"In the days before the sentence was carried out, she had tried to keep living as if nothing was about to happen... She showered and wore thick felt-like clothes..."

"... to absorb the blows as much as possible.... What surprised Roody most, she said, was the appearance of the female officer carrying out the flogging. She said: 'She was an older woman in a black chador, with a thick moustache. She was religious. It was strange. If you saw her somewhere else, you would never imagine this was her job. She looked ordinary.' She said the woman seemed to be trying to be gentle, but that did not lessen the violence. 'It did not stop me from hating them,' said Roody.... 'I hated her polite, ceremonial tone,' she said, adding: 'She spoke to me as if she were doing something normal. Before it started, she even joked and said: "Are you scared? Don’t worry, the whip is very thin and I won’t hit hard." Then she took out a Quran. She prayed and closed it. They try to cleanse their own dirty work.... She had made a few promises to herself before the punishment, one of which was that she would not make a sound. 'I came home with my head held high, the way I wanted,' she said. For Roody, the punishment was not only physical. It was designed to humiliate and was part of a longer history of violence against women...."

From "I danced until 2am… then it was off to my flogging/An Iranian rapper and critic of regime was determined to show no suffering as a woman in a black chador put down her Quran and picked up her whip" (London Times).

"On American TV shows, the London native starred as an android brought to an asteroid to keep a prisoner (Jack Warden) company on 1959’s 'The Lonely'..."

"... the seventh episode of CBS’ 'The Twilight Zone,' and she was the self-described 'office bitch' Roz in 1982-83 on ABC’s adaptation of '9 to 5.'"

From "Jean Marsh, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ Actress and Co-Creator, Dies at 90/The British actress won an Emmy for her performance as the prim and proper parlormaid Rose Buck on the acclaimed ITV drama ['Upstairs, Downstairs']" (Hollywood Reporter).

I saw that yesterday and immediately watched the "Twilight Zone" episode, "The Lonely." Marsh plays a robot, given, mercifully, to a man condemned to 50 years alone on a desolate asteroid:

It's a great robot story! Watch the full episode here, on Vimeo. Great ending (with a great teaser for next week's show). I don't remember having seen "The Lonely" before, and I devotedly watched the show at the time, but perhaps not until after the first season, which aired in 1959, when I was 8. 

The actor who plays the condemned man in "The Lonely" is Jack Warden. That blew my mind! I had just finished watching "Shampoo" (on The Criterion Channel) the previous night.

In "Shampoo," Warden plays the male character who is not played by Warren Beatty. I never go around thinking about Jack Warden! And yet yesterday, before I got the prompt to watch "The Lonely," I was thinking about Jack Warden. Here's the trailer, which has everything you need to know about Warren Beatty and just a bit of Jack Warden:

"Do you think that someone who is a drug addict is absolutely incapable of -- that all people who are drug addicts are absolutely incapable of refraining from using drugs?..."

"All right. Then compare that with a person who absolutely has no place to sleep in a particular jurisdiction. Does that person have any alternative other than sleeping outside?... They have... none. They have absolutely none. There's not a single place where they can sleep.... So the point is that the connection between drug addiction and drug usage is more tenuous than the connection between absolute homelessness and sleeping outside."

Said Justice Alito, in yesterday's oral argument in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. There's a precedent, Robinson v. California, that found it to be cruel and unusual punishment to make a crime of the "status" of drug addiction. The 9th Circuit said that the city — by prohibiting sleeping outdoors — had made a crime out of the status of homelessness.

For more detail, see the SCOTUSblog coverage: "Court divided over constitutionality of criminal penalties for homelessness."

"The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether an Oregon city can enforce its ban on public camping against homeless people...."

"San Francisco, which spent over $672 million during the last fiscal year to provide shelter and housing to people experiencing homelessness, told the justices in a 'friend of the court' brief that its inability to enforce its own laws 'has made it more difficult to provide services' to those people.... [In a 2018 case, the 9th Circuit] held that punishing homeless people for public camping would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment if they did not have access to shelter elsewhere. The court of appeals reasoned that, just as the city could not punish someone for their status – being homeless – it also could not punish them for conduct 'that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless.'"

Writes Amy Howe, at SCOTUSblog.

