Althouse

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• "But DogsBite.org, a group dedicated to telling the stories of those hurt or killed by dogs, reports that from 2005 to 2020, dogs killed 568 Americans, and that 380 deaths, or 67 percent..."
• "I wrote four columns per week on average. If one thinks of those as simple blog posts, perhaps that does not seem like too heavy a lift."
• "Is it too much to hope that a broad coalition across party lines could commit to defeating candidates who have made clear they don’t respect truth or elections?"
• "Sniffspot is among the latest start-ups designed to help homeowners capitalize on every inch of their properties."
• Today, we had a different vantage point for the sunrise.
• 6 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.
• I accomplished my #1 goal for the summer!
• "He became famous in the 1970s for what he called his 'dé-finition/méthode' paintings, which were in fact sets of instructions for making a painting."
• How true-to-life are Hollywood movie dinosaurs?
• Key word: "regifted."
• "Because of the performance gap that emerges at puberty between biological males as a group and biological females as a group, separate sex competition is necessary..."

"But DogsBite.org, a group dedicated to telling the stories of those hurt or killed by dogs, reports that from 2005 to 2020, dogs killed 568 Americans, and that 380 deaths, or 67 percent..." Posted: 20 Jun 2022 06:25 AM PDT "... were caused by pit bulls.... Many groups say numbers mean little without also knowing if a dog acted on impulse, was provoked, mistreated or protecting its owner from an assault.... Pit bulls, mastiffs, Rottweilers, King Corsos, Dobermans, German shepherds and Chow Chows are surrendered more frequently, and stay longer, than the poodles and retrievers, the shelter staff said. The breeds' prevalence in low-income households is a factor, particularly as many dog owners lost jobs during the pandemic. Their reputation as dangerous fighting dogs also makes them less adoptable. 'Unfortunately, these bully mixes aren't the dogs everyone is looking for because of this myth that they are aggressive. Then, when pet owners need to surrender an animal, we don't have space,' said Ashley Jeffrey Bouck, chief executive of the shelter, which euthanizes animals only with debilitating and painful medical conditions. 'When people do want to open their homes to our dogs, insurance can be a reason not to.'" From "Love Your Dog, but Beware of Your Homeowners' Insurance/Many firms have long refused coverage or charge more for pit bulls and other dogs considered more dangerous, but New York and other states say policies shouldn't be breed specific" (NYT). Here's the top-rated comment over there:  I am a veterinarian, and my first pit bull patient was in vet school. I was a senior on the neurology service and we had the sweetest, loviest pit bull come in to the service. Her lab work and radiographs were all normal, extensive neurological exams were normal, she was friendly to everyone and always happy to see us. The reason she was there was that she was to be euthanized after workup because the day before she had killed a 2 year old child. It left an impression.  After 42 year in the business, I still don't completely understand the reason. I have seen what efficient fighters they are, they quickly disable their opponent by going first for the legs. It happens fast. Blaming the owner is unfair to many owners, but some may be culpable. Some dogs are wired a certain way. Breeding and genetics are powerful, just ask a Border Collie owner. I love all my pitbull patients, and most are loving and sweet. I rescued and treated one with heartworm using my own money. He was, as is often noted, a very sweet dog. A Bully rescuer in Maine adopted him, not an inexperienced owner. He was soon euthanized after he attacked the owner's daughter.  There are no easy answers, but I agree with the post that likens this situation to an exploding car. How much risk are we willing to take with our lives and of those around us. The "exploding car" analogy is in the article: In 2014, Mia Johnson co-founded National Pit Bull Victim Awareness to track attacks in Canada and the United States, after a pit bull mutilated and killed her miniature Pinscher, Yuri, who was a service dog for her adult daughter who has Asperger's syndrome and anxiety disorder. "If there's a make of car that tends to explode at high speeds, do you talk about educating the owners of those cars? Do you say the cars are misunderstood?" she asked. "It's the car that's the problem. It's the type of dog that's the problem. We hear from their victims every day."

