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.

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.

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

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.