Trendlist: Althouse

Saturday, June 19, 2021

Althouse

"Do you think I control the laws of thermodynamics?!"
The Juneteenth flag.
The body of Christ, the semolina pilchard, the Mona Lisa, the Duracell batteries...
"'Almost all of the girls here, they do not want to get pregnant, but it is forced on them,' Omodi said. And when they do get pregnant..."
"We were like, 'what if he bought it and ate it?'"
"No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA... Therefore, we cannot identify the species."
"The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft guidance on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a push by conservative bishops..."
Milkweed.
"Joan Crawford is a circus performer who can’t stand men’s hands, while Lon Chaney plays an armless knife thrower."

"Do you think I control the laws of thermodynamics?!"

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 11:13 AM PDT

Video after the fold:

The Juneteenth flag.

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 07:17 AM PDT

Are you flying the Juneteenth flag? Is it this flag?

I had a real-life conversation yesterday about flying flags other than the American flag. If you fly an American flag in front of your house — as we do — do you think that you must always fly that flag and no other flag, that you're interfering with your usual message —or even unpatriotic — if you swap in a different flag some days?

In my neighborhood, which gets parked up on game days — we could get a $20 bill for letting somebody park their car in our driveway — many people put up a motion W or Bucky Badger flag when the team is playing. This month, "Pride" month, I'm seeing some rainbow flags and that complicated beyond-the-rainbow flag (now, with even more inclusivity).

I was saying I'd like to have rainbow flag for June, but that would mean taking the American flag down for an entire month. (I reject the 2-flag solution.) But what about Juneteenth? It's only one day. That makes it more flaggable to those who generally fly the American flag. (And I'll just set to the side the problem of Juneteenth interrupting the gender focus of the month of June, or, to put it another way, the problem of the gender interests having chosen the month that already contained the race-based celebration of Juneteenth).

We can all celebrate Juneteenth. No one objects to the abolition of slavery. (Yes, you can broaden the concept to include all the vestiges of U.S. slavery and slavery everywhere in the world, but people will still readily agree that's all bad, even if they're not going to do anything about it.)

So: How to celebrate? You could fly a Juneteenth flag. When I think about doing that, I care about what the flag looks like, and I can see that the flag in that video is designed to make it easy for average Americans to see conventional American values. I'm just seeing that flag for the first time this morning. When we were talking about it yesterday, I was picturing this flag:

That's a more challenging flag! But that is not the Juneteenth flag!

That's the Pan-African flag, adopted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at a conference in New York City in 1920. The UNIA drafted and adopted the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World on August 13, 1920 at New York City's Madison Square Garden. It included the declaration that red, black and green (or RBG) be the colors signifying the African race.

That flag has a long history, and I think it's a great looking flag. It's better-looking than the official Juneteenth flag, which — I've got to say — makes me think of Canada. So fly whichever flag you want today or any day or fly no flag at all. It's a free country. Celebrate freedom freely.

The body of Christ, the semolina pilchard, the Mona Lisa, the Duracell batteries...

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 05:47 AM PDT

Oh, I see it now! The blog has a theme today: Things to be eaten.

"'Almost all of the girls here, they do not want to get pregnant, but it is forced on them,' Omodi said. And when they do get pregnant..."

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 05:38 AM PDT

"... 'we find that they want to have the abortion.' Some girls move away to other settlements and have their babies in secret. Some give birth and then abandon or kill their infants. Others try to end their pregnancies by taking ulcer drugs or local herbs; some dig up tree roots in an effort to make their own abortifacients. 'Sometimes, you hear they use Duracells,' he said, referring to a practice of steeping batteries in water and drinking the liquid... Although there are no reliable numbers on self-induced abortion in refugee camps, and no one knows exactly how many refugee women die of unsafe abortions every year, there is good reason to believe hazardous procedures are common. We do have solid data on the high rates of sexual violence against refugee women and girls: researchers have thoroughly documented this and, unsurprisingly, found links between rape and unplanned pregnancy. Worldwide, 61 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, and unsafe abortions cause an estimated 13 percent of pregnancy-related deaths worldwide. Every year, mothers who die from unsafe abortion leave behind some 220,000 children. Another five million women worldwide are hospitalized annually with complications from unsafe abortion; this is a phenomenon restricted almost exclusively to developing countries that limit abortion access."

