Althouse |
- "The U.S. Capitol Police, working with federal, state and local intelligence partners, has concluded that 'there does not exist a known, credible threat against Congress or the Capitol Complex that warrants the temporary security fencing.'"
- Find the fox.
- "In the early nineteen-eighties... a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet."
- "North Korea: Kim Jong-un's sister warns US not to 'cause a stink.'"
- And they say there's no election fraud....
- This is a Washington Post headline: "Biden and allies launch stimulus campaign focused on competitive battleground states."
- "Suddenly, Robinson’s daughter went from being an outlier to finding herself in a six-student pod where most of the children were mixed-race, like her."
- "Queer theorists have complained that Obergefell valorizes the family values associated with monogamous marriage and thereby demeans people who resist those values."
- "I’m not a ‘keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant’ man but I am all for keeping them pregnant until I have a little girl."
- "I know rock isn't the most important genre right now..."
- In 19 months of chasing the sunrise, today's was the #1 best.
| Posted: 16 Mar 2021 10:26 AM PDT "Therefore, alterations to the temporary fencing around the Capitol will soon be made, and the National Guard presence will also begin to draw down. However, the USCP will continue to monitor the threat posture, and plans will be adjusted if and as needed." From a press release from Nancy Pelosi.  |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2021 09:41 AM PDT
Sitting at my window this morning, I've seen a big beautiful fox run through the backyard twice, but it's impossible to get the iPhone ready and working quickly enough to get a picture of these full views. So you see what I got. There is a fox in both pictures, I assure you.  |
| "In the early nineteen-eighties... a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet." Posted: 16 Mar 2021 07:45 AM PDT "It was launched by Craig Raine's poem 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization—what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie—as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: 'Model T is a room with the lock inside— / a key is turned to free the world / for movement.' Or, later in the poem: 'In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.' For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: 'Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings— / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. / I have never seen one fly, but / Sometimes they perch on the hand.' Teachers liked Raine's poem, and perhaps the whole Berlitz-like apparatus of Martianism, because it made estrangement as straightforward as translation. What is the haunted apparatus? A telephone, miss. Well done. What are Caxtons? Books, sir. Splendid." From "Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own/In his latest novel, the gaze of an inhuman narrator gives us a new perspective on human life, a vision that is at once deeply ordinary and profoundly strange" by James Wood (in The New Yorker). Here's the full text of "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home."  |
| "North Korea: Kim Jong-un's sister warns US not to 'cause a stink.'" Posted: 16 Mar 2021 07:35 AM PDT
Also:
Biden has yet to announce his policy on North Korea, but during his campaign, he called Kim a "thug."  |
| And they say there's no election fraud.... Posted: 16 Mar 2021 06:35 AM PDT |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2021 06:31 AM PDT Did they think they were praising him or are we seeing actual critique or genuine neutrality?
