Althouse

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• "They failed in Washington. They failed all over the place. Between the impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two, all of these investigations, ah shit, we failed."
• Backyard seen from the 3rd-floor window at 5:47 a.m.
• "You may think exercise is normal, but it’s a very modern behaviour. Instead, for millions of years, humans were physically active for only two reasons..."
• Little Emma foresees being tired of everyone and everything, but she has a plan — a very specific plan.
• "Jon Rahm walked off the 18th green after tying the 54-hole record and building a six-shot lead... Moments later, he was doubled over and saying: 'Not again'..."
• "This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support. Why?"
• "Strangers rank their intelligence."
• "The moon in China has a special meaning. And when it's full, that represents the fullness and reunification of the family. So that poem struck the deep core of my heart whenever I miss my family."
• "We should all declare within one unified voice that China must pay. They must pay. The United States should immediately take steps to phase in a firm 100% tariff on all goods made in China."
• "Young Chinese are rebelling against society through... the tangping, or 'lying flat,' way of life... not getting married, not having children, not buying a house or a car..."
• "Our freedom is being overtaken by left wing cancel culture, and the Biden administration is pushing toxic critical race theory and illegal discrimination into our children’s schools."
• Sunrise, 5:08 a.m.

"They failed in Washington. They failed all over the place. Between the impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two, all of these investigations, ah shit, we failed." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 01:17 PM PDT "Let's send it to the radical left prosecutors in New York, maybe they can have more luck. They'll never stop until November of 2024. They won't stop. There's no better example of the Democrat and media corruption than the 2020 election hoax. As you know, the evidence is too voluminous to even mention.... You look at what happened on that evening when the election was won and all of a sudden vast amounts of votes were taken in just in certain states, swing states. Swing states that I was leading by a lot. Then all of a sudden, oh, something happened. It was a disgrace to our country and if you think people don't see it, people see it. People have seen it."   Said Trump, in his North Carolina speech last night.  The "shit" surprised me.

Backyard seen from the 3rd-floor window at 5:47 a.m. Posted: 06 Jun 2021 12:43 PM PDT   I love the way this was designed and grown to be looked at from above. I'm nearly always seeing it from the 3rd or 2nd floor. It's nice at ground level too, but I'm delighted by the undulating shapes of the low treetops. And of course, I love the part I call "the protractor." The long grass inside of the mown grass is wheat.

"You may think exercise is normal, but it’s a very modern behaviour. Instead, for millions of years, humans were physically active for only two reasons..." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 09:07 AM PDT "... when it was necessary or rewarding. Necessary physical activities included getting food and doing other things to survive. Rewarding activities included playing, dancing or training to have fun or to develop skills. But no one in the stone age ever went for a five-mile jog to stave off decrepitude, or lifted weights whose sole purpose was to be lifted."  From "Just don't do it: 10 exercise myths/We all believe we should exercise more. So why is it so hard to keep it up? Daniel E Lieberman, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology, explodes the most common and unhelpful workout myths" (The Guardian).

Little Emma foresees being tired of everyone and everything, but she has a plan — a very specific plan. Posted: 06 Jun 2021 09:06 AM PDT From r/suspiciouslyspecific:

"Jon Rahm walked off the 18th green after tying the 54-hole record and building a six-shot lead... Moments later, he was doubled over and saying: 'Not again'..." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 08:53 AM PDT "... having been notified he had tested positive for the coronavirus and consequently was out of the tournament. A commanding performance, which included a hole-in-one Saturday morning to complete his second round followed by an eight-under 64 to tie two Memorial records, went to waste. The PGA Tour said the Spaniard had come into close contact with a person who was Covid-19 positive, meaning Rahm could play provided he was tested daily. Every test since he arrived Monday came back negative except the one after his second round, which was completed on Saturday morning. The positive test was confirmed as Rahm was playing the 18th hole, knowing nothing except that no one was close to him on the leaderboard. 'This is one of those things that happens in life, one of those moments where how we respond to a setback defines us as people,' Rahm said in a statement he posted to Twitter."  The Guardian reports. You see him receiving the news in the video below. The amount of money he's losing there is $1.7 million. The announcers don't know what the bad news is, only that he's reacting to bad news (which makes you think about how much worse news can be):  Surreal TV moment as six-stroke leader Jon Rahm learns he tested positive for COVID and Jim Nantz tries to make sense of it without knowing what Rahm's been told pic.twitter.com/WvD6LmAlxs — Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) June 5, 2021

