"He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes than she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more."

"She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument."

Man jumps to his death over the 7th floor railing in a mall in China, in the midst of an argument with his girlfriend. I'm reading the comments at that link and others, and I'd like to note the absence — or near absence — of post-suicide observations about bullying. Why no attacks on the girlfriend? Where's the sympathy of the poor bullied man who lost his life? I'm not even seeing the usual sentimentality about suicide. I'm seeing snark in the form of This is why I don't go shopping with my husband.

Note that the couple were not married, and I wonder what kind of Christmas shopping has one person simply buying presents for herself? I know there's that thing of shopping for others and then not resisting buying something for yourself too, but this is not that. And I know there's the very common practice of a couple shopping together to buy each other presents, perhaps to wrap and exchange in front of the rest of the family. Again, this isn't that. I suspect this has little to do with Christmas and more to do with a man who was in the process of buying sexual access to a woman who was upping the price and putting him into debt.

"This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings."

"Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with 'six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen.' It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings."



Wow! Awesome! It was even in the New York Times! Evolution, baby! What can't it do?!

Well, it didn't do that, but it did produce a human mind capable of settling down after viewing something awesome and figuring out what we're really looking at:

Returning to the viral ant-winged photo, it would appear that the fly is supinating its wings (twisting the wing 90° and pressing forwards to display patterns), which can occur both when a species is pretending they’re a threatening spider as well as in species with courtship wing displays, which doesn’t help us decide what’s going on — is there a female just off camera that’s being courted, or is the fly threatened by the giant camera lens in its face? However, if you look closely at the photo you can see that the middle and hind legs are actually curled up under the body and the fore legs are not resting in a natural position at all — they look more like a ballerina en pointe, with the last leg segments curled and with the tops of the “feet” (the tarsomeres) resting on the surface of the substrate — which leads me to believe the fly in the photo may be dead, or at least heavily compromised, and not actively displaying its wings at all!

Putting everything together, it leads me to believe we may be choosing to see ants where they don’t actually exist.

So what's really awesome is the entomology grad student Morgan D. Jackson and not the fruit fly... or The New York Times.

Or would you have been happier if the story of a fruit fly with ant wings had really been true?

Obama's newest famous quote is "I'm really good at killing people" — but what was the context?

The Daily Mail cherry-picked the quote out of the new book "Double Down: Game Change 2012." The book's not out for normal people until tomorrow. (Buy it here.) So I'm stuck wondering. DM says:

A Washington Post report makes passing reference to the anecdote, saying that while speaking with his aides about the drone program Obama bragged that he was 'really good at killing people.' The Obama Administration has not responded specifically to reports of the alleged boast from the President.

The Daily Mail is punctilious enough to say "alleged" but can't resist characterizing the words as a "boast." We're told he "bragged." The headline says "President Obama joked...." Let's assume for the purposes of discussion that Obama really did say those words in that order. But let's try to imagine why he might have said that.

Perhaps you're imagining a childish man, exclaiming "I'm really good at killing people" like a numbskull teenager playing a first-person-shooter video game. Or maybe you're picturing someone more like a movie super-villain in his vast underground lair, cackling to his fawning minions as he creepily caresses his "kill" button.

But it's possible to think of a context in which Obama would be sympathetic. I could imagine a serious discussion of the lack of genuine accomplishment in his administration.

O: What will history say we have done? Nothing! I was the embodiment of hope, and everything I have touched has turned to ashes.

AIDE: But, sir....

O: What are the accomplishments? Name the accomplish of the Obama administration! What will people say?!

AIDE: He killed bin Laden.

O: A pathetic, isolated idiot sitting in his hovel, watching bad porn. The SEALs blew him away. That was really amazing of me.

AIDE: [Names several significant terrorists who have been killed through the drone program.]

O [sadly, sarcastically]: I'm really good at killing people.

Intent on writing this little dialogue, I searched for a list of 4 or 5 good names for the aide to tick off in an effort to bolster the President's spirits. See if you can do that. I couldn't do it. I kept running into "A List Of Children Killed By Drone Strikes In Pakistan and Yemen." Go there. Scroll through those names (and ages) and think about that context and why Obama might have said I'm really good at killing people.

"If you are truly a feminine woman at your core, but don’t know how to let your femininity surface, you will end up unhappy, feeling miserable and depleted."

