"A gunman firing from a Las Vegas hotel rained a rapid-fire barrage on a huge outdoor concert festival on Sunday night..."

"... sending thousands of people fleeing until SWAT units found and killed him," the NYT reports.

More than 50 victims died, and at least 200 others were wounded, officials said, making it one of the deadliest mass shootings in United States history.

Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of Clark County... identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, 64. He said the police were seeking “a companion” named Marilou Danley, and the authorities later said they were “confident” they had located her....

Video of the shooting captured nine seconds of rapid-fire, continuous bursts, followed by 37 seconds of silence from the weapon amid panicked screaming. The barrage of gunfire then erupted again in at least two more rounds, both shorter than the first.

Who was Stephen Paddock? I'm not seeing any details other than that he was 64 and "of Mesquite, Nevada." I put that in quotes because "of" is different from "from." It indicates only his current place of residence.

ADDED: As for Marilou Danley (who is in custody): "She is described as an Asian woman, around four feet 11 inches tall and weighing 111 lbs." That's from The Daily Mail, which also says that Paddock's lived in a house built 3 years ago and valued at $396,000.

I'm seeing the street address as a particular number on Babbling Brook Court, but Google Street view only gets me to the entrance to the neighborhood:



UPDATE: "At least 50 dead, more than 400 injured after shooting on Las Vegas Strip" (WaPo).

The carnage in Las Vegas surpassed the death toll of 49 people slain in June 2016 when a gunman in Orlando, who later said he was inspired by the Islamic State, opened fire inside a crowded nightclub....

Police believe Paddock, a local resident, was a “lone wolf” attacker. Lombardo did not give further details, however, on Paddock’s background or possible motivation.

“We have no idea what his belief system was,” Lombardo said during a briefing. “Right now, we believe he was the sole aggressor, and the scene is static.”

Today, purely by chance, I wandered into the 47th Annual Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival.

Lectures...



Displays...



I was sorry I hadn't carried my camera. Just took a couple shots with the iPhone.

Is forced prayer the answer to the National Anthem problem?

I'm watching the opening ceremony for the Ravens vs. Steelers game on TV right now because I wanted to see how they'd handle it. The plan was in place, with an announcer on the public address system saying:

Before the singing of the National Anthem, please join Ravens players and coaches and the entire Ravens organization to pray that we as a nation, embrace kindness, unity, equality, and justice for all Americans.

All the players shown on camera then took the position that we've seen players use in the protests during the National Anthem. So the position that meant protest was supposed to transform into meaning supplication toward God.

This was coercive prayer, and I don't know what kinds of religious-freedom objections the players and coaches and spectators might feel: Is there something wrong with using prayer this way, to fix a political (and commercial) problem?

The Ravens coach,  John Harbaugh — who is a vocal Catholic — made the sign of the cross, and I wondered if there were others whose religion impels them to pray in some special way that was not provided for here and still others who are nonbelievers and troubled by the burden of coerced prayer.

From the fans, I heard loud booing, which I interpret as calling bullshit on the instrumental use of religion to preserve the protest gesture they don't like. Management might have thought the prayer packaging would silence the crowd, lest they sound as though they are objecting to religion. Surely, religion will be respected. They thought wrong. Public displays of religion are often the insincere use of religion as a means to an end and sometimes it works, but it didn't work this time, judging by the boos.

But perhaps that was only a minority booing, the booers will be seen as disrespectful, and the pre-anthem kneeling in prayer will become the ongoing solution to the National Anthem problem. I kind of doubt that, because I associate political liberals with a longstanding objection to prayer before football games. Here, read what Linda Greenhouse wrote in the NYT about Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, the football prayer case. (Yes, this was about teenagers and public school, so there are big differences, but the point is that political liberals tend to have strong compunctions against coerced prayer and little sentimental empathy about football prayer.)

After the prayer at the Ravens game today, there was a particularly patriotic version of the National Anthem, complete with a call to "remove your hats as we honor our nation" and the "military who protect us" and a flyover A-10s — with fireworks — as the anthem — which was "written right here in Baltimore" — was sung in luscious harmony vocal trio from the US Air Force Heritage of America Band. The crowd in the stadium responded to all of that with great enthusiasm.

The players and coaches, of course, rose from the kneeling position before the anthem-related section of the opening ceremony began.

Is this really happening?

I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017

...Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017

What's going on?

He sincerely believes the time for talk is over. He intends to take military action.

He's done talking, but he won't do anything (unless NK makes a first strike).

He's calling attention to the good-cop/bad-cop routine he's doing with Rex Tillerson.

He's deviously bolstering Tillerson's efforts to negotiate with North Korea.

He's a crazy/incompetent/dangerous President, and it's truly frightening.

 

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ADDED: Poll results:

James Golden (AKA Bo Snerdly) was surprised to see NFL owners "line up against their fans, or a portion of their fan base..."

