Welcome to Sunday, June 5, 2022: National Ketchup Day (remember, according to the Reagan administration, ketchup is a vegetable!) It’s also World Day Against Speciesism and World Environment Day.
Things that happened on June 5 include:
- 1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper.
A first edition and first printing of this book (two volumes) will run you about $15,000:
- 1883 – The first regularly scheduled Orient Express departs Paris.
- 1893 – The trial of Lizzie Borden for the murder of her father and step-mother begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
She was acquitted, though she almost certainly did the crime with an axe. After the trial, she lived in the family home in Fall River, Massachusetts for the rest of her life, though she was ostracized:
- 1916 – Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court; he is the first American Jew to hold such a position.
- 1956 – Elvis Presley introduces his new single, “Hound Dog“, on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.
And here’s that performance, followed by some banter between Uncle Miltie and the King:
- 1963 – The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, resigns in a sex scandal known as the “Profumo affair”.
- 1968 – Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.
A video of the last moments of Kennedy’s life:
Sirhan Sirhan, now 78, remains iv prison, with his parole appeals regularly turned down. Here’s a photo of him from January’s NYT after Governor Gavin Newsom denied him parole again.
- 1981 – The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that five people in Los Angeles, California, have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.
- 1989 – The Tank Man halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
We still don’t know who Tank Man was, but here’s the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of him taken by Jeff Widener:
- 1995 – The Bose–Einstein condensate is first created.
This is a weird form of matter predicted by both Einstein and S. N. Bose around 1924. Here’s how it was done (Einstein should have won at least two Nobel Prizes):
The first “pure” Bose–Einstein condensate was created by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and co-workers at JILA on 5 June 1995.. They cooled a dilute vapor of approximately two thousand rubidium-87 atoms to below 170 nK using a combination of laser cooling (a technique that won its inventors Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics) and magnetic evaporative cooling.
DA NOOZ:
*I’m a sucker for articles with titles like this (from the WaPo), though when you click on it, the title changes. Click anyway to see how we can win:
Just follow the agenda below!
Democrats should level with voters. Instead of trying to convince us that Biden’s first two years were great, they should just admit that they have fallen short and be frank about the problem: There was never really a Democratic “trifecta,” because Manchin and Sinema are more independents than they are Democrats.
They should be clear, too, about the solution: a Senate with at least 52 Democrats and a House with at least 218 Democrats. If they get that, they can say, they will pass a specific agenda, something like this.
- Eliminate the filibuster. WON’T HAPPEN
- A national law guaranteeing a right to an abortion in the first trimester and in all cases of rape and incest. WOULD BE OVERTURNED BY THE SUPREME COURT.
- A democracy reform law mandating independent commissions to draw state and congressional districts lines free of gerrymandering; vote-by-mail and two weeks of early voting; proportional representation through multi-member congressional districts; and measures to prevent election subversion. TOO HARD TO PASS.
- A ban on the sale of military-style weapons such as AR-15 rifles and high-capacity magazines, along with universal background checks for gun sales. POSSIBLE BUT UNLIKELY
- A minimum income tax of at least 20 percent on billionaires. VERY UNLIKELY
- A ban on members of Congress buying individual stocks. SHOULD BE DONE AND SEEMS FEASIBLE
- National marijuana legalization. IT’S LEGAL IN MANY STATES, WHICH VIOLATES THE FEDERAL LAW. THEY SHOULD BE BROUGHT IN LINE BUT WILL REPUBLICANS VOTE FOR THIS MEASURE.
- A climate change plan that puts the United States on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. NO WAY
- A required civics and life-skills course for high school seniors, with the same curriculum throughout the country. AND WHO, EXACTLY, WILL DESIGN THIS CURRICULUM? IF EVERY THERE WAS A PLEDGE DESIGNED TO ALIENATE DEMOCRATIC AND INDEPENDENT VOTERS, THIS IS ONE.
- Voluntary term limits of 12 years in Congress for all Democrats (six terms in the House, two in the Senate). DREAM ON
Well, even if these were feasible, they’d be impossible to implement within two years, and, at any rate, author Perry Bacon Jr. says that we’d also need the present Democratic leadership to step down. (Presumably he wants to put the Squad in charge.):
A Democratic agenda like this won’t be credible, particularly to voters who aren’t hardcore Democrats, if implementation relies on the same people who have long been in charge. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (S.C.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) have been in party leadership almost my entire adult life. As people who seem desperate to hang on to power even as they decline in effectiveness, they epitomize the problems with Washington. They should all pledge to step down and make room for new congressional leadership if the Democrats retain majorities, as Pelosi has already implied that she will.
