On Twitter.
She's a nationwide NFL/CFB reporter at Bally Sports, and a beauty.
Monday, February 14, 2022
Los Angeles Rams Win Super Bowl LVI
What a moment. I'll have more, but for me, 2021-22 was the best football season ever.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Rams come up big when it counts, come back to beat Bengals in Super Bowl LVI."
Sunday, February 13, 2022
Paige Spirinac: Bengals or Rams?
She's an openly enthusiastic Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Her dad played football with the University of Pittsburgh's Panther football program, winning a national championship in 1976. But she's not a Californian --- grew up in Colorado, in fact, and lives in Arizona.
So who knows? Maybe later today we'll see her announcing her loyalties, but not yet, not yet.
What's Really at Stake in America's History Wars?
In January, McMinn County, Tenn., made international news for perhaps the first time in its history when the school board voted to remove “Maus,” the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the 8th-grade curriculum. The board stated that it made the change on account of the book’s “use of profanity and nudity,” asking school administrators to “find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion.” This curricular change, affecting a few hundred of the approximately 5,500 K-12 students in McMinn’s public schools, was quickly amplified on social media into a case of book banning with shades of Holocaust denial. The author of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, said that the decision had “a breath of autocracy and fascism.” “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” tweeted the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, earning more than 170,000 likes. The controversy sent the book to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. This outrage of the week will soon give way to another, but the war over history—how to remember it, represent it and teach it—is only getting fiercer. America’s political and cultural divisions increasingly take the form of arguments not about the future—what kind of country we want to be and what policies will get us there—but about events that are sometimes centuries in the past. The Holocaust, the Civil War, the Founding, the slave trade, the discovery of America—these subjects are constantly being litigated on social media and cable TV, in school boards and state legislatures. None of those venues is well equipped to clarify what actually happened in the past, but then, the facts of history seldom enter into the war over history. Indeed, surveys regularly show how little Americans actually know about it. A 2019 poll of 41,000 people by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that in 49 states, a majority couldn't earn a passing score on the U.S. citizenship test, which asks basic questions about history and government. (The honorable exception was Vermont, where 53% passed.) Ironically, the year after the survey, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation announced that it would drop the historical reference in its own name, citing the 28th president’s “racist legacy.” It was part of a growing trend. Woodrow Wilson’s name was also dropped from Princeton University’s school of international affairs. Yale University renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Southern politician who was an ardent defender of slavery. The San Francisco school board briefly floated a plan to drop the names of numerous historical figures from public schools for various reasons, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders. It makes sense that educational institutions are leading the wave of renaming, because it is above all a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. Actual historical understanding requires a much greater investment of effort and imagination than giving a thumbs up or down to this or that name. Often even a Wikipedia search seems to be too much to ask. One of the names that the San Francisco school board proposed to get rid of was Paul Revere’s, on the grounds that he was a leader of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which a board member believed was a campaign to conquer territory from the Penobscot Indians. In fact, it was a (failed) attempt to evict British naval forces from Penobscot Bay in Maine. Clearly, the war over history has as much to do with the present as the past. To some extent, that’s true of every attempt to tell the story of the past, even the most professional and objective. In the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke saw it as his task to determine “how things really were,” but if that could be done, it wouldn’t be necessary for each generation of historians to write new books about the same subjects. We keep retelling the story of the Civil War or World War II not primarily because new evidence is discovered, but because the way we understand the evidence changes as the world changes. That’s why so many of America’s historical battles have to do with race, slavery and colonialism—because no aspect of American society has changed more dramatically over time. It has never been a secret, for instance, that George Washington was a slaveholder. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon. But when Parson Weems wrote the first bestselling biography of Washington in 1800, he barely referred to the first president’s slaveholding, except for noting that in his will he provided for freeing his slaves, “like a pure republican.” When Weems does inveigh against “slavery” in the book, he is referring to British rule in America. For instance, he writes that the tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, was meant to “insult and enslave” the colonies. Today it’s impossible to ignore this glaring contradiction. Weems didn’t notice it and clearly didn’t expect his readers to, either. Another explanation for this blind spot can be found in the book’s full title: “The Life of George Washington: With curious anecdotes, equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen.” Weems was a minister, and his goal was moral uplift. That’s why he avoided writing about Washington’s treatment of his slaves but included the dubious story about young George confessing to chopping down the cherry tree. The point was to show Washington in a light that would make readers want to be better themselves. Today’s war over history involves the same didactic impulses. Fights over the past aren’t concerned with what happened so much as what we should feel about it. Most people who argue about whether Columbus Day should become Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of what side they’re on, have only a vague sense of what Columbus actually did. The real subject of debate is whether the European discovery of America and everything that flowed from it, including the founding of the U.S., should be celebrated or regretted. Our most charged historical debates boil down to the same terms Weems used: Is America “exemplary” and “honorable,” or the reverse? How we answer that question has important political ramifications, since the farther America is from the ideal, the more it presumably needs to change. But today’s history wars are increasingly detached from practical issues, operating purely in the realm of emotion and symbol. Take the “land acknowledgments” that many universities, arts institutions and local governments have begun to practice—the custom of stating the name of the Native American people that formerly occupied the local territory. For example, the Board of Supervisors of Pima County, Az., recently voted to begin its meetings with the statement, “We honor the tribal nations who have served as caretakers of this land from time immemorial and respectfully acknowledge the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.” To their supporters, land acknowledgments are a way of rectifying Americans’ ignorance or indifference about the people who inhabited the country