Althouse

I have commemorated proto-bloggers before. For example, something John Keats did in 1816. And, in the first year of my own blogging, I told you about my grandfather, Pop. And though I can’t find where I've blogged about it, there's something I myself used to do in the 1990s. I'd read the paper NYT at the dining table in the morning and if I found something distinctly interesting, I'd tear it out and put it on the other side of the table, where my sons would see it when they eventually came into the room.

"... and his cultural impact proved both singular and lasting. Ikea produced a Geller stool, which had bent, wavy legs. Nintendo made a spoon-wielding Pokémon character, Kadabra, who could cause clocks to run backward. References to Mr. Geller, or mangled silverware, have appeared in songs by R.E.M., Toad the Wet Sprocket and Incubus, and made a memorable cameo in 'The Matrix.' 'It’s not the spoon that bends,' a bald tyke in a robe tells Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character. 'It is only yourself.'...""If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this 'if' — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled.""[W]atching the Geller haters now is like watching people run into nursery schools shouting that there is no Santa Claus."

"... whereas a charcoal-gray kitchen allegedly increases the cost by an average of $2,512. (To get these very specific numbers, Zillow showed study participants homes and asked how much they’d offer for each. Then, the company’s behavioral scientists used statistical modeling to figure out how the relationship between list and offer price changed depending on the room color.) In a news release about the paint analysis, Zillow quoted Mehnaz Khan, a color psychology specialist and interior designer in Albany, N.Y.: 'Buyers have been exposed to dark gray spaces through home improvement TV shows and their social media feeds, but they’re likely drawn to charcoal on a psychological level.' Khan specializes in determining how colors and the built environment impact people’s moods and well-being. Yet when she and her husband built their first house... they fell into the same trap of prioritizing other people’s opinions over their own.... 'I never painted anything. I lived in those white walls and I was always thinking about the next homeowner. Everything was for the next homeowner.'"

"But Tom does not play that way at all. At one point, his face was literally smashed against the [side] of the camera, to get in my eye line as much as possible, even if I could only see the corner of his eye. He was like, 'What do you need, what can I do, how can I help you?'" 

Said April Grace, about making the movie "Magnolia" with Tom Cruise, quoted in "Tom Cruise is here to help/For more than four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies." (WaPo).

"... let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys...."

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "RFK Jr.’s Inside Job How a conspiracy-spewing literal Kennedy posing as a populist outsider jolted the Democratic Party" (NY Magazine).

Now his brain trust appears to be the hyperonline, hard-right masculinity influencers who give him the approval he craves and encourage him to do things like post videos of himself shirtless, his chest and arms improbably pumped, doing nine janky push-ups. 

Traister — who just revealed she knows her "empathy for the female candidates" is regarded by others as "probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification" — now openly displays her distaste for men who seem afflicted by overemotional attraction to the masculinity of a male candidate. 

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

Said Freedom Caucus board member Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), quoted in "Marjorie Taylor Greene booted from House Freedom Caucus/The vote occurred nearly two weeks ago, shortly after the Georgia Republican had called then-fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Lauren Boebert a pejorative in a verbal fight on the House floor" (Politico).

"... which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil. Even the very best produces a lingering frustration, an irritable awareness that we didn’t get what we came for. If translation is like sex, it often leaves us with a case of epididymal hypertension, or, in the vernacular, blue balls. One of the worst things about a bad translation is that it’s unforgettable. The Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, and utopian socialist William Morris took a run at Homer in 1887 and hit the wall hard. 'Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty,” his translation of the Odyssey begins, “the man who wandered afar,/After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war.'"

"Even without the extra boost legacies currently get, it would be almost impossible to offset the advantages of wealthy families who can pay for all the experiences and qualities that make their children seem miraculously, naturally, qualified."

I'm reading a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that begins: "U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has one main concern when it comes to the merger of the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series: maintaining what he calls the 'purity' of golf."

That's the top-rated comment at "Exclusive girls’ school called out after drone footage reveals phallic garden" (NY Post).

"'When dogs are in distress, when they’re adrenalized, that’s never a good combination... Then you add kids into the mix. Kids bring their own stress as any parent will tell you and their own sense of chaos. And it is just a bad situation, especially when kids are unsupervised with dogs.'...  [Michael Groleau of the Suncoast Humane Society said,] 'Things are happening in the environment that are stressing the dog out and the dog can’t tell you or show you what’s wrong, so the dog’s going to use its mouth and that’s the apex of the situation where something bad is going to happen'...."

