"The FBI has issued an alert to law enforcement about a possible 'Halloween Revolt' by a dangerous anarchist group..."

"[A] group known as the National Liberation Militia may be planning to dress in costume, cause a disturbance, and then ambush police who come to help."

"For me, pregnancy is the worst experience of my life. I’m not sure why I don’t like the experience like others do."

"Maybe it’s the swelling, the backaches or just the complete mindf-k of how your body expands and nothing fits. I don’t feel sexy, either — I feel insecure and most of the time I just feel gross."

Wrote Kim Kardashian, who nevertheless arrived last night, in her 8th month of pregnancy, at the InStyle Awards in Los Angeles wearing a very tight and white Valentino gown. What I don't understand is how something that white and tight does not reveal the shape of her navel and — speaking of mindf-ks — the fetal feet and elbows sliding and poking around. I can only imagine that there is an undergarment, similar to the padded bras that keep nipples from making an outwardly visible impression, but how thick would it need to be to hide the activities the unborn Easton West?

"If you look at cartoons depicting individuals of lesser intelligence, they are often drawn with big, protruding ears."

"By the age of six, the child is old enough to understand they are being bullied and can participate in the decision for surgery."

Said Steven J. Pearlman, MD, a facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon.

But Karen Caraballo, a Bilingual-Spanish Child and Family Psychologist, said "It is concerning to use plastic surgery to stop bullying. There should be zero tolerance for bullying. Bullying can threaten students' physical and emotional safety at school and can negatively impact their ability to learn, socialize and deeply impact their mental health."

At the link, you can see before and after photos of a 6-year-old boy whose classmates called him "elf ears."

Should a 6-year-old get plastic surgery to pin back big, protruding ears?

No, because that's too young and he can learn to accept himself as he is.

No, because it's the bullies who need to learn to accept others.

Yes, because it's what he wants now, and it can help him as he faces the cruelty of others.

Yes, because the ears actually look so bad that it's common sense to fix them if you can.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Results:

"If you could take a pill that would help you study and get better grades, would you?"

"The stress of competing for top grades has led to a rise in students’ off-label use of so-called 'smart drugs' like Adderall, Ritalin, and modafinil, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But is this a negative development? Is the use of smart drugs cheating? Should their use as cognitive enhancers be approved by the FDA, the medical community, and society at large?"

From an announcement of a debate that will take place at George Washington University and be available later as a podcast.

When I was a young person, it was often a subject of conversation: Why don't they invent a smart pill? I think we imagined getting the knowledge uploaded in pill form, not that anyone said "uploaded" back then.

I'd be interested in hearing this debate, but just offhand, my thoughts are:

1. It might not be cheating, but it does put pressure on everyone to acquire the same advantage (like  performance-enhancing drugs in sports), especially if, as in sports, the performance of others affects your result (such as, in law school, where grades are curved),

2. If the idea is that there is an individual right to make your own choices about what to do with your mind, then the argument that you should be free to take a "smart drug" would apply at least as much to the idea that you should be able to take the psychedelic drugs that transform emotional, spiritual, sexual, and aesthetic experiences.

"Ben Carson has taken a narrow lead nationally in the Republican presidential campaign, dislodging Donald J. Trump from the top spot for the first time in months..."

"... according to a New York Times/CBS News survey released on Tuesday."

Carson has 26%, Trump 22%. The very quiet man is beating the very noisy man.

The distant third is Rubio with 8%, and Bush and Fiorina are dragging closely after him, each with 7%. Paul, Cruz, Huckabee, Kasich slog along in a dreary pack under the embarrassing number 4.

Did you realize there's another debate tomorrow? What's the best thing that could happen, I wonder. After Hillary Clinton's big week, last week, powered by the weakness of Republicans, what can these characters do this week to give nonGOP fans a sense that anything should or could change the trajectory toward Hillary Clinton's seemingly inevitable victory a year from now?

I'm picturing Trump blustering, Carson murmuring, and everyone else boring the pants off us. Will they — should they — attack each other or is it time to demonstrate that they have what it takes to stop Hillary? If the latter, what can they do that won't remind us of how ineffectual the Benghazi committee was in revealing her to be undeserving of the public's trust?

IN THE COMMENTS: People are accusing me of having somehow suddenly become a Hillary supporter. I respond:

Those who think I'm dedicated to Hillary are seriously deluded. Your delusion is part of a syndrome that is going to help her win. You are in a dream world in which the practicalities of winning don't matter. I'm trying to wake you up. If you are going to just say things like Wow, Althouse is in the tank for Hillary, then you are part of the problem you are blithering about.

