"Juvenal said that being a gladiator turned an ugly man into an Adonis in women’s eyes. 'It’s the steel they love,' the poet wrote."

"Men were obsessed too. Maecenas, a patron of the arts under the emperor Augustus, discussed the warriors’ form on a carriage ride with the poet Horace; the playwright Terence complained that one of his performances had been ruined by a crowd rushing in thinking that gladiators were fighting. The Romans felt it was good luck to part a bride’s hair with a spear that had been thrust into a gladiator’s body and drank tinctures of their blood to cure epilepsy...."

From "Sex, sesterces and status — the perks of being a gladiator/Those Who Are About Die is a myth-slaying history of the world of Roman fighters by the classicist and novelist Harry Sidebottom" (London Times).

"Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure/The Stanford Internet Observatory provided real-time analysis..."

"... on viral election falsehoods but has struggled amid attacks from conservative politicians and activists." 

That's the headline at WaPo, and I'm wondering how the 2 parts of the headline relate to each other. Why did the Stanford Internet Observatory collapse? Was it because conservatives attacked it? How much of a struggle is it for a research group that specializes in monitoring disinformation to handle attacks? The word "amid" fudges the causal connection. Did X happen because of Y or did X and Y just happen around the same time?

The word "amid" also appears in the first sentence: "The Stanford Internet Observatory... has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation."

"Amid" appears again in the 4th paragraph: "Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda."

Have I ever gone on "amid" alert before? Yes! In October 2013, there was a NYT headline, "Obama’s Uncertain Path Amid Syria Bloodshed." 

People who don't know — or pretend not to know — that Roseanne Barr is a comedian.

Here's the highly lovable video clip:

 

At Kari Lake’s fundraising event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Roseanne Barr told young people to “drop out of college” while pushing QAnon conspiracies:

“It isn’t nothing but devil worshipping, baby blood drinking, Democrat donors.” pic.twitter.com/WP9Br1X1DQ

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) April 4, 2024

And here's where I found that: "Roseanne Barr Pushed QAnon Blood Drinking Conspiracy at Kari Lake's Mar-a-Lago Event/Barr also encouraged everyone to drop out of college" ("The people of Arizona will decide if they want to send someone who associates with QAnon conspiracy theories and those who against college to represent them in the senate").

That's at something called MeidasTouch, which I saw because it was featured at my favorite source of links, Memeorandum.

"Former President Donald J. Trump says that his recent warning of a 'blood bath'.... was made in the context of electric vehicles..."

"... and that he was not talking about political violence generally. But if discussing a type of automotive technology in bloody terms seems odd to some, it fits in the increasingly brutal language Mr. Trump has been applying to electric vehicles, one of his favorite foils. He has long claimed electric cars will 'kill' America’s auto industry. He has called them an 'assassination' of jobs. He has declared that the Biden administration 'ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing' by encouraging the sales of electric cars.... Jennifer Mercieca, author of 'Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,' noted that... 'his speech was so disjointed it makes it difficult to know if he was threatening the U.A.W. workers, the U.S. auto manufacturers, or the nation as a whole.... In a sense, it doesn’t matter because Trump was threatening all at once.... Trump paints a dire picture of the nation, threatening economic ruin if he isn’t put in charge.... Using threats of force to gain power over a nation is authoritarian... not democratic.'"

Writes Lisa Friedman, in "Trump’s Violent Language Toward EVs/The former president has deployed increasingly aggressive talk about electric vehicles and their effect on the American economy" (NYT).

I should note that Trump's antagonists paint a dire picture of the nation ruined if Trump is put in charge. There's a lot of metaphorically violent rhetoric going around, but it's only denounced when it comes from the Trump side.

Much has been made of Trump's use of "bloodbath," but if Biden had used that word in his State of the Union, it would have been praised as feisty and fiery.

Biden's supporters begged for the violence:

This is what gets my tag "civility bullshit."

Bloodbath.

This is the third post of the morning and, like the previous two, it has a title consisting of one word that's in the news this morning. I can see from the comments in those other posts and in last night's open thread, that people especially want to talk about "bloodbath."

I feel so pushed to talk about "bloodbath" this morning that I balk at churning out a "bloodbath" post. You already know what you want to say. Is it my job to expound on "bloodbath" as it relates to the free-speaking raconteur Donald Trump and his gasping, raging antagonists?

I'll just feed your bloodbathlust with my favorite "bloodbath" quotations from the OED:

"Trump denied that he intended any racist sentiment with his 'poisoning the blood' comments, and he pointed to his strong poll numbers with African American and Hispanic voters."

