“Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and fifty million on the boat they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred thousand square foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half billion dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.”

First Black Rifle Coffee, and now AR-15.

Although Black Rifle is as it were holding its position, UD fears that – under the influence of unfortunate events – we are seeing the end of an era.

But there’s a little good news on the horizon: The most popular name for baby boys in Fairbanks Borough Alaska is currently Barrett REC 7, and among girls it’s AAC Honey Badger.

The brilliant lawyer who came to the defense of a conspiracy of doctors slicing off the genitalia of many eight year old girls in Michigan cannot understand why people don’t like him.

I don’t get it either. The stories he can tell around the dinner table!

So they like do it under cover of night and lie to the little girls that they’re going for a trip to an amusement park or whatever haha. And then the doctor ties her down because you know she’s gonna bolt when she figures out… Hey why aren’t you guys laughing?

Amy Wax is one big pain in the ass. A bombastic white supremacist, she likes to spoon with Tucker Carlson and pant about the beautiful paleskin future.

She is also a walking advertisement for the perils of tenure, because U Penn can’t think of any way to get rid of this every day/every way embarrassment. She’s eminent, see, with spectacular credentials (Yale College! Harvard med! Columbia Law!) and impressive research. As with her Harvard doppelganger, Adrian Vermeule, you can’t just toss berserk brahmins out on their behinds; but you do need to find some way to sorta neutralize them until they die or leave (Wax is almost seventy, and getting nuttier by the minute; Vermeule, at 54, has many years of Harvard-havoc-wreaking ahead of him). What to do? Free speech being what it is, what to do?

Well, Penn has lately pulled together a faculty committee to review her years of vile banter, with an eye toward rigging up some sort of official justification for booting her. She’s so out of touch with their institutional ethos that she is actually a force of destruction, especially in regard to students. Something like that.

I say don’t go there. I say stuff like that imperils free speech for everyone. I say do two other things:

1. Get really serious about students boycotting her classes. Publicize her horribility among entering students as openly as you can, short of encouraging a boycott. That the university cannot do. But organizations of law students certainly can talk boycotts, and should.
2. Denounce her aggressively, and often. She is indeed a grotesque blot upon the school, and the school should not hide from this, but on the contrary should dramatize it every chance it gets. On its website, for instance, under faculty news:

ANOTHER BLACK EYE FOR U PENN LAW

Professor Amy Wax once again brought shame on the school when she sat down recently with Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and spewed disgraceful racist rhetoric.

Etc. Don’t look Ivy Leaguily away. Get down and dirty.

LOL. Pray that he declares – and fast.

Don DeLillo deaths – postmodern deaths – happen (you recall) when you’re having fun in a sought-after setting and something goes wrong. Here’s another one:

[An elderly woman] fell into a pond located at Boca Royale Golf and Country Club before [multiple] alligators grabbed her as she struggled in the water.

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

There’s also the universally expressed shock that lurking under your smooth luxe golfy world are – should you take one false step – multiple woman-eaters.

“I mean it’s pretty horrible and it’s shocking to think that that could actually happen,” John Whitworth, a resident told WBBH. “We see alligators from time to time but never thought that anything like that could happen.”

Which is odd because franchement down there you see alligators all the time; and you certainly know lots of them lurk just under the surface. But that’s the whole DeLillo thing – the fascinating coincidence of affluent highly secure absolute eventlessness AND total catastrophe very near to one another. It’s a very strange headspace to be in, strolling the sweet paths of your immunity even as a small part of your consciousness registers alligators, hurricanes, red tide, tsunami, sea level rise, heat wave…

Read White Noise for details.

Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.

Sing it!

Circuit judges
Pointing guns at lawyers
Frightened courtrooms
Running for the foyer

Wacko Justice
Pulling out his Colt
Threatening attorneys
Everybody bolt!

Get me home!
Country roads
From the jurist's
Pistoled robes
West Virginia!
Bloody wasteland
Get me home
Country roads

[A] spokesperson of Iran’s Armed Forces said people with “improper hijab” especially celebrities and those in the movie industry who do not observe the regime’s mandatory hijab laws were “Satan’s army”. 

Speaking at a hijab festival, Abolfazl Shekarchi said that those he deems as “improperly veiled” were “brazenly waging war against the Quran.”

The military official’s used the term “moharebeh” or waging war against God for those who do not observe the regime’s hijab laws even while according to Islamic jurisprudence moharebeh is defined as “the use of a weapon against people to scare them” and according to Article 282 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, the punishment for moharebeh is “execution, crucifixion, cutting off the right hand and left foot, and exile.”

