Trendlist: Althouse

Thursday, July 7, 2022

Althouse

Speaking of volcanoes....
"The Last Day of Pompeii is a large history painting by Karl Bryullov produced in 1830–1833..."
"The Georgia Guidestones, a 19-foot mysterious granite monument in the Peach State, was demolished on Thursday for safety reasons, after being damaged in a blast."
"Brad Pitt believes he suffers from prosopagnosia, a rare 'face blindness' disorder — but 'nobody believes' him...."
Sunrise — 5:08, 5:08, 5:29, 5:37.
"In ancient Greek, kanon, the word for rule, was connected to the usefully straight and tall giant cane plant, which was used to make measurements."
"I don’t want to get into how we know he was in Wisconsin, but we know he traveled into the Madison area before turning around and coming back."
Gavin Newsom is running for President against Ron DeSantis.
"[D]ozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists... joined a call with White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. The mood was fatalistic...."
"In deadly assaults and harmless bursts of celebratory explosives, a divided nation demonstrated this holiday weekend just how anxious and jittery it has become..."
"We’ll deal with what we need to deal with... as we move forward, all agreeing that we've got to be smarter as a country in terms of who has access to what."

Posted: 07 Jul 2022 07:19 AM PDT

... a new movie:

"The Last Day of Pompeii is a large history painting by Karl Bryullov produced in 1830–1833..."

Posted: 07 Jul 2022 06:38 AM PDT

"... on the subject of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.... The painting was received to near universal acclaim and made Bryullov the first Russian painter to have an international reputation... Sir Walter Scott is said to have studied the painting for an hour before declaring that it was not an ordinary painting, but an epic.... It was seen there by Edward Bulwer-Lytton whose novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834.... Ivan Turgenev described the painting as 'the glory of Russia and Italy' and it inspired Alexander Pushkin to write a poem about the destruction of Pompeii.... Gogol opined that it was a 'bright resurrection of painting, which has been for too long in some sort of semi-lethargic state,' but was not alone in seeing a parallel between Pompeii and contemporary Saint Petersburg and the painting as a forecast of divine retribution for the modern city's decadent Western ways. The dissident Alexander Herzen, meanwhile, saw it as an allegory about the collapse of European monarchies or the tyrannical power of the Russian state over the individual.""

I'm quoting a Wikipedia article that I'm reading on the occasion of the news of the destruction of The Georgia Guidestones, the subject of the previous post. The awesome painting shows the toppling of stone structures in the upper left corner and the Guidestones are toppled stone structures....

... but it was not that connection that led me to "The Last Days of Pompeii." It was a point of grammar and a scanning of my own memory in search of a title that contains a plural.

Let me know what the first title with a plural you think of. I'm stuck on "Days," so the next one I think of it "The Days of Wine and Roses"...

... and the third one is "Seven Days in May."

"The Georgia Guidestones, a 19-foot mysterious granite monument in the Peach State, was demolished on Thursday for safety reasons, after being damaged in a blast."

Posted: 07 Jul 2022 06:13 AM PDT

Newsweek reports.

The big mystery about the monument wasn't how it got there, but just who paid to buy the land and put it up. It looks a bit like Stonehenge, but it's not ancient. It went up in 1980, financed by someone who worked through a banker who was sworn to protect his anonymity.

The stones were engraved with 10 principles (in 8 languages), and the first one is blatantly evil, once you penetrate the euphemism "Maintain":

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature

Maybe it's the second one that incited whoever set off the explosion that caused the damage that led to the destruction of the entire thing. Could it have to do with overturning Roe v. Wade? "Guide reproduction wisely...." How do we "guide" reproduction? It suggests forced abortion but also forced pregnancy and childbirth. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers could object intensely.

I wonder how strong "safety reasons" need to be before you decide to destroy a monument like that. It was a tourist attraction, but then some of the ideas were bad.