"Asked again specifically about the Hitler comparisons, Trump said: 'First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood, he didn’t say it the way I said it either, by the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.'"

From "Trump: ‘I’m not a student of Hitler’" (The Hill)(summarizing things Trump said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday).

They say that he said something about blood.... Trump opponents should find the Hitler quotes about "blood," put them next to Trump quotes about "blood," and compare the meaning — seriously and accurately. There's a great anti-Trump argument to be made, if the material aligns very well. If the argument is not made, I'm going to presume it can't be made. I put a little effort into this task myself, and the Hitler "blood" quotes I saw were about interbreeding and mixed race children. The Trump "blood" quotes seem to be about immigrants who don't speak English and don't share — or want to learn — our values. I'm wary of the Trump-is-Hitler propagandists, but if they do the hard, honest work of developing their argument, I will listen. If they don't, I'm holding it against them.

What's the connection between sounding like Hitler and having read "Mein Kampf"?

I'm reading "Trump, Attacked for Echoing Hitler, Says He Never Read ‘Mein Kampf'" (NYT).

But he said on Tuesday night in a speech in Iowa that undocumented immigrants from Africa, Asia and South America were “destroying the blood of our country,” before alluding to his previous comments.

“That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country,” Mr. Trump continued. “They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’”

If not having read "Mein Kampf" were an excuse for those who don't want to be considered Nazi-like, then a lot of Nazis would be off the hook. Here's what William L. Shirer wrote in  "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (p. 81):

Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit— in private— that they were never able to get through to the end of its 782 turgid pages.

Who's read "Mein Kampf"? It doesn't mean anything one way or the other not to have read "Mein Kampf." There are Nazi stalwarts who haven't read it and Nazi opponents who should have. To continue with the Shirer quote:

"Until recently, Bryan Johnson was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to infuse one litre of his teenage son’s youthful plasma into his own ageing blood stream every month."

"'I’ve never paid more attention to what he’s eating … because that was going into my body,' the 46-year-old American tech entrepreneur says.... He also pumped his own plasma into his 70-year-old father’s body to help improve his declining physical and cognitive health: 'It was one of the most meaningful moments in his entire life. And it was the same for me.'... But Johnson had just begun using an algorithm to prevent biological ageing, which sifts through all research on longevity to create the best treatment plan and he was using his own body as a petri dish for it. Doctors have told Johnson he has the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of an 18-year-old...."

From "The Immortals: meet the billionaires forking out for eternal life" (The Guardian).

"We try really hard now, and have for a long time, to be clear that Goofus is not all bad, and Gallant is not all good..."

"We just try to be really clear that Goofus isn’t always bad. He’s not. He’s just often making choices that aren’t thoughtful or safe."

Said Christine French Cully, the current editor in chief of Highlights, quoted in "THE COMIC STRIP THAT EXPLAINS THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN PARENTING/What eight decades of Goofus and Gallant illustrate about society’s changing expectations of children" (The Atlantic).

Every installment of Goofus and Gallant now has a line at the top that reads “There’s some of Goofus and Gallant in us all. When the Gallant shines through, we show our best self.”

But isn't that exactly what every kid reading Goofus and Gallant in the old days figured out on their own? It was funny because one kid was always good — too good — and one always bad — absurdly bad. I think putting that label on implicitly says we're not trying to be funny anymore because we think you're dumb.

There are some nice examples of the old strip, notably this gem from 1955:

"Circular, and dark blue, with a Tupperware-style lid, it is precisely the kind of vessel you’d transport a soup or salad in."

"I’ve even sealed it inside a freezer bag, to contain any leaks. Or smells. I walk slowly and with care across Westminster Bridge, because any trip could prove disastrous. As I enter St Thomas’ Hospital and head for the infection department on the fifth floor, I realise the object I’m carrying is still warm, and, despite my preparations, I’m sure I can detect a faint whiff of something ripe, like camembert. It is, in a word, a turd. Freshly laid, and brimming with bacteria, the doctors I’m delivering it to believe such faeces could be the future of medicine. I’ve carried mine across London to be made into capsules – that someone else will ultimately eat...."

 
Writes Linda Geddes, in "Keep taking the crapsules: how I became a faecal transplant donor" (The Guardian).

"The impregnator — a clarifying term for a man who starts an unwanted pregnancy — suffers not one twinge of pain related to childbirth, only pleasure in the sexual act."