A lovely dream (depending on who the “new leaders” are!).
*Five years ago I reported with sorrow that Chicago’s “Dyke March” had banned lesbians carrying the “Jewish Pride” flag: a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the middle. It was said to be “triggering,” but of course it’s only triggering if you’re anti-Semitic. The anti-Semitism is still going on, as reported by Nellie Bowles (who is gay) at Bari Weiss’s Substack site but now Gay Pride parades are increasingly banning police marching in uniform. It’s a sign of hatred of cops, but seems to me deeply unproductive, as what would dispel suspicion of cops, at least in gay people, than uniformed officers proclaiming publicly and proudly that they’re gay. Here’s Nellie’s paragraph with links.
My favorite banner for a “dyke” march in Chicago included a woman dancing on top of a cop car, the words ACAB (all cops are bastards), and a burning Israeli flag (very pro-gay culture in Gaza, I’ve heard). Uniformed gay cops aren’t allowed to march in most of our big city parades (cops are bastards). Jewish stars can’t be flown in some of the marches (Judaism is about Israel, and Zionism is racism, so no Jewish stuff allowed). It’s all very inclusive, you see.
*From The National in Scotland: the BBC has apologized for what it said was a “misleading characterization” of J. K. Rowling’s views on transgender people. The misleading statement was made by an interviewer:
The BBC has said it “misleadingly” described JK Rowling as holding “very unpopular opinions” on gender identity.
. . . The journalist [Tom Sutclife] was interviewing the philosopher Professor Erich Hatala Matthes about his new book Drawing the Line which explores whether it is possible to separate art from the artist.
Sutcliffe brought up the Harry Potter author, who has been outspoken over her views on gender.
He asked: “And do you think there’s a major philosophical distinction between artists who have committed crimes, have been found guilty of crimes, and artists who simply have unpopular opinions?
“You bring up the case of JK Rowling who clearly has a very unpopular opinion regarding gender identity and has, as a consequence of that, faced severe and serious criticism. Are those the same things?”
The BBC said it was fair to discuss Rowling in this context as she appeared in Matthes’s book and the reporter distinguished her from the likes of Hitler and R Kelly.
The broadcaster said that part of the interview was neither “harmful nor offensive”.
But the BBC admitted calling Rowling’s views unpopular was “potentially misleading”.
It said: “The ECU agreed … that Mr Sutcliffe’s reference to a ‘very unpopular opinion’ was potentially misleading because, while it had clearly proved objectionable to some, there was no conclusive evidence that the objectors represented a majority.”
Well I’ll be! Not much of an apology, but at least they’re using empirical grounds to correct themselves!
*Trans-speciesism is here! The Torygraph reports that a man is fulfilling his dream to become a dog by spending £12,000 on a costume that makes him look like Lassie! (see below):
A man has fulfilled his life-long dream of becoming a dog after spending £12,500 on an ultra-realistic collie costume.
It might sound barking mad but Japanese animal fanatic Toko couldn’t be happier in his new life as a Lassie-lookalike.
The amazing tail of transformation has catapulted the Youtuber, known only as Toko, to online fame and made international headlines.
“I was able to fulfil my dream of becoming an animal,” he declared in a celebratory post on Twitter, complete with video of him in his dog suit rolling on the floor.
. . . The canine costume, which allows Toko to achieve his ambition of walking on four legs, was made over 40 days by TV and film costume agency Zeppet.
. . .One fan said, “I think it’s awesome that you are a Border collie. Never change unless you want to.”
But others reacted with howls of derision and suggested he was doggone crazy. One wrote: “You spent money on that?”
As for the dog himself, Toko said on Thursday he had been swamped by the media pack’s interest in his metamorphosis.
“I have received many media inquiries. Sorry, but I am working during the day and will be slow to reply,” he said on Twitter.
Here are pics and a video. Pretty amazing! But what are his pronouns? “Good boy”?
着ぐるみをオーダーしてました！ おかげさまで動物になってみたいという夢を叶えることができました！ https://t.co/jUFxSWW6cl pic.twitter.com/zJIX8VcWfm
— トコ (@toco_eevee) April 11, 2022
*Want to see a really good example of anti-Israel bias in the New York Times? Read the editorial board’s op-ed “Who killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh?” They all but answer: “Israeli soldiers”, when in fact the weight of the evidence is that she was shot by a Palestinian by mistake. But of course the NYT barely mentions that evidence.