Can I check it out through my browser or am I forced to download an app?

Currently you can access Threads only via the iOS or Android apps. There is no desktop version at this stage, and Meta could not say when it might make one available.

Bad. Prohibitively bad.  

Said Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, quoted in "Who Knew the Colosseum Was So Old? Tourist Apologizes for Defacement. A man who etched his initials and those of his girlfriend in a wall of the nearly 2,000-year-old monument wrote a letter of apology, and his lawyer says he is hoping for a plea bargain" (NYT).

"Trump's lead over DeSantis, which had hovered around 30 points before DeSantis's reelection and fell to around 15 points after, returned to the 30-point range.... On June 8, Trump announced that he had been indicted by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.... Trump dipped about 3 points in the RealClearPolitics average after the indictment but remained above 50% the whole time.... Will anything change that? Can anything change that? Who knows? There's no doubt that a number of campaigns, rather than having some clear theory of the race, are simply pushing on in hopes that something will happen. Something will happen to make Trump implode, or Trump will begin a long, slow slide, or something...."

"You want fries with that? 'Awesome!'...  [O]n our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to 'Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.' I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater. But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes...."

Said Veronica Duron, chief of staff for Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), quoted in "AOC, Dan Crenshaw and the mellow struggle for psychedelic drug access/What do a democratic socialist, a Republican war veteran and a long-haired lobbyist from Montana have in common? They want the government to relax about certain mild-altering substances" (WaPo).

Duron, a user of plant medicines, added that she didn’t know whether her boss would ever personally partake but knows the senator often “hears from his wealthy friends and supporters who micro-dose every day and have these experiences. And he is like, ‘These healing experiences shouldn’t be just for rich White people.’” Booker has co-sponsored legislation with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) similar to Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment to study the medical benefits of certain psychedelics....

It's a racial justice issue — that's good political packaging for Booker (and others). Don't say it so it might be heard as: Let's get more drugs to black people. It has to be: If some people feel completely free and don't worry at all about criminal law enforcement, then let's make it equal. Or: It's a matter that inherently belongs to the individual, who gets to decide which of the possibly beneficial drugs to take. I wouldn't recommend calling psilocybin and ayahuasca "these healing experiences." Leave it to the (supposed) experts in the FDA to determine which which drugs are effective cures for diseases and disorders. You sound anti-science when you say "these healing experiences." You might as well start recommending religions if you're going to talk like that.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter is joining me on the show today and reveals what REALLY happened around Trump's infamous Twitter suspension @jack pic.twitter.com/2fwTty30an

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) July 6, 2023

Dorsey said that he came of age as "a punk." He loved that "ethos" — "challenging the system." He didn't want to become an entrepreneur, but that's where he found himself, and he needed to learn how to grow the company. Learning that, he "learned what [he had] forgotten... about what [he] loved about the internet in the first place," which is that it was decentralized.

Things that make me paranoid:

This is, in my view, partly comic and partly a really good argument that's damned close to something I've found myself close to saying:

Jack Schlossberg’s anti-restaurant tirade is the exact deranged himbo social cause JFK’s grandson should be doing. “My friends don’t like eating dinner. Most people in the world don’t spend their lives eating dinner.” Icon pic.twitter.com/XKk8JOX6Q5

— Russell (@RussellFalcon) July 4, 2023

To see the text of this rant and read about how this video is viral, go to "JFK grandson goes viral for anti-restaurant rant" (KTLA 5).

Labour will announce a review of the national curriculum that will seek to “weave oracy into lessons throughout school”....

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association for School and College Leaders, said: “Oracy should be a core entitlement, and held in the same regard as reading and writing. Indeed, if students can articulate effectively in conversation, they are more likely to be assured readers and able to express themselves well in writing.”

Oracy. I don't remember seeing that word before, perfectly easy though it is to understand. The OED traces it back to 1965 where we see the author coining a set of words:

"It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time."

Said an unnamed official, quoted in "White House cocaine culprit unlikely to be found: Law enforcement official/Lines may have been snorted and crossed. But it’s possible we won’t know by whom" (Politico).

"And indeed, some of them could even be understood as having popular support."

"The surprise move will ensure districts' state-imposed limits on how much revenue they are allowed to raise will be increased by $325 per student each year until 2425...."