The only reason I knew about the Georgia Guidestones is this episode of the Skeptoid podcast from back in 2010:

A flat stone in the ground... lists as its sponsors "A small group of Americans who seek the age of reason."... According to [Robert C. Christian, the pseudonym of the man who arranged the payments], this was by design: he once said "The group feels by having our identity remain secret, it will not distract from the monument and its meaning."

I happen to think he was right on the money. If the monument was known to have been erected by a particular group, it would be easy to dismiss it as "Oh, just more of that nonsense from so-and-so."...

From the linked webpage, we are sent to this update, calling attention to this clip from the John Oliver TV show "Last Week Tonight," where "Robert Christian" is said to be Dr. Herbert Kersten:

Skeptoid comments:

What John Oliver was reporting was that in 2015, a documentary came out: Dark Clouds Over Elberton: The True Story of the Georgia Guidestones, made by a small group of evangelical Christians intent on revealing what they believed would be some occult truth behind the Guidestones. They tracked down [the banker] Wyatt Martin.

According to a member of the crew who immediately terminated his involvement, the filmmakers tricked Martin, who had always kept his promise to never reveal the man's identity. Martin was quite elderly and was recovering from a recent stroke, and they took advantage to film a return mailing address on an envelope that he clearly did not want to share with them. It led to Herbert Hinzie Kersten (1920-2005), an Iowa doctor — and there was enough other corroborating information to establish that Dr. Kersten was indeed the creator of the Guidestones. The evidence presented in the film truly does leave no room for reasonable doubt.
Kersten had written pressing for population control, and had a reputation in his town for speaking openly about white supremacy — "racist to his fingertips," according to a local historian interviewed in the movie — and had published letters in newspapers praising the views of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman David Duke. Thus, the true motivation for the Guidestones' advocacy of population control is now established as having been a fundamentally racist one, as many have long suspected.

FOOTNOTE: Would you, like Newsweek, say "The Georgia Guidestones... was demolished" or would you prefer "The Georgia Guidestones... were demolished"?

I agree with Newsweek, since "The Georgia Guidestones" is the name of a single monument that just happens to have a title that is written in the plural.

It's like the way you'd say — to grab the first example that pops into my head — "The Last Days of Pompeii" was an 1834 novel that was made into a TV miniseries in 1984:

"Brad Pitt believes he suffers from prosopagnosia, a rare 'face blindness' disorder — but 'nobody believes' him...."

Posted: 07 Jul 2022 04:43 AM PDT

"Pitt, who has not been formally diagnosed, worries about appearing 'remote … aloof, inaccessible [and] self-absorbed' while struggling to recognize faces, according to the article.... 'So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them.... Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I'll say, "Thank you for helping me"'...."

From "Brad Pitt defends 'face blindness' condition prosopagnosia: 'Nobody believes me'" (NY Post).

I've blogged about prosopagnosia twice before. The first time, in 2006, was the first time I'd heard of the condition. It was funny to read that just now, because it's almost identical to what I thought a moment ago, when I read about Brad:

A person with this problem must have many painful social encounters, especially before being diagnosed. On the other hand, many of us are just lazy about noticing and remembering people. We could make casual claims of prosopagnosia, the way we make casual claims of attention deficit disorder."

The second time I wrote about it was a year ago, when I was reading the NYT article — "The Cost of Being an 'Interchangeable Asian'" — about "the phenomenon of casual Asian-face blindness," which made me go back to something Oliver Sacks had written in The New Yorker in 2010 — "Face-Blind/Why are some of us terrible at recognizing faces?" by Oliver Sacks. I said:

The suggestion that there's racism in the inability to recognize faces needs to be handled carefully, because there are 2 forms of discrimination in conflict. It may be discrimination to be bad at recognizing Asian-American coworkers, but vigilance about this human frailty may amount to a failure to accommodate the disabled — those with prosopagnosia. Quite aside from the specific disability, we're all on a spectrum when it comes to facial recognition. Many of us are bad at it, and some people are fantastic at it. Be careful about throwing accusations of racism around in this area of radically diverse ability.