"This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support. Why?" Posted: 06 Jun 2021 11:43 AM PDT "Are the very Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump because of actions that led to an attack on our democracy unwilling to support actions to strengthen our democracy? Are these same senators, whom many in my party applauded for their courage, now threats to the very democracy we seek to protect? The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen. With that in mind, some Democrats have again proposed eliminating the Senate filibuster rule in order to pass the For the People Act with only Democratic support. They've attempted to demonize the filibuster and conveniently ignore how it has been critical to protecting the rights of Democrats in the past.... The Senate, its processes and rules, have evolved over time to make absolute power difficult while still delivering solutions to the issues facing our country and I believe that's the Senate's best quality...  Do we really want to live in an America where one party can dictate and demand everything and anything it wants, whenever it wants?" From "Joe Manchin: Why I'm voting against the For the People Act." Thanks, Joe. You have garnered my respect. ADDED: No More Mr. Nice Blog writes: If you're concerned that criticizing him for this could inspire him to switch parties and throw full Senate control to the Republicans, don't worry. He'll never do that. So... that concern is out there.

"Strangers rank their intelligence." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 07:29 AM PDT I'm seeing that this morning because something made me want to read the subreddit "Asian Masculinity: Culture, masculinity & racial identity for Asian men," and I happened across a discussion of that video — "Ray is a good example of Asian Masculinity." Quite a bit of the discussion there is about whether a soft-spoken man can be attractive. The video itself is quite something — inviting these 6 individuals to judge each other's intellligence and then — as they're sitting in order of supposed IQ — surprising them with an IQ test. Then they're reseated — or not — according to the test results. It was a very funny (and disturbing) situation because they were openly expressing some prejudice while decorously resisting mentioning other prejudice.  There was some vocal assertion that "emotional intelligence" is part of IQ, but the IQ test wasn't about emotional intelligence, and the strongest booster of the idea of "emotional intelligence" lacked emotional intelligence (I think).  And the test was taken under ridiculously nonneutral conditions, as they'd all just heard judgments about themselves and were seated right next to the people who'd judged them. Plus they were taking the test on a laptop that was balanced on their knees (or a handheld iPhone) — in front of a camera. That made it partly a test of aptitude for concentrating and keeping calm. I think the laptop-on-knees position would have shaved 10 points off my IQ.

"The moon in China has a special meaning. And when it's full, that represents the fullness and reunification of the family. So that poem struck the deep core of my heart whenever I miss my family." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 06:39 AM PDT Says Yuan Haiwang, author of "This Is China: The First 5,000 Years," quoted in "Li Bai and Du Fu: China's drunken superstar poets" (BBC). He was talking about a poem by Li Bai (701-762 AD). Moonlight in front of my bed  I took it for frost on the ground  I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon  Lower it, and think of home. I'm reading that this morning because a reader, K, saw my post about "tangping" and emailed: Tang was the greatest age of Chinese poetry and the greatest Tang poetry included attacks on the court, and on corruption and in praise of "drunkenness" or withdrawal from the struggle to get ahead at the court. Perhaps for the Chinese "tang-ling" [sic] has some sort of resonance suggesting these great Tang poets. Asking, was the Tang era the greatest Chinese era or is Xi's China the greatest. Subtle, maybe, but the Chinese have been civilized for a long time. I wonder. Perhaps we should love bomb Beijing with millions of copies of On Walden Pond and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to counter the Confucian Institutes here. I don't know what classic literature you're reading right now. Me, I've been reading G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." That line about the moon — "The moon in China has a special meaning" — caught my eye, because I'd just read this, from Chesterton: The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. Is the moon clear and unmistakable? It is true that — unlike the sun – you can look right at it and the outline is sharp — because it's a dead stone. But in Li Bai's poem, he's looking at the moon indirectly, as light on the floor, and he mistakes it, sees it as frost on the ground. He looks directly at the moon, but then he looks away, preferring the unseen moon, the moon in his head, which corresponds to home.  As for whether the Chinese hear "tangping" and think of the Tang Dynasty... I cannot possibly have any idea. I used a Google Chinese-to-English translator and it basically told me to mind my own business. It translated "tang" as "tang."

"We should all declare within one unified voice that China must pay. They must pay. The United States should immediately take steps to phase in a firm 100% tariff on all goods made in China." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 05:46 AM PDT Said Trump, orating in North Carolina last night.  He was holding China responsible for Covid19 and proposing a method — to be imposed now and without further investigation — for collecting what he called "reparations."

