Can't grab their ass with both hands

The Charlotte "Hornets." Leading scorer Miles Bridges became a restricted free agent today. He can sign a max contract with Chazz or head elsewhere. But where Bridges headed yesterday was to jail. In Los Angeles, Bridges was arrested for felony domestic battery. 

Bridges’ arrest is the latest incident in a rough offseason for the Hornets. 

Montrezl Harrell, who is an unrestricted free agent, is facing felony drug charges stemming from a May traffic stop in Kentucky. According to court records, Harrell was cited by a state trooper for having three pounds of marijuana in a backpack in the rear seat of a vehicle he was traveling in.

Michael Jordan is an incompetent owner. If a bird had a hornet's brain it would fly backward.

USC, UCLA to Move to Big 10 (!)

USC and UCLA, two of the Pac-12's flagship programs, are planning to leave the conference for the Big Ten as early as 2024, and a move is considered imminent, sources confirmed to ESPN on Thursday.

There is still a formal notification process, as the two schools have to let the Pac-12 know their intentions to leave. USC and UCLA also have to formally apply to the Big Ten. According to a source, that process is underway.

Multiple sources told ESPN on Thursday that the move is expected to happen. A source called the next steps "formalities," and an announcement could come within the next 24 hours.

The PAC is done as a major football conference and the ACC is rendered even more "almost competitive." Major and totally sensible move by the schools and the B1G, which is taking dead aim at the SEC for football dominance. And the B1G likely isn't done. Membership stood at 14, a robust number, before today. Sixteen has often been talked about as the number for a "super-conference" and the B1G will get to that threshold in 2024 with U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. But there will still be a hole in the geography of the B1G in the middle of the country. The conference has long coveted Notre Dame and the addition of its annual rival U.S.C. will only make the B1G more alluring to ND. The "Irish" would be the 17th member. Geographically, Notre Dame does not plug that empty middle but would garner the conference the Queen on the chessboard. If they lure ND, and the betting money is they will, they could then look to expand into the mountain time zone to plug that hole. Utah would be a bridge between mid-west and west coast and would bring membership to 18. I would bet that's what the B1G does. U.S.C., U.C.L.A., Notre Dame and Utah would near contiguously stretch the conference from Maryland to California with Utah the bridge between mid-west and West Coast.

Kevin Durant Requests Trade from Brooklyn

The Phoenix Suns and Miami Heat are among two of the teams that Kevin Durant has on his wish list...

Yes!

 

Women Will Save Us

I've written this before: I don't think there is anything Charles Blow has written that I have read that I am not full 100 with.

Men are pack animals. [Men are COCKROACHES, COCKROACHES! (I don't think I'm not full 100 with Mr. Blow on that, I'm just full 1,000]

Not all of us, of course, but male culture is ordered by hierarchies of power, with the apex being the alpha. It can be toxic and problematic, ill-considered and tribal, but it is also deeply embedded in our society and resistant to modification.

The pack mentality is particularly prevalent in politics, where even men of principle drift toward the centers of gravity.

Donald Trump rose to power, and continues to pose a threat to this country, by pretending to be an alpha male and exploiting the pack behavior of politicians, particularly the Republican men with the most power.

Both the men in the Capitol and the man on the street exhibit pack behavior.

This is why I have come to fully, religiously believe that if this country is to be saved, it will be women who do the saving.

In a gym in Brooklyn a few months ago, I overheard a group of friends loudly discussing politics. Two were white, and one was Black.

The two white men were boasting about Trump, how much they loved his bravado. Even if there were drawbacks, they were overcome by this one positive attribute. The Black man interjected with comments about Trump’s racism, but the two white men dodged and dismissed it. They wanted to focus on his strength and his power.

...

It simply feels in this moment that women, more than men, have a clarity about the danger we face and the courage demanded to fight it.

 

"Merrick Garland Do Your Job!"

Rep. Hank Johnson

@RepHankJohnson

Today shows clear evidence from a brave insider who heard & saw a seditious conspiracy that included a compliant Mark Meadows & an unhinged Donald J. Trump. Merrick Garland Do Your Job!

 

Cheney revealed that witnesses coming before the committee had been contacted by people close to former president Donald Trump. One unnamed witness said something that could have come right from a mafia movie:

What they said to me is, as long as I continue to be a team player, they know that I’m on the team, I’m doing the right thing, I’m protecting who I need to protect, you know, I’ll continue to stay in good graces in Trump world. And they have reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts and just to keep that in mind as I proceeded through my depositions and interviews with the committee.

...

According to Punchbowl News, Ms. Hutchinson received such a warning. A person familiar with the committee’s investigation confirmed that account.

"Hard to envision the scene without this testimony."

In fullness and fairness I must change this post. First, I do not think that psychologists and students of the mind generally would have a "too much detail" concern with Cassidy Hutchinson's memory on the steering-wheel-clavicle-lunge. It is my understanding that the concern applies, usually, to memory over time of a brief, sudden ocular present sense impression or to a lengthy aural event. So: If a witness to a snatch-and-grab describes the robber to the police on the scene as a light-skinned male, 25-30 years of age, medium build, light-colored shirt dark pants, and then at trial says the perp was a white male definitely, had a moustache, longish hair, Converse high-tops, black, it was a t-shirt, white, short-sleeved that he wore, well then your memory seems to have improved with age sir. Or, a cop who takes an hour-long tape-recorded confession from the perp and at deposition is able to rattle off memory every question and answer, well...

Neither illustrative examples are the case with Ms. Hutchinson's steering-wheel-clavicle lunge testimony. She did not witness Trump in the vehicle. The oral account that she was given did not last an hour. Her testimony from the time she began answering Rep. Cheney's question to conclusion was 2:02, two minutes and two seconds, I just timed it, and included the physical motion of the clavicle lunge. She said it all in one breath and never paused or hesitated. The conversation precisely on the point of what she was told Trump said and did in the vehicle would not have taken longer; likely a shorter time with the emotion of the immediate retelling by Tony Ornato. What she was told, again augmented by the physical demonstration, is within the ken of most of us beyond doubt.

I watched Ms. Hutchinson very carefully today. I looked closely at her right hand when she stood to swear the oath. The hand never moved. I have not watched the entirety of her testimony but in those portions I did watch, and rewatch, she never stumbled, stuttered, hesitated, looked sideways, shifted uncomfortably in her seat, or in any manner whatsoever displayed body language of one less certain than she is letting on.

