criticize me and say I have internalized misogyny," she said. "I think I have a sense of internalized empowerment."

The Army is expected to announce changes to the test this month....

__________________

* Here's Griest's piece: "WITH EQUAL OPPORTUNITY COMES EQUAL RESPONSIBILITY: LOWERING FITNESS STANDARDS TO ACCOMMODATE WOMEN WILL HURT THE ARMY—AND WOMEN" (Modern War Institute).

"Biden Has Few Good Options for the Unaccompanied Children at the Border."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 04:54 AM PST

Headline at The New Yorker. 

Inside the Biden Administration, a common refrain is that "all the options are bad."...

"Some of the tools the new Administration is going to have to use to build our capacity back up are going to look a lot like things associated with Trump," the transition official told me....

"The Capitol buildings and grounds are quintessential places for free speech and protest, accessible by people from all walks of life who gather there to express their views, demonstrate, picket, and hold vigils."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 03:54 AM PST

"But if those places are permanently fenced off, the public and our constitutional right to assemble and protest will be in jeopardy. That is why the ACLU and the ACLU of the District of Columbia are urging leaders of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate not to permanently fence off the Capitol, which would turn its architecture into a national symbol of fear and hostility towards the public's presence.... The Capitol complex, where all our elected lawmakers come together to legislate in the open view of the public, has been recognized around the world as a celebrated symbol of democracy. If Congress were to permanently retreat into a militarized zone ringed by fencing topped with razor wire, it would send the kind of message that heads of autocratic regimes send by cloistering themselves away from their populaces in armored fortresses.... The public will suffer diminished access to public grounds with unique importance in the exercise of their constitutional rights to assemble and to petition the government. That exclusion will be especially acute if people want to participate in spontaneous protest in response to rapidly unfolding events—such as the protests for racial justice that arose last summer...."

From the ACLU website.

"As part of the park’s redesign, roughly an acre of concrete slab will be covered with a thermoplastic mural printed with rainbow stripes and planted with eight-foot-tall sculptural flowers as a tribute to [Black trans activist Marsha P.] Johnson..."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 04:04 AM PST

"... who often wore flowers in her hair. Locals are livid that the redesign doesn't include a major expansion of green space or real flower beds. They also say that local residents never had a chance to offer meaningful feedback.... The new design was announced last August, but state officials waited until a few days before the park was set to close for construction in January to present it to Brooklyn Community Board 1....  'It's almost stereotypical at this point. People just think, Oh, it's queer people so we're going to make a gay flag as a park,' said Mihalis Petrou, a horticulturist who has worked on North Brooklyn parks and who identifies as gay. 'It's just redundant and uninventive and it's going to have an impact on the local wildlife. We could have a nuanced tribute that honors marginalized people by celebrating nature. It's a missed opportunity.' 'Olmsted must be rolling in his grave,' said Katie Naplatarski, a North Brooklyn parks advocate and longtime Greenpoint resident. 'To coat a park in plastic? Are you kidding me? That is so fundamentally wrong.'"

From "North Brooklyn Locals Do Not Like the Plastic Mural Proposed For Their Park" (New York Magazine).

Plastic, flowers, rainbows — when is inclusivity insulting? Is there ever a point when those who are designated for governmental uplifting rebel and say this is trite, childish, and just plain bad design?

"The give-them-cash solution to poverty is nothing new. It was conventional wisdom in Democratic Washington toward the end of the Johnson Administration."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 03:04 AM PST

"In 1968, a petition signed by 1,300 economists (including James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbraith) urged a 'national system of income guarantees.' LBJ didn't like the idea, but when Richard Nixon became president Democratic holdovers in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare served him up a no-work-requirid cash-dispensing scheme that became Nixon's 1969 Family Assistance Plan. It almost became law, failing after a fringe West Coast politician named Ronald Reagan called it a 'megadole.'"

That's Point #2 in Mickey Kaus's "Five (5) quick points on the new Biden Dole" (Substack).

Kaus goes on to contemplate whether there's any Republican around these days who's capable of playing the Ronald Reagan role.

"'Being "cancel-adjacent" is exhausting'.... It’s especially enervating, she said, when you’re adjacent to people being canceled..."

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 02:53 AM PST

"... for their coverage of other people who have been canceled. 'There is a word for this, but I'm not sure what it is. "Irony" is insufficient. If we cancel everyone... who will be left?'"

I think that stands on its own ripped out of context. Good luck reading the complicated context (and that's assuming you can get into the NYT): "What Really Happened at 'Reply All'?/A podcast was applauded for its reporting on embedded racism in the workplace. It didn't make it to the third episode."

I couldn't untangle the story. I was almost interested enough, but ultimately the complexity outweighed the hope of enlightenment. Was that also the problem with the podcast? I don't know. Did the podcast about racism have a racism problem? 

You tell me. I'm just posting because I wanted to record the sentence, "Being 'cancel-adjacent' is exhausting." I think "cancel-adjacent" is a term worth remembering. And I've been fascinated lately by the tendency of younger people to use the word "exhausting" in their complaints. 

For example, here's a WaPo article from last June, "Black people are tired of trying to explain racism":

Perhaps I was trying to explain institutional racism, or racism and Western Civilization, or racism and literature.... I have no recollection of this conversation. It sounds like my younger self — the self not yet exhausted explaining racism to white people.... Explaining racism is exhausting. It's exhausting to explain to people who don't believe you, or who look at you with blank expressions. Or, worse, who ask, "How do you know that happened because of race?"... Racism is exhausting.

Trigger warning.

Posted: 11 Mar 2021 02:52 AM PST

ADDED: So what's the message there? We see Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, just sitting there, nothing's happening. We hear crickets. It's boring. Too boring. But remember when it was never boring? Don't you miss all the crazy? Even Joe misses it.

At the Big Crack Café...

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 05:05 PM PST

IMG_2852 

... you can talk all night. 

This morning the snow was gone and the ice on Lake Mendota had a massive crack. It was overcast, and the sunrise looked like this:

IMG_2854

"Former President Trump is releasing statements that read like tweets on letterhead."

Posted: 10 Mar 2021 04:40 PM PST

But this way, you, the NYT reporter who passes it on, are the one who gets retweeted, so that's a nice incentive for you to become the channel through which Trump gets back on Twitter. We'll see how well that works. 

Compare the same reporter's tweet with a statement from Joe Biden that's been up for almost 5 hours longer:

Meanwhile, as you think about the importance of Twitter, take this into account: "Parler Blocked on Apple's App Store After Capitol Riot Review."
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