"It takes a lot of energy to reject a part of you that is there whether you like it or not. And even if you think you are happy, something will feel like it is missing some day. Why? Because you’re rejecting a part of yourself. Being able to claim your feminine energy is at the heart of your own happiness, and most definitely the happiness of your relationship."

From a post titled "How Most Women Reject their Femininity (and How you can stand out from the crowd)" at a website called "The Feminine Woman," written by Renee Wade. I stumbled into this the other day as I was participating in a Facebook discussion that got onto the topic of feminine beauty, and I went on a search looking for examples of the most feminine-looking face (not the most beautiful feminine face).
I'd remembered reading about a study that found that people thought a man's face was most appealing if it was slightly more feminine-looking than the average male face. I was wondering if the most beautiful female faces would be those exactly at what is the average among women or tending slightly masculine or tending slightly feminine. I know that the most extremely male-looking faces are experienced as ugly, but what about the most extremely feminine faces? I wasn't even sure what that would be. A very small, pointed chin? A tiny, tiny nose and gigantic eyes? I really don't even know.

I got sidetracked onto that "Feminine Woman" site, which I thought raised some interesting issues that I'd like to talk about. I'm not saying Renee Wade is a reliable expert or an impressive theorist in the realm of gender studies. I had a flashback to the "Total Woman"/Marabel Morgan phenomenon of the 1970s, which was, even then, ludicrously uncool.

I'd like to put aside the notion that women should be feminine — because that's what God or nature intended or because it's traditional or the foundation of society or whatever you (or somebody else) might think.

I'm interested in individual expression, freedom, and happiness.

Let's hypothesize that there is something internal and psychological that we've been calling "femininity" (because it corresponds generally to having the female body type). You have as much or as little of it as you have for whatever reason. With that understanding, reread the quote that begins this post.

Now, the question becomes: What does it mean to be extremely feminine?

And: What would it be like if those who are psychologically at the extreme of femininity were to feel supported and encouraged to openly and proudly manifest their femininity? Try to answer this question without confusing it with the efforts of those who don't actually have this inward orientation but who are aspiring to images and stereotypes about femininity out of social pressure or as a means of competition for other things they may want.

"Back at the market, I muse how the photos that I take invariably bring out what I think of as local and therefore interesting."

"You're not likely to find me taking a picture of the Polish guy who was standing on the street with hand extended asking for a few coins. Or of the stores along the main drag -- they have a ubiquitous face to them that could appear anywhere at all: places of cheap clothing, a few tattoo parlors, many barbers and butchers too. I like walking up one, peering into another, but my camera waits."

Weekending somewhere obscure in Ireland, Nina reveals her approach to censorship by photographic framing.

And this says something about why I don't — like Nina — put great effort into traveling to distant places. If I were in that Irish market with my camera, I would frame the discontinuities and weird juxtapositions. I'd be drawn to what would disappoint the traveler who's looking for the old world where things are authentic and true to that particular locality.

Nina's phrase is "local and therefore interesting," but what would seem interesting to me would be the inevitable intrusions of the non-local, the very things that spoil the trip for those who formed their  idea of what they would find if they expend great effort going somewhere from of photographs framed as Nina has done.

There are many photographs at the link. It's all very romantic and beautiful in the photographs. Enjoy them. They are probably more enjoyable than taking the trip yourself. But for Nina, I believe that the trip is enjoyable in large part because she is searching for photographs like that, and it's a difficult search that requires a thought and skill. It's exciting and interesting because of the effort it takes to exclude what would not be pleasant to see. I suspect that just outside each frame is something jarring, like a Nike T-shirt or a Miley Cyrus magazine cover.

Think about that before you succumb to the fantasy that travel will be beautiful. These photographs are the lure but also the set-up for disappointment when you see that it's not like that at all, even if it is some non-touristy spot like Ballina by the Lough Derg or Limerick or wherever Nina has alighted.

"Ann could drop her camera and it would somehow take an amazing photograph. Some people just have the eye."

"I'm not jealous, its just that I would have to take two or three hundred photos to come up with one of Ann's throwaway overnight thread pics."

Said Jimmy in yesterday's "Yellow-and-Red Café," which features a photograph that — Jimmy doesn't realize — was one of 200 shots I took on a single walk through Horicon Marsh the other day.