Here's the 9th Circuit opinion: Johnson v. City of Grants Pass.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board quickly responded with "Is There a Constitutional Right to Vagrancy?":

"[T]he Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies...."

"'The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,' said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist.... 'They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.'... 'Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,' Dr. Cooney said. A relief in the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th century B.C. battle details prisoners being brought back to the pharaoh Merneptah with 'donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.' If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. 'The stink must have been awful, and thus the "fish in baskets" comment,' Dr. Cooney said."

From "In Ancient Egypt, Severed Hands Were Spoils of War/Archaeologists offer a new explanation for one of the century’s grislier finds, 'a carefully gathered collection of hands' in a 3,500-year-old temple" (NYT). 

"I was so angry and just irritated at seeing man after man — you know, typically, male politicians — grandstanding about abortion."

Said Gabrielle Blair, quoted in "Gabrielle Blair Would Like a Word With Men/After 16 years of making a name for herself as a blogger and home decor expert, Design Mom has written her manifesto — about reproductive health" by Kase Wickman (NYT).

The NYT article seems to be a reaction to the fact that a book Blair created out of a 64-post-long Twitter thread has debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’s paperback nonfiction best-seller list.

Here's the Twitter thread, and here's the book: “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion.” 

Now, my readers may be saying tough luck for Althouse. She could have written a book called "Don't Be a Splooge Stooge," but Blair got to the best-seller list first. Of all my unwritten books, that's the one I'm least sad about not devoting a year of my life to.

The bankruptcy barrel.

I was amused by these "Exclusive Emojis from Elon Musk" drawings from Barry Blitt (in The New Yorker). Please check them all out. I'm just going to focus on one (and not because it's the best in the set of 12):

  

I just want to talk about the image — which I've seen all my life — of a guy wearing a barrel. I understand it means you're so poor you don't have even a shred of normal clothing and your only hope of modesty is wearing this very bulky, unwieldy object, the barrel.

"An eight-foot tall whipping post has been removed from outside the Sussex County Courthouse in Georgetown, Delaware."

"The Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs (HCA) said the post had been used to bind and whip people for crimes up until 1952, with African Americans being punished disproportionately" — 6ABC reports.

I remember growing up in Delaware and talking about whipping still being on the books as a form of punishment. Exactly how did we experience that? Hard to remember, but I think it just seemed weird, something odd about our state. It was something that wasn't actually used, but it could be. It was there. You never know!

Delaware abolished the punishment of whipping in 1972, but keeping it on display was apparently considered valuable as a matter of history. But, the director of the Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, Tim Slavin says it ought "to be preserved in the state's collections, so that future generations may view it and attempt to understand the full context of its historical significance," but....

"It's quite another thing to allow a whipping post to remain in place along a busy public street - a cold, deadpan display that does not adequately account for the traumatic legacy it represents, and that still reverberates among communities of color in our state."

Interesting use of the word "deadpan," which I feel as though I've only ever seen as a way to deliver comic lines, and obviously there was no comedy behind the stark presence of the whipping post. But "deadpan" simply refers to the expressionless face, and the missing expression can just as well be disapproval or regret.

But something is lost when the notorious object is removed from its historical place. You can no longer go there and see and touch it and say, right here, this is where Delaware whipped its convicted criminals, and imagine that happening to you, perhaps contemplating whether you might prefer a minute of whipping to a year in prison.

From a 2013 Delaware Today article:

"Inmates [on suicide watch] are often placed naked in suicide cells, which are usually bare concrete, often without bedding (to prevent hanging by using bedsheets)..."

"... and under frequent or continuous observation by guards. Unsanitary conditions are also common since toilet paper, underwear and tampons (all potential means of choking) are restricted. Being exposed without any way of covering oneself, coupled with being under constant observation, can aggravate mental distress, particularly if the inmate has been a victim of sexual abuse. These harsh conditions came to light in 1998 when Elizabeth B., an inmate of Framingham prison in Massachusetts, USA, called a radio talk show to describe how she had been treated while on suicide watch: 'I was ... put on eyeball status, stripped of belongings, clothing, placed naked in a room with nothing but a plastic mattress on the floor. Watched 24 hours a day by a man or woman. I was on my period but because of my status not allowed to have tampons or underwear. I was very humiliated, degraded. Being on eyeball status with male officers, my depression intensified. I didn't want to be violated any more than I already was, so I put the mattress up against the window. When I did that I was in violation because they couldn't see me. The door was forced open, I was physically restrained in four-point restraints - arms, legs spreadeagled, tied to the floor, naked, helmet on head, men and women in the room.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Suicide watch," which I'm reading this morning because I saw on Twitter that some people had been aggressively editing the page inserting references to Jeffrey Epstein. If you look at the revision history for the page, you'll see that a huge number of back-and-forth edits were made yesterday until the "protection level" of the page was raised.

