Althouse

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• 6:18, 6:22, 6:27.
• "The investigation I am announcing today will assess whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force including during protests."
• "Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden... to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration..."
• "I wonder how Goldberg would react if the genders were flipped — if the discussion were about 'Andrea Yang,' a 46-year-old woman who's a successful businessperson vs. 'Alexander Ocasio-Cortez,' a 31-year-old man who..."
• This seems to be the final blog post of the charming, inventive blogger Chip Ahoy: "I am in hospital. Intensive care..."
• "Music streaming platforms have sexism wired-in."
• It's the new comments snippets post.
• Symplocarpus foetidus.

6:18, 6:22, 6:27. Posted: 21 Apr 2021 11:56 AM PDT This morning on Lake Mendota:

"The investigation I am announcing today will assess whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force including during protests." Posted: 21 Apr 2021 12:56 PM PDT Said Attorney General Merrick Garland, quoted in "Attorney General Merrick Garland announces an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department" (NYT). So-called pattern-or-practice investigations are often the precursors to consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create and enforce a road map for training and operational changes.... The Obama administration had repeatedly used the tool to address police misconduct. The restoration of consent decrees was one of the Biden administration's first significant moves to hold police forces accountable in cases where they are found to have violated federal laws.  FROM THE EMAIL: Mattman26 writes: Good for the Biden Administration for committing to ferreting out the racism in the Democratic Party! The whole "City X last had a Republican mayor in [year]" thing has become kind of an all-purpose giggle line for righties (myself included). But seriously here: Except for a weird one-day thing, Minneapolis has had nothing but Democratic mayors dating back to the early sixties. The City Council (per Wiki), which governs the PD, has 12 Democrats and one Green (and that's it). The Chief (nominated by the mayor, approved by the City Council) is a Black man who has held the post since 2017, and whom you'd have to guess is not a Republican (not because he's Black, but because he got the job). And I'd guess you'd have to go way back in time to find a Chief who wasn't Democrat-leaning. So who hires these cops? Who trains them? Who disciplines them? Who provides their rules of engagement? It's Democrats all the way down.

"Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden... to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration..." Posted: 21 Apr 2021 01:24 PM PDT "... and to allow tens of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing war, poverty and natural disasters into the United States... The attitude of the president during the meeting, according to one person to whom the conversation was later described, was, essentially: Why are you bothering me with this? What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump's "racist" limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to the new occupant of the White House... Now, a decision to raise the refugee limit to 62,500 — as Mr. Biden had promised only weeks earlier to members of Congress — would invite from Republicans new attacks of hypocrisy and open borders even as the president was calling for bipartisanship. It was terrible timing, he told officials.... Biden's staff came up with a compromise.... The backlash was immediate.... Within hours, the president backtracked...." Writes Maggie Haberman in the NYT.  Isn't that awfully mean? One person interprets the President's attitude, and it gets published in the NYT:   Why are you bothering me with this? As if the man — touted for his empathy — has no empathy. What really happened? Obviously, Biden understands the human experience of the refugees. He doesn't need Blinken acting out the suffering to him at great length. I'm imagining Biden wanting to solve the problems pragmatically, taking all the considerations into account, not just caving in to gushing empathy for the desperate people at the border.  Now, the NYT is portraying Biden as weak and wavering this way and that as he's criticized for anything he does, over a problem for which there is no satisfying solution. IN THE EMAIL: Lloyd writes: Finally, White House staff start leaking against the Pres, just like happened twenty times a day under Trump. Welcome to the real world Joe, or whoever your ventriloquist is. AND: Let me say, I presume the "one person" who interpreted Biden's "attitude" to the NYT was Blinken himself. That strikes me as unpleasantly disloyal. And vain. BUT: Ignorance is Bliss writes to say the language in the NYT is "one person to whom the conversation was later described": "While that does not absolutely rule out someone who was in the room at the time, it does strongly imply that the source did not have first-hand knowledge of the exchange. So, likely not Blinken, and even worse to base a mean quote on hearsay." ALSO IN THE EMAIL: Balfegor writes: The Washington Post article on the refugee cap debacle actually paints Biden in a pretty positive light, I think, despite their headline about the wheels supposedly coming off: He had a specific and to my mind quite reasonable concern about the capacity of the agency responsible for handling both the children abandoned at the border and refugee resettlement: "The president was particularly frustrated by the government's struggle to deal with unaccompanied minors at the border and became increasingly concerned about the Office of Refugee Resettlement's response to the crisis, the people said. The unit, housed at the Department of Health and Human Services, has responsibility for both unaccompanied minors at the border and the separate group of foreigners seeking refugee status due to persecution, war or oppression at home." That's a new crisis (if somewhat self-created) and one that didn't exist when he was making campaign promises, so it's entirely appropriate for him to take those changed circumstances into account when setting policy. But it also sounds like Biden is facing the same problem Trump did, viz. that the civil service, including his own appointees, don't want to obey the democratically elected president and are trying to box him in, including through articles like the New York Times. His State Department proposed 62,500 in a report to Congress before he had a chance to weigh in. His press secretary, Psaki, even lied about whether there was a connection between the minors abandoned at the border and the low refugee cap, only to have Biden promptly reveal the truth when his handlers let him address the public directly. Yes, he got rolled in the end, but the fact that in the face of what must have been a concerted effort by the unelected officials and party activists around him feeding him data and recommendations, he was willing to buck their consensus speaks well of him.

