Elites who read long eloquent essays in the Atlantic comparing George Washington and Donald Trump – the glorious first, the gruesome second – aren’t (if you ask ol’ UD) making very good use of their time, pre-electionwise. It’s by now a tired warhorse, the dangerous vileness of DJT, and one can certainly continue playing variations on it, as Tom Nichols has very prettily done all the way up and down the scale; but at this point the question is not How Existential a Threat is this Authoritarian to the American Republic? Or How Far Exactly Have We Fallen from George Washington?

The question is Why is Half of the Country Voting for an Authoritarian?

The release of a pseudo-memoir under the name of a presidential candidate’s wife can at best occasion jokey remarks (see above) by those tasked with pseudo-reading it. Some of the reviewers’ lines are pretty good.

Another reviewer pissed to have gotten the assignment quotes sentences from the book like this one:

 “Living my life with a core set of principles provides me with a foundation that leads to consistent and rational decision-making.”

The reviewer’s anger intensifies as she’s forced to rifle through the book for quotations for her review (wasn’t flipping through the fucker once enough?), and her final paragraph makes explicit what other reviewers merely signal: Vacuous people shouldn’t write memoirs cuz ain’t nothin to write.

We want to believe that whatever shallowness or stupidity that appears is a survival mechanism a woman had to take up when dealing with a misogynistic world. Well, sorry: sometimes women really are like Marie Antoinette’s pastries, … filled with nothing more complex than artificial fillers and dead air. 

Yet another pissed reviewer (“I let out an exasperated snort.”) excerpts/comments:

Melania Trump team[ed] up with a company run by “successful businesspeople” to introduce the American public (the “consumer base”) to a “line of high-end skincare products” because, after all, “people frequently asked me about my regimen, marveling at the health of my skin,” and so, you see, what she really wanted to do was find a way to “empower women,” and if that means charging you $150 an ounce to put fish eggs on your face, then so be it. 

[W]hether you’re the firearm owner yourself or anybody who lives in the home [where] there’s a firearm present, their risk for death by suicide goes up three to five times.

And it’s not that the firearm makes them vulnerable to thinking about suicide. It’s just that if someone is thinking about suicide and they have quick and ready access to the most lethal method, then they’re at greater risk of dying. If you take all the other suicide attempts together in the United States to combine them, less than 5% of those attempts to result in death. There’s nothing that compares to firearms in terms of how deadly they are in a suicide attempt.

A Birmingham AL politician gets it said.

Weeks later, the police can’t find the killers.

Anyway, after all the rain, a bunch of them

are growing in one of my containers.

Headline of the day.

I…. dunno. When does Birmingham Alabama become so blood-soaked that, well, it ain’t really what you’d call a great city? The letter to the editor from which I’ve drawn this post’s headline is written by a person who has made sure to live well outside the bloody city limits; so it’s not really his great city. He moved out years ago.

And, as I say, Birmingham doesn’t really strike UD, who has seen multiple videos of police hosing gobs of blood off of its main streets, as a great city. The people who gunned down 24 souls the other night, killing four, only wanted to kill one particular guy standing with the crowd outside a club — this was a standard-issue gang vengeance killing, apparently. So what kind of city produces people who say hell since I’ve got a machine gun I think I’ll kill that guy plus everyone else? Not a great city.

This is far from Birmingham’s first mass shooting. And of course the numbers killed and injured all over Birmingham all the time keep rising. The letter writer seems to think that letting teenagers open carry any old gun without needing a permit or anything is maybe a mite unwise…

“Soon applications to our UAB University and Medical School may be affected.”  Yeah, and just when everyone is bleeding out all over the street. Since Alabama also has a punitive, total ban on abortion, I can imagine potential students and medical staff explaining to UAB that “Welp, after I get out of prison for providing maternal health care, I’ll be gunned down in front of my favorite brunch spot. I think not.”

Background here.

And here’s the judge, sentencing her to nine years.

Here, the defense has, and Ms. Peters in particular, remained quite defiant, which is her right, but certainly not helpful for her lot today… Your lies are well documented and these convictions are serious. I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant a defendant as this court has ever seen. 

… You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again. In your world, it’s all about you.

… You have no respect for the checks and balances of government. You have no respect for this court. You have no respect for law enforcement, and you do not have respect for your … colleagues when you were a clerk and recorder who weren’t in lockstep in your beliefs. 

… Your explanation about what happened is preposterous. It’s on video. You have no problem lying to officers. It’s happened multiple times. They’re recorded conversations. It’s just more lies... Yes, you are a charlatan and you cannot help but lie as easy as it is for you to breathe. You betrayed your oath for no one other than you.

… And this is what makes Ms. Peters such a danger to our community. It’s the position she held that has provided her the pulpit from which she can preach these lies, the undermining of our democratic process, the undermining of the belief and confidence in our election systems... Every effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and public’s trust in our institutions has been made by you. 

NRA says: WHOOHOO. Let’s go for 10.

You can’t make this shit up.

Pity the reporter who had to pack all of this into her lead.

