Sunday, July 10, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

Sarah Palin, praising Donald Trump.

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 12:52 PM PDT

ADDED: Rupar has some more good clips:

"Searching for Rosebud, Auletta alights, for lack of better explanations, on the Weinstein brothers’ flame-haired and apparently flame-tempered mother, Miriam..."

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 01:00 PM PDT

"... (for whom their company was named, along with their milder father, Max, a diamond cutter who died of a heart attack at 52). A childhood friend told Auletta that Harvey referred to Miriam as 'Momma Portnoy,' after the shrill character in Philip Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint.' [Harvey's brother] Bob, who somehow avoided growing into a 'beast,' as Harvey is repeatedly described here, allows for the possibility of Miriam's frustration at her life's limitations. 'She could have been Sheryl Sandberg or one of these C.E.O.s of a company. She had that kind of smarts,' he told Auletta. Instead, she proudly brought rugelach to her sons' headquarters, and had an epitaph worthy of Dorothy Parker: 'I don't like the atmosphere or the crowd.'"

From "'Hollywood Ending,' a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein/Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein's Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul's life" by Alexandra Jacobs (NYT)(reviewing "HOLLYWOOD ENDING/Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence" by Ken Auletta).

Maybe there's more in the book, but that's a pathetic explanation. I mean, it's such a cliché to blame Mother. If you're going to fall back on that, you need better material. It reminds me of this recent New Yorker cartoon — an adolescent girl says to her mother: "Nature, nurture—either way, it's still all your fault."

It's always all Mother's fault. But, anyway, was that really her epitaph? "I don't like the atmosphere or the crowd." She did have an obituary in the NYT, I see, back in 2016, before Harvey's reputation went to hell.
Ms. Weinstein was a part of her sons' business from the beginning. After Miramax was founded in 1979, originally just to distribute independent films, she was the receptionist at the company's first headquarters, at Madison Avenue and 48th Street, and often brought pastries to the office....

In 2013, when a joint coproduction and codistribution venture was announced between Miramax's new owners and the Weinstein Company, she issued a statement that began: "Over the years, Bob and Harvey have never let me talk, although I would have done better than them. After all, I am a Jewish mother."

By that account, it was the sons who held her back! Or was she pushing them forward? I certainly don't care enough to read Ken Auletta's 466-page tome.

"Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department.... They are the dumbest part of every college...."

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 08:50 AM PDT

"You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That's hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don't do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don't think so.... If you read a book called 'Abolition of Man' by C.S. Lewis, you will see how education destroys generations of people. It's devastating. It's like a plague. … The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. …"

Said Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, quoted in "Teachers go to the 'dumbest colleges' — who said it and why it matters," a WaPo column by Valerie Strauss.

But what's really bothering Strauss isn't the outrage of insulting education departments. It's Hillsdale's participation in charter schools around the country. There's the "Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help 'students acquire a mature love for America.'"
A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released last year extols conservative values, attacks progressive ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for example: "The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders." Hillsdale College itself offers a "classical liberal arts core" to its students; the website lists more than 30 authors and thinkers that students will encounter — nearly all of them White men.

She's right about that. I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Only one woman crossed the line.

"She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell, and by Mark Twain... with a thumping hurrah for plagiarism, and..."

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 07:30 AM PDT

"... disgust for the egotism of 'these solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their ignorant damned rubbish! . . . A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they've caught filching a chop!'"

I'm reading Cynthia Ozick's "How Helen Keller Learned to Write/With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to unimaginable artistry"  — from June 8, 2003 in The New Yorker.

I'm reading that because — and I can't remember why — I got to thinking how hard it is to believe that Helen Keller could have acquired the language skills needed to write the works attributed to her. (You, who are not blind, can see the entire text of her "Story of My Life" at Project Gutenberg.)

