As yet another faux minority person bites the dust, UD thinks nostalgically of Jessica Krug, a colleague of hers at GWU, who was similarly given to pickling herself in Brown Skin Girl.

Can you blame them? Hope it’s fine champagne, left over from New Year’s festivities. Party on, Dems.

As pundits have noted, it’s chaotic.

The MAGA conspiracy theorist has fingered vaccinations as the cause of the football player’s on-field collapse; but Marjorie Taylor Greene has countered with a theory based on the player’s given name.

“DAMAR” backwards is RAMAD which is one letter short of RAMADA, the international hotel chain owned lock stock and barrel by George Soros in cahoots with Dominion Voting Systems. I leave the rest to you.

At the stroke of midnight, a 62 year old Michigan man drove celebratory bullets from his AR-15 into the bodies of two of his fellow revelers, whose bloody deaths microseconds into 2023 set a new world record for fastest end to a new year.

Police are withholding some details because “we don’t want this to become a trend.”

JUST WALK AWAY D.J.

[Sing it.]

And when I made the ask about your special day
The day you tried to kill Mike Pence to make him pay

You walked away, D.J.
The sixth of what? Nothing much to say.
The ballroom’s empty and your face has gone all pale:
Guest list’s in jail.

Yes deep inside their cells
The Proud Boys sit
They’ve been condemned to hell
You don’t give a shit

So walk away, D.J.
The shit still follows close behind
As bitter rains burn down upon your weary eyes

You lose your mind.

… as I read updates on the reported Idaho killer. So many accounts of the suspect suggest an intellectual interest in what it would feel like to kill someone, coupled with an arrogant sense of one’s exemption from ordinary morality. Both murders involve[d] lengthy strategic planning and stalking; all victims died by slashing (shooting lacks the up-close visceral thrill of feeling yourself putting someone to death), and all perpetrators went to impressive lengths to get away with the crimes.

L&L were wealthy brilliant elitists who arrived at their fate via a peculiar take on Nietzsche’s superman; Kohberger’s homicidal fascination drew him toward formal study in criminology. Just as crazy people can be drawn to psychiatry (see, most famously, the fictional Hannibal Lecter), so mass killers may be drawn to criminology, a field in which they can spend all day luxuriating in lurid details.

One hundred years after L&L, Kohberger has the cultural advantage of a zillion slasher films/video games, etc. etc. It will be interesting to find out if he is a fan of these.

Answer: Nope.

From New Year’s Song, by Ted Hughes

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

… Now there come the weak-neck snowdrops

bouncing like fountains and they stop you

they make you take a deep breath

make your heart shake you

such a too much of a gift for such a mean time

nobody knows how to accept them

all you can do is gaze at them baffled

and the worst cold’s to come

… and that’s saying a lot – has yet another nationally broadcast meltdown. Drink and violence and litigiousness have long been Steve Sarkisian’s (scroll down) game plan, and the resulting embarrassing spectacles in front of trustees, obscene actings-out in the larger community, and, in this latest instance, psychotic attacks on team staff, have totally endeared him to the nation’s premier football programs. He pulls in a huge salary and is massively lionized at one dominant program after another.

He hasn’t yet started pulling out a gun during his special moments (This is How We Do It), but once he does that, he’ll be guaranteed the head coaching spot at the school of his choice.

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

The world of university football/basketball coaches is mainly a variant of Trumpworld. Everyone loves the athletic Trumplets’ sick dirty twisted lying ways, and when the sickest and dirtiest die, the, uh, what’s the word, encomia are enmazing! You’d never know from American sports journalism that Bobby Knight or Mike Leach (one of America’s most fanatic Trumpers) was anything other than a fine inspirational example to us all when his sadistic treatment of players comes to a permanent end. And so it is with another manifestly insane person, Steve S.

Of course a few sissy nay-sayers are calling for him to be fired. They seem worried that the school he rules – Texas, Austin – may suffer reputational damage through having made a gibbering lunatic the highest-profile, highest-compensated person on campus.

To which UD says: Fiddle dee dee! It’s Texas, sweetie!

… and therefore a popular early theory about the U Idaho students knifed to death in their beds seems plausible: It was a random ugly encounter, during a night of barhopping, with someone who turned out to be a vicious asshole, who followed them home and killed them.

PhD student, criminology, Washington State University.

Whether common good constitutionalism supplants originalism remains to be seen. But the idea that it can impose the society it wants through its own interpretation of “the common good” is a sign of just how far the right has moved toward authoritarianism. 

That’s his bald head. Video taken by La Kid. UD stayed home with bronchitis.

Be Anything.