Friday, July 2, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

Matt Damon reaches the Brimley/Cocoon Line.

Posted: 02 Jul 2021 05:16 AM PDT

"If you look at every issue in this country — every issue I believe traces back to this fact: On the one hand, the elites in the ruling class in this country are robbing us blind, and on the other, if you dare complain about it, you are a bad person."

Posted: 02 Jul 2021 04:38 AM PDT

A brilliant political pitch from J.D. Vance, quoted in "J.D. Vance, 'Hillbilly Elegy' Author, Is Running for Senate in Ohio/The author and venture capitalist will vie for the Republican nomination in one of the most wide-open 2022 Senate races" (NYT).

I mean it strikes me as brilliant, but on reflection, it doesn't make much sense. You're made to feel like a bad person if you complain about the elite? Where and how is that happening?

Milkweed with spider.

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 05:35 PM PDT

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"The case arises out of an initiative by Kamala Harris, when she was California’s Secretary of State, to force nonprofits to disclose to the state the identities of their major donors...."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 05:22 PM PDT

"It was generally assumed that Harris wanted to know the identities of donors to conservative organizations so that they could be harassed by various California agencies, or so that their identities could be leaked in order for them to be 'canceled' by left-wing activists.... The Supreme Court has long recognized that forced disclosure of association with a group can chill First Amendment rights.... In my view, this should not have been a difficult case. But the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court's decision, and the vote in the Supreme Court was 6-3, with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer dissenting. Justice Sotomayor made this very silly argument: 'The same scrutiny the Court applied when NAACP members in the Jim Crow South did not want to disclose their membership for fear of reprisals and violence now applies equally in the case of donors only too happy to publicize their names across the websites and walls of the organizations they support.'"

Writes John Hinderaker "SUPREME COURT FOILS DEMOCRATS' ATTACK ON CONSERVATIVE NONPROFITS" (Power Line).

"Environmental experts have long touted the need for wildlife corridors to better help populations stay connected and maintain their genetic diversity."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 05:13 PM PDT

"Underpasses beneath major highways—for Florida panthers along Interstate 75, for instance—have been in place for years, and the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, on the Georgia-Florida border, and Osceola National Forest, in north Florida, were connected by the purchase of a roughly ten-mile corridor in the mid-two-thousands. But Florida is the first state to draw up a map for the entire state and get behind it with real money. 'Florida is way ahead of the rest of the country,'' Tom Hoctor, the director of the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning at the University of Florida, told me.

Writes Dexter Filkins in "Florida's Remarkable New Wildlife Corridor from the Panhandle to the Keys/The state has created a national model for how to safeguard threatened species for generations" (The New Yorker). The new legislation was passed by a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican governor (a fact that seems to mystify the New Yorker writer at least a little bit). 

Here's the map:

"It’s a little, um, unsettling that the only part of the third child that’s visible from the front is some feet and a hand pointing out into the distance."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 05:37 PM PDT

"The proportions of life-size children statues always fall a little too deep into the uncanny valley for me. Most importantly, of all Princess Di's iconic outfits... this is the look they choose? Regardless, it is an impressive piece of art, and I will award bonus points for the inclusion of a belted waist, a rare and bold choice among statues.... Both Prince William and Prince Harry unveiled the statue together, taking a subsequent moment to appreciate all its life-size-ness."

From New York Magazine's article about the new Princess Diana statue, "Please Admire This Statue's Big Belt."

I'm surprised to see the theme of large white benefactor looming over smaller darker folk, which was the sculptoral sin ascribed to the Teddy Roosevelt statue that has to come down from in front of the Museum of Natural History.  

ADDED:

5:25 a.m. — a gentle sunrise.

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 08:17 AM PDT

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"Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 08:06 AM PDT

Adam Liptak reports (in the NYT).
The new case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, concerned two kinds of voting restrictions in Arizona. One required election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other made it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call "ballot harvesting." 
The law made exceptions for family members, caregivers and election officials. The larger battle in the case was not whether the particular challenged restrictions should survive. The Biden administration, for instance, told the justices in an unusual letter that the Arizona measures did not violate Section 2. 
But the letter disavowed the Trump administration's interpretation of Section 2, which would have limited its availability to test the lawfulness of all sorts of voting restrictions. Section 2 bars any voting procedure that "results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race." That happens, the provision goes on, when, "based on the totality of circumstances," racial minorities "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice."

Here's the opinion. Of course, it's 6 to 3.

"Donald J. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, surrendered on Thursday to the Manhattan district attorney’s office..."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 05:29 AM PDT

"... as he and the Trump Organization prepared to face charges in connection with a tax investigation, people with knowledge of the matter said. The exact charges were not yet known."

The NYT reports.

Are Trump-haters salivating over this? It's just some failure to report perks as income, isn't it? It doesn't reach Trump himself, and they were straining to find something to pin on him. Seems like he'll be able to flaunt this as proof of his squeaky cleanliness.

Matt Taibbi is annoyed by the repetitiveness and thinness of Robin DiAngelo's new book "Nice Racism."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 06:39 AM PDT

I'm reading "Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo/Suburban America's self-proclaimed racial oracle returns with a monumentally oblivious sequel to 'White Fragility.'" 