… He also claimed that Iranians’ non-observance of the mandatory hijab has caused an “increase in divorce, an increase in tension in families, an increase in mental illnesses and depression and lack of security in society and has also dealt a heavy blow to the country’s manufacturing industry and economy.”

… Reza Akrami, a member of the Central Council of the Combatant Clergy Association, said on Tuesday that “if a woman exposes herself on the street, no driver or pedestrian can control his eyes, and this will lead to an accident.”

“You cover anything expensive. Are gold shops like fruit shops? They sell jewelry from under glass instead of offering it without any cover like bananas and grapes,” he said.

Javad Hosseini Kia, the representative of the western city of Kermanshah in the parliament, said that “the structure of a man is different from that of a woman.”

“Have you ever seen someone put a crow in a cage and take it home? No. But you see many nightingales and lovebirds (in cages),” he said.

Background here.

Yesterday, a friend’s wedding in Kew Gardens.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) quietly scrubbed a tweet he posted Tuesday that branded the story of a 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel out of Ohio for an abortion a “lie.” After the alleged perpetrator was arrested Tuesday and appeared in court Wednesday, Jordan deleted the tweet but offered no apology or acknowledgement.

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

But that’s nothing. I’ve already moved on to what we might be able to find out about this insurrectionist’s actions before, during, and after January 6. Let’s see what the next Jan. 6 committee hearing has to say about the country’s most fervent Trumpist.

LOL. Love the bit about educating Israel’s massive, massively powerful, population of violent bigots in the ways of kindly pluralism.

How did this country devolve into a farce, where millions of Jews cannot worship freely — or even get married?

Easy. It forgot to kick against the pricks. Israel let itself become a theocracy. Bad career move.

On the regime’s recent Celebrate Your Nonexistence Day, some brave Iranian women removed their veils – only the latest form of hijab-disobedience among women forced to abide that theocracy.

Things are of course much, much darker in Afghanistan; UD will admit to having trouble thinking about daily life for girls and women in Afghanistan. But Iran is also a hellhole for women, who must start swaddling themselves at age nine or risk long jail terms.

Yet there’s plenty of evidence that many women and men there are willing to kick hard against the regime’s sex-obsession, even if it means imprisonment. Indeed there is reason to hope that at some time in the not too distant future imams may be able to glance at unveiled women without getting non-Allah-approved hard-ons.

The arguing began soon after Ms. Powell and her two companions were let into the White House by a junior aide and wandered to the Oval Office without an appointment.

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

This morning, everyone wants to know: Who was the junior aide? And how is it that this person let in the crazies?

To answer these questions, we need to set the scene.

It was late at night in a desolate White House, with the president alone and anguishing in the Oval Office. Bitterness, humiliation, and rage so overwhelmed him that he could not sleep, and, as he glanced through his door, open to the hallway, the only person also still awake was Andrew Giuliani, who stood a few feet away practicing his golf swing.

As a favor to his old friend, Trump had given a sinecure, in these last days, to Rudy’s perennially unemployed son. “It doesn’t have to be much,” Rudy had said; “Just something where he can hang around and say he works in the White House.”

But Andrew took his role seriously, shadowing the president day and night in the hope that at some point or other he might be of use …

Suddenly, just as everything in the White House seemed impossibly silent and empty, three dark figures approached from the end of the hallway! Andrew G. cowered, assuming they were Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert, who always carried AR-15s, until he discerned the shape of a woman among them. And then… “Hey, DAD!!”

“Son, let us in. It’s urgent. A matter of life or death of the republic.”

“No can do,” Andrew answered, laying aside his club. “You don’t have an appointment or anything and I don’t know who these people are with you.”

“Sidney is about to be appointed Counsel for Voting Machine Seizure, and this guy… I dunno … runs a successful business.”

“I’ve had no instruction from the president to let anyone in, especially at this late hour.”

“Look, it was hard enough evading Secret Service and jimmying a window. We’re not about to let some pussy stop us when we’ve come this far. Remember how I said I’d pull strings to make you Governor? Forget it.”

“Well, and do you remember how Steve Bannon described me as ‘born of the grit of two warriors‘?”

“No matter how it looks to the world, Donald Trump and I did not fuck and produce you. Get out of the way.”

Rudy signaled to Sidney, who had been shaking a can of Diet Dr Pepper, which she now opened and released into Andrew’s face. Blinded, he clawed desperately at his eyes as the head of Overstock reached for the golf club and swung it at Andrew’s head, rendering him unconscious.

The rest is history.