Althouse

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• "Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete/There is no evidence so far that vaccines are reducing infections from the fast-spreading variant."
• "Marilyn Bergman, who with her husband, Alan Bergman, gave the world memorable lyrics about 'misty watercolor memories' and 'the windmills of your mind' and won three Academy Awards..."
• "The brandy snifter portrait is as American as hip-hop, acid-washed jeans and plastic-covered sofas."
• "Is there such a thing as 'Trumpism without Trump'?... I understand those who argue that asking for Trumpism without Trump is a bit like asking for sunshine without the sun...."
• The star of my all-time favorite TV sitcom has died.
• Here's a place where you can talk about whatever you like.
• “President Reagan warned that freedom is fragile, always one generation away from extinction.”
• "Or take a young couple who are able to have children but who, for whatever reason — lack of affordable housing, usually — have decided to delay doing so and to get a rescue dog instead."
• "Over the past decade a number of studies have found a significant decline in sexual activity around the world..."
• The WaPo Fact Checker gives Sonia Sotomayor 4 Pinocchios!
• The OED word of the day is "ghostbuster."
• What was "deeply good" about Harry Reid?
• "I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly."

"Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete/There is no evidence so far that vaccines are reducing infections from the fast-spreading variant." Posted: 10 Jan 2022 06:56 AM PST Commentary by Luc Montagnier and Jed Rubenfeld (in The Wall Street Journal)("Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus. Mr. Rubenfeld is a constitutional scholar"). It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that's exactly what's happening here. The government's mandates came out when the concern was Delta, not Omicron, and therefore its "findings are now obsolete." The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday's oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale.  But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death).... For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence. The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection.... According to the CDC, the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild. The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain.... It is axiomatic in U.S. law that courts don't uphold agency directives when the agency has entirely failed to consider facts crucial to the problem....

"Marilyn Bergman, who with her husband, Alan Bergman, gave the world memorable lyrics about 'misty watercolor memories' and 'the windmills of your mind' and won three Academy Awards..." Posted: 10 Jan 2022 06:05 AM PST "... died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93. A spokesman, Ken Sunshine, said the cause was respiratory failure.... For many years their words were also heard every week over the opening credits to hit television shows like 'Maude,' 'Good Times' and 'Alice.'.... In 1956 she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her shoulder.... Unable to play the piano because of her injury, she recalled many years later, she could not compose and so decided to write lyrics instead." From "Marilyn Bergman, Half of an Oscar-Winning Songwriting Duo, Dies at 93/With her husband, Alan, she wrote the lyrics to 'The Way We Were' and 'The Windmills of Your Mind, as well as a number of memorable TV themes" (NYT).

"The brandy snifter portrait is as American as hip-hop, acid-washed jeans and plastic-covered sofas." Posted: 10 Jan 2022 04:18 AM PST "A photo in that style could conjure the same feelings that oversize shoulder pads or a Jheri curl would: cringe. In 2001, the motif was spoofed by 'Saturday Night Live' in a skit that featured Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Fallon, called 'Put It in a Brandy Snifter.' But in the 1980s and 1990s, the brandy snifter photo was an innovative, attainable luxury, and it became ubiquitous in some communities. Its cultural significance is closely tied to the ambitions of the American working class. Mr. Adams's tribute to his mother also honored the countless other people who see that image and immediately recognize and identify with it, as I did. I wore my peach Easter dress from earlier that year. My mother tied my hair in a ponytail and curled my bangs to the side. My siblings wore polo shirts. The day before, I had applied a glow-in-the-dark, temporary tattoo I got in a box of Rude Dudes bubble gum to my cheek. My face has never been scrubbed harder than Mom scrubbed it clean that day...." Writes Sandra E. Garcia in "What New Yorkers See in This Portrait of the Mayor's Mother/Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter posed for a portrait at her 75th birthday party. Her image, floating in a brandy snifter, has a powerful resonance" (NYT). Watch the SNL skit here. It crudely mocks low-class white people who think that superimposing a brandy snifter on a photographed portrait is gorgeous and elegant. But now we're asked to show respect for black people who've been admiring the same photography. Fine. I am encountering brandy snifter photography for the first time, and I'm completely distracted by the inaptness of the association with drinking alcohol. Why would you want the image of your child or your elderly mother inside a brandy glass?! But I can see that people have been doing this for 40 years, and I'm showing that I don't know any of them well enough to have seen that these are their treasured family portraits. The new mayor of New York City is displaying one of his mother, and I am not going to make fun of that photograph.

