[F]eeling a little dopesick is part of the point of doing heroin… [T]o some degree, pain, shame, and degradation are part of the appeal. These are the feelings – not the high, not the euphoria – that actually crack a user loose from the ‘smothering chokehold of love and normalcy.’
The last phrase is Anthony Bourdain’s complaint about his childhood.
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Recall psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:
These are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.
“Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and fifty million on the boat they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred thousand square foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half billion dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.”
Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.
[Depp’s] trial affords many glances inside [his] extravagant yet bleak fortress: the insulating layers of handlers and yes-men; the huge, empty homes loaned out to hangers-on; the noxious mix of paranoia, dependence, and impunity bred by ultra-celebrity; the disorienting suspicion that everything is permitted and nothing necessarily has to be true…
The New Yorker thinks about the Depp/Heard trial.
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Interesting parallels with Michael Jackson, especially the desperate self-drugging. Maybe TS Eliot had it wrong. Humankind cannot bear very much unreality.
What if they gave a country and nobody came?
In May 2000, the entrepreneur Kurt Andersen said raising money for a media start-up called Inside was as easy “as getting laid in 1969.” That was a few weeks after the stock market peaked. Seventeen months and one merger later, Inside shut down. (Mr. Andersen clarified in an email that he did not actually have sex until the 1970s.)
Ted Cruz retweeted a video comparing a U.S. Army recruiting video with footage of a Russian paratrooper with a shaved head and declared that a “woke, emasculated military” might not be a good idea.
It would be interesting to know what has happened to that paratrooper since Putin invaded Ukraine.
[A bunker in the Urals]
Soldier: He is importunate, indeed distract:
His mood will needs be pitied.
Oligarch: What would he have?
Soldier: He speaks much of Holy Mother Russia; says he hears
There’s tricks ‘i the world: and hems, and beats his heart.
[Enter Putilia.]
Oligarch: How now, Putilia?
Putilia: Lord, we know what we want, but know not
what we may get…
[Sings] Then up I rose, and struck my pose
And broke the Ukraine’s door.
Let in the blood! Let in the death!
And then depart no more…
Ghost of Tsar Nicholas: Pretty Putilia!
Putilia: Indeed, la, without a ruble, I’ll make an end on’t.
… I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I
cannot choose but weep, to think they should place Aeroflot
in the cold cold ground. Good night, sweet ladies
Good night, good night.
“Putin believes that in historical terms, as in Peter the Great and so on, blood will be forgotten and his legacy as the uniter of the ‘Russian lands,’ no matter the cost, will remain,” Nina Khrushcheva, an international-affairs professor at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, told me. She said the Russian leader appears to “have lost all grip on reality, more so than I was willing to admit only yesterday.” She added, “I didn’t think he was suicidal, but he clearly is, and is taking the world and us with him.”
UD‘s on Amazon’s German site, enjoying the not-quite-there English.
“The unbridled discretion exercised by the City; its use of the heckler’s veto as an explicit justification; its shifting, post hoc rationalizations; and the City’s invocation of political rhetoric by rally organizers and speakers, point to the conclusion that plaintiff is likely to succeed on the claim that the City engaged in viewpoint discrimination with respect to plaintiff’s political views.”
Hapless, hopeless, Baltimore, city of UD‘s birth, attempts to keep a group of vile people from assembling there. The people sued, and the judge… well…
[Washington State University football coach Nick Rolovich met with] Dr. Guy Palmer, a world-renowned WSU regents professor of pathology and infectious diseases… Over about an hour, Rolovich drove a conversation that focused on topics that were consistent with what Palmer said has been shared by the “anti-vax crowd on social media” over the past several years.
“Kind of typical ones: Is Bill Gates involved with the vaccines? Does [Gates] hold a patent on the vaccines?” Palmer recalled to ESPN. “He asked whether SV40 [the simian virus] is in the vaccines and whether that could be a dangerous thing. And the answer to that is no.”
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The ignorance here is appalling. George Soros holds a patent on all the vaccines, not Bill Gates. Bill Gates isn’t even a Jew.
Zemmour has often been compared to Trump and he does want to Make France Great Again. “We want to protect our language,” he says, “the most beautiful in the world, the most clear, we want to protect it from American and North African influence and inclusive writing.’”
A better comparison, though, might be with Boris Johnson. Like the British Prime Minister, Zemmour has a first-rate mind and is often mistaken for a clown.
“Now whether he blinks or not, I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know whether Bannon is trying to martyr himself; I don’t know if Steve Bannon thinks that twelve months in the pokey is time to get in good shape and begin the next chapter of his career and write a book, like others have done in the fascist movement…”
Steve Schmidt, on The Beat with Ari Melber