"The police arrested Philan-Tam-Duy Le, 35, of Julian, Calif., for 'being in possession of the guillotine,' the department said in the statement. He was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon. 'It did have a real blade,' the police’s public information office said.... The man had driven to the nation’s capital from California, the police said. The truck was parked not far from the Library of Congress and other prominent Washington buildings.... It was unclear whether Mr. Le had driven the truck across the country with the guillotine on it, a journey that could have been more than 2,500 miles."
Is "being in possession of a guillotine" a crime? There's this at Law Commentary:
D.C. law bans several weapons by name, including machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, switchblade knives, and knuckles. It also covers other dangerous weapons when someone possesses them with the intent to use them unlawfully against another person. A guillotine is not specifically listed.... Prosecutors must establish that it qualifies as a dangerous weapon under the law and address the required intent....
D.C.’s highest local court applied that rule last year in Carrington v. United States, throwing out a weapons conviction involving an umbrella because prosecutors had not shown that it was likely to cause death or serious injury in the way it was used....
The police asked Le if it worked and he said, "Yeah, it’s the real deal, man."
Here's a free-access link to the column, which is by William Shoki, a journalist in Cape Town. So read for the content if you want, on your own.
What I want is to talk about the image. He's green. The little green man from Mars. But more importantly, his head is cut off, the top of his head, and it is cut off by a shape that is not a rectangle. It is angled....
The famous old line came to mind as I was listening to "The Joe Rogan Experience" and Joe, talking about the first days of the new Trump administration, exclaimed: "Wild times! Just wild! Like what a fun time to be alive!"
Bret Weinstein followed on:
"It just feels different. I have to tell you, I don't know what's coming, but it's at least, it's at least delightful not to know what to think."
He's got delight, as Wordsworth's French revolutionaries had bliss, but Weinstein professes to find his delight in not knowing what to think. He's distancing himself and enjoying his distance. I think of the spectators who lined the Place de la Révolution. Did they have reservations about the guillotine? Did they think I don't know what to think and find that unknowingness delightful?
Weinstein's thoughtfulness continued:
"The cynicism that was required to understand what was going on two months ago is now no longer required. You actually have to think about what you're, what you're told is coming down the pike and think, well, I don't know. Is that a solution? Is it, is that, yeah. Is it a negotiating tactic or is it a solution that's actually being proposed and would it work?"
Withhold judgment. Meanwhile, 10 more heads will have rolled.
You lie and smear, assuming you'll live out your days as a hanging judge and never find yourself in the dock. No cultural moment lasts forever. Yesterday's fanatics realise they joined the wrong mob. Populist movements shrivel and fall apart. Robespierre ended on the guillotine. pic.twitter.com/mlQhd22s2i
Face it, being called a Nazi by this crowd is like being called a lizard mutant from the plant Zorb. Let's both be careful to keep hiding our imaginary tails from those who're onto us.
The couple had been worshiping the god Shiva — one of the main deities of Hinduism — at an improvised temple they had set up on their property every day for the past year.
"By the way, I have come upon a new piece of slang within the past two months and it has puzzled me. I just heard it from a big newsboy who had a ‘stand’ on a corner. A small boy with several papers under his arm had edged up until he was trespassing on the territory of the other. When the big boy saw the small one he went at him in a threatening manner and said: ‘Here! Here! Twenty-three! Twenty-three!’ The small boy scowled and talked under his breath, but he moved away. A few days after that I saw a street beggar approach a well-dressed man, who might have been a bookmaker or horseman, and try for the usual ‘touch’. The man looked at the beggar in cold disgust and said: ‘Aw, twenty-three!’ I could see that the beggar didn’t understand it any better than I did. I happened to meet a man who tries to ‘keep up’ on slang and I asked [about] the meaning of ‘Twenty-three!’ He said it was a signal to clear out, run, get away."
