The measure would have required doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of a clinic


 WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Louisiana's tough restriction on abortions violates the Constitution, a surprising victory for abortion rights advocates from an increasingly conservative court.
The 5-4 decision, in which Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the court's four more liberal justices, struck down a law passed by the Louisiana Legislature in 2014 that required any doctor offering abortion services to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. Its enforcement had been blocked by a protracted legal battle.

Two Louisiana doctors and a medical clinic sued to get the law overturned. They said it would leave only one doctor at a single clinic to provide services for nearly 10,000 women who seek abortions in the state each year.



The challengers said the requirement was identical to a Texas law the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. With the vote of then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court ruled that Texas imposed an obstacle on women seeking access to abortion services without providing any medical benefits. Kennedy was succeeded by the more conservative Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by President Donald Trump, who was among the four dissenters Monday.

Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the Texas decision, also wrote Monday's ruling. The law poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions and offers no significant health benefits "and therefore imposes an undue burden on a woman's constitutional right to choose to have an abortion."
Roberts said he thought the court was wrong to strike down the Texas law, but he voted with the majority because that was the binding precedent. 

"The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Loui
The Center for Reproductive Rights said the burdens on access to abortions in Louisiana would have been even more restrictive than those in Texas, where about half of the state's abortion clinics were forced to close. It also said the law was unnecessary, because only a small fraction of women experience medical problems after abortions, and when they do, they seek treatment at hospitals near where they live, not ones near the medical clinic.
"As Republicans continue their assault nationally on Roe v. Wade, they are also fighting on a state by state basis," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement. "Louisiana's draconian abortion ban was a clear and intentional violation of the Constitution, explicitly designed to permanently destroy women's reproductive freedoms and dismantle their right to make their own decisions about their health, bodies and timing and size of their families."

Louisiana had defended the law, arguing that the requirement to have an association with a nearby hospital would provide a check on a doctor's credentials. But opponents said a hospital's decision about whether to grant admitting privileges had little to do with a doctor's competence and more to do with whether the doctor would admit a sufficient number of patients.
siana's law cannot stand under our precedents."


Painting murals gives students empowering role in protest movement

I'm reading "Painting murals gives students empowering role in protest movement" (Wisconsin State Journal):


For Madison-area youths such as Nelson Lashley, who just turned 10, participating in the Black Lives Matter protest movement by painting murals on boards covering Downtown businesses was empowering.
“I’ve been feeling good that I am in the protest,” said Nelson, who will be a fifth-grader at Lowell Elementary School. “It’s kind of beautiful how you can show what you’re doing through a peaceful form like art.”

The murals were painted on plywood put up after windows were broken during protests following the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Many still stand.
Nelson painted with his father, Yorel Lashley, who said the opportunity aligned with the messages he tries to instill through his Drum Power company, which teaches drumming but also strives to develop the whole person.
As a musician, Lashley liked the idea of trying something in the visual arts. The project also was personal.
 

Ask the schoolchildren to paint the murals "Black Life Matters" for downtown Madison.

 

     As murals were being painted at the end of the school year, SJ Hemmerich, art teacher at Randall Elementary School, created a slide presentation of them. Hemmerich then presented it to students and as a last assignment asked , “If you could design your own mural for (Black Lives Matter), what would it be?” Then Hemmerich got the idea of why not do it for real.

    Hemmerich, like other teachers, reached out to “Black and brown students” to get involved. Hemmerich got permission to work on one large mural and five panels located near each other. ... Hemmerich also sent an email out to art teachers in the Madison School District to recruit more help beyond Randall and wound up with more than 135 students and some staff members.

    “I am really passionate about social justice work,” Hemmerich said. “I thought it would be a really good way to get students involved.”...

    Monique Karlen, art teacher at La Follette High School, said she started by recruiting some of her students and then got other help from students from Middleton and East high schools...

The only mention of parents in the article is about one student who said that her parents worry about her participation in the protests, so the mural-painting is a good, safe alternative. But I don't think teachers should be recruiting children to engage in political activism — even if it's artistic — without first involving the parents and getting their consent. I don't think adults should put any sort of pressure on children to take a political position and to do political work — even if it's artwork. Teachers should not be exploiting their access to children for any political purpose. They are given access to our children for the purpose of education, and it is a solemn trust that should never be violated. 

 

Chris Wallace Grills Mercedes Schlapp On Failed Tulsa Rally: 'You Guys Look Silly When You Deny Reality'



On his Fox News Sunday program, Wallace noted that President Donald Trump's Tulsa rally on Saturday had been sparsely attended despite the fact that the president claimed nearly a million people had requested tickets.
"We all saw the pictures last night," Wallace explained. "The arena was no more than two-thirds full. And the outdoor rally was cancelled because there was no overflow crowd. What happened?"
"The key here is to understand," Schlapp replied, "there were factors involved, they were concerned about the protesters who were coming in."
"He talks about how he can fill an arena," Wallace said, referring to the president. "And he didn't fill an arena last night. You guys were so far off that you had planned an outdoor rally and there wasn't an overflow crowd."
"Protesters did not stop people from coming to that rally," he added. "The fact is, people did not show up."
Schlapp disagreed before attacking presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for holding virtual events during the ongoing pandemic.
"Mercedes, please don't filibuster," Wallace interrupted. "Frankly, it makes you guys look silly when you deny the reality of what happened."
"I don't know why you are saying that," Schlapp complained.
"There are empty seats there," Wallace replied. "At least a third, if not half of the rally was empty. You can't deny it."
"Joe Biden has been a failed politician that has done nothing but support failed institutions," Schlapp opined. "This is in contrast with President Trump who has a strong record and is rebuilding this economy."

DOJ SPOKESWOMAN: 'THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DESERVE RESOLUTION' OF DURHAM INVESTIGATION INTO RUSSIA PROBE



Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec told "Hannity" Wednesday that "the American people deserve resolution" about exactly what happened in the early stages of the Russia investigation."[Connecticut U.S. Attorney] John Durham and his team have been thoroughly and meticulously working on their investigation for many months now, as the attorney referenced earlier this week ... " Kupec told host Sean Hannity.
"The American people deserve resolution as to what happened to President Trump, his campaign, and then, of course, subsequent to that as well. It's important for the American people. It's important for our system of justice. And it's important, certainly, for the media to accurately report and cover that as well. What that resolution looks like remains to be seen."
Last week, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein -- who oversaw the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller -- testified that he would not have signed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant renewal application for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page had he known about since-revealed "significant errors" in in the document.
Mueller’s investigation yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 election, though the question of whether Trump obstructed justice was left open in the final report.
Kupec declined to comment on Rosenstein's testimony but assured Hannity that Durham was "is working as hard as ever."
"What happened to President Trump was one of the greatest political injustices in American history," she said, "and never should happen again."

"Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture..."

"... whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.... [S]culpture skeptics from Leonardo through Hegel and Diderot have cultivated our prejudice against the medium. 'Carib art,' is how Baudelaire described sculpture, meaning that even the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the medium’s primitive, cultish origins. Racism notwithstanding, Baudelaire had a point. Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern sculptures...."

From an essay by Michael Kimmelman, published in the NYT in 2008, which I'm reading this morning because I blogged it at the time with my tag "sculpture" and I'm going through all my old posts with that tag looking for things that deserve my new tag "destruction of art."

The new tag is something I'd thought about creating for a very long time. I've been interested in violence directed at art much longer than I've been writing this blog — at least as far back as 1974 — but somehow my resistance to tag proliferation kept me from breaking this subtopic out of my generic topics "sculpture" and "art." There was also the "protest" tag. "Destruction of art" is (usually) a subtopic of that one too. But the pulling down of statues of Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key — last night in San Francisco — finally dragged me over the line.

Speaking of Junipero Serra, I remember Richard Serra and his "Tilted Arc." I was one of the workers of lower Manhattan in the 1980s who rankled at the hostility the artist expressed toward mere pedestrians. I've written about that a few times. The people in the plaza have feelings and interests and may richly resent the impositions of artist ego and elitist civic pride. Once art is in place, it demands admiration, and what happens? It might be ignored — that's what Kimmelman fretted about — and it might be attacked — the present-day rage.

I'd like to look up what the "sculpture skeptics" — Leonardo, Hegel, Diderot, Baudelaire, et al. — had to say. Oddly, they — at least some of them — expressed racism. The sculpture skeptics of today style themselves as anti-racists. But there's resonance in Kimmelman's summary of the skepticism:
Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. 
We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal. 

"Is support for free speech correlated with intelligence?/3 studies on that question all point to the answer: yes!"

My son John blogs.

"Respect/Empower/Include."

Murals on the boarded up windows of State Street, photographed today, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madisonians in shorts trudge past a mural of Barack and Michelle Obama that is painted on the boarded-up window of Which Wich Superior Sandwiches:

IMG_6765

On the boarded-up window of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, a drooling troglodyte cop observes what might be a pile of burning doughnuts that give off smoke that reads — like a thought balloon — "Defund the Police":

IMG_6787

A longer view of the side of the museum featuring an ironic "Right turn only" sign:

IMG_6795

There's the notion that "being a revolutionary" has an element of being fun, loving, and beautiful:

IMG_6844

There's the grievance that you can't play your music really loud without people calling the cops:

IMG_6845

More Madisonians trudging along, this time past dripping letters that few will read, but I'm seeing "Tell the President/To prepare the bunker/When he flee/Because until we see/Justice you will/Never see peace!"

IMG_6836

"Yes, we can!" the old President says, as a waiter sets up an outdoor café table.

IMG_6776

"Of course they despise Washington. Notice the graffiti '1619' on the toppled statue...."

In all my sunrise runs on this path, I'd never seen a deer before, and today, suddenly, up ahead, there were 2...

They kept disappearing then reappearing at a later point, and I kept getting my camera out, then putting it away, concluding that they were gone for good, and then, finally, I caught one...

6C9F2617-DA16-472C-B2EE-F07914DF3B2D_1_201_a

"Bolton is extremely famous for his fervent hawkery, including on the Iraq war. If Trump bothered to do a cursory Google search on Bolton before appointing him..."

"... to the most powerful national security position in his administration, he’d have turned up headlines like 'John Bolton: No regrets about toppling Saddam.' Sadly, there was too much good stuff [on] television in the days leading up to Bolton’s nomination to do that search. Trump does not seem to realize how bad it makes him sound that he never bothered to ask what he later identified as the key question about the worldview of his own national security adviser."

From "Trump: I Didn’t Realize Bolton Supported Iraq War Until After I Hired Him" by Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine). Chait is reading the WSJ interview in which Trump says:
He had a lot of policy disputes, he and I. And after the first month or so, you know, I asked him one question. I said, “So, do you think you did the right thing by going into Iraq?” He said, “Yes.” And that’s when I lost him. And that was early on. That’s when I lost him. But no, I disagreed with much of the stuff he said. He was one of many people. I liked listening to many people, and then doing whatever is the right thing to do.

You didn’t ask him about Iraq before you brought him into the White House? If he regretted that?

No, but it didn’t … I knew all about his policy on Iraq. But that didn’t matter, frankly. Because he made a terrible mistake. And so did everybody else involved in Iraq and the Middle East, frankly. I never thought it was the right thing to do. And I’ve been proven right. But when he told me he still thinks it was the right thing to do, and was unable to explain it to me, I said, “Explain that to me, because I don’t think you can.’ And he could not explain it to me. So I said, “Do you say that just to make yourself feel good? Or do you say that because you really believe it?” He said, “I really believe it.” I said, “Well, then you’ve lost me because it’s just wrong.”...
[W]hen I asked him the question, so John, you were one of the people that were really pushing hard to go into the Middle East, to go into Iraq. Would you do it again? He said, Yes. And that’s where I said this guy is crazy.... I was talking to him. I said, So was that a mistake? I said, and it’s okay to admit you made a mistake, although that’s a big one. That’s a beauty. And I said, Do you think it was a mistake? And he said, No, I think it was the right thing to do. And I said, You know, you can’t explain that. You just can’t explain it.
Why didn't Trump ask Bolton before he was hired whether in retrospect he still thinks it was the right decision to go into Iraq?  Chait's answer is that that Trump is impulsive and reckless: He just didn't "bother." A more charitable reading of Trump — and I'm not saying the President deserves charity, just trying to balance things a little — is that he'd formed the opinion that everyone knows now that the Iraq War was a mistake. Trump was and is very proud of his opposition to the Iraq War, his astute perception from the beginning that it was a mistake. But he lacked the astute perception to see that there were still some people who believed the war was a good idea and to notice he was hiring one of those people.

You know this morning when I saw this tweet of Trump's...



... I was going to snark You knew he was a snake.... you know Trump and that song lyric he's recited many times about the woman who takes in and nurtures a snake that ultimately bites and kills her?
“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in
But I guess Trump didn't know Bolton was a snake.

"I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."

Yes, Trump said that.*

Yes, it's hyperbole. The "nobody" is outrageous and false. It gets your attention, and it increases the power of his fame-making machine, further inflating the importance of Juneteenth, and further connecting it to Trump, where it never belonged before.