Second, the first, New York Times, account of the Secret Service agents' response to her testimony yesterday afternoon was:

Mr. Kanno-Youngs' account from the Secret Service is that both Engel and Ornato will testify that that the lunges did not happen. That is not, "as Hutchinson testified today"; Hutchinson did not see it, that is what Ornato, without Engel interrupting or correcting, told Hutchinson happened inside the vehicle--that's why it's hearsay coming from Hutchinson. Now today, in a "First on CNN," Noodles reports, After the hearing, a Secret Service official familiar with the matter told CNN that Ornato denies telling Hutchinson that the former President grabbed the steering wheel or an agent on his detail.

 And from the Times today:

The dispute also highlights Mr. Trump’s relationship with his Secret Service detail, which was unlike that of most previous presidents. Agents were seen as more overtly supportive and admiring of Mr. Trump than they had been under any other modern president, according to people who have spent time in the White House during multiple administrations, and Mr. Trump worked to build loyalty among them.

There are four possibilities here:

1) Cassidy Hutchinson lied under oath to the committee.
2) Hutchinson was mistaken in her recollection.
3) Ornato and Engel and/or the Secret Service sources are lying, not under oath.
4) Ornato-Engel-S.S. sources are mistaken.

I would rank order the likelihood as,

1) Ornato-Engel and/or S.S. sources are lying. Very strong.

2) Hutchinson mistaken. Very weak.

3-4) Hutchinson lied, Ornato-Engel-S.S. mistaken. No likelihood. Ornato told Hutchinson what Hutchinson told the committee, all 2:02 of it. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind of that. At. All. She was neither lying nor mistaken. If Ornato-Engel-S.S. sources say differently they are lying and let them do it under oath.

 first posted 6/29/22 12:44 pm.

When I read this live-blog entry in the Times yesterday I paused. Was he saying he had a hard time believing it?

June 28, 2022, 1:58 p.m. ET

June 28, 2022

Carl Hulse

Hutchinson is painting a picture of a furious, out-of-control chief executive who is trying to force his limousine to the Capitol over the wishes of the Secret Service and his top staff. Hard to envision the scene without this testimony.

 

Then I read a wrap-up article by a Times reporter who described Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony as "cinematic" (It was meant as a compliment.). 

 

Then from a television critic: "The Jan. 6 Committee Produces a Very Special Episode." 

 

 The Jan. 6 committee’s hearings have a lot in common with scripted TV mini-series: narrative, editing — even surprise reveals, as when the committee sprang a bonus episode, featuring Cassidy Hutchinson...

...

For one afternoon, the investigation played like the Watergate hearings as punched up by the writers’ room of “24.”

 

Again it was all meant as compliment.

...like a surprise drop on Netflix, the committee opened itself to be panned if the hearing under-delivered.

It did not. In a stunning two hours of fly-on-the-wall testimony, Ms. Hutchinson, poised and measured at only 26 years of age, described Jan. 6 and the days leading to it in the White House, in a string of scenes and quotations so vivid they could be transcribed almost directly into an HBO docudrama.

There are flies-on-the-wall--Rosemary Woods--people who are so situated that they are nearly omniscient. The Committee demonstrated that Ms. Hutchinson had the propinquity to see and hear much more than almost anyone else. Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama's most senior aides, who saw the president daily, said that even he would not have been in a position to know as much as the equivalent to Cassidy Hutchinson or Rosemary Woods in the Obama White House. After his meetings with the president Rhodes would go back to his office. Ms. Hutchinson's office was right there.

But in her steering-wheel-lunge testimony,

 Hutchinson was the fly who was waved into the room to sit on the wall:

 

When I returned to the White House, I walked upstairs towards the chief of staff's office and I noticed Mr. Ornato lingering outside of the office. Once we had made eye contact, he quickly waved me to go into his office, which is just across the hallway from mine. When I went in, he shut the door, I noticed Bobby Engel who was the head of Mr. Trump's security detail, sitting in a chair looking somewhat discombulated, little lost.

She was "poised and measured"--too much? Like an actor? Something caught my eye and ear as I was watching and listening to her, there was something a little tinny in her tone of voice, it was pretty much toneless. And her demeanor was measured, all the more dramatic. 

After she finished, one of the talking heads marveled at the "dazzling detail" in her testimony. It was highly complimentary. The phrase struck me and I repeated it aloud twice and then my (second unfortunate ex-) wife, with whom I was watching, repeated it. But I said it out loud because too much detail in a memory can be a sign to psychologists that the memory is false. Human beings do not have tape recorder memories. Now, there is a real sense in which a witness cannot win here. The fact is we do not have tape recording recall and therefore when we are asked repeatedly to recount a conversation in detail we leave out or insert a word and then some non-human lawyer pounces on us for "changing our story." On the other hand shrinks tell us we don't remember that way. Cassidy Hutchinson remembered that way.

These misogynistic observations all go to the point made here yesterday: hearsay testimony is very vulnerable to tricks of the mind, to coaching, and when hearsay is contradicted by the people to whom it ascribes conversations it collapses and with it the entirety of the hearsay witness's testimony is vulnerable. In the event Ms. Hutchinson has not been convincingly refuted and I do not believe even unconvincingly refuted. If, as reported by a Times reporter yesterday, Robert Engel and Anthony Ornato, will deny the steering-wheel-and-clavicle-lunge, who will people believe, the 25-26 year old to who Ornato indubitably told the truth or the two lying Secret Service agents? Their loyalty is, uber alles, to the Leader. For this is what we are up against:

Katie Benner

Many Republicans have testified or publicly said they would vote for Trump again, including former attorney general Bill Barr, and former Arizona Republican House speaker Rusty Bowers. I wonder whether they stand by that assessment after today’s testimony, including the account of Trump physically fighting with the Secret Service to join a violent mob attacking Congress.

Hearsay not corroborated is hearsay refuted. Cassidy Hutchinson and the Committee lost credibility.

June 28, 2022, 2:05 p.m. ET4 hours ago

4 hours ago

Luke Broadwater

Some of the Capitol police officers applaud Hutchinson as she exits the committee room.

 

January 6 Hearing June 28

Today blew every other day out of the water. Among Cassidy Hutchinson's revelations:

That her boss, Trump Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows, and Trump personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani sought pardons after Jan. 6.

 

In Surprise, Jan. 6 Committe Schedules Fifth Hearing for Tuesday at 1 pm

Newly-discovered evidence the Committee states necessitated the abrupt scheduling.

The military planner who becomes lost in the fog of war rarely notices the onset of the fog. It comes on gradually, the sum total of many small uncertainties...There is a little patch of mist here, another patch over yonder, a slow-thickening of the haze along the horizon, the sky turning gray and sagging lower over the woods, sunlight fading out imperceptibly...and then suddenly, the horizon has vanished altogether, there is fog everywhere, and the noises that come from the invisible landscape are unidentifiable, confusing and full of menace...Catton, Terrible Swift Sword 295-6.

