12 years without sex, or as Sophie Fontanel calls it, 12 years of insubordination.

Fontanel did not forgo sex for any moral or religious reason or out of a lack of desire. She was only 27 at the outset. She wasn't prudish, but she rejected the way she'd had sex without being "present" and because it was the thing to do.

I wanted to recover my body. My real desire was to re-want having sex....

She decided: "I will return to sexual activities when it is worth it — and it took more than ten years."

When her book — "The Art of Sleeping Alone" —  came out, "a lot of people — a huge amount of people — began to say that they had the same experience."  That was in France. It will be out here next week. Expect a lot of confessions from people who've gone without sex for a long time. If you've voluntarily gone for years, will you admit how long? It's nice of Fontanel to open the floodgates on this topic, which I think many people are embarrassed to talk about, afraid of looking pathetic or undesirable.

Here's her advice:

I recommend being true to yourself. If you are making love and you’re disappointed, then stop. Recover your freedom. Don’t be afraid of being single, and don’t be afraid of being single for a long time.... It’s very important to learn that it’s not a sin to be alone.

Funny to get to the end of the article and see the word "sin." I think she's being humorous, not revealing secret religiosity. Obviously, I haven't read the book yet, but I suspect that she is saying that people have sex out of habit or to seem normal to themselves and others, and the sex is often worse than nothing.

You know my old aphorism: Better than nothing is a high standard.

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$700,000 to $800,000 spent to erase a quote that was displayed out of context.

Martin Luther King said "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness," which we will remember, even through it's now off the memorial. It's off the memorial because, in the "drum major" speech, there were some other words around it — as is always the case with snappy lines in speeches — and Maya Angelou and others felt some shades of subtlety were lost, making the man sound arrogant. Deeper grooves will be carved all over the memorial to disguise the wordlessness where there were once words, words that are etched more deeply into our memory as we read this news story and see, once again, "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."

Ironically, the news story doesn't include the context. So I'll tell you the context: The context is abysmal phony outrage, toadying obeisance to Angelou, and an atrocious waste of money.

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Instapundit opens up comments in a "grand experiment."

He writes:

I’ve opened ‘em up before — and, for that matter, Ann Althouse did it once when I was away, to much excitement — but this new system should be much better. 

The system is part of "the new rollout of tech at PJ Media will allow one sign-in to work across the whole site," so you've got to join their system to be able to comment. And they will be able to manage you in ways that I was not able to manage my commenters (some of whom really were trying to destroy my blog and waste all our time).

Someone at Instapundit named Stoutcat says:

Where Althouse closes a door, Reynolds opens a window! This is an excellent idea, and I'm anticipating much enjoyment and eddification from reading your commenters, who are, no doubt, as far above Althouse's commenters, as hers were above the general horde.

Instapundit responds:

Yeah, Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free gives me pause. But there' s no connection -- this has been in the works for months as part of PJ's single sign-on thing.

As for "Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free," if that's what he's seeing, that is in fact only appearance. The loss has been very painful, because I believed the comments gave the place a lot of energy. But some unknown proportion of the commenters were people with ill will, who wanted destruction, and deleting even the ones we knew about had become literally a full-time job. But I wasn't in some big old system with lots of tech people. I've kept independent, with the simplicity of the people's platform, Blogger, which won't let me exclude people. I could only delete, which was a technique that my most aggressive antagonists used against me (and against all the other commenters who'd contributed so much over the years).

That really hurt, but I'm an optimist, and — like a blog — I live in the present and move forward, so I find the good in whatever the situation is, continually making choices about how to keep things as good as possible, and the day came when the balance of good and bad in the comments experience tipped so severely that I couldn't maintain the sunny denial needed to put up with everything. Since then, I've felt the loss, and part of the loss is seeing exiled commenters talking about me elsewhere on the web, forgetting/ignoring the problem that made me close the comments — as if I would shut off the comments because people attacked my writings! — and saying such nasty things about me that I could get depressed brooding about the real proportion of good faith to bad faith commenters.

But I've got to resist traipsing down that detour as I continue on the road of blogging, where I've found so much joy in the past and hope to find more, doing things in this newly simplified style. Meanwhile, Instapundit gets fancier, as PJ Media makes its play to become a social media enterprise. That's the road I've diverged from. I can't be your social media website.

I've redefined my task as something I can do alone, not that I'm alone. I've got Meade — the commenter I married — walking with me every step of the way. I've got all the joy I can handle, and maybe it is joy at being comment-free. I'm a less is more kind of person. My own version of that slogan is: Better than nothing is a high standard. I do notice and take joy in the negatives that I'm free of. That's called freedom, and comment-free is a kind of freedom.

ADDED: I said it back in 2004:

Why do you blog? > To live freely in writing.

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What is the sight of one hand hidden? The zen koan of a NYT headline.

I'm getting a late start this morning. Only yesterday — ah, yesterday! — I had my first post up at 6:21. It contained the memorable Drudge headline "Big Sis Wants to See Under Your Clothes." Today, the blog didn't get going until 8:45 (and that's Central Time). If I wanted a cover story — a story that you can't see under even with your National Surveillance X-Ray Robot Eyes — I'd say I needed to meditate for hours upon encountering — on the front page of the NYT — the equivalent of the old what is the sound of one hand clapping? zen koan.

Having achieved oneness, what is its sound? In other words, how does it reverberate? How does it go out into the world and function? If we're just being "one" with our own hand, what have we accomplished? If it's all about our own private experience, it's nothing but a hand job!

Are you ready now for the headline? It's: "In Second Term, Obama Is Seen as Using 'Hidden Hand’ Approach."