__________________

*Link goes to Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine, quoting this WSJ interview. Chait:
... Trump has caused more people to become aware of Juneteenth, just as he has caused more people to become aware of the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, narcissistic personality disorder, “democratic backsliding,” the two-thirds threshold required for impeachment, and other concepts that had largely been excluded from daily news coverage. This has not been an era of progress. But it has been a time of enlightenment.
What's "democratic backsliding"? I don't remember hearing that phrase before. I see it has a Wikipedia entry:
In political science, democratic backsliding, also known as democratic erosion or de-democratization, is a gradual decline in the quality of democracy.... Political scientist Nancy Bermeo has written that blatant forms of democratic backsliding such as classic, open-ended coups d'état and election-day fraud have declined since the end of the Cold War, while more subtle and "vexing" forms of backsliding have increased. The latter forms of backsliding entail the debilitation of democratic institutions from within....

Beginning in 2017, political scientists identified the United States under President Donald Trump as being in danger of democratic backsliding. In a 2019 journal article, political scientists Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, and others wrote that Trump's presidency presented a threat to the American democratic order because it simultaneously brought together three specific trends—"polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms"—for the first time in American history. Lieberman et al. noted that Trump has "repeatedly challenged the very legitimacy of the basic mechanics and norms of the American electoral process, invoking the specter of mass voter fraud, encouraging voter suppression, selectively attacking the Electoral College, and even threatening to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power" and noted that "Never in the modern era has a presidential candidate threatened to lock up his opponent; castigated people so publicly and repeatedly on the basis of their country of origin, religion, sex, disability, or military service record; or operated with no evident regard for facts or truth." In 2020, political scientists Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, wrote that "the Trump administration has consistently de-emphasized the importance of human rights and democracy in its rhetoric and while adopting language and tropes similar to those of right-wing, illiberal movements." Colley and Nexon cited Trump's praise of autocratic rulers, his echoing of ethno-nationalist rhetoric, his efforts to deligitmize journalism and journalists as "fake news" and his policies erecting new barriers to refugees and asylum-seekers as similar to politics "found in backsliding regimes."

The 2019 annual democracy report of the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg found that the U.S. under Trump was among the world's liberal democracies experiencing "democratic erosion" (but not full-scale "democratic breakdown"). The report cited an increase in "polarization of society and disrespect in public deliberations" as well as Trump's attacks on the media and opposition and attempts to contain the judiciary and the legislation. The report concluded, however, that "American institutions appear to be withstanding these attempts to a significant degree," noting that Democrats had won a majority the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, which "seems to have reversed the trajectory of an increasingly unconstrained executive."

"Years ago, while working on a story for Rolling Stone about why so few white-collar offenders went to jail..."

"I realized I needed to better understand why the criminal-justice system worked with such monstrous efficiency to put poorer people in prison. What I thought would be a short detour to tackle that question ended up consuming five years, ending in two books about structural inequities in modern policing: The Divide, and I Can’t Breathe, the story of the brutal killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island. There are obvious similarities between the Garner case and that of George Floyd. Both victims were African American men in their forties, grandfathers trying to put troubled pasts behind them. Both were approached over minor offenses.... Both Garner and Floyd died of asphyxia from being sat or knelt upon by police officers with long abuse histories. In both cases, numerous other officers and/or medical personnel refused to stop this clear abuse, or even administer aid long after the suspect had been subdued and stopped breathing.... s I learned through years of talking to brutality victims and police alike, and by following cases like Garner’s through the courts, episodes like the Floyd killing happen thanks to a variety of interlocking bureaucratic and political imperatives. The individual racism of officers (and the structural racism underpinning police departments) is clearly a major part of the picture. But there are more immediately fixable problems at play as well. Here are four troubling logistical reasons these tragedies keep recurring...."

Writes Matt Taibbi in "Why Policing Is Broken/Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence" (Rolling Stone). Read the whole thing. The 4 headings are "Time Works Against Victims," "Abuse Records Are Secret," "Juking the Stats," and "‘Law and Order’ Wins Votes."

"If the Chief Justice believes his political judgment is so exquisite, I invite him to resign, travel to Iowa, and get elected. I suspect voters will find his strange views no more compelling than do the principled justices on the Court."

Just a line from Tom Cotton I wanted to memorialize, quoted at Fox News.

It's of a piece with the sort of rhetoric about judges I've been reading for the last 50 years and more. I can't remember a time when I was able to understand anything about the Supreme Court when there wasn't a notion that what they are really doing is politics. And I saw "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards when I was first learning to read — back when I had no idea what "impeach" meant (something about a peach?) or who Earl Warren was.

So it's an old, old theme. But it plays well, and I think Tom Cotton found a spiffy way to do the phrasing. Instead of calling Roberts unprincipled, he points to the other justices — "the principled justices" — and imagines them finding the Chief's "views" "strange" and uncompelling. That's a nice variation on the theme.

And you've got to give Cotton credit for complexity. He addresses the Chief Justice and invites him to do something he's obviously not going to do, though it's more realistic and respectful than the common insults that tell people to do things — like go to hell or kiss my ass — that they're not going to do. "Invite" is polite, and running for President is very grand. But the idea is that if you ran for President with your agenda, you would lose. Cotton predicts the loss in an elegant comparison of voters to "principled justices," who, he suspects, would have the same low opinion of the Chief's ideas.

Now, the so-called "principled justices" oppose the Chief because he's finding something in the law that actually belongs in the political decisionmaking process, and if the Chief were to run for President, he would be taking these ideas to the place where the "principled justices" say they belong. So if the voters rejected these ideas, it would not be for the same reason the "principled justices" rejected them.

Ah! Now, I see the little flaw in Cotton's rhetoric! The only way the voters and the so-called "principled justices" could share the same opinion of the Chief Justice's "strange views" would be if the "principled justices" were thinking in political terms — in which case, they would be no more principled than the Chief Justice.

But if Tom Cotton is reading this — hi, Tom! — I know you already know how to get off that hook. You only said the voters and the "principled justices" would find the Chief's views to be equivalently compelling. It can still be the case that these views are not compelling in court, because they are not law but merely political, and that they are not compelling in the political arena, because people just don't like them.

"The 'blue wall' is reforming in the Rust Belt."

Writes Lara M. Brown, the director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, in The Hill.
In 2016, President Trump broke through Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall.” He won three states that Democrats had carried since the 1980s: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin....

[N]ow, less than four years later, all three of those states have shifted again and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is leading Trump....

According to Pew Research Center’s analysis of the exit polls, [Hillary Clinton] earned only 37 percent of the white Catholic vote.... As poorly as Clinton did, the largest percentage point decrease for a Democratic candidate occurred between 2008 and 2012, which suggests that white Catholics had “soured” on Obama’s presidency before Trump declared for the presidency. Clinton should have seen this coming...

While it remains unlikely that Biden, a Catholic, will be able to pull a majority of white Catholics towards the Democratic Party in November, were he to garner 45 percent of their votes, it seems likely that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin will again be colored blue....

