The Mother Mall, today. Southdale. There are a lot of empty storefronts like this. The good news, though, is that the mall is going upscale! New stores like Breitling! Svarkski or whatever! Gucci! Polo! Monclar!

Gone: Gap. I can’t say I miss it, really - everything cost too much for what you got, because the cache of the brand had evaporated a long time ago. Eddie Bauer is gone, and again, I don’t miss it - not my style, and never had my size. “You can get other sizes online,” they would tell me.

“Yes, but I am here, now, in your store, with money, desiring to exchange currency for a product.”

They also sold interesting little tools for guys that wanted to have an interesting little tool, just in case. Then they didn’t have them anymore.

The Macy’s store was not packed with merry shoppers walking around with gaily-wrapped packages, a smile on their faces, eyes twinkling as they heard the beloved old holiday standards. I think I saw three people in the department store, pawing through tottering piles of unsorted jeans or looking at overpriced items that were now - get this - on sale, for much less than the original price. That’s great! Any other day I would’ve paid $65 for this featureless long-sleeved shirt.

I was at the Mall for some Christmas errands, the nature of which I cannot mention lest Daughter read the Bleat - hey you never know - and glean clues. I will say that I had fun, because I moved a physical object into a physical cart and interacted with fellow Carbon Units in the process, and somehow the conversation drifted to computer games. The young fellow was either surprised to find that a fellow of my advanced years was conversant on modern gaming controveries, or at least he did a good job of feigning surprise that This Dude From The Time of Pong knew what was going on. I explained how gamers of my demographic were the luckiest of all, because were born into the lowest of resolutions, and found each new technological advance quite thrilling.

I was there when Doom was free, I said, like a wizened man in a dim tavern describing a golden age. But it's true. If you're in your mid 20s you have no idea what it was like to go from Space Invaders to the Flood scene in Halo. I left feeling buoyant and not old at all. Then I remembered that I'd said I was playing "Gas Station Simulator" and felt old, after all.

Like many people, my experience Guardian Hot Takes consists of screengrabs posted on Twitter. The article's title usually does the trick. You get the gist. You apprehend the pith. But sometimes you think "will a novel argument be made, or is this just the weekly reading of the liturgy for the faithful? Well, let's see.

One side cannot understand why you think you should be able to give your money to whomever you like. The other side does not understand why they shouldn’t be able to do it. The former position believes that people who inherit things have not earned it, which is an unusual position for them to take, really. Of course it’s not a matter of earning it; it’s a matter of the wishes of someone else, made of their own free will.

Why does this concern anyone?

Because it concentrates wealth, they’ll tell you. Because it perpetuates inequity. Because the money could be put to better use, if the state took it and decided how it should be distributed.

		A state preferably staffed with lots of Abis. Let’s call them Abianderilk. Abianderilk would be horrified if anyone burst into the funeral of a loved one and pried the rings off their fingers, but Abianderilk give you this look when you object to the state performing the same act.

Let us have a look at some key arguments.

Yes, the desire to pass on property to your descendants may be natural – but

Need we go on, having run into the tell-tale but? Sure.

but why should we be slaves to our biology? Social progress has frequently depended on our ability to transcend individualistic urges and work together for the common good.

Wanting to give your children your property is a matter of being a slave to biology. After all, we went to the moon by hiring a lot of unrelated people, right? Bad example; waste of money, wasn’t social progress. Well, pick a social issue, and you’ll see it was solved by transcending individualistic urges - a feat that was achieved entirely by volunteers, of course, not the application of the force of the state.

In contemporary times, most people agree that tax should facilitate transfer of wealth from those who “have” to those who “need”.

“Most people” being everyone she knows. Other people have a notion that the purpose of a tax is not to facilitate transfer of wealth but to fund the various duties the state has assumed or been given authority to perform by the governed.

Morally speaking, people who stand to inherit large sums haven’t done anything to earn that money.

Try this: Morally speaking, people who are not citizens haven't done anything to earn the benefits the state gives them. I suspect Abianderilk would find her point incontrovertable and the retort to be incomprehensible. What does "earn" have anything to do with it?

An accident of birth placed them in a comparatively wealthy family and they’ve benefited from that their whole life.

Ah, the old “accident of birth.” You were a fully-formed soul up there in the ethereal plane, a glistening soap bubble waiting for your destination. Some were sent to poor places; some were intended for First-World societies. You could’ve been a soldier in French Guiana! Except that person wouldn’t be you, really. You’re a result of your forebears, particularly your immediate ones, and the experiences you had growing up. Your conception may have been an accident, but not the fact that you are the son or daughter of a particular set of people in a particular place in time with a particular set of ideas and motivations.

One of which may be doing something specific for their children to help them in life, but not everyone can, so why should they?

