Trendlist: Althouse

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Althouse

"Some days it’s a journey through hell in my home too. I have things I do to pass the time. Some days I’ll be down and..."
"Many schools have been held back by CDC standards saying that they only permit in-person classrooms if students sit no closer than six feet apart."
The walrus who fell asleep on an iceberg and floated to a place in Ireland where it was the most exciting thing that ever happened.
"'It will one day be worth $1 billion'... Many people really, really wanted the Beeple sale to succeed. In fact, the high price [$69.3 million] smacked of market manipulation."
"The Equality Act... explicitly overrides the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which prohibits the federal government from 'substantially burdening' individuals’ exercise of religion..."
"How Do Big Media Outlets So Often 'Independently Confirm' Each Other's Falsehoods?"
At the Ice Mesa Café...
"Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel has reportedly contributed $10 million to a super PAC that seeks to entice 'Hillbilly Elegy' author J.D. Vance to run for Ohio’s open Senate seat."
"I found the fox."

"Some days it’s a journey through hell in my home too. I have things I do to pass the time. Some days I’ll be down and..."

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 09:22 AM PDT

"... moan to myself, Oh, I can't go on tour. That's a real positive thing to do, clearly. So I decided that I wasn't going to do that anymore and get up and do stuff. I decided I wanted to make an EP. Not an album, just an EP with a few songs. I have a huge EP collection of my own. I love it because you can really get into a small amount of tracks, and that's what the kids love now. They love EPs! And not only that, they love cassettes."

Said Ringo Starr, interviewed at Vulture.

I've thrown out everything cassette-related. Cassettes are back?! I'm getting my information from an 80-year-old man who hasn't left the house more than 8 times in the past year.

But now I see they've just issued a new cassette version of Nirvana's "Bleach." And last July, NME investigated: "Who the hell is buying cassettes in 2020?/NME investigates/It seems UK music lovers are currently revelling in rectangular nostalgia — there's already been a 103% increase in cassette sales in 2020."

Last week, NPR reported "Lou Ottens, Inventor Of The Cassette Tape, Has Died":

Born in 1926, Ottens went from building a radio for his family during World War II — it reportedly had a directional antenna so it could focus on radio signals despite Nazi jamming attempts — to developing technology that would democratize music....

True to their do-it-yourself roots, cassette mixtapes have long been a favorite of punk and rock fans. But their legacy also looms large in hip-hop, where aspiring rappers and producers have used the approach to showcase their ability to chop up other music and create something new. The mixtape ethos has survived — and even thrived — despite the move from magnetic tapes to CDs and digital formats....

[I]nterest in the format has surged in recent years... driven by a mix of nostalgia and an appreciation for tapes' unique status as a tangible but flexible format....

Mixtapes! Do you have any good mixtape stories?

"Many schools have been held back by CDC standards saying that they only permit in-person classrooms if students sit no closer than six feet apart."

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 09:00 AM PDT

"This requirement makes full-time schooling impossible, because schools simply don't have enough room to teach every student while spacing them so far apart. But that requirement, chosen hastily last year, turns out to be useless. The most important scientific advance is the recent conclusion that the guideline that students must maintain six feet of distance in schools has no value. David Zweig reported for New York last week that 'the CDC's six-foot guidance and tethering school openings to community transmission does not reflect the science'.... [A] trio of doctors in the Washington Post, likewise concludes, 'Keeping students three feet apart instead of requiring them to stay six feet apart won't make students or teachers and staff less safe.'... But that crippling and hastily erected barrier has remained in place even after it has been proven useless.... [O]pponents of reopening have managed to maintain the appearance of controversy... by emphasizing uncertainty about the precise level of danger, explicitly or implicitly setting a baseline of zero risk as the correct standard for resuming school...."

From "Just Reopen the Schools Now" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

Chait quotes a WaPo columnist, Valerie Strauss, who insists that "There is no such thing as learning loss." Strauss opines, dreamily:

Learning is never lost, though it may not always be "found" on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement....

We have all learned, every day, unconditionally… They learned to take gym class on YouTube, that people you have never met can be your greatest teachers, that the ability to go outside and play during the day makes every day brighter, and that their safety depends on the decisions of others.

Yeah, you are always learning something. You can learn how to play video games. You can learn how to take naps... and drugs. Oh! The places you go when you don't leave the house!

Or go play in the yard. And stop being so prejudiced against different types of learning! They're all worthy of respect in the rainbow of education.

And if you ever think you're missing out on learning, don't go looking any further than your own backyard. Because if it isn't there, you never really lost it to begin with!

The walrus who fell asleep on an iceberg and floated to a place in Ireland where it was the most exciting thing that ever happened.

