Althouse

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• "Lt. Gov. Brian A. Benjamin of New York resigned on Tuesday as the state's second-in-command, hours after federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment..."
• "Fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter...."
• "Witnesses to the shooting described the gunman as a short, dark-skinned man with a heavy build wearing a green construction vest and gray sweatshirt."
• Coots on Lake Mendota at sunrise.
• "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid/It’s not just a phase."
• "Herd immunity now seems impossible. Welcome to the age of Covid reinfection."
• "Prices climbed 8.5% in March, compared to last year, amid growing fears of economic slowdown."
• At the Sunrise Café...
• "I once believed that I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man, but in truth, few straight men are interested..."
• I bring you 8 TikTok selections in the hope that you'll say which one(s) you like and why.
• Cattail sunrise.
• What is this hashtag — #RespectMySex?
• "About 63% of applicants submitted test scores in the first test-optional year.... Applicants submitting scores were less likely to be female, Black, Hispanic, first-generation and eligible for a Pell grant."
• "[A man] had visited the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store on Michigan Avenue and made a modest purchase, in part so his granddaughter could enjoy the cachet of the signature turquoise gift bag."
• "In 2018, I officially changed the gender marker on my passport from M to F. By that point, I had socially transitioned, undergone top surgery..."
• "In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month."
• The otter at sunrise.
• "Musk informed Twitter on Saturday morning that he would not, in fact, take the board seat."
• At the Sunrise Café...
• "When a single ceramic cockerel, sitting atop a kitchen cabinet, survived a bombardment of Borodianka, it became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance."
• "President Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, in the runoff of France’s presidential elections."
• Mom loves Elton John.

"Lt. Gov. Brian A. Benjamin of New York resigned on Tuesday as the state's second-in-command, hours after federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment..." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 03:49 PM PDT "... accusing him of directing a brazen scheme to funnel illegal donations to his past political campaigns and cover up the criminal activity.... 'This is a simple story of corruption,' Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.... 'Taxpayer money for campaign contributions. A quid quo pro. This for that. That's bribery, plain and simple.'" The NYT reports.  Selecting Benjamin was one of the first things Gov. Kathy Hochul did when she rose from Lt. Governor to Governor after Andrew M. Cuomo resigned. This will, the NYT writes, "complicate Ms. Hochul's bid to be elected to her first full term as governor." She promised to end corruption.

"Fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter...." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 03:36 PM PDT "The subscription news streaming service... charges $5.99 a month or $59.99 annually.... [T]here is broad skepticism whether there's enough demand to sustain a stand-alone news streaming service, with entertainment-first options dominating the landscape. Disney+, for instance, posted more than 10 million subscribers on its first day.... Disney's ESPN+, which offers sports news programming in addition to live event broadcasts, recently reported 21.3 million subscribers. NBCUniversal's Peacock, which features news programming, reported 24.5 million monthly active accounts in the U.S., more than 9 million of which were paid members."  CNBC reports. $5.99 a month for CNN is pretty ridiculous. 10,000 subscribers... hilarious.

"Witnesses to the shooting described the gunman as a short, dark-skinned man with a heavy build wearing a green construction vest and gray sweatshirt." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 03:19 PM PDT "The van was spotted in front of an apartment building on West 3rd Street just off the Kings Highway shopping strip in the Gravesend neighborhood, the senior law enforcement official said. The official also said that a gun had been found inside the subway station. The authorities have not released a suspect's name, nor a motive for the attack. But another high-ranking police official said that the attack appeared to have been planned and showed no signs of having stemmed from something spontaneous like a dispute on the train. As the shooting unfolded and the doors of the N train opened, sending smoke billowing through the station, fearful riders fled, many of them hurrying onto an R train sitting across the platform. Subway seats and cars were streaked with blood as people called for help." The NYT reports.

Coots on Lake Mendota at sunrise. Posted: 12 Apr 2022 02:41 PM PDT This morning at 6:18:

"Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid/It’s not just a phase." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 07:27 AM PDT A good headline... for a piece in The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt. Excerpt: By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would "go viral" and make you "internet famous" for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.  This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the "Retweet" button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon."  As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking. It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.... [In "Federalist No. 10"] Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that "where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts." Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous....