Some people who stand to inherit have struggled, true, but

But tough if they're denied parental assistance. You can't make a small, watery omelette without confiscating 100,000 egg-laying chickens and eating most of them the first year because you decided it was more important to have dinner now than do maintenance on the coops and figure out a way to transport the eggs to distant markets.

Just to show you she understands the other side:

Some may argue that leaving inheritance is a moral right. It’s not about whether the recipients deserve or need it, nor whether having the ability to do so results in productivity gains. The point is that the deceased earned that money and it should be up to them where it goes.

This is where it gets a little murky.

“Some may argue that letting old people live as long as they like is a moral right. They are alive and it should be up to them when they go.

“This is where it gets a little murky.”

What if the desires of the dead directly damage the wellbeing of the living? Is there any situation in which the previous instructions of someone no longer actually present in the mortal realm should be prioritised over the needs, interests and opinions of those who are still alive and kicking?

Yes. When it’s none of their business because it’s not their stuff. Does that help? I mean, if you want to make the argument that the opinions of the kicking should trump someone’s ability to bequeath what they wish, then why do we have to stand around tapping our foot with impatience, waiting for the demise of the person whose goods we covet? This whole "dead" thing becomes an annoying technicality.

Cultural norms teach us that the inheritance of private property is the default and any expropriation of this wealth must be justified. It should be the other way round. There’s some value in respecting the wishes of the dead, yes, but

But there really isn’t, you know.

Note: if you live in the US, you can make “Tax-deductible contributions through a donor-advised fund, foundation or retirement account.” Just don’t leave them any money in your will. They would have to return it out of principle.

It’s 1947.

Some things never change. Weather-records broken and we're Hitler.

Oh, Otto, you naive, trusting sort.

Here's the house of one of the world's finest conductors:

People turn on people like this, fast. Horrible story.

She put him in the attic and let him starve. Dad on the left.

		More crime: this one has a Wikipedia page.

Arrested for murder of a young woman.

Law enforcement's suspicions fell immediately upon Thomas Henry McMonigle, a San Mateo, California, resident with an arrest record going back to his teens and including antecedents for assault and attempted rape. McMonigle had left the area immediately and moved to his father's home in Illinois. On December 6, McMonigle attempted to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills while riding a bus to San Francisco, but he was rushed to a hospital and made a full recovery. After his discharge, he was immediately arrested by FBI agents investigating Chamberlain's disappearance.

I wonder why. Anyway, he got the gas. But it took a while.

While on death row, he confessed to the murder of a San Francisco woman by the name of Dorothy Rose Woods and later claimed to have murdered eleven people overall, but he was not charged with more murders. In his last statement before his execution in 1948, however, McMonigle claimed that he was not involved in Chamberlain's disappearance.

He would figure in a strange experiment that would form the basis of a couple of old radio show plots. Giz:

In 1934 and 1935, Cornish reported two successful revivifications of clinically dead dogs. And in 1935, he also announced that he wanted to try to revive a death row inmate after an execution. Thomas McMonigle, an inmate at California’s San Quentin State Prison, volunteered for the procedure.

Dates don’t line up, but let’s assume he made the announcement in 1935 and waited ten years, and the article just compressed things.

McMonigle may have been a true monster, and not because he wanted to submit himself to a Dr. Frankenstein. He was sitting on death row for the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Thora Chamberlain (although the girl’s body was never found), and he reportedly confessed to a second murder. In 1947, Cornish petitioned the California Department of Corrections to allow him to attempt to revive McMonigle after the condemned was executed in the gas chamber.

They dropped the sachet on February 20 1948. He had ham and eggs for breakfast.

Not a lot about Gene in the Googleplex

Saucy, interesting guy - but the only thing left on the internet seems to be eBay copies of books he wrote about Army life. But that's something.

Marie Wilson:

Wilson first appeared on television in the series My Friend Irma from 1952 to 1954. She was in two episodes of Burke's Law. Wilson's voice was featured in the short-lived animated television series Where's Huddles?.

Ah hah! You know that show, right?

Also:

Wilson's left leg was the model for a 35-ft (sometimes referred to as 34-ft), two-ton sculpture outside the Theme Hosiery (later Sanderson Hosiery) plant on Olympic and Barrington in West Los Angeles. The DuPont Co. commissioned the plaster leg, which was painted as if to be wearing nylons, to promote its new nylons product. Wilson was hoisted thigh-level at the sculpture's unveiling August 6, 1949

I don’t know how this hasn’t made it into a period movie. Maybe it has.

A reminder - subscribing to the Substack is an easy way to support the site and your host, and get EVEN MORE STUFF. The updates will be M-F starting in 2025.

That'll do. See you around!