Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

Sunrise — 7:02, 7:19.

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 04:51 PM PDT

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And... those lovely mated-for-life cranes were breakfasting... 

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... she, picking through the lakeside selections... he, keeping husbandly watch.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers..."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 04:39 PM PDT

"... according to American intelligence estimates. The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It is a staggering number amassed in just three weeks of fighting, American officials say, with implications for the combat effectiveness of Russian units, including soldiers in tank formations. Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.... 'Losses like this affect morale and unit cohesion, especially since these soldiers don't understand why they're fighting,' said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration... 'It is stunning, and the Russians haven't even gotten to the worst of it, when they hit urban combat in the cities,' [said] Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado...."

 From "As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale Becomes an Issue, Officials Say/More than 7,000 Russian troops have been killed in less than three weeks of fighting, according to conservative U.S. estimates" (NYT).

"The tone of the Republican questioning of the public defenders [nominated as federal judges] has alarmed Democrats and..."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 04:30 PM PDT

"... has them bracing for tense moments during Judge [Ketanji Brown] Jackson's hearings. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has argued that Republicans aim some of their harshest fire at 'assertive women of color' to suggest they are 'soft on crime.' Democrats contend that these attacks are tied to a central element of Republicans' midterm campaign strategy, which is to blame Democrats for an increase in crime by portraying them as unwilling to punish lawlessness and hostile to law enforcement.... Republicans deny that they are trying to bar an entire category of potential judges. [Senator Tom] Cotton said he did not believe that criminal defense work was disqualifying, but that it was only appropriate to judge nominees by the cases they had accepted.... As for Judge Jackson, Mr. Cotton pressed her during her appeals court hearing last year on her work for terror detainees whom she was appointed to represent, though she continued to challenge Bush-era detention polices after she entered private practice."

From "As Jackson Faces Senators, Her Criminal Defense Record Is a Target/Republicans have vilified Biden's judicial nominees who have represented criminal suspects. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, for the Supreme Court, is the most prominent" (NYT).

"It's kind of what you hope happens with your kid, that your voice gets in their head and helps guide them through difficult stuff..."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 04:56 PM PDT

"... but you know, a metaphorical voice in the head that eventually it becomes their own voice as they develop into their own people. Neeah had come to rely on a literal voice and just her mom's presence. Neeah heard from her mom so much during the day, through the cameras or on FaceTime, she missed knowing what her mom was up to at any given moment. She says it's actually what she missed most — tracking her mom's day in parallel with her school day. It felt scary to lose that."

From an excellent episode of "This American Life," "School's Out Forever," about the troubles some children are having readjusting to in-person school after all the time they spent out of school during the pandemic. 

At the age of 9, Neeah spent the day home alone, trying to do her schoolwork via computer; and her mother went to work, but kept a camera on the child at all times, and spoke to her often, telling her what to do and what not to do. The child got so used to the constant surveillance and maternal orders that she found it disturbing to go without it.

Here's Neeah's description of how she felt, going back to school: "Yeah, in the snap of a finger, I'm like, oh, crap. And my mom's not going to be here to be — like, be here to watch over me, tell me to focus. Like, how am I going to do this? How am I going to do that without her telling me what to do? And that's when I started getting these panic attacks."

"... he apparently has no core beliefs other than the unshakable conviction that he should sit in the Oval Office."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 03:58 PM PDT

So said somebody about Ron DeSantis — I'm reading that in some unedifying NYT essay — but I just wanted to say: Isn't that an apt description of everyone who's won the presidency in the last 60 years?

"President Putin said today that Russia was ready to discuss Ukraine’s neutral status in talks to end the conflict there as he lashed out at the West for trying to 'cancel' his country."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 10:25 AM PDT

"He claimed that Russia had no option but to invade Ukraine and accused Western countries of wishing to 'continue the bloodshed' by supplying weapons to the Kyiv government. But he said Russia would consider 'the neutral status of Ukraine, its demilitarisation, and its denazification' in negotiations to end the conflict."

The London Times reports.

Sunrise — 7:16.

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 10:18 AM PDT

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10 years ago today I was happiness-blogging.

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 09:43 AM PDT

These are 15 consecutive posts put up on March 16, 2012:

1. "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

2. "Happy people rarely correct their faults — they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways."

3. "Psychologist Martin Seligman provides the acronym PERMA to summarize Positive Psychology's correlational findings: humans seem happiest when they have...."

4. "The Happiness Bank." 

5. "Does Rick Santorum hate freedom and happiness?" (Things we don't have to worry about anymore!)

6. "I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.'"

7. "Romney's Religion of Happiness vs. Gingrich's Religion of Grievance." (At least we don't have to worry about Gingrich anymore.)

8. "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness."

9. "A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older..." 

10. "Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief." 