Writes Bethany Mandel in "Is my favorite dress company the new Bud Light? Son de Flor makes ‘traditional’ clothing — yet decided to use a 'gender-fluid' bearded model" (Spectator).

I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall of the meeting the marketing team had when they made this decision.... For Son de Flor, the target is women interested in timeless fashion and modesty. Overwhelmingly, that is going to translate to religious (read: conservative) women. While a partnership with an individual with over 150,000 Instagram followers might seem appealing on its face, Son de Flor doesn’t seem to understand that an individual is only an influencer for a brand if they actually influence potential customers in a positive way. 

On the front page of The Washington Post:

"In 'Alexander Technique lesson with Diana Devitt-Dawson,' a woman teaches a law student how to sit down and stand up from a chair without causing excess strain on the body. Devitt-Dawson, the instructor, makes microscopic adjustments to her pupil’s posture and movement, all the while issuing an enigmatic catchphrase: 'Allow the neck to be free.'... Boring as it sounds, this video has become a cult object. It now has 5.6 million views.... Fans, some of whom claim to watch the video nightly, have called it 'the "Citizen Kane" of ASMR videos'... What does it mean to allow the neck to be free? (Is that phrase the 'Rosebud' of the ASMR world?) Precisely what modifications is Devitt-Dawson making to her student’s posture? (As one commenter notes, 'Watched this literally 1,000 times and I still have no idea how to do the Alexander Technique.')"

"Unable to reach her on foot without assistance, the hikers called the authorities.... 'Upon arrival, Easton officers heard Tetewsky but could not see her,' the police said. Three officers waded 50 feet from the shore, through thick brush and swamp, to reach Ms. Tetewsky, and carried her back to land...."

Said Jay Butfiloski, the furbearer and alligator program coordinator in South Carolina's Natural Resources Department, quoted in "Alligator Kills 69-Year-Old Woman in South Carolina/The deadly attack in Hilton Head Island was the second fatal alligator attack in Beaufort County, S.C., in less than a year, the authorities said" (NYT).

The woman... was found at the edge of a lagoon in Spanish Wells, a residential community in Hilton Head Island. She had left her home around 7 a.m. to walk her dogs, and relatives went looking for her when the dogs returned without her....

You may think your dog will protect you from dangers when you're out on a walk, but Butfiloski implies that the dog attracts the attack — in this case, from an alligator.

Just a couple days ago we were talking about an incident in which a dog running into the forest attracted a bear attack. There, the human being survived, and we learned that the woman intervened in the bear/dog fight. She punched the bear and got bitten. I asked "if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene?"

Who knows what happened in that Hilton Head incident, but if a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator were going after your dog, would you intervene?

Writes John McWhorter in "On Race and Academia" (NYT).

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program....

The answer is in the official ideology of diversity, though I don't fault Professor McWhorter for failing to detect it on his own. The meaningful lesson in diversity is supposed to be that black people are individuals and not exemplars of a stereotype. By not being economically disadvantaged and by not choosing "race-related" major, these 2 grad students were teaching other students that black people are not all alike. (It's a very elementary lesson and thus scarcely the sort of "compelling" government interest needed to support race discrimination, but there it is.)

"... [his wife] Chirlane McCray surprised themselves. It began with an offhand remark: 'Why aren’t you lovey-dovey anymore?' Mr. de Blasio, the former New York City mayor, asked, according to Ms. McCray.... It moved quickly, both said, into the sort of urgently searching dialogue that had been necessary for years but avoided until that moment: a full accounting of their relationship, what they wanted, what they were not getting. 'You can’t fake it,' Ms. McCray said Tuesday from their kitchen table. 'You can feel when things are off,' Mr. de Blasio said, 'and you don’t want to live that way.' They made their decision that night...."

"He packed a bag, got in his Jeep and boarded a ferry. We had been married for nearly 21 years. When he reached New York City, he laid out his narrative: He thought he had wanted our life but didn’t. He thought he was happy but wasn’t. A switch had flipped. He didn’t want our house or our apartment. He didn’t want any custody of our children."I'm reading "Was I Married to a Stranger? I thought I knew my husband of 20 years. I didn’t — and still don’t" by Belle Burden (NYT). 

