"The Seinfeld cast refused to film this episode. So we animated it instead."

"Jerry and and Julia read this one scene where she has the gun and she's holding in her hand and she says to Jerry in the car, 'All right, Jerry, where do you want it? The Kennedy, the McKinley?' And she could barely get it out of her mouth. And I used to sit right next to Juliet... and I remember her saying it and just looking at me with the most pathetic eyes and then looking at Jerry... and she went, 'I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this.'"

"Over the past 21 terms, the closest any member of the court got to Justice Jackson’s loquaciousness was Justice Stephen G. Breyer..."

"... who was famous for unspooling elaborate hypothetical questions featuring flights of fancy like marshmallow guns (in a case about attempted robbery) and tomato children (in a case about a federal drug law). Still, Justice Breyer... uttered an average of 818 words, or roughly two thirds as many as Justice Jackson [who averages 1263 words]. The runner-up to Justice Jackson in the four years since she joined the court... is Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at 791 words. His colleagues treated Justice Breyer’s professorial digressions with bemused tolerance. Justice Jackson’s extended questioning, by contrast, has been a source of annoyance to some of the other justices, The New York Times reported last October...."

Writes Adam Liptak, in "How a Covid-Era Scramble Transformed Supreme Court Arguments/Live audio, a new format and new voices have transformed and unsettled the court’s signature public ceremony" (NYT gift link).

Liptak offers 3 reasons why Justice Jackson seizes the opportunity to speak far more than anyone else and in defiance of clearly expressed annoyance: 1. She developed her style as a trial judge, the only judge in the courtroom, 2. Her side of the Court is outnumbered, 3. As the junior member of the Court, she's forced to go last when the Justices speak in order of seniority.

Jackson's outsized role at oral argument is so extreme, and so much attention has been paid to it. Clearly, she's choosing it, in spite of the criticism and even disdain and ridicule. She must believe she's doing exactly the right thing. Perhaps she views her contribution as proportionate if you measure not by the number of Justices but by the weight and power of the ideas they represent.

"We see them every day and we just say hi and they’re very nice. They’re peaceful people, they don’t make any noise and when they see you they say hi."

Said a neighbor of Cole Tomas Allen, quoted in "Who is Cole Tomas Allen? White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting suspect in custody/The suspect in the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting was identified as California man Cole Tomas Allen" (Independent).

What's with the awkward "they" pronouns? "They’re peaceful people," etc. Maybe that's just the way they talk in California.

Allen has an elite degree — Caltech. "While a student at Caltech, Allen was a member of the school’s Christian fellowship and the Nerf club. He was featured in a 2017 photo that was posted by the school on Facebook following his graduation. In that photo, he’s holding a picture of himself as a child with a stuffed rabbit.... On his LinkedIn page, Allen described himself as a 'mechanical engineer and computer scientist by degree, ​independent game developer by experience, teacher by birth.' He lists his 'Causes' on that profile as 'Science and Technology.'"

Political affiliation? "Allen donated $25 to the political action committee ActBlue in October 2024, a month before Donald Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris.... According to FEC filings, it was his only political donation in the past ten years."

Caltech NERF Club describes itself at Facebook: "a group of people who raid random buildings on campus and shoot NERF guns at each other. Various other activities include: the modification of blasters for cool effects, mechanical improvements, and cosmetic bad-assery; shoot the Albert Yang game; long-term NERF games such as Red Vs Blue and Humans vs. Zombies."

ADDED: "In a brief interview with The New York Post, neighbor Jeff Smith said that he felt as though Allen was 'on the spectrum.'"

"The American Cornhole League said in 2023 that Webber was a 'shining example of our slogan — anyone can play, anyone can win.'"

That's the last line of a Fox10 article with the headline "Quadruple-amputee cornhole player accused of shooting man to death during argument."

Dayton James Webber, 27, is a professional cornhole player. He was 10 months old when he had a blood infection that cost him his limbs.

It's hard to picture a quadruple amputee shooting a gun, but we are told that he was also driving a car, he shot the front-seat passenger, and there were also backseat passengers, and when they got out of the car and declined to pull the victim out of the car for him, Webber drove off with the victim still in the front seat.

And so it goes for the shining example of the notion that anyone can do anything.

By the way, who knew there was a professional cornhole league?

"The right to publicly carry weapons is a centerpiece of Second Amendment advocacy and has emerged as a key issue in the shooting of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti...."

"Bill Essayli, Los Angeles' top federal prosecutor and a Trump ally, received fierce blowback from gun-rights groups over his Saturday claim that there is a 'high likelihood' law enforcement will be 'legally justified' in shooting someone who approaches them with a gun. The National Rifle Association responded on X that this sentiment was 'dangerous and wrong.' Gun Owners of America condemned Essayli's statement, writing that the Second Amendment 'protects Americans' right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon.' Essayli claimed that condemnation 'mischaracterize[d]' his statement...."