A Seattle doctor whose medical license was suspended after she participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was shot and killed after pointing a gun at two people delivering paperwork at her West Seattle home on Tuesday. 

Which sounds like a lot. But there’s more.

Tuesday’s shooting happened less than two weeks after Towers Parry’s home was foreclosed on and scheduled to be sold at a Sept. 20 auction, King County housing records show. Towers Parry had failed to make about $24,000 in mortgage payments and still owed more than $225,000 on the home, which she previously shared with her ex-husband, according to the records.

A photo taken of the house on Tuesday showed a large U.S. flag hanging from the home’s front window underneath the word “QAnon,” the name of a far-right conspiracy theory that gained traction online after the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump.

Her pissed ex-husband filed a complaint about her failure to pay on the house:

“[My ex-wife] has demonstrated that she is unwilling to execute the documents necessary to alleviate me of the debt on the Hudson property. She has simply chosen to ignore the issue, and instead traveled to Washington, D.C. to be part of an uprising to overthrow the government.”

It’s normal, he explained in his defense against a criminal sentence for planning a child’s genital mutilation and then forced marriage to him (he’s 47; his would-be slave is described only as a child, but knowing this world as UD does after years of blogging about it, I’m gonna guess she’s around nine), normal to perform sexual amputation of a child and then marry her.

Can you imagine more total possession of a slave? And of course he’s right. Hundreds of millions of little girls around the world have their sex organs pulled off and are then married off. 230 million have had FGM done, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Well, but Europe. Hm, Europe. Everybody knows it goes on in certain neighborhoods, but it’s hard to prove if the child-slayers don’t leave chatty messages about it on their phones, the way this guy did.

America? Remember Johns Hopkins’ finest – Jumana Nagarwala. And we couldn’t even convict her. I’m sure she’s long since sharpened her scalpel again.

Deprave‘s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

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To alter Andrew Marvell.

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“Deprave” is such a fine word, intimating dark and private vileness — vileness twisted and extended beyond the capacity of most of us to comprehend it. A survey of its use turns up, again and again, two characters in particular — Josef Mengele, and Kim Jong Un. Which is to say, we tend to reserve the word not only for the perverted evil people among us, but for high-level, solo practitioners: Mengele, Kim, and our obviously more constrained but nonetheless, as in Liz Cheney’s remark yesterday, depraved Donald Trump.

None, I think, do them embrace; all are radical isolationists, slashing depravedly about all by themselves; and indeed, as in the now-notorious Jan 6 moment, telling all the decent frightened normal people around them who beg them not to be depraved to fuck off. “Depraved” carries a sense of morally lost, far outside the recognizable human ambit. Lone wolves.

Depraved indifference. There is a head-scratching oddness and excess about depravity, as in What’s the percentage in it? Why? Questions that only the non-depraved would ever ask; but the answer must involve some deep, positively mystical, gratification, a well of delight into which one dips again and again with each unimaginable (for us. for us unimaginable) cruelty. Part of the sensation is one’s cosmic singular power – you alone have the freedom to torture children, entomb a country, end democratic life. You come to recognize yourself as a charismatic godlet, a Caligula for our times. You feel this, excitingly, in your blood: The willingness of the world to let you enact and then exceed one viciousness after another; the voyeuristic thrill you inspire in millions who lack the depravity to do the things you do, but who would dearly love to do them. I am, Trump declares, your retribution.

Is there ever any content to depravity? Can it have a purpose beyond lurid sexual or power gratification?

The worst form of depraved behavior presents itself as purposive: Mengele’s experiments; Pol Pot’s revolutionary communism. To the extent that any intellectual/ideological something adheres to the worst of which humans are capable, we are merely that much more shaken, hollowed out, terrified, by its emergence. Only when we understand the facade that “ideas” offer pure sadism are we able to put monsters like Mengele and Pol Pot in their proper place.

More common is the simple vacuity of what Cheney isolates in Trump — most depraved people don’t bother trying to sketch even the primitive outlines of a meaningful world view, much less a politics. The enormously attractive – charismatic – role they play for us is draughtsmen of mental darkness, drawers-up and drawers-out of private primal places within us of sadistic rage, obscene curiosity, physical aggression, and bloody nihilism.

Witch, pumpkin, and ghost, all in one. On our afternoon walk.

UD gets how you don’t want to admit– smiley-face principal that you are — that the high school you lead is a very violent institution which needs to be militarized (nothing smiley-face there) in order to continue to function without killing people. Vicious fights are common at Oregon’s Gresham High, and now loaded guns stalk the halls, in the possession of sixteen year old sociopaths.

The combination of a doofus who thinks all conflict can be resolved by chats/hugs, and plentiful weaponized assholes, will almost certainly produce beatings/mass shootings galore.

Parents, teachers, and students beg the principal to see their school as the killing field that it is becoming, rather than the Experiment in Loving Co-Learning that her narcissism seems to want it to be.

Guns being what they are in America, this country can no longer afford to assign school leadership positions to feel-gooders who are on their way to enabling the shooting deaths of students and teachers.

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Today’s walkout.