Warming tren underway. From -18 to this morning to 27 tomorrow. That's a 45 egree swing. That pile will be gone any ay now. Kiing, of course.

DEGREE

ANY DAY

KIDDING

The D-key on my keyboar is shot. I popped it off and cleaned the gunk. But a key that's been popped on a Mac keyboar never behaves the same way afterwars. I know I have a spare, somewhere.

It's one of the iPad keyboards, though. Feels smaller and wrong. Doesn't have a numeric keypad. On't like it. Maybe I'll just have to hit the key harder to produce the necessary letter. In case I don't hit it har enough, here are some extras

dddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

Apply where needed.

I should have done this Monday or Tuesday, when the new bank in Harlingen TX was fresh in your mind. You were fretting for hours, weren’t you? Was it well-received? Was it seen as a civic boon? Yes! It was front page news.

Look at this piece of All-American Post-War Bank.

"The beauty" of the new building could not be dimished by the rain. The happy, welcome rain.

		The writer raved on and on about the fins. Fact: they’re attractive!
		They spared no expense and cared for every detail: Why, the modernism of the facility extended to the pens and the trash bins. I should note that the downtown Minneapolis Post Office, built in the 30s, had waste disposal built into the desks. Cheeky little swipe at the ever-annoying state of bad public pens, but only to note that the problem has been solved. Scientifically, no doubt.

I bring this up for a reason, as you'll see.

There was a debate today on a subreddit about classical architecture, agonizing over the administration’s return to its previous position, which was, well, RETVRN. All Federal buildings will now be constructed in traditional styles. No more concrete monstrosities, no more deconstructed alien embassies, just nice sober structures with columns and porticos, connecting the present to the past. The group is predisposed to approve, but there are worries that the style will now be stained with Fascism.

It s not an usual debate on the site these days, where subreddit after subreddit is banning links to X, because Elon Musk is a Nazi. From a gesture they deduce that he favors gun confiscation, state control of the media, state direction of all industrial output, support for black-clad masked mobs that besiege government buildings and beat their opposition, and the genocide of the Jews. Eventually they will tire of the subject and go back to their favorite causes, which include gun confiscation, state control of the media, state direction of all industrial output, siupport for black-clad masked mobs that besiege government buildings and beat their oppositionand support for an organization that desires the genocide of the Jews.

X, of course, is a rightwing hellsite! There’s no debate at all!

		This was one of my favorites. It spawned a long thread about what interests might be red flags, and people found most of them problematic. At least the ones that were interested in Western history, because that should give you the ick. People who have interest in the accomplishements and achievements of the West are ick-givers.

Rome is a big red flag, of course, even though “Rome” as a subject is so vast and diverse you can find resonance for anything anywhere.

“I’m really interested in the rise and fall of Caesar.”

“Of course you are, because you want a Caesar to sweep away the Republic and do the bidding of a strong man of your choice. I see you. I see you.”

“Actually, I take the view that he was a populist who earned favor with the populares, and was assassinated by a oligarchical cabal. Just kidding! He was stabbed in a theater, which draws comparison to Lincoln, no?”
“What do you mean, theater? He was in the Senate.”

“Which met in the Theater of Pompey. And next door an actors’ troupe was performing ‘My Etruscan Cousin.’ Eerie, no?”

Yes, yes, they met in the Curia, I know. Point is, people fasten on to different eras at different times for different reasons.

More debate: this one was the subject of the daily Discourse for 24 hours or so. A woman with a child wasn’t crazy about safety conditions in the subways.

The interesting thing about this bag of smugma was his aggression. He will yell at a woman with a child because his worldview demands that he defend the right of the crazy person to stand in an elevator smearing crap on the wall with one hand and frotting his yarbles with the other. New York is not for the weak! It is for Stronk Men, like him!

The natural impulse of men ought to be making the subways safe for all, vulnerable women in particular, but this is fascist-coded nowadays because it means using the police to remove the madmen and forcibly confine them. This is victimizing the marginalized. The crazy man cannot move to New Jersey. If he did, and he started threatening women on train platforms in the Garden State, that would be good, because it would bring home the inevitable manifestations of corrosive capitalism to the place where people expect a certain amount of public order.

By the way, if anyone proposes welfare to feed and clothe those who cannot meet their own needs, you tell them: New York is not for the weak. Also, Elon Musk is probably a Social Darwinesque fascist.

So, to recap, according to voices found on the Nazi Hellsite, the ideal world has civic buildings that look like a Jawa sand crawler, men who are only interested in the Bolshevik revolution, odorous wankers in every subway train as a Stark Rebuke, and, of course, a society that does not seek to explore the universe in which we are an astonishing, if small, part.

		Camps are okay if they’re for re-education. I think my favorite part of the tweet was the accusation that going to Mars would be EXTRACTIVE, that being one of the current Bad Things the West does. The Mars colonizers would be indigenous to Mars, no? Does that not insulate them against accusations of exploitation and extraction?

It's going to be an interesting four years. I wonder how long it will take before newly deregulated high-pressure shower heads will be condemned as literal violence.

It’s 1927.   Scores of farmer folk watch able-actor slayer:       The Rubber Stamp killer! He’d be convicted, and would die in prison in 1962. Full story here.           Barking guns! Chicago had such a rep that this would be front page news on the other side of the country.           Bossy prudes, we’re never without them.     I mean, sure, Charlie acted poorly. A lot. But don't blame the medium. From his 1940 obit: His most outstanding battle in recent years was in 1929 when he was instrumental in bringing Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett to trial in Brooklyn Federal Court for her writing of "The Sex Side of Life," a pamphlet she had prepared for the sex education of her own children and which she later printed and distributed to parents, teachers and guides of children. The case was a sensational one and Canon Chase lost no opportunity to condemn Mrs. Dennett’s writings. She was convicted in the trial but the conviction was later reversed by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, which administered a severe reprimand to the lower court. Undaunted, Canon Chase then announced he would write a sex education pamphlet of his own, giving the "holy side" of sex. The volume was never published. Her book can be found here.       The kids were reading too much nihilistic literature, or falling under the sway of daft interpretations of German philosphers. Or so they thought.     Thanks, Jack! It’s enormous. It would be easy to mistake it for some old European church. Pix here, and here. When there's not enough interesting news, we retreat to old movie ads.       You can see the Reverend Case’s point, I suppose. The plot: After observing other peoples' bad romantic experiences, Derry Thomas no longer has any faith in men. Not believing in marriage, she organizes a club in which, in the summertime, married men can meet single women. A meeting of the club is also attended by Tony Landor, who, unlike the other male attendants, is still a bachelor. Derry falls in love with him, but hesitates to accept it. Put under hypnosis, she ends up confessing that she loves him. A judge, also a member of the club, makes himself available to the couple to perform a civil marriage.     The theater still stands, and it's glorious: That will do for today. Except, of course, for the Decades Project update, and the Miscellany and Outtakes at the Substack. Thank you for your patronage, and I'll see you tomorrow.