before European settlement. The use of words like “caretakers” and “time immemorial,” however, raises historical questions that the Pima Board of Supervisors is presumably unqualified to answer. People have been living in what is now Arizona for 12,000 years: Were the Tohono O’odham Nation really in their territory “from time immemorial,” or might they have displaced an earlier population? Of course, the Board has no intention of vacating Tucson and restoring the land to its former inhabitants, so the whole exercise can be seen as pointless. Still, by turning every public event into a memorial of dispossession, land acknowledgments have the effect of calling into question the legitimacy of the current inhabitants—that is, the people listening to the acknowledgment. The fear that the very idea of America is being repudiated has led Republican legislators in many states to introduce laws regulating the teaching of American history. These are often referred to as “anti-critical race theory” laws, but in this context the term is just a placeholder for a deeper anxiety. The controversial law passed in Texas last year, for instance, doesn’t prevent teachers from discussing racism. On the contrary, House Bill 3979 mandates the study of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. , as well as Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. However, it does insist that students learn that “slavery and racism are…deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” In other words, students should believe that the U.S. is “exemplary” and “honorable” in principle, if regrettably not in practice. In the U.S., the war over history usually has to do with curricula and monuments because those are some of the only things the government can directly control. Removing “Maus” from the 8th-grade reading list can be loosely referred to as a “ban” only because actual book bans don’t exist here, thanks to the First Amendment. But other countries that are less free also have their history wars, and in recent years governments and ideologues have become bolder about imposing an official line. In Russia last December, a court ordered the dissolution of Memorial, a highly respected nonprofit founded in 1989 to document the crimes of the Soviet era, after prosecutors charged that it “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” In 2018, Poland made it illegal to attribute blame for the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” In India in 2014, Penguin India agreed to stop publishing a book about the history of Hinduism by the respected American scholar Wendy Doniger, after a nationalist leader sued on the grounds that it focused on “the negative aspects” of the subject. Such episodes are becoming more common with the rise of nationalist and populist movements around the world. When people invest their identity wholly in their nation, pointing out the evils in the nation’s past feels like a personal attack. Conversely, for people whose political beliefs hinge on distrusting nationalism, any refusal to focus on historic evils feels dangerous, like a tacit endorsement of them, as in the “Maus” episode. These extremes feed off one another, until we can only talk about the past in terms of praise or blame that would be too simple for understanding a single human being, much less a collection of millions over centuries. It’s surprising to realize how quickly the American consensus on history has unraveled under the pressure of polarization...
Overdose Deaths in the U.S. Are Rising at Troubling Rate
One can't possibly imagine the loss of a loved one to opioids, among other things.
I mean, the loss of a loved one is tragic in any case, but death from overdose doubly so, as it creates so many "what ifs." It's not like losing a parent in the twilight years of life, for as sad as that is, it's an inevitability. (And both my parents are gone, so I'm speaking from experience.) But if I lost either one of my sons right now, to overdose especially, I think I'd probably fade away. My psychology hasn't been so great this last two years. I've had a lot of anxiety (especially in March 2020 and the overnight shift to emergency remote online instruction) and bouts of depression. The last thing I need is death in the family.
In any case, God bless those facing this crisis. It's unbearable, and worse, it's not one on the top of the radar of public policy.
At the New York Times, "A Rising Death Toll":
Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year — more than vehicle crash and gun deaths combined. Sean Blake was among those who died. He overdosed at age 27 in Vermont, from a mix of alcohol and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. He had struggled to find effective treatment for his addiction and other potential mental health problems, repeatedly relapsing. “I do love being sober,” Blake wrote in 2014, three years before his death. “It’s life that gets in the way.” Blake’s struggles reflect the combination of problems that have allowed the overdose crisis to fester. First, the supply of opioids surged. Second, Americans have insufficient access to treatment and other programs that can ease the worst damage of drugs. Experts have a concise, if crude, way to summarize this: If it’s easier to get high than to get treatment, people who are addicted will get high. The U.S. has effectively made it easy to get high and hard to get help. No other advanced nation is dealing with a comparable drug crisis. And over the past two years, it has worsened: Annual overdose deaths spiked 50 percent as fentanyl spread in illegal markets, more people turned to drugs during the pandemic, and treatment facilities and other services shut down. The path to crisis In the 1990s, drug companies promoted opioid painkillers as a solution to a problem that remains today: a need for better pain treatment. Purdue Pharma led the charge with OxyContin, claiming it was more effective and less addictive than it was. Doctors bought into the hype, and they started to more loosely prescribe opioids. Some even operated “pill mills,” trading prescriptions for cash. A growing number of people started to misuse the drugs, crushing or dissolving the pills to inhale or inject them. Many shared, stole and sold opioids more widely. Policymakers and drug companies were slow to react. It wasn’t until 2010 that Purdue introduced a new formulation that made its pills harder to misuse. The C.D.C. didn’t publish guidelines calling for tighter prescribing practices until two decades after OxyContin hit the market. In the meantime, the crisis deepened: Opioid users moved on to more potent drugs, namely heroin. Some were seeking a stronger high, while others were cut off from painkillers and looking for a replacement. Traffickers met that demand by flooding the U.S. with heroin. Then, in the 2010s, they started to transition to fentanyl, mixing it into heroin and other drugs or selling it on its own. Drug cartels can more discreetly produce fentanyl in a lab than heroin derived from large, open poppy fields. Fentanyl is also more potent than heroin, so traffickers can smuggle less to sell the same high. Because of its potency, fentanyl is also more likely to cause an overdose. Since it began to proliferate in the U.S., yearly overdose deaths have more than doubled. No one has a good answer for how to halt the spread of fentanyl. Synthetic drugs in general remain a major, unsolved question not just in the current opioid epidemic but in dealing with future drug crises as well, Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University drug policy expert, told me. Other drug crises are looming. In recent years, cocaine and meth deaths have also increased. Humphreys said that historically, stimulant epidemics follow opioid crises. Neglecting solutions A robust treatment system could have mitigated the damage from increasing supplies of painkillers, heroin and fentanyl. But the U.S. has never had such a system. Treatment remains inaccessible for many...
