Hark, hark! Jeff Clark, at prison’s gate sings, 

And Eastman ‘gins likewise;

Trump’s team now waters at those springs 

Where Stephen Bannon lies. 

Where Rudy Giuliani is, 

 And Meadows, sweets, doth lie:

Arise, arise.

Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech… [We must address] the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible… [An] obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15 [is] a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians.

You just crossed over into… The Twilight Zone…

Two days before [a] symposium [about Adrian Vermeule’s ideas] was set to begin, my phone pinged with a message from [Mario] Fiandeiro informing me that my credentials had been revoked and the symposium closed to all press. (As far as I could tell, I was the only member of the media who was actually planning to attend, and Fiandeiro wouldn’t tell me who didn’t want me there.) My frustrated appeals to Fiandeiro and the higher-ups at the Federalist Society — which touts an open press policy on its website — failed…

… [Vermeule’s] arguments read an awful lot like a defense of a pseudo-constitutional dictatorship, or at the very least as a plausible legal justification for a right-wing coup. Vermeule doesn’t go to great lengths to obscure this conclusion. At the end of the section on subsidiary, he cites the Catholic theologian Johannes Messner to argue that in some cases, a limited form of dictatorship may “be compatible with the principle of subsidiary.”

Maybe there’s a more charitable way to read these passages so that they don’t lead to such a startling conclusion. But if there is, I certainly didn’t hear it in Cambridge.

NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee

Who knew?

More on the often cynical, high-risk business of honorary degrees here.

Good cover.

Trustee, NYU. But… when your trustees include Maria Bartiromo, I guess you’re past caring.

Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are youss?”

The rivalry continues!

Do you know how many high school basketball/football games end in gun fights in this country?

Lots; and the numbers are growing. Now watch as the phenom – utterly predictable as all of America resolves tiffs with one of the four hundred million guns available – moves to the college sports scene.

“Herschel was like a plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster fire. And an orphanage. Then an animal shelter.“

A Republican comments on Herschel Walker.

To cite the title of your book.

If the first thing people discover when they Google your name is that you’re homophobic, they’re probably not going to want you to hang out with their children. Got that?

A young politician named Herschel

Has a brain that is all but inertial

His night and day REMs

Made it easy for DEMs

To run some amazing commercials

But how lovely the karma, dear readers!

… makes sure its universities share fully in this bounty. Its two highest-profile campuses – U New Mexico, and New Mexico State – are POP POP POP POPPIN away with healthy rivalry, on the basketball court and off! (For the long glorious sports history – there isn’t any other history – of both schools, go here.) Now that both schools’ teams are literally engaged in an ongoing shooting war, the basketball coaches have, uh, started to issue statements and shit.

Cuz I mean.

Read it all.

When your schools are dumpsters instead of colleges, and when your basketball teams are gangs (with the coaching staff apparently part of the gangs), instead of basketball teams, you should…

Oh I dunno. You’re down there with your guns and your gangs, leading your best life now, living out loud, standing in your truth, letting a smile be your umbrella, and ain’t no place of mine to look at the carnage and say one damn word.

… Instead of ‘High IQ’ People“

“I must say I’m very upset about the antisemitism in the U.S. today. It’s not fair. Kazakhstan is the number one Jew-crushing nation. Stop stealing our hobby. Stop the steal. Stop the steal.”

Man Jumps to his Death off

Mickey and Friends parking lot

at Disneyland

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

For more Don DeLillo, postmodern, deaths, go here.