"... deciding that alienating some of the most patriotic people in the country makes good sense for a national sports league, and lining up behind some players that, in some cases, one wonders if they even know what they’re protesting about. It’s all very strange."

Strangely, he pronounces the word "strange" strahnge. I guess that's a joke (like saying garbahge for "garbage" (Rush has some running jokes like that)).

The interviewer is Ginni Thomas (the wife of Clarence Thomas). At about 8 minutes into the interview, Thomas asks Golden if he has any "triggers," and he immediately says "Anybody attacking Rush triggers me." He gets pretty emotional about that.

Palate cleanser.

"Everybody wants to be abused," Marilyn Manson sings as he climbs onto giant stage-prop guns and pulls them over onto himself.

That's the end of the concert. He leaves the stage on a stretcher. And now he's in the hospital with injuries that are not specified. (Daily Mail.)

For the record, the official lyrics to "Sweet Dreams" do not have everybody wanting to be abused:

Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

I believe I'm hearing — as Manson climbs the scenery — the line quoted in the post title. Looking up the lyrics, I see that at the end of the song Manson adds lyrics that were not in the original song by The Eurhythmics. Those extra lyrics are:

I'm gonna use you and abuse you
I'm gonna know what's inside
Gonna use you and abuse you
I'm gonna know what's inside you

Here's how Marilyn Manson wanted people to experience the song:



And here's the classic Eurhythmics video, downright wholesome by comparison:



I hope Marilyn Manson is okay. I saw him in concert once (back in the 90s), and he put on a fine show (not that I can remember any of the "shocking" details (except his wearing leather pants with a sewn-in yard-long fake penis)). But climbing on the scaffolding is a bad idea, unless you've got trustworthy people putting it together in a way that's guaranteed to support you. I don't exclude the possibility that the falling scenery was a publicity stunt, but I don't see how it helps him to look like he's part of some Spinal Tap-like stupidity. And it's not as though you could do it night after night, like Alice Cooper hanging himself...



... which sets an entertainment standard that scenery falling over scarcely approaches.

"Why the Guggenheim’s Controversial Dog Video Is Even More Disturbing Than You Think."

I've already blogged about the video of the Chinese performance art "Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other," first, in "The most fatuous art-talk I've ever heard" and second, in "'Out of concern for the safety of its staff, visitors, and participating artists, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has decided against showing the art works....'"

Now, at ArtNet News, Ben Davis gives us some important additional information. He quotes the Guggenheim catalogue:

“Finding themselves on unstable ground, the dogs instinctively panicked and began to run, which led to a scene in which each pit bull appeared to be running to attack the dog in front of it.”

Of course, it's cruel to scare dogs into running. They were chained onto an upwardly inclined mechanical treadmill, which would have them forced them to run frantically to keep from slipping backward. But:

This sentence’s implication that the aggression was just an appearance is wrong. In an essay on Sun and Peng’s “animalworks” (of which there are many), based on interviews with the artists, scholar Meiling Cheng writes that the dogs were sourced from “a provincial breeding and training institute for fighting dogs.” The animals were grandly transported to the site in eight separate limousines, with human trainers to keep them apart, because they were “so territorial and violent toward each other.”...

Indeed, the Chinese dog-fighting scene may have actually learned a thing or two from Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other. According to Cheng, “the dogs’ regular coach found the machines so effective for canine training that he purchased four treadmills from the artists after the show”!

Remember that the Guggenheim — before it abruptly withdrew the artwork from its show — urged us to think about it in context, but part of the context is, Davis tells us, the treatment of animals in other Chinese artwork:

Consider the artist Xu Zhen, today one of Chinese art’s biggest international stars, the head of an entire art collective-cum-corporation called MadeIn. In 1998, he purchased a cat, strangled it, then beat its lifeless body to a mangled pulp as a performance. “In order to release my frustration without violence towards the public, the cat was a substitute,” he explained.

Sun and Peng’s early works mark the same extremes. Infamously, Peng’s installation Curtain (1999) saw her go to a Chinese wholesale fresh animal market, purchasing an immense quantity of lobsters, eels, snakes, and frogs. Her 10 assistants speared them alive on metal wires to create a dense, writhing, four-by-six tapestry that thrashed out its death throes over the course of the installation....

Read all of what Davis has to say, but here's how he ends it:

Early in the new millennium, the controversies over the “violent tendency” in Chinese art escalated to such an extent that in April 2001, the Department of Cultural Affairs issued a Policy Notice that “sternly prohibits the performance and display of bloody, violent, obscene settings or materials in the name of art.” Among those implicitly targeted, Cheng writes, was the “younger generation of the so-called ‘Beijing shockers,’ also known as the ‘cadaver school.’ Sun and Peng belong to the latter group.”

