Althouse

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• "We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime."
• What if there were a color that could drive (some) people mad?
• He's telling the truth about himself and everyone else — and he's doing it with brilliantly casual humor, which his audience easily gets, while the George Conways of the world stand at a distance and tsk.
• "Younger artists in the dreary, austere Britain of the early 1950s began to reject the modernist disdain for the garish hucksterism of capitalist salesmanship."
• "Other podcasts, billed as 'true-crime comedy,' offer up a homeopathic remedy: steep yourself in murder, and the murderers can’t get you."
• Let's read the full text of Trump's CPAC speech.
• This morning at 5:12 and 5:28.
• 5:31 and 5:51 a.m.
• "From the Malecón, Havana’s famous seawall near the old city, to small towns in Artemisa province and Palma Soriano, the second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting 'Freedom!' 'Down with Communism!'..."
• "There are four warring factions of the police. There is no security. There are 100 gangs with guns. There is no way we can have elections. The people are too scared to vote."

"We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime." Posted: 12 Jul 2021 10:43 AM PDT "The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected. The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves." That is, in full, the Statement by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on Protests in Cuba."

What if there were a color that could drive (some) people mad? Posted: 12 Jul 2021 08:47 AM PDT Nope. pic.twitter.com/BgtT2wvFx1 — Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) July 12, 2021 It's some kind of litmus test, so take the test:  What is your reaction to this Ivanka family photo? Why are they doing that? Why? Why! What does it mean? That color?!! It's nuts! How lovely for them to dress up, coordinated like that, embodying family harmony. Absurd, stylish clowns, tweaking the uptight lefties, with just — a color! Sometimes pure color comes to the fore and overshadows celebrity, politics, and all that is mundane. An evil color, for an evil family — it's all so wrong, so perfectly wrong.   pollcode.com free polls

He's telling the truth about himself and everyone else — and he's doing it with brilliantly casual humor, which his audience easily gets, while the George Conways of the world stand at a distance and tsk. Posted: 12 Jul 2021 08:18 AM PDT Every so often, he tells the truth about his lying. https://t.co/9RiyXDN9T7 — George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 11, 2021

"Younger artists in the dreary, austere Britain of the early 1950s began to reject the modernist disdain for the garish hucksterism of capitalist salesmanship." Posted: 12 Jul 2021 06:40 AM PDT "[In 1957, one theorist said Pop Art should be] popular, transient, expendable, gimmicky, glamorous, and—he used the term explicitly—big business. Such a frank alliance between avant-garde art and capitalism was made possible by the cold war. The rivalry with communism gave consumerism an appearance of depth. It was not, as elitist critics had long maintained, shallow and meretricious. Consumerism stood for what Harry Truman called, in the 1947 speech that inaugurated the cold war, a 'way of life.' Communism imposed everything from above. But capitalism—in its own self-image—created infinite choice. Its claim (seldom borne out in reality) was that it allowed the consumer to make all the decisions. Coke or Pepsi, Gillette or Wilkinson Sword, Max Factor or Revlon—it's entirely up to you... It is not the artist but the viewer, listener, reader, or audience member who creates the meaning of the work. The aim of aesthetic creation is to make the producer disappear and leave only the object and the consumer.... At the heart of the self-image of the West in the cold war was a powerful but often amorphous idea: freedom....What, in any case, was freedom, and to whom did it belong? The desire for the art object to be free came easily enough to artists who were male and white...." From "Freedom for Sale/In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde" by Fintan O'Toole (NY Review of Books)(reviewing "The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War"by Louis Menand).

