Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

I'm sorry, but I don't really know who Patton Oswalt is — I've never needed to know (the name looks familiar) — but I care about Dave Chappelle, so I'm reading...

Posted: 04 Jan 2022 06:30 AM PST

... "Patton Oswalt explains himself after 'nice' Dave Chappelle post goes sideways" in the L.A. Times. I haven't even read the article yet — I'm going to "live blog" my reading of it — but I should disclose that I'm already in my What-a-weasel! mode.
... Both comics were performing at Seattle Center venues Friday night — Oswalt at 3,000-seat McCaw Hall and Chappelle at 17,500-seat Climate Pledge Arena. Chappelle invited his longtime buddy over to do a guest set, after which Oswalt posted.... "Finished me set at @mccawhall and got a text from @davechappelle... Come over to the arena he's performing in next door and do a guest set. Why not? I waved good-bye to this hell-year with a genius I started comedy with 34 years ago. He works an arena like he's talking to one person and charming their skin off. Anyway, I ended the year with a real friend and a deep laugh. Can't ask for much more."

This was supposedly Oswalt being "nice." No, it wasn't! It was Oswalt bragging about his connection to the much greater star. It was enthusiastic self-promotion. He had to already know Chappelle's difficulties with a certain sector of Wokedom and must be deemed to have consciously decided to take the risk. He had to have done a cost-benefit analysis. Do not tell me this weasel did a turnaround when he heard the actual — as opposed to the predictable — outcry. 

Yeah, I'm saying don't tell me. That's because I think I already know. The next day on Instagram, Oswalt is all:

"I (naively) deleted a lot of posts in the comment thread — critical ones from LGBTQ writers AND ... posts by TERF/anti-trans orcs looking for clicks & giggles," he wrote. "I wanted a 'nice comment thread' about the pic with my friend. Ugh."

Okay, I can understand that, because it happens to me. You put up a post that fits your standards, and then commenters leverage their speech and make something positive of yours into something ugly that you don't want in your space. I've been told more than once, by real life acquaintances, that my blog is okay, but the comments are a sewer. (The metaphor "sewer" seems nicer now that I think of it as a channel for the journey of the liquified remains of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.)

But back to Oswalt. Is he a weasel? That's my question. 

After praising Chappelle as "the funniest [comedian] I've ever met," he wrote, "He's refocused and refined ideas a lot of us took as settled about race & history & Life On Planet Earth and spun them around with a phrase or punchline. ... But we also 100% disagree about transgender rights & representation. I support trans peoples' rights — ANYONE'S rights — to live safely in the world as their fullest selves," Oswalt added. "For all the things he's helped ME evolve on, I'll always disagree with where he stands NOW on transgender issues."

That's not fair to Chappelle, because he says he supports transgender rights. For Oswalt to say that he disagrees "100%" because he "support[s] trans peoples' rights" is either an outright lie or more ignorant than someone who purports to know and admire Chappelle can coherently claim to be.

More Instagramming from Oswalt:

"I also don't believe a seeker like [Chappelle] is done evolving, learning. You know someone that long, see the struggles and changes, it's impossible to cut them off. "Impossible not to be hopeful and open and cheer them on," he wrote.

What condescending bullshit! Like you're the evolved one. By the way, it's not a good look for a white man to purport to be more "evolved" than a black man. Oswalt's backtracking could stumble into racism. 

More from Oswalt:

"Also, I've been carrying a LOT of guilt about friends I've cut off, who had views with which I couldn't agree, or changed in ways I couldn't live with. Sometimes I wonder — did I and others cutting them off make them dig their heels in deeper, fuel their ignorance with a nitro-boost of resentment and spite?" Oswalt wondered. "I'm an LGBTQ ally. I'm a loyal friend. There's friction in those traits that I need to reconcile myself." Oswalt added that he was "sorry, truly sorry" for not considering that his picture with Chappelle would spark feelings of hurt and betrayal in others. He said he'd been doing a lot of back-and-forth on Instagram that day and credited that with guiding his second post. "So easy to think someone ELSE needs growth and miss the need in yourself," he wrote. "Gonna keep trying."

So... this Oswalt fellow... he's a comedian? 

"Well, that game's over! 74 years is enough of that!"