After some defense of my use of the word "blithering" and more push back about my supposed in-the-tankedness for Hillary, I say:

I think Hillary is and should be beatable. I just don't see the Republicans getting it together to do that. I think that's what Jeb realizes and why he's blithering that he's got "a lot of really cool things" he could do other than run for President. With the normal candidates crumpling, you're left with a weird party that normal voters won't be able to take seriously. That's what I see down the road, and nobody who's complaining about my telling you that is saying anything that makes me think the situation is going to get better for Republicans.

"I am convinced... that the way the Drive-Bys and the Democrat Party and the left are attempting to reconstitute their media monopoly is via Twitter and Facebook."

"In a way, the sewer of Twitter and Facebook is the left attempting to corral everyone into their playground, their way of thinking, and create a new legacy media to replace what the big three networks had back in 1988. You populate Twitter and Facebook with enough political activists disguised as citizens in their underwear in their basements just tapping out comments and posting left-wing news stories from AP, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Times, and that's how you reconstitute your monopoly.  You don't constitute a network media monopoly, but you constitute a mode-of-thinking monopoly by transferring your polluted, perverted way of thinking to social media to infect as many minds as possible who are incapable of critical thinking anymore, because it isn't taught."

Said Rush Limbaugh on his show yesterday, in a monologue his website titles "The GOP Establishment Comes Undone: Romney Pines for the Days Before Rush, the Alternative Media, and Conservative 'Insurgents.'"

It's interesting when Rush turns on new media, because often he presents himself as the original new media person, leading the way. The line "citizens in their underwear in their basements just tapping out comments" jumped out at me as I was listening to the podcast last night. That's the classic image used to diminish bloggers and other self-publishers of the internet. But, reading the text this morning, I see he's accusing people on Twitter and Facebook of fakery, only pretending to be citizens in their underwear in their basements. He's diminishing them by saying they're not just citizens in their underwear in their basements tapping out comments.

Well, that's funny, because Rush likes to act like he's just some guy thinking out loud into a microphone. He's just the "little fuzzball," alone in his little room somewhere in Florida, shuffling papers around, sharing snippets from from AP, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Times, and reacting, telling you what he thinks. He's "disguised" as your extra-smart, chatty friend, watching the news with you and sounding off. He knows all about "transferring your his polluted, perverted way of thinking to social media radio to infect as many minds as possible who are incapable of critical thinking anymore, because it isn't taught."

I'm quoting him. I wouldn't say "polluted, perverted way of thinking." It's just political ideology. You locate yourself at the extreme if you look across the spectrum and see the other guy as "polluted" and "perverted." It would be nice, wouldn't it, to live in the imagined golden age when people were capable of critical thinking, because people were taught critical thinking? But in the real world, ideas and attitudes have always spread through intuitive responses to other people expressing ideas. That's the core experience of human life. One of the standard expressions that works in transferring the ideas is to convey the feeling that your ideas are sober and reasonable and the product of critical thinking and those other people are oozing some horrible disease. Ugh! Toxic! That's how Rush haters would like you to react to Rush. Don't even listen, you might catch it. And that's what Rush is saying about the foul, unwholesome liberals. 

The official Hillary Clinton website does viral media with a collection of how-to tips on how to make DIY Hillary costumes for Halloween.

The page is titled "Texts from Hillary and 4 other DIY Hillary Clinton costumes for Halloween/What’s in Hillary’s closet? A lifetime of looks," and there are 5 photos of Hillary from various stages of her life, each with a photo of a woman emulating her. We're given a list of items, for example, to be "Hipster Hillary," from 1969, you need a white blouse, glasses, striped pants, "leather shoes" (why stress "leather" rather than sandals?), and long, loose hair. The campaign promo is there: Hillary was "Wellesley College’s first-ever student commencement speaker."



I got there via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, that is, I caught the virus through someone who loathes Hillary and prompts readers to laugh contemptuously ("Not The Onion"). I was initially surprised that the campaign would portray Hillary as a subject for Halloween (traditionally the realm of monsters and the dead), but reading the page, I saw the value. The bio is there, the young women modeling the costumes all look like they're having fun with it. And the Hillary haters who propagate the link, layering on their contempt and astonishment, give it spin that is useful for those who'd love to scream with horror at that old reflexive misogyny, risen from the grave once again.

By the way, back in 1969, college kids didn't refer to each other as "hipsters." A "hipster" would have been a man from the past, more of a 1950s beatnik in some smoky urban jazz club. The word the Hillary campaign has apparently forgotten is: "hippie."

Hippie, oddly enough, has become a go-to Halloween costume in recent years, perhaps because it's easy to put together from crap you might have around the house, like the old-standbys of the 1950s and 60s: bum and gypsy.

"Yeah, last week was the week Hillary won the presidency," I said.

Meade said, "Where are you reading that?" I said, "I'm just saying it."