Some people think it originated with Dickens's novel "A Tale of Two Cities"! It has to do with the numbers given to the doomed prisoners going to the guillotine:
Nothing brings home the French Revolution analogy quite as well as an actual guillotine left outside the homes of rich people. https://t.co/dXPEuZe9fx Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité . . . and la guillotine.https://t.co/uYehstN5SA
DC protester says: “when they become threatened, and we have no voice, the knives come out.” In front of a guillotine set up in front of Jeff Bezos complex in DC pic.twitter.com/synjRwgD1H
Were media leaders in the right place to cover the horror of the early days of the outbreak, when they weren’t being kept awake by sirens? And did they overplay the violent fringes of protests, when they’ve been overwhelmingly peaceful and the city’s broader mood has been a kind of revolutionary good cheer? Walking with a television executive past boutiques on Newtown Lane in East Hampton last week, I tried to convince him that his teenage children would be fine walking around their native Upper East Side unaccompanied. During the protests, the city could look terrifying on television, and reporters on the scene faced violence, mostly from police; but the mood away from the police billy clubs was not exactly the Reign of Terror. (Though stay tuned: When The New York Times forced out the opinion editor James Bennet over a controversial column a week ago, two employees reacted in Slack with a slackmoji of the word “guillotine,” prompting internal complaints, a Times reporter said. “We encourage constructive, honest dialogue among our colleagues but there are lines that can be crossed, and this was one of them,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in response.)
The language of Wednesday’s announcement is that nauseating blend of self-affirmation and Hollywood PR that is Harry and Meghan’s equivalent of baby-talk: ‘After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution.’ They want to ‘work to become financially independent’, while also ‘continuing to fully support’ the brand formerly known as Queen Elizabeth II....
It’s possible for a people to ditch a royal family — revolutionary Americans did just that — but it’s not possible for a royal family to ditch the people.... [T]here is no progressive new role for monarchy, other than renouncing titles and hereditary privileges, returning the palaces and parks to the people to whom they once belonged, and then rejoining us...
What they mean is ‘We want to use our status to lecture you ignorant plebs on institutional racism, environmental paranoia and other pet causes of the righteous rich — and because we think we can use our status as a soapbox, we’re going to retain as much of it as we can, titles and freebies and security details and exotic foreign holidays on Elton John’s private jet.’...
We will rapidly tire of their patronizing petulance, and only then will they finally attain the meaningful life they think they seek — as human sacrifices on the altar of celebrity.
That was well-written! I'm going to follow Dominic Green on Twitter. A sample Dominic Green tweet:
But we have to take steps to harden our schools so that they are less vulnerable to attack. This includes allowing well-trained and certified school personnel to carry concealed firearms. At some point, you need volume. I don’t know that a school is going to be able to hire a hundred security guards that are armed. Plus, you know, I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this week. And they weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners. All right?
The way they performed was, frankly, disgusting. They were listening to what was going on. The one in particular, he was then — he was early. And then you had three others that probably a similar deal a little bit later, but a similar kind of a thing.
You know, I really believe — you don’t know until you test it — but I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t had a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.
And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you.... The delusion that the people you've met are the good people. The disgusting — deplorable — people are farther away.
When other people do something disgusting, you should wonder whether, in the same situation, you'd have been disgusting too.
But he's serving up high hopes of solutions that could work, and like his dream of how he'd run into a stream of bullets for the kids, these solutions are happening now in the realm of the imaginary. You see yourself running toward danger, and you see the "well-trained and certified school personnel" with their concealed firearms "harden[ing] our schools." What fine, brave, competent personnel they are! But they'll be school district employees, just human beings beset by the complicated, unpredictable failings that cause real life to play out in a manner so different from dreams.
That's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening." That title was a clue in today's NYT crossword. The answer is Salvador Dali:
In this "hand-painted dream photograph", as Dalí generally called his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, amidst which [his wife] Gala is the subject of the scene.... In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a Yelloweye rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs....
In 1962, Dalí said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."
An elephant with long flamingo legs. That could be the new symbol of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that dreams.
"She had a fabulous figure, fabulous waist and big bosoms, and she looked good in her clothes."
That's André Leon Talley, doing a "Confirm or Deny" interview with Maureen Dowd. I'm putting this up for Meade because just yesterday we had a discussion about whether it's ignorant or jauntily jocose to put "bosom" in the plural (when speaking of only one person) and because the interview — the whole thing — is very amusing.
The OED takes my side on "bosoms": "In recent use, a woman's breasts. colloq." with quotes going back to 1959:
1959 C. MacInnes Absolute Beginners* 68 Snaps of the Dean sell like hot ice-cream among vintage women with too many bosoms and time on their hands.