"I haven’t had a cigarette in probably 6 years. That’s because I’m scared of my wife.”

Said Barack Obama, caught in a seemingly candid moment.

I don't believe in the truth of either statement — that he hasn't had a cigarette in about 6 years and that he's scared of his wife — but I don't hear an intent that these remarks be taken as true. I hear an off-the-record interaction with one individual that's about making a friendly connection. There's camaraderie in displaying that he knows something personal about the other man and — since what he knows is that the man has a substance addiction problem — referring to his own parallel weakness.

He doesn't scold or put down the other man, but expresses hope — hope! — that the man has quit smoking and makes the possibly untrue assertion that he hasn't smoked one cigarette in "probably 6 years." This is an encouraging remark, and I think that it was offered in the spirit of encouragement but that Obama also realized that it might sound braggadocious, so he toned it down with the self-deprecating humor about being scared of his wife.

That gives an explanation for not smoking and works as posing that he's an ordinary guy tending to the demands of his wife, even though he is the most powerful man in the world. This is humanizing and a bit silly, and it's a male-bonding moment, containing the implication that wives are demanding and require appeasement.

If you want to mock or criticize Obama here, I think the more sophisticated speculation not that he's revealed he's subservient and pusillanimous, but that this is misogyny or male chauvinism. Obama is using his wife — both as a stereotypical woman and as the caricature of her that we see in the media — to make points with another man. Michelle Obama is not there. It's a remark about her behind her back. She's not named, but called "my wife." And she's scary. He's not actually scared, just tapping an old sexist mindset that makes it possible to laugh at stupid cartoons like this:



And Obama is simultaneously appropriating the anti-Michelle propaganda of his political opponents. He's casually gesturing at the huge pile of mean-spirited scribblings about how she's always nagging everybody about health, all the miscellaneous things scribbled on web pages and illustrated with photos like this:



Feminists and traditionalists alike can chide the man who engages in loose, humorous talk about his wife behind her back.

***

"Honor your marriage; keep it pure by remaining true to your wife in every way."

Perseverating about shoes before 7 a.m.

Woken by a phone call from the demonic "Blocked," I make coffee at 6 a.m. and sit down to approve the comments that collected in my "awaiting moderation" folder overnight. Somehow that sets me off to writing 5 comments in the thread about shoes. The coffee kicked in spiked by the false sunrise and the poetry it inspired and I got myself retracked onto the front page, where, looking back now, I feel like the blog has a theme today. It's something like: We're always only seeing things from our own point of view. (Dylan lyric: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view.")

So what did I say — about shoes?? — before sanity kicked in at 7? Highlights from the comments:

... there are things you feel you need to do in NYC that you look almost foolish doing around here. I see some young women around campus mincing about on heels when no one else is. There isn't one man around who is dressed to go with that. It's as if she's on her way to a party that exists only in her mind....

Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me? (The question, put that way, assumes you are not a gay man. If you are a gay man, you don't need advice from me on how you look to other men.)....

I'm vulnerable to the criticism that I've promoted women's shoes that are like little girl shoes and that's inconsistent with saying shorts infantilize men. I'm treading -- in Mary Janes -- on dangerous ground!

Those shoe comments reveal that...
	Althouse should be permitted to wake up naturally.
	The comments section is a good place to hide the crazy.
	Early morning Althouse belongs on the front page and should happen more often.
	Althouse needs to resist defending her posts from whatever the hell gets dropped in the comments.
	There really are some serious issues about sex and shoes that demand exploration.
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Like I said...

That's a phrase used by Obama spokesperson Josh Earnest, fending off a question about U.S. involvement in the David Miranda incident, a phrase I quoted and then repeated in a post earlier today, titled "Juxtaposition highlights the politics of distraction." The commenter Bob Ellison — who seems to have missed that I was repeating Earnest's spoken words — criticized my writing:

[D]on't ever say "like I said" (or "as I said"), or "as I have written before", or "I have commented on this numerous times, but...". If you made an impression the first time, you'll only diminish the impression when you keep hammering on it. And most of us haven't read everything you've written.

Lots of online writers make these mistakes.

Ahem! I responded:

The phrase "Like I said" wasn't written, so you need to adapt your advice for speakers.