The same could be said, with even greater force it seems to me, of nations in the run-up to and at the onset of, civil war. God, both nations, the leaders and people, were in a fog right before and at the beginning of the Civil War.

It reminds me of today. "Small uncertainties," "a little patch of mist," the appointment of Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court, "another over yonder," William Rehnquist's elevation to Chief Justice, "the sky turning gray," "sunlight fading," Clarence Thomas' appointment, "haze thickening," Samuel Alito's appointment, "the horizon vanishing", and with it abortion rights after fifty years; boom! the creation of a new right, private gun possession for unmilitary purposes. Now "fog everywhere" "and the noises unidentifiable, confusing, full of menace."

"And then suddenly": November 6, 1860 the South secedes; again on November 8, 2016, and the lights go out all over the land. 

Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Biden would be Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan in reverse chronology. Biden is also the early Lincoln, promising bipartisanship, the union forever, ignoring the fundamental issue, slavery then, anti-democracy in the other, both trying to win back the South. The nation already split, on November 3, 2020 the people took a step back back and drew its collective breath: we do not want civil war now, we did not want it then. But it was too late in both cases. The South was gone then and now. The first shots were fired hardly before the inauguration of the new president in 1861 and in 2021 the first shots occurred before the new president was even sworn in. I think the first shots in the second American Civil War were fired on January 6, 2021, but it's foggy.

Twenty-two young teenagers, some 13 and 14 years old, have died after a night out to a neighborhood tavern, locally called a "shebeen", in East London, South Africa. The deaths were sudden--seventeen of the dead were found inside the shebeen, five died in hospital--and as yet a total mystery. There were no signs of trauma--no exterior body indications whatsoever--to help explain the deaths. A stampede has been ruled out by officials. Under these circumstances it had to be poisoning--and by some sudden death agent, not alcohol. Alcohol is not going to leave seventeen people, even underage kids, dead on the fucking floor. Toxicology results are pending. Exceedingly strange case and appalling.

Russia Defaults on Foreign Debt for First Time Since 1918

 But given the damage already done to the economy and markets, the default is also mostly symbolic for now, and matters little to Russians dealing with double-digit inflation and the worst economic contraction in years.

Heller v District of Columbia (2008)

From Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Heller v District of Columbia (2008:

Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. 

Actually, Justice Scalia, that is exactly the way abortion was interpreted by your SCOTUS descendants in the Dobbs abortion case! Since abortion was not common or completely legal or illegal at the time of enactment of the 14th Amendment (1868) Roe v Wade and Casey v Planned Parenthood were not only "wrong, but egregiously wrong." 

On Thursday this here undersigned wondered at tth ledgerdemain of SCOTUS in its 2A case overruling a NY gun regulation. How was it that SCOTUS could read this,

Amendment II United States Constitution

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

 

as this,

The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.


Yesterday the NYT Editorial Board wrote on the SCOTUS New York gun ruling,

“(It was only in 2008, with its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, that conservatives on the court divined an individual right to bear arms hidden somewhere in the 27 words of the Second Amendment.)”

In 2008:

In a radical break from 70 years of Supreme Court precedent, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, declared that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to bear arms for nonmilitary uses, even though the amendment clearly links the right to service in a “militia.”...

...the court’s 5-to-4 decision says that individuals have a constitutional right to keep guns in their homes for self-defense. But that’s a sharp reversal for the court: as early as 1939, it made clear that the Second Amendment only protects the right of people to carry guns for military use in a militia.

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens was right when he said that the court has now established “a new constitutional right” that creates a “dramatic upheaval in the law.”

...
The gun lobby will now trumpet this ruling as an end to virtually all gun restrictions, anywhere, at all times.
...
...it was not calling into question...bans on gun possession...in “sensitive places” like schools and government buildings.

That last part is the final indignity of the decision: when the justices go to work at the Supreme Court, guns will still be banned. When most Americans show up at their own jobs, they will not have that protection. 

This audaciously harmful decision, which hands the far right a victory it has sought for decades, is a powerful reminder of why voters need to have the Supreme Court firmly in mind when they vote for the president this fall.

☝🏻

This Court must be resisted on all fronts, and simultaneously, by any means necessary short of violence.

Fanatic

...the fanatical Samuel Alito’s majority opinion...

Le mot juste from Maureen Dowd. It is the Quran of jurisprudence: turgid, verbose, shapeless, and claiming "moral" superiority.

Horror on Oslo Pride day as gunman goes on deadly rampage at gay bar

 Two killed, twenty-one injured. 

3 people shot, 1 fatally at WeatherTech warehouse shooting in Chicago suburb, authorities confirm

Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk now 'completely under Russian occupation' after months of fighting

 

The Arch Angel Becomes the Arse Angel :(

Manchester City have agreed to sell Gabriel Jesus, one of the undersigned's personal favorites on the squad, to Arsenal for 45M pound sterling.

The Centrifugal States of America

No exaggeration: I am shaken by the words of the justices in their opinions. The majority's argument was not legal but moral and morality is the third rail of jurisprudence. 

Compromise is impossible. "When it is not necessary to decide it is necessary not to decide." By Chief Justice Roberts. "Unprincipled," by Justice Alito. The tone! Jesus. That's a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States talking about his Chief! Well, you're going to get that tone when you accept play on the field of morality, not law, not precedent. We're talking about life and death! This was the first time in the history of the Supreme Court that a right was taken away from the people. Yeah, but we're talking about life and death!

Alito's argument was circular, in the way water quickly moving down a drain to the sewer moves in a circular manner. Alito futilely tried to cut the circle at abortion. Nothing doing.

What majority? None of the other 14th amendment decisions are implicated!, Alito, Kavanaugh. The hell they're not!, Justice Thomas. We're not criminalizing abortion!, Kavanaugh. May the states? Well...women cannot be prosecuted for traveling to another state to get an abortion. Jeez, thanks for that, Kavanaugh. And, oh! Women cannot be prosecuted for getting an abortion before this decision. Umm...after? Do the states, by virtue of their right reasonably to regulate abortion have the right to forbid it, regulation acknowledging the existence of the thing, forbidding it to prohibit its existence? Yes, by Kavanaugh. Alito? I think so, but I'm not sure. Thomas? He won't touch the third rail. Why did Chief Justice Roberts concur? He wrote that he would not have overruled Roe and Casey. He wrote that he concurred only because he agreed that the Roe right to abortion up to the point of fetal viability "should be discarded." The majority becomes a majority only on that issue! The conservatives on the Court are fractured on "morality" and "principle."

