August 26th, 2023
‘[W]e never hear people shouting slogans like “This is what aristocracy looks like!” or “The people, under the guidance of virtuous aristocrats, will never be defeated!” Popular movements aim for popular power.’

LOL. Jodi Dean describes the aristocratic Catholic governing authority trying to worm its way into our democratic hearts.

Public morals legislation, the public observation of Christian religious practices, and a family policy aimed toward incentivizing marriage and increasing family size (as opposed to, say, promoting reproductive justice and publicly funded childcare) are hardly the stuff of a multiracial, multiethnic working-class party in a secular society that recognizes the existence of women and the LGBTQ+ community.

Duh. If you want to know what life under a Cathophate would look like, revisit Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and take a gander at Lady Marchmain – that megaCatholic upper-cruster. She’ll be president, and her son Bridey VP, in the Cathophate to Come, and together their putrescent moral superiority will reduce us all to sniveling drunks, like poor Sebastian.

August 26th, 2023
“Time Out,” American Rules…

football.

August 25th, 2023
Out of the frying pan into the

fire.

August 25th, 2023
The mug shot heard round the world…

hits the airwaves.

August 25th, 2023
‘I had never heard the word mugshot. They didn’t teach me that at the Wharton School of Finance.’

As someone who has covered the AMAZING cavalcade of convicted crooks who have learned their trade at Wharton, UD will say what she has lo these many years said about Wharton:

As an insider trader factory — as, more broadly, the nation’s most illustrious breeder of malfeasors this side of Ma Barker — Trump’s alma mater certainly should have taught wee Donald and his classmates what a mugshot is.

August 24th, 2023
Limerick
The Trumpsters now offer their mugs:
Some giggle, some glower, some shrug.
Well, sooner or later
The law catches traitors
Right up to the primary thug.
August 24th, 2023
Fascist-on-fascist…

crime.

August 23rd, 2023
‘[T]he alleged gunman was a retired Southern California law enforcement officer who opened fire as a result of a domestic disturbance with his wife at the bar, and the wife was one of the dead victims.’ 

Hey, it’s America. This is what you do when you’re pissed with the old bag.

August 23rd, 2023
‘In the U.S., Catholic Integralist policies are extreme versions of those of Catholic conservatives: a total ban on pornography, a nation-wide, executive-imposed ban on abortion in all three trimesters, including even the case of rape. They would ban blasphemy, end same-sex marriage, and recriminalize sodomy. They would also likely ban Pride parades, given the opportunity.’

[T]heir ideal society is one where a large and powerful modern state is integrated with the Catholic Church. The church would direct the state to use coercive and non-coercive means to support the church’s spiritual mission, such as policies like penalties for apostasy and heresy, requirements for attending mass. Integralism resembles Islamism but with Catholicism as the religion.

Sounds yummy! Go, Prof Vermeule!

August 23rd, 2023
The Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw…

… … has made postcards of one of Jerzy Soltan’s artworks – a very pretty little picture of a boat – and yesterday they sent his son, Mr UD, a bunch of them. Here’s the work’s collection page; and here’s UD‘s photo of the postcard, with one of Jerzy’s much more typical, very naughty, works as background.

August 22nd, 2023
A song to accompany…

this article.

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

The doctors cannot treat you if you’re dying

So all the doctors up and disappeared

Maternal deaths are secret – no fair prying – 

In Idaho!

Non-viable?  You’ll carry it to full-term

We’ll pray with you throughout it, never fear

Together we will honor all divine sperm

In Idaho!


I know it sounds a bit bizarre

It sounds a bit bizarre

But in Idaho

That’s how conditions are!

No pregnancy may end no matter danger

The zygote is a person through and through
In short, you’ll never know
A more pernicious foe

Than zealot evangelicals
Right here in Idaho

Idaho!  Idaho!
I know it gives a person pause,
But in Idaho
Those are the legal laws.

August 22nd, 2023
Shadowlands


Suicide is shadowland.  Stark statistics are always available – most recently, that American gun suicides have reached an all-time high (and basically anybody who is anybody who doesn’t want to be anybody uses a gun) – but the act itself is so unaccountable, so extreme, that we consign it to the shadows.  

We can sort of make out how a very old person beset by terminal pain might want to do it; but the vast majority of suicides remain hopelessly obscure.  Most of us are too wedded to life, and too afraid of death, to get anywhere with them.

Suicide shadows lie deepest where gunshots to the head ring most sharply.  Cowboy states like Wyoming and Montana have outrageous rates of gun suicide, and their state legislatures do practically nothing about it.  Just getting suicide hot lines set up in these locations is a battle.  Shine a light on massive firearm self-slaughter, after all, and you risk giving gun control people something to talk about.

Even the little we do know about suicide is so upsetting that we avert our eyes.  Can it be that there are many people so lonely, so rejected, so alcoholic – and so bitter and angry about this condition – that they derive their last bit of pleasure from the thought of how they’re abandoning and wounding the few people who do care about them?  Or say their motive isn’t quite this ugly.  Can there really be people whose self-disgust is so intense as to make them pull the trigger?  

Yes, and yes.  

Can it be that there are many people so encased in clinical depression, and so resistant to medication, that no pill or therapy regime will be able to free them from it?  

Absolutely.

So we also press suicide into the shadows because we cannot accept the thought that suicidality often eludes cure.  The best doctors, the most loving families, may jolly it away for a while, but people who have come to hate themselves, or hate their lives, to this extent, may despite all try to do the deed.  And a gun makes it so much easier and more certain to cause death than any other form of self-destruction.  

A gun sits in a drawer by the suicide’s bed, beckoning him (statistics again – it’s overwhelmingly men) to do it.  That’s what it’s for – to kill.  It’s not like pills or ropes — innocent objects which you must struggle to make lethal.  Guns positively sing of unconditional easeful escape from anguish.  In a chorus 450 million weapons strong, they sing of instant surcease.  They even have an anthem, if you like: Bach’s Come, Sweet Death.  

Guns are the kingdom of death on earth, and their preeminent kingdom is America.  In our privileged country, we get pretty much everything we want, including a rich array of death-promisers from which to choose.

August 22nd, 2023
Price fixing, bribery, lying about the danger of the opioids they push…

Even by pharma standards, Israel’s Teva is a real ugly standout. Where’s the long punishing article about this dirty enterprise in the NYT? Far as UD can tell, the place has long been a committed bad actor, and one wonders, with its latest massive settlement, whether anyone will bother looking at its scandalous history and writing about it. I mean, it’s clearly able to handle hundreds of millions in penalties every year as the cost of doing business, so pressure needs to come from elsewhere if we are going to stop these predators.

August 21st, 2023
‘To broadcast his incoherent idea that Trump had somehow won the 2020 election, Giuliani chose as a venue not the swanky Four Seasons Hotel, but Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a local business in Philadelphia, wedged grottily between an adult bookshop and a crematorium… [Now] Giuliani can argue his [legal] case all the way to the Supreme Courtyard by Marriott.’ 

Amusing update on Rudy.

August 21st, 2023
Almost Nothing, West Virginia…

… Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah River…

West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.

Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.

Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.

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

As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.

The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.

As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.

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