The wall that Trump may have erected by November is not along the country’s southern border, but a blue one across the Rust Belt.
First, "were he to garner 45 percent of their votes" — I just have to note the use of that word, "garner."

Second, I've said it before, and sometimes I think I'm the only one who feels this way, but "Rust Belt" is an offensive term. On November 9, 2016, I wrote:

Suddenly, the place where I live isn't called the "Blue Wall" or the "Fire Wall" anymore. It's: "Rust Belt."

When we ceased to operate to generate power for the Democratic Party, it was back to the old insult.

If you call us the "Rust Belt," you are saying our time has passed, that we once prospered because there was manufacturing, but it's gone and it's not coming back. That's not what Donald Trump said to us when he campaigned through the Midwest in 2016. Where is the optimism?

"White fragility is the sort of powerful notion that, once articulated, becomes easily recognizable and widely applicable.... But stare at it a little longer..."

"... and one realizes how slippery it is, too. As defined by [author of 'White Fragility' Robin] DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable; any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point. Any dissent from 'White Fragility' is itself white fragility. From such circular logic do thought leaders and bestsellers arise. This book exists for white readers. 'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'... Progressive whites, those who consider themselves attuned to racial justice, are not exempt from DiAngelo’s analysis. If anything, they are more susceptible to it. 'I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color,' she writes. '[T]o the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived...'... It is a bleak view, one in which all political and moral beliefs are reduced to posturing and hypocrisy...."

Writes Carlos Lozada in "White fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed," reviewing the book "WHITE FRAGILITY: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism" in The Washington Post.

"America must seize on the moment and I truly believe — as I actually told the VP last night when I called him — that I think this is a moment to put a woman of color on that ticket."

Said Amy Klobuchar, who says she called Biden on Wednesday to tell him she was withdrawing from competition for the VP slot, NBC News reports.

I think we all already knew her chance was blown:
In the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s killing, Klobuchar’s time as chief prosecutor for Hennepin County came back under scrutiny, specifically the lack of prosecutions she pursued in cases of police brutality....

Asked if those questions about her past record on police brutality would have made it harder for her in the role of vice presidential nominee, Klobuchar said Thursday: "I think I could've functioned fine and there's a lot of untruths out there about my record and now is not the time to debate those."
So what I hear in her effort at a high-minded statement is an undercutting of the other women who are in the running. First, Elizabeth Warren — who is not a woman of color except in her memory of younger days when family lore and a desire to identify were enough. Why step on her chances, Amy? Second, all the various black women who are in the running. Amy is ensuring that when one of them is picked, everyone will believe they were picked because of their race.

At the Sunrise Café...

IMG_3752

... you can write about anything you want.

Meade took this picture of me looking at the sunrise at 5:24.

And let me remind you about the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

I told you I was going to do something today that I've never done before.



I shot a gun!

John Bolton's book "has been written with so little discernible attention to style and narrative form that he apparently presumes an audience that is hanging on his every word."

According to the review in the NYT, written by Jennifer Szalai.
... Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies, both abroad (Iran, North Korea) and at home (the media, “the High-Minded,” the former defense secretary Jim Mattis). The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged....

In another book by another writer, such anecdotes might land with a stunning force, but Bolton fails to present them that way, leaving them to swim in a stew of superfluous detail. Besides, the moment he cites as the real “turning point” for him in the administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton’s abject disappointment, didn’t happen....

... Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people. “Too many body bags,” Trump told him. “Not proportionate.” Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do.”...

[H]is chapter on Ukraine is weird, circuitous and generally confounding. It’s full of his usual small-bore detail, but on the bigger, more pointed questions, the sentences get windy and conspicuously opaque.... ... Bolton — known for what a 2019 profile in The New Yorker called his “tremendous powers of recall” — said it was too much for him to fully understand....

It’s a strange experience reading a book that begins with repeated salvos about “the intellectually lazy” by an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself.

5:22 a.m.

IMG_6687

That's today, the 9th of the 10 days with the earliest sunrise time, 5:17.

I was there at 5:17, but the sun had not yet broken over the shoreline.

IMG_6654

I don't have a view of the horizon. The first direct bit of sun became visible at 5:20:

IMG_6672

You see why I picked 5:22 as the best. It wasn't because I was 5 minutes "late." I wasn't late! Were you?

I'm going to do something today that I've never done before.

Try to guess. If you begin with "I hope it's..." I predict somebody will get it quickly.

IN THE COMMENTS: The second commenter, Rockeye said:
Going shooting. A boy can hope.
That's the answer. I shot a gun!

I had 2 hours of training and practice at shooting range.

AND: Here's my new post with video.

"I admit to having a complicated relationship with Aunt Jemima... For a period of time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandmother, Ione Brown..."

"... was part of an army of women who worked as traveling Aunt Jemimas, visiting small-town fairs and rotary-club breakfasts to conduct pancake-making demonstrations at a time when the notion of ready-mix convenience cooking was new. I never knew about my grandmother’s work until long after she died... [W]hile researching a family memoir... I learned that she made good money and covered a region including Iowa, the Dakotas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. She was often treated like a celebrity in small towns, but could not stay in local hotels. She kept an eye out for houses that had a small sign in the window that said 'TOURIST,' a code for homes that provided lodging and meals to black people.... As a family, we are offended by the caricature that Aunt Jemima represents, but deeply proud of the way my grandmother used the stage that was available to lift herself up. You see, in those days Aunt Jemima didn’t look like the lady you see on the box today. She was a slave woman, and Ione was expected to act and talk like a slave woman, using the kind of broken patois that blighted the full-page ads in magazines like Women’s Day and Life.... One of the things that irks me most about the Jemima brand is the way the mammy stereotype hijacked what should be an endearing image for black America and tried to turn it into something toxic. Most of us have someone in our family with fleshy arms and a loving smile who serves up cherished advice along with delicious food. They are our aunts and mothers and grandmothers. Our godmothers. Our queens.
You tried to make us ashamed of what Aunt Jemima stood for."

From "Why did it take so long to set Aunt Jemima free?" by Michele L. Norris (WaPo). (Quaker Foods announced that it is retiring the Aunt Jemima brand because to "make progress toward racial equality.")