Our animal-rights activists, in other words, are currently retracing the path of the Chinese Communist Party. What that means, about this art or about our own political situation, is well worth sorting out.

The effort to Katrina Trump with Marie continues apace.

I'm seeing things like this (which is at Daily Beast):



I know Trump fed his haters, yesterday morning on Twitter:

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They....

...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

That's aggravating, when people are suffering, but should it be called "demented" and "racist"? I can see why a Trump hater would jump at an opportunity to frame "They" as Puerto Ricans in general and, in addition, to see Puerto Ricans as a racial group being subjected to disrespect because of race. But that's a leap beyond Trump's text. And yet, if the text supports that leap, one might say Trump intended to cause his followers to make racist inferences.

By the way, what's with the "King Joffrey" epithet?

Later in the day on Twitter, Trump was accusing his critics of doing #FakeNews. Maybe he threw out the red meat in the morning, expecting his haters to trash him as a demented racist and intending all along to come back for a second round accusing them — because it was predictable that they'd go overboard — of doing #FakeNews.

But maybe he started out responding to his critics, because that's what he does. He hits back. Remember what he said at a "town hall" back in April 2016:

“Tone to me matters. Being presidential matters,” Trump told host Greta Van Susteren. “If somebody hits me, I have to hit them back. I have to. I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘I’m wonderful, I’m a president.’ I want to win. I will be so presidential you won’t believe it.”

He must hit back when attacked. Maybe that's all that happened yesterday. The Mayor of San Juan hit him, and he hit back. You saw where turning the other cheek got George W. Bush in the aftermath of Katrina. That's not how Donald Trump does things. It's possible that Trump makes one move at a time, sees how it plays, and then makes the best next move, which in this case will be to hit back at the haters who are calling him a demented racist.

Back in April 2016, Van Susteren pushed Trump to say what he means by "presidential" (because — who knows? — he could become President and then claim to be "presidential" in the sense of the word that he had in mind). At the time, Trump said:

“It means maybe not be so aggressive, maybe not get so personal. But when people get personal with me, they say, oh, they don’t like my hair, okay? If I ever said I don’t like their hair it would be a headline. They’re allowed to say whatever they want to about me. My hair is not that bad is it? And it is my hair. But you know what happens? What happens is they hit me and I hit them back harder and, usually in all cases, they do it first. But they hit me and I hit them back harder and they disappear. That’s what we want to lead the country. I will be so presidential, Greta, you will be so proud of me.”

See? Asked to elaborate on what being "presidential" meant to him, he went right back to the topic of hitting back. They hit me and I hit them back harder. And they disappear. And that's what we want. A fighter is a leader. That's the kind of "presidential" he's going to give us: a leader who fights and hits back.

Notice that his criticism of the Mayor of San Juan is that she is not a leader — such poor leadership.

I'll finish this post with a poll. (Or wait, first I need to figure out what "King Joffrey" means. The only Joffrey I know is the Joffrey Ballet. The article just the situation "trigger[ed] our Joffrey Baratheon into a rage." I'm forced to Google Joffrey Baratheon. Ugh! It's a "Game of Thrones" reference: "Joffrey is an amoral sadist who disguises his cruelty with a thin veneer of charm.")

What Trump said about the Mayor of San Juan was...

hitting back, as he always does. He'll balance that with praise for Puerto Ricans who work with him.

too cruel under the circumstances. He should concentrate on helping.

short-sighted, impulsive, and destructive. Typical of his meanness and ineptitude.

intentional racism, part of a pattern of genuine evil that we have seen in him.

 

pollcode.com free polls

At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk all night.

(And please remember to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"After Weiner’s Sentencing, Abedin Opts for ‘Divorce Jeans.'"

A NYT headline. Excerpt from the text:

These jeans sent a different message [than the black sweater she wore at the sentencing], one surely received by the paparazzi staked outside her door that morning. With a smattering of yellow and orange flowers and leaves from hip to heel, the jeans said: bright and cheery. They said, Let’s roll around in a meadow covered with wildflowers in our hair like hippie children from the 1960s singing “Let the Sunshine In.”... They’re a walking celebration. An explosion of animated joy.

What's up with the adjective "divorce" in "Divorce Jeans"? The occasion is that the sentencing is over. Abedin and Weiner are not yet divorced. The article refers to him as "her soon-to-be-ex-husband." And I don't think he's gone to prison yet.

But we get the idea: "Divorce" works as an adjective in front of the names of things — e.g., "divorce hair" — a woman adopts to express that she has cut herself off from her old married life and feels just great about all the freedom flooding into he life.

In other contexts, it might be bad to celebrate your freedom when your mate is going to prison, losing his freedom. But Weiner's crime required Abedin to show no empathy.

Now what happens to the stereotype-breaking inspiration?