I copied the text you see above because it may help understand why Jeffrey Epstein was not kept on suicide watch, even though he had (apparently) attempted suicide last month. The treatment is so severe that to continue it might be cruel and unusual punishment. It could be used to deliberately torment a prisoner.

"T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications."

An exposé in the NYT. It ends:

“Write whatever you want to write about us on the negative side,” Mr. Landry told a reporter. “But at the end of the day, my sister, if we got kids at Harvard every day, I’m going to fight for Harvard. Why is it O.K. that Asians get to Harvard? Why is it O.K. that white people get to Harvard?”

Mr. Landry raised his voice. He accused The Times of saying that it was wrong for T.M. Landry to want the best for its black students. He told his students that he would always fight for them. “We need the haters,” he said. “I welcome the haters.”

He raised his arms on either side of him, forming a cross.

“My name is Michael Landry. I am the reformer,” he said. “They killed Jesus Christ because he could save the world. I say to myself, who are you compared to Jesus? Nothing! So I stick my arms out and say nail me to the cross if that’s what you want.”

Landry then goes into a practiced routine with the group of students he brought to his interview with the NYT. He calls out the language and they say "I love you" in that language. The final language is "Mike-a-nese!" (that is, Michael Landry's own language) and the students say "I love you" in "Mike-a-nese," which is: "Kneel!" Elsewhere in the article, we learn that he says he has the children kneel for 5 minutes at most to learn humility, but there are also stories of students kneeling for 2 hours and students "forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement."

This is a private school, with high tuition, in Louisiana. You may have enjoyed some of the videos of students from this school opening acceptance letters from, say, Harvard. Millions have shallowly warmed themselves watching that infectious propaganda.

"Police not notified after inmates planned to electrocute guard at youth prison."

Wisconsin State Journal reports on "the latest revelation of violent acts against staff members at the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, the state prison in Irma for the most serious young offenders in Wisconsin."

On Sept. 25, a group of male inmates in one of the prison’s housing units dipped the cord of an electric fan into a cup of water, poured water in a wall outlet and spilled some water on the floor near the fan, according to sources with direct knowledge of the incident but who do not have permission to speak publicly.

Many of the inmates in the unit then asked the guard to plug the fan into the wall outlet. The guard would have done so if an inmate had not, at the last minute, warned the guard not to plug in the fan....

The police were not called, the guard continued to  work in this unit, inmates taunted him about how they almost succeeded in killing him, and no one was even punished.

In the last week, inmates have punched two other staff members, sending them both to the hospital — raising questions about the safety of staff at the facility.

The larger context is that there's a federal lawsuit, brought by inmates, alleging that the inmates have been abused, and there's a court order limiting discipline methods. There's also an FBI investigation. So you need to be somewhat skeptical about prison officials talking to the press about the inmates abusing the prison staff.

And here's a second, newer article at the Wisconsin State Journal: "Youth prison guard: 'I am afraid of getting killed'":

Inmates at the state’s youth prison have kicked in glass windows, stolen pepper spray and threatened to rape female staff members since a federal judge told state Department of Corrections officials to make drastic changes in how they manage prisoners’ behavior, records show....

The comments came after U.S. Judge James Peterson ordered prison officials in July not to keep inmates in solitary confinement around the clock for weeks, not to excessively pepper spray inmates and not to put them in shackles regularly.

“Kids now believe they have nothing to lose,” one staff member told Tiffany’s aides.

“I am afraid of getting killed by an inmate,” said another staff member who recently resigned.

