… a la vida.

… à l’Américaine.

… and we drown.

November 22nd 1963 marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of catastrophes: political assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the denial of Civil Rights and the revolts that occasioned, youth revolt in American cities, right up to Watergate. When I was starting out as a writer it seemed to me that a large part of the material you could find in my novels – this sense of fatality, of widespread suspicion, of mistrust – came from the assassination of JFK.

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And baby, look at us now.

… R. Kelly!

This has a kind of Rose Mary Woodsy feel to UD.

It instantly made me think of the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice.

One onlooker summed it up.

“Right now, I’m just angry. It seems everywhere we turn, it’s just another violent day in the U.S.”

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

Doesn’t seem to have been terrorism; just a typical domestic atrocity, in which a violent person who should be in jail is driving around killing people.

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

Just makes you puke.

All wrapped up nice and pretty for the Trumpians to use in the next election.

Chesa might be recalled. Maybe you’d like his retail theft record in your community.

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[I]n 2014 [California] classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.

In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”

UD‘s on Amazon’s German site, enjoying the not-quite-there English.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm likes the way Michelle Cottle just slipped that clause in there. Nice.

The brazen, inexhaustible nature and variety of his mendacity is something to see. When you read what he does and says, having been caught making up numbers for Temple University’s business school in order to score a US News number one ranking, you have to admire the sheer endurance/agility/creativity of his lying.

When caught by Temple administrators, he simply says Give me more time. I can fix it back. Now in a court of law, he has blamed all of his assistants, who turn out to be vicious prevaricating scum, for the wrongdoing.

For sure, his next move will be to announce to the court that he is profoundly mentally and physically ill, cannot be held responsible for anything he’s ever done, and needs to go home and lie down.

“While his actions were dishonest and criminal in nature, he’s part of an industry sick from top to bottom where this sort of behavior is sadly commonplace.”

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Almost all art dealers commit 86 million dollars worth of fraud and then flee to Vanatu. Vanatu has become a second home for multimillionaire art market fraudsters.

[photo CNN]

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… the New-moon winter-bright!
         And overspread with phantom light,
         (With swimming phantom light o’erspread
         But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon in her lap…

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But overspread with orange light!

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And now – 3:57 AM – it’s like this – the merest sliver of silver… And because it sheds so little light, and because it’s a clear winter night, the STARS are out like mad…

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4:57 and it’s brightening up again. 50/50 bright/dark. Didn’t expect that.

She forgot to mention his steadfast defense of Andrei Shleifer, his taking over Harvard’s endowment and promptly losing $1.8 billion, his hedge-fund freelancing while president of Harvard, etc., etc. Summers is a-fucking-mazing.