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 08:25 AM PDT

The guy at the top of this report about the Irish walrus 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/nYhYfGmDCt
— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) March 15, 2021

"'It will one day be worth $1 billion'... Many people really, really wanted the Beeple sale to succeed. In fact, the high price [$69.3 million] smacked of market manipulation."

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 07:44 AM PDT

"NFTs rely on blockchain, a database technology based on decentralized, collective control of blocks of data that have been chained together in a way that makes the data immutable. Metapurse — the company founded and financed by Metakovan, the buyer of 'Everydays' — says it 'identifies early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate.' According to the Art Newspaper, Metapurse 'is also a production studio for NFTs and a major funder of the digital art form, reportedly owning the largest known collection of NFTs in the world.'... Making the whole spectacle look even more egregiously engineered, the underbidder was Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, another blockchain company.... The irony is that the driving force behind conceptual art... was a desire to resist commodification.... Conceptualists... thought that if you dematerialized art — if you took away the object and our urge to fetishize it — it would be an act of resistance against the art market and the whole capitalist system. How naive that turned out to be. Of course you can commodify artworks that exist only as ideas! It's really easy.... You need only relationships, differentials, future projections and other ideas, all of which can be bought and sold.... As for the actual work that was purchased? Yawn. Beeple's technique — collaging lots of colorful images in grid format — is a soporific cliche. Images like this, sometimes coalescing into other images, are ubiquitous. Metakovan's claim — that 'it represents 13 years of everyday work' — is weak tea.... [But] I like it when the connection between functionality (or even aesthetic merit) and monetary worth is stretched. It can make us question conventional ideas of what has value and what doesn't. That can be salutary...."

Writes Sebastian Smee in "Beeple's digital 'artwork' sold for more than any painting by Titian or Raphael. But as art, it's a great big zero" (WaPo).

This blog represents 17 years of everyday work. Where's my $90.6 million?

Anyway... what do I care if rich people shift their money around according to the rules of some wacky game and get nothing tangible? It's the same thing that occurs in gambling. Is anyone defrauded at any point? Are they paying their sales taxes and income tax properly? Other than that, how can it matter? Is there a philosophical question to contemplate?

I forget whether Metakovan is a person or a company. Let's see: "the buyer, the Singapore-based founder and financer of the cryptofund Metapurse who goes by the name Metakovan."

So it's a person, some cryptic figure in Singapore. The prefix "meta-" denotes "change, transformation, permutation, or substitution" (OED). So "Metapurse," I get. But what is Metakovan? Kovan is a geographical location in Singapore. Is there really a person here?

Considering the complexity of the concepts, I wonder: Is the real artist Metakovan or Beeple? Or is there really anything at all — other than the market, a concept to be admired and cavorted in or scorned by each of us, as we see fit.

And, again: Where's my $90.6 million?

"The Equality Act... explicitly overrides the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which prohibits the federal government from 'substantially burdening' individuals’ exercise of religion..."

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 06:00 AM PDT

"... unless it is for a 'compelling government interest.' While enacted in 1993 with overwhelming bipartisan support, the RFRA in recent years has been most loudly championed by social conservatives. LGBTQ and civil liberties advocates say the RFRA has been used to allow discrimination. The Equality Act matches Americans' fast-moving rejection of discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. More than 6 in 10 Americans say business owners should not be allowed to refuse services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion."

WaPo reports in "Equality Act is creating a historic face-off between religious exemptions and LGBTQ rights."

WaPo wants to assure you that RFRA something only social conservatives cherish, but that is history rewritten. RFRA was a reaction to the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, which was written by Antonin Scalia, who articulated the strong, clear position that the Constitution does not require religion-based exemptions to laws that are written to be neutral and generally applicable. The dissenting opinions in that case were by the liberal Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Blackmun.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago:

The RFRA bill was sponsored in the House by Congressman Chuck Schumer and in the Senate by Teddy Kennedy. (Each had a GOP co-sponsor). The Democrats controlled Congress, but the Republicans all voted for it too (with the sole exception of Jesse Helms).
From the NYT article in 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed RFRA into law:
President Clinton hailed the new law at the signing ceremony, saying that it held government "to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone's free exercise of religion."...

President Clinton voiced wonder today at this alliance of forces that are often at odds across religious or ideological lines. "The power of God is such that even in the legislative process miracles can happen," he said.

It's absurd that it's so easy to forget what progressives valued in RFRA and why the liberal Justices dissented in Smith. It was about the rights of minorities. But there are minorities and there are minorities. You can't favor them all. RFRA chose religious minorities. The Equality Act favors gender identity and sexual orientation minorities.