*Finally, the person behind one of the world’s most widely-seen visages has died. Remember this image?
If you’re my age, you probably saw that face every day, for it’s the face emblazoned on every jar of Gerber Baby Food. And the little girl who posed for it, Ann Turner Cook, died Friday in Florida at age 95:
Ms. Cook was the bona fide Gerber baby, the winner of a nationwide contest in 1928 that has since seen her portrait reproduced on billions of jars of baby food and other items sold round the world.
In 1990, The New York Times described the sketch, by the artist Dorothy Hope Smith, as being “among the world’s most recognizable corporate logos.”
As a baby, Ms. Cook was in very much the right place at the right time. As an adult, however, fearing ridicule for her long-running role as a princess of puréed peas, she did not disclose her identity for decades.
Here she is, young and older:
She became a schoolteacher, and only revealed that she was the Gerber baby in the 1970s. She made only $5000 for the use of her image. Pikers!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is plumping for a treat
Hili: Is this chicken breast for me?Małgorzata: No, it’s our dinner but you will get a piece.Hili: Social justice demands that I get all of it.
Hili: Czy ten filet z kurczaka jest dla mnie?Małgorzata: Nie, to jest nasz obiad, ale dostaniesz kawałek.Hili: Społeczna sprawiedliwość wymaga, żeby był cały dla mnie.
From Stephen:
From Meanwhile in Canada:
From Catspotting Society:
The Tweet of God:
I've made big plans this weekend, so cancel yours.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) June 3, 2022
From Andrée:
Flawless dismount of the day. pic.twitter.com/YJgwCC3Bmo
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) June 4, 2022
From Emma Hilton’s Twitter site:
This is where we are heading unless people wake up… https://t.co/47dj9W3p9M
— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) June 4, 2022
From Barry. Is this the dumbest person in Congress? (I bet the top ten contenders are all Republicans!) Note the reference to a “peach tree dish.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene says the government is planning to “zap” people inside their bodies if they try to eat a real cheeseburger. pic.twitter.com/gCDHiH5Bsy
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) May 29, 2022
From Ginger K. Lock up the owners! #MeowToo
— Meow (@meowingTv) April 17, 2022
From the Auschwitz Memorial:
5 June 1936 | A French Jewish girl, Gina Goldstein, was born in Paris.
She arrived at #Auschwitz on 13 September 1942 in a transport of 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy. She was murdered in a gas chamber after the selection. pic.twitter.com/vA7kt9L3po
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) June 5, 2022
Tweets from Matthew. First, unrequited lovers (can anybody read the script?):
قطط اخر زمن pic.twitter.com/CDwBDrOBC4
— Error 404 (@Error4019082820) June 4, 2022
Damn; they are drunk!
The problem with a five-day royal bank holiday is that by Saturday no one at the Telegraph is still sober pic.twitter.com/wTRJAG6sBt
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) June 4, 2022
Duckling getting a ride. Google translation: “Naminori spot-billed duck parent and child Yawning on top and standing up.” The YouTube video is largely about ducks as well.
なみのりカルガモ親子さん💦
上であくびしたり、立ち乗りもΣ(ﾟДﾟ)https://t.co/ghcjGVK3sN pic.twitter.com/uSlGJh5FGm— mochi(o (@mochico251) June 3, 2022
“Erection” indeed!
A few years ago All Saints Church in Hereford got funding for the erection of a cafe on a new mezzanine level. A new seating gallery had excellent lighting, all the better to illuminate detail of the magnificent intricate carvings cloaked in shadow since the 14th century! …Ah. pic.twitter.com/3Y3wMDkGh2
— Folk Horror Magpie (@folkhorrormagpi) June 2, 2022
Shouldn’t Gerber follow the progressive lead of the Pearl Milling Company and Cream of Wheat by removing any picture of a person on their products? Will that improve anything socially?
The video of the congresswoman was amusing. She seems a bit thick. Was she joking? I heard what I thought was laughter towards the end of the video.
