Saturday, July 16, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day today is, we are told, "humorous," "obsolete," and "Apparently an isolated use."

Posted: 15 Jul 2022 02:47 PM PDT

It seems silly to make an obsolete word the Word of the Day, but it is a silly word: "pantopragmatics." 

Definition: "The notional branch of knowledge dealing with meddling in all things."

There's one quote, perhaps the only existing quote, unless we start using it, now that it's been pointed out:
1860    T. L. Peacock Gryll Grange viii, in  Fraser's Mag. May 617   Two or three..arch-quacks, have taken to merry-andrewising in a new arena, which they call the Science of Pantopragmatics.
Which raises the question what is "merry-andrewsing"? A "merry-andrew" is "A person who entertains people with antics and buffoonery; a clown; a mountebank's assistant.... In extended use: a fool, an idiot; a joker." And Peacock just made a verb out of it.

Here, you can read "Gryll Grange" in its entirety at Project Gutenberg. Sample text:
Barring his absurdities, in the way of lecturing on fish, and of shining in absurd company in the science of pantopragmatics, he has very much to recommend him: and I discover in him one quality which is invaluable. He does all he can to make himself agreeable to all about him, and he has great tact in seeing how to do it. In any intimate relation of life—with a reasonable wife, for instance—he would be the pink of a good husband....

He liked to shine in conversation, and there was scarcely a subject which could be mooted in any society, on which his multifarious attainments did not qualify him to say something. He was readily taken by novelty in doctrine, and followed a new lead with great pertinacity; and in this way he had been caught by the science of pantopragmatics, and firmly believed for a time that a scientific organisation for teaching everybody everything would cure all the evils of society....

"My position on Khashoggi has been so clear. If anyone doesn’t understand it, in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, then they haven’t been around for a while."

Posted: 15 Jul 2022 09:46 AM PDT

Said President Biden, quoted in "Biden lands in Saudi Arabia — a country he once vowed to make a 'pariah'" (Axios).

What is a "pariah"? Can you visit pariahs, if there's something you want from them?

The historical meaning of "Pariah" is (OED):
A member of a scheduled tribe of South India concentrated in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, originally functioning notably as sorcerers and ceremonial drummers and also as labourers and servants, but later increasingly as 'untouchables' in insanitary occupations.
Or (also historical): 
A member of any low caste; a person of no caste, an outcaste.
The current meaning — "The word is considered highly offensive in this sense in southern India" — is:
A member of a despised class of any kind; someone or something shunned or avoided; a social outcast.

Knowing that there are people in India who hear this word as highly offensive, I would recommend avoiding it. Why express antagonism toward Saudi Arabia for its evil action by using a word that expresses unjustified hatred toward an oppressed group?

In any case, if Biden is visiting Saudi Arabia and seeking favor from them, he's quite specifically not treating them like a pariah. And yet he doubles down with this idea that if we don't "understand it," we're the one with the problem. We must be naive and lacking in experience. 

"I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place."

Posted: 15 Jul 2022 09:11 AM PDT

Said Ruy Teixeira, quoted in "'A real chilling effect': A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI/Ruy Teixeira predicted Obama's rise. Now he's scorning DC's liberal think tanks for caring more about diversity than class" (Politico).
To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP [Center for American Progress], and the rest of Washington's institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms.... 
"I'd say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff," he says. "It's just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it's become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, 'How should the left handle these?' ...
"It's just cloud cuckoo land," he says. "The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out."... 
Unlike some of the other conflicts in the now-voluminous older-normies-versus-young-graduates canon, Teixeira's does not involve claims of being snubbed or censored or canceled or maligned.... But, he says, the way projects work in think-tank world means that when an institution doesn't embrace a scholar's interests and ideas, life gets harder....
Going back to the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick, AEI [American Enterprise Institute] has long had a constituency of academics who didn't quite fit in on campuses; it also had fellows, like Norm Ornstein, who didn't fit the conservative mold.... One veteran of conservative think tanks tells me.... "AEI has already alienated the people who stand in the mainstream of the Republican Party by being the home of the Never Trumpers. This is doubling down."... Yuval Levin, who runs the AEI Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies shop where Teixeira and many of the other unlikely newbies have landed, says thinking of think-tank work as simply a collection of policy papers ignores how profoundly unusual the current moment is in America....

"People are being prescribed how they should talk, how to write, and now how to party. This prudish nannying of the politically correct brigade must stop. We are heading for an anti-fun society."

Posted: 15 Jul 2022 05:05 AM PDT

That's a quote from Bild, "the powerful German tabloid," in "Schlager louts? Row erupts over 'sexist' pop hit in Germany/Town festival authorities refuse to play chart-topping Layla by DJ Robin & Schürze, prompting complaints of censorship" (The Guardian).
They are loud in volume, unsophisticated in tune and often offensively bawdy in content. With titles ranging from Sex With a Bavarian to Big Tits Potato Salad, the ballermann sub-genre of schlager pop is a big hit in German-dominated nightclubs on the Balearic island of Mallorca.... 
Layla, by DJ Robin & Schürze, which has sat atop the German singles charts for the last three weeks, is a song about a madam at a brothel who is "more beautiful, younger, foxier" than the other sex workers at her establishment....

I'm surprised anyone cares about sexy lyrics anymore. It's almost touching. I looked up the lyrics to "Layla" (which is obviously not the old Derek and the Dominoes number). Here's the English translation. It says "more beautiful, younger, hornier," by the way. I'm glad The Guardian protected me with "foxier," even as it went out of its way to say "Big Tits Potato Salad."

This is the second time today — and it's only 6:49 a.m. — that I've been smacked in the face by "tits" when I was just trying to read a stodgy old mainstream publication. I was looking up the word "slurp" in the OED, because I wanted to see if it did in fact originate in onomatopoeia, as implied by a crossword puzzle clue I'd just seen. Well, look at the the 1971 quote under the figurative use:


 

Here's the book, by Brian Aldiss, "A Soldier Erect: or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy" It was a best-seller in England, we're told. 

From a 5-star review at Amazon:

A great memoir of soldiering. I shared many similar experiences in my day and wouldn't trade them for anything. The overwhelming drive for sex in any form especially rang true, excepting of course when in combat. Always on the lookout for a quiet place to crank one out... The ongoing war with the locals interspersed with endless training in abysmal circumstances... Thank you Brian Aldiss for bringing it all back. I'm not quite that man any more but I'll be forever grateful that I once was.

"The agglomeration of legal talent on both sides of Twitter v. Musk is mind-boggling—as is the amount of money being billed on this case."

Posted: 15 Jul 2022 05:10 AM PDT

"But with stakes ranging from a $1 billion breakup fee on the low end to a $44 billion acquisition on the high end, with lots of room for a settlement in between, there's plenty of cash sloshing around to cover the lawyers' fees.... Who will prevail in the end? I agree with the conventional wisdom that Twitter has the upper hand. It seems to me that Musk simply got a case of buyer's remorse, especially after the stock market (including Tesla's share price) went south.... [T]he reasons given by Musk for walking away seem pretextual. Yes, specific performance is generally a disfavored remedy in contract law compared to money damages.... [but Delaware] Chancery has not hesitated to order specific performance of billion-dollar M&A deals in the past... [I]f Twitter v. Musk goes to trial, the spectacle will be incredible. I'm not big on scatology, so I tuned out Amber Heard's testimony about poop on the bed. But Elon Musk testifying about his poop emojis? I'm here for it."

Writes David Lat (at Original Jurisdiction).

When are things melodramatic enough that we feel like watching? If we are lawyers, then maybe contracts worth a big enough amount of money are enough. I will never forget the way a partner — at the "biglaw" firm where I worked before I became a lawprof — overpronounced the "b" in "billions." If it's a "b" and not an "m," you'd better stand in awe. I wanted to work on cases that had interesting issues, and for that, in that place, I got called "an intellectual."

Speaking of "b" and "m," long ago, when I was growing up, the conventional word for the substance that is now called "poop" — when speaking around children and other delicate folk — was "b.m." At least in the region where I lived, the place with the famous Chancery Court, Delaware. People would say, "Oh, no, I stepped in dog b.m." or "This place smells like b.m." 

And as long as we are talking about Elon Musk and melodrama and scampering away from high finance to more lowly things, here's this new headline in the NY Post: "Elon Musk's dad, 76, confirms secret second child — with his stepdaughter" ("Elon has not publicly commented on his father's latest baby admission. The pair are still estranged, with Elon describing his dad as a 'terrible human being'...").

"The fact that she has yet to be publicly branded as a rape survivor who got an abortion does not lessen the trauma she’s likely experiencing..."

Posted: 15 Jul 2022 03:18 AM PDT

"... as her tale gets bandied about in the news. What does it say about a political movement that expects a literal child to carry that much weight? Why do we consistently expect the most vulnerable members of society to not merely endure the most grotesque violations but to publicly broadcast their traumas for the good of the rest of us? What might it look like if abortion-rights advocacy didn't hinge on the personal traumas of those most harmed by abortion restrictions — if, instead of highlighting the deaths, the imprisonments, the pregnant children, we simply started from the position that abortion is, at a fundamental level, both health care and a social good? What if, instead of evoking the trauma of a nameless 10-year-old, Biden had offered a platform to people who are proud to talk about how easy access to abortion enabled them to plan their lives, and their families, on their own terms?... Promoting that framework for abortion would [empower] the most vulnerable abortion seekers... to decide when, and how, to share the story of their trauma on their own terms and not on anyone else's."

Writes Lux Alptraum in "A 10-Year-Old Survivor Shouldn't Be the Face of This Fight" (New York Magazine).

The suffering of a child is offered up as a counterweight to the destruction of the life of the unborn. That's the answer to those questions, as I'm sure Alptraum realizes. But her point stands. She's asking abortion supporters to resist using vulnerable persons as leverage in the fight for access to abortion.

Sunrise — 5:32, 5:34.

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 05:13 PM PDT

IMG_1619

IMG_1624

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

I've got 5 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 05:19 PM PDT

1. A way of planting potatoes.

2. A way of slicing apples.

3. Camping... and terrorized by ducks.

4. A song about thinking of what you wanted to say long after it's too late.

5. Coming upon a sandwich station that someone else did.

"James Webb Space Telescope images ranked by how good they look to eat."

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 09:53 AM PDT

Ha ha. 

That's the first headline I read — absolutely not kidding — after I emerged from the comments section of the first post of the day, where I'd just written 4 comments bouncing off the question — posed by Inga — "How can any human not be in awe?"

1. "If you're so lacking in imagination, then your idea of what is objectively awesome is meaningless."  

2. "BTW, what is 'awe'? OED: 'Originally: a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine. Subsequently: a feeling of reverential respect, mixed with wonder or fear, typically as inspired by a person of great authority, accomplishments, etc., or (from the 18th century) by the power or beauty of the natural world.'"

3. "'Reverence' is 'Deep respect, veneration, or admiration for someone or something, esp. a person or thing regarded as sacred or holy.'"  

4. "What is the object of respect here — the universe itself or the images human beings were able to produce? I think it's the latter."

This post gets my "religion substitutes" tag. And I have imagination enough to know that some of us don't do religion or even have a "religion-shaped hole" that we hanker to have something jammed into.

In any case, many of us feel suspicious of the color-and-shape manipulations of these images. They're nudging us too much, insisting that we feel awe. It's a little like the January 6th Committee's over-produced show that insists that we feel anger and outrage. And some people don't think hardcore pornography is sexy. What X thinks is so sexy is exactly what makes it not sexy at all to Y. Maybe something subtler, something more real. Something human.

So let's take a look at "James Webb Space Telescope images ranked by how good they look to eat," a column, in WaPo, by Alexandra Petri:

#4 Carina Nebula — Hmm, I am not sure about eating this. On the one hand, it looks savory, and I love savory eats! That rich brown color would go great in a stew or a steak pie! On the other hand, though, the texture. The texture looks, not to put too fine a point on it, very dusty. That's not a characteristic I like in food! When I look at this, my first thought (after about 90 minutes of thoughts that are awe and wonder about the cosmos and our place in it) is: This looks like mushroom powder. Or the gravy you get in a packet. It might be okay to dip a chip in, but I am not raring to get at it, exactly. I think I would have a little of it if the person I was with said it was good, but if it were just an hors d'oeuvre being thrust at me, I might demur.

Oh! She had to put in that parenthentical! 

"PICTURED: Horrific injuries of selfie-taking US tourist, 23, who toppled into Mount Vesuvius as he tried to retrieve his phone when it fell into the volcano."

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 06:06 AM PDT

 Headline at The Daily Mail.

Philip Carroll, 23, of Maryland was hiking with family members on a forbidden trail up the notorious Mount Vesuvius/At the 4,000-foot summit he stopped to take a selfie to memorialize his achievement/Carroll lost his grip on his cellphone and it landed a few meters inside the lip of the crater....
'He tried to recover it, but slipped and slid a few meters into the crater. He managed to stop his fall, but at that point he was stuck.... He was very lucky. If he kept going, he would have plunged 300 meters into the crater.'...

There's something very grand about Vesuvius, and he didn't die, so we hear about it. But how many people a year die from falling while trying to "memorialize the achievement" of climbing to some high position by taking a selfie?

I think the typical selfie death fall involves turning your back to the edge of a precipice and then taking a step backward or leaning or posing and losing balance. But this was a case of dropping the phone and grabbing at it. Mega-stupid. But he doesn't even get a Darwin Award!

"Biden is the third U.S. president to visit Israel since 2013, and his visit is undeniably the most boring of them all."

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 04:57 AM PDT

"That's not a criticism of Biden, however. In fact, the opposite is true – it's a compliment. The uneventful and uncontroversial first day of his visit, which included fist bumps and handshakes at the airport, an exhibition of Israeli defense systems and a trip to Yad Vashem, represents a good kind of boring, which had been missing from the U.S.-Israel relationship under Biden's two predecessors. When Donald Trump arrived in Israel in May 2017... [all the media] it had to do was place a camera in front of America's erratic president... and let his unpredictable behavior and immature understanding of the world speak for themselves.... [Obama's] visit to Israel in 2013 was also great TV drama – a tense meeting between two rivals who had just spent the four years of Obama's first term fighting each other over endless policy disagreements.... [Biden's visit] truly is a boring visit.... Israel is better off with a president who comes here for 48 hours, sees an Iron Dome battery, pledges to stop Iran from getting nukes, greets the American team at the Maccabiah games, and moves on to his next, more urgent challenges."

Spelling Bee appeals to the women.

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 04:39 AM PDT

I reveal the first 2 things I found in today's NYT Spelling Bee:

Full view:

"During the Apollo era... NASA flooded the public domain with views of both the astronauts themselves and photographs taken by the astronauts."

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 02:55 AM PDT

"One goal was bottling wonder.... In the decades after Apollo funding evaporated, a new visual culture emerged from NASA missions connected to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California and a cohort of Hollywood-adjacent scientists like Carl Sagan. They promoted a new rationale for wandering into the expanse for the sake of intellectual curiosity, not just to beat the Russians."

Yet President Biden remained grounded in the old rationale. He said: "These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things."

In the new rationale, we don't get a flood of photographs. We get a slow succession of carefully chosen, heavily processed images.

The news media and politicians were invited to galas to see eagerly anticipated first glimpses of other planets, beamed back like postcards from sightseeing drives through the solar system. In this era, at the inception of digital imagery, engineers on missions like Voyager often experimented with combining multi-wavelength data into pictures with ultra-vivid hues, said Elizabeth Kessler, a historian of visual culture at Stanford. "They just look like throbbing, shifting, morphing, psychedelic colors," she said.... 
In 2016, a committee of representatives from the Space Telescope Science Institute, NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies convened to start choosing Webb's very first demo targets. They checked off boxes that vibed with the telescope's scientific goals: a deeper-than-ever deep field, galaxies pulsing in the void like jellyfish, a star with an attendant exoplanet, star-forming regions like the Carina Nebula and more.... 
Stars in Webb images have six points, unlike the four spikes common in most space photography, a quirk that emerges from the quantum mumbo-jumbo of how incoming photons lap against this telescope's structure and are then gathered up by its hexagonal mirrors. In particular wavelengths.... clouds that would otherwise look diffuse seem to have hard soap-bubble surfaces, skins of interstellar gas that are absorbing ultraviolet light from nearby stars and shining it back into space as infrared radiation. And in the mid-infrared, when space itself looks afire because of glowing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced by aging stars, colors again get wonky. 'We end up having psychedelic purple clouds'.... 
Will anything land as hard as the Apollo shots?

Part of the science is the science of our emotions and how to manipulate them with images. We are expected to gape and gasp "wow." Color is big. The word psychedelic keeps coming up. Composition matters. They choose to put solid-looking "vaguely geologic structures" at the bottom to mentally orient us in something that feels like a landscape:

Think 19th-century paintings from surveys of the Western frontier, the photography of Ansel Adams, background scenery in countless Westerns — or El Capitan, from Yosemite National Park, looming in the desktop background of a Mac computer.

They are hoping this will "land as hard as the Apollo shots." I remember how Apollo interfaced with the public. I was a skeptic at the time. I'm quick to feel the manipulation and resist. I'm not saying the science isn't worthy, only that what we are getting is a show about science. 

At the Wildflower Café...

Posted: 13 Jul 2022 04:55 PM PDT

IMG_1498

 ... you can write about anything you want (including the Chinese government and TikTok).

Overheard at Meadhouse.

Posted: 13 Jul 2022 05:13 PM PDT

I think this is a great set of TikToks. I think people are going to like them. I've got them trained now to talk about whether they like them. None of this ooh, the Chinese government. You just gave your telephone number to Donald Trump. Truth Social. Call me, Donald. 

Include me in your group text. Let me know when you're having your next insurrection.

Text me, Donald. Include me in the insur-text-ion.

The real one, this time. 

We're going full John Bolton. 

Never go full John Bolton.

Here are 8 TikToks for your delectation tonight. Let me know what you like best.

Posted: 13 Jul 2022 04:14 PM PDT

 1. You know what it means when you kick the Italian husband under the table.

2. That feeling, halfway through a hike.

3. What kind of reader are you?

4. Sometimes there really is a rescue possum.

5. Sometimes the cat is satanic.

6. Meet Andrea, the on-line influencer.

7. "Yeah, space is sexy. It's also none of my business...."

8. "Is baby talk ever acceptable?"
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