11. "5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)." 

12. "'Santorum Promises Broad War on Porn.' Broad war?" 

13. "'I broke my theme. Something made me laugh.' And Meade says: "Then you didn't break your theme...." 

14. "I have told myself a hundred times that I would be happy if I were as stupid as my neighbor, and yet I would want no part of that kind of happiness." 

15. "And... that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

"Making the SAT and ACT Optional Is the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 09:24 AM PDT

Writes John McWhorter (in the NYT)(adopting a term — "the soft bigotry of low expectations" — that originated with George W. Bush)
I would prefer that we address the value of the tests... after first showing that these minority students... can take standardized tests and do just as well, in the aggregate, as white and Asian American students.... To some, that take may seem backward. But I think of it as progressive, and as a demonstration, I ask the reader to consider: What happened to the idea of "tokenism"?
In the not-so-old days, treating people of color as tokens — placing us in positions just to achieve numbers — was not only considered bigotry, but was also the kind of thing that was endlessly pilloried in the media as well as casual discussion.

Opposing supposed tokenism was central to the arguments of those rejecting George H.W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. The concept has faded from general discussion of race issues, but still manages to pop up in conversations about Black Republicans, particularly Black supporters of Donald Trump. But on matters leftward, we instead talk of equity. We constantly hear the phrase "representation matters."

Too often, we forge this equity by tokenizing people of color, declaring that we have achieved the proper representation after pretending that race or ethnicity entails alternate conceptions of excellence from those we unquestioningly expect of everyone else. And I think much of the motivation for that pretense is to allow white teachers and administrators to inoculate themselves against the accusation that they're denying the existence and impact of racism. Maybe that helps them, but that's another kind of low expectation.

"The cannabis industry, designed in part to help communities upended by the war on drugs, is being threatened by theft, racism and a market that is stacked against small operators."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 09:02 AM PDT

That's the puzzling subheadline for "Oakland Cannabis Sellers, Once Full of Hope, Face a Harsh Reality" (NYT). The "industry" was somehow "designed... to help communities"? And then — who could have imagined? — it didn't turn out to be so helpful.

I haven't read the article yet, but I really wonder who produced this "design" and whether anyone really believed it would "help communities upended by the war on drugs." If there's systemic racism, why would the new design avoid racism?

Okay, now I have read it. Here's my excerpt, cutting all the personal stories and homing in on the stark and utterly predictable problems — robbery, banking, insurance, and taxes:

Applicants who live in areas that had a high number of drug-related arrests or who have a cannabis-related arrest record are given priority to receive [equity licenses to run cannabis businesses after California legalized the substance for recreational use in 2016]....

Forced to deal largely in cash, the businesses can be a tantalizing target for thieves.... During a wave of robberies late last year, the police never showed up to some of the crimes, business owners say....

Only a limited number of insurance companies are willing to cover the cannabis industry... because of the federal prohibition, and the few insurers operating in the sector are still trying to understand the "unique risk" that the businesses pose....

The robberies and property damage are compounding the cannabis industry's other challenges, such as high taxes.

"Why would I want to transition to the legal market if I know I am going to go broke?" said Chaney Turner, a member of the city's Cannabis Regulatory Commission.

Now, is this a problem of racism? People of color are receiving these "equity licenses" that give them a privilege to do business, but it's a business plagued with obvious problems. 

The people doing the business are stuck wondering whether a white person would have as much trouble getting the police and the insuance companies to help them deal with the predictable problem of robbery. 

If the person who gets the "equity license" used to sell marijuana illegally, the tax burden on a legal business might feel distinctly annoying.

But really, the state legalized cannibis for the benefit of the state — that's the assumption that everyone should begin with, especially anyone who's well versed in the theories of systemic racism. The capacity to flaunt "helping" the "community" was — like taxes — one of the benefits the state took for itself.

"Russia is a very individualistic society, in which people, to quote the cultural historian Andrei Zorin, live with a 'Leave me alone' mind-set."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 08:02 AM PDT

"We like to isolate ourselves from one another, from the state, from the world. This allowed many of us to build vibrant, hopeful, energetic lives against a grim backdrop of arrests and prison. But in the process, we became insular and lost sight of everyone else's interests. We must now put aside our individual concerns and accept our common responsibility for the war. Such an act is, first and foremost, a moral necessity. But it could also be the first step toward a new Russian nation — a nation that could talk to the world in a language other than wars and threats, a nation that others will learn not to fear. It is toward creating this Russia that we, outcast and exiled and persecuted, should bend our efforts."

Writes Ilia Krasilshchik, in "Russians Must Accept the Truth. We Failed" (NYT). Krasilschchik is "the former publisher of Meduza, an independent news outlet."