From "Gun rights groups challenge shooting of legally armed Minneapolis man" (Axios).

And here's Jonathan Chait, in "What MAGA Really Thinks of the Second Amendment/Now Americans know" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Police Say Jewish Community Targeted in Deadly Sydney Attack/Two people were in custody after the shooting at Australia’s best-known beach during a Jewish event."

The NYT reports.

"The rare mass shooting sent crowds scattering on Australia’s best-known beach.... Shootings are rare in Australia, a country with one of the lowest gun-related death rates in the developed world."

"Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie."

A quote from the subject of the NYT obituary "Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Black Power Activist Known as H. Rap Brown, Dies at 82."

He died in prison, convicted of murder. But once: "With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners."

Other quotes in the article: "Black folk built America, and if it don’t come around, we’re gonna burn America down," "You’ve got to arm yourself. If you’re going to loot, loot yourself a gun store," and, referencing 5 days of rioting, “I don’t think you could articulate the sentiments of Black people any better than they just did in Detroit."

The NYT prints the full "n-word." Is it fit to print? I won't write it. But it is the second word of the 3-word title of the man's 1969 autobiography. The other 2 words are "Die."

"How many people have that much cash buried in tubs under their property?"

Wrote the trial judge, quoted in "Police Found $1 Million in a Tub Under a Garage. The Government Gets to Keep It. A court ruled that the hidden cash, which the police found while searching for an illegal gun in Ontario, did not lawfully belong to the man living on the property" (NYT).

On Dec. 1, 2009, the police searched a house on the outskirts of Thunder Bay, Ontario, looking for an illegal .22-caliber handgun. Instead, they found cash....

"A decade ago, Republican voters, furious with their leaders... tossed out all conventional notions of presidential fitness to coalesce behind Donald Trump."

"Platner is still a contender because a similar alienation is building among Democrats, and party elites seem to have no idea what to do about it."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind" (NYT).

The headline doesn't say why Platner looks finished: He had a big Nazi tattoo on his chest. How does Goldberg get around that? She explains punk culture:

"The issue of minority gun ownership has long been fraught. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people..."

"... should not be recognized as citizens because it would give them the right 'to keep and carry arms wherever they want.' Even after Black people became citizens entitled to Second Amendment rights, they often had to deal with discriminatory gun laws limiting their access to firearms.... 'The trans people I know, both gun owners and others, see the prospect of the D.O.J. taking trans people’s guns as a prelude to atrocity,' Eden Fenn, a young trans woman, told me. She called herself 'the definition of a reluctant gun owner,' describing her ownership as a precautionary measure against the potential of anti-trans violence.... Mental health is often weaponized against the trans community.... [T]here are legitimate concerns about the high rates of depression and suicidal ideation among trans people.... Everyone I spoke with talked about their gun-safety plans. Some suggested that it should be normalized to offload your guns to a friend while going through a traumatic experience.... There are no easy answers—only a delicate calculus to be made...."

Writes Grace Byron, in "The Complexities of Trans Gun Ownership/In the face of threats and harassment, some trans Americans are becoming gun owners—only to be targeted by the same movements that claim to defend gun rights" (The New Yorker).

"We banned assault weapons, but our laws only go so far when an AR-15 can be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought into New York to commit mass murder."

Said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "Even New York’s Strict Gun Laws Couldn’t Prevent the Midtown Shooting" (NYT).

"Five Catholic saints are on the list, including Elizabeth Ann Seton.... However, there is not a single female athlete, unless you count sharpshooter Annie Oakley."

From "Who’ll be in Trump’s hero garden? There are a few surprises. The list of nearly 250 includes the famous, the obscure and, in some cases, the intentionally controversial" (WaPo)(free-access link).

"She is desperate for the book to not be a downer, to be a jolt instead. 'The pity fucking kills me,' she said. 'It kills my strength.'"

"She wanted the perception to be 'the opposite: She’s alive. She’s enjoying her life. This is great.' She went on: 'The book is highly comedic. And then it slides down into horrible tragedy and then comes back up to the punch line.' I’d finished the whole thing, but I had to ask what the punch line was. There were a handful, she said. But the most important one was that you’re never too old to get even."

From "E. Jean Carroll’s Uneasy Peace/In the year and a half since defeating Trump for the second time, she’s written a secret book — and learned to shoot" (NY Magazine).

At the end of this long article, there's some discussion of the security around her home. Asked if she worried about the danger of turning off her security lights so that the frogs that once mated in her swimming pool would sing again, as they had in the past:

"In the manifesto, called 'War Against Humanity,' the author writes that they have 'grown to hate people, and society' and calls their parents 'scum.'"