How is it that the government hasn't figured out how to maintain discipline without round-the-clock solitary confinement for weeks, excessive pepper spraying, and routine shackling?! I feel sorry for low-level employees who suddenly face more dangerous work conditions, but it seems that it's the government's fault.

Yamato Tanooka — the boy whose parents left him in the woods as a punishment — is found safe and alive after 7 days.

"Yamato's parents had briefly left him by a wooded road near Nanae in Hokkaido region to punish him for throwing rocks on a family day out. When they went back minutes later he had gone. He was dressed in only a T-shirt and jeans, in an area where temperatures can dip as low as 9C at night."

How did he survive?

He was discovered at a military base on Friday, about 5.5km (3.4 miles) from where he went missing last Saturday. The site had allegedly already been searched on Monday morning, but the boy was not found... The search team comprised of 180 people and search dogs. The soldier who found Tanooka had not been part of any previous rescue efforts, AP reports. Yamato told police he had walked to the military base by himself soon after his parents left him. "I drank water to get by," he reportedly said. "There wasn't anything to eat." He slept on mattresses spread on the hut floor.

There doesn't seem to be any talk about taking the child away from the parents, who have been effusively apologizing: 

"My excessive act forced my son to have a painful time... I deeply apologise to people at his school, people in the rescue operation, and everybody for causing them trouble. I have poured all my love into my son, but from now on, I would want to do more, together with him. I would like to protect him while he grows up. Thank you very much."

Initially, the parents had said that the boy had just got lost as they were walking in the woods, but later the father admitted that they'd made the boy get out of the car and they drove away. He'd withheld the true story because of sekentei— which means how one is seen in society. During the days of the search, there was a great deal of talk in Japan about what the parents had done:

The treadmill.

The picture comes from the Wikipedia article on treadmills, which I was reading because my son John had done a Facebook post linking to a Forbes article that displayed like this...



... and I thought it was a sad sign of the times that the idea of "relaxing and rejuvenating activities" was illustrated by a person running on a treadmill. A treadmill was once a very clear symbol of drudgery.

I was looking for a video clip from the movie about Oscar Wilde that showed him on the prison treadmill — this kind of treadmill....



... and I didn't find it, but searching for Oscar Wilde + treadmill got me to this:

"We do know Hillary told her daughter Chelsea, well gosh, I knew it was a terrorist attack, while we were out telling the American people it wasn't."

"You know I'll tell you, in my house, if my daughter Catherine, the five-year-old, says something she knows to be false, she gets a spanking. Well, in America, the voters have a way of administering a spanking."

Said Ted Cruz, dragging his daughter into politics again, plying an icky metaphor, and striving — I suppose — to win the hearts of the corporal punishment crowd.

I wonder, what do Americans think of the corporal punishment of children these days? This was a hot question in September 2014, you may remember, when a significant pro football player, Adrian Peterson, was found to have used a "switch" on his little son and the famous former basketball player Charles Barkley said:

"I'm a black guy ... I'm from the South. Whipping — we do that all the time. Every black parent in the South is going to be in jail under those circumstances...."

NPR's Gene Demby looked at the numbers and the research:

[A] sizeable majority of people in the United States, regardless of race, look favorably on corporal punishment. Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight looked at some polling data and found that just north of 8 in 10 black people favored corporal punishment. That's higher than white people, but not by a whole lot: 7 in 10 white people favored corporal punishment. (There was a slightly larger gap on this question among people who identified as born-again Christians and those who did not. But again, strong majorities of both groups felt this way — about 80 percent and 65 percent, respectively.)...

"Climate Chaos, Across the Map/What is going on with the weather?"

That's the headline and the first sentence of the article that's featured front and center at the NYT right now.

My question: When is it only an idiot who equates climate and weather?

Here's the third highest rated comment over there: "It's time to take all politicians who are global warming deniers and knock their heads with two-by-fours." Why not beheadings? I heard that's a thing. Effective against heresy, you know. 100%.

"You think that there are circumstances in which burning alive would not be a violation of the Eighth Amendment? Burning somebody alive would not be a violation of the Eighth Amendment?"

Justice Alito expressed amazement at the hedging of the the lawyer who opposed the way the state of Oklahoma delivered the death penalty. Listen:



The case is Glossip v. Gross, and the question is about the drug that is supposed to leave the condemned man completely unconscious while another drug kills him. This strange colloquy took place at the end of the argument:

"Investigators believe Freddie Gray suffered serious head injuries while he was in a police transport van... his legs were shackled and he wasn’t wearing a seat belt..."

