At the bar, a man who described himself as “someone who invests in things” explained that the reason the hotel could charge $28 for a cocktail is … because, after Sept. 11, many in the finance industry moved here from the Wall Street area.
This article about a new obscenely expensive hotel in New York City is echt-Don Delillo, with occult NYT argot only subscribers can understand (UD subscribes and — come to think of it — she doesn’t really understand the above sentence).
I approached two men in suits — one maybe 55, the other half his age…
What did they think of the hotel?
“Off the record, it’s fantastic,” said the older man.
When I asked for his name, he gave me a smile-smirk that seemed to imply that I should know who he was.
And this is a NYT reporter, so either she’s remarkably out of it not to know who he is, or she’s talking to someone who’s a legend in his own mind, someone with a deep need to say “off the record.” I’m thinking it was Devin Nunes.
But you see the theme in all the remarks – a paranoia which makes the elation of hiding out at a silent, closed, hotel with a servile staff the main feeling the place achieves in you. The people at the Aman New York don’t want anyone to know they’re there. People hate them because they’re obnoxiously rich; or law enforcement agents are after them because they’ve broken insider trading laws; or vindictive ex-mates have lately been showing up unannounced at charity events … Think Steven Cohen, Jacqueline Kent Cooke, Ron Perelman. New York’s clinically berserk billionaire class. The place takes their frenzied convoluted vileness, rolls it up into a ball, and transmutes it into a many-petaled temple offering.
The hyper-pious ex-PM (‘Najib recently said Islam’s holy book, the Koran, would be the guide for all government policies and actions.’) allows modesty edicts to repress Malaysian women, while he himself pleases Allah by stealing seven hundred million dollars directly from the Malaysian people.
Theologically, it is a conundrum; Allah smiles equally upon downtrodden black-cloaked women AND the world’s largest kleptocracy case. He smiles at sick Malaysian children dying from lack of treatment because, of the six billion in the fund meant to help them and their country, four billion was stolen.
Everything would have been peachy; America’s sweetheart, Goldman Sachs, would have pocketed its suspiciously massive fees from 1MDB, all the other crooks who stole hundreds of millions for themselves would have been fine…
But people began to notice the absence of four plus billion dollars from the world. Things began to sour, see, onaccounta
Shades of pious Bernie Madoff (in his case his piety was orthodox Judaism — he acted as the treasurer – not making this up – of Yeshiva University)! Pious Najib and his legion of co-conspirators overlooked the fact that if anything goes wrong with schemes like this, you’re up shit’s creek cuz the money’s already up the nose of your cocaine-snorting, super-yacht-private-jet-super-thin-nyc-penthouse-owning Islamically pious investment group.
Watch this video, titled Behind Goldman Sachs’ Alleged Involvement in the 1MBD Scandal. It explains the gist of the thing. I know you’re distracted by The Trump 300 (700?), but trust me 1MDB is more important; America will survive a once-in-a-lifetime madman having attained the presidency; the sad sick world cannot be defended from lethal international criminals (including, again, our own adorable Goldman Sachs) unless we all make an effort to understand how they are killing us.
The humongous lawsuit everyone’s been anticipating against – among others – the people who make and market the military weapon which that teenager used to obliterate twenty one elementary school kids and teachers in Uvalde is announced ($27 billion, if you were wondering).
Daniel Defense is famous for this adorable ad:
I mean the one on the left. Paranoid, fully militarized variations of the one on the right are used by most gun makers, who typically target violent unstable teenagers with them. As Ryan Busse, a former gun executive, notes in my headline, manufacturers don’t even bother playing along with the protection/hunting bullshit anymore. Daniel Defense’s factory address is 101 War Fighter Way.
The ad on the left stands out because it doesn’t just go after insane eighteen year olds like the Uvalde guy; and it doesn’t just go after babies (what age is the babe in the photo? three? four?) but itsanctifiesthe AK-47 wielding toddler with a Biblical verse and a praying hands emoji. It adds Jesus to the mix.
The president of Daniel Defense sits on the corporate advisory board at Georgia Southern University but UD‘s thinking he’s desperately seeking his own consultants this morning.
I’m pretty sure I know what Bain or whoever is telling him. The suit won’t go anywhere but the whole thing’s gonna cost you a shitload of money. The good news is the NRA will pay it all.
UD likes to revisit, via her category CLICK-THRU U, the ongoing glories of online teaching.
After directing students to center themselves, keep looking directly into the camera, and maintain at all times an “attentive, present, and professional” demeanor, the instructor (see this post’s title) coaches her class to regularly scrutinize their own visage in case their professional facial expression flags.
UD suggests that if this professor remains unsatisfied with the degree of student cooperation, she refer them to any ten or twenty pages of Orwell’s 1984, with special reference to Winston Smith.
Smith&Wesson blasts back at deep state harassment over its kid-friendly/shooter game ad campaigns for human-pulverizing toys. Wee1 must also be pissed:
Not to mention BabyGun or whatever its called:
A little known fact is that rather than featuring in romper room play, most guns are simply used to kill yourself. Self-slaughter holds a vast majority over any other use. Guns are largely about blowing your brains out with one hundred percent certainty (other methods fall short of this standard), and in some states (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana) they’re scooping wildcatters and cowboys off the floor pretty much 24/7.
For instance, Utah, another gunny he-man state, boasts this remarkable statistic:
Utah has one of the highest death by suicide rates in the country, currently ranked sixth. According to the Utah Department of Health, suicide rates in the tricounty area [northeast Utah: Daggett, Uintah and Duchesne Counties] are 58% higher than the rest of the state.
Got that? The state’s already comfortably in the top ten; but the tricounty area is 58% higher than the state’s rate!
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So one thing UD has never understood is why gun makers don’t feature ease and certainty of suicide in their advertising, since this happens to be the gun’s calling card, its claim to fame, the primary reason tens of thousands of owners own guns. One obvious campaign would feature pre-death videos solicited from, say, tricounty suicides, in which they explain why choosing a gun to blow their brains out was, well, a no-brainer!
And there’s no reason consumers need to degrade their final act by choosing cheap pistols and smaller arms; in one celebrity spot, manufacturers could feature quarterback Tyler Hilinski’s use of an AR-15 in his suicide. (A Glock will only set you back $500 or so, whereas an AR-15 costs around a thousand. Tag line in this campaign: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO END THE VERY BEST.)
Guns command a vast and growing suicide market; their makers need to exploit this fact. A lot of drunk lonely cowboys are right now sitting on the fence suicide-wise; a strong ad campaign is probably all they need.
Yeah. That one delegate. When you boast the country’s highest gun suicide rate, you need to be ready to blow your head off at a moment’s notice. To keep your first-place ranking.
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.”
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.