Still more.
Saturday, February 12, 2022
College Students Forgot How to Talk to Each Other
The Democrat Party pandemic lockdown policies have set back, if not destroyed, a generation of young people, and not just school children.
I know this first hand from my oldest, 26, who moved to San Francisco to start at S.F. State in February 2020. He came back home after one semester in The City, depressed and disappointed at how isolated and inferior was his college experience compared his time at Santiago Canyon College in Orange Park Acres.
I also know this from teaching college students online for two years. I'm on my fifth semester in a transition to "remote emergency instruction" that was expected to brief and temporary. Even this semester, where my college has gone back to full in-person on-campus classes, more than 50 percent of those enrolled are taking their courses online. Indeed, the enrollment was so low in some of the campus-based classes that over two dozen were cancelled in my department alone.
You're not getting the full college experience --- and excellence in education --- with online classes. It's good for some very motivated students who thrive in the intense atmosphere of digital learning space, but in my experience, it's not for most. I'm expecting to hear soon about my class schedule for fall, where I've requested to teach all on campus. We'll see how that goes. It feels weird to even be possibly going back. I feel like I need to retrain myself, to get myself fit for teaching in person. Seriously. My lectures are quite stentorian, and I need to be in good cardio-vascular condition. I don't feel like that right now, as I haven't been physically training during the pandemic lockdown.
This summer I'll be changing my daily routine if all works out and I'm set to resume going to work everyday, like I used to for 20 years.
In any case, at the Wall Street Journal, "College Students Have to Learn How to Make Small Talk Again":
When students at San Jose State University returned to campus last fall after more than a year of remote learning, lecturer Damon Moon thought they would be chatty and excited to see one another. Instead, he noticed something concerning: They weren’t talking at all. Before class, students were looking at their phones or laptops. Even in the campus cafeteria, Mr. Moon saw that most students were eating alone, sandwich in one hand, phone in the other. “They lost the skill to have small talk,” said Mr. Moon, who teaches international business classes. To get a close-up look at this phenomenon, I spoke to Mr. Moon and his students at the university. “When I was in elementary school or middle school, if I wanted to talk to someone new, I would go up to them and try to strike up a conversation,” said Kian Kashefi, a 19-year-old business accounting major. Now, he said, “it feels weird to talk to anybody new without first connecting on social media.” In a prolonged pandemic that has shifted more interactions online, college students are finding it harder to strike up conversations and make friends. In the past, socializing wasn’t just a perk but also a big incentive for students choosing campus life. College instructors worry that if they don’t do something to facilitate conversation in class, their students will be unprepared to enter the workforce. To overcome screen-reinforced social awkwardness, some even lean on smartphones and web browsers to encourage students to interact. Researchers from three universities surveyed nearly 33,000 college students around the U.S. and found two-thirds were struggling with loneliness in the fall of 2020. More than a year later, many students, including those at San Jose State, had returned to remote instruction after winter break because of the Omicron Covid-19 surge. Joel Figueroa, a 20-year-old business major, said that since the pandemic began he has become more nervous about talking to people. “I was much more confident in my abilities before,” he said. While technology has enabled him to remain in touch with friends, it has undermined his in-person interactions, he said. “My connections with friends offline would definitely be deeper if we were not so attached to our devices,” he said. Even older students I talked to, who didn’t grow up with as much technology or spend formative years in a pandemic, are finding it hard to make connections. “I didn’t form relationships with any students when I went back to campus last fall,” said Megan Dela Rosa, a 43-year-old business major. “Everyone had their masks on and you didn’t know anyone’s comfort level.” She added, “I just went to class, got my work done and left.” Anna Touneh transferred to San Jose State from a community college last fall. Since school began this year online, the 32-year-old said talking to students has only become more awkward. In one class recently, small groups of students went to Zoom breakout rooms to work on an assignment. Ms. Touneh said in her group, no one had their cameras on and no one spoke. “It took me six minutes to say something,” she said. “I finally gathered the courage, but it was very meek. I said, ‘Hey, guys, so what are we supposed to be doing?’” Runhua Yang, a 43-year-old business major, said she’s normally extroverted but the pandemic has made it more difficult to express herself. Masks have made it harder for teachers to hear her, she said, causing her to speak up less often. “If a professor doesn’t encourage participation, I stay quiet,” she said. Parents and psychologists were already concerned that phone usage was negatively affecting social-skill development among young people, even before the pandemic, according to Danielle Ramo, chief clinical officer at BeMe Health, a mobile platform for teen mental health. In a previous job, she helped develop an app called Nod to help college students improve their social lives by challenging them to do things like smile at five new people or keep their dorm-room doors open in the evening...