Posted: 04 Jan 2022 04:47 AM PST

Announces Meade, channeling the mindset of Gallup, after reading "Did Gallup End 'Most Admired' 74-Year Polling Tradition to Avoid Trump Placing First?"

Yes, the admiration of human beings is a dangerous business. Why not back off? I remember when The Ladies Home Journal used to produce lists of the 10 "favorite heroes and heroines" of boys and girls, something I blogged about back in 2005, with a photograph from my copy of the 1977 best-seller "The Book of Lists":

A page from

Henry Kissinger! And yet:
The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula.

How could Nixon be worse than Hitler? And yet he was. Things near in time seem more important. How will Trump look as he fades into the distance? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I don't know if he's in the process of fading right now or the process of bouncing back. He is very bouncy.

"I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun. It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun."

Posted: 04 Jan 2022 04:14 AM PST

Said Josh Wardle, the inventor of Wordle, quoted in "Wordle Is a Love Story/The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner" (NYT).

I played for the first time and got the word on the fifth line, without being strategic in choosing the first word, just using the kind of logic you use in Mastermind. It's more interesting than Mastermind, because the answer will be a real word, not just any combination of letters/colors.

The popularity of the game — not the game itself — had something to do with the very popular NYT game Spelling Bee:
Mr. Wardle said he first created a similar prototype in 2013, but his friends were unimpressed and he scrapped the idea.... The breakthrough, he said, was limiting players to one game per day. That enforced a sense of scarcity, which he said was partially inspired by the Spelling Bee, which leaves people wanting more, he said.

At the Still Too Cold Café...

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 05:42 PM PST

 ... it's the third day in a row without a sunrise photograph, but you can talk all night. 

I have high hopes for tomorrow morning, when it should be 19° at sunrise, and I'll be willing to venture out.

"If sentenced to prison, Ms. Holmes would be the most notable female executive to serve time since Martha Stewart did in 2004 after lying to investigators about a stock sale."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 05:40 PM PST

"And Theranos, which dissolved in 2018, is likely to stand as a warning to other Silicon Valley start-ups that stretch the truth to score funding and business deals. The mixed verdict suggested that jurors believed the evidence presented by prosecutors that showed Ms. Holmes lied to investors about Theranos's technology in the pursuit of money and fame. They were not swayed by her defense of blaming others for Theranos's problems and accusing her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani, the company's chief operating officer and her former boyfriend, of abusing her. They were also not swayed by the prosecutor's case that she had defrauded patients. Ms. Holmes was acquitted on four counts related to patients who took Theranos's blood tests and one related to advertisements that the patients saw."

"What is aquamation, the burial practice Desmond Tutu requested instead of greenhouse gas-emitting cremation?"

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 12:57 PM PST

A WaPo headline asks the question we were not asking. I'm not sure you'll want to know this, so look away while there is still a chance for you. It's surprising how far you need to read into the article before you find out what is actually involved:

In aquamation, a machine uses "a heated (sometimes pressurized) solution of water and strong alkali to dissolve tissues, yielding an effluent that can be disposed through municipal sewer systems, and brittle bone matter that can be dried, crushed, and returned to the decedent's family," Philip Olson, a technology ethicist at Virginia Tech, wrote in a 2014 paper.

The process takes three to four hours at a temperature of around 300 degrees Fahrenheit, though it can be longer if lower temperatures are used, according to Olson. By comparison, fire-based cremation takes around two hours at a temperature of 1,400 to 1,800 degrees.

In the United States, aquamation was first adopted in the 1990s by researchers looking for an inexpensive and safe way to discard the remains of animals used in experiments....

So most of him went into the sewer system?! 

"A Chinese court has suggested that infidelity is insufficient reason for divorce, prompting heated debate across the country...."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 12:41 PM PST

"'The latest attitude on divorce by the law is to prevent frivolous dissolutions,' read the article, which was later removed after public backlash. China is fighting a rising divorce rate through state counselling and forcing couples who want to split into a one-month 'cooling off' period.... The topic drew 980 million views in 48 hours on Weibo, China's leading social media platform...."

Joe Rogan fighting censorship.

