Greetings from the Dustbin of History!

I'm reading Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, in "I Hope to Repeal an Arcane Law That Could Be Misused to Ban Abortion Nationwide" (NYT):

A long discredited, arcane 150-year-old law is back in the news... Last week at the Supreme Court, the Comstock Act of 1873 was referenced... during oral arguments in a case dealing with access to... drugs... used in medication abortions. Anti-abortion activists like to bring up the Comstock Act because one of its clauses prohibits sending through the mail 'every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing' that could possibly lead to an abortion.... That could effectively make abortion impossible to access even in places like Minnesota, which has affirmatively protected a woman’s right to choose.... Back in the 1860s, a former Civil War soldier from rural Connecticut named Anthony Comstock... lobb[ied] for federal legislation that would empower the post office to search for and seize anything in the mail that met Comstock’s criteria for being 'obscene,' 'lewd' or just plain 'filthy'.... In its broad wording, the law not only made it illegal to send pornography through the mail, it also outlawed the sending of medical textbooks for their depictions of the human body, personal love letters that hinted at physical as well as romantic relationships, and even news stories. The whole thing was very silly and impracticable, and that’s why the Comstock Act was relegated to the dustbin of history...."

It's interesting, this "dustbin of history." How does it work? Apparently not well enough to keep things from needing to be repealed by actual statutory law. 

William Safire wrote in the NYT about the phrase back in 1983— 40 years ago, but still fresh to me. And he himself was looking back 66 years:

"One common tipping complaint is some variation of the truffle conundrum."

"Why should we tip more on the pasta with truffles than on the one without? Call it a wealth tax. There’s also a celebrity tax. One waiter, whose diners have included Selena Gomez, Jon Hamm, and Matthew Macfadyen ('He ordered two entrées successively,' he recalled. 'I was impressed'), said that those who are rich and identifiable typically leave thirty to fifty per cent. 'Robert Plant tipped me twenty per cent, which I respected,' he said. 'There’s this paranoia of being despised by the waiter, and they overtip to compensate. I always thought that was pathetic.'"

From "Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point? Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage" (The New Yorker). Lots more about tipping in that article. My excerpt isn't a summary, just something random that interested me.

"He who doesn't work, doesn't eat.

Soviet poster issued in Uzbekistan, 1920.

From the Wikipedia article, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," which I'm reading this morning because Wikipedia linked to it under "See also" at the bottom of its article "No such thing as a free lunch," which, you can see in the previous post, came up in the context of trying to understand the Russian word "khalyava."

I started this new post to show you that excellent propaganda artwork, and let me quote a bit from the "He who does not work" entry:

"In 2020, among political controversies, Elon Musk and several political figures, including Ivanka Trump made a reference to the red pill concept."

That's the last line of the Wikipedia article "Red pill and blue pill" — which is full of great stuff. In addition to explaining the original meaning in the movie "The Matrix," there's the earlier movie, "Total Recall," in which the Schwarzenegger character is offered a red pill and told "it's a symbol of your desire to return to reality." And:

The choice between taking a blue or red pill is a central metaphor in the 2011 Arte documentary film Marx Reloaded, in which philosophers including Slavoj Žižek and Nina Power explore solutions to the global economic and financial crisis of 2008–09. The film also contains an animated parody of the red/blue pill scene in The Matrix, with Leon Trotsky as Morpheus and Karl Marx as Neo.

Ha ha. I want to see that. Aha!



I love cartoons. Are they real life? Are they just fantasy?

Anyway, yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted: "Take the red pill." That's the whole tweet. What did he want to take the red pill about?

And Ivanka was right there:

Taken! https://t.co/Ng0S2OFC93

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) May 17, 2020

Does she know? I mean, there is no pill to take to get you exactly to reality. If you use the metaphor, you're simply insisting that YOU know where reality is and that other people are living in a fantasy world. It's just a pop-culture, cheeky way to assert that YOU know what is true and those other people are wrong. But Elon Musk's tweet doesn't specify the thing that is asserted to be true. And Ivanka is signaling that she's in on the truth and it's the same truth that Elon Musk is pushing.

You can look at his Twitter feed and try to get a sense of what he's talking about. My previous post is about another Elon Musk tweet — one that rages against the extenuation of the coronavirus lockdown — but this "red pill" tweet isn't close to that in the feed. The lockdown protest was back on May 14th and this "red pill" business was on the 17th.

Now, maybe he's just saying, Let's all look at what's really real. Turn away from the fantasy life that might make you feel good, but the truth is better.

That makes me think of the Jesus catchphrase: "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

ADDED: The director of "The Matrix" responds to Elon and Ivanka: "Fuck both of you."

"Megyn Kelly is in big trouble with NBC after defending blackface on her Today hour..."

"'They’re contacting the staff and reassigning everyone today. Everyone’s being told that they still have a home here, but it won’t be on Megyn’s show,' one source said. 'They haven’t made an official announcement about the show, but everyone knows what it means when they’re being moved somewhere else. The show is clearly over.'"