1961 L. Hughes Ask your Mama 72 Sojourner..Bared her bosoms, bared in public To prove she was a woman.
1965 I. Fleming Man with Golden Gun v. 70 She gave him a quick glimpse of fine bosoms as she bent to the door of the icebox.
1978 C. Beaton Parting Years 2 Can you really imagine that is the way the arm comes out of the socket? Look at their bosoms—they're nowhere near where they should be. Have you ever seen a naked woman?
1986 Observer 2 Mar. 60/1 She was larger than lifesize: enormous buttocks and stomach, with two medium-sized watermelons for bosoms.
Those are some fine quotes! I love "medium-sized watermelons." Meade is outside shoveling snow, and here I am consulting the Oxford English Dictionary to win a debate from yesterday. It's not really a debate. I agree that "bosom" embraces the entire chestal area. "Bosoms," like "chestal area," is silly, and that is the point. By comparison, "breast" has always referred to the entire area OR to one of "the two soft protuberances situated on the thorax in females, in which the milk is secreted for the nourishment of their young; the mamma" (as the OED delightfully puts it). And by "always" I mean both meanings predate modern English.
Maureen Dowd got 2 articles out of her encounter with André Leon Talley. The other one is "Monsieur Vogue Is Leaving Trumpland." It's kind of sad. I don't remember noticing André Leon Talley, but he's an important fashion person. There had to be a reason to see him as being in Trumpland for it to be possible for him to be leaving Trumpland.
In fact, he'd traveled with Melania and helped her pick out her wedding gown. He'd "called Melania charming and private, 'soignée and polished' with 'impeccable' manners." He'd said that Melania was “a wonderful person to be with,” and that she “will be one of the great stars in the administration,” and even "I hope there will be a great, great Trump presidency.”
He got slammed by — well, Dowd doesn't say who:
It didn’t take long for the guillotine to fall. One friend emailed him, “Oh my God, you have gone to the Evil Empire!!!!!”
We're supposed to just somehow know that the fashion world demands that Trump be hated.
Did Talley contact Dowd and request some reputation-saving publicity? The next paragraph is:
He agonized about the “tragedy of ruptured friendships” to me in an email, saying about Melania: “She’s a nice person. I do not endorse Trumpism on any level. So why can’t one be positive and want her to shine? I mean, it’s good she cares about napkins, crystal, dinner plates with gilded edges to the point of over the top, and abundant flower arrangements. In the end, why pick on her when they should be picking on her husband’s billionaire cabinet and his seeming readiness to turn the country back towards oppression, anti-Semitism, anti-culturalism, etc.”
It sounds as though he wanted to play a part in the fashion and design side of the new presidency, but he couldn't bear the risk.
As we sit in the hotel lobby, he muses: “I’m not a big person in the world. I’m maybe a big figure in the fashion world. I mean, sort of iconic. But I don’t want to get phone calls in the middle of the night, telling me I’ve gone over to Trumpland and I’m going to Darth Vader because I said nice things about Melania....."
A sponsored message from Hillary Clinton appears in my Facebook feed.
I find the statement creepy. Why do my neighbors need to know? Why should I "make sure" my neighbors know what I'm expected to believe they think I'm supposed to do?
I mean, it's sort of true that if one were for Donald Trump in my neighborhood, one wouldn't feel secure putting up a sign. So the absence of a sign could raise a inference that you might want to dispel by putting up a Hillary sign... even if you were for Donald Trump.
If only there were a "Hey, everybody, I never put up a sign" sign. But it might just prod people to think that's probably because you realize we'd have to hate you if we knew what you thought.
"For moral prodigies, such pedestrian examples are beneath notice. Rousseau, 'drunk with virtue' as he put it in his 'Confessions,' nonetheless shipped off to a foundlings home all five of the children he had with his semi-literate mistress. She protested, but Rousseau cared not for he had 'never felt the least glimmering of love for her.' Robespierre floated aloft upon a similarly callous intoxication. The Republic, he said, was founded on 'virtue and its emanation, terror.' Hence the work of the Committee of Public Safety, whose chief handmaiden was the guillotine and whose activities depended critically on anonymous reports about those whose commitment to virtue was less than wholehearted. Yale, though sitting on a tax-exempt endowment of $24 billion, does not have the guillotine...."
Using drugs meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful... But executions are, in fact, nothing like that. They are brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality. Nor should it. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.
