What are we seeing here? A dying party's last gasps?

Link to the London Times: here.

Excerpt: "As he told Vogue last July, 'I’m a fun, wacky guy. I’m a silly goose.' Take one look at his bizarre Instagram page... or his X account... and you’ll agree with that. Schlossberg often spends his time shirtless, talking about people’s looks. He has pondered Jesus Christ’s body type. He has commented on his own resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. He has wondered out loud whether Usha Vance is 'way hotter' than his grandmother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.And then there’s the video he posted this week. Donning a blonde wig and speaking in a Slavic accent, he pretended to be Melania Trump as he performed a 'dramatic reading' of her recent letter to Vladimir Putin about the welfare of Ukrainian children. On Tuesday he posted again as Melania, saying he would 'be going live, answering all of your questions on my show tonight.'"

And yes, I see what Gavin Newsom is doing. Suddenly, everybody's a comedian. 

"When Mr. Heiman, 72, began his career in the 1960s, whey was pumped down a river, spread on a field or fed to pigs."

"In other words, it was waste, and the only goal was to get rid of it as cheaply as possible. Times have changed. 'In the last decade or so, there are times when cheese is the byproduct of cheese production, and the cheese plants make more money off the whey production,' said Mike McCully, a dairy industry consultant...."

From "America’s Protein Obsession Is Transforming the Dairy Industry/Whey, the liquid byproduct of cheese making, was once considered waste. Now it is a key ingredient in the protein powders that Ozempic users and weight lifters are downing in ever-greater amounts" (NYT).

As Jesus said, "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first."

"I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?"/"Uh............"/"You’re hesitating"/"Well, I don’t know. I would....... I would....."

"There’s so many questions implicit in this"/"Should the human race survive?"/"Yes.... but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so............................"

It's Peter Thiel, responding to what one might think were easy questions from Ross Douthat, on the new episode of Douthat's podcast, here, at Podscribe.

Go to 00:37:32 to experience Thiel's freakishly long hesitation when Douthat has just asked if he'd like humanity to survive. And I love how he takes the concept of "trans" and runs with it.

Even though Thiel's cogitations wander into Christianity, he doesn't mention The Transfiguration, in Matthew 17. There, Jesus is "transfigured":

"At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity..."

"... the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.... At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. 'She was notorious for being a terrible cook.... They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.' ... [T]he dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as 'a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!' Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.'"

From "Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells/The couple’s lives are preserved in a SoHo building where for decades they plotted their monumental projects" (NYT)(free-access link).

Lots of cool pictures of the Christo real estate, so go check them out at that link, but I want to show you this picture of Teeny, by Henri Matisse (who was her father-in-law during her first marriage):

Duchamp was her second husband. He said: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." Christo went colossal, but Duchamp went small. And he was married to a woman named Teeny.

Is there some idea that you should either go very big or very small? What springs to mind is the related idea of hot or cold: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." File that under: Things Jesus Said In Someone Else's Dream.

Looking for quotes that credit the very small and shun the medium-sized:

"Whether he was high as a kite or hungry as a hippo, he didn’t deserve to be crushed."

Said Darlene Chaney, cousin of Cornelius Taylor, quoted in "In Cities’ Rush to Clear Homeless Camps, People Have Been Crushed to Death/Atlanta’s mayor began a drive to clear homeless encampments. But when heavy equipment came to raze one, nobody noticed that Cornelius Taylor was still inside his tent" (NYT).

In the modest home where they shared a childhood with Mr. Taylor, Ms. Chaney and her brother Derek, both truck drivers, described him as a bright, kind man wounded by a dark teenage episode they did not fully understand. He dropped out of high school and resisted their efforts to help, while complaining that many people view the homeless with disdain. His baptism in a prison chapel raised hopes for change that went unmet.... On good days, friends found him protective and kind. Bad days evoked his street name, Psycho. “If he didn’t get his way, all hell would break lose,” [his girlfriend Lolita] Griffeth said.

"An honour to have my IQ questioned by you Mr VP. But your attempts to speak for Christ are false and dangerous."

"Nowhere does Jesus suggest that love is to be prioritised in concentric circles. His love is universal."

