"We've researched it and it has nothing to do with slavery. James Penny was a slave trader, but he had nothing to do with the Penny Lane area."

Says a Liverpool tour guide, quoted in "The Beatles 'Penny Lane' Controversy, Explained/The street the song is named after has come under fire for a potential link to a slave trader" (radio.com).

Madness Penny Lane Defaced 😡 pic.twitter.com/IARaqO9zcP

— 🔥🔴David McGrady🔥🔴 (@Djmc76) June 12, 2020

We're told not to take "defund the police" and "abolish the police" literally.

In this WaPo op-ed — "Defund the police? Here’s what that really means." — by Christy E. Lopez, who is a a Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown Law School where she co-directs the Innovative Policing Program. She tells us not to be "afraid" because it's "not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds."

We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.

Police themselves often complain about having to “do too much,” including handling social problems for which they are ill-equipped. Some have been vocal about the need to decriminalize social problems and take police out of the equation. It is clear that we must reimagine the role they play in public safety. 

Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs....

Why not use words that people can understand and that convey the meaning you want to put in our head? If your idea is so reasonable, why not use words that are effective in making people who care about peace and harmony agree with you?

Police abolition means reducing, with the vision of eventually eliminating, our reliance on policing to secure our public safety....

Now, that's just confusing! You said "reducing" but then you said "eliminating."

The “abolition” language is important because it reminds us that policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery.

But the slavery abolition movement was not about reducing our reliance on slavery! Why take such an important word and undermine what it means? If you successfully "remind us" of the evils of slavery, you are making us think you are saying the police are an evil, like slavery, that must be entirely eradicated.

"I am from provincial people, though some were academics and scientists and musicians. There was very little money, some religion..."

"... much education, some unrealized talent, some actualized talent, and a strong sense that the world was simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming. My strongest memories of childhood are of quiet interior spaces as well as the outdoors, full of mud and bugs and us kids running everywhere. I miss running everywhere. It was flight in both senses."

From a New Yorker interview with the writer Lorrie Moore.

The last question in the interview is about something Moore wrote in the New Yorker last month about finding Trump's voice "reassuring." I blogged about that here. The interviewer, the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, informs her that "The response on Twitter was censorious" and asks her if she felt "misunderstood." She says she felt "misread" and, in fact, "Not really read at all."

I only meant to present some self-mocking, cock-eyed optimism.... I was a little rambling and wrote past the assigned word count, so things had to be removed from every paragraph. But the point at the beginning is that, if you are in the next room, feeling mildly deranged, and can’t hear the words, the potus can sometimes sound like Merv Griffin or Mel Tormé: one hears a crooner’s croon. This is not praise. This is noting a sound... Twitter’s feeding frenzies seem a display of people with obscene amounts of time on their hands, yet a disinclination to read in any real way. And it seems possible that this one was triggered by the right to get the left to eat its own....

ADDED: The 7th comment at my blog post about Moore's meditation on Trump's voice — from commenter eric — was "She's about to be cancelled and will soon apologize."

AND: If you write about politics and don't say predictable things in an obvious way, you will be misread and read in a way that's well described as not really read at all. But that makes it even more important to keep writing where you don't belong, in that world that is simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming.

"My father had been interested in art since boyhood, when he drew images related to his Ojibwe culture."

"After leaving Pipestone boarding school in Minnesota in 1942, he joined the Navy and was assigned to San Diego, where he worked alongside animation artists from MGM and Walt Disney producing brochures and films for the war effort. In 1946, he established himself as one of the first modernists in American Indian fine art. After I was born in 1946, my family moved from Red Lake, Minn., to Minneapolis, where my father broke racial barriers by establishing himself as an American Indian commercial artist in an art world dominated by white executives and artists.... By often working with Native American imagery, he maintained a connection to his identity.... With the redesign [of the Land o' Lakes butter packaging], my father made Mia’s Native American connections more specific. He changed the beadwork designs on her dress by adding floral motifs that are common in Ojibwe art. He added two points of wooded shoreline to the lake that had often been depicted in the image’s background. It was a place any Red Lake tribal citizen would recognize as the Narrows, where Lower Red Lake and Upper Red Lake meet.... Mia simply didn’t fit the parameters of a stereotype...."

From "My Native American father drew the Land O’Lakes maiden. She was never a stereotype" (WaPo).

"Jenzeers."

I turned on the car radio and CNN was talking about "Jenzeers." Jenzeers, in the aftermath of the coronavirus lockdown, were going to decide whether to abandon New York City and leave it hurting for population and economic vigor.

Jenzeers... Jenzeers... who the hell are Jenzeers?
Gen Z-ers.

The story I was hearing on the satellite radio corresponds to this text news report at CNN.com: "Coronavirus is making some people rethink where they want to live":

After years of growth, New York City's population had started to slowly decline in 2017. Chicago and Los Angeles also saw their populations dip in recent years as the economy picked up in the suburbs and elsewhere. Other big cities have seen growth virtually stagnate.

"It's not just a New York thing," says William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. "It's a kind of softening of growth among cities all over the country.... People have always come back to cities during some of the biggest disasters we've had in our history. ... When we look ahead in the next year or two, I'm not so concerned that we're going to see decline in city populations long-term"...

Immediately after the Great Recession, millennials flocked into cities and spurred a period of growth and revitalization. And in the aftermath of this unfolding economic crisis, Frey says Generation Z could take a similar tack.... "If they follow in the footsteps of millennials during a similarly dim period, they could help invigorate city growth -- especially if opportunities dry up elsewhere," Frey wrote in a recent analysis on the Brookings website....

Lifelong New Yorker Chloé Jo Davis never imagined leaving her beloved city -- until now. Davis and her husband were already used to working from home, but weeks spent cramped inside their rented two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side -- homeschooling their three young sons and caring for four rescue pets -- have changed her calculation.... 

Four rescue pets... that got me. They had 5 human beings in a 2-bedroom apartment and they bring in 4 pets. That's got to be either dogs or cats, don't you think? There aren't rescue goldfish or rescue gerbils. We're talking about sizable mammals that have the run of the place and shed hair and vomit and let you know how they feel.

Anyway... city life. I've done it myself... done NYC for about 11 years of my life. I like it, but adding children — more than one — and throwing pets on top... that already makes it hard to breathe. And then you throw in a dangerous respiratory disease... At some point you've got to want out, and if the job you have is one you do from home — you and your mate.... You're so free to leave.

And yet people don't leave. I understand how some folks are about New York. Every place else seems too not New York to be acceptable. I lived in New York City because I married a person who came from New York and his preference for the place was so overwhelming compared to anything I in my head. I didn't want to go back to Delaware or New Jersey. My ideas were vague — drifting over the general landscape like a line in a Johnny Rivers song ("She wants to live in the Rockies/She says that's where we'll find peace...") — so of course, New York won.

"Confused by This Anti-Joe Biden Meme? The Creator Says You Just Don’t Get the Joke."

"Before being censored by Twitter, the way the image was shared blurred the line between parody and misinformation"  — by Ali Breland (in Mother Jones) — about this image created by Brad Troemel:



It's a great satire, but unfortunately, many people who were sharing it took it to be an actual ad from the Biden campaign.

“The DNC and the Biden campaign are the ones responsible for your familiarity with this type of messaging, because they’re the ones who have been fucking campaigning on it,” Troemel [said]. “This image wouldn’t be shared if it wasn’t so believable.”...

Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor at Syracuse University who specializes in social media and memes, [said] “He seems to want to cross his arms and say that everyone is so stupid,” Grygiel said on the phone, skeptically. “He may claim that he’s helping democracy, but he’s lost control of his art.”