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 07:03 AM PST

At The Post Millennial: "BREAKING: Joe Rogan joins GETTR as Twitter censorship intensifies/As Twitter continues to ban users from its platform, podcast superstar Joe Rogan announced on Sunday that he has set up a GETTR account." 

Go here to follow Rogan on Gettr, where he already has 8.7 million followers. 

Over at Instagram, Joe Rogan put this up at 22 hours ago — a clip from an old podcast, with Jordan Peterson, who says what Rogan, I presume, means to say now:

"34% of voters say the Republican Party is headed in the right direction, up 10 points from immediately after Jan. 6 and slightly higher than before the attack on the Capitol."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 07:09 AM PST

"68% percent of Democrats say Jan. 6 had a 'major impact' on their worldview, but only 35% of independents and 24% of Republicans agree. 59% of voters said Trump is at least somewhat responsible for the events that led to a group of people attacking the Capitol, and 47% say the same of Republicans in Congress. Both figures are down slightly from immediately after the attack.... Since July, the share of voters who say they approve of the select committee has fallen 7 points to 46 percent, fueled by declining support among Democrats, independents and Republicans, all of whom have become more likely to express uncertainty about an investigation that has often failed to capture their attention on a large scale... Overall, the trends signal a weariness verging on disinterest in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack one year later...."

What to wear when it's 8°.

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 04:47 AM PST

"[T]o argue, as Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi do, that Trump didn’t have a right to contest the election is to replace the rule of law with the rule of intimidation."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 04:04 AM PST

"The Democrats and their partners in the media have used all their assembled might to coerce Trump and his allies into silence. His only crime is that he won't shut up about the election being stolen. Nor for that matter is he the only one who thinks that the election was fraudulent. Millions of us independently reached the same conclusion. If any of those supporters had turned to violence at the Capitol, they should be appropriately tried, convicted and punished for their misdeeds, but that's not on Trump any more than it is on the rest of us who encouraged our fellow citizens to work to prevent the installation of Joe Biden as president as long as doubts persisted about his legitimacy."

From "The Big Lie and the Elastic Truth: How to Invent a Coup" by Frank Miele (Real Clear Politics).

ADDED: By "to work to prevent the installation," I believe he means to argue for and pursue legal processes, not to physically obstruct others who are ostensibly pursuing their legal role. If he means more than that, I disagree. As for the idea of keeping going "as long as doubts persisted," there will always be some doubt, as there has been in many past elections. At some point, you need to stand down and allow the new administration to go forward. But, obviously, you can continue to believe that the person installed in power did not really win. You have freedom of thought and freedom of speech. I certainly remember many Democrats believing that George W. Bush did not really win in 2000. And did JFK really win in 1960? We're skeptical! But it's not treason!

"Creasey was in between shifts on Thursday, away from the [dog] day-care and boarding site, when she heard that flames were nearing the facility."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 03:44 AM PST

"She tried to get back, driving from her home in Boulder, but roads were closed. She said her boss, the owner of Dog Tag, loaded up a dozen dogs into her car but didn't have space for any more. Creasey said the owner opened the kennels and all the doors at the facility to ensure no pet would be trapped. Unable to get into Superior, Creasey got to work from her home, calling and updating dog owners, checking in with nearby shelters and mobilizing community members through social media pages to look out for dogs that may have run from the boarding site. In the aftermath of the devastating blaze, desperate pet owners have flooded social media with photos and descriptions of dozens of missing animals, while people from elsewhere in Colorado have driven into the area to help search on foot — eager to find the beloved cats and dogs of families that may have lost everything."

From "Frantic search for pets underway as Colorado takes stock of fire devastation/After a half-day search effort, 40 dogs that were staying at a boarding facility in Superior, Colo., when the flames erupted were accounted for" (WaPo). To underscore what's in the headline: All the dogs were found.

Imagine having responsibility for so many animals and attempting to get as many as possible into your car — in some way that would make it possible to undertake a stressful drive — and deciding that's all you're going to put in the car and that the best you can do for the rest is to leave their cages open. There were 40 dogs, and the owner got 12 of them into her car, so 28 dogs were left to fend for themselves as the fire blew in. They all survived.

ADDED: If you had 40 dogs, 1 car, and only a few minutes to load dogs into your car, how would you choose which dogs to go in first and at what point would you stop loading based on the situation in the car? Let's presume the fire isn't so close that you have to stop what you're doing and drive because of imminent burning and smoke.

