Althouse

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• "The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday that Will Smith was asked to leave the Oscars ceremony after he slapped Chris Rock, but Smith refused."
• At the Wednesday Night Café...
• I watch TikTok so you don't have to. Here are my 5 selections of the day.
• "She recalled that it was snowing gently when the Germans occupied her town in March 1939. An officer commandeered the family’s house."
• "Family’s Balcony Death in Switzerland Appears to Be Suicide, Police Say/The investigation suggests that the victims jumped from the seventh-floor balcony 'one after the other,' the police said."
• "The culture has little patience for the damaged thug in a T-shirt and jeans who’s lucky if his power extends the length of a neighborhood block..."
• "Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on? Degas lives like a little notary and doesn’t like women..."
• Does TikTok have its own firm, getting out the message that Facebook is aligned with Republicans?
• "Particularly for his wife. And she’s got alopecia. So… not a happy home life."
• At the Lake Ice Café...

"The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday that Will Smith was asked to leave the Oscars ceremony after he slapped Chris Rock, but Smith refused." Posted: 30 Mar 2022 03:59 PM PDT "'Things unfolded in a way we could not have anticipated,' the academy said in a statement. 'We also recognize we could have handled the situation differently.' The revelation came after the academy's board of governors met to initiate 'disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Smith for violations of the Academy's Standards of Conduct, including inappropriate physical contact, abusive or threatening behavior, and compromising the integrity of the Academy.'" WaPo reports.  The top-rated comment over there: "How hard is it to call security and walk him out like you would have done for anyone else walking on stage and committing an assault then sitting back down and yelling obscenities? The Academy failed, and does not need three weeks with lawyers to figure out what they should have done."  Second highest-rated comment: "The fact that he sat back down laughed clapped and partied all night with other Oscar winners and nominees says a lot. Disgusting." I'm not buying  "was asked to leave... but... refused." It was not a serious asking if he could just refuse!  Mr. Smith, would you like to leave? No.

At the Wednesday Night Café... Posted: 30 Mar 2022 03:25 PM PDT  ... you can talk about whatever you want. (No sunrise photo today. Sorry! It was raining.)

I watch TikTok so you don't have to. Here are my 5 selections of the day. Posted: 30 Mar 2022 12:40 PM PDT 1. A young woman demonstrates, in quick succession, the types of singers you find in jazz school. 2. Sometimes the murderous emu is sweet. 3. When you visit and your dad tries to keep you from leaving. 4. Setting the Chris Rock/Will Smith incident to music.  5. Metallica's James Hetfield sits for an interview with a cute kid.

"She recalled that it was snowing gently when the Germans occupied her town in March 1939. An officer commandeered the family’s house." Posted: 30 Mar 2022 10:06 AM PDT "Residents were lining the streets silently, she said, and then, 'as if with one voice, they started singing our national anthem that started with the words "Where is my home?" I didn't realize that our home was no longer ours, and I didn't realize that this was the end of our happiness and the beginning of the occupation.' Vera's mother queued up for four days to apply for the Kindertransport; then, one evening, she announced to her husband at dinner that the girls had secured seats and would be going to England. 'There was a deathly silence. Father looked shocked and terribly surprised,' Mrs. Gissing wrote in her memoir. 'All at once his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, whilst we all waited in silence. Then he lifted his head, smiled at us with tears in his eyes, sighed and said, "All right, let them go."'" From "Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by 'Britain's Schindler,' Dies at 93/She was not quite 11 when train convoys organized by a London stockbroker carried her and hundreds of other Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II" (NYT).

"Family’s Balcony Death in Switzerland Appears to Be Suicide, Police Say/The investigation suggests that the victims jumped from the seventh-floor balcony 'one after the other,' the police said." Posted: 30 Mar 2022 10:16 AM PDT The NYT reports.  The police said on Tuesday that their investigation suggests that the four people — a 40-year-old man, his 41-year-old wife, her twin sister, and the couple's 8-year-old daughter — plunged to their deaths in Montreux in western Switzerland in succession. A fifth person, the couple's 15-year-old son, also apparently jumped from the seventh-floor balcony but survived, and he is in a coma.... Investigators said they found a stepladder on the balcony, there was no sign of a struggle and no witness heard any sounds or shouting coming from the apartment or the balcony before the family fell, they said. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the family was "very interested in conspiracy and survivalist" theories, and had stocked up on an "impressive" amount of food that occupied most of the apartment, the police said. "The family lived in near autarky," the statement said, "removed from society." From the Wikipedia article "Autarky": In Stoicism the concept of autarky represents independence from anything external, including independence from personal relationships, so as to immune one from vagaries of fortune. The Stoic sage is autarkic by being dependent only on his own virtue.... Early socialist movements used these autarkic efforts to build their base with institutions like the Bourse de travail, socialist canteens and food assistance.... Right-wing totalitarian governments that have also strived for autarky, developing national industry and imposing high tariffs but have crushed other autarky movements....

