“The room erupted in laughter,” said a reporter in the January 6 hearings room tonight. She was describing the hilarious juxtaposition of Missouri’s Josh Hawley first pumping his macho fist and riling up the crowd of insurrectionists; and then immediately after, with the Capitol overrun, racing like a wittle wabbit to get away from the people he’d made violent.

… it.

Serotonin! For depression!

Looks as though it may not work.

Makes you feel like such a jerk.

What a nasty-ass placebo.

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

Have you tried to stop the pill?

God, that really made you ill.

Now you’re stuck:

With less serotonin!

… Via the Los Angeles Times review of Bad City, a book about disgusting events at pretty much always-disgusting University of Southern California. My coverage of these particular grotesqueries can be found here. Put University Southern California in my search engine for years of scandal and corruption.

[T]wo major scandals at USC involv[ed] two doctors employed by the university: the medical school dean, Carmen Puliafito, and a gynecologist who worked at USC‘s student health center. Both doctors took advantage of young women to satisfy their prurient desires. Eventually, the book becomes a pointed critique of USC’s culture of secrecy and its shameful efforts to protect its public image. The university’s supporting role in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal serves as a kind of coda to a dark tale of privilege, amorality and coverups...

In one especially outrageous scene, [Dean] Puliafito brings a pair of addicts into his office at the Keck School of Medicine, where they don the doctor’s USC lab coat and an inflatable Trojan hat after smoking heroin...

Todd’s Indiana’s Attorney General, and I bet he thinks Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s real purty too, but that don’t seem to be keeping her from suing him for defamation. Why?

Well, since Ohio is a feudal fiefdom, where a pregnant ten year old rape victim can’t get an abortion, the child had to go to Indiana, where Bernard performed the procedure and in so doing got Todd so riled up he spewed all kinds of lies about her on national media and now she needs round the clock security.

Turns out broadcasting life-destroying lies about people is defamation, and Bernard will almost certainly successfully sue Rokita on these grounds.

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What a comedown for Todd Rokita. Once that ten year old hemorrhaged to death trying to give birth in Ohio, he’d for sure have been given Ohio’s Distinguished Service Medal. Now all he has to look forward to is a whopping legal settlement.

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Contribute to Dr. Bernard’s legal/security fund here.

What a welcome headline! And when you put it together with what looks like a really serious rebellion against mandatory woman-covering in Iran, the future of the secular public realm, and of equality between the sexes, seems a bit brighter.

We shouldn’t forget, along these lines, the myriad burqa bans around the globe.

The article from whose headline I quote above duly notes the now-notorious irony:

Merely criticising the hijab in Western democracies has also become almost synonymous with “Islamophobia” or attacks on minority rights.

But in Muslim-majority societies it is still regarded as part of a legitimate campaign for the liberation of women from stifling tradition.

“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.

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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.