"I wonder how Goldberg would react if the genders were flipped — if the discussion were about 'Andrea Yang,' a 46-year-old woman who's a successful businessperson vs. 'Alexander Ocasio-Cortez,' a 31-year-old man who..." Posted: 21 Apr 2021 11:33 AM PDT "... surprised everyone by getting elected to Congress when he was a 20-year-old bartender with an economics degree. I'm going to guess that if a male AOC and a female Yang were running in the same election and taken equally seriously, Goldberg would say that shows that women are systematically disadvantaged."   Writes my son John (at Facebook), critiquing the NYT op-ed by Michelle Goldberg titled "There Could Never Be a Female Andrew Yang/No woman with his résumé would have a chance of becoming New York's mayor."  Goldberg herself brings up the comparison to AOC: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the great political talents of her generation, but I doubt she'd be taken seriously if she ran for New York mayor, despite being far more politically experienced than Yang."  FROM THE EMAIL: James writes: Has Goldberg never heard of Carly Fiorina? MikeR writes: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the great political talents of her generation, but I doubt she'd be taken seriously if she ran for New York mayor, despite being far more politically experienced than Yang."  Non sequitur. Being very talented politically is a good reason to get elected to Congress, where politics is most of what you do. It is no reason at all to be elected mayor of New York City, where you have to run things competently. AOC has shown no talent for that and in fact has never even tried to do that in any phase of her life. AND: bb says: Bartending gets no respect. I've spent some time watching bartenders up close and I think bartending should be a prerequisite to being NYC mayor.

This seems to be the final blog post of the charming, inventive blogger Chip Ahoy: "I am in hospital. Intensive care..." Posted: 21 Apr 2021 12:06 PM PDT "... for right now. Little problem with heart, lungs, kidneys. They all failed together. Heart surgery tomorrow. I told the ambulance crew, the emergency crew, the intensive care crew that I am terrified...."  It's not for me to make announcements of facts I cannot check. The blog doesn't even say "Chip Ahoy" on the front page, and there's no public announcement that relates to this pseudonym.  Chip Ahoy was a highly valued commenter on my blog in the years 2007 to 2013 — especially for his animations of photographs that I had posted. Like this: Click on the tag "Chip Ahoy" and keep scrolling to get to many more. I don't have comments anymore (though you can comment by emailing me here). The last time I used the "Chip Ahoy" tag was the time I ended comments in 2013 — "The comments vacation." Comments came back eventually, but I never heard from Chip again, unfortunately. We've missed his light touch and warm charm.