ADDED: At the NY Post, I'm seeing "After Aunt Jemima, people call to cancel Uncle Ben’s and Mrs. Butterworth’s." I understand about Uncle Ben, but Mrs. Butterworth? I've never perceived Mrs. Butterworth as black.
The syrup, sold in a matronly woman-shaped bottle, is accused of being rooted in mammy culture and was modeled after the body of Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen, the black actress who played Prissy in “Gone With The Wind.” The Jim Crow-era “mammy” character was often used to show that black women were happy working in white households....
That's news to me. I looked up Mrs. Butterworth on Wikipedia and it did not contain that information. I did learn that the voice for the character was done by Mary Kay Bergman, who looked like this:
"Her parents were Jewish," and she died by suicide at the age of 38 in 1999. She was the original lead female voice on "South Park."
Her characters included Liane Cartman, Sheila Broflovski, Shelly Marsh, Sharon Marsh, Carol McCormick and Wendy Testaburger.... Bergman credited South Park for pulling her out of a typecasting rut. 'I'm known for these sweet, cute little characters,' she said, noting her roles in various Disney films. "So I've been doing them forever. My agents were trying to submit me on shows that are edgy, and they're laughing, 'Mary Kay, are you kidding? No way!'" After Bergman's death, the two episodes "Starvin' Marvin in Space" (the final episode for which she recorded original dialogue) and "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics" (the final episode in which her voice was used via archive footage) were dedicated in her memory.
No comment on the role of Starvin' Marvin and Mr. Hankey in the quest for progress toward racial equality. RIP Mary Kay Bergman. Watch this (it's phenomenal):



Mrs. Butterworth voice at 1:11.

ADDED: Norris writes that her grandmother, in the role of Aunt Jemima had to use a "kind of broken patois." And I see in the comments that David Begley is asking, "Just asking, but isn’t 'broken patois' the language of today’s rap music?" Which makes me wonder, what's wrong with a patois? To answer my own question, I naturally look up "patois" in the OED.

I see that it's "dialect spoken by the people of a particular region (esp. of France or French-speaking Switzerland), and differing substantially from the standard written language of the country" or — and this is "frequently depreciative" — "a regional dialect; a variety of language specific to a particular area, nationality, etc., which is considered to differ from the standard or orthodox version."

I was intrigued by this example from "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles (who was born in New York City):
Then he remembered having heard that Americans did not speak English in any case, that they had a patois which only they could understand among themselves. The most unpleasant part of the situation to him was the fact that he would be in bed, while the American would be free to roam about the room, would enjoy all the advantages, physical and moral.

"As the book nears publication and details spill out, many congressional Democrats quickly assailed Mr. Bolton for not telling his story during the impeachment proceedings and instead saving it for his $2 million book."

"Mr. Bolton explains his position in the epilogue, saying he wanted to wait to see if a judge would order one of his deputies to testify over White House objections. Once the House impeached Mr. Trump over the Ukraine matter, Mr. Bolton volunteered to testify in the Senate trial that followed if subpoenaed. But Senate Republicans voted to block new testimony by him and any other witnesses even after The New York Times reported that his forthcoming book would confirm the quid pro quo. Some of those Republican senators said that even if Mr. Bolton was correct, it would not be enough in their minds to make Mr. Trump the first president in American history convicted and removed from office. Mr. Bolton blames House Democrats for being in a rush rather than waiting for the court system to rule on whether witnesses like him should testify, and he faults them for narrowing their inquiry to just the Ukraine matter rather than building a broader case with more examples of misconduct by the president. 'Had a Senate majority agreed to call witnesses and had I testified, I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome,' he writes."
From "Five Takeaways From John Bolton’s Memoir 'The Room Where It Happened' describes Mr. Bolton’s 17 turbulent months at President Trump’s side through a multitude of crises and foreign policy challenges" by Peter Baker (NYT).

ADDED:

"Hours after the Fulton County district attorney announced felony murder and other charges against the former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks... a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick just before a shift change Wednesday evening."

"The city was left scrambling to cover absences as the Atlanta Police Department tried to tamp down rumors of a mass police walkout that spread widely on social media.... 'We do have enough officers to cover us through the night,' Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) told CNN. 'Our streets won’t be any less safe because of the number of officers who called out.'... 'This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that,' Vince Champion, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, told NBC News. 'What it actually is is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.'... Champion added that many officers felt prosecutors had not publicly shared sufficient evidence to back up the charges leveled against Rolfe, in part because the district attorney only released a video still that appears to show the former officer kick Brooks rather than the full video itself.... Although the quick action in Atlanta has been praised by civil rights advocates and hailed as a victory for activists, some in the police department have decried the quick process. Bottoms said that morale in Atlanta’s police department was at a low.... 'The thing that I’m most concerned about is how we repair the morale in our police department,” Bottoms.... 'and how do we ensure our communities are safe as they interact with our police officers.'"

WaPo reports.

In the comments over there, somebody says:
They harassed the guy for 45 minutes and when he panicked and grabbed their taser, they shot him when he was running away. Then kicked him. Sorry guys, if you think that's what policing is, you should be calling in sick.

Why do these cops think someone like Dylann Roof should be gently apprehended (and given a cheeseburger) but a black guy should be harassed? And that he isn't expected to panic? And that those cops couldn't let him run, and go after him later?
That draws this sarcasm:
Cops should wait until 0.1 milliseconds before the stun gun barb pierces the cornea of the eyeball before shooting the perpetrator in the kneecap of their non-dominant leg to slow him down and then snuggle him into compliance.

"Reading Justice Gorsuch’s Bostock opinion, I was thrown back to the summer of 2017, when I found myself in a social gathering of a half dozen fellow progressives and one prominent conservative lawyer..."

"... with whom we were all friendly. It was a civil but increasingly pointed conversation as we pressed the lawyer, first gently and then more firmly, on whether he actually supported the Muslim travel ban and other actions of the Trump administration’s opening months that troubled the rest of us. He took the bait in good humor but finally, all but throwing up his hands, he cut the conversation off. 'Look,' he said. 'We got Gorsuch.' Yes, we did."

Writes Linda Greenhouse in "What Does ‘Sex’ Mean? The Supreme Court Answers/We’ll soon find out whether the court inflames the culture wars or cools them as its term winds down" (NYT).

The top-rated comment over there:
Forgive my cynicism, but I suspect that Roberts, being acutely aware of how politically biased his court appears, decided to select this case as a means of deflecting attention from the flood of conservative opinions yet to come. Having determined that they already lost the culture war on LGBT equality, they tossed progressives this bone, fully prepared to nullify it with a decision that it can be ignored by people with "sincerely held beliefs." They will point to this case as evidence of their neutrality.

At the Pre-Dawn Café...

IMG_6637

... you can write about whatever you want.

The photo was taken at 5:10 a.m. today, the 8th of the 10 days when the sun rises at 5:17, the earliest sunrise time of the year.

And please remember to use the Althouse Portal when you need to do some Amazon shopping. I really appreciate your support for this blog.

"Unlike many artists who reacted to the pandemic with a kind of dutiful tenderness—'Let me help with my song!'—Dylan has decided not to offer comfort, nor to hint at some vague solidarity."