Ozick writes:

"The Story of My Life" was attacked in The Nation not for plagiarism in the usual sense but for the purloining of "things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word. . . . One resents the pages of second-hand description of natural objects." The reviewer blamed her for the sin of vicariousness. "All her knowledge," he insisted, "is hearsay knowledge."... 

[The criticism] "Helen Keller is a living lie"—regularly resurfaced, in the form of a neurologist's or a psychologist's assessment, or in the reservations of reviewers. A French professor of literature, who was himself blind, determined that she was "a dupe of words, and her aesthetic enjoyment of most of the arts is a matter of auto-suggestion rather than perception." 

A New Yorker interviewer complained, "She talks bookishly. . . . To express her ideas, she falls back on the phrases she has learned from books, and uses words that sound stilted, poetical metaphors." 

But the cruellest appraisal of all came, in 1933, from Thomas Cutsforth, a blind psychologist. By this time, Helen was fifty-two, and had published four additional autobiographical volumes. Cutsforth disparaged everything she had become. The wordless child she once was, he maintained, was closer to reality than what her teacher had made of her through the imposition of "word-mindedness." 

He objected to her use of images such as "a mist of green," "blue pools of dog violets," "soft clouds tumbling." All that, he protested, was "implied chicanery" and "a birthright sold for a mess of verbiage." He criticized 

the aims of the educational system in which [Helen Keller] has been confined during her whole life. Literary expression has been the goal of her formal education. Fine writing, regardless of its meaningful content, has been the end toward which both she and her teacher have striven. . . . Her own experiential life was rapidly made secondary, and it was regarded as such by the victim. . . . Her teacher's ideals became her ideals, her teacher's likes became her likes, and whatever emotional activity her teacher experienced she experienced....

Her rebuttal to word-mindedness, to vicariousness, to implied chicanery and the living lie, was inscribed deliberately and defiantly in her images of "swordblade" and "rainbow waters." The deaf-blind person, she wrote, "seizes every word of sight and hearing, because his sensations compel it. Light and color, of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing that all humanly knowable truth is open to him. 

She was not ashamed of talking bookishly: it meant a ready access to the storehouse of history and literature. She disposed of her critics with a dazzling apothegm—"The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction"—and went on to contend that history itself "is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth."

"Glad to see you finally know what a woman is," the 3-star general replied to Jill Biden's tweet.

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 07:41 AM PDT

Her tweet was: "For nearly 50 years, women have had the right to make our own decisions about our bodies. Today, that right was stolen from us."

So he loaded down her tweeted speech about abortion rights with his snark that relates to recent discourse about transgenderism. 


I don't think he was "mocking Jill Biden's support of abortion rights." I think he was observing her use of "women" in the abortion context and tying it to this separate "What is a woman?" issue. It's annoying when someone uses your social media speech to give visibility to something they want to say about a different topic.

But should a high-level politician — such as the First Lady — who chooses to do social media — want punishment for someone who uses the mechanism of that very social media to participate in conversation? A tweet can be responded to, so isn't a person using Twitter to make a statement essentially inviting others to talk back? Isn't that part of the game? 

The retired 3-star general, Gary Volesky, who had "earned a silver star for gallantry while serving in Iraq," was making "$92 an hour advising military officers, staff and students who were taking part in war games and other similar activities." Maybe people with jobs like that should limit their public speech, but he did what he did, and it wasn't as bad as Jill Biden taking revenge on him for weighing down what she wanted to look good saying.

Speaking of looking good, I'd like to talk about her dress:

 

Is that an opium poppy centered over her lower belly?

Know your poppies. That is not an opium poppy. It's an Oriental poppy. Papaver orientale.

ADDED: Back in 2018, when Donald Trump was President and an active user of Twitter, he used the mechanisms of Twitter to block people he didn't want elevating their writing by responding to him (the way Volesky responded to Jill Biden). He got sued, and the judge said it was unconstitutional for him to block them. 

Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, addressing a novel issue about how the Constitution applies to social media platforms and public officials, found that the president's Twitter feed is a public forum. As a result, she ruled that when Mr. Trump or an aide blocked seven plaintiffs from viewing and replying to his posts, he violated the First Amendment.