New York Magazine. Here's the clip of Kelly doing what she did, whatever her thinking was here:

Megyn Kelly wonders what the big deal is about blackface pic.twitter.com/07yvYDuAYe

— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) October 23, 2018

The best thing I can think of to say for her is that TV for some stupid reason has to churn out Halloween stories every year, and taking this dumb position might have seemed like a way to get a lively conversation going on the hopelessly stale topic of what to wear on Halloween. At one point, Kelly talks about the general offensiveness of Halloween costumes such as the one where you've got the illusion of an axe embedded in your cranium — what's that, the Leon Trotsky costume? — and she has no idea that she's already embedded the metaphorical axe in her own head.



That's an image from a play I once saw — "Variations on the Death of Trotsky."

The play is divided into eight scenes... each depicting a differing final moment of Trotsky's life and making satirical allusions to soap opera conventions... [T]he play calls for Trotsky to die at the end of each scene, and then continues on (after the ring of a bell) from near where the last scene left off...  Trotsky is depicted throughout the show with a mountain-climber's ax sticking comically out of his skull... Though this is apparent to the audience from the very beginning, Trotsky himself does not realize that the ax is there....

That's what old Megyn had me thinking about.

There was blood — blood coming out of her wherever.

"Many were shocked that the apparent executioner in videos made by the Islamic State, or ISIS, was an educated, middle-class metropolitan."

"In fact, academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them," writes Maajid Nawaz, in a NYT op-ed.

Islamist “entryism” — the term originally described tactics adopted by Leon Trotsky to take over a rival Communist organization in France in the early 1930s — continues to be a problem within British universities and schools. Twenty years ago, I played my part as an Islamist entryist at college....

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college.

Here's Nawaz's book: "Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism."

"Reformers tend to be difficult people. But they come in different flavors."

Writes Michael Kinsley, reviewing Glenn Greenwald's book ("No Place to Hide").

There are ascetics, like Henry James’s Miss Birdseye (from “The Bostonians”), “who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after 50 years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements.”

There are narcissists like Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. These are self-canonized men who feel that, as saints, they are entitled to ignore the rules that constrain ordinary mortal...

Then there are political romantics, played in this evening’s performance by Edward Snowden, almost 31 years old, with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial worldview of a precocious teenager....

And Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and he is the man who will topple it....

Harriet Miers as the new entry on the list of nonmathematician math majors.

Here's a good list for reference. How does the interest in and aptitude for math affect how one behaves in non-mathematical aspects of life? Think of what math may have had to do with the accomplishments of these folks (and go to the link for the full list, compiled by Steven G. Buyske):

Ralph Abernathy, civil rights leader and Martin Luther King's closest aide.

Harry Blackmun, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, AB summa cum laude in mathematics at Harvard.

David Dinkins, Mayor of New York, BA in mathematics from Howard.

Florence Nightingale, pioneer in professional nursing. She was the first person in the English-speaking world to apply statistics to public health. She was also a pioneer in the graphic representation of statistics; the pie-chart was her invention, for example. Not really a math major, she was privately educated, but pursued mathematics far beyond contemporary standards for women.

Laurence H. Tribe, Professor at Harvard Law School, often regarded as one of the great contemporary authorities on Constitutional Law. An AB summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard.

Leon Trotsky, revolutionary. He began to study Pure mathematics at Odessa in 1897, but imprisonment and exile in Siberia seem to have ended his mathematical efforts.

Art Garfunkel, folk-rock singer. MA in mathematics from Columbia in 1967. Worked on a PhD at Columbia, but chose to pursue his musical career instead.

Phillip Glass , composer, a Bachelor's from the University of Chicago.

Carole King , Sixties songwriter, and later a singer-songwriter. She dropped out after one year of college to pursue her music career.

Tom Lehrer , songwriter-parodist. PhD student in mathematics at Harvard.

Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass , and other works. A ringer: he was a logician under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Heloise (Ponce Cruse Evans), of Hints from Heloise . She minored in math.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Nobel prize-winning novelist, a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostov.

Bram Stoker , author of Dracula, took honors at Trinity University, Dublin.

Ted Kaczinski, PhD in mathematics from University of Michigan. Kaczinski worked at UC Berkeley for some time and published papers in complex variables before retreating to the woods and becoming the infamous "unabomber."

Can we get an op-ed from Larry Tribe on the subject? Or maybe you readers can speculate in the comments.

I'll just say that I expect the Senate Democrats to use the math background as they grill Miers about whether she's got a heart -- a subject they pestered John Roberts about. I expect them to heart-grill Harriet even more. She's supposed to represent women -- O'Connor did! -- so where are her feelings? She never married! She has no children! She majored in math! Will they dare take the tack that she's not a proper member of the group she's supposed to represent? You know they are thinking about it.

I just want to say that I'm standing here waiting for every misstep in that direction, and I intend to slam them for it -- from over here in my little outpost in the blogosphere.