"We were a dysfunctional family but a family." Thomas on the pre-Roberts Court. Like America: We are all Americans, not liberals or conservatives, not Republicans or Democrats. "There are no Obama judges or Trump judges," Chief Justice Roberts. It ain't the court of that unprincipled, amoral RINO John Roberts no more! It ain't that America no more: Thomas' unapologetic refusal to recuse himself from election cases when his wife was emailing Mark Meadows that the election was stolen; the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs majority opinion. Now, it's nine scorpions in a bottle. Now, it's the Centrifugal States of America. Man, if I was Ketanji Brown Jackson my knees would be shaking at the alter about being married into this "family."

Dobbs is the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court.

Justice Alito’s Morality Morass

Did anyone notice the emphasis on morality that Justice Alito placed? He begins the majority opinion with it:

Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.

He ends with it:

We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority.

And in between he uses the various forms of the word "moral" at least seven more times.(1) I challenge anyone to find a Supreme Court majority opinion so grounded in morality. His opinion is shot through with it (2) even when he doesn't use the specific word. On the Court only Justice Kavanaugh seems to have noticed this and is quick to write that the issue before the Court is not a moral one. I predict that when legal scholars pick through the opinion this will be the most striking thing to them. And it reads worse for this emphasis on morality that Justice Alito finds the Constitution neutral on the moral issue of life and death. The Constitution has nothing to say about the existential matter of life and death?! When is the Constitution neutral on life and death?! It prescribes how states must execute its citizens! SCOTUS doesn't issue opinions on morality, nor based on morality. It is not a SCOTUS-quality opinion, it's not even SCOTUS style. My challenge is above. Once you accept morality as the debate ground no compromise is possible. It makes for terrible, unconvincing argument. Alito and the majority he writes for, say that fetal viability is an arbitrary canard. How is when a fetus can exist on its own arbitrary? It seems to me that is the gravamen of the "moral" issue. A SCOTUS member cannot win a moral argument, even with himself, (s)he has to argue from settled law, and I think Alito got frustrated that he started down this path and realized, too late, that he had stepped into a morass and had no way out. I predict Alito is going to be excoriated for this opinion. The holding destroys one half century of the Court's work but I sincerely wonder how influential Alito's opinion will be.

I don't know Alito's writing style but as I was picking through his opinion I wrote a note "This is a fiery opinion." He seems angry, unless that is his style; he is contemptuous of the Roe and Casey courts; he finds personally "objectionable" the dissent, and is highly critical of Chief Justice Roberts' concurrence (Alito ignores, completely ignores, Kavanaugh's and Thomas' concurrences, terming Roberts' "the concurrence.") The contrast with Kavanaugh's even-tempered tone, the first in order after the majority, is striking. As it is with Roberts'. It weirded me out, man. "Fiery." Now, often times dissents are what could be termed "fiery" but the majority opinion...Alito won! and he writes in a slash and burn style as if he lost 8-1. (2) All in all, this is the worst Supreme Court opinion in the history of Supreme Court opinions...With all due respect.





1. I did not record the page in the opinion of Alito's earliest usage of "moral":


-...a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally
leaves for the people.
-None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. (32)
- ...the fundamental moral question that it poses is ageless. (33)
-Defenders of Roe and Casey do not claim that any new scientific learning calls for a different answer to the under-
lying moral question...(33)
-... can it be that a fetus that is viable in a big city in the United States has a privileged moral status
not enjoyed by an identical fetus in a remote area of a poor country? (52-53)
- ...respect for a legislature’s judgment applies even when the laws at issue concern matters of great
social significance and moral substance. (77)


2. Life and death.

-...the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.” See Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently different”); Casey, 505 U. S., at 852 (abortion is “a unique act”). None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. ...They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.(32)


[Note to self: How strange that the Constitution does not say anything about such a "critical moral
question" as the destruction of "potential life".]

-...it is impossible to defend Roe based on prior precedent because all of the precedents Roe cited, including Griswold and Eisenstadt, were critically different for a reason that we have explained: None of those cases involved the destruction of what Roe called "potential life." (37)

-...the dissent’s analogy is objectionable for a more important reason: what it reveals about the dissent’s views on the protection of what Roe called “potential life.” The exercise of the rights at issue in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell does not destroy a “potential life,” but an abortion has that effect. ...the implication is clear: The Constitution does not permit the States to regard the destruction of a “potential life” as a matter of any significance. (38)

[According to this holding the Constitution takes no position on "the destruction of human life."]


-Our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after
birth. (38)

[Alito: You just spent 37 pages criticizing everybody else for not recognizing the "moral" stakes involved. Now you have no opinion on the rights of prenatal LIFE?! Dude, are you feeling unwell?]

-...none of these decisions involved what is distinctive about abortion: its effect on what Roe termed “potential life.” (49)
-[This is a fiery opinion]: The Court’s abortion cases have diluted...They have ignored...They have disregarded...They
have flouted...And they have distorted...(63)
-Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies... (65)

["We the Supreme Court of the United States receive this moral ball of life from center and punt it back to the states."]


-As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” because it terminates “life."

-...rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter(as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 150 (emphasis deleted); Casey, 505 U. S., at 852. (71)

[Tell that to your Brother Thomas who spends the entirety of his opinion arguing that substantive due process does not exist and that cases so-based, like the contraception and same-sex marriage cases, should be next, and post-haste, on the chopping block of reversal.]

-We now turn to the concurrence in the judgment, which reproves us for deciding whether Roe and Casey should be retained or overruled. That opinion (which for convenience we will call simply “the concurrence”) recommends a “more measured course,” which it defends based on what it claims is “a straightforward stare decisis analysis.” (opinion of ROBERTS, C. J.). (72)
The concurrence’s most fundamental defect is its failure to offer any principled basis for its approach. (73)

[Oh well is that all, unprincipled? Okay then.]

-We must now decide what standard will govern if state abortion regulations undergo constitutional challenge and
whether the [Mississippi] law before us satisfies the appropriate standard. Under our precedents, rational-basis review is the appropriate standard for such challenges. As we have explained, procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history. See supra, at 8–39.

[And neither is life.]

... It follows that the States may regulate abortion for legitimate reasons...That respect for a legislature’s judgment applies even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance. (77)...These legitimate
interests include respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development, Gonzales, 550 U. S., at 157–158; (78).

[Would preventing murder be a legitimate reason for "regulation" by the states? How could it not be and how could any other reason be?]