If the principle undergirding Wednesday's ruling in Federal District Court stands, it is likely to have implications far beyond Mr. Trump's feed and its 52 million followers, said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight First Amendment Institute's executive director and the counsel for the plaintiffs. Public officials throughout the country, from local politicians to governors and members of Congress, regularly use social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to interact with the public about government business.

"This ruling should put them on notice, and if they censor critics from social media accounts used for official purposes, they run the risk that someone will sue them and win," he said of public officials.

"[O]n Oct. 4, 1969, everything changed... 20-year old Diane Linkletter jumped to her death from the window of her Los Angeles apartment after allegedly trying acid."

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 06:10 AM PDT

"Her grieving father, TV and radio host Art Linkletter, told the press, 'She was murdered by the people who manufacture and sell LSD.' The newspapers ran wild with Linkletter's take: 'LSD KILLED DIANE.' Later, when news of her clean toxicology report made the rounds, Linkletter blamed the jump on an '"acid flashback.' President Richard Nixon — in the midst of launching his War on Drugs — invited Linkletter to the White House. Nixon knew that a story like this could galvanize the anti-drug movement more than any fact or figure could.... It was the perfect moment for a book like 'Go Ask Alice.'... The fact that the author was anonymous only heightened the buzz. 'Alice' could be anyone, even your daughter. The media ran with it — everyone from The New York Times to the Library Journal presented the book as a verified teenager's diary. A million copies sold nearly overnight. Avon Books published the paperback and two years later, in 1973, ABC aired a TV adaptation of the book. That, too, was a supersonic hit, with nearly a third of all US households viewing it...."

People believe what they want to believe. Too good to check! I wanted to see how embarrassing the NYT coverage of this ridiculous book was. Here, from 1973: "Diary of a Schoolgirl En Route to Death." It's a review of the ABC TV movie. 
Based on the "real diary" of a 15‐year‐old drug pusher, "Go Ask Alice" was adapted by Ellen Violett from the book of the same title....

The scare quotes suggest that the NYT was onto to the fakery but... 

Permission to publish the diary, with names, dates and places changed for protection, was given by the parents after their daughter was found dead of a drug overdose....

... I guess not! 

The title is, of course, taken from the drug culture anthem composed by Grace Slick and successfully recorded by the Jefferson Airplane. The song had Alice in Drugland popping pills to encounter her rabbits 10 feet tail....

What drug is the editor on? Quite aside from the need for an apostrophe in "rabbits," there's nothing in the Jefferson Airplane song about a rabbit's tail and the only thing that's 10 feet tall is Alice herself. 

The total effect of the film is as unusual as its structure. Several crucial and disturbing points are conveyed about the youthful drug culture, and perhaps they are all the more disturbing in the slick context of the film's treatment....

Slick! Don't use "slick" as an adjective right after you've been talking about Grace Slick. 

The book's blunt street language was rigorously deleted and, except for a couple of vague and indirect allusions, references to various forms of sexual promiscuity were cut....

"Various forms"... I know from the NY Post: "'Another day, another blow job,' reads one entry." Ha ha ha. Straight from the mouth of "a suburban housewife." Makes perfect sense. 

[T]he film is considerably less complex than the book. The author of the book careens wildly from one enthusiasm to another. The period away from home is a confusing swirl of contradictions, barely touched in the film....

Apparently, you can write a chaotic mess of a book and get credit for complexity when the point of comparison is a cheesy TV movie. 

The parents are reduced to convenient soap‐opera cues. And a couple of the others provide "star turns." Andy Griffith is on hand briefly as the sensitive‐tough priest....

A star turn by Andy Griffith as a priest?! Now, it sounds as trippy as men on a chessboard getting up and telling you where to go and the White Knight talking backwards. 

