... Richard Serra died yesterday....
It continues:
To live freely in writing...
... Richard Serra died yesterday....
It continues:
Read more about Trump's Bible, here, at Axios. Oh! I see Trump isn't raising money: "None of the money garnered from the Bible will go toward Trump's presidential campaign, the website states."
“We've had...a rash of universal injunctions... This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule or any other federal government action.”
— The Recount (@therecount) March 26, 2024
— SCOTUS Justice Gorsuch hits recent mifepristone rulings pic.twitter.com/5yarbyQC5s
ADDED: From the NYT article on the subject: "Before the merger, shares of the shell company... had long behaved as something of a proxy for investor sentiment about Mr. Trump.... By most traditional measures, Trump Media’s valuation is inordinately high. The company took in just $3.3 million in revenue during the first nine months of last year, all from advertising on Truth Social, and recorded a loss of $49 million."
So... overvaluation seems to be a theme with Trump. Here the market is doing the valuation. It's not Trump's valuation his own property and the DA's alternative valuation— the subject of the New York lawsuit.
Any hope of characterizing the buying of the stock, bidding up the price, as an illegal campaign contribution? It's handing billions of dollars to Trump.
I'm even motivated to post the entire thing:No longer the party of "when they go low, we go high." https://t.co/csA1q5WgMP
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) March 26, 2024
Police stress NO indication Baltimore Key Bridge collapse was intentional or that there is any terrorism connection pic.twitter.com/i1qecEeZUb
— Steve Chenevey FOX5 (@stevechenevey) March 26, 2024
I watched the whole Joe Rogan episode — it's free on YouTube, here — and I was disappointed in Haidt, who is out and about this month pushing a new book about taking smart phones away from kids. Haidt presents himself as a source of wisdom and good sense in our supposedly crazy world, but in that clip, you see him mentally failing, in real time.This is actually an amazing highlight from @joerogan’s recent interview with @JonHaidt.
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) March 25, 2024
It goes to show the importance and impact of initial news that turns out to be fake news.
The initial impression is the one that lasts, and the justification to cling to the initial… pic.twitter.com/xjUiKH7bjE
Patrick Bet-David (@patrickbetdavid) has a theory about why my least supportive demographic is Baby Boomers…and it’s not just because their main source for news is TV. #rfkjr #kennedy24 pic.twitter.com/Mne5TFc0kr
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) March 25, 2024
Writes someone in Finland in a Reddit discussion, "Do Europeans ever use their hand[s] to make 'Air Quotes' in a conversation, for example, to express sarcasm or a euphemism?"
Someone in Slovakia says "If you can't express sarcasm or a euphemism by you voice and tone, you shouldn't be allowed to do it. (I haven't seen it here, but maybe somebody does it.)"So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."
The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."
Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:
“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”
We all hate smartphones... or, I guess, kids with smartphones? I went to look up whether Haidt's name is pronounced "hate," and I ended up running into his dissertation: "Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog?":
A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.
"This is exactly why people don't trust journalists and the media anymore... I'm fed up... I will sue the Washington Post if they publish a false story about me." - LSU HC Kim Mulkey
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 23, 2024
(via @bryce_koon) pic.twitter.com/9Lce7PP4xY
“But you see, reporters who give a megaphone to a one-sided, embellished version of things aren’t trying to tell the truth. They’re trying to sell newspapers and feed the click machine. This is exactly why people don’t trust journalists and the media anymore. It’s these kinds of sleazy tactics and hatchet jobs that people are just tired of.”
Masha Borzunova, a journalist who fled Russia... walked me through a typical day of Russian TV: “A person wakes up to a news broadcast that shows how the Russian military is making gains. Then Anti-Fake begins, where the presenters dismantle the fake news of Western propaganda and propagate their own fake news. Then there’s the talk show Time Will Tell that runs for four, sometimes five hours, where we’ll see Russian soldiers bravely advancing. Then comes Male and Female.... Then more news and a few more talk shows, in which a KGB combat psychic predicts Russia’s future and what will happen on the front. This is followed by the game show Field of Miracles.... And then, of course, the evening news.”
I had gone from being infuriated by this kind of hypnosis to envying it. The free flow of information had become for me what a jug of water is to a severely dehydrated person: The right amount can save you, but too much can kill....
New EV models tend to be heavier and quicker—generating more particulates.... In other words, EVs have a tire-pollution problem, and one that is poised to get worse as America begins to adopt electric cars en masse.
The use of the word "clean" in the title to the rule is deceptive. And it's deceptive to try amaze us with the number 7 billion when it's in relation to 5.5 quadrillion.
