"Don’t assume you feel comfortable with the same things you felt comfortable with in the before times... You’re a different person now. We all are."

Says one expert quoted in From "The Back-to-Sex Special: How to Prepare for the Post-Pandemic Summer of Sex/It's time to have sex again. Here's how to get ready, according to the experts" (Inside Hook).

The Hot Vax Summer discourse makes it sound like everyone is about to have the horniest summer of their lives, and if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong.... For many people, the prospect of impromptu hookups with random strangers never held much appeal, and holds even less in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic....

“It might take some time to feel comfortable opening back up, and sometimes our mind might be faster than our body. So, honor your body’s pace.... Embrace the awkward..."...

“If your sex life has been mostly with yourself during the pandemic, you might be feeling a strange mix of emotions as you prepare to put yourself back out there — excitement, anxiety, maybe even dread — so it’s important to check in with yourself emotionally as you go,” says Kocak.

That said, remember that sex is something our bodies are literally built to do. No matter how long it’s been, you’re probably not as sexually inept as you fear. “It will be like riding a bike,” says Sparks. After all, she adds, “You never really forget how to have sex.”

It's not like riding a bike! You don't fall off if you're doing it wrong. And what makes you sure you were doing it right in the first place. With a bike, you were doing it right because you made forward progress and didn't fall. With sex, you rarely fall off and you aren't traveling from one geographic location to another — e.g., from your house to the park. You may think you're "traveling" through some abstract landscape from titillation to satisfaction — and there are probably towns in Pennsylvania called Titillation and Satisfaction — but you most likely began and ended at the same geographic coordinates. 

And if you've been assuming you're doing it right because it's "something our bodies are literally built to do," that's a crazily broad definition of what it means to do it right. But thanks for taking me back to the time when I was a little kid and asked my mother how babies are made. I have never forgotten her explanation, the sum total of it, verbatim: "Well, you know how men and women are physically built."

Did Donald Trump just say that he will run for President in 2024?

"[A] Republican president will make a triumphant return to the White House. And I wonder who that will be? I wonder who that will be? Who, who, who will that be? I wonder."

Said Donald Trump, near the end of his CPAC speech yesterday (transcript). 

There's coy cuteness in the repeated "wonder" and the repeated "who": "And I wonder who that will be? I wonder who that will be? Who, who, who will that be? I wonder." It's like the old doowop song:I wonder wonder who who who who...

It's clearly a humorous locution. Check it out:

  

The "who" has got to refer to himself, don't you think? There's also the idea of making "a triumphant return to the White House." He's the only one who's been there before and can return, though it could be denied by saying it only means that Republicans have been there before and the Party can return one of its own to the place. 

Rewatching the clip, I think he's saying "who... who," pausing, and saying "who, who, who," because he wants the crowd to chant "You! You! You!" There might be some of that in the crowd noise, but I don't think it's distinct enough to meet his expectations. 

He proceeds to the last couple sentences of his remarks:

Standing before you today, I am supremely confident that for our movement, for our party, and for our country, our brightest days are just ahead. And that together we will make America prouder, freer, stronger and greater than it ever has been before.

Should we interpret to mean that he will run again? I think he's obviously teasing the idea. He gets something he wants simply by teasing a run, and why shouldn't he play that part while it's new and interesting? 

He may be looking to pass his politics on to someone new. When I listened to the speech live, I was struck that he singled out Jim Jordan — out of all the CPAC speakers. He said: 

I heard Jim Jordan did a great job.... oh, there he is... Hi Jim. I heard you were great. In fact, I hated to follow you. I want to follow other people. I could name them too. I like to follow other people. I heard you were great. 

He highlighted Jordan and diminished everyone else. But this morning, I'm looking at the transcript, and I see that's just an intro to something I've heard before. Jordan was "a great wrestler," a "college champion," who "likes to win." And that's a set up for how much Trump likes to win and how much Trump has won:

In last year’s congressional primaries, 120, listen to this, it’s crazy. 120 of 122 candidates I endorsed won, 120. That’s almost as good as Jim’s wrestling record. And the two that lost were beaten by people claiming to be more Trump than their opponent. So I like those two people very much also. In the Senate, I was undefeated in endorsements with a record of 21 and 0....

So I don't think he was passing the torch to Jim Jordan. Maybe some day he will, but I think he wants the excitement and influence of seeming to run and of having a torch to pass if he decides not to run. Singling out Jim Jordan — to the extent that it was anything more than a rhetorical device to ease into the topic of winning — is a way to put all the would-be Republican candidates on notice that he has a power to name his successor and he's going to make a big show of exercising that power. 

And his endorsements are huge — I was undefeated in endorsements.

The masks/condoms analogy might cut the other way.

Public health officials get kind of attached to the power they get in epidemics. They don’t want to lose it.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 23, 2021

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.

"That seems to be more of this 'stuff has agency' trend that is going on. I did not do it, the gun just went off."

Says Todd in the comments to the post that talks — the post that talks! — about using the expression "release weight" instead of "lose weight."

It is NEVER ever MY fault. Stuff just happens, bad stuff anyway. Everyone owns the good stuff but bad stuff just happens.

In this case if the weight doesn't leave, well "it" chose to stay and it is NOT your fault!

But this made me think about the virus. It's just a thing. It has no mind. But we're encouraged to think of it as stuff with agency. Here's Trump, yesterday:

I view the invisible enemy as a war.... Hey, it’s killed more people than Pearl Harbor, and it’s killed more people than the World Trade Center. World Trade Center was close to 3,000. Well, we’re going to beat that by many times, unfortunately, so yeah, we view it as a war. This is a mobilization against the war. In many ways, it’s a tougher enemy. We do very well against the visible enemies. It’s the invisible enemy. This is an invisible enemy, but we’re doing a good job.