Nina Jankowicz
This woman wrote a very compelling thread last night, here: "82 years ago this week, my grandfather, aged 10, was deported along with his family from present day Ukraine (then Poland) to a Soviet work camp ... In part because of his deportation, I’m sitting on Twitter tonight, writing about current Russian threats to the same land."
RTWT.
Abraham Lincoln's Birthday
Our greatest president was born today, February 12, 1809, in LaRue County, Kentucky, literally in a log cabin.
Historian Michael Beschloss reminds us.
Wow! Tulsi Gabard: Washington Neocons/Warmongers Leading the U.S. Relentlessly to War in Ukraine (VIDEO)
She's wild.
The neocons/warmongers have spent years stoking the new cold war with Russia and have now brought us to the brink in Ukraine—this serves their own interests, and lines the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex with trillion$. Let’s not be sheep. pic.twitter.com/jgZEKgtyLT
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) February 12, 2022
Friday, February 11, 2022
U.S. Says Russian Invasion of Ukraine Could Be Imminent: Biden Administration Warns U.S. Citizens to Leave Country as 'Soon as Possible' (VIDEO)
I almost can't contemplate a major European land-war in Europe in 2022. It seems unreal, though I don't doubt the intelligence. It's weird because Russia's a weak mid-level power whose leader is not unlike Kim Jong Un --- one who bluffs, blusters, and bullies until any and all opposition to Moscow's aims melt aside amid craven national self-interests in the West.
No, we don't have to send U.S. troops to Ukraine.
We do need to do something, and not the continuation of Biden's weaselly warnings that Moscow will pay a "terrible price!" should Russian troops waltz right on in. Pfft.
At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Says Russia Could Invade Ukraine at Any Time":
WASHINGTON—The White House said Friday it believes Russia could invade Ukraine at any time with a major military action and urged Americans to leave the country as soon as possible. In the White House briefing room Friday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. wouldn’t conduct a military evacuation of citizens from a war zone. He said Americans should leave Ukraine on their own in the next 24 to 48 hours while land, rail and air routes out of the country remain open, in the most pointed directive yet from the White House. “We are in the window when an invasion could begin at any time should [Russian President] Vladimir Putin decide to order it.” He added: “If a Russian attack on Ukraine proceeds it is likely to begin with aerial bombing and missile attacks that could obviously kill civilians without regard to their nationality. A subsequent ground invasion would involve the onslaught of a massive force. With virtually no notice, communications to arrange a departure could be severed and commercial transit halted.” Mr. Sullivan said an invasion could occur during the Winter Olympics. Until Friday, many U.S. officials and outside analysts believed that if Mr. Putin were to order an invasion, he might await the conclusion of the Games on Feb. 20 out of deference to Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he would be disinclined to upstage with a military incursion. The U.S. wasn’t closing the door on diplomacy, however, and President Biden, who is at the presidential retreat Camp David in rural Maryland this weekend, was expected to speak with Mr. Putin in coming days, Mr. Sullivan said. While U.S. officials declined to detail the new intelligence, some of it appears to consist of fresh signs that Moscow is preparing a pretext to invade its neighbor. The intelligence, officials said, has pushed forward the Biden administration’s understanding of Mr. Putin’s timeline. “The level of concern is increasing on the imminence” of an invasion, one official said. Oil prices jumped to fresh eight-year highs Friday on fears of an invasion, while U.S. stocks and bond yields sank, with investors fleeing to safer assets. The S&P 500 had tumbled 1.9% as of the 4 p.m. ET close of trading. The Nasdaq Composite erased 2.8%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 504 points, or 1%. Mr. Sullivan said the disposition of Russian forces around Ukraine’s borders showed Russia was positioned to mount a major military action in Ukraine any day now, but said the U.S. didn’t know whether Mr. Putin had made a “final decision.” “Russia could choose in very short order to commence a major military action against Ukraine,” he said. “We are ready either way.” Mr. Sullivan said the U.S. envisioned a large-scale incursion by Mr. Putin. U.S. officials have said that an invasion could result in 25,000 to 50,000 civilians killed or wounded if Russia mounted an all-out attack and sought to occupy the entire country. “I can’t obviously predict what the exact shape or scope of the military action will be…but there are very real possibilities that it will involve the seizure of a significant amount of territory in Ukraine and the seizure of major cities including the capital,” Mr. Sullivan said. Ukrainian and U.S. officials say Russian action could also take the form of cyberattacks on critical Ukrainian infrastructure, sabotage, or efforts to undermine the Ukrainian state. U.S. officials estimate as many as 35,000 Americans were in Ukraine at the start of the year, although as few as 7,000 are registered with the State Department. Mr. Sullivan’s comments echo a statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier Friday. “As we’ve said before, we’re in a window when an invasion could begin at any time—and to be clear that includes during the Olympics,” Mr. Blinken said in Melbourne, Australia. Also Friday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley spoke with his Russian counterpart, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the Pentagon said. The two generals “discussed several security-related issues of concern.” And President Biden discussed the Ukraine crisis with the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union allies. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said Friday that it would deploy an additional 3,000 troops to bolster the defenses of NATO allies that could house and support Americans evacuating from Ukraine. U.S. officials said earlier this week that hundreds of U.S. troops would be deployed inside Poland along its border with Ukraine to help facilitate the safe evacuation of Americans and others from inside Ukraine. The U.S. troops aren’t authorized to enter Ukraine, nor will any evacuations involve U.S. aircraft, officials have said. In warning of the Russian military buildup, Mr. Sullivan was referring to the deployment by Moscow of more than 100,000 troops to the border with Ukraine, the movement toward Ukraine of heavy weaponry from bases in the Russian Far East, and the movement of Russian troops and missile batteries into Belarus. To bolster the military position of the Kyiv government against Russia’s overwhelming advantage in air, sea, artillery, missiles and manpower, the U.S. and NATO countries have been transporting defensive weaponry to Ukraine. Those include small-arms ammunition, mortar and artillery shells, antitank guided missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, grenade launchers, explosive- ordnance disposal suits and Mossberg 500 pump-action shotguns, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. The shipments haven’t included advanced antiship missiles or sophisticated air-defense systems. Russia has denied it intends to invade its neighbor. But Moscow says NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War poses a threat to its security and has demanded the alliance swear off ever adding Ukraine and pull back troops from its eastern flank. While rejecting Moscow’s demands regarding the future of NATO’s security posture, the U.S. and NATO have offered Moscow a menu of reciprocal proposals that would provide for inspections of U.S. missile defense sites in Poland and Romania and curbs on military exercises. At the same time, the U.S. and Europe have threatened crippling sanctions aimed at Russian banks and industry and the nation’s economy in the event of an incursion.
The Unbearable Pressure of Winning the Olympics (VIDEO)
It's not just the Olympics, of course. But as these games come only once every four years, the pressure to excel and take home medals is astronomical. Most of those competing are kids. I mean, Lindsey Jacobellis, now 36, probably would've retired years ago if she hadn't blown her near-victory run in 2006, 16 years ago, when she was just 19-years-old. (She finally won her gold medal. It's a good thing. Another wipe out in Beijing would have left a permanent scar on her psychiatric frame for the rest of her life.)
And now we have this poor woman Mikaela Shiffrin who, in Beijing, when the pressure was on, just couldn't cut it this one time --- and she'd been dominating her sport for years and has been called one of the world's greatest skiers of all time.
But she's utterly broken, emotionally drained and psychologically mauled, questioning her very life at this point.
She can barely talk at the video here, her voice starts cracking with sobs, and all the idiot NBC interviewer can ask is, "What are you feeling?" What the fuck d'you think she's feeling?!!. She said she's questioning the last 15 fucking of her life. My god, no wonder people were up in arms at NBC's merciless coverage of her wallowing in pain --- for a full 20 minutes --- at the side of the course, simply trying to comprehend it all.
Oh, the agony of defeat.
And at the Los Angeles Times, "Olympic athletes deal with expectations, which leads to crushing pressure":
The girl who failed… could also fly. pic.twitter.com/EZJVY03DPc
— Mikaela Shiffrin (@MikaelaShiffrin) February 11, 2022
BEIJING — The world’s most famous skier had kicked off her skis and dropped her poles. Sitting alone in the snow, she buried her head in her hands. Other racers zipped past as the women’s slalom event at the Beijing Olympics continued. But Mikaela Shiffrin, who had skidded out of control and missed a gate near the top of the course, did not move. She remained off to the side for 20 minutes. “There’s a lot of disappointment over the last week,” she said. “There’s a lot of emotions.” In what will be an enduring if wrenching moment from these Games, her anguish over failing to finish, much less medal, in the second consecutive event in a little over 48 hours highlighted the unrelenting pressure athletes face at a global competition that comes around once every four years. For some, the Games have become a suffocating crucible that drains much of the joy from the sport they love. Even before arriving in Beijing, the 26-year-old Shiffrin acknowledged the Olympics are often “very uncomfortable the entire time” because athletes “literally feel the expectations from the whole world around you.” At the figure skating venue, an hour or so to the southeast, California-born Beverly Zhu — competing for China — endured similar heartbreak after falling twice during the women’s team competition. Jamie Anderson, the two-time slopestyle gold medalist, posted a raw message on Instagram after finishing an unexpected ninth. “At the end of the day I just straight up couldn’t handle the pressure,” she wrote, “had an emotional breakdown the night before finals and my mental health and clarity just hasn’t been on par.” Even Chloe Kim, who became the first woman to win consecutive halfpipe golds, acknowledged her mental health struggles, telling reporters: “It’s unfair to be expected to be perfect.” Watching Olympians land a double cork 1620 jump, rocket down the side of a mountain at 90 mph or navigate 16 curves headfirst on a skeleton sled can obscure the reality that they can have ordinary struggles despite their extraordinary ability. “Pressure can be an asset to people at times, bringing out their best,” said Edward Hirt, a professor of brain sciences and psychology at Indiana University. “Those moments are the ones that we think separate the greats from the rest of the pack. But we also know that those pressures can be debilitating and make you choke. I suspect the pressure mounts as people have been successful in the past.” The Olympics are a unique stage in that athletes can feel the additional burden of representing their country while receiving more attention, if not scrutiny, than at any other time in their careers. They are hyped relentlessly in this made-for-television spectacle, and sometimes castigated when they do not perform as predicted. These challenges are heightened in a time of pandemic, when athletes are kept in a bubble, separated from the support of family or friends. They must take daily coronavirus tests amid the lingering worry that a positive result — even a false positive — can knock them out of competition. “Uncertainty creates a lot of pressure,” said Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist who is president of Barnard College and author of the book “Choke,” which explores performing under pressure. “We, as normal people do the ‘what ifs,’ Olympians do that, too.” Lindsey Jacobellis made a late mistake that cost her a gold medal during the snowboardcross race at the 2006 Torino Games that haunted her for years. She won the event Wednesday at age 36 to become the oldest U.S. woman to medal at the Winter Olympics. “Some days, I really don’t like it,” Jacobellis said of the pressure...
