Oh, we're all "decomposing," aren't we?

Robots Read News about Biden's campaign strategy pic.twitter.com/pkmL36qu8w

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 24, 2020

ADDED: The Constitution disqualifies you if you're not "natural-born." It says nothing about what if you are dead. And, in fact, dead people HAVE won elections. Read "5 Politicians Who Got Elected Despite Being Dead" (Mental Floss). #1 on the list was Mel Carnahan:

Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan famously won election to the Senate in Missouri in 2000—38 days after passing away in a plane crash that also claimed the lives of his son and a campaign advisor. Carnahan beat incumbent Senator John Ashcroft—who would soon move on to serve as U.S. Attorney General for President George W. Bush. Carnahan’s wife, Jean, filled his spot in the Senate until a 2002 special election.

Mayor Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres of Tantará, Peru got into a coffin and played dead as the police came to arrest him for violating the law of curfew and social distancing.

"It is not clear exactly where he and his friends were drinking, or why there were open caskets close at hand," The Daily Mail reports.

In happier days:



I don't know what's going on in that picture. Is he giving us the finger? "Siempre contigo" means "always with you." But what is "CLODO"? Wikipedia has an entry for that sequence of letters, but it's got nothing to do with Peru... or corn. It's quite French, but we see that "clodo" is slang for "homeless":

Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (CLODO) (in French: Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs; 'clodo' being a slang word for the homeless) was a neo-Luddite French anarchist organization, active during the 1980s, that targeted computer companies. In 1980, after a series of attacks in the Toulouse area, they released a statement to the French media in which they explained their motivations. It read, "We are workers in the field of data processing and consequently well placed to know the current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications. The computer is the favorite tool of the dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to repress."...

"'It was on brand in the sense that Trump allowed his inner showman to make this a spectacle rather than a solemn moment of acknowledgment and a reflection — the way President Obama did'..."

"... said Ned Price, a CIA officer at the time of bin Laden’s death who later served as a spokesman for the National Security Council under Obama.... Obama spoke of the anguish of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, emphasized the nation’s resolve in recovering, and praised the skill of the intelligence experts who tracked bin Laden down and the courage of the Special Forces who killed him. He also took a measure of credit. 'I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,' said a president who was routinely assailed by Republicans as weak and feckless on foreign affairs. He took no questions from reporters. By contrast, the Trump show on Baghdadi started with a tweet. 'Something very big has just happened!' the president posted on social media Saturday evening, and the White House media office quickly announced that Trump would make a 'major announcement' — 11 hours later at 9 a.m. Sunday. Critics speculated that the president was eager to upstage the Sunday morning political talk shows in a bid to drown out coverage of the House Democrats’ impeachment effort against him...."

From "In creating spectacle around Baghdadi’s death, Trump departs from Obama’s more measured tone on bin Laden" (WaPo).

In so many ways, Trump is not like Obama. But I presume that each man — on the success of a raid that killed a feared terrorist enemy — made a public display that he believed would advance American military interests and his own political interests. Obama chose to be circumspect and conventionally presidential. After hearing Trump, who was vividly emotional, I relistened to Obama's announcement, and I was struck by the restraint — the blandness. There was nothing about how bin Laden looked or acted as he faced his death. Obama seemed to want to inspire confidence that everything was done with precise correctness. Trump seemed to want us to experience the righteous anger and the vengeance and contempt. These are radically different choices from 2 very different men.

Remember that the Obama administration made a point of communicating with the world about the respectful treatment of bin Laden's corpse:

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed... The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea.''

And remember that Trump has openly talked about treating the enemy's bodies with outrageous disrespect:

"Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!," he tweeted. That was after "The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!"...

"They were having terrorism problems [in the Philippines], just like we do," Trump said, according to a February 2016 account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."

That's quoted in a blog post of mine in August 2017. I commented:

[Trump] thinks its a good idea to let radical Muslim terrorists know we might mess with their dead bodies in a way that he (presumably) thinks they think will wreck their afterlife. He might think that threat will influence the terrorists, but not necessarily. He might just think that he had a cheeky tweet to entertain his fans and confound his MSM antagonists. 

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham had "a penchant for showing dinner party guests the two glass eyes he kept in his pocket."

"The eyeballs were part of a larger project: Bentham wanted his body publicly dissected; his skeleton cleaned up, fully articulated, and padded with straw; and his head mummified for display. He would be, he said in his will, 'the Auto-Icon,' visited by friends or occasionally wheeled out for gatherings and parties.... Bentham had asked a friend, Thomas Southwood Smith, to embalm his head using traditional New Zealand Maori methods. The process—he was essentially smoked, and fitted with the eyes from his pocket—didn’t work as hoped."