"Lyrically, he’s either cracking weird jokes ('I’ll take the "Scarface" Pacino and the "Godfather" Brando / Mix ’em up in a tank and get a robot commando') or operating in a cold, disdainful, it-ain’t-me-babe mode.... Dylan is a voracious student of United States history—he can, and often does, itemize the various atrocities that have been committed in service to country—and 'Rough and Rowdy Ways' could be understood as a glib summation of America’s outlaw origins, and of the confused, dangerous, and often haphazard way that we preserve democracy. He seems to understand instinctively that American history is not a series of fixed points but an unmoored and constantly evolving idea that needs to be reëstablished each day—things don’t happen once and then stop happening. In this sense, linear time becomes an invention; every moment is this moment.... [F]or me, Dylan’s vast and intersectional understanding of the American mythos feels so plainly and uniquely relevant to the grimness and magnitude of these past few months. As the country attempts to metabolize the murder of George Floyd, it is also attempting to reckon with every crooked, brutal, odious, or unjust murder of a black person—to understand a cycle that began centuries ago and somehow continues apace. What is American racism? It’s everything, Dylan insists. Indiana Jones and J.F.K. and Elvis Presley and Jimmy Reed—nothing exists without the rest of it. None of us are absolved, and none of us are spared."

You can tell by the diaeresis in "reëstablished" that it's The New Yorker. Amanda Petrusich reviews Bob Dylan's new album, "Rough and Rowdy Ways," which will be released on Friday.

Petrusich sure is putting a lot of her own clunky words into Bob Dylan's mouth. She's insisting that he's insisting — insisting that everything is American racism. Why would you go and assume that what he's saying is what you're fired up to think everybody is supposed to be saying right now?

She did say "for me." You can listen to whatever you want any way you want.

"With the slogan 'Silence is Violence' being used at the law school, there will be enormous pressure for student groups to go along. Not to do so would be deemed an act of 'violence.'"

Writes Professor William Jacobson about an effort by some students at Cornell Law School to get student groups to sign a letter that seems — I don't have access to the letter — to be accusing Jacobson of racism and urging students to boycott his classes.
This is an attempt not just to scare students away from my course, but to scare students away from speaking their minds, and to create a faculty and student purity test.

I have received numerous emails from students telling me I have a lot of “quiet” support at the law school, but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism....

This toxic atmosphere didn’t need to take place. At a time when the law school desperately needs an adult in the room, so to speak, we have faculty and a Dean who denounce me.

Can the cop cry?

"Scroll casually through your platform of choice and you’ll see kids. Kids protesting on Pinterest; kids posing on Instagram..."

"... kids socially distanced proms and graduations on Facebook. Kids of people you know I.R.L. and kids of people you don’t. Kids who most likely haven’t given their permission for you and me to see them or who have simply accepted this exposure as part of modern life. Every time we post a picture, we’re telling a story, crafting the myth of our own life. Images of our children become part of that mythology. A shot of kids frolicking on the beach or posing at Disney World tells a story about prosperity, happiness and ease. A photo of well-scrubbed kids on the first day of school says My children are thriving. I’m a good mom.... When my older daughter and blogs were both in their infancy, I posted pictures of my new baby and wrote about new motherhood. I found community and support from other new mothers. But as my daughter got older, as she went from a sleeping, pooping blob to an actual person, and as the world soured on so-called mommy blogging, the sharing got harder to justify. After all, my daughter had never consented to appearing on my blog. How would she feel when she got old enough to Google and discovered her entire life online?"

Writes Jennifer Weiner in "Should Any Parents Be Instagramming Their Kids?/Sure, those of us who do may not all be Myka Stauffers. But we’re all selling some kind of story about ourselves, and using our children to do so" (NYT).

Should have?

I'm giving this my "Althouse the pedant" tag, so stop now if you don't like where this is going. I'm reading the headline at The Washington Post, "Why Scalia should have loved the Supreme Court’s Title VII decision."

The man is dead. There's NOTHING he should have done.

Why not say "Why Scalia would have loved the Supreme Court’s Title VII decision"? I think I know why. The article is by George Conway. It's in WaPo. I'm going to say: They don't want to concede that Scalia would have joined the majority in this case, that he would have stuck to his principles (and that this case was truly an instance where these principles dictated the outcome the majority reached).

"I wasn’t always quite as comfortable with queering our hetero-union."

"She came out to me a few years into our marriage, late on a weeknight.... Silent tears flowed down her cheeks as she confessed her desire to transition.... I responded with an affirmation of her feelings before I shared my own fears and frustrations.... At the time, I couldn’t say whether I wanted to be with a woman. It was something I’d never even considered before.... I struggled with my own internalized transphobia, expecting to mourn her body hair, mannerisms, deep voice and broad shoulders — the features I’d grown to know and love about her former appearance — but the transformation hasn’t been a hurdle for me.... [H]er body’s changes feel like part of the uneventful shifts in appearance everyone encounters as we age and develop or abandon certain habits. Over the years, I’ve gained more than a few pounds — making my midsection lumpier, my face rounder, my thighs thicker. I changed my own hairstyle once or twice.... My breasts sag now that I’ve fed two children from them.... We already act like the two old ladies that we will one day become...."

From "I’m a straight woman whose spouse came out as trans. It didn’t change a thing/Our friends were sure we were on the verge of a breakup at the time. They shouldn’t have worried" by Lauren Rowello (WaPo).

I didn't think it would work...

IMG_6643

... but you actually can point your iPhone camera directly at the sun.

To the eye, the sun looked perfectly orange and the sky was blue. The camera interpreted the sun as white, and that required the sky to be perfectly orange.

"The trouble with drinking is sipping. Give us water only because we'll drain that quickly."

"The same principle will be applied to all aspects of life. Anything you might savor contemplatively will be withdrawn. You will have periodic gulps, and in between, nothing."

I wrote, at Facebook, responding to a post by my son John, which quoted a CNN article: "Many airlines are limiting drink options to water only. As face masks must be kept on other than when passengers are eating and drinking, it's a way of ensuring passengers are lingering over their refreshments for no longer than necessary."

"Federal judge lambastes amendment to rename confederate bases as 'madness'/Gets thoroughly bodied by clerk."

Headline at The Intercept.