Kavanaugh concurrence:

-The issue before this Court, however, is not the policy or morality of abortion. The issue before this Court is what the Constitution says about abortion. The Constitution does not take sides on the issue of abortion.(2)
-... the Constitution is therefore neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral ...
-Some amicus briefs argue that the Court today should not only overrule Roe and return to a position of judicial neutrality on abortion, but should go further and hold that the Constitution outlaws abortion throughout the United States. No Justice of this Court has ever advanced that position. I respect those who advocate for that position, just as I respect those who argue that this Court should hold that the Constitution legalizes pre-viability abortion throughout the United States. But both positions are
wrong as a constitutional matter, in my view. The Constitution neither outlaws abortion nor legalizes abortion. To be clear, then, the Court’s decision today does not out-law abortion throughout the United States. (3)
-The Roe Court took sides on a consequential moral and policy issue that this Court had no constitutional authority
to decide. (11)
-In my judgment, on the issue of abortion, the Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is
neutral, and this Court likewise must be scrupulously neutral. (12)
-...the Court’s decision properly leaves the question of abortion for the people and their elected representatives in the democratic process. Through that democratic process, the people and their representatives may decide to allow or limit abortion. As Justice Scalia stated, the “States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so.” [original emphasis] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 979 (1992) (opinion concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). ...After today’s decision, all of the States may evaluate the competing interests and decide how to address this consequential issue.


Roberts:

-If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more. (2)
-Both the Court’s opinion and the dissent display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share. I am not sure, for example, that a ban on terminating a pregnancy from the moment of conception must be treated the same under the Constitution as a ban after fifteen weeks. (12)

This sidenote is from the New York Times to the full opinion of Dobbs, et al v Jackson Women's Health Organization, et al.

Friday’s historic opinion, written by Justice Alito and joined by the Supreme Court's conservative bloc, overturns almost 50 years of precedent. Justice Alito's guiding principle is that a right to an abortion cannot be found in the Constitution. He adheres to a legal philosophy known as “original intent,” which involves scrutinizing the founding document's language to derive direction on contemporary issues.

—Jan Hoffman

Alito today in Dobbs:

Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies...

Yet yesterday, in a case where one of those legislative bodies regulated firearms possession, following the precise language of the Constitution mandating the states to "well regulate", SCOTUS took the issue away from the legislative body.

Applying the same "original intent" judicial philosophy and its method of "scrutinizing the founding document's language" to Amendment II,

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

 SCOTUS consistently has rendered it,

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Man's philosophy is to keep The Man superior.

It is very rare [Umm, this is the first time EVER.] that SCOTUS overturns a right and this one held for 50 years. It shows how radical this court is. Period, new paragraph.

Abortion is not outlawed. It will now be state-by-state and about half have passed legislation all but outlawing it. In the rest it exists. As The Man’s laws always do this decision will affect marginalized women, the poor, the non-white, the young, the unschooled, grossly disproportionately.

Roe was jurisprudential low-hanging fruit, ripe for picking. “Penumbras and emanations”🙄. RBG her Notorious self wrote that the Court bit off more than it could chew. Liberal activists, legal scholars, even some abortion-rights activists were dismayed.

My (second, unfortunate) ex-wife’s reaction to the decisikn was,

“Well maybe this will result in more black and brown babies replacing whites!”

To which,

“HAHAHAHAHAHA 👏🏻 🥇”

SIEVIERODONETSK FALLS TO RUSSIA

Black Friday. 

What's next for Putin? Per ISW last month he will annex the eastern oblasts and the south around the Black Sea, refuse to negotiate their status on the basis that they are Russian territory (old Soviet doctrine: "What's ours is ours, what's yours is negotiable.") and defend them as he would Moscow, with nuclear weapons if need be. He first had to get control and the fall of Sievierodonetsk was a crucial step to his plans.

ROE v WADE OVERTURNED

"Vivid Picture" in "Stunning Display of Evidence"

I watched 90% of today's hearing and those characterizations by the New York Times are spot on. This was the committee's showcase day.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol painted a vivid picture on Thursday of how former President Donald J. Trump directed a wide-ranging bid to strong-arm the Justice Department into overturning the 2020 election…

In a stunning display of evidence, including testimony from top officials who resisted the former president’s efforts, the committee laid out how Trump tried repeatedly to use the Justice Department to interfere in the election. In near-daily conversations, he badgered its leaders to act on unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, including wild internet hoaxes, accusing them of failing to do their jobs. He explored naming a conspiracy theorist [Sidney Powell below] who was circulating outlandish stories of voting irregularities to serve as a special counsel to look into possible election misdeeds.
…
Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a Republican who led the questioning, explored Trump’s most infamous response to being told that the department had not found evidence of election fraud. “That is not what I’m asking you to do,” Mr. Trump replied, according to Mr. Donoghue’s testimony. “I’m asking you to say it was corrupt and leave it to me and the Republican Congress.”

 
Okay fine, God, you can put me in Illinoise, I'll vote for Adam.

 

 

Trump wanted the department to “declare the election was corrupt even though he knew there was absolutely no evidence to support that statement,” Mr. Kinzinger said. “The president didn’t care about actually investigating the facts. He just wanted the Department of Justice to put its stamp of approval on the lies.”

That is exactly what he wanted to do.
...
“He hoped law enforcement officials would give the appearance of legitimacy to his lies, so he and his allies had some veneer of credibility when they told the country that the election was stolen.”-Chairman Bennie Thompson.

Exactly right.
…
...the committee…present[ed] a portrait of an embattled Justice Department that worked frantically to stave off a constitutional crisis driven by a president who refused to relinquish his power, and showed how close the country came to such a breakdown.

Painful to read.
...

[Rep. Scott] Perry [R-PA.] played...a prominent role...in Trump’s effort to weaponize the agency. [He] introduced [Jeffrey] Clark [on whose residence today the FBI executed a whatchall search warrant today],...the key man in Trump’s plan to wield the agency’s power to accomplish his goals,...to Trump the day after he and other Republicans met at the White House to discuss ways to overturn the election outcome. He pushed Mr. Meadows to have Trump install Mr. Clark as attorney general. And he encouraged Mr. Donoghue to give Mr. Clark more ability to “do something” about Mr. Trump’s fraud claims...[Clark]...pushed Mr. Rosen to send a letter to Georgia election officials that falsely claimed that the Justice Department “identified significant concerns” that would affect the state’s election results.
...
There was audible laughter in the hearing room when Mr. Donoghue recounted how he told Mr. Clark he was unqualified to be attorney general: “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill?”
...
…three days before the Jan. 6 attack, White House call logs show, Clark was referred to as the acting attorney general, suggesting that parts of the White House already believed that Trump had gone through with his plan and ousted Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.

