First there was the antisemitic DEI official from the University of Michigan; now there’s the DEI project manager who was recently filmed calling a woman an ugly dumb cunt.

You are surprised? Really? Familiar with the phrase return of the repressed? If your very livelihood forces you to suppress the routine mildly derogatory/belittling shit we all express now and then as a perfectly healthy social outlet, it’s liable to come out — and eventually it will come out — in an explosive extreme form onaccounta the power of all that repression.

It’s normal and necessary for women among themselves to occasionally laugh and call men assholes; it’s just as normal and necessary for men among themselves to demean women. All affinity groups produce a certain amount of derogatory discourse about other groups; it’s called letting off steam. But if your vocation won’t let you – if you always have to pretend to have none of these non-DEI thoughts – then eventually, like Mount Etna, it’s all gonna come rushing back from your depths of resentment at having to deny it, and you are gonna BLOW.

… postmodernized.

… and Ours!

Major LOL on all fronts.

On DEI and its current inevitable dismantling: Human beings tend to learn by making glaringly obvious mistakes and then backtracking from them. UD doesn’t know why this is. In principle, advanced societies should feature people who anticipate that many procedural paths are in error, and these people would therefore avoid these paths.

One crucial, all-American pitfall on this particular path involves our national tendency to overdo. We can’t leave well-enough alone; we seem compelled to pile on to whatever idea we’ve got hold of, until it’s not just a policy or a program anymore — it’s a calling, an obsession, a nasty insistency.

Anyone with even modest brains should have known that imposed DEI regimes were disasters waiting to happen, but, lemming-like, our universities went there. Now we must pick up the lemmings from the bottom of the cliff, dust them off, and encourage them not to find another way to rush the cliff.

So what was he doing eating at McDonald’s?

State Senator Filmed Urinating On Himself During DUI Arrest

Football Chairman Fined for Gun Photo in Programme

When I was a lad I served a term
As leader of a US veterans’ firm.
I spent all its money and I shtupped the gals
And I polished off the liquor with my army pals
I polished off that liquor so thoroughly
That now I am America’s Defense Secret’ry!

(He polished off that liquor so thoroughly
That now he is America's Defense Secret'ry!)

… running through this defense of the politicized humanities.

 [A]dministrators — in thrall to university donors at private institutions, and who at public ones serve at the whim of state governments — represent the beachhead by which the academic Trumpism [William] Deresiewicz lusts for will arrive on campus.

Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” couldn’t have found a better example of a sentence squirrely with militancy (lusts? beachhead?), and intellectually lost in a strange old world. “Academic Trumpism” might as well be Revisionist Menshevism.

A fawning portrait of Annie Leibovitz in the Financial Times finds the fact of one room opening to another in her house remarkable.

This H Street burger bar became a right-wing darling during the pandemic for openly defying the city’s vaccine and mask mandates. Rand Paul and Thomas Massie were among the Republican members of Congress who made a point to stop by after the DC health department shut it down for violating Covid rules. 

(WHOA. Says here on Amazon it’s a collectible! Only two copies available, one of which sells for more than $200! The second asks almost $500! Hell – how do I sell my copy? In ‘thesda that’s one excellent dinner out for one.) The meeting concluded with a manifesto, signed by many of the participants, calling for the reconstruction of the Roman colosseum, along with much else of ancient Rome. Once rebuilt, these sites would assimilate into the modern city — they would be libraries, supermarkets, courts, cafes.

Leon Krier loves the idea, feeling only “sad and frustrated” when looking at “expensive to keep up” ruins. “Ruins mean nothing.” O.M. Ungers disagrees and alludes to “memory … romance … [the colosseum’s] patina, its aspect of time,” the continuity of that particular auratic history-charged object over centuries. I.e., ruins of many kinds mean a whole lot to many of us, and the colosseum arguably sits at the top of the world’s ruin-lists.

Of course most people are scandalized by this very idea. You will notice nothing’s come of it.

And indeed the very latest, far more modest, repurposing of the structure also has much of Rome colossally pissed: The city’s agreed to let Airbnb rent out the place to customers who want to pretend to be gladiators in the colosseum: Check-in’s 9 PM; must check out by 1 AM. Details.

Preaching State Superintendent Demands Video of 
Himself Praying for Trump be Played to All Students

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The problem with precedents of this sort is that Jeffrey Toobin has demanded equal time.

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Watch me now (work work)!

A Nation opinion writer makes the case for Gaetz. Short version: Too dumb to do truly serious damage.

Multiple news outlets are reporting the impending bankruptcy/abandonment of Portola Valley, California, where housing prices are starting to crash (“In July, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems reportedly sold his Portola Valley mansion for $35 million—which was 65% less than the $100 million it was initially listed for in 2018.”), and where the city council despairs of paying even basic bills. Perhaps they can apply for federal emergency funds. A GoFundMe page?

The Russian soldiers talk disdainfully about the incoming North Korean soldiers, … at one point referring to them as “the f**king Chinese.”

The intercepts also reveal plans to have one interpreter and three senior officers for every 30 North Korean men…

“The only thing I don’t understand is that there [should be] three senior officers for 30 people. Where do we get them? We’ll have to pull them out [of combat],” one Russian serviceman says.

“I’m f***ing telling you, there are 77 battalion commanders coming in tomorrow, there are commanders, deputy commanders and so on,” a serviceman says in another extract.