If some states and the federal government wish to continue carrying out the death penalty, they must turn away from this misguided path and return to more primitive — and foolproof — methods of execution. The guillotine is probably best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos. And the electric chair, hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps. The firing squad strikes me as the most promising. Eight or ten large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time. There are plenty of people employed by the state who can pull the trigger and have the training to aim true. The weapons and ammunition are bought by the state in massive quantities for law enforcement purposes, so it would be impossible to interdict the supply. And nobody can argue that the weapons are put to a purpose for which they were not intended: firearms have no purpose other than destroying their targets. Sure, firing squads can be messy, but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood. If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.
I chose Nina's "Nino's No-No" headline from among the possible headlines to blog about that mistake Justice Scalia made the other day, and I see that Nina Totenberg is pleased with her own headline writing:
[W]hen a Supreme Court justice pointedly cites the facts in a decision he wrote, and gets them exactly wrong, it is more than embarrassing. It makes for headlines among the legal cognoscenti.
I'm not sure I rank as one of the cognoscenti, but here's my headline for Justice Antonin Scalia's booboo: "Nino's No-No."
Nina notes that some Scalia law clerk " is — to put it in delicate terms — likely having anatomical changes made to his or her body." I think that's a reference to the old guillotine metaphor heads must roll.
Or am I inclining toward French imagery because Scalia's horrible error appeared right under a subheading that read "Plus Ça Change: EPA's Continuing Quest for Cost-Benefit Authority"?
If you're going to dissent, criticizing the comprehension of others, and you get flashy about it with attention-getting language — like "Plus Ça Change," which requires more than the ability to read French — you're glaring light on any mistakes of your own you may make. If you take an imperious tone, you're setting yourself up for a harder fall if you trip.
The "Plus Ça Change" phrase has, along with the correction of the mistake, been replaced by the very modest "Our Precedent."
"Plus Ça Change" requires more than the ability to read French because it's only the beginning of a longer phrase, and the meaning is only understood by those who know how the phrase ends: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." But it's just what is a reasonably well-known aphorism in English: The more things change, the more they remain the same.
The French aphorism, by the way, comes from the 19th century writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, who also said, on the topic of abolishing the death penalty: "Je veux bien que messieurs les assassins commencent"/"Let the gentlemen who do the murders take the first step."
Is severed head covered in the Obamacare-conforming plans?
The article, by Michael D. Shear, begins:
For weeks, the president and his aides have said they are not interested in conducting a witch hunt in the middle of the effort to rescue the website.
But they've gotten interested. Apparently, a witch hunt is just the right distraction for the holiday season. But heads are rolling, so the image is a guillotine — a reign of terror. But feel free to picture hangings (witch execution, American-style) or burnings at the stake (if you want to go medieval).
The possible targets include Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary; Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services; Mike Hash, the head of the health and human services health reform office; Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer at Medicaid and Medicare; Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the website; Jeanne Lambrew, the head of health care policy inside the White House; David Simas, a key adviser involved in the rollout; and Todd Park, the president’s top adviser on technology issues.
Don't pick all women. That would look bad. Maybe Mike Hash and Todd Park, I'd say, just going on the optics of the names. You just need heads. Which heads would look best on a pike?
No, no, no. Our modern Messiah must survive. The metaphorical executions must be directed somewhere lower down. I say Mike Hash and Todd Park and then throw in a lady too. Kathleen Sebelius. No, make it Marilyn Tavenner.
That's a nice array of heads. Enough of a purge to settle you down until the new year?
Roseanne Barr is a comedian. It's irrelevant whether you find this funny or not. She's laboring in the field of comedy:
"I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount of that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn't help, then being beheaded," Barr said with a straight face.
Comedy is hard. She's cranking up the hyperbole to higher and higher levels, maintaining the deadpan all the way. Do not revile her in her suffering.
There are some people who need to apologize to Mr. Justice David Prosser now that he has been cleared and soon. They took a shallowly researched and preposterous allegation -- that Prosser held fellow justice Ann Walsh Bradley in a chokehold -- and ran to the guillotine with it.