"... which authorities say was a violation of policy. They said officers ignored his pleas for medical help."

One wound occurred when Gray struck his head on a bolt that jutted out in the van, the official said, but that was not Gray’s only head injury. And the injuries overall are consistent with what medical examiners often see in car collisions, the official said.

So, you shackle a man, put him in a van with jutting bolts, and then you drive the van in such a way that he slams into things hard enough to cause multiple injuries, and the man dies of those injuries.

That's worse that shooting a man on the street, where there's some argument of needing to stop him. The shackled man enclosed in a vehicle is already completely restrained. There's no harm to say you needed to stop.

I think of torture devices like the iron maiden, where a helpless person is shut inside something that is designed and intended to injure him.



UPDATE: "Freddie Gray death ruled a homicide; six Baltimore police officers charged."

"This might be the worst week in the history of the NFL, with another despicable act by a privileged player taking Roger Goodell’s league to an unfathomable low."

Writes Gary Meyers in The Daily News.

Goodell can begin to make up for his mishandling of the [Ray] Rice case by immediately suspending [Adrian] Peterson for the season and then throwing him out of the league....

The personal conduct policy does not require a conviction in order for Goodell to impose discipline. One of the circumstances that allows Goodell to punish Peterson is "conduct that imposes inherent danger to the safety and well-being of another person."...

Peterson reportedly called the tree branch a “switch,” and the [4-year-old] boy suffered bruises to his back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum and defensive wounds to his hands... According to police reports, the child told authorities that “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face.” He also said he had been hit with a belt and “there are lots of belts in Daddy’s closet.”

The radio station reported that in an interview with police, Peterson appeared to believe he did nothing wrong. “Anytime I spank my kids, I talk to them before, let them know what they did, and of course after,” he said. Reportedly, Peterson regretted his son did not cry because he then would have known the switch had done more damage than intended.

The boy did not cry, and the boy calls his father "Daddy Peterson." Peterson smiles in the mug shot and claims to have experienced the same form of discipline when he was a child. The term "switch" — which Meyers treats as odd and deceptive — is traditional:

Switches are most efficient (i.e., painful and durable) if made of a strong but flexible type of wood, such as hazel... or hickory; as the use of their names for disciplinary implements...

Making a switch involves cutting it from the stem and removing twigs or directly attached leaves. For optimal flexibility, it is cut fresh shortly before use, rather than keeping it for re-use over time. Some parents decide to make the cutting of a switch an additional form of punishment for a child, by requiring the disobedient child to cut his/her own switch.

Here's Richard Pryor: "Anyone here remember them switches?"



And this was once the norm in school:

One of the most common punishments was getting a whipping with a hickory switch or a birch rod. Sometimes the strapping was so severe that students went home with red marks across their legs....

Are you too young to remember the ‘good old days’ when “Readin’ and writing’ and ‘rithmetic were taught to the tune of the hickory stick?”

That last line quotes the 1907 song "School Days" ("Dear old golden rule days...").

I'm not recommending or excusing disciplining children with switches or sticks, just observing that it is an old tradition. As a culture, we have abandoned that tradition, and it's hard to believe that Peterson hadn't noticed, but that's his story. It's a story that will be harder to sell coming immediately in the aftermath of the Ray Rice incident, and commentators like Gary Meyers are demanding that Peterson's punishment include punishment for what Ray Rice did.

Isn't it ironic that outrage at the unfair punishment inflicted by Adrian Peterson distorts thinking about how to punish him? Emotional overpunishment — it's the problem, not the solution.

"I'm not a weakling and a censor like you."

"And I actually wish I could interact with what you have if it had some value beyond your typical Althouse is being stupid again. (Really intelligent to come up with that, little schoolboys.)"

(Careful, with the link within the link that I link to at that link. That's the blog I'm punishing with traffic starvation.)

"Officials in Poland are in an uproar over photos showing a group of young teens licking cream off a priest's knees."

"The school said the initiation ritual was a long-standing tradition at the school, and no one had ever complained about it before."