So let's read this 2021 article in The Guardian, "Grace Slick and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane: how we made White Rabbit." Grace Slick addresses the decades-old question whether this was supposed to be a pro-drug (as the NYT assumed) or an anti-drug song. She says:

All fairytales that are read to little girls feature a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice's Adventures in Wonderland did not. Alice was on her own, and she was in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity – that's the White Rabbit. 
A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda. The 1960s resembled Wonderland for me. Like Alice, I met all kinds of strange characters, but I was comfortable with it.... 
In the 60s, the drugs were not ones like heroin and alcohol that you take to blot out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD and shroomies. Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities. You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you. 
The line in the song "feed your head" is both about reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention....

 Jack Casady — the bass guitarist — said:

It's difficult to explain how innocent the beginning of discovering drugs was before people got so dependent on them, or their life changed, or they made really poor life decisions. The song explores the simplest form: the idea of taking psychedelic drugs to open you up and make you more receptive. 
Everybody took some psychedelics but we rarely played on them, not like the Grateful Dead guys did. When I did it got a little too weird for me – my bass would turn into a tree log and grow vines and I'd say, "I gotta move on here."...

"Hello one percenters, I take walk in Moscow premium hood Patriarshy Ponds."

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 06:11 AM PDT

A photo essay at Quora — answering the question "What is the most expensive area to live in Moscow?" — by Misha Firer (whose profile says "Lives in Moscow/Brutalsky Son of Quora"). 

Here's the Wikipedia article for "Patriarch Ponds" — "Patriarch's Ponds (Russian: Патриаршие пруды, Patriarshiye prudy) is park, pond and an affluent residential area in downtown Presnensky District of Moscow, Russia. For the last 200 years, there has been only one pond, although, as the name of Tryokhprudny Pereulok (Трёхпрудный переулок, lit. Three-Pond Lane) suggests, there used to be more."

Firer encounters the pond: "And here is a pond. One. Not plural. Where plural I do not know. Tall building in front most expensive apartments in Moscow.... Clothes big difference vulgar and cheap you see office plankton, drivers and such plebs walk around pond inhale airs of wealth."

Most interesting is his observation of the women. For example: "Groomed. Rock face. No emotions or feelings. Hidden deep inside. For special occasions. In private. Is rusky way."

Who is Misha Firer? I found this video:

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 04:57 PM PDT

IMG_1543D

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Here are 8 TikTok videos to amuse you this evening. Let me know what you like best.

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 03:29 PM PDT


2. One more time... with just the best parts.

3. Kevin Bacon would like you to know he's 64 (as of yesterday).


5. When Mother talks to the scam callers... sometimes they cry.


7. If you had a bowl of rice, what would you put on top? (In 5 different countries.)

8. When introverted dogs get together.

Expressions.

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 10:09 AM PDT

"Unlike nouns and pronouns, verbs don’t have 'proverbs' to pick up the pace, although we cheat a little with sentences such as, 'Susan drank wine and Mary did, too.'"

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 10:05 AM PDT

"Verbs are grammatically more complex than nouns but have less to reveal. When you're about to say a verb, you're less likely to be saying something new, so your brain doesn't have to slow down what it's already doing to plan for it."

From "Why Nouns Slow Us Down, and Why Linguistics Might Be in a Bubble" (The New Yorker).

(The title refers to a study that found that in 9 different languages, "the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb....")

Of course, "proverb" is a word. It's just not a word that parallels "pronoun."

That article came out in 2018, before the current obsession with pronouns. These days we ask, What are your pronouns? But it would be more interesting to know: What are your proverbs?

Mine are: Nothing ventured nothing gained and Truth is stranger than fiction.

"What did I learn?... That mathematics is both real and not real. Like novelists and musicians, mathematicians produce thought objects..."