From "How US Abortion Politics Distorts Women's Lives in Conflict Zones/From Rwanda and Bosnia to Myanmar and Tigray, rape is now recognized as a genocidal crime. Yet its survivors rarely receive the health care they need—thanks to America's deadly culture war" by Jill Filipovic (New York Review of Books).

"We were like, 'what if he bought it and ate it?'"

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 05:05 AM PDT

Said Kane Powell, author of the petition described in "Why Do People Want Jeff Bezos to Buy and Eat the Mona Lisa?/An online petition that started as a joke has gone viral, becoming a kind of digital performance art piece all of its own" (NYT).

This article is illustrated with a photo of Jeff Bezos standing next to a portrait of Jeff Bezos. I would rather see closeups of Jeff Bezos and the Mona Lisa side by side, with Bezos looking as much like Lisa as possible. My slapdash effort:

Must I go back to the article? Powell's joke is explained pedantically. He's calling attention to "the absurdity of massive amounts of accumulated wealth." Oh, really? We're told the Mona Lisa isn't even up for sale, but if it were, what would it cost, and what would stop the buyer from destroying it? And what is it even made of? Tuna fish?

I swear I wrote that last question — a joke, based on the previous post — before I read this paragraph in the Mona Bezos article:

More recently, in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, the New York artist David Datuna ate the banana in Maurizio Cattelan's buzzy and high-priced "Comedian." (He said that "it tasted like $120,000.") Mr. Datuna also claimed that it wasn't an act of vandalism, but a performance. "This is the first time where an artist eats the concept of another artist," he said.

The tuna!

"No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA... Therefore, we cannot identify the species."

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 04:26 AM PDT

Said the unnamed commercial food testing lab, quoted in the depths of a very long NYT article titled "The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery/A lawsuit against America's largest sandwich chain has raised questions about America's most popular canned fish. We tried to answer one: Is Subway selling tuna? The spokesman from the lab offered a bit of analysis."

"There's two conclusions," [said the spokesman]. "One, it's so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn't make an identification. Or we got some and there's just nothing there that's tuna."

"The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft guidance on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a push by conservative bishops..."

Posted: 19 Jun 2021 04:44 AM PDT

"...to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights. The decision, made public on Friday afternoon, is aimed at the nation's second Catholic president, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief since Jimmy Carter, and exposes bitter divisions in American Catholicism. It capped three days of contentious debate at a virtual June meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The measure was approved by a vote of 73 percent in favor and 24 percent opposed."

The NYT reports, in "Targeting Biden, Catholic Bishops Advance Controversial Communion Plan/The decision was aimed at the nation's second Catholic president and exposed bitter divisions in American Catholicism."

Are they targeting Biden?

[T]he move to target a president, who regularly attends Mass and has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices, is striking coming from leaders of the president's own faith, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump because they supported his political agenda.

And many liberal Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of Joe Biden because they supported his political agenda. But it's important to drag Donald Trump into this article somehow.

In any case, I'm not a Catholic, but my understanding of Christianity is that your sins are forgiven. Actively furthering abortion rights, going forward, is different from the sins in your past. We're at a point where it seems that the Supreme Court may overturn precedent and withdraw the longstanding right to have an abortion, and Biden is openly committed to appointing new Justices who will preserve the right. And he actively and publicly displays his commitment to Catholicism and uses Catholic priests in this presentation of himself. One way or the other, they participate in politics.

Stray questions:

1. What was the "warning from the Vatican" that the bishops are "flouting"?

Last month Pope Francis' top doctrinal official, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, warned the U.S. bishops in a letter that a policy on communion as relates to politicians could "become a source of discord rather than unity."

2. Is Biden really "the most religiously observant commander in chief since Jimmy Carter"? That "perhaps" is carrying a lot of weight. When George W. Bush was President, his political opponents portrayed him as a religious fanatic.

Milkweed.

Posted: 18 Jun 2021 06:10 PM PDT