Teen Girls' Sexy TikTok Videos Take a Mental-Health Toll
Our society’s completely FUBAR.
When Jula Anderson joined TikTok at age 16, her first video featured her family’s home renovations. It got five likes. After seeing others post risqué videos and get more likes, she tried it, too. “I wanted to get famous on TikTok, and I learned that if you post stuff showing your body, people will start liking it,” Jula, now an 18-year-old high-school senior near Sacramento, Calif., said. Sudden TikTok fame is catching teens off guard, leaving many girls unprepared for the attention they thought they wanted, according to parents, therapists and teens. In some cases, predators target girls who make sexually suggestive videos; less-dangerous interactions can also harm girls’ self-esteem and leave them feeling exploited, they say. Mental-health professionals around the country are growing increasingly concerned about the effects on teen girls of posting sexualized TikTok videos. Therapists say teens who lack a group of close friends, and teens with underlying mental health issues—especially girls who struggle with disordered eating and body-image issues—are at particular risk. “For a young girl who’s developing her identity, to be swept up into a sexual world like that is hugely destructive,” said Paul Sunseri, a psychologist and director of the New Horizons Child and Family Institute in El Dorado Hills, Calif., where Jula began receiving treatment last year for anxiety and depression. “When teen girls are rewarded for their sexuality, they come to believe that their value is in how they look,” he said. He said approximately a quarter of the female patients at his clinic have produced sexualized content on TikTok. Carter Barnhart, co-founder of Charlie Health, a virtual mental-health care provider, said a growing number of teens she treats report their self-esteem is dependent on the quantity of likes they get on TikTok. “Many of them have figured out that the formula for that is producing more sexual content,” she said. Videos just ‘for you’
Teens’ dependence on TikTok for social validation has risen as the app has become their favored platform. TikTok overtook Instagram in popularity among teens last year—and became the most visited site on the internet. TikTok’s algorithm regularly propels virtual nobodies onto millions of viewers’ For You pages. TikTok weighs whether viewers show strong interest in a particular type of content, measured by whether they finish watching videos, the company says. Its recommendation engine then chooses videos to send to those viewers, regardless of the creator’s follower count or past video virality. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Twitter work differently, serving content to users based on search terms and friend connections, so developing a sizable following—and going viral—on those sites can take longer. “We think carefully about the well-being of teens as we design our safety and privacy settings and restrict features on TikTok by age,” a TikTok spokeswoman said in a statement. “We’ve also worked with youth safety experts to develop resources aimed at supporting digital safety and literacy conversations among parents and teens.” A company fact sheet says “content that is overtly sexually suggestive may not be eligible for recommendation.” The spokeswoman said content from users who state they are under 16 isn’t eligible for promotion via the recommendation engine, nor would it appear in search results. Teens are known to lie about their age when creating social-media accounts. Users must be 13 to create a TikTok account, and it is company policy to suspend the accounts of kids the safety team believes to be underage. At Newport Academy’s outpatient treatment program in Atlanta, 60% of the girls treated since the program started last summer have posted sexually inappropriate videos on TikTok, said Crystal Burwell, the program’s director of outpatient services. One 16-year-old girl Dr. Burwell is treating made progressively more suggestive videos. “The more likes she had, the more revealing her outfits became,” she said. The girl ended up chatting with a man who urged her to take their conversation off TikTok and into a messaging app. The girl sent the man partially nude photos of herself and the two were making plans to meet in person when her parents discovered the texts, according to Dr. Burwell. “When you combine human behavior and algorithms, things get messy,” Dr. Burwell said. “We’re trying to clean it up, one client at a time.” TikTok famous A few months after she joined the app in the summer of 2019, Jula Anderson’s wish for TikTok fame came true. A video of her wearing a tightfitting tank top and lip-syncing the pop song “Sunday Best” blew up. For reasons Jula and her mother, Shauna Anderson, still don’t understand, TikTok’s algorithm pushed the video to viewers’ For You pages. More than a million people viewed the video and nearly 500,000 people liked it, they both said. Jula’s following went from a few hundred to more than 200,000. There was nothing overtly sexual about the video, she and her mother said, but her video’s comments were inundated with boys and men saying how hot she looked. Buoyed by the success, Jula made her videos more risqué, including by lip-syncing lyrics about sex and getting more revealing in her wardrobe choices. “I’d wear clothes that I wouldn’t wear to school but that I felt good in,” she said. “I didn’t view them as that sexual, but other people did.” By then, she was constantly checking her likes. “It was my whole world,” she said. Her parents weren’t aware of how suggestive the videos had gotten until Jula’s grandparents, tipped off by cousins, alerted them. “To us, she’s this sweet girl, so it’s almost like this split personality between who she really is and how she portrayed herself on TikTok,” Ms. Anderson said. “When we confronted her about it, she was like, ‘Mom, that’s what everyone is doing.’” Ms. Anderson said that her daughter didn’t have a close group of friends, and she thinks the isolation of the pandemic intensified her need to find