"The author also writes that they acquired weapons 'by lies and manipulation, and my father's stupidity' and describes wanting to die by suicide, but feeling like carrying out a shooting was 'better for evolution rather than just one stupid boring suicide.'"

Writes Newsweek, in "Natalie Rupnow's Reported Manifesto: What We Know" (about the school shooting that took place in my city yesterday).

The use of the word "scum" in a manifesto makes me think of "SCUM Manifesto," a 1967 feminist document. I discussed it back in 2017, when Facebook was banning some women who wrote about men as "scum." The "SCUM Manifesto" begins: "'Life' in this 'society' being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of 'society' being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex."

And yet, this new manifesto — what I'm seeing of it, anyway — uses the language of gender neutrality: "Humanity... people... society... parents." There is, however, "father." I see that Newsweek is using they/them pronouns for the killer.

Newsweek also reports President Joe Biden's hasty response: "We need Congress to act. Now. From Newtown to Uvalde, Parkland to Madison.... Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines...."

But when he pardoned his son Hunter for violating existing gun laws, Joe Biden attacked the prosecution as unfair and biased. One might have thought he'd refrain from calling for more gun laws when he so recently and conspicuously treated a gun law as not justifying enforcement. And yet didn't we all expect it — expect that next time there's a school shooting, Joe would indignantly cry out for more gun laws? #hypocrisy

"Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it. Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now..."

"... they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose."

Said Nancy Pelosi, answering the question "why did voters who earned less than $100,000 go for Trump in such large numbers," in "The Interview/Nancy Pelosi Insists the Election Was Not a Rebuke of the Democrats" (NYT).

"I'm a gun owner... and if somebody breaks in my house, they're getting shot... Probably should not have said that, but my staff will deal with that later."

Said Kamala Harris, at last night's Oprah event:

1. Where does her prosecutor persona come into play here? She knows it's not good legal advice to encourage people to go ahead and shoot a person who has broken into the house but not yet physically threatened you.

2. That's why she said "probably should not have said that." She knows it's bad, but she almost seems to want to display herself as somewhat bad. She’s been trying to come across as one of us, a "middle class" American, fond of our guns and adamant about protecting our family inside the home. She needs to replace the image that she's that person who said — in 2007 video that went viral yesterday — "Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs."

3. Which Kamala is she — the one who walks into your house to check to see if you're being responsible or the one that shoots the person who walks into her home? I suspect she isn't really either person, but is simply saying what seemed worth saying at the time.

4. Don't get me started on the distinction between "breaking" into the home and "walking" into the home. I see it, and you can do your own legal research. I read her first comment to create an image of finding someone in her house and shooting him because he's there, and I read her second statement to say that she would use the authority of the state to gain access to the homes of people who are not opening the door and inviting her in.

5. She's portraying herself as the lone armed protector of her home, but we all know she has the Secret Service protecting her. 

6. My favorite part of the quote is "but my staff will deal with that later." The staff will clean up after me. I'd like to see the Harris impersonators do a scene where Kamala is President, making wild, impulsive decisions, then laughing, and saying lightheartedly — as World War III begins — "my staff will deal with that later."

Trump says he thinks that Biden withdrew because he was "threatened... violently."

From the Theo Von podcast embedded in the previous post — at 44:31. Von asked about what pushed Biden to let go of the nomination he had won in the primaries. Trump said:

"I know what happened, and you're not supposed to do that. It's not supposed to be probably constitutional. She got no votes. He got 14 million votes. All of a sudden they're telling him to get out. or they threatened him. And he is an angry person."

Von breaks in to ask, "But who are 'they'?" and Trump responds:  

"Well, I would say Schumer, Pelosi, and numerous other people — the heads of the Democrat Party, yeah — and they did, they threatened him violently, I think. And he didn't want to get out. Remember he said only God will get me out — right? Only God... Yeah, and what happened is they went to him, and they said — this was after the debate — now, if he didn't have the debate he would still be running...."

What violence is Trump talking about?  

Haven't I looked into the word "violence" before? Yes, I did the OED routine back in 2019 when Elizabeth Warren introduced the term "traffic violence":

To what extent does "violence" mean that the damaging action was intentional? The first definition is, as expected, "The deliberate exercise of physical force..."

But then there's "Great strength or power of a natural force or physical action" — for example, a storm or an earthquake. There's no mind deliberating there (though maybe there's an implication of human will and the usage is metaphorical, such as when corny writers tell you the sea was "angry").

"Violence" is also "Great intensity or severity, esp. of something destructive or undesirable. Example: " Mrs. Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home..for a rest." (That's Aldous Huxley.)