I guess not. She is that thick. Maybe someone was laughing at her 🙂
She’s the same bright light who said gazpacho for gestapo, and, I believe, started the idea of western forest fires being caused by Jewish space lasers. A real credit to Congress😵💫😵💫
Right. I looked her up 🙂
I cut people some slack for confusing foreign terms; some of the smartest people I know confuse “voilà” (French: look there!) and “wallah” (Arabic: by god, I swear). Polyglots think it sounds ignorant, but for people who only speak one language, the confusion is understandable. Still, thanks to George Carlin, every time I hear people confuse “forte” (French noun, one syllable) and “forte” (Italian adjective, two syllables), my skin crawls.
There’s still no excuse for believing in space lasers.
There’s a difference between mispronouncing foreign words and phrases and misunderstanding the words and phrases themselves.
“Choots-pah” (as former Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann pronounced chutzpah) belongs to the first category; “gestapo” (Marjorie Taylor Greene) and “Molotov” (former Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker) for, respectively, gazpacho and mazel tov, to the latter.
I think the latter can be done intentionally to signal a lack of caring about getting it right. Which is what I think MGT does, she DGAF. And then she can just categorize all criticism. of her as pedantry. It’s win win for her.
Mebbe so, yazikus, though I’m reluctant to attribute to Machiavellian cunning that which can as readily be explained by plain old pig-ignorance. 🙂
Yeah saying things correctly labels you as a member of the cursed “elite”.😫
It’s good to be elite. Literally.
It’s better to reach for the top than to the bottom🤓
> There’s a difference between mispronouncing foreign words and phrases and misunderstanding the words and phrases themselves.
There are several shades of gray and a lot of depends on how metropolitan the speaker is. ‘Voilà’ / ‘wallah’ was one example of using a similar sounding foreign word for another. In this case, ‘gazpacho’ and ‘gestapo’ have the same stress pattern and similar consonants in a slightly different order. Swapping the /p/ and /ʃ/ sounds is basically a spoonerism, fun to ridicule, but all too common. I wish I could tell you the number of times I have heard people unfamiliar with English doing the same thing, confusing ‘kitchen’ and ‘chicken’ (another spoonerism).
I’m not defending anyone here, but I’ll accept that Spoonerisms a common human error – especially for politicians. Many politicians are speaking extemporaneously, while we keyboard warriors take a moment to reflect and spellcheck. Ridiculing someone for that takes bandwidth that could better be used in criticizing deeper problems.
I think such Spoonerisms are common in speech (as was the case with Prof. Spooner himself); such mess lo … er, much less so … in writing (as when Gov. Walker wrote “Molotov” to his constituents). 🙂
Wow, sorry. I didn’t realize some of the mistakes were written rather than spoken. I generally don’t follow celebrities, political or otherwise.
No one who voted Biden for President should mock the malapropisms of any politician.
In just one month, for example (August, 2021), Biden hacked up these hair balls…
“…they’re spending the most powerful message to their families…
…Our own Department of Energy pioneered and transformed the battery industry, where Barack and I w-w-went into offer, when we were in office…
…Jill & I would never have thought, we’d have to join you, the Capitol Rotunda, not once but twice. Once, to iron — to honor Officer Brian Sicknick, who lost his life…
…Those of us been around a while, we knew his dad, knew his dad well. He was Secretary a the United States — Sergeant-at-Arms in the United States Senate…
…It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated I know I’ve said that constantly, and others have as well. The vaxation of the unvaccinated…
…Thank you, man; you’re a helluvan assalete…
…Hi-speed Internet — gonna be available and affordable everywhere, to everyone, so farmers nationwide can get the breast prices for their products at home and abroad…
…We started off the intercontinental railroad, in the late eighteen hunerds; all all kidding aside, we leak the coast…
…That’s why, I’ve instructed the Federal Drug Administration to get these genetic drugs to consumers…
Cleaning up and calfing capping the orphan wells.
We’ve trapped uh we’ve tapped additional aircraft from the Department of Defense.
…My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency, including — and contingency — including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now…
…Like their fellow brothers and sisters, who’ve died, defending our vision and our values, and the struggle against terrorism, of the fall on this day, they’re part of a great, noble company of American heroes”
First take the plank out of your own eye. Please don’t choose truth over facts.
There’s a big difference between Biden’s frequent verbal slipups and MTG’s ravings. Biden’s don’t indicate any sort of knowledge deficit. They are just innocent manglings of the English language. MTG’s “mistakes”, on the other hand, show a true lack of knowledge.
Okay, Corn Pop. “And by the way, you know, I sit on the stand, and it gets hot … I got hairy legs that … turn blonde in the sun and the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down so it was straight and watch the hair come back up again. They’d look at it. So, I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap, and I’ve loved kids jumping on my lap.” Guy’s a weirdo.