connection. “She thought this was a way to be liked and have friends,” Ms. Anderson said. “I struggled with what to do, because the thing I love about TikTok is that kids can be really creative, and we encouraged that as a family.” Worried about dangers that might arise from publicly viewable videos, Jula’s parents asked her to delete the suggestive ones. They also discussed the issue in family and individual therapy sessions. Jula, who said she had a history of anxiety before joining TikTok, said the widespread attention and creepy comments from men had become difficult to handle. Comments critical of her appearance also stung. Following the intervention, she chose to step away from TikTok for a few months. She said it was hard. In the middle of last year, she returned to the app but created a new account that she set to private. She has just a few followers—people she knows in real life. She said she rarely posts now. Jula said she ultimately decided that the suggestive videos weren’t how she wanted to portray herself to the world, or to younger girls who might see them. She has four younger sisters and said she doesn’t want them to seek or receive attention the way she did. “I think I tried growing up a lot faster than I should have,” Jula said...
'Luxury Dream Model' Eileen Gu
I mentioned it the other day, "...she's a freakin' hotsie-totsie high-fashion cover model who's graced the front of Vogue Hong Kong."
Apparently she's been on the cover of Vogue China's bimonthly edition.
At CNN, "Why Eileen Gu is luxury fashion's dream model":
For followers of freestyle skiing and fashion alike, the buzz surrounding Winter Olympian Eileen Gu at this year's Games has come as little surprise.
The 18-year-old's gold medal performance in the big air competition thrust her into the global spotlight Tuesday, sparking such a furor in China that social media platform Weibo crashed under the weight of interest. But Gu has spent years establishing herself as both a top athlete and a hugely bankable model who appeals to brands in both Asia and the West. In 2021, as she won gold medals at the skiing World Championships and Winter X Games, Gu was also forging lucrative partnerships with fashion houses and luxury labels. Signing for IMG Models, the agency representing Bella Hadid, Kate Moss and Hailey Bieber, she has penned deals with Louis Vuitton, Victoria's Secret and Tiffany & Co., as well as the luxury Swiss watchmaker IWC and cosmetics brand Estée Lauder, among others. In fact, the California-born athlete is among the most heavily sponsored athletes at these Olympics. She arrived in Beijing with more than 20 commercial partnerships, ranging from Beats by Dre headphones to Cadillac. But it is Gu's mass appeal in China, where she is known by her Chinese name Gu Ailing and has been nicknamed the "Snow Princess," that makes her especially valuable to brands. For the Year of the Tiger, can luxury fashion change its stripes? Having switched her sporting allegiance to her mother's home country in 2019, Gu's fluency in Mandarin has helped secure her place on Chinese TV ads, billboards and even milk cartons (as the face of Inner Mongolia-based Mengniu Dairy). E-commerce giant JD.com, cafe chain Luckin Coffee and telecoms firm China Mobile are among the growing list of mainland brands that she's modeled for in recent months. China is on track to become the world's largest luxury market by 2025, according to consulting firm Bain. The Asian edition of marketing and advertising industry magazine Campaign estimated that new endorsements there could be earning the athlete around 15 million yuan ($2.5 million) apiece -- and that was before her gold-medal success. According to Bohan Qiu, whose Shanghai-based creative agency Boh Project works with major fashion brands, Gu's surging popularity in the country comes at a time when nationalist pride in China has seen "the relevance of Western celebrities" decrease. "For this generation, a lot of the celebrities here are quite domestic-oriented -- so (Gu) being half-American half-Chinese, and speaking both languages fluently, has a very global appeal," he said over the phone, adding that the country's Gen Z demographic contains "third culture kids" who simultaneously understand Chinese and Western contexts. "She is definitely a once-in-a-decade type of talent." Gu has coupled big-money deals with reputable magazine features and appearances at A-list fashion shows. Spotted at events like Paris Fashion Week as far back as 2019, she has since been seen on Louis Vuitton's front row and the notoriously exclusive Met Gala, where she arrived on the red carpet wearing a Carolina Herrera bubble dress. "The fashion world has helped balance my training," she told Vogue Hong Kong, appearing on the cover of the magazine's July issue. "Just like skiing, modeling requires incredible expression and personality. It requires creativity, confidence, and the ability to learn and adapt... The transition between modeling and skiing became a break and a practice for each other that helped me eventually feel more motivated in each area." Gu has also appeared on the cover of Chinese editions of GQ and Elle. And as guest editor of Vogue China's Gen-Z-focused bimonthly issue, Vogue+, the athlete recently explored the complexities of her identity under the theme "code switch." "I wanted to explore and showcase the inherently malleable nature of adolescent identities, Gu wrote on Instagram, "a quality I've found myself tapping into time and time again as I display different facets of myself (athlete, model, student, Chinese, American, teenager, writer, public persona, etc) in different environments. Everyone code switches, and I think it's time we start celebrating that multifaceted nature." Gu's social media is also littered with fashion. Whether posting to Instagram or writing to millions of followers on Xiaohongshu and Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Instagram and Twitter, respectively), her feeds flit between sport and style, with pictures from the slopes posted alongside modeling shots and her latest fashion editorials...