Yes, let's look back on the public demonstrations. Let's remember that protesters had a big ugly balloon effigy of Justice Prosser, which they tied by the neck to a lamppost. Look at their signs. Let's remember how these protesters strung together "allegations about Justice Prosser choking Justice Bradley [with] much more general issues about abortion and violence against women." As I said at the time:
I heard no acknowledgements of the uncertainties about what we know about what happened and no sensitivity about fairness and due process. I heard: 1. declarations about the importance of women's issues and 2. a demonization of Justice Prosser.
This is the level of left-wing activism we witnessed here in Madison. A justice is despised because his decisions do not please liberals, and so, without thought, they forgot about things liberals like to love themselves for caring about, such as fairness and due process. These are the same people who have been chanting the chant "shame, shame, shame" for months up at the Capitol.
How are they not oppressed by their own shame? Seriously, for the purposes of writing the previous paragraph, I channeled the feeling of shame that I would feel if I had done that, and now I am literally nauseated. If I had said what the people in the video at the last link said, I would be weeping now and begging forgiveness. But I am not them, so I will simply ask that they stage a rally in support of Justice Prosser and they publicly retract their earlier statements and commit themselves to the core principles of liberalism: fairness and due process.
Blaska demands apologies from people who should be "ashamed of their lynch mob mentality." He names the "practitioners of the dark arts of 'by any means necessary.'" Check out his list (which unfortunately includes the name of a UW law student). I'll highlight this:
Ms. Emily Mills owes an apology for blogging that UW law professor and bloggress Ann Althouse "has gone to great and terrible lengths to excuse the alleged behavior, attack the credibility of only the anonymous sources with whom she disagrees, suggest that no arrests (yet) mean no wrongdoing, impugn the honor of Justice Bradley, and cast doubt on the very justice system of this state." Looks like it is the other way around, Ms. Emily.
(Here's my contemporaneous pushback of Mills.) Blaska ends his column with a request for more names. I have one: Bill Wineke. Like Mills, he owes me an apology.
ADDED: My analysis of the investigative report that was released today is in the previous post.
He didn't do anything with his dick, phone, and internet access that millions of his fellow Americans aren't also doing. He got a few online thrills, he sent out a few pics, he drained his sack sitting in front of his computer. This is part of the new normal, people, just another one of the ways technology is impacting and shaping our lives....
Now here's what I hope the legally married congressman doesn't do: confess to having a problem, blame "sex addiction," check into the Tiger Woods Memorial Sex/Career Rehabilitation Center, resurface a month later Dr. Drew's couch looking contrite, and apologize to the American people for being one of them.
By checking into rehab—by pretending that it's him, and not the culture, that has a problem with sex—Weiner is sharpening the blade on the guillotine to which he's been dragged.
Why didn't Weiner fight for the right to fool around on line, new-normal-style? By pandering to the old normal and aiding the forces of repression by spreading the lie that the new normal is an illness, he lost Dan Savage.
"She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn't even bother to lower her panties...." Etc. etc. "... Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: 'I'm going to pull the lever, I'm going to let the blade drop.' She begged me: 'Please, fuck my pussy.' - 'No.' I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg."
Read all the finalists — and laugh (or climax!) — here. Be charitable. It's really very hard to write about sex. Have you ever tried to do it? If you have, I hope you had the sense to laugh at yourself.
Over the years, some of literature's most glittering names have competed for one of its least coveted prizes.
Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Philip Roth are titans among novelists, generally acclaimed for their representations of every kind of human experience - except one.
When writing about sex, says the Literary Review magazine, their standards slip.
Here's the Roth passage that got noticed this year (from "The Humbling"):
He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps...
It was a big year for devices, apparently. Again, I'm cutting the most NSFW parts, which you can click over and read.
... There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement - the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.
It was English that Pegeen spoke when she looked over from where she was, now resting on her back beside Tracy, combing the little black cat-o'-nine-tails through Tracy's long hair, and, with that kid-like smile that showed her two front teeth, said to him softly, 'Your turn. Defile her.'....
Oh, okay. I liked the coyote, though, Phil. That was good. And the "mask on her genitals," that "weird totem mask." That meant something.
IN THE COMMENTS: DADvocate wrote:
I've always wanted to write about nerd sex. Certainly, it would win the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
"After the proper amount of digital manipulation of each others genitalia, I inserted my penis into her vaginal orifice and began rhythmic thrusting motions at a cadence I had calculated to maximize her arousal...."
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