At the Saturday Night Cafe...

... you can talk about anything.

"The man who shot dead two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, on Friday before killing himself was a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist..."

"... who railed against women, black people, and immigrants in a series of online videos and songs.... On a YouTube channel in 2014, [Scott] Beierle filmed several videos of himself offering extremely racist and misogynistic opinions, in which he called women 'sluts' and 'whores,' and lamented 'the collective treachery' of girls he went to high school with.... In one video called 'Plight of the Adolescent Male,' he named Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 and is often seen as a hero for so-called incels, or those who consider themselves 'involuntarily celibate.' 'I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males ... that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent,' he said.... Some in the incel community have previously raged against women wearing yoga pants... Beierle’s political affiliations were not immediately clear, but he was highly critical of the Obama administration in his 2014 videos...."

Reports BuzzFeed News.

If his "political affiliations were not immediately clear" why is Buzzfeed referring to him as "a far-right extremist"?

Lots of terrible song lyrics at the link: "To hell with the boss that won’t get off my back, To hell with the girl I can’t get in the sack"/"I’m no athletic shark. I’m not a physical specimen. I don’t win the trophies and medals. Nobody stands in awe of me"/"I have no shame, but this is to blame. I would do anything. I just don’t care. I have no fear of any consequences... I am pro-death... The more that die the merrier."

"The mystery of Donald Trump is what impels him to overturn the usual rules. Is it a dark sort of cunning or simple defects of character?"

"Because the president’s critics tend to be educated and educated people tend to think that the only kind of smarts worth having is the kind they possess — superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge — those critics generally assume the latter. He’s a bigot. He’s a con artist. His followers are dumb. They got lucky last time. They won’t be so lucky again. Maybe this is even right. But as Trump’s presidency moves forward, it’s no longer smart to think it’s right. There’s more than one type of intelligence. Trump’s is feral. It strikes fast. It knows where to sink the fang into the vein.... The truth is that there is no easy fix to the challenge of the caravan, which is why Trump was so clever to make the issue his own and Democrats have been so remiss in letting him have it. The secret of Trump’s politics is to mix fear and confidence — the threat of disaster and the promise of protection — like salt and sugar, simultaneously stimulating and satisfying an insatiable appetite."

From "Why Aren’t Democrats Walking Away With the Midterms?/Democrats miss Trump’s political gifts and the real threat he represents" by Bret Stephens (NYT).

I tried to read the comments, but what I saw was, as I expected, a lot of no, no, no, Trump is evil and his followers are idiots.

By they way, are we allowed to speak of human beings as non-human animals or not? "Trump’s is feral. It strikes fast. It knows where to sink the fang into the vein" — portrays Trump as a snake.

ADDED: It's funny — isn't it? — that people who pride themselves on their own intelligence and sneer at others for lacking intelligence, cannot understand what the hell is going on. I think it's that emotion reigns in the human mind, and they cannot settle down and coolly analyze the situation, and they are afraid of having any ideas that would inspire the contempt of people whose love and respect they feel they need. What is there to do then but hate Trump and think half the country belongs in the basket of deplorables?

"Is Ted Cruz really 'Tough as Texas'? Hardly. Here's one Texan's take on that Ted Cruz fella... Directed by Richard Linklater."

Pretty fine little film. Not sure whether it has the intended effect — seems too pro-violence! — but I'm a fan of Linklater's early film "Slacker," so, whatever.

ADDED: Source material from Linklater's 2011 movie "Bernie":

"Those horrible pink hats': midterms divide women in era of #MeToo."

A nicely done, nicely balanced little film, from The Guardian. Watch the whole thing. I love the low-key, steadfast demeanor of the filmmaker, Paul Lewis:

#BelieveWomen

This is bullshit. Just because they never met, that does NOT mean that Kavanaugh didn’t rape her. #BelieveWomen https://t.co/6GDFiUUiEh

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) November 2, 2018

"There haven’t been any interviews in any of my films. I think some people make great interview movies. It’s just not a style that I’m interested in."

"I think my movies are more novelistic than journalistic and I think when my films work, they work because you feel you’re present in the sequence that you’re watching and hearing. I like the sense of immediacy that it gives."

Said the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who, at the age of 88, has a new movie, "Monrovia, Indiana."

“I’ve made movies in 17 states, but I never made one in the Middle West before, with the exception of a public housing film in Chicago. I thought it would be interesting to make a movie about a small town in the Middle West,” he tells Deadline. “A friend of mine told me about Monrovia and I visited it, liked what I saw, and started to make a movie there.”

He filmed on hog farms, in cornfields, at a Masonic lodge, Lions Club, high school, veterinary clinic, tattoo parlor, barbershop, restaurant, a baby shower, a wedding and more. The film contains moments of conversation between townspeople, including some old duffers at a diner who discuss a recent experience eating carrots....