"And none of the new laws forcing pregnant women to give birth have mandated consequences for the impregnator.... Forced-birth laws mandate a woman not only to withstand childbirth but also to choose: either raise a child she does not want or surrender that child for adoption, a decision that some women embrace but others describe as a lifelong grief. In this way, abortion bans and restrictions could also be called 'forced child-surrender' or 'forced motherhood' laws.... A wise grandmother once told me: 'The decision to have a child is a decision to have your heart go walking outside your body for the rest of your life.' What happens if that decision is made in a statehouse? A courtroom? Does the lawmaker’s heart walk with a child — the one whose mother was denied an abortion — for life?"

From "Antiabortion laws are forced-birth laws. Here’s what that looks like" by Kate Manning (WaPo).

There's also this: "Like abortion foes who wave photos of bloody fetuses outside clinics (fetuses that could not survive outside a woman’s uterus), we who oppose the annihilation of our bodily autonomy ought to plaster statehouses with photos of our episiotomy incisions, our Caesarean scars, our intravenous-line hematomas, our bloody postnatal sanitary pads and bloodstained bedsheets, our cracked nipples and infected breasts."

"[A]n 1885 anti-vaccine banner that read 'Pure blood and no adulteration'; and activists who asserted that vaccination was 'pollution of our veins.'..."

"The association of 'pure,' 'natural' and 'good' would have made perfect sense at the time, since natural goodness and unnatural evil were standard in popular discussions of health. In his immensely popular 1867 book 'The Philosophy of Eating,' homeopath Albert J. Bellows blamed all illness on impurity and in a chapter titled 'Impure Blood' explained how good health depended on 'natural food' and 'pure water.' Illness was the result of 'unnatural drugs or medicine.' The same associations remained powerful in the mid-20th century, when opponents of water fluoridation complained about unnatural adulteration of what should be pure. Their position — described by social scientists at the time as 'naturalist syndrome' — was so mainstream that Stanley Kubrick skewered it in his classic 'Dr. Strangelove,' wherein the lunatic Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper bemoans how fluoride corrupts the 'pure blood of pure Americans.'"

 From "How the phrase ‘natural immunity’ misleads us about real risks and dangers/Antibodies to the coronavirus are not better just because they are ‘natural'" (WaPo, September 29, 2021). 

That's written by Alan Levinovitz, an associate professor of religious studies at James Madison University and the author of "Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science."

"So, I know we're all making fun of this. But, I think there should be a much stronger push back against Biden claiming that mainstream Republicans are trading in blood libel."

Highest-rated comment on "Biden Denies Sucking The Blood Out Of Children" (r/Conservative). The post links to "Biden Denies Sucking The Blood Out Of Children" (Guardian Gazette). 

I found that comment because I was looking to see if anyone was saying what I wanted to say. I'm seeing the usual fun-making over Biden gibbering nonsense. But it didn't sound like nonsense to me. It's garbled, but I think he's essentially saying the Republicans are libeling Democrats the way the Nazis libeled the Jews. 

Here's background: "What does blood libel mean?" (BBC). That article is from 2011, taking Sarah Palin to task for saying, after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, "Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."

And here's Biden talking:

PRES. BIDEN: "The idea that the Democrats or the Biden is hiding people and sucking the blood of children, no I’m serious, that’s the — Now you may not like me and that’s your right..”

pic.twitter.com/KuBqYi2mXN

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 22, 2021

AND: There is another Biden blood-sucking clip, so he clearly means to get this meme out there:

Biden really just responded to a reporter this way. 😬 pic.twitter.com/4FbmtMqjlS

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) July 23, 2021

"Blood bath."

I'm reading "Has Trump Drawn the Water for a ‘Republican Blood Bath’?/And if he has, what should Biden do with his first term?" (NYT), a conversation between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, which ends:

Bret: Oh, and speaking of the Senate: Did you hear Nebraska’s Ben Sasse tear into Trump during that phone call with his constituents? Too little, too late, in my view, though it’s always nice to hear what Republicans really think of their favorite president. 

Gail: Yeah, thanks to Sasse we can point to a sitting senator from his own party who accused him of screwing up the coronavirus crisis, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists and drawing the water for a “Republican blood bath.” Can’t get much better than that. Catch you again next week, Bret. God knows what will have happened by then.

I'm thinking — do you draw water for a blood bath? Just taking the metaphor seriously — and I'll put to the side the violence of the imagery — isn't the liquid for a blood bath blood? 

A "blood bath" is, in its oldest figurative meaning, according to the OED, "A battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre." Figurative in the sense of "bath." The blood is real blood. That goes back to 1843. The fully figurative meaning — "A dramatic loss or heavy defeat" — with both the bath and the blood as metaphor — is traced back only to 1967. 

Strangely enough, there is a nonmetaphorical meaning that predates all that — "A bath in warm blood taken as a tonic or form of medical treatment"! 