Strategy #1: First, unlock all the cages, then call the dogs out to the car and encourage them to jump in, so that you're choosing based on their readiness to get in the car and ride and their cooperativeness. Observe the behavior in the car (remove "bad" dogs?) and keep going until the dogs indicate that they can't tolerate more crowding.

Strategy #2: Take the smallest dogs and put them in the car, because you can get more of them in and they'd probably be most vulnerable if left on their own. 

Strategy #3: Take the dogs you've observed to be the "best" dogs — cooperative, friendly, cute, beloved of their owners, etc. — and whose owners have been the best customers. 

"The moral price of life in a fallen world was not a thought exercise for Simmons [DMX], who died this past April of a cocaine-induced heart attack."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 02:47 AM PST

"Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1970, he was the only son of Arnett Simmons and Joe Barker. Barker left, leaving Simmons — a teenager — to raise her child alone in Yonkers. She struggled with how to raise a Black son amid the poverty of the School Street projects, and subjected him to outrageous abuse. In a 2019 interview with GQ, Simmons recounted being beaten so badly by Arnett that she knocked his teeth out; he was 6 years old. The mistreatment cloaked his life in almost total, grinding fear.... The abuse begot criminal and antisocial behavior — Simmons once stabbed another kid in the face with a pencil — which in turn triggered more abuse. One summer, trying to discipline Simmons, Arnett locked him in his bedroom for months. He was allowed to leave only for bathroom breaks. In 1983, Arnett effectively severed their relationship when she took him to the Children's Village group home on the pretense that they were just visiting. It was a trick: She left him there. 'Right then and there... I learned to just put away, conceal, bury whatever bothered me. End of story. I think another side of me was born right there, that enabled me to protect myself.'"

From "DMX/His music seethed with aggression and the kind of pain Black men rarely get to air in public" in "The Lives They Lived" — the NYT collection of essays about people who died last year.

"In 2016, on his way to California for a series of concerts, [Arlo] Guthrie had a stroke. Ms. Ladd flew to San Jose, into grateful arms."

Posted: 03 Jan 2022 02:37 AM PST

"'He said, "I not only want you in my life, I need you in my life." To me, that was when we made a real commitment to each other.'... He had been performing the 18-minute monologue at Carnegie Hall every Thanksgiving for 49 years when he had another stroke days before the 50th anniversary show in 2019. This time, he was hospitalized. But he defied doctor's orders and played anyway. 'Even if I died onstage, I was going to be there,' he said. A few days later, he woke up at his home in Sebastian, Fla., and had a third stroke. Ms. Ladd... nursed him through his recovery. By the end of the year, he was back on tour. Then came Covid.... Ms. Ladd and Mr. Guthrie were... quarantining in Massachusetts when Ms. Ladd had a stroke on Oct. 3, 2021.At first, Mr. Guthrie didn't know what was happening. 'When she was talking to me it sounded like gibberish,' he said. 'I thought she was fooling.'... On one of her first nights home [from the hospital], she tried to say the word 'apocalyptical.' 'It came out "Popsicle,"' she said. 'Arlo was cracking up.' Underneath his amusement over her verbal stumble, though, was a welling of emotion about the woman who, for nearly a decade, had shepherded him through his own crises. 'My father always said be true to your own life and your own reality,' Mr. Guthrie said. His reality, and Ms. Ladd's, had become anchored to a sense of life's fragility.... On Oct. 22, Mr. Guthrie proposed at the farm, over morning coffee at the kitchen table. 'I said, "I'm going to take care of you the way a man wants to. I want to marry you."'"

From "They Could Be Anything They Want (Together)/The folk singer Arlo Guthrie and Marti Ladd, who met 20 years ago, forged a long lasting friendship that started over Guinness beer and his grandmother's cheese blintzes" (NYT).

Arlo Guthrie was married to his first wife, Jackie, for 46 years. She died in 2012. Marti Ladd was a friend who became closer after Jackie's death. 

At the 2022 Café...

Posted: 02 Jan 2022 05:02 PM PST

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

No photograph, because I avoided the sunrise run today. The "feels like" temperature was below zero.
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