...In mid-December, [Trump] asked Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who was circulating an array of groundless theories of widespread election fraud, to be a special counsel to investigate such allegations, according to testimony by Ms. Powell the panel played on Thursday.

The January 6th 6

…at least six Republican members of the House who played leading roles in Mr. Trump’s efforts to use Congress to overturn the election sought pardons for themselves and for all the Republicans who voted to reject electoral votes for Mr. Biden.

Matt Gaetz [rhymes with "Rapes"] of Florida
Mo Brooks of Alabama
Andy Biggs of Arizona
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania
Louie Gohmert of Texas
Marjorie Taylor ["I was allowed to believe things that were not true"] Greene of Georgia

In addition Jim Jordan of Ohio made a request for pardons for all MC’s who carried water for Trump.

Adam Kinzinger summed this up accurately: you don’t ask for a pardon for something you didn’t do. Asking for a pardon is tantamount to a confession.

Kyrie Irving has created a list of teams he'd like the Brooklyn Nets to consider working with on a sign-and-trade if he and the team can't agree on terms for him to stay in Brooklyn, sources told ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski.That list includes the Los Angeles Lakers, LA Clippers, New York Knicks, Miami Heat, NOOOOO!!!! Dallas Mavericks and Philadelphia 76ers, sources said. None of those teams have the cap space to sign Irving without Brooklyn cooperating on a sign-and-trade, and sources said some of them aren't interested in acquiring him. YESSSSS!!!!

Gaetz, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Perry Asked White House for "General" Pardons

In addition to those specific request Rep. Jim Jordan asked Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, for pardons generally for all members of Congress.

      "All purpose." The Deputy White House Counsel testified that they were broad so as to cover everything the requester did since the beginning of time.

                                                                         Gaetz:

Regulation Without Designation Is Anarchy!

Supreme Court Limits Local Ability to Restrict

Guns Outside the Home

Amendment II United States Constitution

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That is one sentence, four clauses (as written) of one sentence. It must be read as one sentence. The right to bear arms is created in the context of the necessity of "A well regulated Militia..."  to a "free State." So only militia members have the right created, not all fucking Joes on the street; explicitly, only "well regulated Militias". Implicitly, only State militias, that is extensions of the state (who else is to "regulate" them?). Updating to modern times a well regulated militia would include the police, it would include any body that the state deems "necessary to security" and which it "well regulates." A plausible reading of the whole is that private citizens designated by the state be a reserve force for the standing militia have the right to bear arms, but once again the state would "regulate", by designating, "the people" to comprise the reserves and it is an entirely unreasonable reading of the whole to say that each unregulated, undesignated individual citizen comprising "the people" has a right that "shall not be infringed" to bear arms. The "right of the people" is to join a state militia or equivalent, a police force, which shall be "well regulated" in all cases, in order to activate their right to bear arms. This is common reading of language. It is also "strict construction," not reading into or beyond the Framers' intent. But somehow guns rights advocates have convinced the courts that the third and fourth clauses alone define the right and that is not what the Second Amendment says. Per New York Times, in the case that came before SCOTUS in today's ruling,

The New York law requires that people seeking a license to carry a handgun outside their homes show a “proper cause.” California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws, according to briefs filed in the case.

“[Neither of the original two plaintiffs]... received unrestricted licenses because neither demonstrated a nonspeculative need to carry a handgun virtually anywhere in public,” Barbara D. Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, told the justices in a brief.

Immediately we see that the guns people have long convinced the Courts that the Second Amendment extends to private citizens who are not members or adjuncts of state militias or their equivalent. Once that is accepted as the interpretation of the Second Amendment the states' ability to "well regulate" is fucked. That gets you into this squishy, ambiguous, "proper cause" stuff where the people have an unbridled right and any state infringement thereupon requires some heightened scrutiny by the courts, as opposed to "You have a highly conditional right to bear arms which the states have a right to 'well regulate' by requiring membership, subject to state approval, in a state militia or equivalent and perhaps a reserve force."

Speaking of heroes…

Uvalde school district places 

police Chief Pete Arredondo 

on administrative leave

As Russia Breaks 

Through Line, a Pivotal 

Battle for Eastern City 

Looms

How’s he doing by the way? Has anybody heard from him? Is he still doing the Grand Tour of the Parliaments?

 

Russia Captures More 

Ground as It Seeks Full 

Control of Luhansk

 

I am a deep blue Democrat through and through; changing the color I am what used to be called a "yellow dog Democrat." I made the gravest political mistake of my life in voting for George W. Bush in 2004. I vowed then never to vote for a Republican again and I have not and will not. After 2016 the issue never entered my mind, it was unthinkable, and has been since. It would, therefore, cause me enormous distress to have a voting choice to be made between 1) Liz Cheney and a Democratic opponent, 2) Adam Kinzinger 3) Rusty Bowers 4) Brad Raffensperger, all of whom voted for Donald Trump twice and besides have positions on the issues antithetical to mine. I admire each of those Republicans, democrats without being Democrats, enormously. The (Second, Unfortunate) ex-Mrs. Harris attended a fundraiser to benefit Liz Cheney. Did not, could not, and would not do that. I don't know what I would do and if there is a God I thank him that He did not locate me in Illinois, Arizona, or Georgia.

Correction: I could and would vote for Raffensperger even against a D. He's Secretary of State of Georgia. Who cares what his positions are on issues I care about? His writ runs only to ensuring the integrity of elections in Georgia. WHICH HE DID! No D could do it better. Nix Georgia. I give thanks I was not planted in Adams district in Ilinoise and in Hairy Boner. End.

“The door was unsecured.”

Texas Public Safety Director Steven McCraw in testimony before the Texas legislature.

 

...McCraw’s testimony addressed a central, and painful, question that still hung over the massacre and the delayed police response, one that investigators have attempted to answer through interviews with officers and reviews of video: Were the doors to the classrooms locked, preventing police officers from entering in time to save others?

...
“I don’t believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured,” Mr. McCraw said of the classroom door that the gunman entered. “The door was unsecured.”

“There’s no way to lock the door from the inside. And there’s no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside.” "How about trying the door and seeing if it's locked?"

Mr. McCraw focused his blame on the on-scene commander, whom he identified as the chief of the Uvalde school district’s Police Department, Pete Arredondo, who he said was the highest-ranking person at the scene.

...

"You don't wait for a SWAT team. You have one officer, that's enough. I don't care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in," McCraw said in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing. He also said officers did not need to wait for shields to enter the classroom. The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to McCraw. Also, eight minutes after the shooter entered, an officer reported that police had a "hooligan" crowbar that they could use to break down the classroom door, McCraw said.

