(Twice, Wanna One, and EXO are still expecting to release new albums this year) - Pann: Ranking of K-pop album sales in 2018 1. [+217, -8] BTS reached 4M with just two comebacks ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Amazing 2. [+157, -5] BTS is really amazing and so is Twice. Both groups' physical sales are a different world. 3. [+156, -12] Twice daebak ㅋㅋㅋ Seventeen also sold 700K... They're all amazing. BTS and Wanna One are always there and CBX did well despite being a subunit. They're still promoting so they'll sell more ㅋㅋ 4. [+133, -91] EXO is the only subunit one, really amazing... 5. [+74, -2] BTS ㅋㅋㅋㅋ How are you supposed to surpass that... 6. [+64, -2] BTS is outstanding 7. [+52, -5] Why are people defensive against Twice? Blame your bias' lack of popularity for not advancing into Japan. Is it wrong for Twice to advance into Japan and selling a lot? 8. [+44, -6] BTS, Twice, and Wanna One are the top tier right now.
... Trump isn't an impetuous, wildly swinging idiot. What if he is what he says, a political genius?
Let's see how far the WaPo journalists go:
Again and again, President Trump was instructed not to do it. A cadre of advisers, confidants and lawmakers all urged him — implored him, really — not to personally attack the women who had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
So he did it anyway.
Addressing thousands at a boisterous rally in Mississippi, Trump relied on his own visceral sense of the moment and mocked Christine Blasey Ford for gaps in her memory, directly impugning the accuser’s credibility.
Establishment Republicans initially reacted with horror. But Trump’s 36-second off-script jeremiad proved a key turning point toward victory for the polarizing nominee, White House officials and Kavanaugh allies said, turbocharging momentum behind Kavanaugh just as his fate appeared most in doubt....
Trump had no particular personal affinity for Kavanaugh, although a dinner was arranged between the two men and their wives to cultivate a relationship. “I don’t even know him,” the president told the Mississippi crowd, “so it’s not like, ‘Oh, gee, I want to protect my friend.’ ”...
“Kavanaugh’s an establishment guy. He was a Bush guy,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), referencing the nominee’s experience as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush. “There was a lot of pushback, you know — ‘Don’t go [down] that road,’ ‘That’s not why you won,’ and he said, ‘Wait a minute. I want to pick the best people to be on the court I can,’ and he said he was incredibly impressed by his background, just the whole package of Kavanaugh.”...
[Kavanaugh's Fox News interview] was widely criticized — “objectively a horrible idea,” in the words of one White House official. Kavanaugh appeared wooden and dispassionate, sticking only to a few talking points, and Trump, an avid consumer and critic of television news, thought he appeared weak and unconvincing....
[The Judiciary Committee hearing with Ford and Kavanaugh] left the president seesawing from fatalism to enthusiasm about Kavanaugh’s confirmation prospects.
When Ford had finally finished, [White House counsel Don] McGahn spoke privately to Kavanaugh, who had not watched, urging him to be passionate. “Speak from your heart,” McGahn advised the nominee, according to someone familiar with their discussion.
Kavanaugh roared into the committee room and shouted his opening statement, which he had personally written the night before with the help of one trusted clerk. The hotly defiant performance was so effective in the eyes of his advisers — and, perhaps most importantly, of the president — that a group gathered in Vice President Pence’s Capitol Hill office began to cheer and pump their fists. Some even had tears in their eyes.
The hearing galvanized activists on both sides and left jittery senators — including Flake, one of 11 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee — torn between competing accounts and party loyalties.... McConnell spoke with Trump and convinced him that the only option was to delay a vote and move forward with the FBI probe....
On the campaign trail... Trump ratcheted up the partisan warfare at his rallies. In Mississippi, the president — already fuming over a New York Times investigation into his family’s allegedly fraudulent tax schemes — felt the media was not properly scrutinizing Ford’s account and decided to engage.
“How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember,’ ” Trump said, reenacting Ford’s hearing. “How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”
The riff lasted less than a minute, but had lasting ramifications. The senators whose votes Kavanaugh was wooing said they were aghast at the president’s rally-stage behavior. But Kavanaugh allies saw a clear benefit: An argument by the president that bucked up Kavanaugh, discredited Ford and became a clarion call for conservatives.
