Okay, but where are the op/eds from rafts of Western women intellectuals, and from jolly burqa wearers all over Europe, saying Well of course there shouldn’t be an edict, but burqas are beautiful empowering expressions of piety and selfhood and you’re all defaming them just as much as Johnny and Amber are defaming each other … ?

I mean, everyone’s dumping on the burqa lately… It’s almost as if people think there’s… something wrong… with a heavy agonizingly constraining black full body bag robbing wearers of sunlight and peripheral vision, and featuring a heavy cloth strip over the mouths of women and little girls as if I mean is there some sort of symbolic value there…? That mouth thing?

So where are its defenders? They’re noisy enough when countries begin voting for burqa bans. They organize big pro-burqa marches and they tell us we’re Islamophobes for objecting to burqas. Where is all that moral passion now that everyone’s acting as if burqas are obviously atrocious? I’m waiting.

… UD‘s spring garden.

NYT

A remarkably rich, all-female, artistic ferment is on view right now in Kabul galleries, where women painters from all over the country are putting on canvas their perspectives on the world. One group show in particular – Fade to Black – is attracting global attention and acclaim.

“It’s long past time the world heard the voices of Afghan women,” commented Sotheby’s contemporary art specialist Franchetta Settembrini. “Until now, we’ve known little of the specific outlook and experiences of this hidden population. Now they’ve emerged, to tell their story on museum walls, and I’ve found it exhilarating.”

“The movement reminds me of the famous ape artist in the Jardin des Plantes,” she continued. “Vladimir Nabokov was inspired by the ape’s story, and talked about it in an interview about Lolita.” ([“I was] prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”)

Settembrini announced a forthcoming catalogue (BACK TO BLACK: STUDIES IN MESH) featuring the most prominent of Kabul’s neo-impressionists. “Few lay on total cave darkness as masterfully as X,” Settembrini remarked. “X has the technique, vision, and sheer physical strength to place layer after ‘noir’ layer on the canvas.”

X? “Oh, they’re all X. Wouldn’t want to get beheaded, would we?”

Bidding for a single X Series painting will begin at $500,000.

… out.

What if they gave a country and nobody came?

We cannot control ideas or speech and should not attempt to do so even if we could. But we could reduce access to the weaponry that converts ideology into atrocity. At least, other advanced countries find themselves able to do so. Almost every country on Earth has citizens filled with vitriol, but no comparably advanced country has a gun-violence epidemic quite like America’s…

[T]he American exception that bathes this country in blood and grief again and again and again is not that we are uniquely susceptible to racism or jihadism or veganism. The American exception is the unique ease of access to weapons.

…Americans die by the gun in such terrible numbers because Americans live by the gun with such reckless disregard.

… that, but the Pennsylvania Republican slate can also purchase guns.

Headline of the day.

Scroll down for all the footage!

*****************************

“This should be a bigger story.”

But the Buffalo supermarket massacre -18 year old; semi-automatic – just wiped it off the map!

“‘Damn, look at him, a young boy,’ [an] onlooker … comments on one of the bodies.”

How ya gonna keep em

Buried and choked

After they’ve learned

To breathe?

*********************

… make UD think of Kitaj’s If Not, Not:

Horror among the palms. Among the blue skies and blue ponds and pools of a languid landscape. As in D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel, or the book/film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the effort is to convey the world as both a highly evolved beautiful secure retreat, and a far-too-delicate entity subject to sudden lurid conflagration. Foreground, on-goingness. Background, the vile, all-arresting catastrophe.

[A Capitol rioter] was scheduled to plead guilty in D.C. federal court Wednesday to a misdemeanor of unlawful picketing or parading in the Capitol but when Judge Emmett Sullivan asked [him] why he wished to plead guilty, he blurted out: “I wanted to go to trial but the prosecutor said if I didn’t go to trial they would put a felony on me so I think this is probably the better route. I believe I’m innocent.”

Sullivan replied that he “can’t take a plea of guilty if you say you’re innocent.”

… As part of the conditions, [Anthime] Gionet must notify the court if he changes his home address but a pre-trial services officer told a judge in October that Gionet had left home in Arizona and moved to Clearwater, Florida without telling anyone.

Officers said they only found out when Gionet had a run-in with local law enforcement over someone apparently throwing cans at his house. Months earlier, his release conditions were tightened over a series of run-ins he had with Arizona police.

A judge declined to revoke his release. Then a month later, Gionet was charged with defacing a Hanukkah display at the Arizona state capitol.

He was also sentenced to 30 days in jail in January for assaulting a bouncer in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2020 but is appealing it.

You won’t begin to understand America until you understand why no one commenting on Naomi Judd’s suicide has asked that question. No one will ask that question, which goes to levels of responsibility for locking guns away from critically self-destructive people.

Some people might say it’s madness to have a houseful of loaded guns around someone who has made it screamingly clear that she wants to die. But those people wouldn’t be Americans.

Oh. And here’s where UD gets all excited:

He’s more scathing about the “postliberal” intellectuals of the American right, with their admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, like the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (whom he describes as having “flirted with the idea of overtly authoritarian government”) and the political scientist Patrick Deneen.

The more high-profile outing of our enemies, the better. Bravo, and keep bashing.