+mucho. Zero comparison between MTG and Uncle Joe!
Did you transcribe Hannity’s montage yourself, or do you lazily believe somebody else’s attempt?
But is she wrong to worry about biometric surveillance?
No she is not. Not at all. In fact, it could be that she is very perceptive when it comes to analyzing the technical aspects of biometric surveillance. It is terribly hard to judge from only a short video.
In general, I don’t think it is wrong to worry about any kind of surveillance, particularly if you are the one being surveilled.
A person who thinks that a pizzeria is involved in sex trafficking may not be entirely correct about that particular instance, while still having a valid concern about sex trafficking.
A person who thinks that JFK is coming to Dallas next week may have made a minor calculational error, but is not wrong in worrying about people faking death certificates.
A person who thinks that the moon landing was faked may not be entirely accurate about that particular instance, but their general concern about the possibility of the government lying to the people is understandable.
A person who thinks the earth is five thousand years old may be off about the particular instance, but their interest in the age of the earth is understandable.
I don’t worry about surveillance but the improper use of the information gained by it. After all, I will have no control over light that bounces off me and my stuff, the sound it emits, or the distribution of my DNA on stuff I touch. That fact, coupled with the availability of AI software and massive computing power, means that, while we’re not quite there yet, the information will be out there for anyone to gather. It’s what they do with it that may be illegal.
What you’re saying is that we should excuse the loons because SOMEWHERE there is deception in the world, ergo we should worry about moon-landing deception. What you’re saying, I think, is pretty meaningless.
I think Chetiya’s tongue was planted in Chetiya’s cheek on this one, boss.
Yes. It was sarcasm. I explained below 🙁
That is not what I meant at all 🙂 I meant that we could ridicule it because any loony idea can be seen as being part of something more serious. That was what the examples were meant to convey.
I was responding to
I wanted to say that the broader concern is not at issue. Even though I can understand people being concerned about surveillance in general, that is not what I was talking about. My response was meant to convey that through sarcasm.
On a more serious note, a man may think that a local pizzeria is turning children into pizzas and selling them to people who want to have sex with pizzas. And people may ridicule the man. I would. However, if someone were to ask me if it is wrong for the man to worry about child sex trafficking, I would point out that, in general, the concern is not wrong. I’ll do that just to make my position clear. Then I would say that that’s not the point.
We can mitigate anything by focusing on a broader concern: A man may think the earth is flat, but his curiosity about the geometry of the earth is admirable. The examples were meant to convey exactly that in a humorous way; but I did not say that explicitly, perhaps I should have.
She’s really nuts. People openly laugh at her all the time.
Re the Queen: So “the kings of the Old Testament” were “loyal to Christ”? Talk about prescience.
When it comes to religion and royalty, retconning is the name of the game.
With respect to the photo of the cycle race winners, here are the organisers’ details about the Lightening and Thunder “inclusive” cycle races. Transwomen won 4 of the six podium places, so that went well: https://thundercrit.com/race-categories/
Emma Bridges, the winner of 1st place in the photo won in competition against male cyclists just a couple of months ago.
D’oh – that should be “5 of the six podium places”. And, naturally, men got to choose which category to compete in while women couldn’t.
Re, How the Democrats can win:
Without commenting on the wisdom and practical common sense of the movement to ameliorate climate change, I will just point out that to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions at any time, it is not sufficient to end the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation. Shipping and aviation seem unlikely to be electrified, ever, except for very short hops. There are also many agricultural and industrial processes that emit GHGs as well, regardless of the source of energy.
Therefore to get to net zero, we meet be going hell-bent-for-leather to be removing CO2 from the atmosphere permanently. It has been calculated that the world needs to be building, every year starting in 2021, 32 “direct carbon-capture and storage” plants each capable of removing 1 billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere and turning it into limestone. Since none has been built beyond small subsidy-harvesting demonstration plants, we are now just 64 plants behind schedule. Next year we will be 96 behind. They will require direct government financing as public works projects because they produce social benefits only, nothing of saleable economic value,
These plants require energy to build them and to power the highly endergonic processes involved, energy that will become very expensive (because in chronically short supply) when fossil fuels are extinguished. Additionally, many futurists are already assuming that the use of fossil fuels will never end and are counting their chickens among the presumption that DCCS will save us. We just have to build even more of them.
We’d best get cracking.