More than two dozen Trump supporters interviewed at the president’s campaign rally Thursday in Minnesota said they wish he had not gone after Ford, fretting that doing so was not presidential. Yet many also acknowledged the president had simply spoken aloud what many of them thought privately.
The reporters don't tie it all up. In fact the headline at the article is toned down from the one on the front page which you see in my image at the top of this post. At the article, there's less credit to Trump. It's just: "‘Willing to go to the mat’: How Trump and Republicans carried Kavanaugh to the cusp of confirmation." But the facts are there in the article. Trump critiqued Ford's testimony in clear powerful terms — something everyone else was afraid to do. He recognized that Kavanaugh's presentation on Fox News wasn't compelling (even though it was what the pushers of the "judicial temperament" argument claimed they needed to see). And during the hearing, after Ford testified, Trump performed a public routine of "seesawing" about whether Kavanaugh could make it, lighting the fire on him to shed his establishment guy/Bush guy demeanor and talk more like Trump.
That's all in the article, but with no strongly stated bottom line, Trump haters can shrug it off and cling to their belief that Trump is an impetuous idiot.
Says Madison Man, in the comments to a post where I said "Harrumph!" He links to this:
Fantastic! My post has an embedded clip from "Putney Swope," because it has a line — "How many syllables, Mario?" — that I have held in my memory for half a century. But there's no chance that I'd have dragged up "Harrumph," because — can you believe it? — I have never seen "Blazing Saddles."
Is it "harrumph" or "harumph"? Double letters are the peskiest spelling problem. The OED says the double-r is correct. It's defined as "A guttural sound made by clearing the throat. Also fig. So as v., to make this sound; to speak in a rasping or guttural voice; to make a comment implying disapproval." One example is from The New Yorker in 1961, a cartoon, I'm guessing: "My goodness, Henry, you're much too young to be going har-rumph, har-rumph all the time!"
I put "Blazing Saddles" on my list of movies that came out during the period of my life when I pretty much went out and saw everything that was supposed to be excellent but that I never did see — not at the time and not in later years, when it became easy to see whatever I wanted on videotape or DVD. Also on my list: "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Picture Show." I think of those 2 because they are DVDs that I bought as soon as they came out because I assumed surely I'd watch them and that my previous failure to watch them was nothing but a chance omission. They've sat on my shelf for way more than a decade.
And I still don't feel like watching "Blazing Saddles." Harrumph!!
The work, “Girl With a Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale. It was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s.
“Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm the Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.”
The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby’s staff members, had been shredded by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame....
As the artwork shredded itself, a seemingly unperturbed Mr. Barker, the auctioneer and Sotheby’s European chairman, said, “It’s a brilliant Banksy moment, this. You couldn’t make it up, could you?”
Theater. It's all already been done, but it's a charming iteration of an old idea. It's not as though anyone really wants or needs a painting of a sentimental notion, a girl with a balloon! The art is something other than that, and it's cute to do the destruction at the auction, with the money (almost) in hand.
Reminds me of the 2-year-old who put her parents' $1,060 in cash through the family paper shredder, which we were just talking about yesterday. But the girl had no artistic intention — or did she?!! — so that's not the old idea I'm talking about. I'm thinking about stuff like "Erased de Kooning":
Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities. It's a choice to highlight similarities when there are also differences. For example I could say that there are similarities between Hitler's gesture in that screenshot and Melania's. There are also differences, and it would be a choice of mine to accuse Vox of juxtaposing those images as a way of saying Melania is like Hitler. I could just as well say those images were juxtaposed as a way to say Melania is different from Hitler. Or maybe there's no juxtaposing at all, and it's pure happenstance that Melania got tucked in over there, to the right of Hitler and underneath "Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good/It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years."
That's some hyperventilating by Matt Yglesias, and I don't know where he gets the authority to "wake up" America to what's really going on at the Supreme Court. You know, Vox touted that new essay about America and the Nazis precisely because it is written by "one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust." And now here comes Matt Yglesias, who is not an eminent and well-respected Supreme Court scholar, and he's eager to wake us up to the "reality" of the "radical right" that's been "run[ning]" the Supreme Court and to explain why it's good for the Supreme Court to be "delegitimized."
When the Supreme Court gives lefties outcomes lefties like, they want conservatives to stand down and accept that the Court is doing proper, even brilliant, legal work. It's analogous to what I call "civility bullshit." You propound belief in something when it serves your interests, but you violate it without a care when your interests go the other way.