"The culture has little patience for the damaged thug in a T-shirt and jeans who’s lucky if his power extends the length of a neighborhood block..." Posted: 30 Mar 2022 09:44 AM PDT "... but it has the stamina to dissect the psychic pain of a mogul in a made-to-measure Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo. It has the wherewithal to pause and consider the complexity of a powerful Black man who says that he was protecting his powerful Black wife, when society too often doesn't have the patience to deal with anonymous Black folks just trying to get by...." Writes Robin Givhan in "Will Smith, spit-polished thuggery and disrespect" (WaPo).

"Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on? Degas lives like a little notary and doesn’t like women..." Posted: 30 Mar 2022 07:17 AM PDT "... knowing that if he liked them and fucked them a lot he would become cerebrally ill and hopeless at painting. Degas's painting is virile and impersonal precisely because he has resigned himself to being personally no more than a little notary, with a horror of riotous living." Wrote Vincent Van Gogh in a letter, in 1888, quoted in "A Compulsive Perfectionist/The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor" (NYRB).  But the article is about Degas, not Van Gogh. We know Van Gogh is interesting. What about Degas? Okay, I scanned the article so you don't have to (and I even have a subscription to the NYRB). Here's a Degas quote for you: "How can one chat with people like that? Let's see, with a Jewish Belgian who is a naturalized Frenchman! It's as if one wished to speak with a hyena, a boa. Such people do not belong to the same humanity as us."

Does TikTok have its own firm, getting out the message that Facebook is aligned with Republicans? Posted: 30 Mar 2022 06:45 AM PDT That's my question, as I read "Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok/The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. "Dream would be to get stories with headlines like 'From dances to danger,'" one campaign director said" (WaPo): Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok. The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users. Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post. Why is the biggest thing about the revelation the fact that the consulting firm is Republican? What makes a consulting firm Republican? The Arlington, Va.-based firm advertises on its website that it brings "a right-of-center perspective to solve marketing challenges" and can deploy field teams "anywhere in the country within 48 hours." The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. Details on the anti-TikTok message Targeted Victory has been pushing. Targeted Victory needs to "get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using," a director for the firm wrote in a February email.... In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app's purported harms. "Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?" a Targeted Victory staffer asked. "Dream would be to get stories with headlines like 'From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,'" the staffer wrote.... One trend Targeted Victory sought to enhance through its work was the "devious licks'' challenge, which showed students vandalizing school property... But according to an investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet, rumors of the "devious licks" challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok. In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the "Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge" in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook.... In addition to planting local news stories, the firm has helped place op-eds targeting TikTok around the country, especially in key congressional districts.... Whenever I put up anything from TikTok, I always get some comments generically attacking TikTok. How do I know these comments aren't coming from Targeted Victory? Even if they're not directly from Targeted Victory, I suspect that they have been influenced by the work of Target Victory.

"Particularly for his wife. And she’s got alopecia. So… not a happy home life." Posted: 30 Mar 2022 05:08 AM PDT I got through the entire blogging day yesterday without mentioning Will Smith, but this morning, reading the comments in last night's cafe, I took the prompt to watch a clip of Joe Rogan talking about it.  That's a 15-minute clip. I still intend to watch the rest of it, but 5 1/2 minutes in, I found myself wondering what Ricky Gervais has said about the incident. Ricky is brilliant, and he's a stand-up comedy who's hosted awards shows and roasted the big stars. Here he is at the 2020 Golden Globes.  I would expect Ricky to defend the role of the comedian versus the stars, but all he did was one little thing, retweet this tweet from the British "Office" twitter feed that shows the tiniest clip from an old episode of the show: "And she's got alopecia. So... not a happy homelife." pic.twitter.com/b1NYWWIncX — David Brent Music (@DavidBrentMovie) March 28, 2022 ADDED: From that 2020 Golden Globes performance:    "Let's go out with a bang. Let's have a laugh at your expense — shall we? Remember: They're just jokes. We're all going to die soon. And there's no sequel." Oh, but the "just jokes" defense — just jokes at the expense of the hyper-privileged — that's not going to work anymore. It's the Era of That's Not Funny, and the preening empaths are out there in force telling you never ever ever ever to joke about anything that's actually physically wrong with a person. Or something like that. Can we still laugh at bald men? At bald white women? Who knows? I'm guessing we've reached end of the entire tradition of comedians on stage at awards shows making fun of the stars for the amusement of the little people out there in the dark. Whoever they get to emcee will be telling the stars they are wonderful and beautiful. Will Smith smacked the comedy out of the whole show. Get all the jokes out ya fucking mouth, from now until the end of Hollywood.

At the Lake Ice Café... Posted: 29 Mar 2022 05:40 PM PDT   ... you can talk about whatever you want.  This photo was taken at 6:53. Quite a difference from all that red, purple, and pink in the photo posted earlier today, which showed the sunrise at 6:35. The sunrise time today was 6:44, so this was an example of the importance of needing to get out there early if you want to see the really florid color. It doesn't happen every day. Not even close. But when it happens, it happens early. Notice that big wall of ice in this 6:53 photo. You may remember yesterday's photo of the ice, looking out in the western direction, but this is the eastern view, and this ice is newly piled up at the shore. Here's a little video I took to highlight how different it was today:

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