More.
Thursday, February 10, 2022
The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling
A phenomenal essay, from Robert Pondiscio, at Commentary, "How contemporary education fetishizes the bad and the broken in American life":
On a mild October night in 1962, a frightened housewife, eight months pregnant, climbed into bed in Yonkers, New York, with her two-year-old daughter. Her husband was at work on the West Coast and not with his family on what she felt certain would be the last night of their lives. Laying down in the dark holding her child, she cried and prayed until sleep overtook her. Morning came and they were both still alive, not incinerated in bed as she had feared after President Kennedy shocked the nation with his televised address on the Cuban missile crisis the night before. I was born five weeks later. Days before my first birthday, Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. By the time I started kindergarten on Long Island, nearly 30,000 American GIs had been killed in Vietnam. I learned to read in Mrs. Bobrowitz’s first-grade class the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; race riots tore apart Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities the summer before I started second grade. My elementary-school years were marked by levels of domestic unrest and political violence that in retrospect stagger the imagination. There were more than 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone. Airplane hijackings were common. My dad flew for American Airlines. My parents made no attempt that I’m aware of to shield me from the turbulent events of my childhood years. I thumbed the New York Daily News every morning after checking the Mets box score; I plucked Newsday out of the mailbox when I came home from school. The television was rarely turned off in our home. I watched Eyewitness News at 6 p.m. and, once I was allowed to stay up late, again at 11. It became a forgone conclusion that I would someday work in the news business after I had stayed up all night mesmerized by Jim McKay’s coverage of the Black September terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the summer I was nine. Vietnam stretched far enough into my middle-school years that I wondered whether it would be over before I was old enough to be drafted. In short, I grew up understanding that the world could be a dangerous place of unpredictable menace. But I was not tyrannized by this knowledge. I went to school, played unsupervised in the street, and had blanket permission to range widely on my bike, far from my neighborhood, provided I was home when the streetlights came on. Adults were not omnipresent as they tend to be in children’s lives today, but they seemed in charge and mostly competent. I also knew one thing with certainty about my country, reinforced by my parents and teachers and in the media and culture at large: We were the good guys. ***** The mental landscape of American childhood is very different today. By any reasonable measure, the world is safer and more stable than at any time in living memory. Adults could hardly be more active in children’s lives, but at the same time we seem less inclined to play a reassuring role. This is particularly true in schools, where curricula and school culture seem nearly to revel in the bad and the broken, suggesting to children that they have suffered the great misfortune to have been born into a country that is racist to its core, whose founding documents were lies when written, and where democracy is hanging by a thread. Not that it matters, since we are just a few short years away from irreversible climate catastrophe, all but certain to render the world a spent and burned-out husk by the time they are grown. Neither is it a given that American children will internalize the idea that their country is a force for good in the world or an engine of freedom and prosperity. In fact, quite the opposite. Forget adult competence. Children are told, sometimes explicitly in school and in the broader culture, that the world is counting on them for deliverance from problems grown-ups heedlessly created and have proven incapable of solving. In 2019, Time magazine named 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg the youngest “person of the year” in its history. A group of Parkland, Florida, high-school gun-control activists topped the magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people. The article praising their efforts was written by Barack Obama. Worst of all, this pedagogy of the depressed—America the Problematic—is thought to be a virtue among professional educators who view it as a mark of seriousness and sophistication...
American Bar Association Forcing Wokeness on Law Schools
It's everywhere. And it's not going away soon.
Here's William Jacobson and Johanna Markind, at RCP, "ABA Forcing Wokeness on Law Schools."
Laura Ingraham: The Left's Racial Hatred Never Ends (VIDEO)
The never-ending obsession with race is one the top factors driving political polarization, thanks to the radical left.
Hateful, hateful people. And they never learn, either. Expect a lot of pushback this year culminating in a massive walloping for the Democrats in the midterm elections. I can imagine it now: Just sitting in front of my TV next November, watching the returns come in, rubbing my hands together with glee. If Biden loses in 2024 (if he even runs), it's going to be a new day in America, and Republicans cannot squander the opportunity to turn things around. They need to get ruthless. Beat the left at their own game, divide the opposition, and destroy them.
Here's Ms. Laura:
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