...

The chief has said he did not consider himself in charge, but Mr. McCraw disputed that. “If you’re going to issue commands, if you’re going to direct action,” he said, “you’re the on-scene commander.”

Several of the senators reacted with shock and anger. “Every shot is a death,” said Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from the suburbs of Houston. “And yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.”

“I challenge this chief to testify in public,” Mr. Bettencourt said loudly at one point, referring to Chief Arredondo. The chief was also in the State Capitol on Tuesday, testifying before a closed-door hearing of a Texas House investigatory committee. He did not speak to the news media before or after.

...
Texas Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the entire premise of lockdown and shooter training is worthless if the doors can't be locked. 

 

Pretty pithy point there by Sen. Bettencourt. 

He angrily pointed out that shots were heard while police waited in the hallway.

...

"There are at least six shots fired during this time," he said. "Why is this person shooting? He's killing somebody. Yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing."

…
Mr. McCraw said that just minutes after a gunman began shooting children at Robb Elementary School on May 24, the police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm the classroom.

…

Arredondo had arrived at the school without his police radio and focused on finding keys to the classrooms, even though it was not apparent in the videos that anyone had checked the classroom door to see if it was locked.

Chief Arredondo said that the classrooms had been locked and that he knew this because he and another officer had checked both doors. He said he then focused on finding keys, testing dozens of them, he said, in an effort to find one that would work on the doors. Eventually one was located…

But Mr. McCraw said there was no indication, either from video or interviews, that anyone had in fact checked the doors. “Moreover, you don’t need a key,” he said, pointing to the availability of breaching tools and the possibility of entering through the windows.

That has always been the most puzzling specific part of Arredondo’s story. You need keys?! You’re a cop and you need keys?! Do you have to ring the doorbell too and ask permission?

...police supervisors had been told there were people alive but wounded in the classrooms; that an officer had been on the phone with his wife, a teacher, after she was shot but before she died, and that he had told other officers about this at 11:48 a.m., providing them with a clear indication that people inside the classrooms were in urgent need of help...

Talent & etc.

Sunday late afternoon, having read all the news I deemed fit to read, I was sitting at my desk minding my own business when I decided to check out Arts & Letters Daily.

According to Mary Gaitskill, writing is a
rational process. But great writing comes from a stranger place...more>>

Ooh, sounds cool. Click on more. Forty-five minutes later and having read, per the page progress bar at right of my 'puter, one-third or one-fourth of the essay, I had to stop because my head hurt. 

I am a retired lawyer, not as retired as I would like to be, but getting there. To think like a lawyer means, in part, to read like a lawyer: closely, very closely, you can't speed-read the opinions in a seminal case, can't elide the chaff for the wheat as it were, the dicta for the holding. So did I read "The deracination of literature."

See, right at the beginning I was in over my head. I had never heard of Mary Gaitskill and I didn't know the meaning of deracination. We, the profoundly ignorant and talentless, make ourselves known to others by the pathognomone of thinking we know something when we don't. As example--You should know that I started this post that baneful Sunday afternoon, tried again yesterday, and now today.--having read the one quarter or one third of the essay I decided that I had grasped the nettle and could for the benefit of mankind improve upon it by removing certain words which I deemed superfluous. I was conscious that in doing so I was transmogrifying Gaitskill's essay into my own and had drafted a satisfying advisement to the reader; it was to own benefit after all.

Before completing "my" essay I read Gaitskill's a little further and realized I was getting to a depth so over my head that ascent with the easy comfort suggested by late Sunday afternoon setting would be impossible. In other words, I thought I knew something which I decidedly did not. I remember the point of epiphany: It was when Gaitskill read--aloud--there's a tape in the goddamned essay, a passage from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Light, which I had never heard of (Pale Light, OF COURSE I had heard of Nabokov). And, more wincing, the passage did precisely what Gaitskill said it did. She was not in over her head. That I was dunked on by a writer I had never heard of using a word in the title I had never heard of, calling upon the reader's auditory sense as well as his ocular (a matter of first impression for the undersigned; what's she going to do next, scratch and sniff?) and doing so so felicitously  bummed me out profoundly

Ms. Gaitskill's essay...I should have written this earlier...is a miracle, Revelation--Behold!--it is of fathomless depth and leaves the reader (this reader anyway) gasping; it is dense, complex, there is meaning nested in meaning, it is spare as an algorithm, clear as a teacher's freshman class lecture notes (Ms. Gaitskill teaches writing (Temple was one of her stops*) in addition to being a novelist)), is free of pedantry, and as how-to on good writing, should be beside every aspiring writer's keyboard. 

At least (most of) the first two-thirds. It is a little bit all over the place. The last third or so, with the paragraph beginning "It's true that very few people can write this way..." gets off the amazing writing tutorial. The tutorial portion is contradictory in some key places (see conclusion). When I broke from reading the essay I googled Ms. Gaitskill. She has been a little all over the place in her life, which is not justification and may not be explanation for the confused thought. It just is.

Thus far, unsure of my footing, I have consciously avoided summarizing Gaitskill's writerly guidance. It reminds me of The Garden of Eden, where similarly the unlettered reader first believes he understands and then realizes he doesn't and at the end so many pages are dog-eared and so many lines underlined that understanding comes from the feel you are left with rather than any logical, written summary you could write, which I believe to be fair summary, as far as it goes, of Gaitskill's essay:

...the plot or the theme functions almost like a conduit; an ineffable content which can be compared to a person’s unconscious or the guts of the body; you don’t see the unconscious but you feel it, you may misunderstand it but you feel it.

"Guts" immediately recalls Hemingway's dictum on writing, "You sit over the typewriter and bleed." The difficulty of summarization of Garden, Joyce I would say, Gaitskill's essay, a court opinion, or an algebraic equation is in removing the log that causes the whole Jenga tower to collapse. It reminds me of Professor Michael Sugrue's anecdote of the professor asked after class what War and Peace is about. "It's about Russia," the dumbstruck prof eventually summarized. (Tolstoy was asked a similar question, whether the book was fiction or history. "It is what I had to say in the way I said it," he replied.)

Gaitskill's argument is that there are some things (she argues most of life) in life that cannot be put into words, they are felt rather than processed rationally by our brains; yet, it is the writer's paradox to,

...give words to what is wordless and form to what is formless through creating pictures and images that...make a connection to the deeper body of the story — the viscera or unconscious. (This is one of the places in the essay that I was extremely tempted to alter: In whole context it would be much better by her to say "to make the reader feel" in place of "creating pictures and images." She is trying to get the reader away from the ocular.)