"Super Awesome Sylvia was a role model to girls in science. Then he realized he is a boy" (WaPo).

This is the story of Super Awesome Sylvia, an ingenious little girl who made robots, or so everyone thought.

At age 8, Sylvia Todd put on a lab coat and started a web show. A gaptoothed little kid with a pony tail and soldering iron, a rare sight in the boy's club of amateur inventors....

It got Sylvia invited to the White House Science Fair in 2013, when President Barack Obama tried it out and told its shaky-legged, 11-year-old inventor that it was great to see girls in tech. Then came reporters, magazine profiles, even book deals. A story in the New York Times.... By middle school, Sylvia was giving speeches all over the world....

This is the story of Zephyrus Todd, a 16-year-old boy who prefers art to science, and knows a lot more about himself now than when people called him Sylvia and assumed he was a girl. It's about how Zeph got stuck inside Super Awesome Sylvia, “trying to be that person,” as he puts it....

"What remains enthralling, though, are Millett’s close readings, her exposés of the naked emperors of the literary left."

"'After receiving his servant’s congratulations on his dazzling performance, Rojack proceeds calmly to the next floor and throws his wife’s body out of the window,' is Millett’s deadpan description of the aftermath of the hero’s sodomization of a maid in Mailer’s An American Dream. Millett then observes, 'The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a "man."'"

Writes Judith Shulevitz in "Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values" (New York Review of Books):

For a glorious moment, this very bookish literary critic was the face of American feminism. The New York Times called her the “high priestess.” After “Prisoner of Sex” became the talk of the town—and the revered Harper’s editor Willie Morris was fired for publishing it—Mailer organized a riotous debate known as “Town Bloody Hall,” which was filmed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and is now streamable. It was a circus, and it was Millett who set it in motion, even though she refused to show up. Mailer aimed a torrent of insults at the feminists who did agree to take the stage or appear in the audience, among them Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, and Cynthia Ozick. They rolled their eyes and gave as good as they got—much better, in most cases—and the crowd roared with delight. Try to imagine a public clash of ideas being so joyously gladiatorial today.

Here it is:



ADDED: The word "bugger" (for anal sex) is rare these days. Did you know the word is related to "Bulgarian"? From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

bugger (n.) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite."

bugger (v.) "to commit buggery with," 1590s, from bugger (n.)...

The earliest use of "bugger" to express "annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc.," is, according to the OED, in the diary John Adams, in 1779: "Dr. W[inship] told me of Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marble-head man."

AND: Here's a William Safire column (from 1995) on the word "bugger," written after some Congressman said "We're here to nail the little bugger down" (and the "little bugger" was Bill Clinton). How disrespectful was it?

"I pity you with your inefficient nostrils."

#4 on Scott Adams's list of top 10 favorite "Dilbert" strips.

Maybe I like this the best because I myself have lost nearly all my own sense of smell. And I happen to know that Scott Adams has lost his sense of smell. I've heard him say (on a Periscope) that he's completely happy to have no sense of smell because most smells are bad. Might as well love whatever it is that's your predicament if you can't change it. If I were deaf, I'd enjoy the quiet. If I were blind, I wouldn't have to bother with turning lights on and off.

Here's a 2009 blog post by Adams, "Addition by Subtraction":

Recently I lost my sense of smell thanks to, I assume, some allergy meds I’ve been snorting.... Over time I have come to realize that the ratio of stinky smells to delicious smells is very high. If the price for not smelling a flatulent cat five times a night is that I also don’t get to smell pumpkin pie once a year, I’ll take that deal.

What about the problem of not realizing your house reeks?  Solution: Never let anyone else in your house. Communicate only by Periscope and blog. But that's not what he says. He says he keeps nonanosmic people around to keep track of stinks for him.

Adams also likes the lost sense of taste that accompanies the loss of smell, and he adopts the bright-side perspective there too. It keeps his weight low, because food seems merely utilitarian. He theorizes that fatness/skinniness in human beings correlates to the intensity of the smell sense.

That is, he pities you with your efficient nostrils.

BONUS:

There 26,000 polar bears in the world, and 1% of them came together for a single feast...

... on the carcass of one dead bowhead whale (in Siberia).

“You had to live it to believe it, even now there are people pinching themselves to make sure it really happened,” Rodney Russ, Expedition Leader, Owner and Founder of Heritage Expeditions writes....

The polar bear is the largest living land carnivore, and yet 260 of them feasted on one bowhead whale (which is about half the size of the world's largest whale).

"I exist. I mean, I exist. I really exist!"

(Randomly encountered on Youtube this morning. There's no context to why I'm sharing this, just something I liked a lot. What a great cast SNL had in 1989. The assumption that everybody remembers "Fatal Attraction" isn't good 3 decades later, but that's how it is.)