"Other podcasts, billed as 'true-crime comedy,' offer up a homeopathic remedy: steep yourself in murder, and the murderers can’t get you." Posted: 12 Jul 2021 06:21 AM PDT "This weird logic is openly acknowledged in the first episode of My Favorite Murder, the Gen-X and Millennial answer to True Detective. With hosts Karen Kilgariff, a stand-up comedian, and Georgia Hardstark, a cooking show personality, it launched in 2016 with the women saying, 'Let's get cozy and comfy and…talk about murder!' Girlfriends huddling around a campfire sharing scary stories, they take violence to be inevitable. 'Tell me everything so I can avoid it!' says Hardstark in that first episode. Kilgariff replies, 'I just want to collect information and hear theories and stories so I can be braced, so that…I'm ready.' She goes on: 'It's the law of physics…the more you know about something, the less likely it will happen to you.' That's more fantasy than physics, but this program too has been downloaded millions of times. The hosts' motto and title of their 2019 joint memoir is Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered. It's a joke, but it's not a joke." That's an isolated snippet of "Murder Is My Business/In the true crime genre's latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence" by Caroline Fraser (NY Review of Books).  Lots more in that article, including a recommendation of the book "True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969." Here's the website for "My Favorite Murder." I've mostly stayed away from the true-crime genre myself. I listened to "Serial" but ultimately disapproved of it. I listened to "Dirty John" around the same time. But I've avoided all that since then. I don't want those things in my head. I don't even want to watch movies with murders anymore. There's something very strange about the way we humans entertain ourselves with murder, and I am not buying the homeopathy theory!

Let's read the full text of Trump's CPAC speech. Posted: 12 Jul 2021 06:01 AM PDT Here's the transcript of yesterday's speech. I'll just give you some highlights — things that jumped out at me as I read it, seeing things for the first time (that is, I didn't watch the speech): For generations, the American conservative union has helped lead the charge to defend our values, protect our country, and preserve our glorious American heritage. You see they're taking our heritage away.... In a matter of mere months, Joe Biden has brought our country to the brink of ruin.... Now the Biden administration has turned the border into the single greatest disaster in American history, and perhaps in world history. Nobody's ever seen a border like this. Other countries don't have a border like this.... Biden's border crisis is also helping drive an unprecedented crime wave, and you see the crime wave. Even without this you see all in Democrat run cities. Please remember that. The bloodshed and violence in these cities is reaching epidemic proportions.... In New York City, crime is out of control. It's at record levels with nobody being prosecuted except of course innocent Republicans are being prosecuted. The Democrats know their policies on crime are so unpopular, so radical, so crazy, they are now trying to pretend they never led the defund the police movement in the first place. Disinformation.... That's what they do. It's called disinformation... If you support defunding the police, vote for the radical left Democrats, and you see what's happening to the cities where they defunded the police. There's never been anything like it. If you want more police and more cops on the streets, vote for America first Republicans or let's put it very simply, vote for MAGA. Make America great again. MAGA. MAGA, MAGA, MAGA. The same far left Democrats who are defunding police are also leading an all out crusade to strip you, the law abiding citizens of America, of your God given Second Amendment rights. I told you again. I told you. I told you.... They are hard at work to abolish the First Amendment as well. Probably all amendments, when you get right down to it. Why not? The radical left and big tech's attack on free speech is unlawful. It's unconstitutional, and it is completely un-American. To protect the Constitutional rights and liberties of every citizen, this week I filed a major class action. Lot of people are joining. Yep. A big class action lawsuit against the big tech giants. We are suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google.... We are taking Mark Zookerbucks, Jack Dorsey, and the other Silicon Valley billionaires to federal court.... The big tech election interference in 2020 was an outrageous assault upon our Republic and upon the American voter.... Mark Zuckerberg alone spent $ 400 million dollars on election meddling. In virtually all of the key swing states, he funded unmanned and unprotected drop boxes that were deployed in Democrat run cities and heavily Democrat precincts to scoop up ballots which were supposedly 94, 95, 96% for Joe Biden, because he campaigned so well from his basement. How about where Biden did substantially better in the swing states than Barack Hussein Obama with the black population?... Every time the media references the election hoax, they say the fraud is "unproven. And while there is no evidence … " No evidence? There's so much evidence.... Democrats are ruthless, but they are united. They don't have these Romney types.... Like socialists and communists movements throughout history, today's leftists do not believe in freedom, they do not believe in fairness, and they do not believe in democracy. They believe in Marxist morality. Anything is justified as long as it hurts their political opponents and advances the radical agenda of their party.... We will take back our elections, and finally, we will always include a thing called voter ID. That's another thing. The Democrats are now saying, "Oh, we always wanted voter ID." There was a poll. 88% of the people in the country want voter ID, so now the Democrats again, same old story. They're saying, " We want voter ID. We've always wanted voter ID." These people are sick. We will completely defund and bar critical race theory. 1776, not 1619, if you don't mind. And if government run schools are going to teach children to hate their country, we will demand school choice that we already have. If you listen to the media or watch the evening newscast, our country has really gone bad. All we talk about is race. That's all they talk about. Race. The whole show. race, race. We don't talk about our country being great anymore. We don't talk about how America can lead the world. We don't talk about stopping crime or the hundreds and hundreds of people that are being shot in Democrat run cities and what to do about it.... The Democrat controlled media talks race, race, race for political reasons. And they always have, but never like this. But it's hurting our country, and more than anyone else, our great minority communities. It's hurting them very badly. The Democrat obsession with race is only dragging us backward into the past, and it is bringing our country down to a point where even China and Russia are lecturing us on human rights, race, and they're doing it in a very humiliating fashion. This never happened. Never happened with me. During my administration, our country was respected again. It is no longer respected.... Our glorious American inheritance was passed down to us by generations of American patriots who gave everything they had. Their sweat, their blood, and even their way of lives to build America into the greatest nation in the history of the world, and we are not going to let it be taken away from us by a small group of radical left Marxist maniacs. We're not going to let it happen.... We will lead the conservative movement and the Republican Party back to victory, and it will be a greater victory than this party has ever had. We will take back the House. We will take back the Senate, and then after witnessing all that has gone wrong in our country in such a short period of time, with our borders, with our economy, with crime, we will take back that glorious White House. That sits so majestically in our nation's capital. Beautiful white house. That's small letters. White house. That beautiful white house. And it is the most beautiful house of all.

