Althouse

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• Sunrise — 5:25, 5:30.
• Beasts of Wisconsin.
• "Estimates of just how many babies will be born because of new abortion restrictions vary. One researcher suggests 75,000, another 180,000."
• "The breeding kink—intense sexual attraction to the idea of getting pregnant, or getting someone else pregnant—is having a moment right now."
• "I was surprised that the dissenters never tried to defend the right to abortion and never try and offer an alternative ground. They relied entirely on stare decisis."
• "When he was 12, Mr. Brook had fallen in love with the heroine of 'War and Peace' and decided to marry someone named Natasha."
• "[John Andrew] Rice and his fellow dissidents believed that a college should be owned and run by its faculty and students."
• "Often the problem is 'death by a thousand cuts'... when we garden too aggressively in the root zone" of a tree.
• "Always love your photos, the rising and the setting. How about you take a stab at D Millbank(sic, maybe)’s defense of Biden in WaPo today."

Sunrise — 5:25, 5:30. Posted: 07 Jul 2022 06:20 PM PDT Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Beasts of Wisconsin. Posted: 07 Jul 2022 05:28 PM PDT 1. There are 24,000 bears in Wisconsin: "The DNR said in 1989 there were only about 9,000 black bears in the state. Now the population is up to 24,000. 'Our bear population has been steadily increasing and expanding southward'...." 2. They found an alligator in Long Lake in Fond du Lac County.  3. We spotted 6 foxes romping together in our neighbor's lawn just before sunrise the other day. They were very active, even trying to run up a tree. The next day, same time and place, I saw them again. At what point do you say, now, there are too many foxes? 4. Seen today in great numbers: very tiny toads/frogs (about a half inch long), extremely nervous chipmunks, rabbits (doing their best to look like rocks), turkeys.

"Estimates of just how many babies will be born because of new abortion restrictions vary. One researcher suggests 75,000, another 180,000." Posted: 07 Jul 2022 05:29 PM PDT I'm reading "Many more babies will be born post-'Dobbs.' We need to help them and their moms" by Alyssa Rosenberg (WaPo). That's 75,000 to 180,000 per year. Rosenberg doesn't seem to notice that to emphasize the number of new babies is to say, implicitly, that during the reign of Roe, that's the number, per year, that were quietly and invisibly kept from our presence. But Rosenberg calls our attention to the importance of making life in America good for parents and children. The end of Roe creates an opportunity to lobby for things like better child care and health services. I would think most of those who longed for an end to Roe would want to join forces with women's rights advocates and work to lighten the burdens of parenthood.  That's Rosenberg's pitch: It may feel daunting to think bigger and do more than merely try to claw back the rights so recently lost. But these times demand that the entire country — not only those in the abortion-rights camp — be more ambitious. In this extraordinary moment, feminists and family policy advocates should welcome conservatives who are willing to heed the call from former congressional Republican staffers Mark Rodgers and Kiki Bradley to "increase our commitment and, through public resources, help carry the load that we are asking many women to bear."...  Access to abortion may have let some Americans disregard our broader failures to support mothers and babies. That excuse is gone.

"The breeding kink—intense sexual attraction to the idea of getting pregnant, or getting someone else pregnant—is having a moment right now." Posted: 07 Jul 2022 05:00 PM PDT "A deluge of viral TikToks of users are professing their yearning to breed and be bred. A porn creator told Vice this week about a recent surge in demand for 'breeding' content. There is quite literally a WebMD article on breeding fetishism, not to mention an entire genre of horror movies and documentaries about unethical fertility doctors secretly fathering hundreds of kids. And the discovery of Elon Musk's eighth and ninth (known) children on Wednesday led the richest man in the world to triumphantly tweet: 'Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,' and 'I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!' I'm reading "Does Elon Musk Have a 'Breeding Kink?'/To ascertain whether or not Musk has a breeding fetish is to wade into territory that I'm not sure I have the stomach for—but I'm doing this for journalism" by Kylie Cheung (Jezebel). Cheung answers her question: [I]t seems very possible Musk doesn't have a breeding kink, and is just sexist, narcissistic, rich enough to afford infinity kids, and a low-key eugenicist....  Musk also obviously sees himself as the self-appointed hero of humanity's supposed crisis of declining births—he's quite literally tweeted as much. He's also claimed that "if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad," which is why Musk, a supposedly very smart man, has taken it upon himself to have nine kids. It's also worth ruminating on his assertion that "smart" people—a quality that has always been defined by white supremacist constructs—are the ones who should be having more kids.... In today's post-Roe v. Wade America, unplanned pregnancy sounds like a nightmare—but for some breeding fetishists, the added risk, stakes, and fear might just be more of a turn-on....

