The retrial is about to be scheduled! Our guy! We’ve long followed the worst Medicare-Medicaid criminal/most insanely pious Orthodox Jew (In prison, he prayed nine hours a day, “spending so much time praying on his knees that his legs were swollen and purple.”) in the country’s history, through conviction, Trump pardon, and now retrial. And, as world-historical hypocrisy mavens, we are loving every minute. The only spectacle as amusing is the Caged Wisdom sequence in the comedy Arrested Development, which is in fact largely indistinguishable from the ongoing Philip Esformes sequence.

In 2016, prosecutors charged Esformes in what they called the largest-ever scheme targeting Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for the elderly and the poor. Esformes was accused of bribing medical professionals to admit patients to his network of assisted-living facilities and nursing homes for services that were never provided or were unnecessary.

During the two-month trial, prosecutors asserted that Esformes personally received more than $37 million in the scheme. They told the jury he used his proceeds to finance a lavish lifestyle and pay $300,000 in bribes to the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania basketball team to recruit his son…

In April 2019, a jury convicted Esformes on 20 criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, paying and receiving kickbacks, bribery, money laundering and obstruction of justice…

Esformes worries constantly about a new trial and the threat of incarceration…

Poor baby! I tell you it’s doing nothing for the guy’s mental health that he might, even after Trump pardoned him, serve his prison term for stealing billions of dollars from the American health system and degrading the lives of millions of poor old people. What’s the world coming to when one of the most disgusting crooks America ever produced actually has to serve jail time? Put Esformes in my search engine for even more lurid criminal details!

[S]upporters of [Jim] Jordan have been sharing Federal Election Commission [FEC] documents around Washington D.C. showing that [Steve] Scalise has spent more than $500,000 through his congressional campaign account [on steaks] at Capital Grille since 2011.

… American youth football.

Timothy Noah.

Tuberville Falls.

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Sing it.

Ever since ol’ Tommy took a tumble
And landed like a fool upon his ass
I’ve wondered when the rest of him would crumble
And make his farce a memory of the past…

When Bama makes no rendezvous
With folks whose brains are all doodoo
When this disgusting pol is through
Won’t our lives be fine?

However, it chose Hamas.

And now the Group of 33 is being blacklisted by corporate America, a place a lot of them probably assumed would welcome them with open arms.

[Bill] Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, tweeted he has been approached by “a number of CEOs” asking for the names of the student organizations to ensure “none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” arguing students “should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists.”

… Jonathan Neman, the CEO and co-founder of healthy fast casual chain Sweetgreen, responded to Ackman’s post on X, saying he “would like to know so I know never to hire these people,” to which healthcare services company EasyHealth CEO David Duel responded: “Same.”

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Here’s how UD thinks of it. Go ahead and publicly affiliate yourself with the fifth century. But don’t then expect to step smoothly into the twenty-first.

All of America is way gunny, but certain areas (Balto MD, larger Shreveport, Macon, and Richmond, among others) are just totally insanely gunny. Colleges in these areas are getting all shot up, especially during big, open, outdoor/evening events like Homecoming, which UD, for these campuses, calls Guncoming.

Morgan State has now indeed announced it’s building a wall around itself.

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And look – its not very college-y — everyone knows that. Which is why so many shot up schools are postponing the inevitable. It’s a mark, a stigma, a plain admission that your school sits in a shooting gallery. And so – parents and applicants ask – what does that say about the experience of going out at night to get a pizza? Do we really want to choose this school?

Gratified as UD is to see others finally pay attention to the Insane Integralists, and esp. their Harvard law prof spokesperson, Adrian Vermeule — cuz see UD’s been caterwauling about Vermeule for a number of years — she is less delighted to see looooong essays take serious historical, theological, and philosophical issue with him and his All Catholic All The Time movement.

Vermeule and his buds basically represent a Dungeons and Dragons circle jerk with Xian elements. To quote their rival World Takeover By Jesus sect, they are … SPOOKYTUS…….

Which sort of behavior among adults who hold respectable jobs is astonishing, and funny, and I write about it on this blog on that basis. Taking the lads with any real seriousness just makes them tug the slug more energetically.

But! I’ll go ahead and quote from a couple of recent articles anyway, in case you need reminding what this is all about.