To me — and this is the reason I repeated it — Earnest had a tell. He was answering a NEW question, so beginning the answer with "Like I said" was a way to say: You're just asking the same question, so I'm going to give you the same answer. It wasn't the same question, and even his first answer was evasive. "Like I said" was, to my ear, a red flag that he had talking points, he intended to deliver them, and the questions would not be taken seriously.

Commenter Ellison repositioned:

"You need to adapt your advice for speakers."

Good point, and it picks at another sore spot: why do people speak differently than they write? I do... I curse more orally than on the keyboard, and I say "um" and "well" a lot more, but these are just faults. I don't deliberately talk differently, I think, unless I'm talking to someone I really dislike.

I say "it is I" and "had it been she." Those get weird looks.

Shouldn't writing be as smooth as speaking, mostly? Not everyone can do it. I can't.

I think he meant to say Shouldn't speaking be as smooth as writing?, but, in any case, consider this passage from Janet Malcolm's great book "The Journalist and the Murderer":

When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech — that Molière’s M. Jourdain was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose — is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had been “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation. The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public.

Now, I think some people do speak in unbroken, well-structured sentences that are free of grammatical errors that could be transcribed directly into excellent writing, but I don't think those stuck listening to them are very happy with it. We need the backtracking and disfluencies to feel comfortable.

Similarly, most good writers "hear" their words and think about them as if they were speech — it feels speech-like as you go along — but it's actually different from speech.

I'd tend to be suspicious of anyone who seemed to be trying too hard to speak like writing or to write like speaking. I'd wonder what's up? What's the motivation? A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. A writer who affects an overly speech-like style may be padding or talking down to us.

"Does how to cook bacon count as my personal life?"

"If you say yes, then 1 of 11 posts today is about my 'personal life.' If not, then 0 of 11. Going back before today, I counted 47 posts before I got to one that could arguably be considered about my personal life, and it was only a photograph of our backyard garden with the TT parked next to it."

That's me, responding to Pete, who has the impression that other lawprofs blog mainly about law and occasionally put something in about their personal lives, whereas "the reverse is true" for me.

I'm posting to say that Pete's wrong, but I'm pleased by that wrongness. I like that this feels personal. But the notion that you're seeing my personal life... where does that illusion come from? I hope you're getting pleasure too... from this faux voyeurism.

And here's the garden + TT, in this morning's light-and-shadow.



Data mine that, peepers!

"Blue Is the Warmest Color" — that movie about lesbians that won the grand prize at Cannes — is hated by...

... the lesbian who wrote the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. And by "graphic novel," I don't mean that it has detailed descriptions of the sexual act. (The movie, however, has a 10-minute sex sequence that the author calls pornographic.) What I mean is what the NYT is referring to as a "comic book-novel" to avoid the ambiguity that appears in my first sentence.

Here's the Wikipedia article for "graphic novel":

The term "graphic novel" was first used in 1964; it was popularized within the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978, and became familiar with the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Spiegelman's Maus, Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Book Industry Study Group added "graphic novel" as a category in book stores.

Oh, but the author-artist of "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude," Julie Maroh, will be stuck with the less respectful terminology as the topic under discussion is porn. Her book has sensitive images like this:



And the movie doesn't capture what she meant to convey.

Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”

Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”

Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

But what do you expect when a commercial movie is made from a book? The story is much less about the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters, and what's on the screen are superficial images, particularly beautiful faces and bodies, and the audience is invited to gaze and feel whatever they feel. The movie director,  Abdellatif Kechiche, said:

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”

So, like many, many movies — perhaps nearly all movies — this movie is about how beautiful women are. Meanwhile, we learn that the actresses were not as naked as they look. "We were wearing prostheses," one says, mysteriously.

Studying college-age females and their "fat talk" (in which 93% of them indulge).

"Alexandra F. Corning, a research associate professor in psychology at the University of Notre Dame... showed 139 undergraduates photos of two thin and two overweight women, each making either a positive or negative remark about her body."

Before reading on, answer this: Which woman do you think was considered most likable?

Dr. Corning professed to be surprised by her result, but I'm not surprised at all.

The most likable woman chosen by the students was overweight and quoted as saying: “I know I’m not perfect, but I love the way I look. I know how to work with what I’ve got, and that’s all that matters.”...

But, she acknowledged, her experiment had limitations. “Are the students really liking these women the most? Or are they saying it because they think they should?” said Dr. Corning. “They might like them more, but would they really want to hang out with them?”