Scratch-n-sniff? Yes, actually. Good writing, Gaitskill argues, must involve more than our sense of sight inputted to our CPU:

Unless you are a surgeon or are the witness to a horrible accident, you aren’t going to see the guts of the body...

She means blood and "guts" literally. Which is bizarre. Hemingway meant "bleed" metaphorically, as pouring out one's soul.

...but if you touch the person you will feel them beating under your hand — on a hot day you might even smell them. 

Nested meaning: Gaitskill's inclusion of her in her soundclip reading Nabokov was conscious "writing" that worked in understanding Nabokov's talent and Gaitskill. We hear the woman's voice.

Has anyone besides my daughter ever thought of writing a novel from just the sense of smell? Poe wrote Footfalls from a blind man's auditory sense only. How about smell? Have you ever read the descriptions of scented candles? Here are some: "Laundry Day"; "Lakeside Morning"; "Summer Boardwalk." Nothing more need be written! We all have olfactory "memories" of those. Bed, Bath & Beyond, with words, makes us smell. Or “This Smells Like My Vagina” by loopy, gloopy, gross Gwyneth Paltrow.

Ms. Gaitskill reads aloud another passage from Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People. The conclusion is foreshadowed by the recited portion,

Which you don’t remember by the end of the story and don’t need to. Because you’ve felt it…

Another place that I snipped-and-cut initially is this, an old bookseller in Ann Arbor who gave the young student Mary Gaitskill a definition "that I have never forgotten": 

He considered style to be the “inevitable by-product” of the writer feeling their way through the shape of their creation, through word choices and small decisions as well as big ones. I didn’t like the term “by-product” because it didn’t sound central enough — style mattered to me even then — and he said that he meant it in the way the appearance of a plant or flower is the by-product of its most essential inner workings, that there is simply no other way for the flower or plant to look according to its genetic structure.

I do not like "by-product" either; the completed thing, book or flower, is the product; I don't like "product," it's too industrial. What are the specs for this widget? "Creation" would be better, what I would have said in my essay, but this is Gaitskill's. Fundamentally, I don't like "style"! What style is this flower? "Art for art's sake": don't ask what a post-war painting is "about." A post-war painting just is. Like a tree. What's a tree about? It's not about anything, it's just a tree! Trees and flowers and post-war paintings make you feel, you don't understand (or misunderstand) them rationally. They are post-rational, this is the art of post-writing writing: "the most powerful writing uses words in a way that transcends language."  Finally, I don't like the plant analogy. Too biological. Too "inevitable." There is nothing inevitable about the finished novel. If there were there wouldn't be drafts. There wouldn't be waste baskets, paper-shredders, erasers. The finished novel is a creation:

Writing is a rational process of connected thoughts and ideas, but great writing comes from a stranger place; an interface between the intensely intimate perception of an individual and the social and natural worlds. It is related to the rational mind but in a way that dreams are related to thought —poetically and irrationally. It is through poetic and irrational means that the unseen world of your story gets radically illuminated, like a burst of music can illuminate a scene in a movie...

Hand me my scissors. "interface," snip. Too Silicon Valley; "unseen", snip; "illuminated," illuminate", SNIP, SNIP. Cutting those out, that could have been my essay. She misses it: music. Music does not fucking "illuminate." What is she thinking? Music is the one art-form that bypasses the mind entirely and goes straight to the soul. We feel music. Music is a creation that makes us feel through our ears. That is consistent with the central thread of Gaitskill's essay and would have been far better analogy than her muse's plant. But, it's her essay.

*I went to Temple Law School. She also was married to a writing professor, then and current, at the University of Pittsburgh. I quit for the night last night after reading that.

🤣🤣

“Pearls,” Louise Brooks by Eugene Richee (1935)

GAWD I wish I had talent in just ONE thing just ONE time.

 

How Did the Civil War Last So Long?

Outmanned, outgunned, unindustrialized, poor and backward the C.S.A. has lost:

1) western Virginia
2) Missouri (which it never had but tried to get)
3) Kentucky (ditto)
4) its coastline
5) the middle-Mississippi
6) And now New Orleans, the largest city in the C.S.A. at this time. And we're only in April, 1862. McClellan himself, old Iron Ass, won West Virginia, about the last thing he did win. But he would not move further effectively on Virginia and that's where the war shifted, where it had to shift, the U.S.A. having won nearly everything of importance already, in the next three years.

Sometimes I Wonder...

For two years, the coronavirus killed Americans on a brutal, predictable schedule: A few weeks after infections climbed so did deaths, cutting an unforgiving path across the country.

But that pattern appears to have changed. Nearly three months since an ultra-contagious set of new Omicron variants launched a springtime resurgence of cases, people are nonetheless dying from Covid at a rate close to the lowest of the pandemic.

What are the odds? The first time since June 1 I posted on COVID-19 and the very next day the Quasis have the same story angle. I have confessed this before so I am immune to humiliation (if not COVID-19): Do they read this, Public Occurrences? I have concluded many times that, of course, Thomas L. Friedman does not. I conclude that the reporter on this piece does not either. But maybe...lol.

Google Questions

I have developed a fondness for Google questions for the same reason I developed a fondness for spam email: sometimes they are so bad they’re good. “Why is Miami called the Heat?” first alerted me to the mirth potential of the questions. Today I googled Kyrie Irving (who is in the news) and then, as they are similar shit-for brains, Ben Simmons:

Trump Walk of Shame Day!

 

Second anniversary! June 20, 2020. 

Russia is...

Russian Forces Tighten Noose Around Important Cities in Ukraine’s East

The area around Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk is about three-quarters encircled by Russians, leaving only a slender gap there for Ukrainian troops to maneuver.

 

COVID-19 BIDEN+514 (June 18)

I have been watching the Times' numbers. The percentage increases depressed me, that's how come I didn't post about them. But in the last few days I've had some cognitive dissonance looking at the Times' box on the front page. For example, +17% Deaths over two weeks but 314/day ave. over the last seven days. We got down to 264/day (ave.) on June 3. Our all-time low is 218/day last July 12 and I thought we were heading that way. But neither did 50 more Deaths/day seem to translate into daily two-week double-digit changes. So finally just now I checked the numbers:

If you iron out the kinks in the Cases fabric the daily number is about where it was on May 18.

Hospitalizations are clearly still on the rise although leveling.

If you iron out Deaths' kinks the number is only slightly higher on June 18 (314) than on May 18 (304). So...I don't know, what would be a decent term for these trends, a "holding pattern"?