Once you start challenging library books, the firmament’s the limit. Provincial Keller TX has gotten TWO challenges of THE BIBLE, baby! Datz right. You don’t like Gender Queer; someone else happens not to like The Good Book. Hah! Both books get pulled. Plus purty much everything else in the library, I’d warrant. Eventually it’ll all go, and the state of utter ignorance the good folk of Keller seem to want for their kids will win the day. Good on ya, Keller.

“The former president’s current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company and a former host at far-right One America News.”

Here’s a thought: Why not bring back Alan Dershowitz?

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The problem with Tribe’s otherwise excellent idea is that Dershowitz is far too taken up lately with his bombshell lawsuit against the Martha’s Vineyard public library for not inviting him to give talks there. He plans to take down Chilmark Library and its elderly volunteers, and the prep work alone is exhausting.

Dershowitz has tried to explain the priority he’s placing on his library litigation in a poem addressed to Trump, who he knows he has disappointed.

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To Doncasta, On Going to War

Tell me not, Don, I am unkind,   
  That from the scumm'ry   
Of thy black breast and insane mind   
  To Chilmark Lib. I fly.   
  
True, a new lawsuit now I chase,
  'Gainst a modest house where simple books they lend;   
For while it once did me embrace   
  It turned against its one-time friend.   
  
Forgive my harsh inconstancy, belov'd client, Don!   
  Once I've destroyed the library, and made it shut its door,
I will return to thee, my One,   
  To defend my Love once more.

Catholic universities can sometimes be a bit… off the grid when it comes to the hiring process.

Or perhaps UD should call it the highering process, for Houston’s University of St Thomas was so excited by Mario Enzler’s heavenly contacts (it’s who you know) and the effects of their, uh, secondhand-sainthood-smoke?, that the school hired him as their b-school dean even though he had zero credentials in that particular field!

Not to worry! He had heart! For that betimes he had encountered not merely Mother Teresa, but Pope John Paul II! He would bring a warm “climate of values” to the chilly b-school world.

Some faculty complained from the start (they took him on in 2020) that his hiring process was rushed, that he was forced on them, that he seemed a bit bogus… But with God on their side, the … uh … higher administration said fie to the devil with you you know not what you do etc. etc.

But now. Gevalt. He has hastily resigned. Faculty are calling him a charlatan, a cheat, and a con-artist.

These are not high things. Rather, they are low.

Turns out all this time, instead of relying on things like peering into his heart plus his having friends in high places, faculty have been trying unsuccessfully to verify his resume’s putrid, prolific, and very pious bullshit.

A New York Times writer begins by speaking the harsh truth (see above), and then suddenly davens over backwards to absolve New York’s ultraorthodox community of decades of public health irresponsibility.

Quoting only one person as an authority on the subject of vaccine hesitancy – a member of the ultraorthodox community – she would have us believe that this particular group of Jews is justified, by its tragic history, in its appalling indifference to any state authority (this approach also lets them off the hook for endemic welfare cheating and refusal to educate their children to a state standard). The writer does not ask why groups of Jews around the world with similar tragic histories seem able to discriminate between a Nazi state and a democratic state. She does not consider that the crucial problem may be that this group obeys only its authoritarian rabbis and has contempt for profane entities outside of its sacred realm.

“Vaccine hesitancy is not rooted in Orthodox religion,” [Nesha] Abramson says. “It’s fueled by people who come from outside the community to spread lies and sow fear.” Indeed Israel’s ultraorthodox also seem captive to the same outside forces, since, as Samuel Heilman points out, their community is as just as “perfect… an incubator for epidemics” as New York’s.

Trace the problem back, in both cases, to a refusal to educate their children in basics like the germ theory of disease; but don’t forget primitive powerful rabbis, in some cases, who tell their followers not to bother vaccinating. The notorious tendency of some ultraorthodox communities to incubate epidemic is rooted in the form religion takes among them – in particular, blind obedience to a rabbi, and a shocking lack of basic cultural literacy that makes people credulous in regard to conspiracy theories, and easily manipulated, by outsiders as well as insiders.

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has formally launched his campaign to reclaim the presidency with a ferocious broadside against his rival, Jair Bolsonaro, who he claimed was “possessed by the devil”.

Catholic Integralist Vermeule has taken a leave of absence from Harvard to run Lula’s campaign. Should be interesting.

… UD‘s late friend, Paul Laffoley. I’m happy Paul’s work is showing up in the art curriculum. But it’s never been my thing.

Flight risk. Some people are saying he’s really a Scottish citizen. Through his mother. I hope the FBI was also able to find his birth certificate.