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 09:45 AM PDT

"... that have no presence in the physical world. (Anna Karenina is no more actual than a thought about Anna Karenina.) Like other artists, mathematicians also have the run of a world that others hardly or only rarely visit. For mathematicians, though, this territory has more rules than it does for others. Also, what is different for mathematicians is that all of them agree about the contents of that world, so far as they are acquainted with them, and all mathematicians see the same objects within it, even though the objects are notional. No one's version, so long as it is accurate, is more correct than someone else's. Parts of this world are densely inhabited, and parts are hardly settled. Parts have been visited by only a few people, and parts are unknown, like the dark places on a medieval map. The known parts are ephemeral, but also concrete for being true, and more reliable and everlasting than any object in the physical world.... An imaginary world's being infallible is very strange. This spectral quality is bewildering, even to mathematicians. The mathematician John Conway once said, 'It's quite astonishing, and I still don't understand it, despite having been a mathematician all my life. How can things be there without actually being there?'"

"The bots thing, man, I don’t know. We have talked about this before. Back before the market crashed, back when he was pretending to want to buy Twitter, Musk was pretending..."

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 09:31 AM PDT

"... that he wanted to buy Twitter in order to clean up the bot problem. Now he is pretending to want to get out of the deal because of the bot problem. It is tiresome to pretend to take this seriously, so let's not. Still, as a legal matter... Is this pretext good enough to get him out of the deal? Well, look. If Musk can prove that in fact Twitter has been running a years-long fraud on its shareholders and advertisers — that it has knowingly been massively understating the number of bot accounts in order to trick companies into buying Twitter ads and shareholders into buying Twitter stock — then, sure, maybe that will get him out of the deal. Twitter does represent in the merger agreement that its SEC filings are correct.... If Twitter were simply lying — if it knew that bots were really 75% of mDAUs — then I suppose the rep would be false. Again there is absolutely no evidence for this.... But if you just pretend that Musk can somehow prove that Twitter is lying then... [he] still has to close the deal unless the representation is false and it would have a 'material adverse effect' on Twitter.... Companies advertise on Twitter because it sells products! People use Twitter because other, non-bot people also use Twitter, so it is a useful and enjoyable social network! Elon Musk — who has far more interactions with bots than most Twitter users — is addicted to Twitter because it is full of real people!... The pretense that Elon Musk has somehow exposed the secret truth that nobody uses Twitter except himself and some spam bots is just absurd! But we have to keep talking about it! It's so stupid!"

"President Joe Biden and numerous mainstream media outlets have touted the story of an unidentified 10-year old girl who traveled to Indiana to obtain an abortion..."

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 09:03 AM PDT

"... that was illegal in her home state of Ohio. Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, claimed a child abuse doctor referred to her a 10-year-old patient who was pregnant and seeking an abortion a few days past Ohio's six week limit. The story was originally published in the Cincinnati Enquirer then quickly picked up by national outlets including Politico, The Washington Post, CNN, Teen Vogue, The Hill and numerous other outlets, which did not claim to have independently verified the story and in several cases simply cited previous reports. Bernard's account did not mention specifics such as the name of the young patient's doctor, any of the towns where these events took place, whether charges were being pressed against the child's alleged rapist and at what point, if at all, Bernard or the child abuse doctor contacted the authorities regarding the individual who had impregnated the 10-year-old."


Yes, I have been waiting to hear the name of the rapist and news of his arrest or details about a rape by an unknown man who has eluded arrest. Of course, I care about a 10-year-old girl facing pregnancy and denied access to abortion in her home state. But rape is an even more serious problem! 

If this rape is only coming to our attention because of the difficulty of obtaining an abortion, and if even here we are left to wonder if the rape has been reported to the police, we should think about how much rape has been covered up over the years by abortion. 

Abortion is about womens' and girls' bodily autonomy, but it is also about hiding the evidence of rape, and freedom from rape is even more important than freedom from unwanted pregnancy.

So we should all be demanding to see that the rapist of this 10-year-old girl be brought to justice. But perhaps the story was made up, and that's the reason we don't know the name and the fate of the rapist: There is no such person.