"Is there such a thing as 'Trumpism without Trump'?... I understand those who argue that asking for Trumpism without Trump is a bit like asking for sunshine without the sun...." Posted: 10 Jan 2022 03:48 AM PST "I understand the concern about Trump's vaunted 'divisiveness.' But... [t]he tsunami of hatred and vitriol that washed over Donald Trump since before he assumed office until the present moment was nothing if not 'divisive.'...  We now know that the whole Russia collusion delusion was invented lock-stock-and-barrel in the fetid skunkworks of the Clinton campaign. We know, too, that it was seized upon and pumped up by an irresponsible media and the rancid outposts of the administrative state and its so-called intelligence agencies. Trump was cooked before he set foot in the Oval Office.... I think it likely that, should Trump be the nominee, and should he be reelected in 2024, the forces arrayed against him will suffer a nervous breakdown that will make the anti-Trump hysteria of 2016-2020 look like an Oxford Union debate.... [J]ust a week or so back, [Liz] Cheney said an important goal of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol protest was to demonstrate that Donald Trump is 'clearly unfit for future office, clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.'... There might be some positive good achieved if the Left and the NeverTrump neither-Left-nor-Right were to suspect that they might themselves be the object of the sort of hysteria they have visited upon their opponents. There might be something salutary in making that sort of intimidation reciprocal." Writes Roger Kimball in "Trump in 2024? Maybe! What's certain is not too many Americans will be willing to hand over the honor of choosing the next president to Liz Cheney and her smug, entitled, and repellent confrères" (American Greatness). Personally, I'd prefer way less craziness — from both sides. But I understand the idea of rejecting unilateral disarmament.

The star of my all-time favorite TV sitcom has died. Posted: 10 Jan 2022 03:01 AM PST I'm sad to hear that Bob Saget has died. He was only 65. But this post is about Dwayne Hickman, who died yesterday at the age of 87. His show, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," was on TV from 1959, when I was 8, to 1963, when I was 12. From the NYT obituary: For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager's point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin's "Thinker," gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul. Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie's best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps "Work!" at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment.... Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie's affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate.  Dobie's cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.) They forgot to mention Chatsworth Osborne Jr., the ridiculously snobby rich kid.  And why did they call Zelda "deeply intellectual"?! Seems to me Zelda was sexually harassing Dobie, failing to accept that no means no, insisting that he'd end up with her because their names on the alphabetized class roster were right next to each other — Gillis and Gilroy. Thalia was at least as smart — and much more rational.  I really don't think anyone on that show was intellectual, and certainly not "deeply intellectual." Deeply! Where does the NYT get that? From the fact that the actress turned out to be gay? Here's the Wikipedia article on Zelda: Zelda especially irritated Dobie by wrinkling her nose at him. He always wrinkled back; he claimed it was a reflex action (often admonishing her "Now cut that out!"), while she took it as proof that he loved her but didn't realize it yet. Zelda assured Dobie that he would eventually come to realize his love for her through the influence of "propinquity": because he was Gillis and she was Gilroy, they were always going to be seated together through high school and college and would eventually fall in love. Here's a full episode — complete with opening theme, musing by "The Thinker," and plenty of Thalia:

Here's a place where you can talk about whatever you like. Posted: 09 Jan 2022 03:37 PM PST One more day without a sunrise picture. Once again it was bitterly cold and windy.

“President Reagan warned that freedom is fragile, always one generation away from extinction.” Posted: 09 Jan 2022 11:31 AM PST "As I have told crowds since my first Tea Party speeches in 2010: This is a fight for freedom. This is not someone else's fight, this is our fight, and it's a fight we absolutely must win. I believe America is in peril. Much as I'd like to ease into a quiet retirement, I don't feel I should. Countless people have encouraged me to run, saying they rely on me to be their voice, to speak plain and obvious truths other elected leaders shirk from expressing—truths the elite in government, mainstream media and Big Tech don't want you to hear.... We face powerful forces that desire even more power and control over our lives. Their path, paved with false hope and greater dependency, always leads to tyranny." Writes Ron Johnson in "Why I'm Seeking a Third Senate Term/I'd like to retire, but I think the country is in too much peril" (in The Wall Street Journal).

"Or take a young couple who are able to have children but who, for whatever reason — lack of affordable housing, usually — have decided to delay doing so and to get a rescue dog instead." Posted: 09 Jan 2022 08:20 AM PST "How is that selfish, rather than prudent and responsible? You can't go dropping babies everywhere just because you're fertile, and, besides, women aren't brood mares. Cat first, baby if and when the time is right is a perfectly reasonable approach." From "Pets deserve worship, whatever the Pope says/Having dogs or cats instead of children isn't selfish: it enriches our existence" by India Knight (London Times). I think Pope Francis meant to reject exactly that "perfectly reasonable approach." That's not the meaning of life, to be prudently responsible and to wait until all your material conditions will make children comfortably manageable.