The Grand-Prix-level show-jumping horse had been led out of his stall during the night and "filleted": "The slices were so deliberate..."

"... and so well done that the moment you saw it: This was a professional.”

Phedras’s carcass was found lying partially against the fence and ground. The head and neck were intact, but the legs were gone from the shoulders and cuts in the torso were smooth and deliberate.

“They literally filleted his shoulders,” she said.

Monuments and nonmonuments.

I feel like there's a theme today on the blog:

Monuments:

The Ukrainian Darth Vader Lenin

The big bronze head of Karl Marx 

"The monumental task of building California's bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels..." (This quote looks so phallic — so rape-y —in the retrospect of late morning. And now the Karl Marx head on a plinth seems especially penile. And I guess everyone has already noticed that Darth Vader's helmet resembles the head of a penis.)

Nonmonuments:

As president: a comedian

The fruitless "bare branches" of China — millions of men who, without women, can produce no offspring

Gloria Steinem expresses her love for the nonhierarchical "talking circles" (outside of mud huts in India and amongst the Native Americans) and her distaste for "our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top."

Ukraine sculptor transforms a statue of Lenin into Darth Vader.

"I wish to save the monuments of history. I’m trying to clean up the operating system and keep them on the hard drive of memory."

Said Alexander Milov, who shouldn't be considered a vandal, since his transformation preserves the statute, which was slated to be removed after the Ukrainian parliament passed a "de-Communisation" law.

"We are gathering all these statues – like Lenin – and we would like to make a park of forlorn heroes of the epoch,” says Milov. “I want to take the statues out of the central squares of cities and put them in a different place like Disneyland, where they can be visited. It seems to me that if these statues are destroyed, people coming after us will have no possibility to make conclusions for themselves as to whether people needed them or not."

That would be like Grutas Park in Lithuania, which we talked about here and here last winter. But Milov prefers to keep the statues where they are and to "turn them into characters from Soviet cartoons."

As for the Darth Vader Lenin: "I wanted to make a symbol of American pop culture which appears to be more durable than the Soviet ideal." Interestingly, aptly, he put a Wi-Fi router in its head.

By the way, in the second of the 2 linked posts from last winter, we talked about the controversy about whether some aesthetically pleasing statues on The Green Bridge (in Vilnius, Lithuania) should be relocated to Grutas Park. I expressed concern about moving high-quality sculpture that "was designed for a particular site" because it "is partly destroyed when it is moved, even though it is otherwise preserved," and I asked: "If something is artistically good, but a remnant of an earlier time that the people who control the place now wish to reject completely, what should they do?"

The bridge sculptures were removed this past July, to be replaced by flowers.

Comedian wins the presidential election by a landslide...

... in Guatemala.

Cue the ready-made jokes about American elections won by comedians. 

ADDED: My son's take:

A celebrity who's a "household name" in Guatemala and used to have a TV show, but has never held office, and was initially considered a long-shot contender who didn't offer enough policy specifics to back up his conservative platform, went on to shock many people by winning the presidential election in the face of "widespread discontent with Guatemala's political class." Fortunately, that could never happen here . . .

"No one is forcing anyone to accept 'one wife, many husbands!'" said the Chinese economics professor, proposing a solution...

... to the problem of too few women in China to meet the demand of Chinese men who want wives.

The professor, Xie Zuoshi, blogged his idea. He has a lot of readers — 2.6 million followers for one of his 3 blogs — and this idea went viral — though the post itself has "been removed."

By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches.”...

One answer is: Stop aborting girls. But Xie's solution takes the current situation as it is.

Many men, especially poor ones, he noted, are unable to find a wife and have children, and are subsequently condemned to living and dying alone without offspring to support them in old age, as children are required to do by law in China. But he says he believes there is a solution.

Old-age pensions from the government? No:

“The guanggun problem is actually a problem of income. High-income men can find a woman because they can pay a higher price. What about low-income men? One solution is to have several take a wife together. That’s not just my weird idea. In some remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman, and they have a full and happy life.”

Polyandry has been practiced before in China, particularly in impoverished areas, as a way to pool resources and avoid the breakup of property. And apparently, there are Chinese who think polyandry may already be legal....

"There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it."

A young political activist finds it "disgusting" that he should have to pay £4 (≈ $6) to visit the popular tourist attraction in London's Highgate Cemetery, the grave of Karl Marx. But Highgate Cemetery is private property, it's not making money burying new bodies (it's full), and the place had gone into decline. It was "a favorite hangout of occultists" and there was vandalism, "including two attempts to blow.. up" the giant bronze head of Marx that tops his tomb.

Not even all Marxists are against the fee. That includes Alex Gordon, chair of the trustees of the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School, a charity that helps look after the grave.

