Time's up

Living memory is about 70 years. Time's up.

America, terrible and great

Leon Lederman sold his Nobel medal to cover his medical expenses per reports.
https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1047700795695800320
https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1047700795695800320

A poem by Mary Steele

From Anna's Summer Songs, a book of poems for children - interestingly, it was originally a book with illustrations and Swedish text by Lena Anderson, a lovely little lyric:

FORGET-ME-NOT

Forget-me-nots
Have magic powers,
They make my rabbit
Dance for hours
On starlit nights.
He leaps and whirls
And jumps and twirls.
He kicks his heels
Above his ears.
I wish I heard
The tune he hears
For though I dance
With all my might
I never get
The steps quite right...
he says.

There are two features of the poem that struck me - the enjambment of the fifth line, 


- Started this post five years ago, and apparently got distracted.  Now I don't know what the other feature was.

Art, like information, wants to be free

https://abcnews.go.com/US/giant-250-pound-red-ball-art-installation-knocked/story?id=33230712

Omelas in 2018

"14 month old boy separated from immigrant parents at the border, was returned after 85 days, covered with lice, had apparently not been bathed - part of lawsuits filed by states against Trump administration"

https://twitter.com/JudyWoodruff/status/1014998271532597248

Volokh.com working on the Reagan memory hole

Pretty amazing denial here.

No more poems by John Hollander

Hollander passed away yesterday after a rich and amazingly productive life.

See here for a comment about him and the strange ways of the web.

Having a sad about Orin Kerr

This comment, and the replies to it, crystalized for me why I had lost my respect for Orin Kerr, the best blogger at Volokh.com.

But really that's not saying much - see e.g. here. Still, consider this simplistic post. I'm quite unhappy with many aspects of Snowden/Greenwald's actions, so it's especially obvious to me that there's no need to turn off one's brain to criticize them. And see comments for startling petulance on Prof. Kerr's part when commenters dare to point out the flaws in his position; the responses to that petulance make me feel acutely embarrassed for him.

I managed to get banned at Volokh a while ago when expressing my surprise that Prof. Kerr was commenting on the PPACA discussion by the SCOTUS without knowing basic elements of the liberal case (which had bee widely reported in mainstream media). I've been hoping for a long time that volokh.com would be a good source of reality-based conservative opinion, but in post after post one has to read the comments to learn highly pertinent facts about the topic. And after the horrific Shelby decision tearing up the voting rights of a huge section of society for the benefit of a political party, the Volokh response was, well, saddening. As someone trying to be informed, and as an American citizen, it sucks that the best the conservative (legal) blogosphere has to offer is so shoddy.

Comment on "you can't eat justice"

here:

The law in its majesty forbids the rich and poor alike from stealing bread. Anyway, it doesn't much matter to the poor that they can't eat justice, because it's not on the menu where they eat, or if it is it's much too expensive - and even when they luck into some it usually arrives cold.

Killing a gnat with a neutron bomb

Amazingly intense blog comment: Sarcastr0 Winston Blake • 4 hours ago

Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth

Update - I'm informed in comments that this comes straight from something called penny arcade.

Schadenfreude showing

The news that Tacitus aka Josh Trevino had an unfortunate $400k relationship with the government of Malaysia briefly made me want to go to the Obsidian Wings blog and gloat, but happily I was quickly able to be sad instead. This example of animus-based misreading makes me feel more pleased to have reconsidered my first impulse.