I'm interested in this word "delegitimize." I wonder, is it "delegitimize" or "delegitimatize"? The OED doesn't contain the word "delegitimatize," but "delegitimize" is only a subentry, under the entry for the prefix "de-" and without a definition, just 2 historical examples, the oldest of which is from 1969. What a year, 1969! I can't link to the OED, but let me cut and paste this telling quote:
1969 C. Davidson in A. Cockburn & R. Blackburn Student Power 349 People will not move against institutions of power until the legitimizing authority has been stripped away... And we should be forewarned; it is a tricky job and often can backfire, de-legitimizing us.
It looks like we're seeing the word coined right there! It works because we already know "legitimize." But is it "legitimize" or "legitimatize"? Both "legitimize" and "legitimatize" have been around since the 1600s.
"Legitimatize" is defined as "To make legitimate; to serve as a justification for (something); spec. to make (a child) legitimate by legal enactment or otherwise." The OED tells us it's rare, but John Cheever used it in 1961:
1961 J. Cheever Jrnls. (1991) 152 The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage.
Harrumph! Sounds right wing. Let's check "legitimize." The OED refers us to "legitimatize" for the definition but does not warn us that it's rare. I guess people don't like too many syllables.
In 2014 the International Council on Clean Transportation discovered that the diesel cars of a number of different car manufacturers exceeded legal levels for nitrogen oxide emissions. The result of diesel cars emitting higher levels of pollution than claimed by the manufacturers has been far higher levels of air pollution across the world. This has been starkly visualized by Da Standaard.
I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again. But to say that is to say, there is a lower depth, and they've got to get there before they'll see they've got to enter recovery.
Notice the connection between "rock bottom" and "hope": "One can only hope... the process has finally hit rock bottom." "Rock bottom" means more than just: at least we can't sink any lower. It means a confrontation with reality that shocks you into changing your ways.
One of the many impressive things about Maia Szalavitz’s new book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, is how effectively she debunks various myths about addiction and how to treat it. In fact, the book’s main argument is that many people are misreading what addiction is altogether: It should be seen not as a disease or a moral or personality shortcoming, but rather a learning disorder. “Addiction doesn’t just happen to people because they come across a particular chemical and begin taking it regularly,” she writes early on. Rather, “[i]t is learned and has a history rooted in their individual, social, and cultural developments.”
Or, as Szalavitz put it to the Daily Beast: “If you don’t learn that a drug helps you cope or make you feel good, you wouldn’t know what to crave. People fall in love with a substance or an activity, like gambling. Falling in love doesn’t harm your brain, but it does produce a unique type of learning that causes craving, alters choices and is really hard to forget.”...
As Szalavitz explains, the idea comes from “one of [Alcoholics Anonymous’s] foundational texts, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.” She pulls this excerpt:
Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s, the remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything for a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.’s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect—unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.
Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation.
Since the first of the 12 steps an A.A. member must work through is to admit to “admit their powerlessness” over their addiction, it makes sense that the program would embrace a device like “rock bottom.” It’s only when your alcoholism (or other addiction) has gotten so bad you’ve been kicked out of your house by your spouse, have alienated all your friends, and are down to the last $50 in your checking account, that you’ll finally be able to realize just how far you’ve fallen — or something. Fully buying into the program requires desperation, in other words, and to “help” addicts get to that desperate point is to help them recover: “From this perspective,” writes Szalavitz, “the more punitively addicts are treated, the more likely they will be to recover; the lower they are made to fall, the more likely they will be to wake up and quit.”
Szalavitz explains that this is a totally pseudoscientific concept.... For decades, Szalavitz writes, programs like Phoenix House and Daytop used “sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, attack therapy, sexual humiliation like dressing people in drag or in diapers, and other abusive tactics in an attempt to get addicts to realize they’d ‘hit bottom’ and must surrender.”...
[W]hen it comes to “hitting bottom” and so many of the other pseudoscientific approaches to fighting addiction, the actual goal — or part of it, at least — has always been to marginalize the addict, to set them apart and humiliate them. There’s a deep impulse to draw a clear, bold line between us, the healthy people, and them, the addicts. What clearer way to emphasize that divide than to cast them down into a rock-bottom pit, away from the rest of us?
