… between yesterday’s balmy afternoon walk, where we were surrounded by runners in shorts and tees, and this morning’s frigid visit to the balcony. Les UDs are in heaven; they want to see the coast in all its moods, and this is their first snowstorm at the beach.

Not quite as dramatic as our buddy Peter’s frigid experience — On December 7 he endured some of the world’s roughest Antarctic seas to sail to the total solar eclipse (and then it was too cloudy to see it). But pretty effing dramatic.

Pic doesn’t capture the wind whipping the snow horizontal.

Texas comes crawling back to its big bad federal daddy. How disappointing. If Abbott had any balls, he’d let the whole state cough its guts out and die.

… tweet.

In the wake of Ghislaine Maxwell’s resounding guilty verdict, most people have their eye on the fate of sketchy Prince Andrew; but people like UD, who write about universities, are more interested in Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of Harvard girls (see this brief discussion), prominent among whom is the most peculiar Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s highest profile emeritus, and a man accused of having sex on several occasions with an underage Epstein slave.

A most peculiar man. My headline is a sentence from the beginning of his book The Vanishing American Jew and ya know it makes me wonder what’s goin on what’s goin on…

On the simplest level, given Dershowitz’s lifelong gnawing ambition, you could argue this is a clever thing to say if you want to launch a best-seller that appeals to Jews of all stripes – the sentence squeezes into itself, and allows Dershowitz to identify with, every possible iteration of “Jew.”

You could be less cynical and applaud the man’s ecumenicism or something… But if you’re secular and you make a point of joining a raft of religious congregations it’s …. peculiar. Why does he do that? Does he actually attend (on a revolving basis?) each of them? Is he, at this late date (he’s 83) still at sea, bobbing from one religious practice to another?

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If you look at the ferocity with which he has, in his legal practice, defended female genital mutilators, and, more to the point, in his writing, defended male genital mutilators (he calls people opposed to circumcision Nazis), it’s clear that he’s really not out to sea at all; far from being secular, he fervently defends the most grotesque and fundamentalist of religious practices.

I mean, this isn’t just defense for the sake of money or attention – his heart’s really in it. Religious people who want to nick away at infant clitorises deserve the highest possible representation.

It’s hard to imagine a truly secular person convincing herself that female genital mutilation is a defense-worthy form of religious freedom. And since most decent people find FGM appalling, it’s hard to imagine any respectable attorney taking on the vile Dawoodi Bohra sect and its ways. But Dershowitz calls the millions of decent people opposed to male baby mutilation Nazis, and the millions of decent people opposed to female baby mutilation enemies of religious liberty.

No one with these views – views he forcefully writes about/acts upon – can comfortably be called secular. Not to mention his membership in four Jewish congregations.

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Most peculiar. And not to put too fine a point on it, but – does the fact that he stands accused of child sexual abuse seem not entirely out of line here?

Now that we’re done with Ghislaine Maxwell, we may be able to answer this question… “Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz vehemently denies wrongdoing but he has questions to answer. His primary accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, stands by her story that she was required to have sex with him on multiple occasions.” Oh, and plus: I hope someone somewhere at Harvard is beginning to think about damage control.

Hell, we’ve already got widespread civil violence, what with all them guns going off everywhere. Remember the slogan of the NRA:

You went to a lot of trouble and expense to build your arsenal. Might as well use it.

This angry pointless diatribe about wearing a hijab does absolutely nothing to push the discussion along. But that’s because you have to acknowledge there’s a discussion to be had. You have to be willing to move away from neurasthenic victimology/finger-pointing and actually debate. You can’t debate when you snivel, and when you mischaracterize your opponent.

You can’t write, for instance, that a doctor described the hijab as an “instrument of oppression” when in fact he wrote that for adult women it is a perfectly acceptable personal choice. The doctor wrote that in several countries in the world the enforced hijab is an instrument of oppression – an obvious truth – and that since three year old girls have no choice at all in the matter it is objectionable when their parents make them wear it, as some do in Canada and various European countries. (Do some parents in the US do this to their children? Probably.)

The fact that you’re pissed off and exhausted because the world makes wearing hijabs and burkinis difficult and unpleasant is not an argument, and people will understandably read it and shrug. When you complain of Trudeau’s “very tepid” response to Quebec’s Bill 21, it only raises a question in your reader’s mind: Why? Why has Trudeau been tepid? Oh, because he’s a racist. He’s part of “an already intolerant country” which includes a “province even less tolerant.”