The judge is Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit.
Silberman [wrote]... that his great-grandfather had fought for the Union as part of Ulysses S. Grant’s army and was badly wounded at Shiloh, Tennessee. His great-grandfather’s brother, meanwhile, joined the Confederate States Army and was captured at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “It’s important to remember that Lincoln did not fight the war to free the Slaves Indeed he was willing to put up with slavery if the Confederate States Returned,” he wrote (lack of punctuation and errant capitalization in the original, and throughout). “My great great grandfather Never owned slaves as best I can tell.”
From the clerk's pushback:
[M]y maternal ancestors were enslaved in Mississippi.... [M]y ancestors would not have been involved in the philosophical and political debates about Lincoln’s true intentions, or his view on racial equality.... [Y]ou talked about your ancestors, one that fought for the confederacy and one that fought for the Union.... [N]o matter how bravely your uncle fought for the Confederacy, the foundation of his fight was a decision that he agreed more with the ideals of the Confederacy, than he did with those of the Union.
Silberman, a Reagan appointee, is 84 years old. Giving him the Medal of Freedom in 2008, President George W. Bush said:
Few men have played roles in as many memorable moments in recent American history as Laurence Silberman. He was a senior official in the Justice Department in the aftermath of Watergate, and helped to restore America's confidence in the Department. As Ambassador to Yugoslavia, he was a vigorous representative of America's values behind the Iron Curtain. He was a fierce advocate for the "peace through strength" policies that helped win the Cold War.

As a federal judge on the D.C. circuit -- often called the second-highest court in the land -- Judge Silberman has been a passionate defender of judicial restraint. He writes opinions that one colleague has described as always cutting to the heart of the matter -- sometimes to the jugular. (Laughter.) His questioning is crisp and incisive -- and at least one lawyer who was subjected to his inquiries actually fainted. (Laughter.) Judge Silberman was a particularly important influence on two other members of that court: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. When each was nominated to the Supreme Court, Judge Silberman, in typical fashion, was not sad to see them go. That's because when Scalia left the court, Judge Silberman gained seniority. And when Thomas left the court, Judge Silberman gained his furniture. (Laughter.)

In a new and dangerous era for our country, Larry Silberman has continued to answer the call to service. He served with distinction on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. He took a year off from the federal bench to serve as co-chairman of a bipartisan commission on intelligence reform. And in all his work, he's remained a clear-eyed guardian of the Constitution. He continues to leave his distinctive mark in the opinions he issues, and the generations of bright and talented lawyers he has trained.

For his resolute service to the nation and his stalwart efforts to advance the cause of ordered liberty, I am proud to bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laurence H. Silberman. (Applause.)

The Interactive Social Contract.

1522762833_a11307dbe2_o

That's a photograph I took in Brooklyn in October 2007. Just ran across it as I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a post about something that happened to me around that time. That caught my eye. It was right next to this...

Breaking wave

One of my New York photos. What is it? I can see what it's not. It's not a wave breaking on a beach.

Anyway, I thought perhaps the Interactive Social Contract from 2007 could speak to us in this famously screwed up year, 2020.

What I wanted to learn.

I wanted to take the "Master Class" from David Sedaris, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 for a subscription to the app until I saw that they also had a class from Billy Collins, a poet I've liked ever since I randomly picked a book off a high shelf at Paul's Books and read one poem.

Both Sedaris and Collins, I see now, begin their writing by noticing some little thing that is present in their own life. Both teach that you ought to carry a notebook with you everywhere and jot down these little things as they happen.

That's all writing. Of course, I wanted to learn about writing, but what else? Master Class has 80+ famous people teaching how they each do their thing. I've watched 2 others, neither in the writing category. I watched Bobbi Brown, who teaches about makeup — the kind of makeup that honors whatever face you happen to have. (You do not need to "contour" your nose or "overline" your lips.) And I watched Alice Waters, the restaurateur, who says you really need to start your cooking by getting in touch with your local vegetables.

Do you see the theme of these 4, which I chose without thinking of a theme? The theme occurred to me as I was doing my sunrise run this morning. I don't listen to headphoned-in music anymore when I run. I listen to the immediate environment and let thoughts rise up from within my own head, and I got where I could see how these 4 choices represented a single desire on my part. All these lessons have to do with awareness of what is right here.

When I got back to my car, the radio was on MSNBC, which I'd listened to on my little drive out to my running place. I'd put up with Joe Scarborough angsting about Republicans being less likely  to wear masks than Democrats — what is wrong with them?! — but I didn't want that infecting me on the ride home. I clicked over to music. It was Neil Young:
Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away
But there's a full moon rising
Let's go dancing in the light
We know where the music's playing
Let's go out and feel the night
Neil was getting what was for him an unusual idea: To go out and experience the moon.



I got the idea a while back to get out and experience the sunrise, to go running in the light.

"Should you happen to find yourself near a statue that you decide you no longer like, we asked scientists for the best, safest ways to bring it to the ground without anyone getting hurt—except, of course, for the inanimate racist who’s been dead for a century anyway."

Popular Mechanics obviously wants a link, and I topple for it.

At the Sunrise Café...

IMG_6622

... you can write until dawn.

That photo was taken at 5:20 this morning, the 7th of the 10 mornings with the earliest sunrise of the year — officially: 5:17.

Don't forget about the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"Shortly before Elizabeth Warren joined their virtual happy hour on a recent Friday afternoon, the five African American women co-hosting the #TheSipHour mused about calling her by her first name."

"The Massachusetts senator had her own moniker in mind. 'I was going to say I’m here today as an ally, but can we really just say co-conspirator?' laughed Warren, one of the few white women to appear at the events organized by Higher Heights For America, which promotes the organizing and voting power of black women. 'Nothing’s going to change unless it is black women’s voices that are uplifted.' Such overtures could help Warren’s bid to become Joe Biden’s running mate. The presumptive Democratic nominee is under mounting pressure to pick a black woman in the wake of recent outrage over racial injustice and police brutality. But some black leaders say Warren’s progressive politics, economic populism and specific policy proposals addressing everything from maternal mortality to the coronavirus could put her in a strong position. 'I think she’s totally still viable,' said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy and partnerships for the Working Families Party, a progressive labor activist group that endorsed Warren in the primary. 'Warren is one of the folks whose been talking about big structural change. And when we’re thinking about re-imagining public safety, that is something that’s going to require some actual structural change.'"

AP reports.

"Patients with underlying conditions were 12 times as likely to die of covid-19 as otherwise healthy people, CDC finds."

A WaPo headline, quoted along with substantial text from the article by my son John at Facebook, where I expressed surprise that the factor was so low and asked:
Did they count obesity as a "condition" when they did that calculation?
Then:
I looked at the CDC report, and I see it only counted "severe obesity (body mass index ≥40 kg/m2)" as a condition. I'm a 5'5" woman, and I would need to weigh more than 240 pounds — more than 100 pounds over normal weight — to enter that BMI range.