Good points, however, I can imagine planting trees could pull a lot of CO2 out of the air, at least as a delay tactic while CO2 capture is being built.
Tucker Carlson’s thoughts exactly!
During our last election campaign, our PM pledged to plant a billion trees. Well, not him personally. But the little buggers are expensive to plant as seedlings, when their carbon fixation is going to be positive for twenty years or so. Back-breaking hand work in the woods among blackflies and mosquitoes, sleeping in bunkhouses, often no cellphone coverage. High school and university students don’t want to do it as a summer job anymore. The unemployed will fake it until they get sent home as useless. Much of Canada already has trees on it. What doesn’t is either too cold or too dry for trees or it already has farmland or houses on it, none of whose owners are willing to move off and plant trees there instead.
My wife and I planted 5 elm saplings ourselves for the Bruce Trail Conservancy on land the BTC owns. We were part of a group of 20 or so volunteers who planted another 150 tree saplings of various species last fall on abandoned farmland near us. This is part of restoring Carolinian forest in Ontario with native deciduous trees, not to control climate change with rapidly growing conifers. We are mostly retired but still have other calls on our time and, of course, the BTC has only so many trees to plant along the 300 km or so of trail they manage. One billion is a lot of trees: 30 for every man, woman, and child in Canada.
Who doesn’t like trees but I think both Tucker and our PM are FOS.
> state and congressional districts lines free of gerrymandering
The most effective way is to get rid of congressional districts entirely and go for proportional representation. That would, of course, benefit third parties – and voters – much more than it would benefit Democrats or Republicans, so it won’t happen any time soon.
> required civics and life-skills course for high school seniors
For all high school seniors? Or only those in public schools? And remember, 18-year olds can legally withdraw from school. It would take a Constitutional Amendment to implement this fully throughout all public schools; the Constitution never gave the feds the power to regulate education, and the feds have tried to backdoor access to education policy through funding. I’d love to see the challenges if federal policy tried to declare a mandatory curriculum for private schools (I’ve seen it happen in other countries, so it’s not impossible. Again, though, it would take a Constitutional Amendment or a really twisted interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause).
Re: Google error message on the Arabic captioned cat video, the iPhone version isn’t much better. It’s “Cats of the last time. “
Interesting comments by MTG. Seems she and her party are OK w governmental monitoring of what’s happening in women’s reproductive systems.
Well, MTG (who in addition to her “peach tree dish” remark also came out in favor of “Christian Nationalism”) is certainly in the hunt. But, for the week’s dumbest, I gotta go with good ol’ Louie Gohmert (R-TX) — a guy who spent a decade as a Texas state court judge, for Chrissake — who went on the right-wing network Newsmax to piss’n’moan that poor Republicans can’t even lie to the FBI and congress anymore, what’s this world comin’ to?:
I saw Louie’s comment about lying😩😵💫
And to Linguist’s point about forgiving monolingual speakers, Gestapo vs. gazpacho doesn’t take many marbles…And as for the peach tree dish🙀She’s from the Peach tree state, for chrissakes.
If the state is the peach, Greene is the pits.
Was the peach-tree-dish video from a live presentation? If not from a live presentation, I wonder why someone in her staff did not ask for a correction.
Do you really think MTG is going for truth or that the details of her statement matter? She was going for the reaction she got. It’s all part of owning the libs. Once she’s gotten the outrage, it is on to the next one. The real mystery is why there are huge numbers of constituents who seem to enjoy this sort of thing to the point where they give her money and vote for her.
No. But some people are competent at bullshitting and would at least have corrected ‘peach-tree-dish’. From the video, she seems immeasurably stupid. After all, it is sufficient to be an imbecile to stop acting like an idiot. Maybe her staff are as bad. I just read about her soup gestapo. That is pretty funny too.
It’s politics as entertainment that can only be appreciated by a certain audience.
Not really a mystery, though it is depressing. Hate is a powerful tool in the hands of a demagogue. The South also has a culture steeped in white grievance- they’re easy to rile up with MTG’s style of propaganda.
Congresswoman Greene has zero interest in legislation or policy. A House seat for her is merely the best possible platform for trolling.
I always love those “what the X party can do to win” articles. They always propose things that are either impossible, or require the party and its leaders to be who they aren’t.
I had thought the Lizzie Borden house was up for sale a few years back, but it was actually just last year. The new owner says he will continue it as a museum.
