And it does. Scan the political commentary of the last couple of years, and you’ll encounter the word again and again.

Seldom has it been invoked more powerfully than by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez today, in the discussion leading up to Rep. Gosar’s censure. She’s right – nothing matters to these people, so they feel free to act obscenely.

People like Gosar represent a kind of disease end-stage. He himself is obviously, literally, diseased: His siblings have begged people not to vote for this damaged man; his sister has described him as a “sociopath.”

He is, more importantly, the manifestation of the disease in his party.

The med school and sports program have, over many years, been the main source of scumminess at that benighted institution (go here), but now international relations has gotten into the game, with the last chair of the department (he has, uh, retired) just convicted of money laundering. His Venezuelan BFFs steal international funds meant for the poor and hide them in Swiss banks and Professor Bagley got his share of the goodies which having been caught in the act by a government agent Bagley’s way sorry and fuck it hasn’t he suffered enough?

Bagley’s defense attorney, Peter Quijano, said the former professor [shouldn’t get jail time because he] had already suffered “devastating collateral consequences” as a result of his conviction, the end of his UM career and the death of his wife earlier this year.

Dude was in his seventies when he started killing poor people unable to afford medicine because he stole their money, so his career was going to be over anyway, so let’s forget that devastating consequence. The fact that his wife died because of what he did (of embarrassment? heart attack from shock? He might at least have told her he was doing something that might end in jail time.) is totally on him, and if anything he should get more time for collaterally killing her along with all those Venezuelans.

I mean, UD totally understands that he figured this would be an easy way to score some really significant supplemental retirement funds, a fitting valedictory for a career specializing in international crime, but, you know, he took a risk and he lost. It happens.

The judge sentenced him to jail. Another feather in UM’s cap.

[The] gun lobby [has grown] more powerful and darker… The N.R.A. … has worked hard to leave the impression that the ideology of gun ownership has been constant, emphasizing a Second Amendment politics that flattens the distinction between the eighteenth century and the present, and marketing AR-15s as if they were made for hunting. [By] the time of Sandy Hook, the gun culture … was all new: the treatment of lobbyists as charismatic leaders, the black-rifle influencers, the military weapons in the stores, and the military imagery used to market them. [This is] the world that the N.R.A. built…

The allegations against [Wayne] LaPierre may weaken the N.R.A., but the tactical culture that consolidated under his watch appears more durable. The sort of people who, not long ago, [one] might have characterized as “couch commandos” are everywhere on the American right — in power, and also on the fringe. Kyle Rittenhouse, … at the age of seventeen, got an AR-15-style rifle from a friend and brought it to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two men and wounded another … Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, … owns a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado; supported the storming of the Capitol; and has posed frequently with AR-15-style rifles.

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Adam Lanza was twenty.

And the best part is, no one gets to see the paintings that way. Wouldn’t want them on display or anything.

The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, a New York nonprofit, criticized the announcement [of forthcoming stricter oversight of private school education standards for New York students]: …”Yeshivas are in good standing with education law so why create a problem?”

We’re good! As recently as 2019

a New York City investigation of 28 yeshivas found that only two of them provided “substantially equivalent” education to secular public schools.

Two out of 28! That’s good, right? That’s around 93%.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Alex Jones that is, whose vileness has finally bumped up against a court of law. He has been successfully sued for defamation by the parents of the slaughtered children whom he dismissed as actors in a government plot.

How to assess a money penalty for the pain this monstrous man has inflicted on the Sandy Hook families?

Whatever the juries decide, UD hopes it ruins him.

… at Barrel Oak Winery with her buddy Natasha.

The heart of the heart of it, the height of the height of the season, and today is Market Day, so absolutely everyone is walking down and up Rokeby Avenue as UD rakes bright wet leaves. The feel is pre-industrial — a studied pre-industrialism, I guess – with almost-carless village streets and trains that trundle through town with a mild choo. Everyone’s exhilarated and madly social with the weather so pure. Clear air, sunlight, and enough wind to set going masses of leaves that catch onto our container plants. My neighbors are stirred to life… They gather in the street in front of UD‘s house, waving at her as she rakes, and their groups enlarge with dog walkers and carriers of fresh tomatoes, and everyone is as extroverted as they’re ever going to be, because the earth in this hyper-keen aspect excites them and makes them want to make sure everyone else is on board. Amazing day. Look at that dogwood. Can you believe this day?