"I wrote four columns per week on average. If one thinks of those as simple blog posts, perhaps that does not seem like too heavy a lift." Posted: 20 Jun 2022 06:03 AM PDT "Over time, however, Spoiler Alerts morphed from being a blog to being much more like a column.... The tone of Spoiler Alerts became less irreverent and more, dare I say, mature.... A lot has happened over the past eight years... I found a few ways of writing about some of this with a bemused tone, but there were limits. The biggest driver for this change, however, is probably a less forgiving public sphere. As I have noted before, Spoiler Alerts was a form of 'contingent writing'.... We live in an age in which retweeting a tasteless joke and then apologizing and deleting it 10 minutes later still winds up being on your permanent record. Not all infractions are equal, and in some cases such behavior merits serious sanctions. There is something bizarre, however, about the capricious nature of reactions and overreactions to acts that less than a decade ago would barely have merited a shrug. It is entirely possible that as a middle-aged straight White guy, my read on this is wrong. Another trend I have noticed over the past eight years is that my inner cranky-old-man voice is starting to get louder. I am keenly aware that this voice is not always wrong, but it ain't always right, either." Writes Daniel Drezner, in "Goodbye, farewell and adieu to Spoiler Alerts/R.I.P. Spoiler Alerts, 2014-2022" (WaPo). "Spoiler Alerts" was the name of his column, which wasn't placed very conspicuously in the Washington Post, I don't think, because I read the Post every day, and I hadn't blogged anything by Drezner in years.  The Post is ending his column, and he's trying to explain or come to terms with this.  I was interested in his discussion of blogging. I know what it's like to blog and then to write columns that are published prominently. It's very stressful. You think you can take the spirit of blogging and spin it out into a column. But something is very different. You like the big platform, but it's also ruining everything. I can see thinking now I've got to be more thoughtful and mature. As for his hostility to his own white-man voice... Is that self-awareness? Is he realizing that perhaps he doesn't deserve his position? I can't tell. There's also the fear of everyone who is not "a middle-aged straight White guy." They may catch him on anything — why didn't he say "cis"?! — and destroy his stature. But his column has been discontinued, so he's motivated to come up with reasons why that's all for the best.

"Is it too much to hope that a broad coalition across party lines could commit to defeating candidates who have made clear they don’t respect truth or elections?" Posted: 20 Jun 2022 05:11 AM PDT Asks Jennifer Rubin, in "We need a plan to deny the election deniers victory" (WaPo).  But where's the line between "election denying" and fighting for a victory after initial returns indicate your candidate has lost? In August 2020, Hillary Clinton made a strong argument for contesting election results... ... and we remember how hard Al Gore fought for a victory in 2000 before finally conceding. Should we denounce Hillary and Al as "election deniers"?  Can we form "a broad coalition across party lines" about how much post-election fighting is acceptable? Is the term "election denying" helpful? I don't think so. To me, it's too emotional. It feels like an effort to borrow resonance from "Holocaust denier." (Rubin also uses the term "big lie" twice.)  Labels shouldn't take the place of substantive argument. We should see that some contesting of election results is normal and desirable and that at some point we need a result and we shouldn't be dragging out the fight in a search for perfection. We need a winner, and we need a way to declare a winner and move on. Let's be rational about that. The shared standard has to be something that we'd accept when our candidate is on the losing side. It can't be that Democrats ought to fight hard, but Republicans must stand down.

"Sniffspot is among the latest start-ups designed to help homeowners capitalize on every inch of their properties." Posted: 20 Jun 2022 04:28 AM PDT "While vacation apps like Airbnb and Vrbo have long dominated the market with conventional home rentals, newer ones have crashed the party with specialized offerings — like Swimply, where homeowners rent out their pools by the hour, and Splacer and Peerspace, which turn living rooms into party venues.... [A Sniffspot homeowner's] profit is modest after he pays the 22 percent commission that Sniffspot shaves off the top, plus the credit card processing fee. But as far as passive income goes, it doesn't get much easier than hosting dogs. [One Sniffspot homeowner] simply leaves guests a key to the backyard, and they come and go without any effort on his part. 'Literally, I do nothing,' he said. 'We have a hose.'... Renting your property to an endless rotation of visitors is not without its pitfalls...." From "Your Backyard Is Actually a Lucrative Private Dog Park — if You Say It Is/A new generation of apps is allowing homeowners to make extra money by renting out their pools, yards and living rooms for an hour at a time" (NYT). This article has no comments section and not one word about the impact on neighbors or about insurance and liability. It's just... apps 'n' startups are cool... it's a new income stream for the gig economy.... and dogs dogs dogs. But here's something that hints of a private world of woe: [F]or dog owners like Genie Leslie, 34, a copywriter and screenwriter in Seattle, Sniffspot has become a regular routine. Ms. Leslie lives in a townhouse with no yardspace for her dog, Darcy, to run around. Darcy, a rescue, is reactive around people and other dogs, often making the afternoon walk a stressful grind. So she spends $20 once a month to take Darcy to somebody else's yard where there are no other dogs to romp with, just an outdoor space that doesn't set off this poor animal's reactiveness. And all those other days? Think of all the Darcys populating the sidewalks of Seattle!