If it's a hidden hand, how is it seen? Some unnamed entity/entities are seeing, but they are hidden by the hidden hand of the headline writer using the passive voice. The passive voice is evidence of the unseen hand of another hand job for President Obama.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

The leaves of the newspaper are trembling with the wind that passes through, and thus do we "see" the unseen. But what is this wind? The underlying article, written by Peter Baker begins like this:

In the nearly two weeks since Egypt’s military seized power, President Obama has promoted a better federal bureaucracy, given a medal to George Lucas of “Star Wars” fame and had former President George Bush to the White House for lunch. What he has not done is publicly address the violent upheaval in Cairo.

Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.

That is not to say Mr. Obama is uninvolved. In the privacy of the West Wing, away from the cameras, he has made calls to leading figures in the Arab world and has met with advisers trying to influence the crisis. But his low public profile on issues like immigration, Syria and health care underscores a calculated presidential approach that admirers consider nuanced...



... and detractors call passive.

When we see nothing, how can we know that the person who would be expected to act is choosing to act by not appearing to act, in some deliberate "hidden hand" approach? Quite aside from whether that is a wise and workable approach, is it even something he's doing? Peter Baker cites no inside sources for the proposition that Obama claims to be using a "hidden hand" approach. The old inside phrase was "leading from behind," and it would be interesting to analyze a shift from "leading from behind" to "hidden hand." (Is the hidden hand goosing the behind?)

Peter Baker's quoted sources are — I kid you not — Jim Newton, author of "Eisenhower: The White House Years," and Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan. These are the seers seeing.

Some compare Mr. Obama’s approach to the “hidden hand” style of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who often steered events behind the scenes without being public about his role....

Some... If you use the notoriously shifty sentence subject "some" you'd better have at least 2.

“In those senses, Obama does appear to me to be taking a page from Eisenhower’s playbook,” Mr. Newton said. “What I don’t know, however, is how aggressively Obama is working out of view on these matters. The essence of Eisenhower’s hidden hand, of course, is that there was real work going on that people didn’t know at the time. If that’s true now, then Obama really is emulating Ike. If, on the other hand, he’s simply doing nothing or very little, that would be passivity, not hidden-hand leadership.”

Susan Eisenhower, a granddaughter of the late president, said it might be too soon to tell. “Eisenhower’s hidden-hand means of meeting his objectives was not really evident until his papers were opened, many decades after he left office,” Ms. Eisenhower said.

So Susan Eisenhower is not even seeing the hidden-hand. She's just talking about how hard it can be to see what is hidden. And Newton — who must be thrilled at the invitation from the NYT to push his book — is (as I see the unseen) responding to Baker's effort to get him to endorse the hidden-hand theory that has no theorists. And he doesn't. The Newton quote is studded with weasel words: appear... if... if... 

What unseen things were seen by the some who saw none?

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Nuance!

A clip from 2009, out of context, presented on the occasion of today's use of the "nuance" tag, one of my all-time favorite tags on this blog.

I think it's fun to take things out of context, and fun to put them back in. Another example is in yesterday's vlog, where I was answering questions from readers. I threw in the line "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." I saw over at Lem's place, where some of my former commenters have congregated, that at least one aggrieved commenter assumed I was mad as hell at the commenters. I'll show you the actual context in a few minutes.

The original context for that "Nuance!" clip above is here: "The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."

What emptiness are your jaws clamped around?

"I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real."

That's a hint about the context for my "mad as hell" outburst.

Here:

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Should Obama "call for calm after the Zimmerman acquittal"?

Over at Breitbart, Joel B. Pollak is blaming Obama for "amplif[ying] the racial element of the case" by saying "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon" and "fanning the flames of outrage and division--arguably, in an election-year attempt to drive voter turnout." He says:

Following the verdict, with rallies and protests being held across the nation, and the NAACP and Al Sharpton vowing to take matters further, the President might be expected to remind the nation of the importance of the rule of law and respect for the judicial process....

But as of early Sunday morning, with the country on edge, the White House had yet to issue any statement.

1. Is the country really "on edge"? Ironically, saying that is fanning the flames of outrage and division. How about waiting to see some sign of this edginess before expecting the President to advise calm?

2. If, without evidence of edginess, the President were to call for calm, it would imply that people don't know how to handle disappointment and emotional pain, that they descend into irrational, harmful activity. That implication is itself racial stereotyping.

3. I can see that Pollak resisted advising Obama to counsel black people not to riot, which would be the most egregious example of the problem I've cited in point #2, above. He says Obama should issue a reminder about the rule of law and the judicial process, but even that would be to say: I think you people might lack the self-control and intelligence to grasp the most basic fundamentals of the society we all live in. That's patronizing, and it relies on a racial stereotype that shouldn't be fed.

4. So I see no problem in Obama's silence. No statement in the face of no rioting is a whole lot of nothing of the very best kind. Have the perception to give credit for The Good Nothing. Some folks like to call Obama "Zero." Sometimes zero is the best number. Think of all the things we might try to count and feel delighted to find zero.

5. Obama's original statement in March 2012 — "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon" — should be remembered accurately, not for the way that it was used and is being used now by Joel B. Pollak. Obama didn't choose to go out and talk about the case. He was silent until he was asked about it. And what he said was measured and careful. Here's what I said at the time, which ends with "To my ear, his words have a calming, moderating effect, but we don't all hear him the same way, I've noticed time and again." [ADDED: Pollak's piece links to that post of mine for the proposition that the question was planted, but all I said was "he knew [the question] would be asked or at least anticipated it. (At most: his people planted it.)"]

6. If Obama were to speak, whatever he said would be exploited race hucksters and the Obama-haters alike. I think it's just fine for Obama to deprive these shit-stirrers of raw material.

7. Before hitting the publish button, I double checked a couple news sites to see if the predicted riots had broken out. Anyone who's disappointed at the lack of action should be ashamed.

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