Fat talk is — we're told — "airless and scripted." One person exclaims about her fat and the other responds with an equivalent exclamation about her fat. So it's really small talk, social etiquette like "How are you?"/"Fine. How are you?" But Corning portrays the interchange as a problem to be solved — a "hungry cry for affirmation," met with a "toxic" reciprocation.

Dr. Corning said that to break the cycle, a person shouldn’t engage. But particularly for younger women, it’s hard to say something like, “Hey, no negative self-talk!” or “Why do we put ourselves down?”

I suspect there's a positive side to the "negative self-talk" that's hard for older folks to hear. For one thing, in the script, the second speaker is declining to lie or to reinforce the first female's negative opinion of herself. Instead, she shifts the focus to herself, but in the friendly way of offering company: I'm fat too.

Corning seems to be about examining the presumed problem of low self-esteem among females, so she doesn't consider — as far as I can tell from this article — whether what's really going on with this "fat talk" is a kind of mutual comforting and camaraderie in the denial of what is a health problem. Ironically, the psychologist is joining in this activity with her self-esteem talk.

(Note: The linked article — "'Fat Talk' Compels but Carries a Cost" — is by Jan Hoffman, who wrote my all-time favorite NYT article.)

"In one case, a New Jersey bar allegedly mixed rubbing alcohol with caramel food coloring and served it as Scotch."

"In another, a bar is accused of pouring dirty water into an empty bottle and passing it off as liquor."

This week's action was the result of a year-long undercover investigation, in which agents from the New Jersey Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) used a new instrument — the True Spirit Authenticator — to analyze alcohol samples quickly and cheaply. Early this year, agents visited 63 establishments and ordered straight shots of premium brands of liquor, then slipped off with a total of 150 samples; 30 were not as advertised.

They called it "Operation Swill."

When is it a rape-threat hoax and when is it a sock-puppeting moby?

I've been thinking about the Meg Lanker-Simons incident. Here's James Taranto asking: "Why are phony 'hate crimes' so common, especially on college campuses?" He also looks into the First Amendment doctrine of "true threats." Obviously, it's not a "true threat" when the threat is actually written by the person targeted in the threat, but the police cited Lanker-Simons for statements she made to them, not for the original statement put up on the University of Wyoming "Crushes" page on Facebook. I can't tell from the articles I've read whether Lanker-Simons was the one who reported the Facebook post to the police, but the police did an investigation and had a warrant to search her computer, where they found evidence that she'd made the statement.

Sarah Zacharias, Wyoming state director for UniteWomen.org, said she and Lanker-Simons are friends. Zacharias spoke Monday during a campus demonstration against UW Crushes.  Zacharias said she was with Lanker-Simons when she found the post on UW Crushes.

“If the police are going to give her handcuffs for this, they need to give her an Oscar as well for her acting skills because I saw a woman devastated,” she said. Zacharias said she’d stake her own reputation on Lanker-Simons being innocent of creating the controversial post.

Did Zacharias report it to the police? Did the police initiate the investigation because of the demonstration? How awful to have the police seize your computer! It was the decision to leverage the Facebook posting into a demonstration — stirring up fear and outrage — that turned this thing into a hoax (and brought the apparently unforeseen horrible consequence of the police going through her computer). Thinking about the potential for the police to search your computer should make victims of true threats worry about calling the police, but it should also be a powerful deterrent to doing a fake threat.

But let's consider the Facebook posting alone:

“I want to hatef--- Meg Lanker- so hard. That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican b----.”

It's really not in threat form. It expresses a desire, not an intent to do something. And, let's be clear: "hatefuck" does not mean rape. It means: "To have sex, especially in a rough manner, with someone who one finds physically attractive but personally loathsome." So — assuming that Lanker really did write the post — we're seeing the work of a sockpuppet + moby. She was a sockpuppet to the extent that she was complimenting herself, proclaiming herself extremely seductive. She was a moby to the extent that she pretended to be one of her own antagonists and made that fake entity speak in a way that would bring her antagonists into disrepute.