"Nurses in Kyiv are looking after 21 newborn babies in a makeshift basement clinic because the fighting has made it impossible for their parents to reach them."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 07:11 AM PDT

"The children were all born to surrogates and staff say it is unclear when their parents will be able to collect them."

The London Times reports.

There are many ways you might become separated from your children in wartime, but these are newborns who were never united with their parents in the first place.

The basement shelter is owned by the BioTexCom fertility clinic.

"You will return from the Chechen Republic a completely different person Elona, that is, Elon."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 07:02 AM PDT

Said the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, quoted in "Chechen leader advises 'effeminate' Elon Musk not to fight Vladimir Putin" (NY Post).

On Monday, Musk pitched a bizarre offer to fight the Russian president to settle the war in Ukraine. "Elon Musk, a word of advice. Don't measure your strength against that of Putin's. You are in two completely different leagues," Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov wrote in a lengthy and sarcastic Telegram post. After dubbing Musk "effeminate," Kadyrov suggested that the Tesla founder train at the Russian Special Forces University, Akhmat Fight Club and the Chechen State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company to prep for the hypothetical match.

If we're just playing "Quién es más macho?", let's take a look at  Ramzan Kadyrov:

If we're just making Hans-and-Franz-level jokes about names — Elon becomes Elona — then Kadyrov needs to worry that he'll become Ladyrov. Ma'am-zam Ladyrov.

But here in America, we show complete respect for erstwhile men taking on a feminine identity, so the Chechan leader is completely out of touch with American culture and how to insult us. 

By the way, Hans and Franz goes back to the late 80s/early 90s — it was mocking concern about masculinity more than a quarter century ago — and Hans and Franz itself is way out date. 

"Quién es más macho?" was a brilliant SNL sketch on a 1979 episode, with Bill Murray running a quiz show where the contestants were Gilda Radner and Ricky Nelson. That was 6 years before Ricky died and a decade before Gilda died. "Who is more macho?" was a joke 40 years ago.

"Mr. Zelensky invokes Martin Luther King Jr. in saying 'I have a dream," and then saying 'I have a need' to protect the sky, as he presses Congress for a no-fly zone."

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 06:26 AM PDT

 The NYT is live-chatting Zelensky's address to Congress, which is in progress now.

"President Zelensky is layering in American touchstones in his address: Mount Rushmore to discuss shared values, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 to recall shared threats."

UPDATE: He asks us to watch a video. The video evokes great empathy. It's hard for me to imagine anyone watching and not weeping. After the video, Zelensky speaks in English. I transcribed this line: "I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths."

Sunrise — 7:29, 7:47.

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 06:46 PM PDT

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What a soft sunrise this morning!

Write about anything you want in the comments.

If Marco Rubio doesn't know why we do something... well, then, abolish it.

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 06:43 PM PDT

"After losing an hour of sleep over the weekend, members of the United States Senate returned to the Capitol this week a bit groggy and in a mood to put an end to all this frustrating clock-changing. So on Tuesday, with almost no warning and no debate, the Senate unanimously passed legislation... making daylight saving time permanent.... Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, rose on the Senate floor on Tuesday to speak in favor of his bill, called the Sunshine Protection Act.... 'One has to ask themselves after a while: Why do we keep doing it?' Mr. Rubio said, adding, 'The majority of the American people's preference is just to stop the back-and-forth changing.'"

I'm reading "A Groggy Senate Approves Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent/Legislation that passed unanimously would end the practice of setting clocks back one hour in the fall. Its prospects were uncertain in the House" (NYT).

There are times when I suspect that no politician is a true conservative. Rubio doesn't know why things are the way they are and he can see one advantage to a change, and therefore a long-established practice can be abolished. The full Senate, unanimously, votes on the spot to make the change. No debate. Look, we accomplished something seems to be the babyish idea.

At least this bill must get by the House, and we'll have a scrap of time to peruse articles like "The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the '70s. People Hated It" which The Washingtonian rushed into press today. Hint: It killed kids!!

"You don’t like that kind of beauty?"/"Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?... In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build..."

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 06:19 PM PDT

"... we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity. We don't appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn't get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don't appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it's not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman's breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there's more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren't hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it's necessary that a woman's eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that's completely useless."

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

IN THE summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road—Olney's, eighteen miles south—but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth–century lives.

Sunrise with sandhill cranes — 7:13.

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 09:43 AM PDT

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"I apologize for myself, for my squad to every home, to every street, to every citizen of Ukraine, to the elderly, to women, to children for our invasion of these lands."

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 09:25 AM PDT

"I gravely apologize for our treacherous invasion. To the generalship of our military units, I would like to say one thing — that they've acted cowardly, that they acted traitorously to us. I would like to say to all regiments of the Russian army: Lay down your arms. And Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, stop further combat actions. Stop bombings, stop sending soldiers here to kill civilians, to perform airstrikes."