Obesity begins at a 30 BMI, which would be 180 pounds for my height. That's 60 pounds less than the weight the CDC counted as a "condition" when it did its calculation. It wouldn't be 12 times as likely but what? — 100 times? — if they'd included the merely obese. And what if they'd counted the overweight but not obese? That would go all the way down to 150 for my height. It would be useful to know, because we have some power over our own weight!
ADDED: My son questions my observation. The factor should be lower if they included less severe conditions. I agree with him. I'm thinking in terms of being less likely to die. When you're trying to figure out how dangerous the illness is to you, you consider how likely it is for a person in your condition to die if they get the disease. Perhaps it's the case that 99.9% of those who died of the disease were obese. Of course, that's not the same as saying if you get the disease and you're obese, you have a 99.9% chance of dying. But if the overall percentage of those who get the disease and die is 0.1%, then I'd like to know what's the percentage for those who get the disease but are not obese? Is it 0.01%? That would be extremely useful information! For one thing, it would give people something to do to protect themselves: lose weight. But also, it would show us who should continue the more extreme form of social distancing and who should feel free to get out and about.

"The administration has been working to pursue a narrow definition of sex as biologically determined at birth, and to tailor its civil rights laws to meet it."

"Access to school bathrooms would be determined by biology, not gender identity. The military would no longer be open to transgender service members. Civil rights protections would not extend to transgender people in hospitals and ambulances. But the administration’s definition is now firmly at odds with how the court views 'sex' discrimination."

From "Supreme Court Expansion of Transgender Rights Undercuts Trump Restrictions/The ruling focused on employment discrimination, but legal scholars say its language could force expanded civil rights protections in education, health care, housing and other areas of daily life" (NYT).

Why is "sex" in quotes? I'd say the Court's case is also at odds with the effort to banish talk of sex and replace it with the concept of gender. I wonder, now will there be a new focus on sex?
Monday’s case was focused on employment law, a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 known as Title VII. But Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s opinion used language that is likely to apply to numerous areas of law where there is language preventing discrimination “because of sex” or “on the basis of sex.” Under the ruling, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity ran afoul of the standard....

“They’ve ruled,” [President Trump] said. “I’ve read the decision, and some people were surprised, but they’ve ruled and we live with their decision.”
He's read the decision. Ha ha. Did anyone tell him it was 172 pages long before he concocted that lie? I assume it's a lie. And go ahead and bullshit that if you've read any of the opinion — a paragraph, say — you've "read the decision."

Anyway, I'm sure he doesn't mind the Supreme Court taking this pesky issue out of his hair.* "They’ve ruled and we live with their decision." If he really objected, he'd talk about how important it is to reelect him so he can appoint more Justices like Kavanaugh. Oh, but there is the complication that his #1 choice for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, wrote the opinion. He can't purport to have the power to control where the Court goes with all the legal issues.

But I don't think Trump is keen to hold back gay and transgender people. At most, he hopes to maintain the enthusiasm of the religious conservatives he needs to get reelected. But I don't think he is the slightest bit interested in reining in sexual — or gender — expression. Has he ever reined in his own?
______________________

* His orangified, poofed up, spray-spritzed hair.

"In the first presidential race in which the combined age of the two leading candidates exceeds 150 years..."

"... mental acuity and physical health have become a central theme as the 77-year-old Biden and the 74-year-old Trump compete for votes. While previous presidential contests have included whisper campaigns and rumors about candidates’ health, the open charges of senility flying between the two camps sets the 2020 contest apart.... As the video of Trump on the ramp trended online Saturday, the president took to Twitter to explain his cautious stroll. 'The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery...'...  'I honestly don’t think he knows what office he’s running for,' Trump said.... 'They’re going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country and they’re going to be super left radical crazies.'... A Washington Post-ABC News poll released May 31... found that only 46 percent of voters thought Trump had the 'mental sharpness' necessary to serve effectively as president. For Biden, the number was 51 percent.... Some Biden supporters have pushed him to take Trump on more directly and more aggressively on the issue of mental and physical fitness. Some have highlighted how Trump effectively raised doubts about Hillary Clinton’s health in 2016. Philippe Reines, a former top Clinton adviser... publicly pleaded... 'PLEASE force the TRUTH about donald trump’s physical & cognitive health into the open... BEFORE his LIES about YOUR health harden any further.'"

From "As Trump casts Biden as ‘sleepy Joe,’ his critics raise questions about his own fitness" (WaPo).

I'm worried about both of them, so I'm creating a tag — "candidate infirmity" — to keep track of them. That's my absurd little way to help — make a tag about it. I dislike both candidates. Maybe you've noticed. Ever since Trump's West Point ramp descent down that ramp...



... I've visualized him taking the off ramp from the presidency and letting Pence go forward into the election. I can't believe we're left with the choice of Trump or Biden.

ADDED: Presidential visits are carefully set up, with the safety of the President meticulously attended to. How could they have provided him with a long, steep, slippery ramp?! That makes no sense.

At the Sunrise Café...

IMG_6597

... you can write until dawn.

That photo was taken at 5:19 this morning — the 6th of the 10 days with a 5:17 actual sunrise, the earliest sunrises of the year.

Here's how it looked — at my secondary vantage point — at 5 a.m.:

IMG_6564

And please consider using the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"We've researched it and it has nothing to do with slavery. James Penny was a slave trader, but he had nothing to do with the Penny Lane area."

Says a Liverpool tour guide, quoted in "The Beatles 'Penny Lane' Controversy, Explained/The street the song is named after has come under fire for a potential link to a slave trader" (radio.com).

"Amid calls for taking down statues tied to France’s slave trade or colonial wrongs, Macron said 'the republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history ... it will not take down any statue.'"

"'We should look at all of our history together with lucidity' including relations with Africa, with a goal of 'truth' instead of 'denying who we are,' Macron said."

From "Slave-trade statues stay, Macron insists" (Arkansas Online).

Why are college students ever trusted to run their own lives?

I'm reading "Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy/Safety plans border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty and staff" by Laurence Steinberg (a psychology professor who wrote a book called "Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence').
Most types of risky behavior — reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few — peak during the late teens and early 20s.... Under calm conditions, college-age individuals can control their impulses as well as their elders, but when they are emotionally aroused, they evince the poor self-control of teenagers.... But it’s hard to think of an age during which risky behavior is more common and harder to deter than between 18 and 24....

My pessimistic prediction is that the college and university reopening strategies under consideration will work for a few weeks before their effectiveness fizzles out. By then, many students will have become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. They will ignore social distancing guidelines when they want to hug old friends they run into on the way to class. They will venture out of their “families” and begin partying in their hallways with classmates from other clusters, and soon after, with those who live on other floors, in other dorms, or off campus. They will get drunk and hang out and hook up with people they don’t know well. And infections on campus — not only among students, but among the adults who come into contact with them — will begin to increase....

[U]niversities must be informed by what developmental science has taught us about how adolescents and young adults think. As someone who is well-versed in this literature, I will ask to teach remotely for the time being.
We need to keep these little monsters locked up until they're 25. Who knows what they will do with their freedom? They might party in their hallways and become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. There's no end to the dangers of freedom. You really cannot trust people to put safety first, week after week, month after month. At some point, they will hang out and hook up.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)