Gabe, a young chef, interrupts my raking to walk my paths with me in search of mushrooms. I tell him I’ve seen scads, but have been pulverizing them with my rake. Don’t. Pick them up. Put them in a paper bag, and drop them at my house. He reels off all the types and I say I’m so ignorant I have to assume everything’s poisonous. He says he has a friend who will give me good money if I have some exotic ones.

I spy new neighbors moving in across the street and trot over to welcome them and congratulate them on inheriting Caroline’s wildly flourishing garden. I tell them to knock on my door with questions, problems, etc. They are warm and happy and unoffended when I tell them two minutes after introductions that I’ve already forgotten both of their names. They repeat their names, and all I remember is Rebecca.

A little later, one of my neighbors, who just turned seventy and looks forty, wants to talk. We stand in my driveway. I lean on my rake. This birthday really has me thinking. I’m in pretty good shape. Let’s say I have another fifteen twenty years. How do I want to spend it? How do I want to make it count? He’s a reflective, sensitive man, and as I look at his youthful face I think Garrett Park is a place where you can instantly enter into way non-trivial conversations in your driveway. Dig in, says UD. You’re already doing the right things – your long every-other-day hikes, your reading, thinking, traveling [he’s planning to walk the Camino de Santiago]… Your family and your friends… Just keep doing what you’re doing, no? Yes of course but there’s the restlessness all thoughtful people feel, a sort of second-guessing about what we might be overlooking… Or just a sort of emotional overflow and you don’t know what to do with it… See Adam Phillips, “On Being Too Much For Ourselves.” Or – especially on a day like today – Saul Bellow, in Paris, in the spring:

The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

I wouldn’t mind, says UD to her neighbor, living long enough to be tired and achy enough not to be entirely shocked and appalled when I realize I’m about to die. He says: My mother was like that. A day before her ninetieth birthday she just said I’ve had enough and died.

The stinkiest form of excreta

Is Ohio’s fair son, Mark Pukita.

When asked for his views

He replies “Fuck the Jews.”

Has the brain of a sub. trilobita.

In her wonderfully diplomatic way, Yale student Sude Yenilmez notes how moral relativism and political correctness drive indifference – even among the best and the brightest – to the suffering of millions of women all over the world.

Can she really be saying that her fellow students think global forced veiling is unimportant?

Well, yes. That is exactly what she’s saying.

The latest look in Karachi.

The ultraorthodox lads are in there swinging. But score one for the godless harlots.

MK Yulia Malinovsky’s amendment to increase fines for ripping up images of women on the streets of Israel seems to have riled another MK, who passionately defended the vandals. He also took offense at Malinovsky’s description of ultraorthodox motive and behavior:

“What interests them is to build a Taliban state. First of all, they vandalize and exclude women from the public sphere… Whoever does this is degrading himself, hurts women and equality for women. Then it slides into segregation between men and women. … The extremist organization that took over Afghanistan banned women from riding bicycles. It forbade displaying figures of women in the public space. They decide what a woman should look like and at what length her sleeves should be… “

Rather than owning his fanaticism, her opponent shrieked and sputtered… though since the amendment passed, I guess it didn’t work. Let’s see what he said.

“She said Taliban and you did not respond? A Knesset member is standing here calling us the Taliban, and that’s okay? There is a party in the Knesset whose sole purpose is not to allow the ultra-Orthodox to live here… What a disgrace that such an antisemite comes up [to speak] here! Taliban?! This is an antisemitic party. You’re antisemitic. Disgrace. Are we Taliban?”

I wonder why no one responded.

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UD is inclined to look on the bright side of this particular interaction. Malinovsky’s opponent acknowledged her existence in the chamber. He did not rip her face off. Good boy. Getting there.

Be still my heart.

And again.

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Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about? . . . People [hiding] even when no one is looking for them?

Jack Gladney, the hero of Don DeLillo’s great novel, White Noise, asks himself this as he searches out a university colleague who always makes it extremely difficult to find her. The novel is full of characters “avoiding situations,” as one of them puts it.

“I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely.”

People in Gladney’s town, Blacksmith, drape themselves in oversized sweatsuits and create state of the art all-inclusive houses so they rarely have to go out. Their massive cars have darkly tinted windows. There’s a shared undifferentiated paranoia which drives people in on themselves. Some of his neighbors belong to tiny hidden cults.

In other words, the hijab and burqa were just waiting for us. Hiding’s what you do when it’s like this out there. UD‘s surprised it took this long for an entrepreneur to see the possibilities.