1834 London Med. Gaz. 22 Feb. 813 (heading) On blood-baths... According to a dark tradition,..the ancient kings of Egypt used to bathe in human blood when they were seized with leprosy. 

1895 Cincinnati Med. Jrnl. May 380/2 Although French doctors do not often prescribe these forms of treatment, ‘blood baths’ are not infrequently used....

I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can take a blood bath to cure the coronavirus. You know? If you could? And maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Again, I say maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor. Have you ever heard of that? 

"Extremely pale people tend to have visible veins. No foundation is going to be able to cover a bruise effectively while allowing those blue-tinged lines to show through..."

"... which leaves the pasty among us kind of screwed unless we’re going to go get serious special effects makeup training. Try having your husband bite the nape of your neck in or just on your hairline.... Ask your doctor about arnica. It’s an herb that can be applied topically, and some circus people, BDSM aficionados, and sex workers swear by it for speeding up the healing of bruises...."

Advice from Slate's sex columnist, How to Do It, responding to a question that begins "I love being bitten. I especially love being bitten at the joint between my shoulder and neck during sex."

As an extremely pale person, I was interested in the makeup advice. I think she's saying that the EPP needs to use foundation that's translucent enough to let your little veins show through, that the purple is part of your natural-looking skin tone — sort of like pointillism....



As for the bruises... well, that's what's in Slate today. I wonder how hard they had to try to make sure nobody thought they were giving advice to women who are actually abused and wanting to hide it.

Cory Booker misused the term "red badge of courage."

At last night's debate (transcript), Booker said:

[W]e know Donald Trump's a racist, but there is no red badge of courage for calling him that. Racism exists. The question isn't who isn't a racist. It's who is and isn't doing something about racism.

In the classic American novel "The Red Badge of Courage," the term appears exactly once and is easily understood:

The mob of men was bleeding.... At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.

The "red badge of courage" is a war wound. That's why it's red. It's not a medal you get in recognition of courage. It is physical damage to your fleshly body that may be taken — rightly or wrongly — as evidence that you were courageous in battle.

Booker was right that you don't deserve a courage medal for calling Donald Trump a racist. It's an easy — even pusillanimous — move. ("Pusillanimous" is the opposite of "courageous.") But even if it were courageous and we were inclined to give you a medal for courage, we shouldn't be giving you a red badge of courage! That would mean we should shoot you!

A basic American education should include reading "The Red Badge of Courage." I was forced to read it in high school, and though I found it hard to understand at the time and a half century has passed since I read it, I have not forgotten what "red badge of courage" means. It makes me sad to hear Cory Booker get that wrong. He is one of the best-educated individuals in American politics today. He went to one of the finest high schools, received a BA and an MA from Stanford University, studied at  Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and then went to the most illustrious law school in the country, Yale. Yet he doesn't know "The Red Badge of Courage." What does that say about American education? This makes me sad.

Even sadder is the low standard for what courage means. Of course, Booker is right that there's no courage in calling Donald Trump a racist. But what did he think was courageous? He said:

We have to come at this issue attacking systemic racism, having the courage to call it out, and having a plan to do something about it. If I am president of the United States, we will create an office in the White House to deal with the problem of white supremacy and hate crimes.

It's not courageous to express belief in "systemic racism." It's the basic ideology of the left. It would be more courageous to critique the dogma than to repeat the usual incantations.

Elsewhere in the debate transcript, we see the impoverishment of the concept of courage: Kamala Harris said: "Beto, God love you for standing so courageously in the midst of that tragedy." Beto was not on site during the El Paso shooting. He visited the city afterwards. What was courageous? Opposition to murder and shooting people?!

Booker said Beto showed "such courage" for supporting supporting gun licensing. Warren talked about "courage" to fight Trump on immigration. Buttigieg talked about the "courage" it would take for Congress to vote on military interventions. Harris credited Barack Obama with "courage" for his work on Obamacare. There is no serious effort to engage with the idea of courage.

It's an empty, blather word.

***

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks, an existence of soft and eternal peace.

Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

I know, I'm arriving late at the subject of Biden's blood eye.

What can I add to the discussion? How can eye help?

ADDED: Maybe you think that's a cheap pun, but I was influenced by "The Book of Prince" (blogged here yesterday):

Even in longhand, he wrote in his signature style, an idiosyncratic precursor of textspeak that he’d perfected back in the eighties: “Eye” for “I,” “U” for “you,” “R” for “are.”...

He’d written about his childhood and adolescence in Minneapolis, starting with his first memory, his mother winking at him. “U know how U can tell when someone is smiling just by looking in their eyes?” he wrote. “That was my mother’s eyes. Sometimes she would squint them like she was about 2 tell U a secret. Eye found out later my mother had a lot of secrets.”