"Herd immunity now seems impossible. Welcome to the age of Covid reinfection." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 06:38 AM PDT  Writes Devi Sridhar in The Guardian.  The rising number of documented reinfections, sometimes occurring relatively quickly after the initial infection, as well as the high number of infections with the Omicron variant among the fully vaccinated, means that herd immunity is likely impossible – even if seroprevalence hits 100%....  Vaccines have largely blunted the virus's ability to kill, and its destructive impact on health services. However.... Covid-19 is not yet mild enough to be treated like the common cold because it makes people so ill that they cannot work....  It's clear that it's better that no one is infected with this virus.... An increasing number of people who are unable to return to work, or suffering from chronic illness, will be a major burden on healthcare services as well as the economy...

"Prices climbed 8.5% in March, compared to last year, amid growing fears of economic slowdown." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 06:12 AM PDT WaPo reports.  Just a few months ago, officials at the White House and Federal Reserve hoped that inflation was starting to tick down month by month. But those projections were quickly dashed by Russia's invasion, covid shutdowns at major Chinese manufacturing hubs, and the bleak reality that inflation continues to spread through every crevice of the economy. "One cannot escape it, even if one wanted to," said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. "This is going to continue for a while."

At the Sunrise Café... Posted: 11 Apr 2022 06:06 PM PDT ... you can talk about anything you want.

"I once believed that I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man, but in truth, few straight men are interested..." Posted: 12 Apr 2022 06:04 AM PDT "... in having a physical relationship with a person who was born the same sex as them. In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body. It turned out that several of those crushes were also gay. If I had confessed my interest, what might have developed? Alas, the rampant homophobia in my school during the AIDS crisis smothered any such notions. Today, I have resigned myself to never finding a partner.... From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.... I was still a virgin when I went in for surgery.... I chose an irreversible change before I'd even begun to understand my sexuality. The surgeon deemed my operation a good outcome, but intercourse never became pleasurable.... The prospect of sex can be intimidating. But sex is essential in healthy relationships. Give it a chance before permanently altering your body." From "What I wish I'd known when I was 19 and had sex reassignment surgery" by Corinna Cohn, who is now 50. The article is — surprisingly — in The Washington Post. ADDED: Cohn writes "It turned out that several of those crushes were also gay." Also gay? That would seem to need to mean that Cohn is/was a gay man and not transgender at all. The warning is: You'd better make absolutely sure you're not gay.

I bring you 8 TikTok selections in the hope that you'll say which one(s) you like and why. Posted: 11 Apr 2022 05:20 PM PDT 1. A song about cooking salmon in your studio apartment. 2. Scary stories for horses. 3. Dolly Parton and Patti LaBelle use their acrylic fingernails for percussion. 4. A freaky optical illusion. 5. A Tasmanian devil yawns. 6. How to live with a boy and still have a cute apartment. 7. Thatched roof skills. 8. Ukrainians before the war and now.