Monrovia is overwhelmingly white, nestled within a county that Donald Trump carried in 2016 with more than 75% of the vote. Wiseman shows the intrinsic role of Christian traditions in daily life (“People are very religious,” he states) but he doesn’t overtly address the politics hovering in the background. Some critics would have preferred he confront red state mentalities.

“That’s the film they want to make. That’s not the film I want to make,” he declares. “I don’t like to make obvious films.”

You can see the carrot scene in the trailer for the movie:

What's up with the pinned Tweet on Trump's Twitter feed?

pic.twitter.com/nk2vKvHuaL

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2018

The vertical lines in the "O"s refer to what... "Game of Thrones"?

Ah! Yes: "Game of Thrones Stars and HBO Are Not Happy About Donald Trump's Bad Meme/It was a total Joffrey move" (Esquire). What's the point of getting mad in public? You'll only boost the virality of Trump's own tweet.

Trump tweeted an image of himself with the text “Sanctions Are Coming, November 5” to warn about upcoming sanctions on Iran. The font mimicked Game of Thrones, and the phrase played off the show's tagline, “Winter Is Coming.”

HBO didn’t take too kindly to the ripoff. "We were not aware of this messaging and would prefer our trademark not be misappropriated for political purposes,” the network told TMZ in a statement. The premium network then followed up the statement with a tweet of its own that said, "How do you say trademark misuse in Dothraki?"..

HBO should just say nothing. Creating anxiety about enforcement of purported intellectual property rights is: 1. lame and 2. discouraging to people who care about free speech and satire.

"Normally, I would not comment on something as egregiously misstated as today’s story. However, the assertion that I punched anyone over a parking spot is false."

"I wanted to go on the record stating as much. I realize that it has become a sport to tag people w as many negative negative charges and defaming allegations as possible for the purposes of clickbait entertainment. Fortunately, no matter how reverberating the echos [sic], it doesn’t make the statements true."

Tweeted Alec Baldwin, after his humiliating arrest, reports Page Six. Video at the link shows him hounded by the press as he leaves the police station.

"Hey, Alec, what kind of example are you setting for your kids with your little temper tantrum?" taunts someone in the crowd, maybe a reporter. Baldwin has 4 children under the age of 5.

"Huh? Can't you afford a garage at this point with the money you make?" continues the taunter, who was, presumably, disappointed when Baldwin did not charge into the crowd and take a shot at him. Baldwin calmly entered an awaiting car and rode off.

Trump — the man Baldwin is famous for impersonating — was informed of the arrest and said, spontaneously, "I wish him luck." Trump Jr., on the other hand, tweeted, "Is anyone shocked at this piece of garbage anymore? As if the phone calls to his daughter weren’t bad enough. He’s a lib so he gets chance after chance to be decent but always fails!"

"Gone is the senator who once called the future president 'the world’s biggest jackass' and a 'race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot.'"

"With an eye toward re-election in 2020 in a state still on the Trump Train, Mr. Graham has climbed into the locomotive. 'I stepped up,' he boasted in an interview, 'and I’m getting rewarded for it by conservatives, and liberals are all upset.'"

From "What Happened to Lindsey Graham? He’s Become a Conservative ‘Rock Star’" (NYT). Part of what happened is that John McCain died. His friend Trey Gowdy is quoted saying that McCain was "the closest thing he ever had to a father." And McCain — as the Times puts it — "hated Mr. Trump."

[P]erhaps nothing has cemented Mr. Graham’s standing in Mr. Trump’s world as much as his performance at the divisive Supreme Court confirmation hearing for the future Justice Kavanaugh, who faced allegations of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford.His finger-wagging, lip-curling performance — “Boy, you all want power — God, I hope you never get it,” he snarled — was lampooned on “Saturday Night Live.” But Mr. Trump loved it.

“Wow! Remind me not to make you mad,” the president told Mr. Graham on a private call, the senator said...

"A vandal who scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti in a Brooklyn synagogue and set fires around several other Jewish places of worship was arrested Friday, police sources said."

The Daily News reports.

Cops committed James Polite, 26 of Bedford-Stuyvesant to the psychiatric ward at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn.... The suspect was busted in the same clothes he wore in surveillance video of his vandalism at the historic Union Temple in Prospect Heights. Polite is also suspected of setting a series of small trash fires in and around synagogues in Williamsburg, police sources said.... Cops released a surveillance image of the vandal on Friday. He is described as a black man, about 20 years old, 5-foot-8, 140 pounds with black hair.

