Friday, July 1, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

Sunrise — 5:19, 5:20, 5:24, 5:25.

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 05:04 PM PDT

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Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"You'll get more than dirty looks, you'll get the shushing of a lifetime by retirees who just dropped $300 on wine and cheese."

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 04:41 PM PDT

That's if you sit close to the stage and don't keep quiet. That's the advice at Reddit given to a Madisonian who is thinking of going to next week's Concert On The Square and wants to know if there's any "unwritten etiquette" that needs to be observed.

If you're wondering if I'm one of the shushing retirees, no, I've lived in Madison for 38 years, and I've never gone to one Concert On The Square. I don't know if I've gone to any sort of outdoor classical music concert in my entire life. If I did, it wouldn't be because I thought it would be good listening but because it's a social occasion. Isn't classical music supposed to be indoors? Don't you need walls for it to sound right?

And I'd have a hard time shushing people. I didn't even resort to a slight look askance to deter the lady sitting next to me at the "Elvis" movie and singing along. With an outdoor classical concert, I think the idea is to draw in young people by making it casual and easy and fun. It's totally wrong for old people to act stuffy. Speaking of indoor things: stuffiness.

Over there at Reddit, somebody says "This should tell you everything you need to know":

Let's take a solemn moment to witness the swearing in of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 04:14 PM PDT

Will Trump be charged with a crime?

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 01:32 PM PDT

This is your big chance to think about an array of options and rank them in order of likelihood. I'm sure I'm forgetting some possibilities and that you will tell me about them in comments. I'm deliberately leaving out the possibility that he could die before things are resolved. That's too morbid. I'm also leaving out the possibility that the United States itself could pass away. That's too remote, though perhaps not all that remote to those who are inclined to believe in coups.

Here are your options, identified by letter so you can use numbers to rank them. I'm putting them roughly in order of severity.

A. Trump is never charged with any crime.

B. Trump is charged with a crime but President Biden — perhaps observing that "we are not a revengeful people" — immediately pardons him, so he is never brought to trial, and the government is never challenged to prove the charges.

C. Trump is charged with a crime but issues of law take precedence and, ultimately, Trump wins on the legal merits in the Supreme Court. The case never goes to trial. The government never faces the challenge to prove the charges.

D. Trump is charged with a crime, the case goes to trial, and the jury finds him not guilty.

E. Trump is charged with a crime, the case goes to trial, and the jury finds him guilty, but he appeals, and he wins on appeal, and the government declines to retry him. 

F. Trump is charged with a crime, the case goes to trial, and the jury finds him guilty, and before he appeals, he is pardoned by whoever is President of the United States at this point. 

G. Trump is charged with a crime, the case goes to trial, and the jury finds him guilty, he loses all appeals, but the sentence does not entail any prison time.

H. Trump is charged with a crime, the case goes to trial, and the jury finds him guilty, he loses all appeals, and he actually goes to prison.

"[T]he Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, took control of this symbol of tsarist decadence" — The Imperial Porcelain Manufactory — and renamed it the State Porcelain Manufactory, "seeing surprising potential in it..."

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 01:10 PM PDT

"...  as a wheelhouse for artistic innovation and the production of propaganda. Stocks of unpainted, snow-white china became a tantalising canvas for avant-garde artists keen to express their utopian ideologies and rouse enthusiasm for the new socialist era, giving this delicate, bourgeois material an unexpected, almost contradictory, second life.... Agitation porcelain, as it became known, featured effigies of Lenin and was decorated with calls to action.... [C]rockery once intended for the lavish feasts of the Romanovs was now emblazoned with militant Reds trampling upon their white ermine furs (Adamovich, 1923). Danko's porcelain chess set (1923) used the same colour play, with a red army taking on a white skeleton king whose proletariat pawns are in chains. While the porcelain plates' blocky constructivist artwork conveyed energy, explosions and destruction, the requisitioning of the factory was part of a softer approach to demonstrate the communists' respect for Russian patrimony, and ingratiate the precarious new regime with the powerful upper-middle classes whose support they depended on in order to govern."

"It’s good to know that Melville, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, had the company of 'a black Newfoundland dog, shaggy like himself, good natured and simple.'"

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 12:57 PM PDT

"('My shaggy ally' was how [Emily] Dickinson referred to her own Newfie, Carlo.) Readers of Moby-Dick may remember that after Ishmael wakes up in Queequeg's arms in the Spouter-Inn, and complains of the 'unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,' Queequeg 'shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water.'"

I looked up the passage in my own (Kindle) copy of the book:
Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding....

Putin "obviously isn't" a woman? Do we still talk like that? Come on, Boris, your effort to sound up to date is at least 5 years out of date.

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 12:35 PM PDT

Somebody responded:

"Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.... It was after what happened to George Floyd..."

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 03:06 PM PDT

"... that I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of. That was really the moment that I began to examine the ways I had participated. I knew then I needed to course-correct.... What makes this truly emotional for me is that I want this connection I didn't have.... I deeply, deeply want this connection with the Black community that I didn't have. Because of 'Friends,' I never attained that.... In this case, I'm finally, literally putting my money where my mouth is.... I want to make sure from now on in every production I do that I am conscious in hiring people of color and actively pursue young writers of color. I want to know I will act differently from now on. And then I will feel unburdened."


Kauffman — who gets this fawning publicity — endowed a professorship in the African and African American Studies department at Brandeis. The amount of her donation is 1% of her $400 million net worth. I'd say she ought to contribute something more like $40 million before she claims to have literally put her my money where my mouth is. It's still the wrong use of "literally," but it wouldn't be so bad.
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