So the head isn't kept on display with the rest of his body (which sports a wax head), but you can see a photograph of the head — with its brilliant blue glass eyes — at "Jeremy Bentham’s Head Is Coming Out of Its Box and Under the Microscope/Scientists want to know if the forward-thinking philosopher had autism" (Atlas Obscura).

"There are many pornographers, but what, within the realm of pornography, earns you a substantial obituary in The New York Times?"

"Some day we'll see how they treat Hugh Hefner, who made pornography clean, commercial and classy, but today we read about the death of Al Goldstein: '... The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was... 'We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ...'... Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser.... ' In later years, it became impossible to get famous for being a loud sleazy guy with a magazine, and the idea of anyone 'inking' out pubic hair seems mostly puzzling...."

So I wrote back in 2013, and now the day has come when I can read the substantial obituary for Hugh Hefner in the NYT. I've already written 2 posts, the first 2 of the day, on the death of the gargantuan cultural icon Hugh Hefner. Let me then, at long last, get to the NYT obituary:

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

A boy's fantasy of adulthood and sophistication.

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs. You couldn’t talk politically.... You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”...

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

Born in 1926, he was raised "with a lot of repression" by Methodists, but he found his way through drawing comics, first as a child, in high school (where he "'I reinvented myself' as the suave, breezy 'Hef,"  and in college as the editor of the humor magazine. He came up with Playboy as "a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons."

What did his cartoons like like? I found this (click to enlarge and read ("This is me, dreaming about women in general!"))

More here.

The NYT devotes the mid-section of the obituary to the feminist challenge. Gloria Steinem did undercover research as a "bunny" in the Playboy Club in 1963 and discovered that it's hard work, the outfits are uncomfortable, and the customers are (as the Times puts it) "vulgar."

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on a television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue contained an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

The 3 quoted sentences from that internal memo are fascinating. The first 2 talk tough, calling for a hard fight, but the third one makes an argument that belongs in a sweet, soft fight: The feminists want to say that we're alienating men and women — with domineering men and oppressed, insignificant women — but we're the ones who are for "the romantic boy-girl society." What do women want? A lot of us love the ideal of a romantic boy-girl society. It's interesting that Hef wrote "boy-girl" and yet later publicly talked about the "adult world" and rising above the "make-believe children’s world."

Marilyn Monroe appears twice in the obit, first as the nude model in the first issue of Playboy and second as the long dead body in a mausoleum next to which the newly dead body of Hugh Hefner will lie.

Trump has us studying General Pershing.

"Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!," he tweeted. That was after "The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!"

That's not making an assertion about what General Pershing did, just telling us to go study something. Is that really enough to get a "Pants on Fire" rating from Politifact?

Politifact merges the new tweet with something Trump said back in February 2016:

"They were having terrorism problems [in the Philippines], just like we do," Trump said, according to a February 2016 account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."

Is that story true? How would we know? If it were true, it might be denied, and if it were false, it might be claimed.

The best evidence U.S. troops used pigs as a tactic against Muslims comes from a memoir by Pershing titled My Life Before the World War, 1860-1917, which was republished in 2013 by the University Press of Kentucky. In the memoir, Pershing writes that another commanding officer in the Philippines, Col. Frank West, had in at least one case seen to it that bodies of Muslim insurgents "were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig. It was not pleasant to have to take such measures, but the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven sometimes deterred the would-be assassins."

In a footnote, the editor of the 2013 edition, John T. Greenwood, cited a letter about the incident from Maj. Gen. J. Franklin Bell, the commander of the Philippines Division, to Pershing: "Of course there is nothing to be done, but I understand it has long been a custom to bury (insurgents) with pigs when they kill Americans. I think this a good plan, for if anything will discourage the (insurgents) it is the prospect of going to hell instead of to heaven. You can rely on me to stand by you in maintaining this custom. It is the only possible thing we can do to discourage crazy fanatics."

While these writings do provide strong evidence that United States forces used pigs as a tactic against Muslim insurgents, there is no evidence that Pershing himself committed these acts.

The interesting thing is that Trump is choosing to waft this myth right now. That is, he's thinks its a good idea to let radical Muslim terrorists know we might mess with their dead bodies in a way that he (presumably) thinks they think will wreck their afterlife. He might think that threat will influence the terrorists, but not necessarily. He might just think that he had a cheeky tweet to entertain his fans and confound his MSM antagonists. It's a new topic: Pershing!

It gets rid of whatever the old topic was.

Purging with Pershing.

But, seriously, the bodies of the enemy dead should not be desecrated.

Remember: "Horror at Fallujah / SAVAGE ATTACK: Bodies dragged through street, hung from bridge 4 U.S. contractors killed in ambush hours after 5 soldiers slain in Iraq."