Similarly, there's "Vehemence or intensity of emotion, behaviour, or language; extreme fervour; passion." Example, from Shakespeare, "Marke me, with what violence she first lou'd the Moore." But now we've got the human mind in play again. I don't think what's being called "traffic violence" is any intensity in the traffic, just accidents, by people who didn't mean to do that (if we set aside the very tiny proportion of car damage done by an evildoer deliberately running somebody down).

"Violence" is also used to refer to restrictions imposed on nature, as in "He was obliged to attend near a Quarter of an Hour, though with great Violence to his natural Impetuosity, before he was suffered to speak" (Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones" (1749)).

And then there's the "Improper treatment or use of a word or text; misinterpretation; misapplication; alteration of meaning or intention." Again, from "Tom Jones": "A Passion which might, without any great Violence to the Word, be called Love."

Back then, the issue was the lack of intentionality in car accidents. Pressuring Biden to drop out was completely intentional, so the issue here is whether "violently" connotes physically injuring him. I find it very hard to believe anyone threatened to physically injure him, but perhaps it's not so hard to believe that Trump thinks that or that Trump would lie and say that he thinks that. 

But let's look at the fact that Trump did say that he thinks Schumer, Pelosi, and numerous other people — the heads of the Democrat Party — threatened Biden violently.

Now, maybe the word "violently" was used in a different sense that doesn't involve physical injury, that aligns with the OED's definition of "violence" in terms of great intensity, severity, vehemence, fervor, and passion. Maybe Trump just meant to say They threatened him very strongly. Then his use of "violently" may be easy to accept... depending on what the meaning of "threatened" is.

Of course, Trump has been accused of inciting violence on January 6, 2021. That word looms large in his subjective experience of persecution. So I don't think he uses it lightly. I think he feels mistreated in these accusations of violence. Perhaps he thinks: If they're going to use that word wildly as they come for me, I'm using it against them. Very strongly.

"And over 26 years of marriage, Gail played housewife. But in the early years it was for a house full of groupies."

"'A diverse array of horny dreamers, oddballs, misfits, and sycophants freeload on heavy rotation,' Moon describes in her memoir. (They included longtime Zappa bassist Roy Estrada, who was later twice convicted on charges of child molestation.) 'I still wear my pacifier around my neck for security, never knowing who’s safe and who isn’t, who my dad is humping and who he isn’t.' In a 1971 documentary, Frank was asked about his affairs on the road. 'I like to get laid,' he said. What about your wife, the interviewer asked? 'She’s become accustomed to it over a period of years,' says Zappa.... In fact, Gail was bitterly unhappy about his extramarital pursuits and could explode into rages. Moon writes about the time her father asked her to find the gun so her mother couldn’t get her hands on it. 'Gail is on a rampage,' he said. 'I didn’t even know we had a gun,' she writes.... Even after the groupies drifted away, nothing much changed. There was no structure, no family vacations, no PTA meetings. None of the four Zappa children graduated from high school.... Ahmet and Moon... each ran away from home only to find that nobody seemed to notice."

From "Frank Zappa’s kids are still grappling with his legacy — and each other/Like their dad’s oddball rock songs, their family defied description. His music, and their pain, has endured" (WaPo)(free access link).

"Everyone... had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch."

"Stop cutting your toenails on your desk. Don’t bring a gun to the office.... H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls."

From "So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?/Get in line behind the H.R. managers themselves, who say that since the pandemic, the job has become an exasperating ordeal. 'People hate us,' one said" (NYT).

"... Vance offers what right-wing politicians have always peddled to downwardly mobile Americans: the quasi-spiritual saga of family-bred individual uplift..."

"... which serves to neatly underwrite the broader political fable of great-leader salvation.... As 'our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor, and in years to come with cheap Chines fentanyl,' Vance announced with relief, 'I had a guardian angel'—his Ohio grandmother, immortalized as 'Meemaw' in Hillbilly Elegy. The rapt convention crowd took up the chant of 'MEEMAW' in jubilant recognition, and thrilled to Vance’s later parable of Meemaw’s cache of handguns. After she had died in 2005, he related in folksy relish, 'we went through her things [and] we found 19 loaded handguns,' strewn throughout various corners of her house. The convention crowd hooted and applauded in recognition, and then Vance delivered another redemptive moral: As Meemaw contended with the challenges of aging and illness, she made sure that 'she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family.' Here the crowd plunged into a reflexive chant of 'USA!'.... What does the domestic arsenal of an aging relative have to do with the glories of our Republic?... A bellicose citizenry must rally to save and bolster its imperiled birthright by any means necessary—under a great leader’s tutelage, of course."

Writes Chris Lehmann, in "J.D. Vance’s Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled. The vice presidential nominee pitched himself as an avatar of the working class. Don’t believe the hype" (The Nation).

Hey, at least cover your tracks if you're writing about a book you haven't read. It's not "Meemaw." Its Mamaw.