Sockpuppets and mobys are ordinary characters all over the internet. As I said in my earlier post about Lanker-Simons: "People need better bullshit detectors!" The elements of sockpuppetry and mobyism are all over that Facebook posting. "Crush" pages for various institutions — like the University of Wyoming, in this case — invite statements about crushes on various students and make these statements anonymous. Of course, students are tempted to post about themselves, advertising how attractive they are. And of course, they are tempted to weave in their political opinions. The Lanker-Simons posting is exactly what you ought to expect. Sharpen up, everyone.

But what are the school authorities supposed to do? If they slough off these postings as the usual internet flimflam, they'll be denounced for minimizing violence against women. There lies the real problem: There's pressure against sharpening up.

Remember when feminism was about consciousness-raising?

Obama's performance in the Theater of the Ineffectual President.

It's not "my job... to somehow get [Congress] to behave," said Obama at yesterday's news conference, quoted by Maureen Dowd, who says:

Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.

He still thinks he’ll do his thing from the balcony and everyone else will follow along below. That’s not how it works.

How can the president star in a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner satirical film pretending to be Daniel Day-Lewis playing Barack Obama in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Obama,” and not have absorbed the lessons of “Lincoln”?

1. It's silly to think that because Obama played the role of himself (playing Day-Lewis playing himself) that Obama is all about Lincoln. It made Obama look like he's about Obama, and putting Obama on the same level as Lincoln, with the mock-historical grandeur and the direction by Steven Spielberg, seems likely only to inflate Obama's egocentrism.



2. Why would this Hollywood-in-Washington adoration make him deferential to some other historical figure, one who had to accomplish great things to achieve his high place in history? Quite the opposite! It should make Obama feel that it's always been enough for him simply to be Obama, the screen onto which a nation projects its hopes and dreams. Why should Obama "absorb lessons" from the movie about "Lincoln"? Obama created his own mode of arriving at greatness, and it's not much like Lincoln's at all.

3.  A "community organizer" doesn't really "organize" a community, but even if one does, Congress isn't like the communities Obama supposedly organized. The idea that Obama could "organize" Congress is silly. Congress has its own organization, and it's full of powerful individuals who are currently actively pursuing political goals, not a bunch of citizens going about their private lives who might be induced to back some political project run by somebody else.

4. Yesterday's performance at the press conference was — I would presume — theater. It was the Theater of the Ineffectual President. It was not the Theater of the Lame Duck. (Dowd's piece is titled "Bottoms Up, Lame Duck." The "Bottoms Up" refers to her suggestion that Obama "have a drink with Mitch McConnell.") Obama likes to say he'll never face another election, but he's facing the 2014 elections. His performance yesterday was — I presume — a scene in the script for winning the midterms. I can't accomplish anything without Congress. Congress is the problem. He needs his Congress. Will we not give this beautiful man — upon whom we've projected our hopes and dreams — the Congress that will bring his presidency to a successful end? He is the central character in this movie "Obama" that we've all got to sit through. If we stay in character as members of the audience — passively taking in whatever we see on the screen — we'll merge our desires with the main character in the big spectacle. Identification with the protagonist. In the scene that ran yesterday, we saw our protagonist suffering his doubts and his weaknesses. He is beset with adversaries. Oh, no!

5. So, now we can see that Obama is doing his "job," as described by Maureen Dowd: "to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do." Somehow. I'm telling you how I think he's going about getting Congress — Congress 2015 — to do the stuff he wants them to do. Keep sitting on your bottom as he leads from behind. Or: Bottoms up! And I don't mean drinking. I mean, get your ass out of your theater seat and stop watching the "Obama" movie. The lameness is not in our President but in ourselves.

"I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport."

"But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation."

Jason Collins has strong political connections. Bill Clinton said: “I have known Jason Collins since he was Chelsea’s classmate and friend at Stanford."

And Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) was Collins's roommate at Stanford: "For as long as I’ve known Jason Collins he has been defined by three things: his passion for the sport he loves, his unwavering integrity, and the biggest heart you will ever find. Without question or hesitation, he gives everything he’s got to those of us lucky enough to be in his life. I’m proud to stand with him today and proud to call him a friend."

Collins has been in the NBA for 12 years and will be a free agent at the end of the season. Does he face abuse within sports? He says he's led a "double life has kept me from getting close to any of my teammates." There's always politics. The man has some powerful friends there.

"Imagine, Mr. Speaker, a world without balloons."

Said Congressman Hank Johnson. "How can we make sure that the injustice of there being no helium for comedians to get that high-pitched voice that we all hold near and dear to our hearts."

