Trendlist: Althouse

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Althouse

"If you are unhappy, or if you frequently say you are 'exhausted,' if maybe you cry at work a little more often than you personally think is reasonable..."
"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned Bill Cosby’s 2019 sexual assault conviction..."
"The real 'aha' moment for myself was thinking about all of our kids who are usually late or were already slipping through the cracks. When I realized that we were going 100 percent virtual..."
The NYT has produced a 40-minute documentary about the January 6th incident: "Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol."
"Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers."
"I'm on my feet all day long with the kittens and so many litter boxes you have to bend over."
"There was a long time — who knows when it ended? — when, if you were a woman and you parted your hair on the side, someone would say you look like Veronica Lake."
5:11 a.m.
"North Korea closed its borders with China and Russia at the start of the pandemic, halted international air travel and imposed strict limits on domestic travel."
"With pageantry, people think it is only about beauty. But it’s how you present yourself, what you advocate for, what you’ve done and the goals you have...."
My morning place, seen at 6:19 p.m. and 6:25 p.m.

"If you are unhappy, or if you frequently say you are 'exhausted,' if maybe you cry at work a little more often than you personally think is reasonable..."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 10:51 AM PDT

"... if you wake up in the morning and consider dying instead of going to work, you CLEARLY owe it to yourselves to do something else. Will making a change maybe make you poor or scared? SURE. Could the change be bad? ABSOLUTELY. But the alternative — staying put, degrading like an old yogurt — is to become a worse person. You can't solve your own burnout, you can only change the system or your situation. And while it seems like becoming a worse person is a pretty common choice, do you really want to be common?"

That's Choire Sicha (at Substack), where I went because it was linked at "Ex-New York Times Styles editor says he suffered from burnout, wished for death" (NY Post). Sicha had been the NYT Styles editor for 4 years.

I don't know if Substack offered him better money or what really happened. He says he likened himself to old yogurt. He thought of dying. And who are we to say he didn't?

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned Bill Cosby’s 2019 sexual assault conviction..."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 10:15 AM PDT

".... ruling that a 'non-prosecution agreement' with a previous prosecutor should have prevented him from being charged in the case..... The case had a complicated history that began in 2005 when [Temple University employee Andrea] Constand first reported the alleged assault to then-Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr., who ultimately declined to file charges in this case. But Castor's successors reopened the case and charged Cosby in 2015, just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired and amid a barrage of new accusations from women across the country. At the time, Castor objected to the new prosecution, saying he'd struck a deal with Cosby and his lawyers not to prosecute him for Constand's assault if Cosby agreed to sit for a deposition in a civil case she had filed against him..... He was charged in late 2015, when a prosecutor armed with newly unsealed evidence — Cosby's damaging deposition from her lawsuit — arrested him days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired."

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

"The real 'aha' moment for myself was thinking about all of our kids who are usually late or were already slipping through the cracks. When I realized that we were going 100 percent virtual..."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 09:53 AM PDT

"... my initial thought was: 'How many kids are we going to lose? How many parents are we going to lose?'"

Said Charleston Brown, principal of Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School, San Francisco (where 79% of the students are low income), quoted in "'How Many Kids Are We Going to Lose?' Four Principals Speak About the Past Year" (NYT).

The NYT has produced a 40-minute documentary about the January 6th incident: "Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 09:39 AM PDT

And here's the accompanying article, "Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation/The Times analyzed thousands of videos from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building to understand how it happened — and why. Here are some of the key findings."

The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times's Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence.... We found evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot and assault police officers. And we learned how Donald J. Trump's own words resonated with the mob in real time as they staged the attack.

"Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 08:59 AM PDT

"Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a Black or Latino candidate from winning the race.... To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams's backers and others already urging a new referendum on it.... According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise. After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.8 percentage points...."

From "New York Mayor's Race in Chaos After Elections Board Counts 135,000 Test Ballots/The extraordinary sequence of events threw the closely watched Democratic primary contest into a new period of uncertainty and seeded further confusion about the outcome" (NYT).

Wiley and Adams are the 2 black candidates.* If they are shut out after multi-round computer shuffling and Garcia gets the nomination, I don't see how people are going to believe what happened was legit. And the Democrats will have themselves to blame, since they've been leaning into characterizing everything that happens within the structure of voting as racist.

