Let’s start with delight: One of UD‘s heroes, Steven Pinker, has started a defense of free speech group among faculty there. Everyone’s got an eye on Stanford and Oberlin and multiple other stagers of politically coercive campus melodrama, and all self-respecting centers of free inquiry need to take an explicit stand against these enemies of freedom. UD’s beloved University of Chicago is a pioneer here; Harvard and other schools follow UC in strong unmitigated statements, rules, and organizations deployed to resist right and left ideologues – some of whom, grotesquely, were hired by these same universities – who are always trying to shut/shout down free thought and free expression. Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom (which includes econ prof Jason Furman, whose Cambridge house UD knows well, because for years it was owned by her buddy Peter Galbraith) rightly anticipates, and readies itself to fight, mindless and destructive fanaticism.

On the disgust front, there’s yet another greedy egomaniac who can’t think of anything to do with three hundred million dollars other than give it to an institution worth significantly more than fifty billion dollars in order to get his name on a building and get some tax benefits. Vomit.

Not to mention.

‘[Kim Jong-Un is] top of the line. Really smart. As a young man at 24, even though he sort of inherits it, most people when they inherit it they lose it… He has total dominant control. That’s not easy.‘

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.

… but everyone else has. UD assumes the paper of record wants to make ENTIRELY sure that Trump intends to sue Michael Cohen for five hundred million dollars onaccounta he shouldn’t have talked about Stormy Daniels.

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

There you go.

Steinhardt eventually got tossed from the BOT for being a comprehensive, all-’round, all-inclusive, across the board POS. Bartiromo – not a criminal, but certainly a national freakshow – remains on the board.

As the hilarious Fox/Dominion trial proceeds, and the judge gets madder and madder about the effort on the part of the Fox attorneys to hide things like the depth of Bartiromo’s conspiratorial delusions, observers at NYU are going to start asking – especially in the wake of the Steinhardt scandals – whether the school really wants to keep her seat warm. It’s obvious that more documentation of Bartiromo’s panting, I’ll do anything, Trumplove – an orientation somewhat at odds with her representation as a respectable journalist – is forthcoming, and it’s going to make NYU look even nuttier for retaining her.

It’s not about her politics – she’s free to love Trump. It’s about whether NYU wants Blanche DuBois helping to run the school.

… where gun ownership is mandatory, has begun to attract attention from social theorists as well as policy makers due to its sudden, exponential, growth.

The so-called ‘Flakellants’ (pronounced “flak,” not “flake”) derive their identity from the medieval Flagellants, groups of religious fanatics who marched – and march: flagellants continue to exist – through the towns and cities of Europe half naked, scourging themselves bloody with penitential whips in a public, masochistic act of self-mortification.

Contemporary “Flak”ellants – in a behavior reflecting what David French describes as “a form of gun idolatry or gun fetish that treats a gun as a quasi-sacred object” – march semi-nude in public thoroughfares while scourging themselves with guns in the shape of crucifixes.

Last week, a three thousand-strong contingent of Flakellants took to the streets of Provo (for modesty’s sake, women Flakellants wear flak jackets), their numbers increasing as local citizens spontaneously grabbed their own guns, attached heavy ropes to them, and pistol-whipped themselves.

All Flakellant marches end with at least one public suicide as an act of ultimate sacrifice/penitence; these are apparently never planned but rather the result of an overflow of spiritual/gun-bearing fervor. “Of course, it’s a sin,” one of the Provo marchers commented to a reporter covering the event, “but you can’t stop someone determined to bow to the power of the gun. For us, the pouring out of their blood in front of us is a communion as powerful as the Blood of the Lamb. We wet our fingers with this sacred outpouring and mark our foreheads and our gun crosses with it.”

The next Flakellant march (co-sponsored by the Catholic organization Rifle-Scopus Dei) will be in two days, in Salt Lake City, led by Tennessee Representative Andrew Ogles. It is expected to attract at least ten thousand participants.

‘A Round-Up of

Today’s Massacres and

Attempted Massacres:

Another Monday in the United States of America.’

… the town of Garrett Park (which is an arboretum) goes in as we speak.

It’s a Siebold magnolia, variety Colossus.

… involved a six-year-old obviously disturbed kid who almost killed but only badly wounded his teacher (she’s suing the school board for forty million dollars, but details of the virtually criminal neglect on the part of administrators suggest she should sue for sixty million) … Wounded, she still managed to save all the children in the room from the shooter.

Do you remember this case? I know all them massacres in Nashville and Louisville are crowding out your memory of this one and hundreds of others. But you probably remember this one because six-year-old gun-bearing would-be murderers are – even in this country, where the blood comes sweepin’ down the plain – pretty fucking amazing.

So, the latest is that, following in the footsteps of the bone-chilling Crumbleys, the woman who birthed this severely mentally ill little boy and left her gun lying around for him to take to school, has been indicted by a Newport News grand jury.

That’s very good news; but in both cases – and the tons of others on their way – we must send these people, once found guilty, to prison.

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From the wonderful family that brought you Alex Murdaugh on down, oodles of American assholes are currently leaving loaded guns all over the place. When their one year olds find them and kill their two year olds it barely makes the news, cuz it happens all the time. The babes need to shoot up a school to get our attention.

But they still don’t have our attention. Not sose you’d notice.

From prison, the Crumbleys and Deja Taylor need to be incentivized to star in a joint public service announcement, in which, sadder but wiser, they encourage other Americans to lock their guns and put them away.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm doffs her Watkins Glen souvenir sun hat to Halliea Milner, famous author of famous Kenneth Kenne Joseph Pluhar, Jr’s obit.

Most of the many comments on Pluhar’s Legacy page are from people – from around the world! – who never knew him (one of the comments is this post’s headline) but were so stirred by Milner’s obit that they had to say something.

And if you click that link up there you’ll see why. The substance of almost anyone’s life, rendered with lucid accuracy, would occasion some species of laughter (‘Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind,’ says a character in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. ‘I’m fairly positive that I’ll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness,’ said Alec Guinness to James Grissom in an interview.), but his daughter’s rendering of redneck Kenne’s sojourn is so piercingly brilliant you’ll be peeing yourself. People adore this obit because there’s something exuberantly liberating about encountering not evasion and platitude and Hello Jesus but head-on honesty about the actual life an actual person lived.

Ol’ Kenne, an irredeemable rascal, finds himself rendered an irredeemable rascal by the truth-teller he raised.

SOS doubts he’s shocked/offended. Wherever his gin-soaked, weed-smoked spirit wafts, it’s laughing too.

… Catoctin Wildlife Preserve. Camp David is down the street.

… embraces her cousin while waiting to chomp down on mazurek.

Photo Joanna Soltan.

I guess that time is now.

Though of course this body is left far more intact than the AR-15 must have left the real ones in Nashville.

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UD thanks Al.

I told you it’s hard to keep up.

Even if, like UD, you really try.

Asked for a reaction, one Wharton insider said: “We clearly need to search our soul. But we haven’t got a soul.”