The answer to a very old question is: 9.

In the comments to the previous post — "Things to do with cigarettes," which looked at some fabulous vintage ads for a long forgotten cigarette brand, Murad — Laslo Spatula was inspired to rewrite some of the sentences that were part of my old "Gatsby" project (where I'd take a sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and we'd talk about it out of context).

So Laslo was posting things like:

"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one smoking a Murad."

Here's the old post from "Gatsby" project, where you see the original sentence from the novel was: "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

The first commenter on that post asks "How many times does the word 'yellow' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

Within the half hour, I give him my answer: 24. And that makes me want to count the rest of the colors. Is yellow the dominant "Gatsby" color? What's most likely to beat it? The other primary colors. Using the search function in Kindle, I found 22 appearances of "blue," but...

The man in the middle.

"It was an aggressive display of physicality. They were rambunctious and trying to instigate a conflict. We were wondering where their chaperones were. He was really trying to defuse the situation."

Said Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project, quoted in "'It was getting ugly': Native American drummer speaks on the MAGA-hat-wearing teens who surrounded him" (WaPo).

I am touched by the charity of "They were rambunctious."

But I'm only guessing at what the video sounds like. I cannot bring myself to play it.

[A] Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity urging them to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.

Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, with one who stood about a foot from the drummer’s face also wearing a relentless smirk.

Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle....

The phrase "man in the middle" resonates with me. I will never forget the day — at the rambunctious Wisconsin protests — when Meade encountered The Man in the Middle:

[O]ne man — who did not agree with the protesters — decided he would occupy the central spot. To the consternation of the others, he invited people to come talk to him one-on-one....

I started to imagine Wisconsinites coming back to the building every day, talking about everything, on and on, indefinitely into the future. That man who decided to hold dialogues in the center of the rotunda is a courageous man. But it isn't that hard to be as courageous as he was. In the long run, it's easier to do that than to spend your life intimidated and repressed. That man was showing us how to be free. He was there today, but you — and you and you! — could be there tomorrow, standing your ground, inviting people to talk to you, listening and going back and forth, for the sheer demonstration of the power of human dialogue and the preservation of freedom.

Video at the link.

Looking for posts about that man in the middle, I see that in 2013 I wrote about the phrase "man in the middle" as it appears in "Atlas Shrugged." Ayn Rand wrote:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

I said:

Is this cranking you up? It doesn't work on me. I think moderation is a virtue, but in this imagery, virtue is blood, evil is poison, and moderation is a tube. You're supposed to feel this as a flashy display of reason, but it's full of emotional bluster and heavily reliant on metaphor. I'm being asked to regard myself as a rubber tube. No....

I'm not accepting this picture of life in terms of people with good blood and people with bad blood and everyone else as a bunch of tubes conducting a big old transfusion that's just got to stop....

I was talking about that Ayn Rand passage because Ted Cruz read it — along with "Green Eggs and Ham" — out loud while filibustering in the Senate. The phrase "the man in the middle" grabbed me, and I wrote:

"Man in the middle" is a phrase that feels like a call to action, because it's a phrase Meade and I have used when we talk about a man we saw as a hero for sitting down in the middle of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, in a crowd of sign-carrying, noisy partisan protesters, inviting them to speak, one-on-one, with someone who was not in agreement with the crowd....

Talking, indefinitely into the future... in the middle of a government building. That's what Ted Cruz is doing, but not in the moderate, surely-we-all-can-get-along mode. He's on one side, and he's reviling anyone in the middle. He's reading from Ayn Rand, saying that the moderate is evil, because the moderate is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. Oh? But would you like it it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? Would you like it in a house? Would you like it with a mouse?

UPDATE: I still haven't watched the video, but I have watched Scott Adams's strong apology for portraying the Catholic schoolboys in a negative light, and Adams describes the extended video in detail. So check out my new post, which includes quotes from Adams's description.

Jimi Hendrix's copy of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" has Jimi's blood on it.

"In 1965, as a struggling musician in New York, Hendrix was already enough of a Dylan fan to spend his last money on this album. The Brook Street copy of this LP has Hendrix’s blood on its sleeve, after he cut his hand on a broken wine glass then picked up the album."

From "Inside Jimi Hendrix’s blood-spattered record collection." You can see the collection at the historic recreation of Hendrix’s apartment (AKA "flat) in Mayfair, London. At the link, to NME, there's a list of all the albums in the collection and some info about how well-worn they look, e.g., "Hendrix owned two copies of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, both of which show signs of wear and tear."