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What the integralists call the social reign of Christ will be achieved by integrating the temporal power (the state) with the spiritual power (the Catholic Church). The military, the economy, the arts, and religious life will be directed toward human flourishing as defined by one severe reading of Catholic tradition. Which doesn’t mean bishops would command armies or set tax rates — civil authorities in an integralist regime would retain broad spheres of competence within which to forward the ends prescribed by the Catholic Church, but the Church would define those ends…

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[I]n the … words of an American integralist, “the state should recognize Catholicism as true and unite with the Church as body to her soul.”

[T]hey are another group in our society that judges governments and regimes and political orders by how good they are for them. This selfishness, which is a common feature of identity, is as tiresome in its religious versions as it is in its secular ones; it is a … form of contempt…

[The bizarre] Vermeule is talking about the American government. Who does he expect to persuade with this sectarian rapture?

… This is, well, nuts. Vermeule has no reason to fear the jackboot of Nancy Pelosi in the middle of the night. But his extreme view of his position in contemporary America enables him to cast himself grandiosely. He is the lonely knight of the faith who has taken up the Cross to do battle with the Jeffersonian infidels.

… When rationalists seem to be acting imperialistically, they can be challenged rationally, on their own grounds, and a rational argument for humility or restraint can be made; but no argument can be made with anybody who dissociates reason from truth, who repudiates “intrinsic grounds,” who demands of authority that it be “external.” 

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And of course it’s valuable to visit and revisit the enemies of liberalism, the revilers of freedom. But taking AV and Co. with great seriousness is like taking the CEO of MyPillow seriously. UD doesn’t deny that people of this sort ought to be monitored occasionally; but leaving them alone to stroke themselves to sleepytime is by far the best move.

This is a partial list of schools where homecoming features (sometimes year after year) mass shooting on campus. Bowie State’s the latest. I think it’s time to call this a trend.

To call it a trend and think about it. Why is Guncoming (seems a better name for it) a thing?

Here are a few observations.

1.) These are already notoriously shot up locations: Baltimore, Shreveport area, Macon area, Richmond area. The gun crime rate in these locations is astounding; these campuses are unsafe.

2.) I don’t think the campuses quite acknowledge/realize how badly shot up things are around them. I recall Grambling’s president’s comment: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” His campus sits in one of the most murderous metro areas in the US, but he thinks he’s in Arcadia.

I mean, UD gets it that you’re profoundly disinclined to characterize the local bloodletting correctly if you want your institution to survive. Let the murder/injury rate get bruited about, and parents are going to be reluctant to entrust their children to you. I’ve made this point also about whacked out Waco, where parents still send their kids to Baylor, despite knock your socks off gun violence all over town. (Plus some, er, on-campus issues.) When will Guncoming locations become so infamous that people won’t want to go to school there? Things are definitely going to get bloodier.

3.) Big, open, often late-night homecoming events are just asking for it. Penetrate the crowd with ease and find the guy/group that has dissed you in some way and let it rip. Maybe you don’t know your victims, but someone jostled you and you’ve been itching to give your Glock a test run. Don’t make it easy for the gunnies: Close your campus, and I mean seriously close it. Don’t do late-night events.

Bad enough that infidels with cameras keep filming our attacks on insufficiently swaddled girls; far, far worse that the Nobel committee has given the Peace Prize to one of the more prominent unswaddled, unchaste among us.

Think of Jon Fosse as more like Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor than the literary precursors in my headline (Fosse, when asked about influences, cites these two, Beckett and Pinter): His work, across all literary genres, is a longing for an end to the self and an equal longing for its replacement by God.

“To write what I myself have experienced doesn’t interest me at all. I write more to get rid of myself than to express myself,” he tells one interviewer. “Writing is all about transformation. I listen to a universe that is different from mine, and writing is a way to escape into this universe. That’s the great thing about it. I want to get away from myself, not to express myself,” he tells another.