With regard to the Gerber baby, $5000 was a lot of money in 1928. The average salary was about $2,200 per year, and the average home price was about $6,300.
If the peach tree dish line came from anyone else I would suspect it was a reference to a Sarah Silverman’s joke from her “We Are Miracles” special:
“I’ve been with a few men who have told me that my vagina smells like a peach…a peach tree….a peach tree dish.”
I’m gonna stick with imagining like an actual peach — unless and until personal experience proves me wrong. 🙂
Thought just struck me, now that you tell me there is such an expression as “peach tree dish” (which was heretofore mystifying—thanks). I wonder if, when Ms. Greene heard that joke, maybe she said to herself, “Gosh, all these years I’ve been calling it a Petri dish, whatever that is. I must have misheard, like a pop song lyric. Now that I know what it really is, I’ll be sure to say it right next time, educated like.”
a/k/a “mondegreens”.
Brilliant. That is the best Wikipedia page ever.
The Economist has a soft spot for eggcorns and recommends kind indulgence toward people who use them ignorantly: that is one way the language evolves. (“Peach tree dish” is not an eggcorn.)
But to think this is how Traditional Knowledge was transmitted orally for thousands of years and is given probative value in our Courts today.
It’s only a matter of time before a new subcategory of mondegreen appears known as the MarTGreene. It’s a phrase or statement so goddamned stupid that no one would ever believe it was uttered by an elected official and so intentionally mishear a more reasonable version as a self-deception to maintain their faith in democracy.
So Lizzie Borden was ostracized for the rest of her life. That started me thinking about the word, “ostracize”. It sounds like a surgical procedure resulting in the removal of the ostra, whatever they are. Turns out, that this is the Spanish word for oysters! Ok, I’m guessing that isn’t the part of ostracize’s etymology. Still, food for thought. 😉
Ostracize = bigger than an emu.
“A national law guaranteeing a right to an abortion in the first trimester and in all cases of rape and incest. WOULD BE OVERTURNED BY THE SUPREME COURT.”
On what basis? Wasn’t the Roe decision only the “law of the land” because Congress has never made any laws regarding abortion? It has always been my knowledge that Congress could always settle this one way or another using proper legislation. That’s not to say there aren’t ways they could make such laws unconstitutional but the Constitution doesn’t mention abortion at all. Amirite?
I think that is right. I’m sure there is a compromise position that will be acceptable to 75% of the public.
On the other hand, many pols will decide that the issue works better for them if it isn’t solved.
Yes, and the politicians aren’t going to agree on much these days, regardless of what their voters think.
The Mississippi law that appears to have led to the end of Roe v. Wade allows abortion for any reason at all including rape and incest up to 15 weeks, which is beyond the first trimester. Treatment of a maternal medical emergency at any time that results in the inadvertent death of the fetus is not considered to be an illegal abortion. This is probably the sort of middle-ground compromise that most of those 75% are thinking of.
Of course the Mississippi law is not the law of the land and some states are more restrictive than that. Could Congress over-ride the Criminal Codes* of those states and impose a national law modeled on the Mississippi compromise? At risk of my putting words in his mouth, Ken Kucek has written here that Congress could invoke the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution. Whether that would “stick” in a criminal matter is unknown. Could Congress permissively regulate as commerce conduct that was a criminal offence in, say, Missouri, especially when the offence occurred entirely in that state and had no implications for other states?
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*Forgive the Canadian expression, please. I don’t know what the states call their bodies of law that govern the most serious criminal matters.
> Could Congress over-ride the Criminal Codes* of those states and impose a national law
My understanding, and I fully admit that this is not my field, is that Congress can invalidate sections of states’ criminal codes and make them unenforceable – if the US Constitution grants Congress the federal power. Similarly, Congress can criminalize something that is legal within the state – again, if the Constitution grants them that power. However, (if I understand this correctly) Congress cannot force the states to enforce federal criminal policy, which is how sanctuary cities and locally decriminalized drugs exist. State LEOs enforce state laws, while federal LEOs enforce federal laws. And then there are county cops, city cops, campus cops…
Ah. Thanks. So it’s complicated. Complication means there could be an avenue for national action: failure to withstand a Supreme Court challenge by a state wanting a stricter law is not a foregone conclusion. I am hoping to see some movement in this direction. We’ll see.