And the respect the previous administration showed to the body of our arch-enemy bin Laden:

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed," the May 2 email from Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reads. "The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea.''

AND: From 2013: "One of the U.S. Marines who was caught on video urinating on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters has broken his silence to say that he's not sorry for what he did and he'd do it again."

"These were the same guys that were killing our family, killing our brothers," Sgt. Joseph Chamblin told ABC News affiliate WSOC in his first interview since the 2011 incident. Chamblin said he did regret any repercussions it may have had on the Marines, "but do I regret doing it? Hell no."

"John Glenn’s remains were disrespected at the military's mortuary, Pentagon documents allege."

"A senior mortuary employee at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware twice offered horrified inspectors a peek at American icon John Glenn's dead body while the famed astronaut awaited burial earlier this year, according to an internal memo obtained by Military Times."

Chef dies of a bite from the severed head of a cobra.

This is news from Guangdong, China, so maybe it's fake, but the story is that Peng Fan, making some delicacy, had cut off the head, picked it up to throw it away, and it bit him.

"There was nothing that could be done to save the man. Only the anti-venom could have helped but this was not given in time."

A snake expert said: "It is perfectly possible that the head remained alive and bit Peng's hand... By the time a snake has lost its head, it's effectively dead as basic body functions have ceased, but there is still some reflexive action."

"Polish town installs lime green statue of Lenin taking a leak."

"The statue replaces a more traditional sculpture of Lenin that was removed in 1989, following the fall of communism in Poland. The piece, dubbed the ‘Fountain of the Future,’ is designed to encourage debate...."

ADDED: I oppose, in addition to communism, tag proliferation, but this was the post that made me do what I'd resisted in the past, making a tag for Lenin. Having done so, I went back and added the tag to 11 old posts with the name Lenin and it's an interesting lot — including:

"Despite being declared dead and kept in a deep freezer at his ashram for six weeks, an Indian guru’s followers are confident he will return to life to lead them."

"Mission spokesman Swami Vishalanand insisted earlier this week their leader [Ashutosh Maharaj] was not dead but was in fact in a state of 'samadhi,' the highest level of meditation, and was therefore still conscious."

How different is it from the Christian belief in Jesus returning from the dead? It's different in that Maharaj's followers are asserting that he hasn't died, but is in a state of deep meditation.

But then why put him in the freezer? I see that a man petitioned a court and accused the followers of keeping the body frozen as a way to acquire his property, but Maharaj has been officially declared dead, so from a legal standpoint it's just a question about what to do with a dead body, which, I take it, is unrelated to inheriting the dead person's property.

Is freezing a permissible method for dealing with a dead body? In the United States, we have our cryonics places.

"She’s not alive, honey."

Psychic's words, true at last.

When your dog drags home a human leg, what do you do?

1. Call the police, or 2. Bury the leg.

"I don’t care who you are; it’s not right to put a human person’s ashes in a Wal-Mart bag."

When you get cremated remains, they're in a plastic bag inside whatever outer container you ordered — perhaps the standard cardboard box, perhaps some urn that you imagined was what urns are supposed to look like. How you feel when you receive that package will depend on a lot of things, but seeing the plastic bag — especially if you chose the ancient-bronze-looking Vessel of Somber Respect — is probably going to hurt. So then what if you pull the bag out and see that it's the cut off bottom of a bag that you recognize as a Wal-Mart bag?

If you're this lady in Ohio, you call the local TV station and let them put you in front of a camera to enact your grief. And you name the funeral home on television and to the Kentucky attorney general’s office and the Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors. The woman's ex-husband, father of the 17-year-old boy who died of a heart condition, also appears on camera, just to say what the funeral home did was "not malicious."

What if your family member had died, and you discovered the ground-up bones they gave you — they aren't really "ashes" — are in a Wal-Mart bag? Fragile souls should close that container back up and forget about it. Cover memories of the bag with memories of the dead person. Look at your best photographs. Remember life.

For less fragile souls: Find the humor. A remark about the value of recycling or what the dead one thought of Wal-Mart — for example: "He was always trying to get me to shop at Wal-Mart and I said I wanted a more posh shopping experience, and now, I can hear him laughing at me for wanting a more posh urn experience. Laughing at me from the grave. I mean from the goddamned Wal-Mart bag. No, not damned. He's not damned. He's gone to the Big Box Store in the Sky."

ADDED: Inevitable movie reference:

"A person has to be buried. Period. If we had Hitler here, we would bury Hitler."

Says the funeral director looking for a place to put the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

"My main thing is looking for a cemetery,” he said. “I’ve been making calls. I’ve been turned down by every one of them. All these people are petrified.”