Federal judge orders President Biden to stop censoring his critics including me. The decision mentions me on page 17. Happy Independence Day Everyone!https://t.co/nEE40XSjpC

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 4, 2023

From the article: 

I'm reading "The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements Demanding that everyone embrace the same values will inevitably narrow the pool of applicants who work and get hired in higher education" by Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic).

"While the search for romance feels normal, and even noble, actively seeking friends as an adult — and saying that openly on apps or social media — still carries stigma, friend-seekers said.... Making adult friends requires work and vulnerability, which is a lot to ask from people who are lonely, different or tired, [31-year old, self-described loner Greg] Walton said, blinking back tears.... You won’t make a friend the first time you show up [to a group meetup arranged through an app], Walton said, or even the second, because friendship requires revealing yourself over time. But real friends are out there, and the fear and ambiguity are worth it. 'Yeah, you might feel like a creep, but hopefully somebody will help you,' they said. 'First, you have to show that you’re trying.'" 

A comment, at the NYT, on the article "New York City Residents Will Soon Have to Compost Their Food Scraps/The City Council passed a bill on Thursday requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste from regular trash, with mandatory composting coming to all five boroughs by next year."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nathan W Pyle (@nathanwpyle)

"Same. Ruined my morning. And a picture on top. There’s nothing cute or funny about this story, though the author tried. It’s just horrible"/"It wasn't entirely clear what the author was doing. Some of it seemed like he was making the horror into a cute story...."/"Wonder if they ever took those pups out walking - get them tired so no running around crazy in the back yard"/"I'm mostly against trigger warnings in general, but I resent this story being presented as some sort of whimsical travel tale. I also didn't need to see the picture of the dead kitten, adorable as he was. I don't think I'll ever want to revisit this dude's writing"/"This was an awful article, made worse by pictures of the angelic, deceased kitten. Who continued to be mentioned for the rest of the article. I’m reading this with my cats on my lap. WTF, WaPo??!!"

The comments section is reviling this WaPo travel article: "They arrived to housesit amid 2 dogs and 16 cats. What could go wrong?"

"The 'extremist' label is justified, said Esther Prins, a professor at Penn State University who has studied the intersection of education advocacy and Christian nationalism in America. Prins said the activities of Moms for Liberty chapters — especially efforts to remove books nationwide, many of which are led by group members and which overwhelmingly target people of color and LGBTQ+ authors, a Post analysis found — are consistent with groups that promote a hierarchical social order in which 'men are over women, straight people over LGBTQ people.' Prins said, 'That’s why they don’t want children learning about racism or about the existence of people who are not straight or the existence of families that aren’t the heterosexual nuclear family.'..."

... you can write about anything you want.

"Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy 'Flamin’ Hot'; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on 'Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.' I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that [Greta] Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out. (One viral tweet: 'i know this is an unpopular opinion but i feel like . . . completely repelled by the barbie movie. branded content with a wink and movie stars is still branded content!') Gerwig told me that adapting Barbie felt as natural as adapting 'Little Women,' though she did use a toy metaphor to describe the process: creating 'a story where there hadn’t been a story' felt like solving 'an intellectual Rubik’s Cube.'... 'Barbie' is somehow simultaneously a critique of corporate feminism, a love letter to a doll that has been a lightning rod for more than half a century, and a sendup of the company that actively participated in the adaptation...."I learned the word "toyetic." Here's the Wikipedia article, "Toyetic":

How far would you go to protect your dog? For two 60-somethings in Maine and Connecticut, doing so involved fighting a bear.... Wildlife authorities say that dog owners should walk their pets on a short leash that doesn’t retract, and that people should remove all sources of food, including bird feeders or bird seed, from outdoor spaces because they can attract bears.... According to the National Park Service, if you surprise a bear and it is not acting in a predatory way toward you, you should wave your arms to show the bear that you are human and then "slowly and calmly back away while avoiding direct eye contact."...

By the way, if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene? Keep your dog on a short leash and you won't face that test of dog love, like that 64-year-old lady who punched a bear in the nose.

ADDED: They're discussing the Maine incident at the subreddit Dogfree: "Woman has her dog off leash and it goes and harasses a bear in the woods. She then attacks the bear for chasing her dog and gets bitten. Of course now they are putting out traps for the bear."

I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding):

Like me, @JoyAnnReid is a kid of immigrants from a former European colony who went to Harvard. Unlike me, she benefited from affirmative action because she counts as “black” & in her own words wouldn’t have gotten in without it. She complains that her peers looked at her… pic.twitter.com/zCMbXNHwEZ

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 2, 2023

She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn't have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn't come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn't changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn't have been enough if she were not black.