Of course, the Oliver Sacks article was worth reading and rereading, and I'm ready to reread it again. Sacks himself had prosopagnosia:

I have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as I can remember. I did not think too much about this as a child, but by the time I was a teen-ager, in a new school, it was often a cause of embarrassment. My frequent inability to recognize schoolmates would cause bewilderment, and sometimes offense—it did not occur to them (why should it?) that I had a perceptual problem. I usually recognized close friends without much difficulty, especially my two best friends, Eric Korn and Jonathan Miller. But this was partly because I identified particular features: Eric had heavy eyebrows and thick spectacles, and Jonathan was tall and gangly, with a mop of red hair. Jonathan was a keen observer of postures, gestures, and facial expressions, and seemingly never forgot a face. A decade later, when we were looking at old school photographs, he still recognized literally hundreds of our schoolmates, while I could not identify a single one....
At the age of seventy-seven, despite a lifetime of trying to compensate, I have no less trouble with faces and places. I am particularly thrown if I see people out of context, even if I have been with them five minutes before. This happened one morning just after an appointment with my psychiatrist. (I had been seeing him twice weekly for several years at this point.) A few minutes after I left his office, I encountered a soberly dressed man who greeted me in the lobby of the building. I was puzzled as to why this stranger seemed to know me, until the doorman greeted him by name—it was, of course, my analyst. (This failure to recognize him came up as a topic in our next session; I think that he did not entirely believe me when I maintained that it had a neurological basis rather than a psychiatric one.)...

Sunrise — 5:08, 5:08, 5:29, 5:37.

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 04:05 PM PDT

Talk about anything you like in the comments.

"In ancient Greek, kanon, the word for rule, was connected to the usefully straight and tall giant cane plant, which was used to make measurements."

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 07:20 AM PDT

"It's because of this connection that the word became associated both with laws and with the idea of a model—that with which something is compared, but to which it is not meant to be identical. (No one suggests a ride in a model train.) This association is interesting, because the idea of following a model or paradigm is now seen as distinct from or even counter to following rules. Similarly, the Latin term regula connects both to straight planks used for measuring and building and to a model by which others are measured more metaphorically—the ruler of a nation, say. In that more metaphorical case, the ruler may be the source of rules, and possibly exempt from them; alternatively, the ruler can be exemplary, the ideal by which one determines how one ought to be."

I'm reading "Why Do We Obey Rules? Some last and some don't, yet we cling to them in times of change" by Rivka Galchen (The New Yorker)(discussing the book "Rules: A Short History of What We Live By" by the historian of science Lorraine Daston).

By the end of Daston's book, one feels a sense of clarity about how to think about rules.... Rules that leave a ruler, or a judge, in charge of interpreting them feel at once humanized and corruptible. Rules that allow no exception seem free of human frailty but alien, and unable to admit properly of complexity. Despair as a response to the ever-present weakness of laws seems intuitively honest....

"I don’t want to get into how we know he was in Wisconsin, but we know he traveled into the Madison area before turning around and coming back."

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 03:38 PM PDT

Said Christopher Covelli, a spokesperson for the Lake County Sheriff's Office, quoted in "Alleged Illinois parade shooter came to Madison area before arrest, authorities say" (Wisconsin State Journal).

UPDATE: From the Washington Examiner, noting that Crimo has confessed:

Police also revealed that after the shooting, Crimo had considered carrying out another attack at a celebration in Madison, Wisconsin. Crimo arrived at the event in Wisconsin but indications are that he had not put in enough thought and research to conduct the attack, Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli said. Crimo ditched his phone while in the Madison area....

Gavin Newsom is running for President against Ron DeSantis.

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 06:18 AM PDT

I found that at "Gavin Newsom's TV ad slamming DeSantis fills a void among Democrats" (WaPo).