To the question of the mole’s identity, UD takes a Shakespearean approach: Cherchez the bastard child.

True, Tiffany’s no bastard; but she’s close to it. She’s the much-overlooked fruit of his brief, disastrous, marriage-killing adultery with Marla. Kind of an embarrassment.

That is, he married Marla for sure, but it was dumb and he got out quick, but then there was Tiffany, who is no true Trump, and is treated that way. She not only lacks the sylphlike splendor of the legitimate line; much more tellingly, she actually seems to have earned her educational credentials.

Tiffany knows the law; she studied it at Georgetown. She knows just how evil Dad’s actions are. This and this alone might be able to destroy the patriarch of the family against which she has long harbored burning resentment.

You don’t have to agree with Kim Holmes’s overbroad denunciation of the left to appreciate his well-observed attack on the motley crew of right and left American Robespierres who know ever so much better than we how to live, and who intend to shove that way of life right down our throats.

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People who believe in individual liberty as a founding national value need to know their enemies.

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UD’s favorite from the motley Holmes assembles:

Michael Baxter, for example, a DePaul University professor writing in America: The Jesuit Review in 2013, argued that [John Courtney] Murray’s “Catholic version of American exceptionalism blinded him to the danger of Catholics being absorbed into U.S. political culture.” As a result, “Murray got the story of American Catholics wrong. The United States is not unique among modern states.” The implication is the American order is fundamentally flawed. Baxter even goes so far as to hope that “providence will bless us with a revolution” to change this order.

All Power to the Providence, Baby!

Isn’t that more than enough for them to have in common?

… And how odd, thinks she as she settles in to blog at the only wifi spot up in these here hills, that they held off on the country version of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue until your blogeuse, her Baez baggage fully intact at her advanced age, wandered in.

This park, where rustic meets ruination (everything’s in a state of disrepair, with the burnt-out hulk of a row of cottages moving the eye from disrepair to disintegration), generates strange auras like this all the time – I mean the Baby Blue moment; but also many other cosmic convergences, spots of time when some hillbilly Proust rigs up tightly-packed deep-meaning tableaus just for UD.

Or is it simply a lot of age and experience in me, folded into many Augusts one after another at this strange place?

Doesn’t hurt that the big frame of reference every second, in this fern forest/huge open-sky park, is down-home cozy Mother Earth and, at the very same time, jest past the itty bitty atmosphere, the crushing unfathomable universe. A mix embodied the other night in a lecture (downstairs, in the Massanutten Room) given by a space expert who heehawed and guffawed through the tragic gigantism of a dying cosmos. It’s the same thing out on Big Meadows, where people gather very late to watch the stars begin to fall, and it’s a gentle folk ritual with fellowship and tiny peals of music. The massive Sturgeon moon is one hell of a harsh mistress, but we’re after the golden photographable version.

What else are we supposed to do? Even the Christianity inspired by the morbid world expresses itself, ’round these parts, in happy I’m Saved ditties (they dominate the truegrass programming). Looking around her at this social space, UD flashed, yesterday, onto an image of a young monk at Holy Cross Cistercian Abbey (it’s not too far from here), who suddenly, at Vespers (Les UDs were there to do a retreat) hurled himself flat to the floor in front of the crucifix! She was shocked! Just lay flat and unmoving, his white robes flowing around his body, for what seemed forever. Now you’re talkin’.

You knew they would. Best thing to do this morning: Read his dear friend Hitch on “the absolute right of free expression and free inquiry… [and] the eternal attempt to veto by the dogmatic and fanatical the curious, the inquisitive, and the experimental.”

And while you’re at it: Don’t forget the role played by “the pathetic euphemisms about religious sensitivity that are put forward by those who know better.”

Trubu, the Genius of the Carpathians, Ada Doom — call him what you will (these are what we call him on this blog) — moves another step toward his obvious end: The limited nuclear explosion of Mar-A-Lago. As sure as Absalom‘s Clytie burns down her house full of devils and dolts, Trump hoards the codes in preparation for the nihilism to end all nihilisms.

He himself, like Faulkner’s Jim Bond, will flee the estate while family members and Trumpians burn within. He will head for Ted Kaczynski’s Montana hideaway, where, after some remodeling, he will settle in for his legacy years.

In this vintage New Wave film, rebel and disrupter Jean-Pierre Trump is questioned by various authorities on the subject of his law-breaking.

After refusing to answer any questions, he retreats to the Florida coast, where in the film’s last image he runs into the sea.

“I’m Herschel Walker and I approve this message.”