When Necheles characterized Daniels’ e-commerce operation as “shilling,” the adult film star snapped back that Trump — who is currently hawking sneakers and Bibles with his name on them — does the same.

“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she replied.

This passage, from André Gide’s novel, The Countefeiters, struck me when I encountered it as a Northwestern undergrad, and has stayed with me all these years. Of course I recognized this comical, poignant form of dissembling from real life, but I suspect this passage, on the fourth page of the book, was my first encounter with a lucid prose description of it. The ways we defend against the exposure of our strongest and most authentic passions intrigued and intrigue me; forms of emotional self-defense intrigued and intrigue me.

And why do we defend? Because precisely the places we feel the most are the places we can be hurt the most.

And also – see Adam Phillips – it disturbs us to think of ourselves as capable of volcanic affect; most of us cultivate what Stephen Dedalus called “the refrigerating apparatus,” and Isaac Rosenfeld “formo-frigidism.” We be cool.

We are too much for ourselves – in our hungers and our desires, in our griefs and our commitments, in our loves and our hates – because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves. The whole idea of ourselves as excessive exposes how determined we are to have the wrong picture of what we are like, of how fanatically ignorant we are about ourselves.

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.

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].

“[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.

[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 …

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

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

Quote of the day. Giuliani.

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

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.”

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.

Marina Hyde on the much-surgeoned Lauren Sanchez.

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

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.

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.

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