This morning at 5:12 and 5:28. Posted: 12 Jul 2021 04:58 AM PDT   What happened after 5:28 was interesting too, but I'll save that for later. Oh, the suspense! You can imagine, given the structure of the clouds at the point where the sun will emerged.  I wanted to put the first 2 photos up early because I'm going through my email, and I see this question from Portly Pirate: "Have you ever mentioned which season is your favorite for sunrises? Do you even have a favorite?" If I clicked my "sunrise" tag and scrolled and scrolled, I might be able to form an opinion about which season has the best chance of a better than average sunrise balanced against the likelihood of a very plain sunrise, factoring in my preference for the completely cloudy form of plainness over the completely clear form of plainness, especially when there's at least some structure to the clouds.  But here's the thing about seasons. We live in the day. Let each day reveal itself. Show up and pay attention. Don't worry about the days in the recent past or near future. There's nothing I can do about the sunrise other than to witness and respect whatever sunrise presents itself in the day I'm in. The sunrises don't group together and influence each other, and there's no benefit to thinking about the likelihood of better sunrises in particular seasons. We were walking in the woods yesterday and talking about the way the leaves looked at this point in the summer. We were all enclosed in an area that in winter will open up. And it will be pretty in a different way in the fall and the spring. What good is there in picking favorites? All the seasons are beautiful, and if you believe that, the seasonal change increases the beauty. It's like growing old. You can say, It was better to be young!, but it's better to believe that it was not better.

5:31 and 5:51 a.m. Posted: 11 Jul 2021 05:52 PM PDT

"From the Malecón, Havana’s famous seawall near the old city, to small towns in Artemisa province and Palma Soriano, the second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting 'Freedom!' 'Down with Communism!'..." Posted: 11 Jul 2021 05:50 PM PDT "... and 'Patria y Vida' -- Homeland and Life -- which has become a battle cry among activists after a viral music video turned the revolutionary slogan 'Homeland or Death' on its head. 'We are not afraid!' chanted Samantha Regalado while she recorded hundreds of people walking along a narrow street in Palma Soriano." From "'Freedom!' Thousands of Cubans take to the streets to demand the end of dictatorship" (Miami Herald).

"There are four warring factions of the police. There is no security. There are 100 gangs with guns. There is no way we can have elections. The people are too scared to vote." Posted: 11 Jul 2021 05:22 PM PDT Said Ralph Chevry, board member of the Haiti Center for Socio Economic Policy in Port-au-Prince, quoted in "In Haiti, rivals claw for power as crisis escalates after assassination" (WaPo). The caption on the top photograph at the link is: "Haitian citizens hold up passports as they gather in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tabarre, Haiti, on July 10, asking for asylum after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse."

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