Fortunately, Matt Taibbi  keeps his book review super-short and even so, he's risking committing the same writerly sin as DiAngelo — saying the same thing over and over. And it would be especially bad to say over and over that some other writer keeps saying the same thing over and over. 

DiAngelo's main point is something I myself believe: Lots of people who think of themselves as good people — because they think of themselves as good people — are — obliviously — racist.

DiAngelo has cashed in with this insight, and who can blame her for slapping together another book? Taibbi dismisses it as "the booklike product released this week by the 'Vanilla Ice of Antiracism,' Robin DiAngelo."  

DiAngelo presents herself — her past self — as an exemplar of the self-loving liberal who views racism as a sin that afflicts those other people — those awful people over there. She writes:

My progressive credentials were impeccable: I was a minority myself—a woman in a committed relationship with another woman…I knew how to talk about patriarchy and heterosexism. I was a cool white progressive, not an ignorant racist. Of course, what I was actually demonstrating was how completely oblivious I was.

It's an important insight, but how do you make it into a book and then another book? There isn't really any new material, just a need to bonk complacent liberals on the head again, and this new book is offered for that purpose.

Matt Taibbi cries out in pain:

Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over. You hear ideas repeated ten, twenty, a hundred times, losing track of which story is which....

CORRECTION: As originally posted, I had Matt Taibbi's name confused with that of another writer with a very similar name. Sorry! 

AND: Embarrassing as it is to mix up 2 names — and I bet I've casually regarded them as the same person for years — I was just blogging, and I had about a dozen readers email me immediately to tell me about my mistake — at least I wasn't on television yelling at Matt Taibbi because I had him confused with Matt Bai. That's what David Gergen did — back in 2010, as reported in Rolling Stone, here, by Taibbi:

A few weeks back I participated in a post-election roundtable that included Peter Hart and former Nixon aide David Gergen. The session got unexpectedly hot, in particular over the whole issue of whether or not Obama had done enough to keep America's CEOs happy.

Gergen kept pressing this idea that, even though finance-industry bonuses are back up to record highs at the same time that real human beings are facing horrific unemployment and foreclosure crises, Obama needed to work harder at jacking off the CEO class. When I got genuinely emotional in response to this idea, Gergen continually expressed not so much anger as surprise.

He made some cryptic comments (which didn't appear in the printed transcript) that included one exchange in which he suggested that he didn't expect to hear this sort of thing from me, among other things because my opinions clashed with something that had recently appeared in my own "newspaper."

I thought, what newspaper? What is this guy talking about? In a quizzical voice I asked Gergen what he meant, but by then we were rolling onto the next subject. The whole thing was odd — clearly he had no idea who I was, but the interesting thing is that he seemed to think he knew who I was. After the event I smiled weakly, shook his hand, and walked out, confused. A few hours later, I figured it out.

Gergen clearly had me mixed up with Matt Bai, the New York Times reporter.

Thanks to a reader named — of all things — Matt for tipping me off about Gergen's so-much-larger-than-mine embarrassment.

"Among Cosby’s most high-profile supporters on Wednesday was actress Phylicia Rashad, his former co-star and incoming dean of Howard University’s College of Fine Arts."

Posted: 01 Jul 2021 02:56 AM PDT

"Rashad applauded the overturned conviction, tweeting that 'a miscarriage of justice is corrected' alongside an image of Cosby. After a flurry of criticism over her tweet, Rashad later added, 'I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth.' Nylah Burton, a writer and former student of Howard University, called Rashad's initial comments 'obscene.' Burton said she was raped while attending the university. Last year, she set up a GoFundMe to help support current and former Howard University students who have experienced sexual violence on the HBCU campus. The 26-year-old said she's still processing the news about Cosby, which was 'triggering,' but it was Rashad's comment that she found immediately chilling. 'To see random people celebrating Bill Cosby is always hurtful, of course, but to see people with so much institutional and cultural power … so firmly against you, it makes you feel hopeless,' Burton said."

From "Sexual assault survivors are devastated by Bill Cosby's release: 'It makes you feel hopeless'/Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after his sexual-assault conviction was overturned" (The Lily (at WaPo).

Why is Phylicia Rashad a dean at Howard? I see at her Wikipedia page that her highest degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Here's Howard's official announcement, dated May 12, 2021. Excerpt:

"I can think of no individual better suited to take on this role than Ms. Phylicia Rashad," said Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick, M.D., MBA. "As we reintroduce our campus community and the world at large to Howard's College of Fine Arts, the dean will play an instrumental role in ensuring an auspicious beginning for this reestablished institution. Given Ms. Rashad's reputation as well as her capabilities and impressive list of accomplishments, she will undoubtedly empower the college to transcend even our incredibly high expectations."

What did they think they were getting? Image? Now, they need to distance themselves from her and they say — sensitively! — that she lacked "sensitivity." 

This would have been a good time for Howard to say that the rights of the criminally accused are just as important as enforcing the criminal law, but Howard's statement asserts "Survivors of sexual assault will always be our priority."

Sunrise — 5:28, 5:28, 5:30.

Posted: 30 Jun 2021 05:52 PM PDT

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