"Music streaming platforms have sexism wired-in." Posted: 21 Apr 2021 10:48 AM PDT Jawad Iqbal writes in the London Times:  Their algorithms, which recommend things you might like based on your listening habits, are basically sexist, generating playlist after playlist dominated by male musicians. Isn't it like sexual preference — you really do respond to the sex of the singer? With no machine helping me at all, I can see in the music choices I am making that I prefer a male voice.  Those damning findings... Damning!! ... come from research conducted at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Academics analysed the listening patterns of 330,000 users over nine years: only a quarter of the artists they listened to were women, because on average the first algorithm-recommended track was always by a man; listeners had to wait until the seventh or eighth song before hearing from a woman. It's a problem only if you assume that the outcome should be equal. But isn't the algorithm attuned to what people have responded to? Some of this bias is a reflection of historical failures in the music industry, which has always been dominated by male acts, save for occasional superstars such as Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. Maybe we respond to what we respond to because it's familiar, and what is familiar is a consequence of sexist decision-making within the music industry. Why do we like what we like? Is it deep or is it shallow? There's something called the "mere exposure" effect (Wikipedia): The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often someone sees a person, the more pleasing and likeable they find that person...  In the 1960s, a series of Robert Zajonc's laboratory experiments demonstrated that simply exposing subjects to a familiar stimulus led them to rate it more positively than other, similar stimuli that had not been presented before.... In 1980, Zajonc proposed the affective primacy hypothesis: that affective reactions (such as liking) can be "elicited with minimal stimulus input." Through mere-exposure experiments, Zajonc sought to provide evidence for the affective-primacy hypothesis, namely that affective judgments are made without prior cognitive processes.... [One] experiment exposed Chinese characters for short times to two groups of people. They were then told that these symbols represented adjectives and were asked to rate whether the symbols held positive or negative connotations. The symbols the subjects had previously seen were consistently rated more positively than those they had not. In a similar experiment, people were not asked to rate the connotations of the symbols, but to describe their mood after the experiment. Members of the group with repeated exposure to certain characters reported being in better moods than those without.... Why do we like the pop songs we like, and what is Spotify doing to our brains refeeding us what we've been fed before? Is it evil — damnable? The question whether it's sexist is only a small part of the problem. That seems to focus on whether the singers are getting their due or are penalized by pernicious subordination. But the minds of the listeners are much more important. There are billions of us, and we're plugged into this system of endless feeding and refeeding. Within it, we have the feeling of being pleased. But neither the machine nor we understand why we are pleased. *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email. FROM THE COMMENTS: Jen R writes: Hi Ann, Hi Ann,  This is the first time I've written in, as I never registered as a commenter. A few months ago, I realized I'd stopped listening to Pandora, when I used to listen to it almost every day. I had grown irritated with the service, and it sounds like Spotify has the same problem. It's not what I would call sexism so much as what I think of as the algorithm whirlpool, which is the same reason I dropped my Netflix subscription and get exasperated with other feeds. The algorithm whirlpool goes like this. I have a song stuck in my head, so I put the name of the artist into a channel. I click like on the song, then move on to other work. I never give other feedback, unless I skip one or two songs, other than continuing to listen while using other applications. Say the song in my head has a tenor in a rock band. The first few songs are more tenors, more rock bands. After a while, I feel quizzical -- why so many tenors, so much guitar, so much of the same beat? It gets monotonous, especially as the playlist moves away from the original artist, into songs that sound like weaker and weaker knockoffs. A DJ who did this kind of playlist would be fired. This soundtrack would never sell for a movie. I found myself increasingly annoyed that I would only hear female artists if I put a female artist first, or only male artists if I went with a song by a male artist, when I'd rather hear a mix of voices and variations on style. The whirlpool, at first a fun ride, has sucked me down into an inescapable stream of music that all sounds too much the same. I'd rather the playlist built in some diversity while staying in the same era of music. I also like instrumental music, but if I select a piano concerto, I'll only get to hear piano music. No violins, no orchestra, no trumpet. Just ... more piano, all with the same approximate tempo and dynamics. You might wonder, why not just pick "classic rock" or "classical music" for my station? My answer is that then, I tend to get the more (to me) blah, overplayed stuff that I already got sick of hearing on the radio. I don't consider this "sexism," but bad programming that doesn't allow for a randomizer escape. On Netflix, it was even worse. I'd watch one comedy special from a favorite comedian of mine. Then I'd be offered even more comedians from the same demographic as the first. I'd try a couple out -- these would also be fairly funny. Then I'd be offered more, more, more, until I wasn't even smiling at their rambling non-jokes. Each time I'd open Netflix, I'd be faced with unrecognizable comedians. I'm not obsessed with stand-up, but the Netflix algorithm had pushed us both into a whirlpool. Their old interface was more indifferent to my prior choices, and therefore less annoying. I dropped my subscription and don't miss it. Currently, everyone in my Youtube suggestions is from Australia or New Zealand. All after I liked one cupcake video. Go figure. What ticks me off, besides the annoying algorithm design, is that now if people start hearing the female voices (or the non-comedy specials, or the non-Australians) pop up in their feeds, they'll assume this is a cloying "eat-your-vegetables" directive and resent women vocalists. The programmers created the problem by failing to understand how a lot of us engage with media & enjoy a little bit of surprise or variety. Then their solution will be something that supposedly looks like they are fighting sexism, but is just a distraction from how boring their algorithm-directed feeds are. So the conversation will be about whether female or male voices are more pleasant, instead of how wealthy computer programmers are treating us all like my toddler, bringing me every shoe in the house to try to get me to play outside. AND: James emails:  I listen to a lot of songs on Spotify and I had no idea that the recommended playlist algorithms could potentially be sexist. I merely thought that they were lame. But I did decide to put it to the test and see how long I had to wait to hear something from a female artist. For today's Daily Mix #1 it's not a good start with the first female artist Janis Joplin appearing at number 24! Mix #2 is a little more promising with the first female artist is Sidney Gish at number 4. Back to sexism with Mix #3 that has Lana Del Rey at number 16, but Chrissy Hynde fronting the Pretenders takes the number 1 spot on Mix #4. With an unsurprising ZERO female artists appearing on Mix #5 due to its heavy German techno-metal content, Mix #6 comes back strong with a number 1 Irma Thomas. My unscientific and completely personal experience verdict: not sexist. That made me look at my Daily Mixes from Spotify. I don't see a Mix#1, but in Mix #2, I have Nico twice in the top 6 and Lana Del Rey and Yoko Ono.  In Mix #3, 7 or the top 10 are females — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Etta James. The only males are Frank Sinatra and — doing "Whiter Shade of Pale" — King Curtis. Mix #4 is mostly male, and Mix #5 is all male. My unscientific and completely personal experience verdict: not sexist.