Cattail sunrise. Posted: 11 Apr 2022 08:33 AM PDT

What is this hashtag — #RespectMySex? Posted: 11 Apr 2022 04:59 PM PDT There was a lunch and I'm not saying I've only just sobered up enough to type this tweet but at the same time, I'm not not saying that. 💜🤍💚#RespectMySex pic.twitter.com/RH4DX1XSvj — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 11, 2022 ADDED: The London Times has an article about that event: "JK Rowling joins ladies who lunch and laugh off trans fury The author and other women targeted in the debate over gender have launched a campaign, James Beal writes."  Rowling organised the lunch, at The River Café, Hammersmith, for campaigners, including the Labour MP Rosie Duffield and the philosopher Kathleen Stock, who have been targeted by the trans lobby....  The lunch followed the launch of the Respect My Sex women's rights campaign and Forstater said: "It was getting together, celebrating each other, keeping our spirits up and having a nice lunch. It was amazing, a lovely day." There's a link on "Respect My Sex" that goes to another London Times article published today: "If you want our vote, talk about sex/Door-knocking election candidates had better watch out, writes Damian Whitworth."  The women behind a new "Respect My Sex" campaign say that they are creating the most significant women's movement since the suffragettes...  "To have reached a point where some people want to pretend that we don't know what a woman is, is really undermining our shared reality, and our shared space and how we all orientate ourselves around each other," [Caroline] Ffiske says. "That's why we see this as so big and so important. We need to defend ourselves and our bodily integrity. Are we going to defend science and reality and truth and our senses and women and vulnerable girls, or are we not?"  Society broadly organises itself around what works for large majorities then provides support and assistance for minorities, she says. "An entire institution can't reorganise itself around a tiny group of people and meeting their demands. We need to say sex is real, and it matters for all of us. It matters for all of our health, including trans-identifying people."  The campaign she has co-founded, "Respect My Sex if you want my X", encourages voters to ask those standing in next month's local elections to answer simple questions about sex and gender identity. Another question is the one that Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, refused to answer: "Can a woman have a penis?" Starmer said that discussing the issue in this way doesn't help anyone.  Heather Binning, another of the campaign's founders, is withering. "There is an answer. It's not difficult. You don't have to be a biologist." Women, she says, "are raging"....  Dividing up women's lives into being 'menstruators', 'cervix-havers', 'pregnant people', 'birthing people' and 'menopausal people' in the name of inclusion dehumanises us and prevents us talking about how being female — and the way that society treats female people — has impacts over our whole lives."

"About 63% of applicants submitted test scores in the first test-optional year.... Applicants submitting scores were less likely to be female, Black, Hispanic, first-generation and eligible for a Pell grant." Posted: 11 Apr 2022 07:33 AM PDT "They were more likely to come from a higher-income neighborhood, have a higher high school GPA, have completed more rigorous high school coursework. Test-submitters were also more likely to apply for majors in science, technology, engineering or math. Test-optional admissions led to an increased volume in applications but didn't lead to changes in applicant characteristics, such as race or income level, compared to previous admissions cycles." From "Here's what early results of UW-Madison's ACT/SAT test-optional experiment show" (Madison.com).

"[A man] had visited the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store on Michigan Avenue and made a modest purchase, in part so his granddaughter could enjoy the cachet of the signature turquoise gift bag." Posted: 11 Apr 2022 08:59 AM PDT "But before the reader left the store, the clerk discreetly placed the bag in a more anonymous sack. The implication? It's not safe to walk down Michigan Avenue with a Tiffany bag anymore. That anecdote focuses the mind on the perception of high crime bedeviling what long has been known as the Midwest's most prestigious shopping destination.... According to the Urban Land Institute, the vacancy rate on Michigan Avenue stands close to a troubling 25%.... The Urban Land Institute report has... good ideas, including an upgrade in dining options. Michigan Avenue never has been hospitable to restaurants, especially on the ground floor, a function of high rents and canyon-like ambience. That's also true on New York's Fifth Avenue but was never the case on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where you can sip and watch people promenade...." From "Editorial: The Michigan Avenue crisis is getting worse" (Chicago Tribune).

"In 2018, I officially changed the gender marker on my passport from M to F. By that point, I had socially transitioned, undergone top surgery..." Posted: 11 Apr 2022 06:13 AM PDT "... and been on hormone replacement therapy for years. But updating the marker didn't make travel easier. Traveling while transgender only became more difficult. I'm well over 6 feet tall. Unless I decide to dress extremely femme and put on a full face of makeup — to then sit for hours on a cramped, sweaty airplane — the F on my passport actually invites extra scrutiny. Because I don't always 'pass,' it frequently outs me as trans. The U.S. State Department... will soon have the option to choose X as their gender marker as an alternative to M or F.... But given the trouble that often accompanies being out as non-binary, the move won't 'advance inclusion' as much as the department's announcement claims. If the State Department really wanted to take a step forward, there's an easier, cheaper and more powerful option: remove gender from passports altogether.... In the future, we may live in a society that doesn't require trans people to out ourselves at the airport." From "There's a better solution than offering X-gender passports" by Abeni Jones (WaPo). Yeah, why is the government involved in your genitalia? What are you bringing onto this plane?