"Young Chinese are rebelling against society through... the tangping, or 'lying flat,' way of life... not getting married, not having children, not buying a house or a car..." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 12:52 PM PDT "... and refusing to work extra hours or to hold a job at all. 'I stay at home and sleep and watch television series. Sometimes I go out for walks, read books and just think a lot,' said Daisy Zhang, 28... Tangping has emerged over the last few months as the rallying call of Chinese millennials who have had enough of the rat race. Some compare them to the 1950s Beat Generation in the United States. Others call their behavior a form of nonviolent resistance or 'ideological emancipation' from consumerism. Supporters portray it as a rejection of struggle and endless striving.... Internet users identified themselves as 'lying flatists,' posting photos of cats and seals lying supine. ... When Chinese officials announced loosened family-size limits to allow all couples to have up to three children, one commentator quipped, 'We are all thinking about how best to lie down while they are pushing us to reproduce.'" From "Young Chinese take a stand against pressures of modern life — by lying down" (WaPo).  Here's a definition for "tangping" that somebody — LeoF — wrote up at Urban Dictionary: A Mandarin word, "躺平", literally means "to lie down" , which is widely used on social media and among young people. The word has indifferent connotations. Tangpingers give up fighting for a better life like they used to. They are in total submission to the status quo and they willingly lower their aims, wishes and even expenditures. They have no more unrealistic expectations, illusions, pressure or interest in real life. No more ambitions, craving for success, struggle, resistance or fear. They try to be a normal person and chillax. All they want to do is to lie down, to "tangping" and do nothing. They aren't cooperative and they don't give a F*CK to other people's opinions or blames. Tangpingers scorn the behaviour of fleecing and milking the Masses by devious capitalists and speculators, which always try to play the young people for sucker. So no more Pie-in-the-Sky or brainwashing. Either you pay me decent money to get the job done, or I choose to "tangping" and you get nothing. They try to find the inner peace, happiness and balance, let go of themselves from enormous burdens, pressure and baseless accusations and focus on themselves only. Tangpingism is a peaceful "demonstration" and non-cooperation movement against social inequalities, exploitation, elitism and meaningless competitions of any kind. I must already have a tag that fits this, but which one? I know I have "laziness," "hippies," "protests," and "nothing," and "these kids today." I can see that I made a specific tag for the Japanese phenomenon, "hikikomori" — and I have 6 posts with that tag. Will there be more "tangping" posts? If I knew there would be, I'd definitely make a tag now. Ah, I'll make the tag, out of respect. ADDED: Here's a BBC article on the subject, and it links to this at Sixth Tone, "Tired of Running in Place, Young Chinese 'Lie Down'/The 'Why try hard when you can just skate by?' mentality embraced by some young people has not been enthusiastically received in official circles": The new lifestyle buzzword, tang ping, stems from a now-deleted post on forum site Tieba.... The author... described how he had been unemployed for the past two years yet did not see this as problematic. Instead of accepting and pursuing society's ideas of success, he decided to just lie down. "Since there has never been an ideological trend exalting human subjectivity in our land, I shall create one for myself: Lying down is my wise movement. Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things," the user wrote in his lying-down manifesto.... There's a social media group,  the "Lying Down Group." One member wrote: "According to the mainstream standard, a decent lifestyle must include working hard, trying to get good results on work evaluations, striving to buy a home and a car, and making babies....However, I loaf around on the job whenever I can, refusing to work overtime, not worrying about promotions, and not participating in corporate drama."... A literature professor, Huang Ping, is quoted: "The state is worried about what would happen if everyone stopped working," said []. "Humans aren't merely tools for making things... When you can't catch up with society's development — say, skyrocketing home prices — tang ping is actually the most rational choice...  In a relatively good social environment, people may feel involuted, but at least they're trying... If it's worse, people will tang ping." "Involuted," we're told, means "trapped in ceaseless cycles of competition."  ADDED: Sixth Sense is a Chinese website. It's in English, but it uses some English words in a way that feels wrong to this native English speaker. I looked up "involuted" and couldn't find that meaning. I also had trouble with the use of "subjectivity" in "there has never been an ideological trend exalting human subjectivity in our land." I'm guessing that the word "individualism" would have been a better translation. ALSO: Language Log has some deep detail about the Chinese use of the term "involution" (and thanks to the Linda for sending me that link): Well, involution is an economic, more specifically, agricultural anthropological term. First proposed by Clifford Geertz regarding Indonesia's (colonial Java's) agricultural model, where many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change. This process — of the accumulating of societal resources without essential change at the core — was named involution by Geertz Etymologically, involution is a "turning-in" of itself; the members within a system compete with each other increasingly fiercely with highly homogeneous methods for highly homogenous results, eating and encroaching on each other with no vision on "revolution" (to re-start). A dilemma where quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but in turn prevent the latter from coming forth by paying no attention to reflection and effective use of the already acquired sources and quantitative changes. The concept of "involution" as a term for agrarian economic change was applied to China by Philip C. C. Huang. A good description of how the notion of economic involution developed, from the anthropologist, Alexander Goldenweiser, who used it "to describe a situation in which the crafts or art of a society stuck with the same fundamental patterns, only making them more an[d] more intricate over time", to Geertz, and thence to Philip Huang, may be found in Dietrich Vollrat, "Involution and Growth", Growth Economics Blog (10/15/18).... In cybernetic terms, it is a chāo wěndìng 超稳定 ("super stable"), static system determined by inertia...