Seems as though they think they are praising him for his political acumen.  |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2021 06:01 AM PDT "The teacher Young had hired to run the pod, Teenisha Toussant, a former teaching assistant at P.S. 41, happened to be Black, too. Robinson said that her daughter seemed to notice the difference. 'I think, for her, it was, like, "Oh, it's not so strange to have biracial parents."' Another student in the pod told Toussant, 'This is my first time not being the only brown person in my class and having a brown teacher. It makes me happy.' As for the parents, Robinson said, the pod had created a 'temporary reprieve' from school politics. 'It's just taken the stress level down.'... Life may be easier in a pod, Robinson said, but that's because it's not the real world. 'It's a fake world that we created,' she said, 'because the real world is dysfunctional. We can't have our children growing up thinking that life is always like that. Like, "You're only going to be surrounded by people who love you, and you're not going to have any conflicts, because, even if you did, your parents are friends and they're going to fix it for you."'" From "Why Learning Pods Might Outlast the Pandemic" (The New Yorker). Robinson is Katrina Robinson, who is identified as a lawyer who lives in the West Village (in NYC). Her daughter is a kindergartner, who, we're told "has one Black parent and one white parent." I didn't read the article carefully enough to know if the mother — the parent who's quoted a lot in the article — is the black parent or the white parent. Here's another of her quotes:"The issue of race isn't discussed at the school, period.... The kids are not being equipped with the tools to talk about race... Here's my daughter, who's Black—and who recognizes that she looks different from everyone else, and that she has one Black parent and one white parent—but there's no discussion of any of it. It can leave a kid feeling rather isolated. It's sort of like being the only alien in the classroom. And thinking there might be other aliens around but not knowing for sure." Do you think that's the black parent or the white parent talking? I don't know! Isn't it important? Why is The New Yorker being race blind about just this one thing? I'll just guess it's because this is the white parent speaking. The husband is referred to at one point and just called "Robinson's husband." That low level of recognition makes me think he's the white parent. I genuinely don't know, and I feel it's a little rude to wonder about the internal dynamics of mixed-race couples and the effect on their children, though I've noticed that there are academic papers on this subject — as well as folk theories. Anyway, notice that Robinson is saying that racially segregated education is good for nonwhite children (at least in the context where the parents are choosing it voluntarily). By the way, the public school Robinson was complaining about is PS 41, a famously great school.  |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2021 04:51 AM PDT "But others see it as the first step toward more radical change. 'Obergefell is a veritable encomium for marriage as both a central human right and a fundamental constitutional right,' Joseph J. Fischel, an associate professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale, has written. 'We, as an LGBT movement, should be ethically committed to endorsing poly relations and other experiments in intimacy.' He argues for 'relational autonomy' without regard for 'gender, numerosity, or affective attachment.' The campaigns of both polygamists and polyamorists to have their unions recognized point to the larger questions that swarm around marriage battles: what are the government's interests in marriage and family, and why does a bureaucratic system sustain such a relentless focus on who has sexual relationships with whom? Surveys in the past decade have consistently found that four to five per cent of American adults—more than ten million people—already practice some form of consensual nonmonogamy, and the true number, given people's reticence about stigmatized behaviors, is almost certainly higher.... In the West, champions of polyamory have included Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Havelock Ellis, and Bertrand Russell. Still, a particular ethos, rooted in Christian, European values, has created a presumption that monogamy is superior to all other structures. Immanuel Kant saw marriage as emblematic of Enlightenment ideals, claiming that it was egalitarian, because spouses assigned ownership of their sexual organs to each other."  |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2021 04:32 AM PDT Said Joe Biden, in 1969, when he was 27, quoted in the new article "Rage against the 'gaffe machine'" (at Politico). I'm noticing that this morning, because my son John linked to it at Facebook. John called attention to that quote and said "LOL." I commented over there:
I should add that Biden did get his little girl 2 years later, the little girl who died when she was one year old. Perhaps that's why this old "gaffe" of his isn't in wider circulation. I put "gaffe" in quotes, because, as I said, I think that was within the humor norm of the time.  |
| "I know rock isn't the most important genre right now..." Posted: 16 Mar 2021 04:02 AM PDT |
| In 19 months of chasing the sunrise, today's was the #1 best. Posted: 15 Mar 2021 03:22 PM PDT I gave you some unretouched photos earlier today — here — but let me give you a few more. These are modestly tweaked in Apple's Photos — basically just moving the "Light" slider a bit to the left. The lake has been melting and cracking up, and wind/waves are driving shards of ice to pile up on the shore. This is 7:02, the earliest shot, which makes me wish I'd gotten out 10 minutes earlier.
What a broiler! This was the scene at 7:04, with the shoreline ice looking cobalt blue. 7:05, framed without the shoreline ice:
Here's the panorama: This photo is quite a bit later — 7:27 — and in a different location. Beautiful color that I'd count as above average, but drastically faded from 20 minutes earlier. In this spot, the ice was piled much higher. The wall between me and the lake must have been 10 feet high:   |
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