My WordPress blog over the decade-plus has shifted from my own story and opinions to curation of others (often with a little commentary). Today’s mostly-curated post is utterly political, relentlessly anti-Trump, but awfully good, I think. There are a lot of smart kindred spirits out there.
The latest fitness craze is surely going to be Fake My Run. It fits perfectly with the national ethos whereby university students are already doing Fake My Education.
There’s a reason why highly-educated Englishmen seem better education than highly-educated Americans (not excepting myself). In 5 Ways to Stop AI Cheating, Ted Gioia outlines what graduate studies were like at Oxford.
Paywall, I’m pretty sure (though some of his posts may be free.)
I added 86 47 to all my email signature blocks, but I find I’m erasing it for everyone but family. I’m involved in too many things where I don’t know others’ politics and I don’t want to throw a stink-bomb into the mix.
But here, at MB, I can do me.
86 47, y’all.
There’s a tsunami of hype about AI. Leave it to Hedgehog Review to reward an even half-attentive reader with sobriety.
I’m not one of “we,” but I’m glad for them and hope this unanimous loss is a harbinger of my more “Bench-slaps” for ultra vires stunts.
What the federal courts are facing from the Trump administration is trolling, outright defiance, administration attorneys making representations to the court with the administration refusing to follow through, and in general, a double game:
(1) Trump 2.0 says “The establishment is broken. We need to come in and wreck the place. We need to up-end everything.. We need to start throwing tables. Everything’s got to change. We are an administration unlike any other.”
(2) The legal system responds as if Trump 2.0 is an administration unlike any other.
(3) Trump 2.0 complains that they are being treated differently.
David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast (lightly paraphrased).
I doubt that it’s legal, but here’s an answer to “Can the Trump Administration Stop Harvard From Enrolling International Students?“
Reading Apocrypha: An Introduction to Extra-Biblical Literature. 📚I haven’t really stalled out on Matsuo Bashö Travel Writings, but I can’t read too much poetry at once.
Reading Matsuo Bashö, Travel Writings (Steven D. Carter translator and editor).
I don’t remember why I put it on my Christmas list, but my brother-in-law obliged me. I may bog down, but for the moment I’m fascinated by the idea of “linked haikai.”
I listen to a lot of podcasts. It’s interesting to see how educated people mispronounce words they’ve only seen on the printed page differently than I mispronounce them.
Today’s episode: simulacrum.
Today is the 1700th anniversary of what’s generally accepted as the opening of the Ecumenical Council of Nicea.
Was it the excitement that woke me up so early this morning?
Had I remained Protestant, I like to think I’d have aged into a Tim Keller kinda Protestant, but I was pretty contentious as a younger man.
Edward Bartkus, who appears to have been the Palm Springs bomber and who died in the explosion, was a “pro-mortalist,” meaning he opposed people being born “without their consent.”
Weird.
No wonder some media call him “anti-natalist,” others “nihilist.”
Finished The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. 📚All of the poems are available in German, too, but I didn’t read those.
Mounjaro update.
Apart from the cost, it has been 99% positive. I hit satiety sooner and stay satisfied longer. No nausea, no anhedonia. Unmistakable and heartening weight loss.
But the effect seems to wane a day or two before my next injection, so I’m ready for higher level.
I had no idea that CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Wow! Jack Goldsmith, The Solicitor General Embraces Judicial Supremacy.
This gets fairly far into the legal (and political) weeds, but it’s an angle I haven’t seen on yesterday’s SCOTUS argument, and it seems solid.
(I’ve been drinking from a firehose since yesterday.)
Is KJ Muldoon the new Dolly the Sheep? I’m skeptical about interventions into humans at so deep a level, but it’s hard not to feel good about this boy’s miraculous cure.
Helpful analysis: Trump’s Legal Strategy Has a Name - The Atlantic.
The name is “court-baiting.” The game is to aggrandize the executive branch at the expense of the courts by forcing the courts either to approve (directly aggrandizing the executive) or disapprove (relatively aggrandizing the executive by railing against the “undemocratic” courts) popular but illegal practices.
At present, those practices involve immigration — Trump’s strongest hand.
The success of this game makes me think that we need a rudimentary civics test for voting, including the question “Does the constitution forbid some laws or practices that might be very, very popular?”
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”
E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, quoting Leo Tolstoy.
Finished E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful 📚
The pattern of my old highlights not capturing my current mind continued throughout. Glad I re-read it.