"I was surprised that the dissenters never tried to defend the right to abortion and never try and offer an alternative ground. They relied entirely on stare decisis." Posted: 07 Jul 2022 11:02 AM PDT Said Larry Kramer, in "Liberals Need a Clearer Vision of the Constitution. Here's What It Could Look Like. The legal scholar Larry Kramer on why the left's embrace of judicial supremacy was a mistake" (NYT).  Stare decisis is this flabby doctrine. You can go either way on it. It's really hard to get a huge grip on that either way. So no engagement on the merits on the left and no effort to really explain why this right would make sense today from a popular constitutional perspective.... Kramer is talking to Ezra Klein. It's Klein's podcast — audio and transcript at the link — and a bit later in their conversation, Klein says: I want to spend some time in the liberal legal and constitutional culture that has emerged since the Warren court maybe has been at its apotheosis in recent years. I'm going to lay my cards on the table a little bit. Anybody who's followed me for a long time knows I find the court functionally a bundle of myths dressed up in robes. And liberal legal thinking has struck me for some time now as somewhere between very defensive and very lame that it often appears to me to be animated much more by a defense of institutions, of courts, of procedures, of processes, of mystique, than any particular vision of the Constitution....  Kramer responds:  I think... there needs to be a substantive animating vision of what the Constitution is trying to do. And that's what the left lost, right....  And so they've been left with a kind of potpourri of leftover things from the periods when liberals were ascendant in the 60s and 70s. You don't see that on the right. They actually do have an animating vision of what the Constitution is meant to look like and do. Now you're right about It being dressed up in mythic stuff. Because originalism and this notion that all we're doing is letting history tell us what to do, that's the myth.... Klein says liberals have been challenged by the critique inherent in originalism, which at least purports to be a "binding interpretive methodology," even if in practice, it's malleable. Kramer repeats that liberals need "some kind of animating vision." Otherwise, it's "just your personal preferences" or "some pretended, sort of, thing out there that decides it for you."  What has been lost on the left is that — that kind of overarching animating principle that they can use to help them think about what to do. Why does he keep saying "animating"?! To "animate" is "To give spirit, inspiration, or impulse... To move mentally, to excite to action of any kind; to inspire, actuate, incite, stir up" (OED). The liberals are uninspired. What is this missing spirit? Is he looking for God? But he scoffs at "some pretended, sort of, thing out there that decides it for you." Where is the meaning? If it's not "deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions" — as the conservative Justices have it — then where can it be?  It can't be just the stare decisis that was all the Dobbs liberals talked about. As Kramer puts it: And so you've just got holding on to lots of things, outcomes that were generated at a time when there was such a vision. What was the vision? If it was once there, where did it go? Is it still "out there"? Kramer says:  But that vision itself is no longer widely embraced on the left, and it really hasn't been replaced by anything.... It's just, as I say on the left, they've, sort of, lost a coherent, overarching, animating vision of what the Constitution is trying to achieve that helps take it the rest of the way home and that would give them an affirmative agenda. As I say on the right, I think they have that, and then they use these, kind of, fake references to history, which just astonishingly seems in every single case to line up exactly with their current political preferences.... You can't beat something with nothing. Speaking of looking for something to believe in, Kramer and Klein get around to the fact that — and Klein puts it — "this court is full of Catholics."  Kramer: "Yeah, really." Klein: "I mean, but there's something to that. Not against Catholics, Catholics are great. I'm married to one. But there is the idea that there is an original context that can survive unchanged to this day. It's just very strange." The very idea of something that can survive unchanged! As the podcast goes on, Kramer uses the term "popular constitutionalism," which has to do with judging "by what resonates with us, what makes sense, what kind of society do we want to have" and "not just blindly following popular desires." What does that mean? What's the difference between "popular desires" and what "resonates... makes sense... [and] we want to have"? I suspect the answer is elitism. Look at Kramer's stress on "leadership": It involves leadership. If you read Madison's original stuff, he had an important role for leadership. But it wasn't leadership tells the subjects what to do and what they should believe. It's that we engage in an ongoing active conversation where the role of leadership is to lead towards some sort of better vision. You offer that vision, and you try and persuade, and if you do, the country follows you.... So that's what political leaders are supposed to do.... The ability of leadership to exercise leadership is really impaired. The media system has been fragmented. Deference to leadership is down... And then it's back to vision:  So it's a little hard to see how it emerges, but the idea is that you get competing political visions of what the country should be that are themselves coherent and normatively attractive that are presented and people vote. I mean, Ronald Reagan did that, right. It's not that we haven't had visions. He had a vision, and he sold it.... But the liberals don't have a vision. They need a leader with a vision to animate them, but "we're kind of between, betwixt and between uniting visions."

"When he was 12, Mr. Brook had fallen in love with the heroine of 'War and Peace' and decided to marry someone named Natasha." Posted: 07 Jul 2022 09:35 AM PDT "'And so it came about,' he wrote in his memoir, 'Threads of Time' (1998). He married the actress Natasha Parry in 1951." From "Peter Brook, Celebrated Stage Director of Scale and Humanity, Dies at 97/He was called 'the greatest innovator of his generation,' leaving an indelible mark with plays, musicals, opera and a relentless curiosity" (NYT)