"Over the past decade a number of studies have found a significant decline in sexual activity around the world..." Posted: 09 Jan 2022 07:14 AM PST "... the latest example of this being a recent US-focused study showing declines from 2009 to 2018 in all forms of partnered sexual activity and a decline in adolescent masturbation. The researchers, by the way, looked at self-reported information from government surveys among people 14-49 years old.... So what's going on with young and youngish people these days?... There's increasing social media and video game use, of course. A decrease in alcohol use could be another factor. Perhaps most interesting and worrying, however, is the researchers' hypothesis that the mainstreaming of extremely rough sex could be putting a generation of young people off sex altogether.... Pornography has played a big role in this, but women's magazines and popular culture (50 Shades of Grey, for example) have also helped to make rough sex 'trendy.'" Writes Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. It's like in the old days: People decide sex is bad.

The WaPo Fact Checker gives Sonia Sotomayor 4 Pinocchios! Posted: 09 Jan 2022 09:40 AM PST She said, "Those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did. … We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators." She left some major weasel room: What does "serious" mean? She didn't say 100,000 children were on ventilators, just that "many" were. So I'm surprised Glenn Kessler went the whole 4 Pinocchios on her. Let's read: That's wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor's number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in "serious condition." Kessler notes the special importance of accuracy for Supreme Court Justices. This isn't a place to show special respect. And her number was "absurdly high." So, "She earns Four Pinocchios." By the way, Kessler also absolves Justice Gorsuch off the accusation that he got a number absurdly wrong. The official court transcript has him saying: "Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year." Kessler listened to the audio verifies that Gorsuch said, "flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year." Wow. Correct the transcript, people. Or is correcting the transcript a dangerous, endless exercise?

The OED word of the day is "ghostbuster." Posted: 09 Jan 2022 04:55 AM PST And "Who ya gonna call? (Ghostbusters!)" is not the first quote on the OED list, though it is there. It's second. The first quote is from 1930, and it's used in reference to Harry Houdini:

What was "deeply good" about Harry Reid? Posted: 09 Jan 2022 04:47 AM PST "Few people have done more for this state and this country than this driven, brilliant, sometimes irascible, deeply good man from Searchlight, Nevada." Said Barack Obama, quoted in the Washington Post account of yesterday's memorial service for Reid. It's the "deeply" that gets you. It draws so much attention to "good." We might have let it go — was Harry Reid good? — if "deeply" hadn't forced us to stop and stare. I haven't used my "deeply (the word!)" tag since last May. Here's the original post — in 2014 — where I created the tag. There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition." I went back into my own archive to see how I had used it over the years and, funnily enough, the first thing on my list was about something Obama famously said about Kamala Harris: 1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."... Oh, what's not a gaffe these days?  But back to the memorial service. Biden and Pelosi spoke too, and both of them told a joke premised on the reputation Reid had for being untalkative.  Here's Biden joke : "Harry and I both liked to talk a lot... I'm just testing whether you're asleep yet." Here's Pelosi's: "He was a man of few words — and he wanted everyone else to be a person of few words." They kept it light. There was an opportunity to go much lighter on the man-of-few-words theme — man of even fewer words now, ha ha — or to go much more deeply.... But I won't end with the end of Hamlet. I will lighten up and give Chuck Schumer the last word, because who doesn't love kissing and because I have a "saliva" tag that I get a kick out of using: It was election night 2006, when Democrat Claire McCaskill won her race in Missouri, a victory that gave control of the Senate to Democrats, and Reid rushed over and kissed McCaskill through the television screen. "His lips remained attached to the TV screen for a full 10 seconds," Schumer said. "I had to get up and wipe the copious spittle off the TV screen."

"I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly." Posted: 09 Jan 2022 03:07 AM PST Said John Abeigon, the Newark Teachers Union president, quoted in "As More Teachers' Unions Push for Remote Schooling, Parents Worry. So Do Democrats. Chicago teachers have voted to go remote. Other unions are agitating for change. For Democrats, who promised to keep schools open, the tensions are a distinctly unwelcome development" (NYT). Labor officials say that many of their critics are acting in bad faith, exploiting parents' pandemic-related frustrations to advance longstanding political goals, like discrediting unions and expanding private-school vouchers.... If periods of remote learning this winter hurt the Democratic Party, "that's a question for the consultants and the brain trusts to figure out," said Mr. Abeigon, the Newark union president. "But that it's the right thing to do? There's no question in my mind." You can't open the schools without the teachers, and Democrats can't win without teachers.

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