Walter Benjamin welcomes you to the Formula One Exhibition.

You got a zillion guns and very little police enforcement in the city with the highest murder rate in America – who wouldn’t carjack? It’s got to the point in New Orleans that just, say, beating up an old guy and taking his car doesn’t rise to the level of a crime.

Michael Casey, owner of Liberty Cheesecakes, was on a date in a wealthy area of the city when he witnessed an older man being beaten during a carjacking.

The police arrived relatively quickly, he said, but when Mr Casey pointed out the attacker, they wouldn’t go after him. An officer advised the victim to buy a gun, Mr Casey said.

Everybody get a gun, y’all! Shoot-out city!

Chekhov’s nineteenth century directions are in severe need of updating in our time, most potently on view in the ongoing Murdaugh familicide trial. Taking the stand on behalf of his father, who is accused of murdering his wife and son, the surviving Murdaugh son describes hundreds, if not thousands, of guns of all kinds scattered about the three Murdaugh properties.

Buster, who is testifying even as we speak, says no one put guns away properly; all three of these alcoholics (plus Alex has a twenty-year-long drug addiction) constantly used them, played with them, shared them, threw them in unlocked cars, got them stolen, lost them. These are not what you’d have considered irresponsible people – highly educated, influential attorneys from way back in the long family history, they are one of the first families of the state of South Carolina.

But – well – all the details here, if you can stomach them.

Poor Paul Murdaugh, raised by drunken savages. Amazing he made it to 22.

But… I mean… the Southland.

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So maybe we rewrite Chekhov for our time like this:

If there are two hundred loaded guns of every imaginable kind lying around the house in act one, scene one, you must kill your family with two different ones (the very likely murderer, Alex Murdaugh, used one gun for his wife and another for his son) by act three, scene two.

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There’s also the Wyoming variant of these directions:

If you have more guns than any other state in act one, scene one, you must also have the highest suicide rate in the country by act three, scene two.

[Mexican] Supreme Court Justice Yasmín Esquivel has been tarnished by evidence a thesis she presented in the 1980s was a near-exact copy of one presented a year earlier…

She … claims the earlier thesis copied her later work.

Duh. One glance at Lady Lara de Bourgh (about whom we have had WHAT to say on this blog) instantly brings to mind Mr Collins’ praise of her precursor in Pride and Prejudice: “What affability! What condescension!”

But if you’re a little slow on the uptake, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic will help focus your attention on this notorious aspect of High Trumpworld, composed of vulgarians like Catherine de Bourgh who look down on vulgarians like Mr Collins.

That Foxworld and Trumpworld have a special horror of the yahoos who gather ’round them/vote for them is hardly surprising: Anxious about their own social standing, they can’t help but watch in dismay/cynicism as an embarrassing rabble tries to touch their hems. A dude like Jared Kushner, who affects aristocracy but in fact hails from the basest money mafias, can’t help but lose his latte when hopeless schlumps sidle up. He’s counting on his new fifty million dollar house on a heavily policed island to keep them out.

Anyhoo we’re focused on this matter again because of new revelations around UD‘s favorite ongoing billion dollar lawsuit, in which Dominion, a voting machine company, seeks damages for having been slandered by Fox broadcasters, who as one denounced Dominion as a malicious part of the Soros-engineered conspiracy to keep DJT from his second presidency. Dominion says all the Fox broadcasters knew they were lying when they assured the rabble the election, with important help from Dominion, had really scout’s honor been stolen. But now that Fox emails from the time have been released, it turns out… Dominion’s right!

Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back…

The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”

… “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.

… in one of UD’s birdbaths.

I

Early studies of Non-Specific Characterological Assholism (N-S CA), originally denominated the AH-Factor, focused on its chromosomal provenance. Later studies have tended to examine particular sociocultural applications, as in the question posed here: How long, and to what effect, do specific instances of N-S CA linger? If, for example, a subject is a notorious asshole in 2014, will he suffer measurable consequences roughly a decade later?

II

A recent tenure denial at Harvard University offers a suggestive case.

In 2014 Benjamin Edelman, an untenured Harvard prof

 ordered take-out from Sichuan Garden, a family-run restaurant in Brookline…

[Edelman] also has a consulting business, for which Bloomberg Business reports [he] charges clients $800 an hour.

The food cost $4 more than he had calculated, because prices on the website had not been updated. The professor complained in an email. Ran Duan, whose family owns the restaurant, apologized and ultimately offered to return $4.

Edelman wrote back,

I suggest that Sichuan Garden refund me three times the amount of the overcharge. The tripling reflects the approach provided under the Massachusetts consumer protection statute, MGL 93a… I have already referred this matter to applicable authorities in order to compel your restaurant to identify all consumers affected and to provide refunds to all…

Widely reported at the time, the incident generated strikingly negative attention, and two limericks.

