CEOs at Trump meeting:

Ex-president ‘meandering’ and

‘doesn’t know what he’s talking about’

Right around the beltway from UD.

A 41-year-old woman has been arrested and charged with two separate attempted armed robberies at McDonald’s drive-thrus in Gaithersburg… [The woman,] who was driving a gray Jeep Cherokee, pulled into the drive-thru lane with a handgun on her lap. 

When the employee approached the window, [the woman] motioned toward the gun and announced the robbery. 

The employee quickly closed the window, and [the woman] drove away.

Approximately 18 minutes later, [she] targeted another McDonald’s on Montgomery Village Avenue. She again drove into the drive-thru, displayed a gun, and announced a robbery. The employee immediately shut the window, and [the woman] left. [Then she was arrested.]

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That sneaky “close the window” thing.

Any number of cliches pertain to the problem facing hijab defenders in France, who are outraged that French Olympics athletes can’t cover their heads during play.

Secularist France has nothing against people wearing the thing in all other Olympics venues, but wants those officially representing the country during games to project religious neutrality.

Supported by many human rights organizations, hijabis are making a lot of noise about overturning the ban before the event begins next month.

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Ecoute. Here’s the problem, if you ask ol’ UD.

The far right so massacred Macron’s government in the recent EU election that Macron has called snap elections. My guess is that support for hijabs, abayas, burqas, etc., among this lot is approximately zero percent. Left, center, or right, in any case, French governments have long banned various forms of veiling, and it sure looks as though growing majorities of the French people object to strongly visible religious garb. At the moment, ye olde will of the people is against you, in other words, and while you’re free to fight the good fight, it’s arguable that this isn’t the moment.

It can’t help matters that, hijab-wise, most of the attention of the world is riveted to Iran, whose vile theocracy has succeeded in linking the head covering to murderous surveillance of women. Certes, it’s unfair, certes, it’s illogical, but efforts to portray the hijab as a symbol of healthy diversity, gender equality, and individual expressive rights (which all the letters from human rights organizations gas on about) are currently up against super-repressive mullahs who have made the hijab the central actor in their globally notorious death-to-women thing.

Hijabis in France, seems to me, would do well to acknowledge what they’re up against there, and act more strategically.

Here’s where you might start. Concede that hijabs don’t seem to most people to have jackshit to do with gender equality. (Recall this unfortunate campaign.) On the contrary. Drop that quixotic quest, and confine your language to religious freedom more broadly and indeed more vaguely.

IVF is “as immoral as anything we can imagine.”

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A CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this year found that 86 percent of respondents thought IVF should be legal …

Only in America.

And every third world country.

… Moonrise Kingdom, has died.

TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME.

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

… the venerable Dave Almy sings a John Prine song with his grandson.

[Massachusetts psychiatrist Gustavo] Kinrys billed insurers 382 days of more than 24 hours worth of psychotherapy services in a single day, including one day in July 2017 when he claimed he had provided hour-long psychotherapy sessions to 70 different patients, all while outside the United States on vacation. 

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Does he still teach at Harvard?

Resentment of elites is a powerful motive in democratic politics, and so is the feeling … that the economy was better under Trump. But that disregards the moral and psychological cesspool himself: a bully, a liar, a bigot, a sexual assaulter, a cheat; crude, cruel, disloyal, vengeful, dictatorial, and so selfish that he tried to shatter American democracy rather than accept defeat. His supporters have to ignore all of this, explain it away, or revel in displays of character that few of them would tolerate for a minute in their own children. Now they are trying to put him back in power. Beyond the reach of reason and even empathy, nearly half of my fellow citizens are unfathomable, including a few I personally like. The mystery of the good Trump voter troubled me.

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The essay is a sincere effort to understand Trump voters/enthusiasts.

The tragedy [of Kurtis Bay’s wife’s death in the hospital] fed his skepticism toward what he called the “managerial class”—the power elite in government bureaucracy, business, finance, and the media. The managerial class was necessary—the country couldn’t function without it—but it accumulated power by sowing conflict and chaos. Like the hospital’s doctors, members of the class weren’t individually vicious. “Yes, they are corrupt, but they’re more like AI,” Bay said. “It’s morphing all by itself. It’s incestuous—it breeds and breeds and breeds.” As for politicians, “I don’t think either political party gives a shit about the people”—a dictum I heard as often as the one about whiskey and water.

Bay saw Trump as the only president who tried to disrupt the managerial class and empower ordinary citizens. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would do it too, but voting for him would be throwing his vote away. If Trump loses this year, the managerial class will acquire more power and get into more wars, make the border more porous, hurt the economy by installing DEI algorithms in more corporations. “I’ll vote for Trump,” Bay said, “but that’s, like, the last thing I think about in terms of how I’m going to impact my neighbor, my friend, my society.” Everyone wanted clean air, clean water, opportunity for all to make money and raise a family. If the extremes would stop demonizing each other and fighting over trivia, then the country could come together and solve its immense problems—poverty, homelessness …

I listened, half-agreeing about the managerial class, still wondering how a man who dearly loved his multiracial family and cared about young people on the margins and called his late wife “the face of God on this Earth” could embrace Trump. So I asked. Bay replied that good people had done bad things on January 6 but not at Trump’s bidding, and he might have gone himself if the timing had been different; that he didn’t look to the president for moral guidance in raising children or running a business; that he’d easily take “grab her by the whatever” from a president who would end the border problem and stop funding wars.

Frank Miller.

Not literal roadblocks. Legal. It’s New Mexico, America’s most dangerous state, where gun toting eleven year olds sack and pillage Albuquerque without consequence onaccounta they’re babies.

‘“Fortunately the governor, District Attorney’s Office and CYFD stepped in and helped us,” the police chief said.’ Yep, you just line up the gov, the DA, and the children youth and families thingie and you’re good to go.

Charges:

• Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon
• Conspiracy
• Shooting at or from a motor vehicle
• Shooting into an occupied dwelling
• Aggravated Battery
• Unlawful possession of a weapon by a minor
• Non-residential burglary
• Criminal damage to property over $1,000
• Conspiracy to commit a fourth-degree felony

This blog has for years followed universities dragging their feet about revoking honorary degrees awarded to people who turned out to be so dishonorable you could plotz. But having watched the Sean Combs tape we all watched, Howard gathered its trustees and right away not only revoked the degree; they returned his million dollar donation, and they shut down a scholarship program with his name on it. For good measure they issued a public statement… Something to the effect that men who routinely beat the shit out of women don’t get Howard honors.

Jawbone of a deer? Ever-present anti-mosquito spray. Pointless attractive teapot.

Gray watering can contains wren sitting on her eggs.