An almost-fatal alcoholic (he doesn’t drink anymore), a depressive, Fosse understands with painful clarity the unbearable lightness/heaviness of human being, and he also understands that the process of aesthetic creation suspends the hated self (just as alcohol does). “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” wrote T S Eliot; “it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”  Remember the title of Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s memoirs: Ways of Escape. Remember that the one book left behind on his bedside table after Anthony Bourdain’s suicide was Ways of Escape — in which Greene writes: “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”

Not sayin it’s fair, but if you don’t happen to be an artistic genius, you might indeed have to deal with your self-hatred (UD thinks the capacity to hate oneself is one of humanity’s more endearing traits) via drink or drugs… I mean, you also remember the Randy Newman song, right?

You know how it is with me baby
You know, I just can’t stand myself
It takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else

And a whole WHOLE lot of medicine for me to pretend that I’m nobody else…

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Worse, for many creative geniuses, it’s not either/or: You drink AND you write The Great Gatsby… or you drink and write a novel that had a huge impact on Fosse: The Sound and the Fury… So think of Jon Fosse as a particularly desperate escape artist, unwilling to inhabit permanently the tormenting nothingness of being and the occasional suspension of nothingness via writing/alcohol, and really longing to move to a higher plane. “[E]veryone has a deep longing inside them,” he writes; “we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God, because the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing…”

Consider Fosse’s poem, “Night Psalm.”

There is an earth that opens wide
its night of black abyss
and soul and body will it hide
until there’s none to miss

There is a night that meets with you
receives you nice and soft
and lets you rest with honour due
hand, foot and soul aloft

For God he is in all on earth
in teeming night above
your soul is His, you are His worth
you shine His heaven’s love

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So in the first stanza it all comes down, as Tracy Nelson reminds us, to Mother Earth; just under your bright life black death awaits your capture, Midnight Skater…

But! (Stanza Two) There’s a softer night all around us that doesn’t simply gobble us up; it is gentle and wafts you to an honored place, and if you follow God you will find it. For, as Fosse says in his final stanza, God is here with us on earth. He is everywhere, above and below; and you must learn, if you are not to fall forgotten into the abyss, that you belong to him and he awaits your acceptance of his gift of eternal life. Remember Simone Weil’s favorite poem, the poem which propelled her into the Catholic faith:

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
    From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
            Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
            ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
            ‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
            So I did sit and eat.

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You must accept this divine gift of eternal life; if you do not, you will fall into the abyss.

And no, there’s no bitter Blakeian irony behind the simple language of Fosse’s last stanza. The lines honestly state the convictions of a Catholic convert.

As with Flannery O’Connor, most of Fosse’s writing locates itself in the agonizing daily void which is life prior to faith; but in this poem he sets forth the way out of ways of escape.

Burbled! To see ‘burble’ burble up in this NYT Annals of an Alky is such a pleasure! The word is amusingly close to ‘bubble,’ and indeed seems to find its origin in ‘bubble.’

The alchemic metaphor is nicely maintained, with Giuliani’s enigmatic chemical “transformation” burbling up from a no-doubt Soros-spiked brew.

Burbled. So close to ‘bourbon.’

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Like all great words, this one boasts a distinguished poetic lineage.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

      And burbled as it came!

This blog has long followed the way gun-mad America has ritualistically gunnified more and more of our public events, especially those involving parties and football/baseball/basketball games. Gather large numbers of excited people pretty much anywhere now. Make some of them drunk or high; piss some of them off because they lost a game or an object of sexual interest or indeed any sort of competition/argument.

Or hey maybe just make one of them plain ol’ celebratory and what better way to express your exuberance than to shoot your AK into the air, or into a crowd? Once guns are always and ever there, and once they take on massive symbolic/expressive significance, it seems pretty obvious that Morgan State and many others will, year after year, feature gunfire as a crucial part of homecoming.

And the logic of escalation/tradition means that by the third gun-year, five people will be shot (five people were just shot at Morgan State’s homecoming) rather than one or two. It also may mean groups of shooters: Baltimore’s mayor has announced that “It’s believed there were three shooters firing into the crowd, none apprehended or ID’d at this time.”

Getta loada that! THREE shooters.

Hysterically racing away from the shots; lockdown; weeping with your loved ones when lockdown’s over and you’ve survived — it’s a full-grown postmodern metanarrative now, self-defining and even somehow cathartic. We’ve come through! We’ve cheated the reaper again this year. On to next year.

Fuckface’s ex chief of staff lets it rip.

A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

… A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

… 33.