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The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Friday
Jan212011

Guns and Good Manners

The Times moderators have held back my comments on Gail Collins' & Charles Blow's columns. So here they are:

Gail Collins: "Congress really has been looking a little more civil. Not quite Athens in the age of Pericles, but it’s very possible that this year we’ll get through the State of the Union address without anybody jumping up to scream insults at the president."

The Constant Weader's reply:

The trouble with all this civility is that it masks the reality of what Republicans are hiding behind their new good manners offensive. The House Republican Study Committee, which includes something like two-thirds of the Republican members, has rolled out a plan to cut back spending by $2.5 trillion over the next ten years. Having given a massive tax break to millionaires & billionaires, the newly-civilized ladies & gentlemen now propose that the rest of us sacrifice. Of the Study Group's proposal, Steve Benen says, "if lawmakers were to get together to plot how Congress could deliberately increase unemployment, their plan would look an awful lot like this one."

Jobs for Americans evidently aren't a component of the new civility. When asked about jobs, Speaker Boehner told reporters that the Congress had other priorities: "a ban on taxpayer funding of abortions across all federal programs," he asserted, "is one of our highest legislative priorities." Well, he said it politely.

Besides cutting thousands of public jobs, the House has some other great cost-cutting ideas: "eliminate or decimate: the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Title X birth control and family planning, AmeriCorps, the Energy Star program and work on fuel efficient cars, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." [Dana Milbank] If all this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it's because you heard it back in 1995, when the decidedly uncivil Newt Gingrich became Speaker. It's the Contract on America, dusted off &, now, thanks to that cost-saving paperless policy, slapped up online.

Oh, there's more that has got to go -– Amtrak subsidies, food safety inspections, mine safety inspections, fair wages on government contracts. Sissy stuff, favored by East Coast elites.

Of course, repealing the Affordable Care Act -– the House's big legislative "accomplishment" of the week -- is about as uncivil as a Congress member can get. Depriving millions of Americans of an opportunity to obtain affordable medical care – while refusing to give up their own government healthcare plans, of course – is an act of gross incivility no matter how nicely you say it. I’ll take "You lie!" over "You die!" *


As for comparing Republican talking points to Nazi propaganda -– that's just stupid. The House Republican plan stands on its own as a low water mark for legislative depravity. Ad hominem comparisons are superfluous.

So. A good start? People in power can do a lot to unravel civil society even while they maintain courtly demeanors. That's what House Republicans are doing now. In my view, their sadistic actions are all the more vicious when they carry them out with smiles on their faces.


* See the link to the post by Jim White of Firedoglake above. It looks as if Congressman Wilson has figured out a way to combine "You lie!" and "You die!"


Charles Blow: "Pre-presidency, Obama had been a strong supporter of gun-control initiatives. Since then, however, he has remained curiously quiet on the issue in general and following the Tucson shooting in particular. The question now is: which Obama will show up at the State of the Union?"

The Constant Weader sez:


When even Dick Cheney of quail-hunting fame came out in support of semi-automatic gun control this week, how much courage does it take for a Democratic President to do the same? Whether he says it in the State of the Union address or in some other venue, President Obama must get behind an assault weapons ban during this first semester of the new Congress, while there is a still a public will to reinstitute the law. To do less would be a gross disservice to the nation.

As Nicholas Kristof said last week, gun control is a health issue. Arguably, more people are dying for want of gun control than are dying for lack of health insurance. President Obama should not be sending his wife out in praise of Wal-Mart, which has promised to phase more healthful foods into its product line, if he is going to allow some of those new healthy eaters to be mowed down by assault weapons.

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