Said Galkin Sergey Alekseevich, 34, quoted in "Captured Russian troops sob, apologize for invasion of Ukraine in TV interviews" (NY Post).

Surveillance paranoia.

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 07:23 AM PDT

I was just looking at this (at Yelp) (and moving it into a text and writing a little about it):

 

And then, reading the NYT — "There Are Almost Too Many Things to Worry About" — I got this ad served up:

That's just the photo. There was also text. I've stripped that out. An ad for some fish delivery company.

But, so, first, I'm paranoid. Did they have me pegged as a person who likes food on a metal tray with a layer of brown parchment? Second, I'm amused, because the food is so absurdly different. Third, I'll be okay, because if there is surveillance, it's so misguided, so dumb. And yet, maybe that's exactly what's scary. The AI thinks it knows, but it's so wrong.

By the way, the second photo — the one that seems to want to model the orderly, well-run life — is the one with the paper on the tray at an angle, and the fish overlapping fish. I think that is disorderly. It's an insane amount of disorder within that effortful order. I feel much more at ease with the mild disorder of the overflowing baked beans in Photo #1.

Anyway... as they say in the NYT... there are almost too many things to worry about.

"Let’s say Putin realizes he’s in deep trouble. Russia has become a pariah state. His reputation, not great to begin with, is blackened."

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 06:57 AM PDT

"And if he achieves nothing, he faces the risk of being overthrown by his own security and military elites. He may feel, then, that he has little to lose by fighting on. Things can't get much worse for him than they already are. And if he somehow manages to succeed, things might get much better for him. Gambling for resurrection can be a rational behavior. But it's the rational behavior of a man who has become desperate and will try almost anything to save his skin."

 From "Here Are Three Reasons Putin Might Fight On" by Peter Coy (NYT). The 3 reasons are: 1. sunk cost fallacy, 2. golden spike theory, and 3. (discussed in the quote above) gambling for resurrection.

Dolly Parton does not want to be considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until she's put out a rock and roll album.

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 06:20 AM PDT

She's not saying that out of nowhere. They actually put her as a nominee on the ballot this year. For so many reasons, she was wise to withdraw the way she did. To lose the vote isn't good, and to win would draw intense criticism. I'm sure there was criticism just for the nomination. It's better to take that criticism and make it her own. It's not criticism at all anymore, but a recognition that country music is not rock music. 

And this way, she really could put out an album designated rock and get lots of new attention for that.

The Hall is voracious. It needs new inductees every year, and sometimes it looks rather desperate. By reaching into other music categories — designated the "roots" of rock — it can get some giant icons. It's nice to see a firm rejection of that grasping.

ADDED: She specified album. But as Andrew noted in the comments, there's this:

"Those raised by professional-class parents... do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. In some ways..."

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 06:14 AM PDT

"... religion even constrains teenagers' educational opportunities (especially girls') by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career. However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor's degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.... When [the] elites criticize religion, they often do so on the grounds that faith (in their eyes) is irrational and not evidence-based. But one can agree with the liberal critique of conservatism's moral and political goals while still acknowledging that religion orders the lives of millions of Americans — and that it might offer social benefits...."

From "How Religious Faith Can Shape Success in School" (NYT). 

The article is by Ilana M. Horwitz, "an assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Tulane University and the author of 'God, Grades, and Graduation.'" Focusing on Christian denominations , she "followed the lives of 3,290 teenagers from 2003 to 2012 using survey and interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, and then linking those data to the National Student Clearinghouse in 2016."

Talking to NYT readers — the highly educated, professional/managerial people — Horwitz seems to be saying: Don't be so dismissive of religion, because it may be the best substitute for the privilege that benefits you. Religion is practical. Not for you, of course, because you don't have the need. But for the others.

Doesn't that sound more elitist than looking down on religion?

Speaking of wanting to do things that work, it's not practical to disparage religious people... at least when the cameras are running.

  

ADDED: You may sacrifice educational and career opportunities if you prioritize parenthood, altruism, and service to God, but you may sacrifice parenthood, altruism, and service to God, if you prioritize educational and career opportunities. 

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

At the Monday Night Café...

Posted: 14 Mar 2022 05:22 PM PDT

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Stop the war/Don’t believe propaganda/They’re lying to you."

Posted: 15 Mar 2022 03:28 AM PDT

ADDED: "The English-language content of [Marina] Ovsyannikova's poster reflected how some Russians are keen to show that the war against Ukraine is not being fought in their name. Despondent over their country's future and afraid of possible conscription and closed borders, tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Central Asia and Europe since the Russian invasion began." 

From "A protester storms a live broadcast on Russia's most-watched news show, yelling, 'Stop the war!'" (NYT).
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