Today, we had a different vantage point for the sunrise. Posted: 19 Jun 2022 06:26 PM PDT Looking out over prairie: At my back was a wheat field (or is it rye?):  Write about anything you want in the comments.

6 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best. Posted: 19 Jun 2022 06:11 PM PDT 1. People in 5 different countries show what they would make with an orange. 2. How well could you do if you had to adapt to walking on all fours? 3. Hiking from one coast of Scotland to the other. 4. A West Coast Trail hike. 5. What it's like being one of the infinite monkeys who will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare. 6. The history of Roland the Farter.

I accomplished my #1 goal for the summer! Posted: 19 Jun 2022 06:14 PM PDT I slept overnight in the camper! Meade took that picture of me after our hike out to see the sunrise. And here's his panorama that includes me along with the sunrise (to enlarge click (and click again)): I'll have a few of my sunrise pictures in a separate post. This is a post to celebrate what was, for me, a big challenge.

"He became famous in the 1970s for what he called his 'dé-finition/méthode' paintings, which were in fact sets of instructions for making a painting." Posted: 19 Jun 2022 05:26 PM PDT "One of his signature 'protocols,' as they were also called, was to paint a canvas the same color as the wall on which it would hang. He did not do this himself; rather, he enlisted a 'charge-taker' — an art collector, museum representative or independent curator — to make the work according to his specifications.... Mr. Rutault's wryly iconoclastic process represented a break from the past, subverting the basic notion that painters are people who paint. Instead of making paintings, he wrote texts; yet his work was both collaborative and potentially open-ended. His 'protocol' could be painted and repainted, as the charge-taker saw fit. As a result, he said, 'The painting is never finished.'... 'He's one of the only artists who won't see what his work looks like in the future, and it will still be his work.'... 'Claude called himself a painter.... Everyone else called him a conceptual artist. It's true that he did not touch paint or canvasses, but instead he wrote paintings.'" From "Claude Rutault, Master of the Painted Word, Is Dead at 80/His paintings were actually instructions for making paintings. One of his signature 'protocols' was to paint a canvas the same color as the wall on which it would hang" (NYT).

How true-to-life are Hollywood movie dinosaurs? Posted: 19 Jun 2022 03:15 PM PDT

Key word: "regifted." Posted: 19 Jun 2022 03:06 PM PDT For Father's Day my kids regifted me a cold and distant stare. — Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) June 19, 2022

"Because of the performance gap that emerges at puberty between biological males as a group and biological females as a group, separate sex competition is necessary..." Posted: 19 Jun 2022 02:56 PM PDT "... for the attainment of these objectives. Without eligibility standards based on biological sex or sex-linked traits, we are very unlikely to see biological females in finals... and in sports and events involving collisions and projectiles, biological female athletes would be at greater risk of injury." Says the new policy adopted by Fina, "the global regulator for swimming, diving and water polo," quoted in "Swimming chiefs ban trans athletes from women's elite events/'Open' category to be created for swimmers whose gender identity is different than their birth sex" (London Times). Sharron Davies, the British swimmer who won silver at the 1980 Olympics, welcomed the ruling. The 59-year-old says she has "paid a price" for backing inclusion for all in sport while arguing against transgender participation in women's elite swimming... "I am over the moon. I couldn't stop crying. Here's a decision that finally backs the rights of women to have their own category saved for female athletes. It's been a long, hard road and anyone who spoke up for women, pointed to the obvious science and how it plays out in sports like swimming, has been bullied and harassed. I hope this gives other sports the courage to do the right thing and empower women to speak up without feeling they're going to be shot down in flames."

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