“Marx believed that labor should be rewarded, he didn’t believe that you could achieve a classless society simply by refusing to pay for things,” he said. “He wasn’t a hippie, let’s put it like that.”

"The monumental task of building California's bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles."

"Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped. It will be the most ambitious tunneling project in the nation's history...."

"If it were one single mass of granite, it would be easy to drill through and provide structural support," said [Caltech geologist Leon] Silver, who trained the Apollo astronauts in lunar geology and pioneered the dating of the San Gabriel Mountains. "But everything in the arc has been bent, shoved, stretched, compressed and metamorphosed."

The mountain range lies in a giant crescent between two major faults, the San Gabriel and the San Andreas, which separates the Mojave Desert on the North American tectonic plate from the Los Angeles Basin on the Pacific plate. Between the two major faults are many secondary faults. Some are vertical strike-slip faults that move laterally, and some are thrust faults that move vertically. Some are horizontal, traveling through the ground at various depths....

The longest possible tunnel, described as one alternative in state documents, would stretch 13.8 miles under the Angeles National Forest. Assuming TBMs started at both ends and advanced at 20 feet a day for 261 days a year, the tunnel would take seven years to complete — finishing in 2026. At an advance rate of 10 feet a day, the time would double to 14 years....

"Nobody can sit here and tell you what something like this is going to cost over a 20-year period," [said Jeff Morales, the rail authority chief executive]. "Any big program like this is loaded with challenges. The day you hear me say I am comfortable is the day I am not telling you the truth or the day I have deluded myself."

That's at the L.A. Times, where the top-rated comments are: "Why is it that when we predicted this, we were callled [sic] flat Earth declinists, when were the right the whole time?" and "No one with a single brain cell ever thought this was rational. It is and has been a political boondoggle from day one. It's stunning to think environmentalists in CA would allow such a dangerous construction project."

Flashback to April 2009: "Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan... The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.... His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service.... The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East."

Wisconsin said no to that money. It was the single issue that caused me to vote for Scott Walker in 2010. Local media whined that we lost  $810 million, while California was "the big winner, with up to $624 million." California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget. The rail authority chief executive says it would be delusional even to believe you can project the ultimate cost.

"The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine."

"People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together."

Said Gloria Steinem, in an Esquire interview. That quote struck me, having just read an article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker called "Road Warrior/After fifty years, Gloria Steinem is still at the forefront of the feminist cause," which shows how central this idiosyncratic anthropology has been to Steinem. Steinem went to India for a 2-year fellowship after college and says she did her "first organizing there." She returned to India in 1974 and:

She had trekked to villages cordoned off by the government because of caste riots, and watched, at night, as the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles, lit by kerosene lamps, and tell their stories of burnings, murders, thefts, and rapes, “with fear and trauma that needed no translation” but with the relief that came from talking and being heard. In her road book, she calls it “the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles, those groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”

Also:

[Wilma] Mankiller had been the first elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, and she and Steinem had been close ever since she joined the board of the Ms. Foundation. Over the years, Mankiller had become, for Steinem, a kind of spiritual guide.... It was Mankiller, she says, who continued her education in the “deep history” of matrilineality, and the communal talking circles that expressed it. “We have always started our ‘history’ with when hierarchy, patriarchy, and nationalism started,” Steinem told me. “But democracy did not come from Greece. It is much, much older, and it came from women and men together.” She added, “The Iroquois Confederacy had circles of consensus—it was matrilineal.”

Before Mankiller died in 2010, she was working on a writing a book with Steinem, and Steinem wants to continue the project:

“I want to contribute our idea that most of human history was very different from what we have today, with our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top,” [Steinem] said. “Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages. And there was rarely a single chief. There was always a chief for peace, and a different one for war. Their societies were not polarized, and not violence-based.” The jury is out on that. Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree. But, as an organizing principle for Steinem, and for the feminists she has brought together, the evocation of an ancient tradition of talking circles for sharing stories, bridging differences, and coming to acceptable common solutions has been a remarkably effective tool.

Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree.... but it's not science, is it? It's mythology. Mythology is a different process. When Steinem says she "witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles," we're witnessing the ancient and modern magic of mythology.

By the way, this fascination with the imagined better world of India and the Cherokee and the Iroquois is stereotypical of the 1960s. The hippies had the same dream. Steinem is not a hippie. Her cultural stream diverged from the hippie philosophy. I remember when that divergence occurred. At the time I thought the Ms. Magazine people were retro, missing the zeitgeist, the counterculture. If we were shedding "concepts of masculine and feminine," getting together and loving one another, why heighten the sense of the differentness of women, why talk about the oppression of the kinds of families our parents lived in — we were already free — and why go on and on about careers — when the point was to drop out?

ADDED: That line "the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles" made me think of the old Camille Paglia lines: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts" and "Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."