Said Rory Stewart, a podcaster, quoted in "JD Vance says Rory Stewart has ‘low IQ’ in Christian values clash/The US vice-president copies Trump’s playbook with response to the former minister’s claims that his rhetoric was ‘false and dangerous'" (London Times).

Vance's original statement was: "There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that."

When Stewart disagreed, Vance came at him with: "Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years. Rory Stewart thinks he has an IQ of 130 when it’s really 110.'"

It's not a question of what Rory really thinks but what Jesus really said. What IQ does Vance ascribe to Jesus?

"In September 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, in a speech in Las Vegas, warned that drug use was threatening 'to sap our national strength'..."

"... and called out a number of pop songs, including the Beatles’ 'With a Little Help From My Friends' and the Byrds’ 'Eight Miles High,' as 'latent drug culture propaganda.' Within a year, under the Nixon administration, the Federal Communications Commission warned broadcasters about playing songs with lyrics that might promote drug use. As a result, 'One Toke Over the Line' was banned by radio stations in Buffalo, Miami, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Dallas and New York. Brewer & Shipley, Mr. Brewer said, came to embrace the crackdown as 'a badge of honor.'"

From "Michael Brewer, Whose 'One Toke' Was a Big Hit, Is Dead at 80/The duo Brewer & Shipley reached the Top 10 in 1970 with 'One Toke Over the Line,' a ditty about marijuana that ran afoul of Nixon-era censors" (NYT).

Brewer lived to be 80 and that was half a century after he expressed this conception of how he wanted to die: "My last wish will be just one thing/Be smilin' when I die/I wanna be one toke over the line, sweet Jesus/One toke over the line..."

The singer was "sitting downtown in a railway station" and "just waitin' for the train that goes home, sweet Mary." 

Even if the song originated from an exclamation about smoking marijuana, it seems that the substance of the song is religious. The metaphor of the train is seen in other songs, such as "People Get Ready (There's a train a-coming....") and "This Train (Is Bound for Glory)."

I wouldn't brush off "One Toke Over the Line" as a "ditty."

And by the way, screw Agnew. Back in 1970, young people easily opposed censorship. Who would have thought that in 50 years, the tables would be turned and the young would embrace it?

Don't say "Christmas." Don't even say "joy."

A Grok summary, at X:

During a recent event at the White House, Jill Biden mentioned the need for 'joy' during the holiday season, a comment which some interpreted as a subtle mockery of Kamala Harris's previous campaign slogan 'sense of joy.' Jill Biden later clarified that her remarks were not meant to be taken as an insult, emphasizing that the audience was reading too much into her statement. The incident has sparked discussions about the dynamics within the Biden administration. This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

Here's the relevant video clip.

🚨 JUST IN: Jill Biden is now OPENLY MOCKING Kamala Harris’ “joy” line

The audience even knows what’s going on, and breaks out into laughter 😂

Anybody still think Jill Biden DIDN’T vote for Trump? 🤣 pic.twitter.com/8ePBuLQVKD

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 11, 2024

"Joy" is a Christmas word: "Joy to the World/The Lord is come"/"Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." It's a word that might be selected by someone who wants to avoid limiting her message to Christians. It seems more general, even as Christians hear it as specific to the Christian religion.

Jill also says "peace" and "light": "I hope that you all feel that sense of, you know, peace and light." 

"Peace" and "light" are also words that, for Christians, call to mind Jesus Christ. Jesus is "the light of the world" — "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Jesus is the "Prince of Peace" — "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

But Jill's audience, hearing "joy," thinks not of Jesus Christ but of a worldly power-seeker who used "joy" as a political brand that worked for a couple weeks and then was recognized as idiotic emptiness. Now, it's a laugh line.

Jill hears the laughing and flaps her arms about. Instead of holding steady and conveying the beauty and seriousness of the hope for peace and light and joy at Christmas, she emits a scoffing laugh and acknowledges that she too can hear what they hear, a reference to Kamala Harris.

"Just moments ago, Joe Biden stated that our supporters are garbage."

"He's talking about the border patrol, he's talking about nurses, he's talking about teachers, he's talking about everyday Americans who love their country and want to dream big again and support you, Mr. President. And I hope their campaign is about to apologize for what Joe Biden just said. We are not garbage. We are patriots who love America and thank you for running Mr. President."