American politics is shot through with us/them rhetoric and emotion right now. I don't know the way out, other than to resist it myself, as I continue my daily scribblings here. I like hope as much as the next person, but I don't think hitting rock bottom is the beginning of a path of recovery, and if I did, I'd need to believe that the Senate can't go any lower, and I don't think the musings of Susan Collins are going to turn anyone back.
It was a great speech, but why did we hear this from her so late in the process she purports to decry? Why is she only willing or capable of saying these things when she's looking back on the wreckage?
"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."
Here's a comment over there (with over 1,000 up votes):
Thank you Heidi Heitkamp, and thank you Lisa Murkowski for standing up for women and against sexual predators. And how about you Susan Collins? Do you want to be the only woman in the Senate to put a man creditably accused of sexual assault against multiple women who has clearly demonstrated his intent in the very recent Jane Doe case to eviscerate, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade? It's time to stand with your sisters and vote "No!" to white male power and privilege to avoid responsibility for sexual misconduct by blaming and mocking the women.
Informed by Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 76, I have interpreted [the Senate's advise-and-consent role] to mean that the President has broad discretion to consider a nominee’s philosophy, whereas my duty as a Senator is to focus on the nominee’s qualifications as long as that nominee’s philosophy is within the mainstream of judicial thought....
Some argue that because this is a lifetime appointment to our highest court, the public interest requires that doubts be resolved against the nominee. Others see the public interest as embodied in our long-established tradition of affording to those accused of misconduct a presumption of innocence. In cases in which the facts are unclear, they would argue that the question should be resolved in favor of the nominee.
Mr. President, I understand both viewpoints. This debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamental legal principles—about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness—do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.
In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.
The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.
ADDED: I'm only quoting a portion of Collins's speech, which is quite substantial. Here is a much shorter speech from Senator Lisa Murkowski, the one Republican who is voting no:
This hasn’t been fair to the judge, but I also recognize that we need to have institutions that are viewed as fair and if people who are victims, people who feel that there is no fairness in our system of government, particularly in our courts, then you’ve gone down a path that is not good and right for this country. And so I have been wrestling with whether or not this was about qualifications of a good man or is this bigger than the nomination.
And I believe we’re dealing with issues right now that are bigger than the nominee and how we ensure fairness and how our legislative and judicial branch can continue to be respected. This is what I have been wrestling with, and so I made the — took the very difficult vote that I did.
I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s a good man. It just may be that in my view he’s not the right man for the court at this time. So I have taken my vote here this morning, I’m going to go back to my office and write a floor statement that is more fulsome and have the opportunity to have that.
But this has truly been the most difficult evaluation of a decision that I have ever had to make, and I’ve made some interesting ones in my career. But I value and respect where my colleagues have come down from in their support for the judge, and I think we’re at a place where we need to begin thinking about the credibility and integrity of our institutions.
What did she do? She wore a white pith helmet in Africa. The quote is from Matthew Carotenuto, a coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University, who added "Historical context matters." That is, some people associate pith helmets with the colonial era in Africa. The quote appears in "Melania Trump Raises Eyebrows in Africa With Another White Hat" (NYT). The NYT says a few nice things, deep in the article:
Mrs. Trump has seemed at ease... She has posed for photos with babies and children, often murmuring the same things at each stop — “Beautiful!” and “Hi, guys!” — while holding their hands or waving at the cameras.... On Friday, she looked happy as she visited a red clay feeding pen for orphaned elephants at the Nairobi National Park. She administered them formula in oversized baby bottles, patted the animals on their heads and inspected their floppy ears.
We're told she wore a white shirt and that the shirt did not get dirty as she fed the baby elephants.
In the iconography of the Western, the good guys wore white hats... It’s possible Mrs. Trump is not aware of this.... Except she has something of a history of using white suits to send what seem like fairly pointed messages; see her decision to wear white — associated with women’s rights in the form of the suffragist movement, as well as Hillary Clinton — to her husband’s first State of the Union address, which happened to be her first high-profile appearance with him after the Stormy Daniels scandal broke....
Whatever. We know Melania's most famous fashion message: "I really don’t care. Do U?"
AND: In getting pushed around by a baby elephant, compare Ava Gardner (in "Mogambo," suggested by commenter rcocean):