He was, as the video at the link showed, mocking Republicans for wasting 2 days debating the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act (which passed the House on a nearly unanimous vote, 394-1). "Too often lately, this body has sat deflated — not for lack of hot air, mind you. But seriously, ladies and gentlemen, unlike a noble element, this House has failed to act on Americans’ real concerns."

Now, Hank Johnson is the Congressman who famously asked whether the island of Guam, if it gets over-populated, might "tip over and capsize":



On his Friday show, Rush Limbaugh played the old tip-over-and-capsize clip along with the new world-without-balloons clip. Rush derided Johnson for caring about helium as if he's some kind of nut:

Did you know that helium was endangered or threatened? What, is the Hunt family trying to make a run on helium like they did silver? Or maybe the Koch brothers? The Koch brothers are trying to corner helium. That's what it is, so that kids can't have birthday parties. That's what it is. The Koch brothers are doing it! The Koch brothers are trying to corner the helium market. And Hank here was saying that he supported the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act. He's from Georgia. 

Well, every single Republican in the House who voted, voted yes, and the vote was 391-1, so you might want to educate yourself about what this program is about. When I blogged a Washington Post item about it — "Congress finds it hard to let Federal Helium Program run out of gas" — I got called out by a number of commenters, notably Carl, who said:

The issue is not nearly as picayune as this asinine article suggests. In the first place, helium is essential stuff for a number of high-tech, scientific, and medical uses. I said essential, as in completely irreplaceable, at least with present or foreseeable technology.

Second, it is a weirdly irreplaceable resource. When your liquid He boils off, it makes its way to the top of the atmosphere and drifts off into interplanetary space, because the Earth's gravity is too weak to hold it. It's gone for good. You will never be able to recycle it, the way you might think of recycling iron from scrap heaps, or even reconstituting oil from the CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere after it gets burnt.

Third, the only conceivable source is the underground decay of uranium and thorium, which verrrry slowly produce helium over millions of years, particle by particle. There is no way to hurry the process up, and the supply is obviously finite and decreasing remorselessly every year.

Fourth, the economics are stupid, because the 1990s Federal law said to sell off the reserve as fast as possible, so the Federal government has been dumping He at far less than the cost to actually supply it for years and years. Not surprisingly, all these wrong economic signals have built up a whole economic structure built on them -- built on sand, so that once those signals reset to reality, you are going to have significant disruption.

That's the difficult issue. There may be broad agreement that economic reality should take over, and the signals reset, but how and when to do that is a matter of debate, as well it should be, and for the admittedly narrow segments of tech for which this is relevant, hardly trivial. It is by no means something Senators and Representatives shouldn't be wasting their time upon. The Post could do its readers a better favor by explaining why this happened, and the strangely unique nature of helium, than by phoning in a cheap mindless story about how government programs live forever ha ha ha.

But that's modern journalism. It has decayed to formula so absurdly that I wonder whether someone with an actual original thought or story line could survive. I suppose it is conservatism born of their shrinking bottom line. Reminds me of Hollywood, similar[ly] threatened by cable and the Internet, which can only make Spiderman 8 and Star Trek: The Fourth Reboot because is timidity won't allow for any bolder essay.

I am pushed back. What seems dumb may not be dumb. It may be dumb to accept the prompt that something is dumb.

And is Hank Johnson dumb? Surely, his world-without-balloons speech isn't dumb. He may be wrong to minimize the significance of the helium program, but Rush was deriding him for seeming to care about the program, which wasn't even what he was doing. Was Rush dumb to misunderstand the balloon quote and to present it along with the tip-over-and-capsize quote? Rush has his fun, but I don't think Rush knew much about the value of the helium program.

But if Rush has his fun, occasionally at Hank Johnson's expense, he (and we) ought to see that Hank Johnson also has his fun. Unquestionably, the world-without-balloons speech deploys sarcasm. It's time to ponder whether the tip-over-and-capsize question was deadpan humor.

This is a island that, at its widest level is, what, 12 miles from shore to shore, and at its smallest level, smallest location, it's 7 miles between one shore and the other.  My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and, uh, and capsize.

I say it was!

ADDED: Back in 2010, at the time of the "tip-over-and-capsize" remark, Neo-Neocon said it was "deadpan humor"... but she was doing a big old April Fool's joke.

"Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones."

"Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere — seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom (in the 'Nausicaa' episode) — and no one is corrupted."

Funny the way literature was defended on the ground that it wasn't going to affect us. But that was a literary device, used to portray the social conservative as unsophisticated — cringing at phantoms.

"Ricin Suspect Released from Jail: Was He Framed?"

"Two sources had earlier confirmed to Fox News that the FBI was looking into the possibility that he might have been framed as part of a grudge against him from someone in his neighborhood. A detention hearing for Paul Kevin Curtis that was scheduled for Tuesday has also been postponed."

ADDED: Let's look back to reports after the arrest, which came when people were very keyed up about murderers/terrorists on the loose after the Boston bombing:

If guilty, Curtis didn't cover his tracks very well. The arrest was based on information gathered "very early on," an official tells The New York Times. Presumably that information includes Curtis' use of his actual initials, KC, in the letter.

In fact, Curtis left enough breadcrumbs that a conservative website, Lady Liberty 1885, apparently fingered Curtis hours before the FBI announced his arrest, just through internet sleuthing. Curtis' Facebook posts include both the sign-off used in the ricin letters to Wicker and Obama — "This is KC and I approve this message" — and, according to Lady Liberty, the same quote: "To see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance."

In retrospect, these clues work as evidence of framing. Take someone's Facebook catchphrases and put them in the letter....

"Is It Time for Off-the-Shelf Birth-Control Pills?"

A NYT "news analysis" written by its environment and health reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal plays off the news that "a federal judge recently ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make the morning-after pill available to women of all ages without a prescription." We're told that was "a political embarrassment for the Obama administration."

Was it a political embarrassment? I thought it was exactly what is helpful to the Obama administration. Instead of being responsible for cheapening contraception and perhaps risking women's health in the process, Obama et al. can say the judge made it happen. It's great political cover.

But that controversy may look like a tempest in a teapot compared with a broader and no less heated discussion that is roiling the medical community: should birth-control pills of any type require a doctor’s prescription? Or should they be available, like Tylenol, on pharmacy shelves?

Last December the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an official position paper concluding that the time had come for birth-control pills to be sold over the counter. It was the first time the group had endorsed such sales, concluding that scientific evidence suggested that the practice was safe and calling it “a potential way to improve contraceptive access and use, and possibly decrease the unintended pregnancy rate.”

After having won reelection by demagoguing contraception, Obama is mired in the horrible — how horrible? — problem of implementing the Affordable Care Act, with its promise of contraception coverage. What would be more helpful than birth control pills sold over the counter like Tylenol? Oh, it's safe enough say the obstetricians and gynecologists. What are their economic interests here? Do they want a big new stream of patients coming in for simple prescriptions? Perhaps they fear the piddling reimbursements they'll get for this work. If only the federal courts would take the heat for the decision to block access to doctors for routine birth control care. The federal courts could make it seem like it's about — yay! — Women's Rights and not — boo! — cost cutting.

But the NYT analysis is not about the economics of Obamacare and things that might disturb liberals. It's about the Warriors on Women, the religionists and pro-lifers. They've been questioning the safety of the morning-after pill, which, unlike regular birth control pills, entails the abortion issue. Making righties seems like the opponents of over-the-counter birth control pills is a great distraction from the cost-cutting in the implementation of Obamacare. If righties are the opponents, opposition — to lefties — is toxic.

That legal dispute [over morning after pills] has highlighted the Obama administration’s hair splitting over the sensitive issue of contraceptive policy. Even though F.D.A. doctors said in 2011 that studies showed that it was safe to sell Plan B, the most common emergency contraceptive, to adolescents over the counter, the administration refused to approve the practice. (It was already available to older women.) That set the stage for the ruling earlier this month by Judge Edward R. Korman of the Eastern District of New York, who called the administration’s action “politically motivated and scientifically unjustified” — essentially an attempt to appease religious conservatives.

Surely, the Obama people are privately thanking Judge Korman. Opposition to the need to go to the doctor for birth control is religious conservatism. The judge says it's women's rights!

Politics aside, there are procedural hurdles to clear before packs of birth-control pills can be sold without prescription. First of all, a drug maker would most likely have to apply to the F.D.A. to make the switch....

Most likely. Unless the judges step up.