Said Marco Rubio to Donald Trump, on stage at Trump's rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania last night. Click the video below, which is cued up to the spot. Trump appears to be hearing this news of President Biden's statement for the first time.

Trump reacts: "Wow. That's terrible.... Remember Hillary? She said 'deplorable' and then she said 'irredeemable.' Right? But she said 'deplorable.' That didn't work out. 'Garbage,' I think is worse. Right? But he doesn't know. You have to please forgive him. Please forgive him! For he not knoweth what he said."

I believe that last bit was an attempt to evoke the words of Jesus: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

Trump continues: "These people. Terrible terrible terrible — to say a thing like that, but he really doesn't know. He really, honestly, he doesn't. And I'm convinced that he likes me more than he likes Kamala. Convinced. But that's a terrible thing."

It was a terrible thing to say, but you can see that Trump knows that Biden's rhetoric — like Hillary's "deplorable" — was an excellent gift to his campaign. And it came just as Kamala Harris was delivering her big closing-argument speech that was supposed to reach out to all Americans and to characterize her as the one who, unlike Trump, embraced everybody.

Here's the NYT article about that: "Harris’s Mission: Disqualify Trump, but Extend a Hand to His Voters/Kamala Harris, in her closing argument to voters, acknowledged an inescapable political reality: Donald Trump is not a fringe figure within his own party or the nation" (free-access link):

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

At long last: marriage for Tim Scott.

Tonight, we promised to cherish and nourish each other and our marriage for the rest of our lives.

Mindy, you've made me the happiest man alive. I love you.

"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

Matthew 19:6 pic.twitter.com/tRjlffL0EE

— Tim Scott (@votetimscott) August 4, 2024

 

Watch Republicans pounce on whatever meanness or dubiousness or racism this elicits.

"My son has all but cut connections with me.... A year or so ago when I was visiting, I had a DNA test swab with me..."

"... and asked [my granddaughter] to supply the saliva. The good news is, it turns out she is indeed my granddaughter, although unlike all the other grandkids, she looks nothing like any of the families on my side. She looks like a clone of her mother and a lot like her half brother from a different father. The results of this test leaked out via another family member, and there was a lot of anger by the mother that I doubted her faithfulness. I did apologize, although I really wanted to know the results. My apology was not accepted as good enough...."

From "Carolyn Hax: She doubted her grandkid’s paternity. So she picked up a DNA test. A letter writer insists on the truth of a grandchild’s paternity, and wonders if it must come at a cost with the child’s family" (WaPo).

That goes into The Annals of Unaccepted Apologies.

I wonder:

1. How often does it happen that someone secretly acquires a DNA sample from another person and gets it tested? It's always wrong, so there would not usually be confessions.

2. What tempted the grandmother to give in, not only to her unseemly curiosity, but to telling someone else what she did? Did she not realize how wrong she was? Did this other person participate in gossip about the child's paternity, motivating the grandmother to whip out her proof?

3. How often has it happened, across the great span of human existence, that family members have gazed upon the face of an innocent child and formed ideas about who, really, is the father? What evils, great and small, have they committed in the name of their suspicions?

4. Did Jesus Christ look "like a clone of [his] mother"? (I know: different sex. But still.)("With the facts in place, there is only one conclusion: Jesus was trans, as he would have been born as a genetic copy of Mary, but transitioned to male at some point.")

"White people like Vance’s grandmother who are strongly anti-institution and don’t go to church but consider themselves very much Christian..."

"... were a huge part of the Trump base from the start and explain how religious conservatives could connect with him, [said Geoff Layman, head of the University of Notre Dame’s political science department and an expert on political behavior and religion]. This phenomenon was so common that Layman and a co-author of a 2020 book about new religious-political fault lines used the term 'mamaw' to describe nominally Christian Trump supporters, an allusion to Vance’s grandmother, by then well known because of his popular memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy.'"

Writes Michelle Boorstein, in "JD Vance’s Catholic conversion is part of young conservative movement/The Republican vice-presidential nominee and Ohio senator was raised nominally evangelical, then dabbled with atheism before converting in 2019" (WaPo).