Scalia's Smith allowed Congress to shift back and forth like that. It merely said that legislatures can get away with laws that don't discriminate against religion, that it doesn't have to favor religion. RFRA is just a statute — even if Clinton pronounced it the work of God Himself — and it only takes a statute to change it. The requirement of religious exemptions could have been found in the Constitution's Free Exercise Clause, but the conservative Court did not see it.

"How Do Big Media Outlets So Often 'Independently Confirm' Each Other's Falsehoods?"

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 04:51 AM PDT

Glenn Greenwald asks (at Substack).

When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have "independently corroborated" a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story....
We just saw proof of that... with a major Washington Post "correction" — which should be called a retraction — of one of the most-discussed news stories of the last six months: the Post's claims about what Trump said when he called a Georgia election official while he was still contesting the 2020 election results.

On January 9, The Washington Post published a story reporting that an anonymous source claimed that on December 23, Trump spoke by phone with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State's office, and directed her that she must "find the fraud" and promised her she would be "a national hero" if she did so. The paper insisted that those were actual quotes of what Trump said.

This time, it was CNN purporting to independently confirm the Post's reporting, affirming that Trump said these words "according to a source with knowledge of the call." But late last week, The Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of that call, and those quotes attributed to Trump do not appear.

As a result, The Washington Post — two months after its original story that predictably spread like wildfire throughout the entire media ecosystem — has appended a correction at the top of its original story.

Politico's Alex Thompson correctly pronounced these errors "real bad" because of how widely they spread and were endorsed by other major media outlets. This is a different species of journalistic malpractice than mere journalistic falsehoods....

[T]he U.S. public was inundated for weeks with an utterly false yet horrifying story — that a barbaric pro-Trump mob had savagely murdered Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick by bashing his skull in with a fire extinguisher. That false tale about the only person said to have been killed at the January 6 riot other than pro-Trump supporters emanated from a New York Times report based on the claims of "two anonymous law enforcement officials."

As it turns out, Sicknick's autopsy revealed that he suffered no blunt trauma, and two men arrested this week were charged not with murder but assault and conspiracy to injure an officer: for using an unidentified gas. In reporting those arrests, even The New York Times acknowledged that "prosecutors stopped short of linking the attack to Officer Sicknick's death the next day" because "both officers and rioters deployed spray, mace and other irritants during the attack" and "it remains unclear whether Officer Sicknick died because of his exposure to the spray."

Many liberals defenders of these corporate media outlets insist that these major factual errors do not matter because the basic narrative — Trump and his supporters at the Capitol are bad people who did bad things — is still true....

It's the old "fake but accurate" defense.

[T]here is, manifestly, a fundamental difference in both intent and morality between deliberately murdering someone by repeatedly bashing their skull in with a fire extinguisher and using a non-lethal crowd-control spray frequently used at protests even if it is ultimately proven that the spray is what caused Officer Sicknick's death (which is why those two acts would carry vastly different punishments under the law)....

That audience does not care if these media outlets publish false stories as long as it is done for the Greater Good of harming their political enemies, and this ethos has contaminated newsrooms as well....

At the Ice Mesa Café...

Posted: 16 Mar 2021 04:11 PM PDT

... you can talk about anything you want.

"Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel has reportedly contributed $10 million to a super PAC that seeks to entice 'Hillbilly Elegy' author J.D. Vance to run for Ohio’s open Senate seat."

Posted: 16 Mar 2021 03:53 PM PDT

"Fans of a thoughtful, conservative-populist coalition should hope he runs and wins. Vance, whom I've known and liked since we met in 2015, would not be a normal Senate candidate. Only 36 years old, he has never run for office and has not worked his way up the political chain.... His heartbreaking autobiography tells the story of his Appalachian-descended family. The Middletown, Ohio, community in which they lived spiraled downward under the pressures of globalization and community decline. His story became the go-to source for many to explain the burgeoning Trump phenomenon in 2016. Vance's story, therefore, is the story of the prototypical Trump backer: White, working-class and desperate for a restoration of the decent, moderately prosperous communities they once knew.... His 2019 talk at the National Conservatism conference, entitled 'Getting Beyond Libertarianism,' was a masterful critique of the economic and moral depths to which unbridled free-market fundamentalism leads.... Ohio is the perfect place to nurture the thoughtful conservative populism Vance backs.... Two big-name competitors, former state treasurer Josh Mandel and former Ohio GOP chair Jane Timken... pledge fealty to Trump and will be quick to attack Vance for his 2016-era doubts about the former president, although Trump's performance in office led Vance to back him for reelection."

Writes Henry Olsen (at WaPo).

"I found the fox."

Posted: 16 Mar 2021 04:52 PM PDT

Says one reader of my "Find the fox" post. He sends this: