Althouse

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• "The defendant decided he was above the law, and he didn’t have to follow the government’s orders like his fellow citizens. So this whole case is about a guy who just refused to show up? Yes, it is that simple."
• "Mr. Brand uses no special technique to produce his images.... He doesn’t use filters, preferring his special effects to come from a reflection in water or a dramatic angle of light..."
• "[Matthew] Crawford is out to defend what he calls 'homo moto,' the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it..."
• "The vast majority of people here are pro-choice. And the very vast majority of people here think that these protesters have gotten out of control."
• "Am I the only one who liked the girl afraid to drop in?…one father-daughter dynamic 2022 in a nutshell. Plus, she can drop in."
• A sunrise sequence.
• "She was outstanding. Beautiful inside and out. We began all of it, our lives together, with such a great relationship."
• Updates on 2 recently blogged NYC stories.

"The defendant decided he was above the law, and he didn’t have to follow the government’s orders like his fellow citizens. So this whole case is about a guy who just refused to show up? Yes, it is that simple." Posted: 20 Jul 2022 09:01 AM PDT Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Vaughn argued to the jury, quoted in "Prosecutor: Steve Bannon thumbed his nose at the law/Outside court, the defendant denounced the House Jan. 6 committee and the case against him" (WaPo). Lawyers for Bannon dismissed Vaughn's characterization, saying their client was still negotiating with the House Jan. 6 committee when he was accused of a crime. "No one ignored the subpoena," said defense lawyer M. Evan Corcoran. "It's called negotiation, it's called accommodation."...  After Tuesday's trial testimony ended, Bannon erupted outside the courthouse, blasting the head of the Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and repeating false claims that Trump, not Biden, was the true winner of the 2020 election."They're charging me with a crime?" Bannon fumed. "Have the guts and the courage to show up here and say exactly why it's a crime."  It is highly unusual for a defendant to speak publicly outside court in the middle of his own trial, let alone criticize decisions about which witnesses appear.  Bannon also predicted that Republicans would win back the House in November and create a new Jan. 6 committee that will function far differently than the existing panel, which he derided as a "show trial." ... Here's the description of how Bannon looked in court: "Wearing one dark button-down shirt over another, a black suit jacket and a black mask, Bannon, 68, leaned forward at the defense table and listened intently." He's "pugilistic," we're told. The defense attorney urged jurors to question the motivation behind testimony or evidence presented by prosecutors. "My single request for you is to think about it and ask yourself: Is this piece of evidence affected by politics?" he said.... The two misdemeanor contempt charges Bannon faces are each punishable by at least 30 days and up to one year in jail. But criminal trials over contempt of Congress are exceedingly rare, and serving time in jail for a conviction is even rarer. It has been about seven decades since someone went to jail for that offense — a seminal case in U.S. political and legal history involving the First Amendment, the Cold War and political efforts to publicly shame suspected communists.  In 1947, 10 movie directors and screenwriters refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee about their alleged ties to communists. The Hollywood Ten, as they were known, were convicted, and the Supreme Court ultimately rejected their appeals, sending them to jail in the early 1950s, in what many historians now consider one of the worst instances of red-baiting during the Cold War era. In 1957, the Supreme Court sought to rein in what it had come to view as the excesses of the red-hunting days, ruling in favor of an Illinois labor official, John Watkins, who agreed to answer some questions about people he knew who were communists, but refused to answer questions about people whose communist associations or activities were in the past. Through the Watkins case and other decisions, the high court discouraged the Justice Department from pursuing more contempt of Congress cases.....

"Mr. Brand uses no special technique to produce his images.... He doesn’t use filters, preferring his special effects to come from a reflection in water or a dramatic angle of light..." Posted: 20 Jul 2022 09:24 AM PDT "... rather than from software. He simply finds his subject and frames it, zooms in and then touches the screen to lock the focus where he wants it — and takes multiples of every subject to improve his odds of success." From "It's Time to Slow Down and Appreciate Nature's Tiny Marvels/Grab your iPhone: Andrew Brand wants to show you a side of your garden that you've never seen before (and how to photograph it)" (NYT). Some nice photos at the link — closeups of plants, insects, dew. The key is to keep looking at details and notice when there's good light. You always have your iPhone (or whatever phone), so you're fully equipped to get the photo. You just have to be there and to see. I recommend getting out around sunrise, and not just to catch the sunrise. The light on the ground is better, and the things on the ground are always changing. Where I go, different sets of wildflowers rise up and then fade. Every week, it's different. 2 weeks ago it was milkweed. Last week it was verbena and rattlesnake master. Now, it's coneflowers and butterfly weed. But just because it's there doesn't mean you can get a good photograph of it. The light has to bless you.  At 5:35 a.m. on July 14, 2022, the light shone on the rattlesnake master:    I saw these plants later in the day, and the white-green color was gone.

"[Matthew] Crawford is out to defend what he calls 'homo moto,' the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it..." Posted: 20 Jul 2022 07:03 AM PDT "... who uses a 'car or a motorcycle as a kind of prosthetic that amplifies our embodied capacities,' who gains freedom, familiarity and mastery by navigating swiftly through a complex landscape. Driving, Crawford argues, remains an important 'form of organic civic life' and a 'realm of interaction that demands the skills of cooperation and improvisation.' Whereas its possible replacements, especially the supposed self-driving utopia, transform democratic agents into isolated passengers moving under algorithmic power, no longer 'mentally involved in our own navigation and locomotion,' ruled, scrutinized and passive...."  Writes Ross Douthat, in  "What Driving Means for America" (NYT). Matthew Crawford book — which Douthat read as he drove his family across the country in a minivan — is "Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road." More from Douthat: [W]hile Crawford wants to defend the road as a seedbed for democratic virtues, he is himself a natural automotive aristocrat — a well-trained mechanic who loves to refit battered vehicles, a motorcyclist drawn to intense auto-subcultures.... I have spent most of my life driving station wagons and minivans....  The virtues involved in being a good driver — the mix of independence and cooperation, knowledge and responsibility — really are virtues well suited to citizenship in a sprawling and diverse republic. And if driving makes some people distinctly anxious, learning to do it well, or just well enough, is also a tonic for anxiety, an easily available antidote to the sense that the world is pure chaos, beyond anyone's control. That anxious, hopeless sense seems particularly widespread among younger Americans, the same group retreating from car culture....  If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place? If you do not drive your country's highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble? If the road is a "seedbed for democratic virtues," what politics grow out of these different driving experiences? A loner without a schedule who's concocted his own hotrod will not develop into the same sort of citizen as the a man with NYT columns to write enduring the forced togetherness of 3 weeks in a minivan with his wife and kids. What form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking down which byway? For the last few months, until just the other day, we owned 3 vehicles — my beloved 17-year-old Audi TT, a 4-year-old Honda CRV, and a new Ford F-150 truck with a slide-in camper. One of these had to go, and it's easy to see which one fails the love test. It's also the completely practical, functional one, the one you'd want if you moved about the highways and byways with a family. We sold the CRV, of course. Wouldn't you, if you were us?  Now, the 2 vehicles represent big extremes in the seeking of mastery and knowledge.

"The vast majority of people here are pro-choice. And the very vast majority of people here think that these protesters have gotten out of control." Posted: 20 Jul 2022 05:21 AM PDT Said Lyric Winik, who lives "several homes down from" Brett Kavanaugh," on a "narrow street of towering trees, tightly spaced homes and families with young children" in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  Quoted in "Brett Kavanaugh's neighbors: For abortion rights but tired of protests/Weekly demonstrations on their street prompt increased noise complaints; police warn of possible arrests" (WaPo). Last Wednesday, officers indicated protesters were edging closer to being arrested. Demonstrators take strong exception to the reactions, saying that to whatever extent they disrupt tranquility, it is part of a much more important message — bringing attention to how a number of justices altered the lives of millions — and a message could be even stronger with the residents' participation. As they chanted recently: "Out of your houses and into the streets!" "We already have our rights being taken away," said Sadie Kuhns, 28, who has been a liaison for the abortion rights advocates in conversations with police each week. "We're having our voices, literally the volume of our voices, policed, on top of everything else that we've already been stripped of."  At a more appropriate location for a protest: "Lawmakers, abortion rights protesters arrested outside Supreme Court/Democratic Reps. Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley were among the dozens of protesters arrested" (WaPo). The charge was "crowding, obstructing or incommoding." A D.C. law that, we're told is "often cited when arresting protesters during peaceful, planned and coordinated actions of civil disobedience such as the demonstration on Tuesday." It's not really civil disobedience, because the law they were breaking (allegedly) is not the law they are protesting. They're not protesting the D.C. law against crowding, obstructing, and incommoding by engaging in crowding, obstructing, and incommoding. They are crowding, obstructing, or incommoding to express outrage and call attention to the loss of the right of access to abortion.  The way to engage in civil disobedience to the overruling of Roe v. Wade would be to participate in the delivery of abortion services in a place where state law bars abortion. I'm not recommending that violation of law. I'm just saying that would meet the definition of civil disobedience.

"Am I the only one who liked the girl afraid to drop in?…one father-daughter dynamic 2022 in a nutshell. Plus, she can drop in." Posted: 20 Jul 2022 04:43 AM PDT Writes Barbara, in the comments to last night's TikTok post. That prompted farmgirl: Barbara- I just watched the Father/daughter. That is what America should look like. What a great Dad!! I'd only written "She's scared to drop in." So I didn't let on what an immensely cool father/daughter interaction there was. It makes me want to be more obvious: @chasing.sage ♬ Adore - Instrumental - GC

A sunrise sequence. Posted: 19 Jul 2022 05:43 PM PDT Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"She was outstanding. Beautiful inside and out. We began all of it, our lives together, with such a great relationship." Posted: 19 Jul 2022 05:31 PM PDT Said Donald Trump, about Ivana Trump. He'd called up NY Post columnist Cindy Adams, because he was "just thinking how well you knew Ivana. You knew her very well. You knew her from the first." Adams asked what he remembered about Ivana, and he said: "That she was different. That she never gave up. Beautiful, yes, but she was also a hard worker. No matter how rough things were or how badly they looked she never fell down. She went from communism to our lives together. She took nothing for granted." Never fell down. Adams asked "if he thought we were about to also lose our country," and he said: "It's horrible. We've never been at such a low point. That trip to Saudi Arabia? We have more oil than they have. This man in Washington is setting us all back. Setting everybody back."

Updates on 2 recently blogged NYC stories. Posted: 19 Jul 2022 05:22 PM PDT 1. "DA Alvin Bragg drops murder charge against bodega worker Jose Alba" (NY Post): "The DA's office filed a motion in Manhattan Criminal Court to dismiss the case against the 61-year-old bodega worker after an investigation found it couldn't prove the 'defendant was not justified in his use of deadly physical force.'" Blogged here on July 11th. 2. "Shack attack: NYC demolishes Manhattan Bridge hobo's makeshift SRO" (NY Post): "The street denizen who was living rent free among the city's most amazing river views, did not appear to be around when his makeshift shack off to the side of the historic span's bike path was destroyed and the splintered pieces carted off, said local fruit vendor Mohammed Ali." Blogged here on July 17th.

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