Althouse

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• "The Taliban have showed off containers full of weapons and military hardware seized from the Afghan military as American forces withdraw from the country...."
• "It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina. That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place."
• Sunrise — 5:29, 5:37, 5:40.
• "After 500 years of injustice, you can’t just put up a fake village manned by a token Indian and say, 'We’re good.' We want to meet with Biden and ask him to honor the treaties. We want to find out what he will do to stop the ethnocide of our people."
• Have you noticed all the anti-4th-of-July articles?
• "For many years, there was one kind of swim cap. It was ultratight, made of latex or silicone..."
• Until tomorrow...

"The Taliban have showed off containers full of weapons and military hardware seized from the Afghan military as American forces withdraw from the country...." Posted: 06 Jul 2021 09:48 AM PDT "The weaponry includes 900 guns, 30 light tactical vehicles and 20 army pickup trucks.... District after district has fallen to the Taliban. The militants have seized 120 districts since May 1.... [M]any military outposts have been surrendered without a fight, allowing the Taliban to seize weapons, according to multiple Afghan military and government sources." NBC reports.

"It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina. That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place." Posted: 06 Jul 2021 09:38 AM PDT Says Nikole Hannah-Jones, quoted in "Nikole Hannah-Jones to join Howard faculty after UNC tenure controversy/Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is also set to join the faculty of Howard, a historically Black university in the nation's capital" (WaPo).  Hannah-Jones will also found a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. She said it will aim to train journalism students from historically Black schools to "accurately and urgently [cover] the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today's journalism." Meanwhile, Coates "will be a writer-in-residence in the university's College of Arts and Sciences, and hold the Sterling Brown chair in the English department." We're told he "also has plans to finish his bachelor's degree, which he started at Howard in 1993."

Sunrise — 5:29, 5:37, 5:40. Posted: 06 Jul 2021 06:53 AM PDT

"After 500 years of injustice, you can’t just put up a fake village manned by a token Indian and say, 'We’re good.' We want to meet with Biden and ask him to honor the treaties. We want to find out what he will do to stop the ethnocide of our people." Posted: 06 Jul 2021 05:55 AM PDT Said Phil Two Eagle, quoted in "The battle for Mount Rushmore: 'It should be turned into something like the Holocaust Museum'" (The Guardian).

Have you noticed all the anti-4th-of-July articles? Posted: 06 Jul 2021 05:15 AM PDT Here's one I'm just catching up on: "Maybe it's time to admit that the Statue of Liberty has never quite measured up" (WaPo). It's time! Why is it time? Is there a "Time's Up" movement that's sweeping up all the manifestations of love for America? No more enjoyment of the comfortable attributes of everyday patriotism! Here's an excerpt from the column, which is by WaPo's art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott.  The ironies and blind spots pile up. Liberty was depicted as a woman, at a time when women didn't have the right to vote. In 1882, the United States passed the nakedly racist Chinese Exclusion Act; a year later, construction of the base of the statue began with Chinese laborers among the workforce. The idea of the statue was associated with the 100th anniversary of the revolution that brought American independence. But Bartholdi created a sedate, classicizing and mostly sexless figure, not the radical revolutionary icon of liberty known in France as Marianne (the bare-chested woman seen in Delacroix's 1830 painting, "Liberty Leading the People)." Like breasts slipping out of a bodice, that quotation mark has slipped outside of the parenthesis. Here's the Delacroix: Lots of guns in that picture. Kennicott implies that this woman (Marianne) is not "mostly sexless," but it's a call to arms, not a call to sex. Does Kennicott think the pantsless man in the foreground is sexy?  Speaking of sex: I remember yet another moment of dissonance, from the day in 1986 when Reagan celebrated the renovation of the statue with a bland speech about liberty, complete with bombastic music and a relighting spectacle. Only days before, the Supreme Court had issued its decision in a case called Bowers v. Hardwick, which held that states could criminalize same-sex activity without violating the constitution. The week's newspapers contained both stories, beautiful, choreographed imagery of the president with liberty in the background, and excerpts of a legal opinion that held a law targeted at LGBT people was justifiable because it was based on "millennia of moral teaching." I remember thinking, at the time, that a statue that held little meaning to me was suddenly meaningful in a very particular way: I could reject it. "This is your symbol, not mine," I said, repeating if not the exact words at least sentiments similar to those others had no doubt felt since the beginning of the republic. It may well be that there is more genuine liberty embodied in the rejection of a symbol than the acceptance of it.  The boldface is mine. I believe this has been a theme in the articles I've been seeing — what my post title calls "anti-4th-of-July" materials. I can imagine that the writers of this material would push me back and say, no, we're not anti-4th-of-July — you're anti-4th-of-July! — because we're for the deepest values of liberty and you're not.

"For many years, there was one kind of swim cap. It was ultratight, made of latex or silicone..." Posted: 06 Jul 2021 04:35 AM PDT "... and it was 'one size fits all.' But those swim caps left out large groups of swimmers, adding to structural inequities that often keep people of color out of the pool. Many swimmers have celebrated recent advances in swim cap technology. Several brands... have introduced options with more flexible material that vary in size, accommodating swimmers with hair that is larger and more textured than their White competitors'...  [T]he International Swimming Federation...  said the design does not fit 'the natural form of the head.' To the best of their knowledge, they added, 'the athletes competing at the international events never used, neither require … caps of such size and configuration.'" From "Swim caps for natural hair are banned from the Olympics. Black women hear a clear message: 'You don't belong.' The International Swimming Federation said the design does not fit 'the natural form of the head'" (WaPo).  I expect this decision to be reversed. It's not as though the enlarged crown of these hats gives the swimmer an advantage. It must be a disadvantage, increasing drag.

Until tomorrow... Posted: 05 Jul 2021 06:13 PM PDT

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