A new chapter in The History of Ears.

I'm reading "From Van Gogh to Mike Tyson: a brief history of ears," a 2009 Guardian article, by Lucy Mangan.

Found after trying to think of a list of famous ears, a list to which Trump's ear will now take one of the top 2 spots. I think Van Gogh's ear still belongs in first place.

I'd thought of the ear Mike Tyson bit off but had forgotten whose ear it was. (It was Evander Holyfield's.)

I'd thought of a movie ear —

"Inmates in New York are suing to be allowed to see the solar eclipse."

WaPo reports.

The six plaintiffs in the class-action suit filed Friday, who are Christian, Muslim, Santerian and atheist, are... arguing it has religious significance. Some said it is critical to their practice of their faith — because the Bible describes the sun going dark during the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; because Muslims perform a special prayer upon the eclipse; and because it is important in the Santeria faith to make a spiritual offering.

“Watching the eclipse with the people I know here is a way for me to feel closer to God,” wrote Travis Hudson, a Protestant Baptist....

"But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven."

Said Jesus Christ, quoted in Matthew 5:44-45.

Recalled on reading Trump's Truth Social Easter message:

"But what is interesting is that a few voices on the Left have spoken up to question the fairness of the proceedings."

"Not to defend Trump — they could never bring themselves to do that — but to ask whether the process being used to go after him is fair. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, firmly in the liberal camp and firmly anti-Trump, expressed worries about the precedent the Trump case could set. From her column this week: 'The essence of Trump’s argument on appeal is that the supposed harm he caused was minimal at best — all his lenders were repaid — and that the penalty levied against him was therefore wildly excessive....' Progressive commentator Cenk Uygur, also firmly anti-Trump, had a similar view. 'To me, putting up all the cash upfront before you appeal the case seems draconian for everyone, not just Trump.... But what if he wins the appeal? So you made him sell all of his properties to get the collateral, but then he can’t buy them back....'... Someday, of course, what goes around will come around for Democrats, probably in circumstances that none of them could predict right now...."

Writes Byron York.

Most Trump antagonists seem to be laughing and salivating. I suppose they would enjoy seeing the man tortured. It's bizarrely shortsighted. Do they think Trump is uniquely evil and nothing that happens to him will set a precedent?

"[T]hey agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering."

"Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism...."

Writes Elizabeth Barber in "The Case Against Children/Among the antinatalists" (Harper's). The author wants a baby.

Lots of stories of antinatalists at the link, but what I want to quote is some of the philosophical material:

"In perfect sync with his much-hyped generation, Keith... adored the Monkees more than the Beatles and was briefly a Jesus freak...."

"Haring may have out-Warholed Warhol, a mentor and collaborator, in enjoying celebrity friends.... But he was less cool than hot, eager and earnest: handing out free buttons and selling cheap merch at his prescient Pop Shop but fretting about his place in the canon and firing off indignant letters to editors. Time magazine’s influential critic Robert Hughes emerges here as a particular Joker to his Batman, likening Haring and his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat to 'those two what’s their names on "Miami Vice"' and calling them 'Keith Boring' and 'Jean-Michel Basketcase.' (Good lord!)..."

From "A New Keith Haring Biography Draws the Most Complete Picture Yet/In his thoroughly researched 'Radiant,' Brad Gooch considers the short, blazing life of the ’80s artist, activist and man about downtown" (NYT).

ADDED: The New Yorker article is "Keith Haring, the Boy Who Cried Art/Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?" Excerpt:

"Holy Week constitutes precisely the expression of a Christ away from the codes of male power."

"The Christ we love, before whom we prostrate ourselves and who is our example, does not look like an All Blacks rugby forward."

Said the columnist Chapu Apaolaza, quoted in "'Homoerotic Christ' on posters for Holy Week divides Spain/Artist defends painting used for Easter celebrations in Seville" (London Times).

From the artist, Salustiano García: "Those who see something dirty in the painting are only projecting their own internal dirt on to the image.... [They display] a lack of culture, of not knowing anything, of never having been in a museum or a church, because I haven’t invented any element that appears in the painting."