Why would 6 weeks pass without medical attention when a 10-year-old child is raped? Here is an incident that should be immediately reported to the police. If it was not, then it must be that some man — perhaps a family member — was coercing the child to protect him. Is the child still dominated by this man? We should know a lot more about what happened. The need to make the trip from Cincinnati to Indiana is the least of it.

Russell Brand has fun with Kamala Harris's "passage of time" and Joe Biden's difficulty clapping.

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 08:39 AM PDT

"All the kids were screaming and yelling. I remember, I said to the kids, I go, 'Well, OK, well, what do you guys think I did wrong?'"

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 07:00 AM PDT

"And a line formed. These kids said everything about gender, and this and that and the other, but they didn't say anything about art.... And this is my biggest gripe with this whole controversy with 'The Closer': That you cannot report on an artist's work and remove artistic nuance from his words. It would be like if you were reading a newspaper and they say, 'Man Shot In The Face By a Six-Foot Rabbit Expected To Survive,' you'd be like, 'Oh my god,' and they never tell you it's a Bugs Bunny cartoon.... When I heard those talking points coming out of these children's faces, that really, sincerely, hurt me. Because I know those kids didn't come up with those words. I've heard those words before. The more you say I can't say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it... And it has nothing to do with what you're saying I can't say. It has everything to do with my right, my freedom, of artistic expression. That is valuable to me. That is not severed from me. It's worth protecting for me, and it's worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions.... And these kids didn't understand that they were instruments of oppression. And I didn't get mad at them.... They're kids. They're freshmen. They're not ready yet. They don't know."

Said Dave Chappelle, quoted in "Dave Chappelle special quietly released on Netflix, defends trans jokes" (NY Post). I need to watch this immediately.

UPDATE, 8:59 a.m.: I just watched it.

"I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years. It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades..."

Posted: 10 Jul 2022 07:41 AM PDT

"... and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it 'work.'... It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it!.. I was too permeable.... So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that's just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news.... I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong.... Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in 'The Social Dilemma,' when all those tech executives admitted that they didn't let their kids use the products they had created."

She decides that news needs to be rebuilt around human needs. It needs to give people: 1. hope, 2. a sense of agency, and 3. dignity. 

These kids today "are fluent in the thin-gruel cant (diversity, inclusion, equity, anti-racism, antipatriarchy, antiheteronormativity, etc.) of ostensibly political but actually just emotionally satisfying performative demands."

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 04:02 AM PDT

Says George Will, in "How millennials became aggressively illiberal, censorious young adults" (WaPo).
In a flattened world drained of greatness, today's steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity's lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation's unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the "information age." LOL.

I wondered: How old is George Will? Answer: 81.

"Crimo attempted suicide in April 2019. Then, in September of the same year, he announced to his family that he wanted 'to kill everyone.'"

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 03:53 AM PDT

"Police visited the Highland Park home where Crimo lived with his father and uncle, and confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword. Because no complaints were filed, there was no further investigation. Still, if these incidents didn't raise red flags, then the world must be color blind. Three months later, Robert Crimo began buying guns with his father's signed approval. The real quiet kid passed four federal background checks, purchasing five guns — including the one used at the parade.... Had Bob Crimo been nosier, he might have discovered that his quiet son was quite loquacious as his online persona named Awake The Rapper. Posting thousands of videos, songs, messages and photos, he was a young man clearly obsessed with violence.... He was also a dedicated contributor to an online forum where people share violent photos and videos of people dying. How could so many have missed what is now so obvious?"

"A pickup truck in front of her — driven by her husband, with her children aboard — took a powerful hit from a cloud-to-ground lightning bolt."

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 02:56 AM PDT

"He and the kids were fine, although the truck was reported to be 'completely fried.'... [T]he steel-framed vehicle acted as a 'faraday cage,' in which the current of the lightning bolt goes around the metal body and typically exits to the ground from the tires. The strike will avoid people as long as everyone is inside the vehicle and not touching the outside metal. This is also a reason aircraft are often struck by lightning without major damage. Concurrently with the first flash, a bright orange sheath surrounds the spot where it connects with the truck as sparks erupt in all directions. In less than a blink of an eye, two more rapid-fire flashes are seen, as is smoke rising from the impact location."