The top-rated comment in the NYT is:

Please oh please do not make it sound like ranked choice is somehow rigged! The old way meant people who the majority did *not* want could win elections because of multiple candidates dividing the vote. Ranked choice makes it so that a majority is in favor of the winner, even if that person wasn't their first choice. Voters voted for this process. Eric Adams and fans, do not follow Trump into the moral void and start undermining results just because you don't like them.

Too late for that sort of wishful thinking. This is a bed Democrats made for themselves.

______________________

* They're the 2 black candidates among the leading vote winners. Among the many, many candidates, there were at least 2 others who are black.

"I'm on my feet all day long with the kittens and so many litter boxes you have to bend over."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 05:42 AM PDT

"My husband says to me, 'You don't even have to do the five mile walk this morning. You were on your feet all day long with the foster kittens.' So yes, I guess I'm holding kittens and leaning over for litter boxes, scooping poop all day."

Said Howard Stern's wife Beth, quoted in a very puffy puff piece at Hamptons.com, where I clicked through to from "Fans outraged by Howard Stern's summer off after $500M Sirius XM deal."

Imagine having that much wealth and spending your time so deeply involved in cat shit?

It made me think of this video I saw the other day of Curtis Sliwa, the GOP candidate for mayor of New York:

No one but the cat people can fathom the mysteries of the cat people.

"There was a long time — who knows when it ended? — when, if you were a woman and you parted your hair on the side, someone would say you look like Veronica Lake."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 08:49 AM PDT

"Side part *meant* Veronica Lake" — I write over at Facebook, where my son John — a propos of his "101 Years of Movies" blog — posts a lovely photograph of Veronica Lake (from "Sullivan's Travels," his second favorite movies of 1941).

John responds:

A scene in Billy Wilder's breakthrough movie, "The Major and the Minor" (1942), starring Ginger Rogers, pokes fun at Lake's famous hairdo: "There's an epidemic in [this] school…. They all think they're Veronica Lake."

Amazing! Look:

To quote myself again (with an added link, to Glamour):

That was way back in 1942. That was still going on in the 1960s and beyond.

These days, there's a big fad for parting the hair straight down the middle. We had that in the 1960s too. But hysteria over a side part is really very funny. Lake didn't pull the hair back, though. That was a big thing about it. She let it fall over her eyes.

It was the hair in your eye/eyes that drove people crazy. I got the impression they thought it was one thing for one actress — Veronica Lake — to perform that insanity in movies, but no one else can try that — certainly not in real life, where you've got to watch where you're going — and if you do, we're going to discipline you by calling you out for copying Lake. Like this was a hairstyle for one person and one person alone.

I think it was just over-the-top policing of young women. And I'm saying that as someone who, in junior high, was sent to the vice principal's office for having excessively long bangs. I mean, what are eyebrows for if not to tell you here is the line that must not be crossed?

5:11 a.m.

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 04:38 AM PDT

"North Korea closed its borders with China and Russia at the start of the pandemic, halted international air travel and imposed strict limits on domestic travel."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 02:55 AM PDT

"It has told the World Health Organization it has not found a single case of Covid-19 after testing more than 30,000 people. That claim has been greeted with scepticism by the international community, with experts warning that the country's threadbare health services are ill-equipped to deal with an outbreak.... Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said Kim's comments 'indicate that health conditions are already deteriorating inside the country. Kim will likely find scapegoats for the incident, purging disloyal officials and blaming their ideological lapses. This may provide Pyongyang justification for demanding that citizens hunker down more, but it could also be political preparation for accepting vaccines from abroad."

From "North Korea Covid-19 outbreak fears after Kim Jong-un warns of 'huge crisis' in 'antivirus fight'/Leader speaks of a grave incident and sacks officials for neglecting duties in fighting 'global health crisis'" (The Guardian).

"With pageantry, people think it is only about beauty. But it’s how you present yourself, what you advocate for, what you’ve done and the goals you have...."

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 02:50 AM PDT

"I worked with Pride Tree, talking to kids and supporting them and helping them build a wardrobe because sometimes they don't have access to clothes than express their gender identity.... I told the judges that as a transgender woman of color and a survivor of physical and sexual abuse, I am everything that is underrepresented in this country. Our voices matter. Those whose voices aren't always heard deserve the chance to be heard.... It means a lot to represent Nevada.... We are an example for other states and we can create a place that is less hateful for all."

Said Kataluna Enriquez, quoted in "First transgender Miss Nevada USA calls win 'huge honor'" (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

My morning place, seen at 6:19 p.m. and 6:25 p.m.

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 07:02 PM PDT