Lots of commenters over there (at TikTok) vote for "team grandma."

That video has over 5 million views, and the audio track is being used for other videos with their own variation on mother's clothes for daughter — utilitarian playclothes/tomboy style — and grandma's clothes — pink with frills.

I don't want to embed anything I'm seeing here because I'm afraid of elevating something random, so go over there and scroll, but there is a good deal of calling people to nationalism and self-defense.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweets.

It’s not about conspiracy – it is about transparency. In a midnight Friday night announcement the White House has delivered the bad news that President Biden will be maintaining secrecy indefinitely on some JFK assassination related records.... 

NPR airs a piece about how the Asians weren’t actually being discriminated against by Harvard etc and were just being used by white people who wanted to end Affirmative Action while interviewing exactly zero people who dissent from that view https://t.co/KnN3Ik77r2

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) July 2, 2023

"But the president has not yet met or publicly mentioned his other grandchild. His White House has not answered questions about whether he will publicly acknowledge her now that the child support case is settled."

From "Hunter Biden’s Daughter and a Tale of Two Families/The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who has not yet met her father or her grandfather, is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright" (NYT).

5 out of 6 of the most popular comments over there are critical of President Biden: 

"Then... his older sister struggled to find the right career path. When she didn’t get a job she wanted, she took her own life. Witnessing his siblings try and fail to find their place in the world of work must, I say, have informed his decision to turn his back on conventional employment. He considers this. 'I can’t quite tell myself how what happened to my siblings influenced me,' he says. 'But what happened, I think, is that they couldn’t really go into society. That’s what we say in Japan: ‘go into society’. It means that you are becoming a proper grown-up. In modern society, in Japanese society, you have to be a proper adult to be acceptable, but my brother and sister couldn’t work, so they weren’t accepted. They were rejected by society. And that just made me determined that I don’t want to be in a world where my siblings weren’t accepted... I went to university. I made a great effort... I got a job and I wanted to get on with people, and I wanted to be like other people. I tried harder and harder, but I just couldn’t do it. However hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to be like the others... [I feel] an anger... towards... the atmosphere of society, that you’re not worth anything if you don’t do anything, and that you have to be productive. And I just want to say, "No. Everybody is worth their existence."'"

“As Rental Person, I have only the flimsiest connection with my clients,” he says in his memoir. “I am practically transparent. They have a story they have to tell and it’s my role to be there while they tell it. In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.”... 

At best, Morimoto is an impassive confessor. He does not advise or commiserate or look people in the eye and tell them he understands. Usually, he says, the people telling him things don’t even want this of him. They just need him there, doing nothing, while they speak. Those who have never used him often think he is motivated by benevolence. He wants to be clear that he is not.

There's an excerpt from his book. An excerpt of the excerpt:

We’d been chatting for quite some time when, finally, in a very off-hand way, he started talking about his hidden past. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I was a teenager,” he said. “Oh yes?” I said, nodding as I normally do. “Well, yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I… er… killed someone.”... Somehow it really took me aback to think that a person who cooked so well, who gave an overall impression of competence, could have such a dark past. 

The incongruity had a real impact on me. In a way, I was very moved. Since then, I think I’ve looked at people in a different way, realizing that even the most ordinary, upright-looking people are not what they seem....

By the way, there was a blogger who heard there was an Aesop fable with a character who tells a secret to the reeds. The blogger searched the complete text of Aesop's fables for "reeds" and "secret" but found nothing. And the moral is: 

The moral is...

Don't go looking for untold secrets in nonexistent texts.

A person devoted to doing nothing may have nothing to say.

Time spent checking other people's assertions is frittered away.

A secret told to the reeds is kept very well.

You can't spell "freedom" without "reed."

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews. The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action."

Writes Dave Begley in last night's open thread. Of course, it's true. And thanks for asking. You caused me to go back into my archive to find the time I was at the Capitol, wandering around something called the "Silent Majority Walk" when the Naked Bike Ride suddenly whizzed by. That was in 2011, the year of the Wisconsin protests.

This is an article in the NYT, and I'm annoyed at myself for spending the time to try to understand what is going on. These 2 showboats want our attention, and now I'm checking to see just how old, tall, and heavy each of them is and what that means in a "cage match."