“Our big plan to cancel student debt doesn’t apply to everyone. Just yesterday, a defeated-looking man came up to me and said, ‘I’m being crushed by debt. I’m completely wiped out.’ And I said, ‘Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.'”
Meanwhile, Trump has jokes too, and over at Politico, Michael Kruse is trying to convince us that there's something terribly wrong with that: "In on the Joke: The Comedic Trick Trump Uses to Normalize His Behavior/His supporters love it. Critics call it a sign of his autocratic tendencies."
Autocratic tendencies... can you believe it? He unleashed the deadly power of... humor.
Saved by the Wayback Machine, here. I got up to list #49 before noticing there were 150 lists.
I stumbled upon that compilation of compilations while reading a 2021 article, "How Led Zeppelin's 'Going to California' Crushed on Joni Mitchell."
... Stephanopoulos... said Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury had found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape....
“Indeed, the jury expressly found that Plaintiff did not commit rape and, as demonstrated below, Defendant George Stephanopoulos was aware of the jury’s finding in this regard yet still falsely stated otherwise,” [Trump’s attorney, Alejandro] Brito continued....
ADDED: The complaint quotes 12 times that Stephanopoulos said "rape," so he really leaned into what he had to know was wrong:
The Don Lemon Show episode 1: Elon Musk
— Don Lemon (@donlemon) March 18, 2024
TIMESTAMPS:
(02:23) News on X
(10:07) Donald Trump and Endorsing a Candidate
(13:04) The New Tesla Roadster
(16:46) Relaxation and Video Games
(17:54) Tweeting and Drug Use
(23:19) The Great Replacement Theory
(30:03) Content Moderation… pic.twitter.com/bLRae4DhyO
Galas built around impressively named awards are a stalwart of the Washington elite social scene — and a way to entice celebrity honorees to rub elbows with politicians and business leaders over $1,000-a-head plates of prime rib....
Ugh. Let them stew in their own au juices.
"Ms. Stewart and her stylist, Tara Swennen, have taken the film’s carnality and covert politics and translated them for the promotional panopticon, forcing anybody watching to confront their own preconceptions about women’s bodies, their sexuality and exactly what empowerment means, while at the same time undermining the whole circus of branded celebrity dressing."
Later he said the remark was a "figure of speech" and that anyone who took it seriously was "neurotic." Within a few days, four students were shot at Kent State.
I ran across that because I'd noticed that the NYT was spelling "bloodbath" as 2 words — "Trump defends his warning of a ‘blood bath for the country" — in its current reporting. I had 2 theories about why:
1. A compound word takes a long time to become standard. When we see "bloodbath" as one word, it feels more like a stock term. Trite. By spacing it out as 2 words, you might get people to think that Trump put it together in his own fervid brain. But maybe...
2. The NYT has a style guide, and it decided long ago that "blood bath" was the correct configuration, and people at the Times are meticulous about writing it the same way every time.
To narrow my 2 ideas about twoness and oneness down to one, I searched the NYT archive for the 1-word form. I found many examples of "bloodbath," including Reagan's crazy idea of sticking it to the students. There was also Russell Baker making jokes about Richard Nixon's "bloodbath" theory of Vietnam (in 1970, deploying a fictional character he called "Dandy"):
This is the third post of the morning and, like the previous two, it has a title consisting of one word that's in the news this morning. I can see from the comments in those other posts and in last night's open thread, that people especially want to talk about "bloodbath."
I feel so pushed to talk about "bloodbath" this morning that I balk at churning out a "bloodbath" post. You already know what you want to say. Is it my job to expound on "bloodbath" as it relates to the free-speaking raconteur Donald Trump and his gasping, raging antagonists?
I'll just feed your bloodbathlust with my favorite "bloodbath" quotations from the OED:
"Jawboning"... is the use of authority to persuade various entities to act in certain ways, which is sometimes underpinned by the implicit threat of future government regulation. In the United States, during the Democratic administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, officials tried to deal with the mounting inflationary pressures by direct government influence or jawboning....
From an amicus brief in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, one of 2 free-speech cases up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today:
[A 5th Circuit panel] said the [Biden administration] officials had become excessively entangled with the platforms or used threats to spur them to act.... [The administration argues] that the government was entitled to express its views and to try to persuade others to take action.
“A central dimension of presidential power is the use of the office’s bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans — and American companies — to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest,” Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote.
In response, lawyers for the states wrote that the administration had violated the First Amendment. “The bully pulpit,” they wrote, “is not a pulpit to bully.”
Originally: a man given to or characterized by riotous, thuggish, and threatening behaviour; one who behaves in a blustering, swaggering, and aggressive manner. Now: a person who habitually seeks to harm, coerce, or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable; a person who engages in bullying.