Seen on this morning’s walk
through Rehoboth Beach.

A startling poll released on Friday by public broadcaster ARD showed 81 percent of Germans support banning the most conservative types of Islamic veils from schools and government institutions. The garments they want banned are the burqa, which covers women from head to toe, including the face, and the niqab, which does the same except for a narrow slit instead of mesh square to see out of.

Could we please declare a moratorium on this particular startle reflex? I guess the Foreign Policy guy who wrote this 2016 article was startled; I guess he thought gobs of Germans, and no doubt other Europeans, were fine with public spaces full of degraded women. Will he also be startled to discover that a not-small part of that 81 percent is Muslim? Wow. Gosh.

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UD has rarely seen so graphic an instance of separation between elites and everyone else as she has on the burqa/niqab front. Each time another European country bans these vile shrouds, startled reporters round up indignant people to talk about how nasty everyone in every European country is.

Maybe we could do better than this. Maybe we could stop reacting like this. It’s really dumb.

Positively spiritual.

Photo UD.

Kris Kobach, whose official portrait in the state capitol reflects his love of mounting guns, said in an interview today that “Mounting guns is something I do and have done since Pops and I mounted guns together when I was a boy of six.”

Asked to respond to the town of Shawnee’s public apology for having allowed Kobach to take part in its Memorial Day parade mounting a huge gun, Kobach commented: “Guns call out to me to mount them. Mount me… mount me now.”

Good opinion piece about how information-mongering and welfare statism generate mediocrity in India’s universities.

[W]e need to exorcise ourselves of our subliminal fear that the spread of liberal education — especially the liberating and egalitarian ideals embedded in it — could nudge the country into unrest.

… along with good food and drink.

Although so much older than all other
patrons that they expect at any moment
to be asked to leave, Les UDs really
like the place.

… UD‘s hometown, Garrett Park.

“Something old, something very new,” an otherwise respectful report on the royal wedding, said, “Bespoke, cut and sewn by hand, Harry was wearing his aviator wings and a medal honoring his service.” Describing a prince as bespoke is appealing, but cut and sewn is unseemly for the occasion even if true. And it sounds awfully painful.

Matt Gillman, Garrett Park

Succession, early on, is more interested in mocking the ridiculous excesses of the monstrously privileged than probing the monsters they’ve become. In the first episode, a family dinner turns into a makeshift softball game outside, as many do — only this one involves multiple helicopters ferrying the [family] to a field on Long Island. Later, [a family member] offers a Latino employee’s son a million dollars if he can score a home run, only to tear the check up in front of him when the kid just gets to third base. In one outrageous (and Veep-like) scene, [a daughter’s] fiancé … encourages [a young family member] to eat a whole roasted songbird. “This is like a rare privilege, and it’s also kind of illegal,” [he] crows.

UD does not suffer from generalized fear of paintings, only fear of several paintings that, until last week, hung in her own wee ‘thesdan house. She acquired them in 2005, on the death of her father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, who had himself acquired them in the form of gifts from his old friend Wojciech Fangor.

By virtue of being Poles who lived through most of the twentieth century, Soltan and Fangor got served up absurd, atrocious, obscene, ridiculous sorts of early lives – picaresque farces where they were always leaping about trying to survive the latest global disaster. It’s a bit of luck that either man survived to mid-century, and even more amazing that both eventually returned to the very privileged lives into which they were born.

The early ‘seventies saw Soltan a Harvard professor and Fangor the subject of a one-man show at the Guggenheim.

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

Yet not much happened for Fangor after that show; he remained obscure, and during the subsequent years I knew him in upstate New York, was simply one more struggling artist, working hard in his studio, getting occasional teaching/lecturing gigs, trying to sell canvases.

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

So when Les UDs sat on the floor of Jerzy’s Cambridge studio sifting through his art collection and dividing things up with Mr UD’s sister, they treated the Fangors the way they treated all of the other mildly significant artworks Jerzy, who knew many Polish artists, had gathered. Mr UD put one of Fangor’s circles on his office wall at the University of Maryland, and the other circles went in La Kid’s room.

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

When did UD start idly checking the prices of Fangor’s circles online? Aucune idée. But it gradually occurred to me that the numbers were going up and up and up, and that articles about his hotness were proliferating. “Take that Fangor off your office wall and bring it home!” UD screeched at Mr UD one day. “And while we’re on the subject, we need to put all of these behind glass and insure them or something…”

Les UDs both became more and more uneasy as they realized they were holding onto, and not taking particularly good care of, paintings that had suddenly become insanely valuable. It was time to sell.

UD sent exploratory emails to Sothebys, Christies, and Bonhams. The first two sent polite form letters asking to see some pictures of her Fangors. A Fangor specialist from Bonhams almost immediately got on a train from New York City to DC and visited our pictures. She spent hours in the house, scrutinizing, taking notes, taking pictures, chatting to me about Fangor and the paintings, and of course offering us a contract.

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More to come.

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Photos Tamara Trocki.

Around 2 a.m. on May 14, 2017, [16-year-old] Michael T. Dennis shot himself with a .44-caliber Taurus Magnum Raging Bull revolver in the basement of his family home at 9515 N. River Road in Tittabawassee Township, [Michigan]. The property had been the site of a bonfire involving minors and alcohol in the hours preceding Michael’s death.

Police were summoned to the house on receiving reports of a shooting. They found Michael on the basement floor, bleeding from a head wound and with the revolver between his legs. Police found a second gun, a .44-caliber Pietta Colt Army revolver, in a different part of the basement.

The teen’s parents were home at the time of the shooting.

… Four others also faced adult criminal charges, while several minors who were present faced juvenile petitions. David Hubbard, 62, was charged with and later pleaded guilty to furnishing alcohol to minors, receiving a $500 fine.

… Two 17-year-olds faced the same charge as well as counts of minor in possession of alcohol. Connor Brunett, 18, was charged with aiming a firearm at a person without malice and lying to police.

So much fun and no harm done. They’re all drawing itty-bitty misdemeanor charges.

… presiding over vile and violent world soccer, gets desperate enough to go the girl route.

What a sexist, ethnocentric, headline.

Denmark’s burqa ban will affect one hundred percent of the women there.

Obviously the salafist enthusiasts who wear it will have to take it off. That is the very least of it.

The reason huge majorities of people of all faiths and genders all over Europe tell pollsters they want the burqa off their streets is that it affects all modern egalitarian civic-minded human beings. It is most damaging to girls and young women, who grow up witnessing the most graphic exposure of — not the inferiority, but the nothingness of women, every day of their lives as they walk the streets of their cities. It is only slightly less corrosive to everyone else, as they suffer basic ongoing offense to their basic democratic instincts. Do I really live in a country where men can blind, deafen, and mute their women? For most rational people, the answer to this question has got to be no. And that is why, one after another, the countries of Europe are banning it.

I’m not sure how saying someone looks like a child of “Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes” is racist. I thought “Muslim Brotherhood” was supposed to be a “good” thing and Liberals say we are descended from apes?

Bill Mitchell; quoted by Conor Friedersdorf

Attorney Peter Osinoff also argued that [Carmen Puliafito] suffers from a mental illness that makes him brilliant and leaves him with “immense energy,” but instills an “ugly side” in Puliafito that drove him to be infatuated with a young prostitute.