The words in the graffiti: "Hitler," "Jews better be ready" and "Die Jew rats, we are here!" What makes a 20-year-old black man write that? An immediate decision seems to have been made that he is a person with mental illness.

Meanwhile, what do we know about the Pittsburgh murderer? I'm reading "As questions linger about Pittsburgh suspect, details emerge from his early life" (WaPo):

But while rage-filled anti-Semitic online posts from an account bearing Bowers’s name have drawn considerable attention, his offline life left startlingly little impression on people who met him before the massacre.... The elements of his background that have emerged since the bloodshed at Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27 suggested moments of instability in his early life, including family divorces, moves and ultimately being raised by his grandparents....

Much of the rest of Robert Bowers’s life remains a mystery. He attended high school in Baldwin, Pa., but did not graduate. He was not well-known to neighbors, who said he kept a low profile and gave no indication of the racist views he espoused online.

This morning, a new story is: "Two women were killed when a gunman opened fire in a Florida yoga studio before class members fought back and the attacker killed himself, police said on Saturday" (NYT). I don't know the killer's motivation, but a yoga class is a religious or religion-like ritual (see "Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?" (BBC)).

"No indication Saudi sisters found dead and bound with duct tape in NYC were killed, authorities say."

A puzzling headline in The Washington Post. How isn't bondage in duct tape an indication of murder?

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said the sisters had alleged that they were abused by family members and sought asylum on those grounds in the United States.... "The money started to run out — that’s what we believe started to happen," Shea said.

The sisters were found on rocks beneath a pier on the Upper West Side. They were fully clothed and bore no signs of trauma. Silvery duct tape was wrapped around their ankles and torsos, leading to speculation they might have been killed and dumped.

But Shea said the duct tape was loose, more like it was meant to keep them together rather than bind them. He said police had every indication that the Fareas were alive when they entered the water.

At the Glass Roof Cafe...

... you can see your way clear.

38 minutes of Swedes looking askance at Jordan Peterson.

Peterson holds forth in his usual way, quite cogent, earnest and unflappable, and not for one minute is he released from the stinkande öga.

Something made "pettish" seem like the right adjective with "heiress," so I wondered if "pettish" was to "heiress" as "scantily" is to "clad."

I don't want to write in clichés. I eschew triteness here. I wrote "pettish heiress" and felt artistically compelled to Google the phrase...

Far from trite, "pettish heiress" hasn't been (googlably) used since 1891, in "Mr. Zinzan of Bath, Or, Seen in an Old Mirror."

"No One Wants to Campaign With Bill Clinton Anymore."

Headline at the NYT.

As Democrats search for their identity in the Trump era, one aspect has become strikingly clear: Mr. Clinton is not part of it. Just days before the midterm elections, Mr. Clinton finds himself in a kind of political purgatory, unable to overcome past personal and policy choices now considered anathema within the rising liberal wing of his party....

In an election shaped by the #MeToo movement, where female candidates and voters are likely to drive any Democratic gains, Mr. Clinton finds his legacy tarnished by what some in the party see as his inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions as president with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, as well as with past allegations of sexual assault.

"Inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions"? Does the NYT use the phrase "sexual indiscretions" when writing about other celebrities who've been accused of rape and sexual harassment? "Sexual indiscretions" is very pre-MeToo.

Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a veteran Democratic strategist, says... “It was an abuse of power that shouldn’t have happened and if the Clintons can’t accept that fact 20 years later, it’s hard to see how they can be part of the future of the Democratic Party”....

Few Democrats were eager to talk publicly about Mr. Clinton’s future role in the party. Though they’re reluctant to say it out loud, Mr. Clinton’s political exile is an open secret in Democratic circles....

[M]any Democrats are mystified by what seems like the Clintons’ inability to respond to questions about Mr. Clinton’s past that are inevitable in the #MeToo era.

Efforts to promote a thriller novel he wrote with author James Patterson were overshadowed after the former president said he would not handle the Monica Lewinsky scandal any differently today. Earlier this month, Mrs. Clinton said in a television interview that her husband’s affair was not an abuse of power because Ms. Lewinsky was “an adult.”...

What's mystifying? Unless you can articulate a better response, you shouldn't be mystified at what Bill and Hillary came up with. It's not mystifying. It's infuriating. But go ahead. Say you're "mystified," because you who have consorted with Bill Clinton for the last quarter century have no good response for why you stood with him so long.

But "mystified," like "sexual indiscretions," is the NYT's word — the NYT's mystification.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa said:

IMO, anyone who ignored their principles to give him a pass when he was still trendy should be named and shamed as well, including Ms. Clinton and quite a few folks at the Times.

Meade said:

#your indiscretions are rapey rapes while my indiscretions are merely peccadilloes.