He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children…

Let’s stop beating around the vice-presidential bush: While Kamala Harris’s choice – probably Tim Walz – is a mild-mannered older person with two kids, Vance “The Lance” is a raging bull with three kids in quick succession and certainly more to come, if he takes seriously his pro-stiffy convictions.

Pragmatically, after all, the central pillar of anti-IVF natalism (no techno-cheating!) must be what Morrissey, winner of the 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, dubs one’s “bulbous salutation.” Absent a willingness to scale up the “large pink prong,” as novelist/critic Edmund Wilson called his, there’s not going to be any other form of scaling up, Hungarian or what have you.

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

A Trump/Vance pro-natalist presidency would perhaps feature graphic encouragement to men along these lines… So for instance take this Pyongyang poster:

Lose the Korean writing, and alter the exploding shaft to look more like a phallus, and imagine this image flashing at you day and night in the middle of Times Square. That sort of thing.

On the vp front: UD‘s thinking that if the Harris campaign’s going to press hard on the weird thing, her pick might be the inventor of the weird meme, Tim Walz. A mere Wiki acquaintance with the guy uncovers abysms of unweird. Tales of the Unweird. Crypts of the Unweird. Nights of the Living Unweird. He’s a sixty year old boy scout, a ramrod-straight product of a world UD – evil right coaster – will never know.

Let’s scrutinize. Working from top to bottom: Bad haircut, goony glasses, flannel shirts, slight beer belly… everything about him’s authentically askew. He’s so deeply him. Up against hillbilly turned cat obsessive Vance, he will look like Harry Truman on steroids. Sounds like Truman too, with that flat prairie twang. No fancy schmancy lectures about the therapeutic society from this Chadron State College-trained high school geography teacher, babe! Tim Walz won’t be checking your sheets for spilled sperm. He’ll let you decide how you want to bonk.

“I wish people would paws and catually hissten to the words he says and try to understand their preening and purrpose.”

Just cannot get away from it.

Asked what [Trump] meant when he once said immigrants were taking “Black jobs,” he said: “A Black job is anybody who has a job.”

Democrats have already had a field day with Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments. There are signs they will take aim at Republicans’ broader concern with procreation and the birthrate, too.

On Monday, a super PAC aimed at youth voters called Won’t PAC Down posted an ad to X suggesting that Republicans’ focus on people’s private sexual conduct is just plain “weird,” drawing on an attack line that has been deployed by Harris and some of her allies.

“Your genitals are reserved for procreation,” says an elderly white man in a sweater vest, as ominous music plays.

Soviet or post-Soviet, Vance’s best bud.

Basically it’s an empty whorehouse; might as well make money off whores.

But the coppers are on to you, bro!

… Phil Matier, a former political columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, … asked all the [mayoral] candidates: Would you support criminal consequences for homelessness? 

Unsurprisingly, most candidates didn’t have a straight answer, and many tried to deflect the question. But the moderator pressed each until they gave their position. 

… [Ahsha] Safaí deflected until the moderator had to jump in and ask him for a clear answer on whether he supported criminal consequences or not. Safaí could only offer “maybe,” which left the crowd laughing. 

Our postmodern Waste Lands get all turned and twisted…

1] Nawlins don’t do gun control, and as things along those lines get even worse (concealed carry, blahblah) AND as murders remain astounding, the city’s gotta do some real thinkin bout how to keep the carnage to a reasonable level… Reasonable defined here as before the point at which local hospitals are so overwhelmed that the city’s gotta pay for the bloodied to be coptered out.

Now keep in mind that the state of Louisiana could give a shit about educating its people, so it takes a whole hell of a lot for it to, say, open a school. But lookee here – the city came up with a devilishly clever go ’round in response to the latest BIG GUNS FOR ALL legislation there.

The plan is to open a vocational-technical school in the Eighth District Police Station. According to state law, guns are prohibited within 1,000 feet of a school. Signage will alert visitors of the firearm-free zone.

IN. IN the police station. See what they did there? At least the cops will have a small measure of protection. And if the price is having to educate at least a small slice of the population, so be it.

2] It’s official. SF has declared that after almost a decade of massive, city-destroying, filth and crime, the time for compassion is over.

‘We have had to move from a compassionate city to a city of accountability, and I have been leading the efforts to ensure that we are addressing this issue differently than we have before,’ [the mayor] said on Thursday in a change of tack on the issue. 

‘We are going to be very aggressive and assertive in moving encampments which may even include criminal penalties,’ she explained, with the ‘sweeps’ scheduled to begin in less than two weeks once staff are retrained to follow new legal guidance.

Of course, aside from the fact that there’s nothing remotely compassionate about what SF has been doing all these years, I think the city will find that thousands of people who have long considered themselves owners of the city’s streets will not be very nice about the change of tack.

So it hit the wires (see post below this one) only an hour or so ago — though Sue-Mi Terry seems to have been spying for South Korea for almost two decades! — but already at lunch UD and Mr UD were all over the story, wondering in particular if Terry’s famous neo-con mate, Max Boot, could possibly NOT have known what the missus was up to.

“Did she rent a storage unit for the luxury bags? If not, he had to ask himself how she managed to own three million dollars worth of clutch purses,” mused UD.

“And… she’d have to have a separate bank account for the South Korean cash,” said Mr UD. “But basically it would be hard as hell to hide what she was up to, and what she was earning in gifts and cash, from him.”

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

In short, Les UDs, FWIW, figure her husband probably knew.

The indictment includes photographs of [Sue Mi] Terry meeting with South Korean officials who prosecutors contend served as her “handlers” for that country’s National Intelligence Service, including photos of one agent shopping for a Louis Vuitton handbag with Terry in a Washington store and the two of them departing together, with the agent carrying it in a shopping bag.

Ah, but the “Mrs” Macron one was a body double!

… shopping.

What more can we do, its legislature asked, to make sure that for all time and in all categories we rank at the very bottom?

Oh. Right!

TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME.

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

“Mrs. Alito’s comments do not sound better in the original German.”