Yep, complicated. And then sometimes the Feds use extraconstitutional measures. In my understanding, Louisiana had a lower drinking age than the other states and the Federal government withheld highway funds until Louisiana raised the drinking age to 21 in 1987-1996 (long story). That doesn’t mean that state, parish, or city cops and judges necessarily enforce the policy on Louisiana’s books, though; like any other prohibition scenario, enforcement can be inconsistent and selective, with all of the questions that raises regarding demographic bias in jurisprudence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimum_purchase_age_by_state
Under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, Clause 2 of the US constitution, federal law takes precedence over any contradictory state or local laws. (Whether the executive branch of the federal government chooses to enforce such laws is a separate question.)
SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality (under congress’s commerce clause powers) of federal laws prohibiting the local cultivation, use, and distribution of marijuana in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), although federal authorities have, by and large, declined to enforce these laws in states that have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use. It is the existence of these federal laws (and of the Raich decision) that has thus far prevented companies involved in the distribution and dispensing of marijuana in states where it is legal from participating in the interstate banking system.
Mississippi is one of 13 states that has so-called “trigger laws” that would automatically make all abortions illegal if Roe v. Wade is overruled.
And let’s not overlook that Mississippi was the party that, in its briefs before SCOTUS, asked the Court to go beyond the more narrow issue on which certiorari review had been granted regarding the constitutionality of its 15-week ban and to overrule Roe v. Wade outright.
The Mississippi trigger law has an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or where an abortion is necessary for the preservation of a woman’s life, though not for any other elective abortions at any stage of pregnancy. Not all states with trigger laws make such exceptions.
Sigh. I’m not even going to ask why the more recent 15-week law doesn’t over-ride the older (2007?) trigger law, but apparently from your link it doesn’t.
The only source for the idea that Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by a Palestian is the Israeli government. Everyone else who has looked at her dead has come to the conclusion that she was kiled by Israeli soldiers; the question remaining is whether that was deliberate or not.
I know it is useless to say that here, but the NYT is not biased on this topic.
It’s not only the Israeli government, it’s both the Israeli and Jewish researchers who base their conclusions on videos and interviews given by Palestinians. In the beginning, two Palestinian journalists who were with this woman talked about bullets coming from a sniper in a high building nearby. They didn’t know that there were only Palestinian snipers there and that Israeli soldiers were in the opposite direction. These interviews are not mentioned later in any of the analyses. The two journalists themselves never mentioned it again after learning that there were no Jewish soldiers in the building.
But this is just one of many details gleaned from the videos taken and posted by Palestinians which indicates that it could be a Palestinian bullet. Nobody on the Jewish – Israeli side is saying that it surely was a Palestinian bullet. They talk only about probabilities. It’s not Israel which refuses inquiry and refuses to show the only evidence which would give a definite answer: the bullets which killed the female journalist and wounded her colleague. It’s the Palestinians.
And if somebody wonders why should we believe something if only Jews are saying it, try to remember Kofie Anan’s words “Can the whole world be wrong and Israel be right?” about the false accusation about the “Jenin massacre” (the whole world, with CNN, NYT, Guardian and all the rest believed that Jews massacred thousands of Palestinians in Jenin 2002; but later it turned out that 52 Palestinians died in this battle, most of them with arms in their hands. And this fact was confirmed by the UN’s inquiry). It may be also worth remembering that the whole world believed in blood libel (Jews kill Christian children in order to use their blood in matzos): Could everybody be wrong and the Jews be right? It’s happened before.
I don’t find MTG funny – I find her scary. She’s a modern day Brigham Young, imo. She wants a theocratic nation state and isn’t afraid of partnering with violent groups to get there. And in this clip, I think it is meant to make her supporters feel justified in feeling mocked for being stupid. I hope GA gets rid of her.
I don’t think GA gets rid of her. She just won her primary and brings in million$. She is in a gerrymandered district as well. What’s really scary is that if the House goes back to the GOP, she will be put back on committees and will wield real power- a gavel wielding Republican who thinks she’s above the law. Right now, she’s stripped of power and can’t get anything done except spread lies, hate and stupidity, which she excels at.
MTG just gets more popular when lefties attack her. She is totally planning all of this. It is obvious once you see what she is doing.
No, she is not planning anything other than creating as much attention for herself that she can muster. (I agree, it is obvious what she is doing and achieving.) Lefties mostly ignore her, and when they “attack” her, it’s because she is off-the-hook aggressive and seemingly deranged. Sucks that so many Georgians (no surprise, but still sucks) would vote for such a delusional loon. I reckon delusional loons have been America’s “state primate” for far too long.