February 15th, 2024
I thought ‘thesda was already a haven for the cognitive elite.

The cofounder of the Seasteading Institute is Peter Thiel, who is also currently attempting to develop remote property in New Zealand with the hope of establishing a haven for a “cognitive elite” of “sovereign individuals” (clearly inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged). As [Douglas] Rushkoff points out, these entrepreneurs have always regarded the public and civic sectors as “antagonistic to their grand designs.” The creators of projects like ReGen and Seasteading have no interest in sustainable living or alleviating economic inequality. What they want is their own personal sandbox, unrestrained by governments, judicial oversight, or the collective will. These start-up societies reflect, if nothing else, a desire to create a new world from scratch and then choose who gets to be a part of it.

December 5th, 2023
But if they can find Hitler’s receipt…

Italian officials have refused a request from the German State Antiquities Collection in Munich to return a Roman statue bought by Hitler in 1938…  “This work was obtained fraudulently by the Nazis, and it’s part of our national heritage,” [Italy’s culture minister said].

December 1st, 2023
Latin America Eulogizes Kissinger

“[P]rofound moral wretchedness.” Juan Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s US ambassador.

 “[A]n incredibly important figure in the breakdown of Chile’s constitutional order.” Historian Gabriel Salazar.

“Encouraging coups d’état in the region, justifying them, being aware that these coups implied a genocide against workers and students.” Argentine human rights lawyer Myriam Bregman.

November 28th, 2023
The Flying Bentley Flying Spur

[The] ultra-high-end Bentley with a 542-horsepower engine … [goes] from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds… Why on earth would someone want to own a car—one meant to be driven on regular old roads in, for example, upstate New York, where its driver operated a small local chain of hardware stores—that can go a reported 175 miles per hour? That’s 110 miles per hour faster than the highest posted speed limit in the state of New York… The faster drivers go on the road, the more likely they are to suffer a crash and for that crash to be fatal—a point that is both bluntly, stupidly obvious and more or less ignored by plenty of drivers, automobile marketers, and road designers…  U.S. traffic deaths are skyrocketing because the cars that are going faster and faster on our roads are also bigger and heavier than ever before …

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You need something to go with your Szecsei & Fuchs Double Barrel Bolt Action Rifle.

October 17th, 2023
“He lived very high; his ex-wife said that they were burning through $250,000 a month on sheer ‘fun.'” 

Quote of the day. Giuliani.

August 18th, 2023
UD’s old boyfriend, David Kosofsky, who died ten years ago, would have…

… enjoyed this. His sister and UD, practically on top of each other.

July 9th, 2023
DeSantis DiSpatch: Latvia and Legacies.

Two items of interest:

  1. Governor DeSantis has announced his first foreign policy measure if he gains the White House:

“I will immediately cut off all recognition of/cooperation with Latvia, which has just elected its first admitted homosexual president. Bad enough that this person is known to be an ‘ardent’ supporter of Ukraine; he adds insult to injury by poisoning the minds of our children with woke ideology. With friends like these, America doesn’t need enemies.”

2. Yale University has issued its first statement about its practice of favoring legacy applicants:

“Ron DeSantis was one of our few non-legacy admits his year at Yale. We’ll stick with legacies.”

June 29th, 2023
Chris Christie remains a delight to listen to.

When asked whether Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power on Jan 6, Ron DeSantis replied:

 “I wasn’t anywhere near Washington that day. I have nothing to do with what happened that day. Obviously, I didn’t enjoy seeing, you know, what happened, but we’ve gotta go forward on this stuff. We cannot be looking backwards and be mired in the past.”

Christie’s response:

He wasn’t anywhere near Washington. Did he have a TV? Was he alive that day? Did he see what was going on? I mean, that’s one of the most ridiculous answers I’ve heard in this race so far. You don’t have an opinion about January 6th except to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy what happened? People were killed. People were killed … on Capitol Hill, defending the Capitol. We had members of Congress who were running for their lives. We had people trying to hunt down the Vice President of the United States, chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ And Donald Trump the entire time sat outside the Oval Office, that little dining room of his, eating a well-done cheeseburger and watching TV and doing nothing to stop what was going on until it got to the point where even he could no longer stand it. And Ron DeSantis doesn’t have any opinion on that?

An earlier Christie post.

May 26th, 2023
‘I simply cannot get enough of this Nietzschean superwoman, the final form of the East German silicon-doping programme, who has missile-titted her way into my consciousness…’

Marina Hyde on the much-surgeoned Lauren Sanchez.

May 22nd, 2023
RIP Martin Amis. If only you were around to write an essay about Barbara Stiegler.

Yachts are the symbol of the neoliberal predation of the world… We are all impregnated by [neoliberalism’s] hegemony.

April 13th, 2023
This just in from the New Yorker.

House Republicans expressed alarm after an increasingly unhinged Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaed himself to testify before Congress.

In a blistering statement, the House Judiciary Committee chairman demanded that he comply with his subpoena and called himself a “toadying Soros-backed flunky.”

“The message to Jim Jordan is clear: you can run, but you can’t hide,” Jordan said.

The Ohio congressman warned that, if he refused to testify, he would have “no other choice” but to call for himself to be jailed.

March 14th, 2023
“This whole thing is surreal. Like negotiating with terrorists, but especially dumb ones. Cousin- fucking types …”

And lo the prophecy (Daniel 11:5) has come to pass:

“Then the King of Fox will grow weak, along with many of his princes; and Dominion will gain ascendancy over him and obtain dominion; his domain will belong to Dominion indeed.”

For verily as the massively expensive Dominion lawsuit allows for the public release of internal Fox emails, the network faces not only billions in damages but also the exposure of its true feelings about its – in the words of one of its producers – cousin-fucking demographic.

Yet cuz-shtupping (to give it its formal name) is a perfectly legal activity in much of the United States, especially if you’re infertile and/or real old. Even if you’re not those things, there are more than twenty states in which you can on the up and up tie the tribal knot. So the Fox producer who characterized his viewers as cousin fuckers may have thought he was being mean, but he was actually just being ignorant.

February 26th, 2023
The ribs on the plane story makes UD …

think of Joel Feinberg’s immortal A Ride on the Bus.

November 8th, 2022
Whoa. Dershowitz’s accuser withdraws the accusation, and both have entered into a settlement.

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey E. Epstein who for years maintained that the law professor Alan Dershowitz sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, settled a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Dershowitz on Tuesday, and said that she may have made a mistake in accusing him…

The joint statement also included comments from Mr. Dershowitz, who commended Ms. Giuffre for her courage in saying she may have been mistaken.

November 6th, 2022
From a review of a biography of Anthony Bourdain.

[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.

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