I was going to end this post with just: "Catch up!"

But that made me think of Trump.

"[D]ozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists... joined a call with White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. The mood was fatalistic...."

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 05:25 AM PDT

"[Deborah] Messing said she'd gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked to do anything at all, yelling that there didn't even seem a point to voting. Others wondered why the call was happening. That afternoon, participants received a follow-up email with a list of basic talking points and suggestions of Biden speech clips to share on TikTok. The call, three days after the decision eliminating federal abortion rights, encapsulates the overwhelming sense of frustration among Democrats with Biden. It offers a new window into what many in the President's party describe as a mismanagement permeating the White House...."

From "After string of Supreme Court setbacks, Democrats wonder whether Biden White House is capable of urgency moment demands" (CNN).

The President who campaigned on putting America back together again after four years of deep divisions appears to have stopped trying, supporters say.

"There's no fight," another Democratic member told CNN. "People understand that a lot of this is out of his hands – but what you want to see is the President out there swinging."

A year and a half in, the Biden administration is struggling to untangle supply chains and tackle soaring inflation....

Biden's support of a gas tax holiday was the subject of months of deliberations among officials – many of whom were against it and privately suggested it was a purely political step to show initiative on gas prices, and only recently put the question in front of Biden directly. "It had the appearance of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks," one official said privately.

Reminds me of the time Trump confronted Biden in the dining room:

Next time, try ketchup.

"In deadly assaults and harmless bursts of celebratory explosives, a divided nation demonstrated this holiday weekend just how anxious and jittery it has become..."

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 05:07 AM PDT

"... as the perennial flare of fireworks saluting American freedom reminded all too many people instead of the anger, violence and social isolation of the past few years."

Marc Fisher writes, in "'Nothing feels safe:' Americans are divided, anxious and quick to panic" (WaPo).

Fisher quotes:

Thane Rosenbaum, a lawyer and novelist who runs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society at Touro University in New York: "There is a fundamental national insecurity now, after a perfect storm of social chaos where covid forced us to stay apart and the killing of George Floyd unleashed a movement that broke trust in the people who protect us... We're in a moral panic: 'Will anyone pick up the phone if I call for help?' Women feel more vulnerable because of the Supreme Court decision on abortion. Everyone feels more vulnerable because of soaring gas prices. People don't see a way out."

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a former Boston police official: "[W]e're in uncharted territory in terms of anxiety... With the George Floyd murder, war in Ukraine, the questioning of elections, people don't know who to trust. Who would think that in an iconic place like Highland Park, you would need to post snipers on rooftops on the Fourth of July? But that's what we've come to. Nothing feels safe anymore."

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist: "We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth... We are cut off from one another and from the past."

The Haidt quote is from ""Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid/It's not just a phase," an article from a couple months ago in The Atlantic, which I blogged at the time.

Haidt's article is centered on stupidity, rather than anxiety. Here's another passage, chosen because it brings up George Floyd, and the Rosenbaum and Wexler quotes cite George Floyd:

You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example, in the first week of protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of which included violence, the progressive policy analyst David Shor, then employed by Civis Analytics, tweeted a link to a study showing that violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats in nearby counties. Shor was clearly trying to be helpful, but in the ensuing outrage he was accused of "anti-Blackness" and was soon dismissed from his job. (Civis Analytics has denied that the tweet led to Shor's firing.)

The Shor case became famous, but anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don't question your own side's beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists' more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization. This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to "go woke" in rapid succession that year and the next....

"We’ll deal with what we need to deal with... as we move forward, all agreeing that we've got to be smarter as a country in terms of who has access to what."

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 04:44 AM PDT

Said Kamala Harris, quoted in "Harris visits Highland Park after mass shooting at July Fourth parade/Harris went to the Chicago suburb shortly after authorities announced first-degree murder charges against the shooting suspect" (NBC News).