It's the new comments snippets post. Posted: 20 Apr 2021 04:04 PM PDT Thanks to all who have emailed in comments. This post is here to point you to posts in the last few days that have comments. The quotes are snippets chosen for amusement value and to give me something to put a link on: 1. "I'm weirdly interested in the fact that you're planting wheat and barley." 2. "It's funny that the article didn't mention Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel, Snowcrash...." 3. "I'm getting a lot of email saying that's not a bobcat, but a regular house cat, but I can't believe this man would put up the video if it were because he grabs the beast and hurls it hard into the ground." 4. "More than once I was called into chambers in the principal's office and point blank asked if I was a 'racist.' Me!" 5. "These boxes are not Habitats for Humans but a kind of litter." 6. "I presume your assertion near the end of your post was meant to be facetious; it would be profoundly racist to presume...." 7. "Looks like the Times needed another article on the shooting, so they published one before they had figured out a clear story." 8. "Perhaps 'eye raising' now means something so attention-grabbing that it causes someone to look up from their phone." 9. "A well-fitting corset is far superior in support to a bra...." 10. "The powers that be just did not bother to let the rest of us know this until after the 'they killed a cop' narrative was firmly rooted in the public mind." 11. "Somehow she has moved from 'afraid to die' to 'afraid to live.'" 12. "It really doesn't make business sense to keep a program open when students don't want to enroll."

Symplocarpus foetidus. Posted: 20 Apr 2021 03:15 PM PDT The view from the Skunk Cabbage Bridge:   There really is a Skunk Cabbage Bridge in the UW Arboretum. It traverses the Skunk Cabbage Wetland.    I took those pictures yesterday. The Latin name for skunk cabbage is Symplocarpus foetidus:  Eastern skunk cabbage is notable for its ability to generate temperatures of up to 15–35 °C (27–63 °F) above air temperature by cyanide resistant cellular respiration in order to melt its way through frozen ground, placing it among a small group of thermogenic plants.... Some studies suggest that beyond allowing the plant to grow in icy soil, the heat it produces may help to spread its odor in the air. Carrion-feeding insects that are attracted by the scent may be doubly encouraged to enter the spathe because it is warmer than the surrounding air, fueling pollination....

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