"Our freedom is being overtaken by left wing cancel culture, and the Biden administration is pushing toxic critical race theory and illegal discrimination into our children’s schools." Posted: 06 Jun 2021 04:25 AM PDT "Now you tell me, we take this? Joe Biden and the Socialist Democrats are the most radical left-wing administration in history. Even Bernie Sanders can't believe it. He said, I can't believe this happened. This is worse than I ever was. I don't know if they even know what the hell they're signing. Somebody is drawing these documents and putting it, and it's getting signed. It's a disgrace what's happening to our country. The survival of America depends upon our ability to elect Republicans at every level, starting with the midterms next year. We have to get it done. We have to get it done. We have no choice, actually. We have to get it done. Together, we're going to defend our freedoms. You just take a look at what's happening. We have to defend our borders. We have to do all of these things and the cancel culture, the defunding culture, the defending culture and they defend the wrong things, we're not going to let it go any longer. Going to stand up for our values. We have to stand up for our values, and we're going to take back our country and we're going to take it back at a level that is very, very good for our country and it's good for citizens because we can't allow bad things to happen to our country. Bad, bad things are happening to us, perhaps like never before. You'll be seeing what goes on and perhaps like never before." From "Donald Trump Speech Transcript at North Carolina GOP Convention Dinner June 5" (Rev). Trump sounded like his old self last night. We watched the whole thing. It was interesting to see him again. He looked fit and vigorous and focused on Republicans winning the upcoming elections in 2022. He concentrated on telling us all the things the Democrats are doing wrong — disastrously wrong in his view.  There was some talk of the 2020 election, but that was toward the end, and it didn't come across as morbidly self-obsessed or paranoid. It was more an upbeat expression of the belief that Americans can't really be split 50-50 on issues like supporting the police and protecting the border. And protecting the security of the voting process: We need to learn what happened in 2020, so it can never happen again. I liked this bit about Zuckerberg: He used to come to the White House. He would call, "Oh, could I have dinner with you, sir?" "Sure." "Could I bring my wife?" "Oh, absolutely." He actually walked into the office one day in front of numerous people, "Congratulations, sir." "Why?" He said. "You're number one on Facebook." He said to me, "You're number one on Facebook." I said, "Thank you very much. I appreciate it." We had a nice dinner. The day I was out he became a rather, well, I guess it's human nature. But we can't let our country be run by that kind of human nature can we? Zuckerberg, it's another beauty. Zuckerberg may notice that at least Trump is crediting him with humanness. So often, people say Z doesn't seem like a human being, but some sort of alien. Just yesterday, a NYT columnist said he seems like "another species on another planet." I also enjoyed the riff about furniture: Over the years, I've built lots of hotels and lots of things. I used to buy my furniture from North Carolina. Are you a furniture guy? Stand up. There's only one in the room I think. Right? But I helped you a lot, right? Good. Thank you. It's great to have you. The quality was incredible. Now it's so much of it's made in China, right? So much. We were stopping that. It was all stopping. Then we had to slow it down a little bit after the pandemic, but it was all stopping. It was all starting to come back here and to other places. I will tell you, I bought a lot of furniture, a lot of things. A lot of times, you'd put furniture made in China into a hotel room and it would break. Somebody sits down in a chair. If you don't sit down lightly, the damn thing would collapse. Then I'd get sued as usual. But nobody ever made it like you made it here and you make it here. So just stay tuned, okay? Because we were all set to bring it all back. It was all coming back.

Sunrise, 5:08 a.m. Posted: 05 Jun 2021 05:20 PM PDT

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