Datz me. One of the No Kings demonstrations goes right along my town’s only through street, and Les UDs, plus UD’s cousin and her husband, will be out there with flags and signs.

Let’s take this one element at a time.

If anyone ever tries to sell you on the idea that wearing a burqa or niqab is comfortable, feel free to laugh in their face. Anyone who has ever witnessed what it’s like to walk around cities, often in sweltering temperatures, draped head to toe in black, knows just how punishing the garment is. Go ahead and argue that it pleases Allah to see women and little girls with no peripheral vision try to navigate busy streets. I mean, that argument at least is in line with twisted hyper-modesty edicts. But don’t try telling us that these deathly weeds are comfortable.

As for safety: Walking around severely perceptually and physically hampered is not safe at all; and if you mean safe from the raping ways of all evil men… Men who find your eight year old daughter as evilly seductive as they find you… Look at the normally dressed women around you, moving freely among normal men. Try to work on your attitude toward men rather than cling to an outsized sense of the degree of danger to you they represent.

Do you really think the people gazing at your invisibility behind full body black cloth feel respect? As your husband in jeans and a t-shirt, and similarly free boy children, gambol about in front of you?

There’s nothing patronizing about pointing out that there’s something disturbing about someone whose lived experience tells her that walking around with a symbolically rich black fabric over her mouth generates personal comfort and respect from others.

No kidding.

Years ago I bought three silver/gray wreaths for the house during holiday season. After that, I decided I liked them enough to want to keep looking at them, so I found a gray planter that seemed in the same color realm, piled them largest to smallest in it, and stuck it among some grasses and hydrangeas.

Why does this curious little item pack a certain aesthetic/symbolic punch? Why does it draw the eye?

Best I can do: Aside from the symmetry (tapered wreaths; tapered container) and the bird-nesty, kinetic feel of the wreaths as they deteriorate and put out a mess of needles, and the texture thing (rough/smooth), there is, I guess, the anthropomorphic nature of the thing. Piled up hair/turban, on a human face?

We’ve already encountered Spain’s Rafael Luque, who makes an excellent living charging random people all over the world to have their names added to his (bogus) chemistry papers. The currency here is number of references on scientific studies — the more journals your name appears in, the higher your salary, and the higher your university’s institutional ranking. Luque is an important part of “an international network of scientists dedicated to inflating their own prestige through cheating, thus falsifying the rankings of the world’s top universities.”

Yes, yes, he’s been dismissed by his university, had endless papers retracted, and been exposed in the press as a stupendous fraud; but he’s still chugging along. They love him in Saudi Arabia.

The problem with this Artnews piece about differential pricing at the Louvre begins with its eye-popping headline:

France to Charge Non-Europeans $10 Tax to See the Mona Lisa

!!!

White skin?

Do come in.

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Turns out they mean non-EU people pay more.

They had many questions, all of which I tried to answer. Lots of people came through. I loved it, but am now exhausted.

“Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California,” [Gavin] Newsom wrote [in response]. “Its murder rate is ranked third in the entire country. Stick to football, bro.”

Bama!

NIMBY’s a bitch, ain’t it? Here’s a bunch of Idaho farmers – presumably some of America’s keenest gunnies (see the impressive Everytown writeup in my headline) – who’ve decided they DON’T want a “massive” gun range in their backyard.

Now the county they’re in – Bingham – went to the trouble of declaring itself a Protected Second Amendment County just in case the feds try in any way to fuck with their weapons, see, and that’s how gun gonzo they are! But now they’re boohooing cuz their county’s probably going to approve the range cuz why wouldn’t it. It’s Idaho, land of the worst guns laws in America. Land of militias. Land of Trump won by seventy percent. C’mon, people! You made your bed — lie in it! Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas! Take what you want but pay for it! Get the picture?

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Croyez moi, as a degenerate east coaster, my heart goes out to you guys! I wouldn’t want a massive gun range, with “rotating outsiders” (whatever that is) all over the place. But then I don’t like guns. YOU do. Enjoy the bangbangbangbangbangbangbang.

… and on the way UD reminded Mr UD: “Don’t say anything about his job! Don’t even say the word job.”

Their friend not long ago got his dream job at the Dept. of Education; then, in a matter of weeks, in a DOGE sweep, he was fired. He and his wife have just bought a house; a baby is on the way!

So we said absolutely nothing; but somehow the matter came up, and he explained.

“I’ve already gotten a new job in DC, in education. AND I’m still getting full salary from the DOE because of a court case. I’ve got two jobs.”

“Man, K. and I were doing SO well not mentioning your sad situation and now this??”

Details here.

Enjoy!

… Algeria, Azerbaijan, and Bosnia, encompassing ethnic, political, sectarian, and geographical diversity in Muslim populations, … have restricted the [burqa] in public spaces. Some of these Muslim states also have bans in place for the hijab, the Islamic head covering, in legal and public institutions that limit the display of all religious symbols. The number of Muslim-majority states outlawing the face veil is increasing.