Here's the amazing video.

"Providers of sex education in schools are teaching children that prostitution is a 'rewarding job' and failed to advise a 14-year-old girl having sex with a 16-year-old boy that it was illegal."

Posted: 09 Jul 2022 02:44 AM PDT

"Outside organisations teaching children about sex also promote 'kinks' such as being locked in a cage, flogged, caned, beaten and slapped in the face, The Times has found.... Last night campaigners said that 'inclusiveness is overriding child safeguarding' and that the materials were 'bordering on illegal.' This week Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner, revealed that she would review sex education being taught in schools after Miriam Cates, an MP, was contacted by a parent whose nine-year-old child came home 'shaking' and 'white as a sheet because they'd been taught in detail about rape.'  Relationship and sex education (RSE) became compulsory in English secondary schools in 2020, with many contracting out the teaching. Since then an industry has sprung up of providers who produce resources and go into schools to teach sex education and gender issues... The Proud Trust produced a range of resources called Alien Nation that asked primary schoolchildren aged seven to 11 whether they felt closest to 'planet boy, planet girl, planet non-binary.' It also asks: 'Which planet were you sent to as a baby' and 'What would your ideal planet be like?'"

There are lots of comments at that link. The one with the most up-votes is: "The things that are going on are barely distinguishable from grooming."

The part about prostitution as a "rewarding job" was about a post at a website, Bish, "an online guide to sex and relationships for children aged over 14," written by Justin Hancock, who "teaches sex education in schools and provides teacher training on sex education."
In [a] post on the site, a reader wrote to say that she felt "dirty" after being coerced into having sex for money. Hancock replied: "There are many many people doing sex work who do enjoy what they do — even if they don't necessarily enjoy the sex. It can be a really difficult job but many people find it rewarding — just like other jobs.

"This is especially true if sex workers mainly have good clients, which I don't think you do. If you did want to continue, maybe you could get better clients?"

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 05:42 PM PDT

IMG_1537D

... you can write about whatever you like in the comments.

A lunchtime TikTok break. I've got 8 selections. Let me know what you like.

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 10:00 AM PDT

1. Feeling really blessed and lucky to hear the northern bobwhite.

2.  Joe Biden explains sex.

3. The interior decoration style of various men, based on their clothing style.

4. A woman is mystified by the phenomenon that is pick-up basketball.

5. A cathedral of milk and other AI-generated images.

6. I don't usually select videos about dementia, however good they are, but this one is an exception — about remembering love.

7. The most steadfast sister comforts her brother.

8. Certified vibesmith teaches you how to vibe professionally.

"The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters to return absentee ballots, giving the state’s Republicans a major victory in their efforts to limit voting access in urban areas."

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 08:35 AM PDT

"The 4-to-3 ruling by the court's conservative majority will take effect for Wisconsin's primary elections next month, though its true impact most likely will not be felt until the November general election. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, both face what are expected to be very close re-election bids. The court adopted a literal interpretation of state law, finding that returning an absentee ballot to a municipal clerk, as Justice Rebecca G. Bradley wrote for the majority, 'does not mean nor has it been historically understood to mean delivery to an unattended ballot drop box.'"

"I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative."

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 05:20 AM PDT

"His promise to 'drain the swamp' was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to 'drain the swamp' in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to 'Make America Great Again' in 1980. Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history's stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I'm genuinely asking. Bottom line, Trump is an extremely tedious dude to have had in our face for seven years and running."


ADDED: I'm contemplating the writing: "from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end." That's kind of good, isn't it? Hemorrhage implies blood, and ketchup is used sometimes as fake blood. It's a little unmixed metaphor to discover.
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