"In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month." Posted: 11 Apr 2022 05:11 AM PDT "At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats' attitude to police.  From "What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month? A study that paid viewers of the rightwing cable network to switch shed light on the media's influence on people's views" (The Guardian).  David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale university, respectively, paid 304 regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to instead watch up to seven hours of CNN a week during the month of September 2020.... By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: "It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin" and less likely to believe that: "If Joe Biden is elected President, we'll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists", when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News... In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: "If Joe Biden is elected President, we'll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists."... But once it was over, and the $15 an hour was taken away, "viewers returned to watching Fox News", Kalla said.... Maybe if there were a news channel that gave the news straight and didn't lean either way, after exposure to it, people would stay with it, rather than return to the channel that tracked their political inclination. The subjects of this study may have moderated some of their more extreme views, but I presume they were also continually irritated by the liberal bias of CNN. Were they surveyed about that?

The otter at sunrise. Posted: 11 Apr 2022 05:00 AM PDT

"Musk informed Twitter on Saturday morning that he would not, in fact, take the board seat." Posted: 11 Apr 2022 03:57 AM PDT "Musk's appointment would have started on Saturday, 'contingent on a background check and formal acceptance,' according to [Twitter CEO Parag] Agrawal. 'We... believed that having Elon as a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders was the best path forward,' he wrote.... Throughout the weekend, without revealing that he had turned down the board seat at Twitter, Musk posted a number of ideas to transform the social media company and its products. One of the suggestions was a coarse joke in the form of a Twitter poll. Musk asked people to vote on whether Twitter should drop the 'w' from its name. Doing so would turn Twitter into 'titter,' an allusion to female anatomy." From "Elon Musk decides not to join Twitter board, says CEO Parag Agrawa" (CNBC). An allusion to female anatomy! To "titter" is to laugh. But I guess there are people — I'm thinking of Beavis and Butt Head types — who hear the word "titter" and titter over tits. And I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk intended to amuse such people, and CNBC did say allusion.  Anyway, you can see good reason for Musk to decline the position. It's right there in Agrawal's statement: background check and fiduciary duty.

At the Sunrise Café... Posted: 10 Apr 2022 05:11 PM PDT   ... you can talk all night.

"When a single ceramic cockerel, sitting atop a kitchen cabinet, survived a bombardment of Borodianka, it became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance." Posted: 10 Apr 2022 05:09 PM PDT "So when Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskiy were given one each as a gift as they walked through Kyiv, it carried an added significance." From "Ceramic cockerels surprise Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Kyiv walk/'I'm from London' says British PM. 'I know, I'm from Kharkiv,' says bystander proffering traditional jugs that in the war have come to symbolise Ukrainian resilience" (The Guardian).  You can see the presentation of the cockerels at 0:57 here: The video footage of the Cockerell. https://t.co/4DDeXOhQzT — John DC (@manysmilesgod) April 9, 2022

"President Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, in the runoff of France’s presidential elections." Posted: 10 Apr 2022 05:03 PM PDT "With 92 percent of the ballots cast on Sunday counted, Mr. Macron, a centrist, was leading with about 27.4 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen's 24.3 percent. Ms. Le Pen benefited from a late surge that reflected widespread disaffection over rising prices, security and immigration. With war raging in Ukraine and Western unity likely to be tested as the fighting continues, Ms. Le Pen's strong performance demonstrated the enduring appeal of nationalist and xenophobic currents in Europe. Extreme parties of the right and left took some 51 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the extent of French anger and frustration." The NYT reports.

Mom loves Elton John. Posted: 10 Apr 2022 05:01 PM PDT @aubreywarmouth When you take you mom to see Elton John ♬ Bennie And The Jets - Remastered - Elton John

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