Well, babe, if Canada is an intolerant country I’d invite you to find a country more tolerant. Go ahead! Find a country more tolerant than a country that routinely lands on the top of World’s Most Tolerant Countries lists.

No, your problem is that you won’t ask even basic questions about escalating worldwide restrictions on various forms of covering. Until you calm down and start thinking rather than reacting you and your cause will really suffer.

Betty White.

… gazing at one of many 2022s scratched into the sand, and wishing his sister a happy new year.

WASH

People are drawn to nothingness

Here on the coast at the end of the year
The horizon makes itself disappear
The banner planes are gone the gulls are gone
It's nothingness to which people are drawn

The sand is smooth the blue umbrellas went away
The noisy white boats that nose up and say
Ladies Night at the Bar and Grill are not missed
People are drawn to nothingness



The lifeguard stands are standing down
Calm waves make the only sound
Portugal  Africa  None wonder anymore
What lies along the other shore

Really all that's left is us
Drawn so hard to nothingness

Packs of winter scarves and coats
Black against the gray of the coast
Praising the sacred empty space
The misty mystic vacant place

People are drawn to nothingness

… with its lyrical meter and meld of sentiment and science. Not that she’s ever read it – she only now, googling it, discovered it’s a novel, and not a long personal essay as she had all this time (pub. 1982) assumed. She had all this time assumed it was an end of life – or deepest night – dirge on the deepest themes: For creaturely beings, we know a lot, but we really know nothing; or, anyway, our cosmic knowledge, full of violent immensities, mainly frightens us.

In the other direction, the microworld pulses with pandemics; or, as merrily we roll along, masses against our hearts.

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As in this brief night thoughts essay by a neuroscientist recently diagnosed with heart cancer.

I was absolutely white-hot angry at the universe. Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor? This is what’s going to take me away from my beloved family, my cherished friends and colleagues? I simply couldn’t accept it. I was so mad, I could barely see.

David Linden spins his anger, puzzlement, and despair into an intriguing riff on the permanent propensity of humanity to project eternal life. No real night thoughts, no real December 31.

I cannot imagine the totality of my death, or the world without me in it, in any deep or meaningful way. My mind skitters across the surface of my impending death without truly engaging. I don’t think this is a personal failing. Rather, it’s a simple result of having a human brain…

[B]ecause our brains are organized to predict the near future, it presupposes that there will, in fact, be a near future. In this way, our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the totality of death.

… I would contend that this basic cognitive limitation is not reserved for those of us who are preparing for imminent death, but rather is a widespread glitch that has profound implications for the cross-cultural practice of religious thought. Nearly every religion has the concept of an afterlife (or its cognitive cousin, reincarnation). Why are afterlife/reincarnation stories found all over the world? For the same reason we can’t truly imagine our own deaths: because our brains are built on the faulty premise that there will always be that next moment to predict. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures.

Or, as a much earlier (1745) night thoughts thing (“The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality”) has it:

As on a rock of adamant we build
Our mountain hopes; spin out eternal schemes,
As we the fatal sisters would outspin,
And, big with life’s futurities, expire.

Everyone’s having a field day [‘BBC: Who Better To Break Down Ghislaine Maxwell Verdict Than… Guy Accused In The Same Matter?‘] now that the BBC has chosen to interview Harvard’s finest, of all people, about his buddy Ghislaine’s guilty verdict. (See post below this one.) Whodathunkit?

To be sure, Dershowitz fully exploited the big fat opportunity the BBC gifted him with to protest once again his own innocence in the child sexual abuse game. Yeah yeah tough titties ’bout Ghislaine but did you notice I’m still out of jail? See what a good boy I am? You wouldn’t put an eminent Harvard professor on trial for child sexual abuse, would you?

A jury found claims against Epstein/Maxwell persuasive. Maxwell will spend a lot of time in jail. Let’s see if things heat up for Alan Dershowitz.

And do we ever take open carry seriously. Look at the poor mayor of America’s current deadliest city, Jackson, Mississippi! Desperate, he tried getting rid of open carry — and the state came down on him like a ton of Glocks.

As for burqas – they’re banned in much of Europe, but babe this is the land of the free! Banish the thought.

View from our balcony.