"[John Andrew] Rice and his fellow dissidents believed that a college should be owned and run by its faculty and students." Posted: 07 Jul 2022 09:29 AM PDT "There would be no board of trustees, no dean, no president and limited administration beyond a secretary, treasurer and the lead role of 'rector,' all of whom taught classes, as well. There was also a Board of Fellows, which was composed of several professors and a student representative — this group would primarily make business decisions on the college's behalf — as well as a 'disemboweled' advisory council... that had no real power. As for the curriculum, there wasn't one, really: neither required courses nor formal grades."   From "Why Are We Still Talking About Black Mountain College? In 1933, a handful of renegade teachers opened a school in rural North Carolina that would go on to shape American art and art education for decades to come" by Amanda Fortini (NYT). "Professors taught what they wished, and students graduated when (or if) they wanted — only about 55 of the 1,200 or so students who attended Black Mountain in its 24-year existence attained a formal degree — as long as they passed two sets of exams, one roughly at the halfway point and the other before the end of their tenure, whenever they decided that was. The hierarchy, too, was minimal, with students and most faculty living in the same building and taking their meals together. There were none of the 'usual distinctions... between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it.' Students often performed chores as part of the 'work program'; afternoons were left free for activities outdoors, which might have included chopping wood, clearing pasture and planting, tending or harvesting crops.... By all accounts, the manual labor was not only fun but gave students a meaningful sense of contributing to the day-to-day maintenance of the college. It was also a great leveler. 'You might be John Cage or Merce Cunningham... But you're still going to have a job to do on campus.'  "Among Black Mountain's most visionary notions was to put the arts 'at the very center of things.' Rice believed that the study of art taught students that the real struggle was, in his words, with one's 'own ignorance and clumsiness.' The idea was not to produce artists per se... but thinking citizens who, honed by the discipline inherent to the arts, were capable of making complex choices — about their own work and, ultimately, in the larger world."

"Often the problem is 'death by a thousand cuts'... when we garden too aggressively in the root zone" of a tree. Posted: 07 Jul 2022 09:16 AM PDT "Or worse, if an irrigation system is installed, slicing repeatedly through the tree's lifelines. He is a proponent of 'living green mulch, not a ring of bark mulch.' But transforming an area under established woody plants into a ground-covering, herbaceous layer requires a gentle hand and patience. 'You need to start with small plants or divisions and dig very little holes,' he said. Think soil knife, not shovel: With larger tools (or plants), the tree roots will get chopped up. 'A few is no big deal,' he said. '"But when you're disturbing lots of roots, that can affect the tree.'" From "In Your Enthusiasm for Planting, Don't Forget About the Trees/Trees can take a lot of punishment, but they have their limits. Here's how to work around them safely" by Margaret Roach (NYT). "He" = Christopher Roddick, head arborist and foreman of grounds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This article caught my attention because it seemed so weird to me to think about people who would forget about their trees. And yet I have encountered people who are fired up about things they want to do with their yard that really do amount to forgetting about the trees.

"Always love your photos, the rising and the setting. How about you take a stab at D Millbank(sic, maybe)’s defense of Biden in WaPo today." Posted: 07 Jul 2022 08:06 AM PDT "I trust your judgment enough to want to know what you thought…. Is this the denial stage then, or a shot off the bow to start it?" Wrote Rhonda, in the first post of last night's open thread (which had a few sunrise photos). I'm glad to hear from Rhonda. Why, only 5 days ago, I commented — in a post about pinkness — that the name Rhonda means "the noisy one." The name Rhoda means rose — pink. One letter makes so much difference. But here's Rhonda making noise about me possibly blogging a Dana Milbank column that I'd already skimmed and deemed too dumb to blog: "Give Biden a break." Give me a break. Tim in Vermont said "Before inflation, Althouse said it was one thousand dollars to get her to write whatever she wanted on a topic of your choosing, but maybe she writes about what Democratic shill Milbank wrote today in the three letter disinformation clearinghouse that is the Washington Post." I don't know what "three letter" refers to, and I don't remember making that offer, but I do accept $1,000 donations — see the PayPal link in the sidebar — and you can leave a note about the topic. Remember though that what you get is whatever I want to say and that I'm the final arbiter of what counts as "on topic." To give an obvious example, this post you're reading right now, is already a post on the topic of Dana Milbank's column. But the truth is that I'm blogging this now not because of Rhonda's prod, but because I got a second prod. My son John wrote about it on Facebook: "This piece makes no sense. It quotes Democrats complaining that Biden hasn't had enough of a sense of urgency on abortion and other issues. Then the author (Dana Milbank) tells them to shut up — why? Because Biden has made a lot of strongly worded *statements*. But that's just talk — that's not taking action." What I see in Milbank's column is another plea — I'm seeing these pleas everywhere — for people to please please please refrain from hurting Democrats' chances in the next election. It's so dismally weak. Here's what jumps out of that Milbank column for me: For weeks, Democrats have arrayed themselves in traditional circular firing formation, complaining about the president's failure.... Accompanying this hat trick of own-goal scoring by Democrats were [etc. etc.].... The fratricide is likely stoked by the press, which likes a "Dems-in-disarray" story and would love a presidential primary. Democrats are habitually more self-critical than their Republican counterparts.... So shut up, lest you help Republicans, and keep voting for Democrats.

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