III

Professor Edelman, in suing Harvard for the tenure denial, identifies as root cause the 2014 incident.

In a civil lawsuit against Harvard filed Tuesday in the Suffolk County Superior Court, Edelman alleges that the 2014 email correspondence — for which he later apologized at the Business School’s request — resurfaced when he was being evaluated for tenure, among other concerns of misconduct…

Edelman said he believes the negative publicity from the Sichuan Garden incident was a key reason for his tenure denial, adding there is “some fundamental truth to the centrality of that media disaster.”

“Had it not been for those stupid restaurant emails, I would have been just fine,” he said.

IV CONCLUSION

Evidence here points to the possibility that, in particular institutional settings, and under particular rule-bound circumstances, fulminating N-S CA may indeed impede personal advancement over the course of a lifetime. These results however are very preliminary and somewhat vitiated by their association with Harvard, unusually sensitive to being perceived as full of assholes.

… NYU’s board of trustees [has] decided not to remove [Steinhardt’s] name from the school.

Read the whole thing! I promise you’ll love it.

Kentucky is one of our stupidest states, a fact reflected in its long list of terrible colleges and universities. I don’t know what this blog would do without the astonishingly, enduringly, scandalous University of Louisville; but UK and a bunch of other schools with “Kentucky” in their name are also real scum buckets. As a blogger dedicated to writing about what’s worst (and sometimes of course best) about American universities, let UD take this opportunity to say to that state THANK YOU. I believe the applicable cliche is The Gift that Keeps on Giving.

And now that Kentucky makes its benightedness official by banning abortion under all circumstances, it’s time for non-demented women to make it official and strike the entire state off their college-choice list.

Amid the sewage, though, there’s Berea, a deeply inspiring, profoundly impressive institution marooned in the swamp. As the state of Kentucky joins Mississippi and Alabama at the bottom of all quality of life lists, one hopes there’s some way to keep Berea afloat.

Sing the state song with me.

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In the far and mighty West,

Where the lonely drunk seeks rest,

There’s a Remington that fits him like a glove.

The bloody chest of this lost man…

It’s where he took his one last stand

In Wyoming, dead and drunk, the State I love!

Wyoming, Wyoming!

Arkansas Proud!

The local loon who killed sixty and wounded for life hundreds and hundreds and hundreds six years ago didn’t shut down the place. Most of the killed were tourists at an outdoor concert; maybe if his ultrapowerful weaponry had shredded people strolling residential Henderson, there would have been a bit of an exodus. But big metropolitan areas are incredibly resilient. Look at the slow-mo daily murder/wounding rates in Oakland, Balto, etc. The core of the city of UD‘s birth has indeed lost population, but just outside the city, in bedroom communities, population rates seem steady.

Vegas itself is the sixth most murderous city in the US, and its population booms.

Universities are different. True, current applications at Virginia Tech are up; but it’s been fifteen years since its massacre, and the campus, in the wake of the event, has become one of the most highly secured in the world.

The Va Tech massacre occurred before America began experiencing daily mass murders, before certain locations became notorious carnage hubs. Only a fucking idiot, for example, would wander into a hookah bar late on a weekend anywhere in the States or Canada; and more and more of us know this.

As for universities, most remain insanely open locations – unlocked doors, large milling crowds, young heedless people, a massacrist’s delight. This is why essays about Michigan State this morning have titles like Requiem for the Spartans; people know that at least for awhile that show’s over.

Many students are leaving campus – who knows for how long. Everyone assumes universities are, in Bartlett Giamatti’s words, free and ordered spaces, but the free part begins to bite the dust as every hopelessly insane paranoid in America is issued an arsenal.

A Michigan State student who spent hours terrified, hiding in the dark, while one of many Americans working out his personal issues via mass slaughter killed people around her, registers her loss of innocence. Oh. Here too.

Here there everywhere. Everything everywhere all at once.

Also perhaps that particular American accounting: We only lost three. Virginia Tech was 32.

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Her partner rejected Va Tech because of the unbearable pathos/enduring stigma. You can’t forget the way that 76 year old professor died for his students… Or the sickening gun-toting photograph of the madman – mad boy – who did it… Maybe you know enough to know about yet other murders and lockdowns on that campus.

Enough already. Who needs it. Go someplace with at least a lower body count. Better chance to get out after four years alive, or not critically wounded. It’s like figuring out your chance of getting out of Baylor not raped.

Oh well. Enough of that. Back to the Murdaugh trial.

One of UD‘s oldest friends, from Northwestern University, works there.

Three dead; five remain in critical condition.

Went on and on; students crouched for hours, terrified, in the darkness.