…  [I]t is ironic that counter-terror laws applied to all citizens are criticised [in Europe] in a way that Muslim-majority states are not when they pass policies aimed specifically at these garbs.

What is also evident is that more Muslim states can deem these sexist coverings, designed to erase female identities, as not belonging to their society than European states. 

… Instead of simply dismissing a burqa ban, the UK government should listen to progressive voices within the Muslim community who condemn such clothing as a tool to suppress women. 

Excitedly, the young reporter warns us that some of the images we’re about to see “are disturbing.” He then shows them to us twice – the gape-mouthed woman in the foreground, the anxious policeman pushing her away from danger, a man standing over a dead body, the repeated sound of gunfire, and (the Don DeLillo Death touch), the glitzy background of the Bellagio at night.

Postmodern deaths happen while people are having fun.

You Tubes are now available showing closeups of the dead lying along the Las Vegas Strip. As Walter Benjamin, quoted in my title, noted many decades ago, our own destruction has become a thing recorded and delectated. Our own close to 50,000 gun deaths a year yield plenty of shared footage — especially when it’s mass murder, as in the 2017 slaughter of sixty people two miles down from the Bellagio.

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Here’s an even better one! Clearly shows the shooter doing his thing.

Bonus point: Since it’s night, we can see his gun shoot off sparks. Coooooool

And listen. Shooter’s a social media personality. Ya gotta assume he got a friend to film him shooting. Fantastic upload.

Louisiana Republican Points to ‘Big White Lines’ From Planes as Proof Government Is Manipulating Weather

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Burnishing its reputation as the dumbest state in the country (okay, fourth dumbest, but this successful legislation may be just what they need to put themselves over the top), Louisiana goes after evil chemtrails.

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While Louisiana faces an insurance crisis, a crumbling coastline, and one of the highest overdose death rates in the country, state lawmakers have decided their latest priority is… chemtrails.

Not fixing the Sewerage & Water Board. Not stopping insurance companies from fleeing the state. Not funding addiction treatment programs. No, instead, our legislature is spending precious time and taxpayer dollars debating a bill—Senate Bill 46—based on a completely debunked internet conspiracy theory that claims airplanes are spraying chemicals like aluminum and barium into the sky to manipulate the weather. The theory has been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from pushing it through the House by a vote of 58 to 32.

… We could be talking about how to prepare for another brutal hurricane season. We could be debating how to keep teachers from leaving the profession in record numbers. We could even be discussing how to rein in Entergy as utility bills skyrocket across the state. But instead, our elected officials are chasing clouds—literally.

… If you’re wondering why our roads flood when it drizzles, or why your homeowner’s insurance bill just tripled—look no further. The same people who think Delta Airlines is controlling the weather are the ones writing our laws.

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Not unexpectedly, Louisiana yet again was ranked as the absolutely rock-bottom worst state in America, 2024.

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Baton Rouge and Shreveport are the only other cities of note, and both are crime-ridden. We could throw in Lafayette as well. That’s one reason the magazine ranked the state at #50 in crime and corrections. According to the FBI, New Orleans had the third-highest homicide rate in 2023 of all U.S. cities…

… Crime is heavily weighted in these studies. According to the FBI’s final report of 2022 (the latest available), Louisiana had the worst homicide rate in the country — 16.1 homicides per 100,000 people. Of the 408 homicides that year, 266 took place in New Orleans.

Crime is a symptom of poverty, lack of education, and unemployment, to name a few. And Louisiana falls flat on its face in all dimensions.

The 2023 state budget produced a surplus of $325 million. Much of that will go toward paying down the state’s debt. None of it was allocated for elementary and secondary schools…

Questioned in Parliament about banning burqas, the PM got all How Dare You? flustered, as did a bunch of other politicians. In a country where comfortable majorities support a ban, this was not a brilliant move, because now UD‘s Google News alerts are exploding with BURQA stories out of Britain. Everybody’s talking about it.

The minute a country initiates a serious debate about the burqa, it is on its way to a ban. Talking and reading about it all the time unburies a latency: Latently, millions of modern people really dislike burqas and what they blatantly say about women; and all it takes is manifesting the subject for their dark inchoate messes of feelings about them (pity, guilt, repulsion, studied indifference, helplessness at their small daughters seeing invisible women) to firm up into opposition. I’ve followed this narrative many times; it’s a step by step process into referenda, partial restrictions, etc etc.

So the latest thing is an important Conservative party member announcing that “employers should be able to ban their staff from wearing face coverings.” Also, she will not talk to constituents in “surgeries” if they are fully covered. These announcements will activate religious and political indignation, which will in turn inflame the other side, and so it goes.

The problem is that there’s absolutely no reason for a modern democracy to tolerate gender-based repression and a total refusal to join civil society, and even good people who pride themselves on their tolerance know this. This is why so much of the world already bans/restricts this garment.