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.

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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.

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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.

We are aware that Sidney Powell held a can of Dr Pepper during her January 6 committee deposition; we are also aware that she drank from it.

Dr Pepper disavows any prior knowledge of this event, and affirms in the strongest terms its rejection of the global conspiracy theories and treasonous activities associated with Ms Powell. In the 125 years since our founding, we have consistently demonstrated love of country and fidelity to the United States and its institutions. We are appalled to see our soft drink featured so prominently in the shameful testimony of Ms Powell. The idea of our company being associated in viewers’ minds in any way with this person is anathema. Please do not judge us by events over which we have no control.

Ezra Dyer, Car and Driver:

[North Carolina] House Bill 1049 … would allocate $50,000 to destroy free public car chargers.

… We’ve simply got to do something about these free public chargers, even if it costs us $50,000! Those things cost tens of cents per hour, when they’re being used…

Critics of this bill might point out that increasing the number of electric cars could actually benefit owners of internal-combustion vehicles, thanks to reduced demand for petroleum products…

[Yes,] electric-car company VinFast is building a 2000-acre factory just up the road that will employ 7500 people, and Toyota is building a battery factory outside Greensboro that’ll employ 1750 people. But let’s remember that House Bill 1049 would also create a job — for the person who goes around and rips out the free public chargers …

President Donald Trump turned to Hope Hicks in June 2017 when he wanted a “number” to back up his false claims that his approval ratings were “setting records” for a first-year president...

[Trump’s] approval rating on that day’s Gallup tracker was just 36 percent…

Hicks … made Trump happy by offering up “seventy percent,” wrote the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich, who witnessed the exchange...

[The poll turned out to be] from Tennessee [only], and … it was of Republicans.

As you know, this blog tracks the postmodern American way of death – described and discussed most vividly in DeLillo novels like White Noise – which takes place when something goes wrong while you’re having fun in a sought-after setting. Visual technology almost always plays a part.

This latest close-to-death is another entry:

A 23-year-old American tourist fell into Mount Vesuvius while taking a selfie and dropping his cellphone inside the volcano.

Italian police had to rescue the tourist after he climbed up without a ticket and fell inside, but authorities are now charging him and his family for trespassing.

The man and three of his relatives had decided to bypass the visitor entrance, ignoring the turnstile and taking a forbidden route to the crater at the top of the volcano that looms over the Italian city of Naples.

He scrambled down inside the crater at the top of the volcano, which is active but has not seen an eruption for almost 80 years, seemingly to try and get better photographs.

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UD likes the additional frisson, here, of cretinous American arrogance.

… was in a business class lounge at Dulles Airport. She’ll be in London for ten days, half of them celebrating a clearly over-the-top wedding of an old friend (stretches for four days), and the other half in a Mayfair townhouse, training for a new job.

It remains, for Les UDs, a constant mild shock that their spawn works in the heart of the heart of capitalism. Both UDs come from academic families. Mr UD‘s family, for centuries, was about landowners/government officials.

With the exception of my father’s immigrant father, who owned and ran Rapoport’s Department Store in Port Deposit, Maryland (Grampa Joe: Early Capitalism / La Kid: Postmodern Multinational Capitalism), you just don’t find much capitalist activity in our background. We feel like Ma and Pa Kettle as we marvel at La Kid’s five-star ways.

… one of four stops on today’s Chesapeake Bay adventure,

… something stirred in UD’s headlet, and she searched the name Junod on University Diaries.

Sure enough, back in 2010, she cited Junod’s smart remarks about her beloved Don DeLillo; and one of those remarks has now helped her think about the Black Rifle Coffee/Dallas Cowboys controversy – a controversy that doesn’t seem to be dying down.

No, [DeLillo] has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque…

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

Black Rifle, with its bloody brews (Murdered Out; AK-47), is corporatized violence becoming – via the Dallas Cowboys – a way of thinking and talking; a part of the landscape. What Brooks misses in his analysis of the origins and motivations of our teen massacrists is this normalization, this banality if you will, of apocalyptic weaponry and what it is doing to us. Coffee – that most banal of drinks – is now visually (via advertising footage, endlessly recycled) wedded to mass slaughter, to weapons that can literally murder us out.

An AK-47, first encountered by kids on a Jumbotron at a cool, fun, wholesome Dallas Cowboys game, is something that gives you the same vague chemical kick as a cup of Joe or a sports event. Everybody’s doin’ it.

Our violent psychotics do not necessarily, as Brooks argues, regard their AK-47s (often bought for them by daddy — Brooks has far too little to say about the depraved parents/suppliers of our killers) as charismatic icons of power and vengeance. They more probably seem to them utililtarian, normalized (how outlaw can AK-47s be when you get them from daddy, and when everyone’s drinking AK-47 coffee?), parts of the landscape.

Thus when Brooks gets melodramatically Biblical about guns (“The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to them.”), I wonder if he’s headed in the wrong direction. How can guns have this effect when dad’s chipped coffee cup has images of AK-47s all over it? When American parents routinely receive marketing pressing them to buy baby versions of AK-47s for their eight year old? When the raffle prize at the county fair is an AK-47?

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Our country’s most outspoken, violent teenager, after all, is famous for having boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and it would only intensify his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. He didn’t know how right he was. Even his reported excitement about the impending death of his vice-president did nothing to dislodge him from his position of undisputed king of the nation’s Republican Party. His sons are even more violent – in word and deed – than he; and his congressional spawn … How surprised are you going to be when Jim Jordan can’t take it anymore and blasts into the January 6 committee room with a – you know – in his grip?

Go ahead. Laugh at this scenario. Go ahead.

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Just as the handgun has become the home appliance of choice when you want to grab something to kill yourself with in this, our massively suicide-ridden land, so the AK-47 is simply there, part of the landscape, the thing you grab (dad’s far too ruggedly independent to lock it up) when your loathing of humanity reaches – let’s go with coffee – the boiling point. “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” and only America goes a step further than flooding the country with guns for absolutely everyone and electing a pathologically violent president: America makes guns cute and sassy and savory, an unremarkable part of our shared corporate advertising world.

Filthy stupid yahoos who give the whole enterprise a really bad look.

… U.S. News & World Report announced that it had “unranked” Columbia University, which had been in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after being unable to verify the underlying data submitted by the university…

The Ivy League university said then that it would not participate in the next rankings because it was investigating accusations by one of its own mathematics professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data.

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Background.

“We deserve a better class of bastards,”[said a British commentator about Boris Johnson].

We all do. Still, as an American, I have to say: Be thankful for what you’ve got.