Petrified of what? I can think of at least 5 things that are completely rational to fear.

The funeral director has sign-carrying protesters outside his door.

“He should burn in hell,” said Ann Mink of Worcester, who was part of the sign-toting crowd.

When you stroll through a cemetery, do you think about whether some of the souls previously housed in the bodies at your feet are suffering in hell? When you're choosing a cemetery, do you contemplate whether it contains bodies of souls now in hell and attempt to select one that's free of the damned? Would it trouble you to bury a loved one near the body of someone you believed was damned? If you don't believe in damnation, would you avoid cemeteries that contained bodies of those who you think would deserve to burn in hell, if there were such a place?

The intersection of Comics Curmudgeon and Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

Comics Curmudgeon, April 23, 2013, reads "Beetle Bailey":

Haha, are you tired of dry, lifeless hamburgers, Sarge? Why not enjoy this burger? It’s made up of flesh that’s been shredded into innumerable tendrils by an enormous industrial meat grinder; yet somehow, impossibly, that flesh is still alive, still moving, those tendrils writhing and squirming. The abomination has no eyes, so it cannot see, yet somehow it still senses the presence of another living thing, and so it drags itself impossibly across the plate, leaving an oozing trail of blood behind. It moves ever so slowly, and Sarge is paralyzed in terror as it twitches towards him. It hungers, he knows; it hungers for revenge, and to feed. He feels the clammy touch as the leading edge of this pulsating meat-mass touches his hand. He wants to run, wants to scream. But he cannot.

NYT, April 23, 2013: "Philadelphia Abortion Doctor Is Cleared on Some Counts."

Dr. Gosnell’s lawyer, Jack J. McMahon... dismissed prosecutors’ arguments that an arm movement by one of the fetuses, known as Baby C, indicated that it was alive. He said that the movement was “one spasm” but that the fetus was not breathing....

But Edward Cameron, an assistant district attorney, said that Baby C responded and “pulled back” when touched by medical staff. “That’s voluntary movement, and that’s all the law requires,” Mr. Cameron said. “That baby was alive.”... Mr. Cameron also highlighted the case of Baby D, which he said was 10 to 15 inches long and had a head “as big as a pancake.” It was moving when it was delivered into a toilet, Mr. Cameron said.

EMS workers who post pictures of the sick, wounded, and dead on social media...

"... a twisted hobby of voyeurism that has been part of the emergency-worker culture for years."

“I saw one where this victim’s head and spinal column were completely removed from his body,” [said one former EMS worker]. "Lots of people have them — patients galore, all ripped apart and mangled... And it’s not just EMS. Fire has them, too, of burn victims, and police take them of people who get killed. It runs across the service. They have them on their phones and there are lot of hardcover books like photo albums."

A nurse on Staten Island complained about one EMT who got his kicks shocking health workers with images of bodies arranged into poses. One showed a woman’s corpse hanging from a noose with a cigarette in its lips. Another showed dismembered legs placed in a sexually suggestive position.

"It was black humor. It was in poor taste. We're not saying it was OK, but it was not desecration."

Said the lawyer for one of the Marine snipers who urinated on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Lawsuit against the hotel that had a corpse in its water tank for perhaps as long at 19 days.

A class action has been filed against Los Angeles' Cecil Hotel.

The Los Angeles Public Health Department immediately tested the water supply, but told the manager they could stay open as long as they provided bottle water and warned guests not to drink the tap water.

The results of the testing showed no harmful bacteria in the tank or the pipes, according to Angelo Bellomo, director of environmental health for the department. Chlorine in the city's water may be the reason it is safe, he said last week....

New guests continued to check into the Cecil in the hours after firefighters removed Lam's body from the water tank. But each guest was asked to sign a waiver releasing the hotel from liability if they become ill.

"You do so at your own risk and peril," the hotel's release said.

Richard the Lionheart's heart... preserved in a lead box... analyzed by forensic experts.

The English king died in 1199.

After his death, his body was divided up - a common practice for aristocracy during the Middle Ages.... [The] heart was embalmed and buried in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen....

The heart, which was wrapped in linen, also had traces of myrtle, daisy, mint and possibly lime...

"That consciousness of using very high-quality herbs and spices and other materials that are much sought after and rare does add to that sense of it being Christ-like in its quality... Medieval kings were thought to represent the divine on Earth - they were set apart form other lay people and regarded as special and different...."

"The Department of Health determined there was no biohazard threat with a body being inside the water tank."

The body of a woman last seen on January 31st at the Cecil Hotel was discovered yesterday in the hotel's rooftop water tank. Guests were complaining about low water pressure.

How is there "no biohazard threat"? Can anyone explain the science of the health department's assurance?