Headline of the day.

An expert notes the firestorm of Republican ads featuring more and more desperate firearm brandishing.

UD gets this guy’s point that by 2024 guns in ads will be so routine that candidates will be blowing up Planned Parenthood offices to demonstrate their fervency.

But what about after that? What happens when not only guns are a snooze, but bombings elicit a shrug?

UD anticipates that, by 2028 or so, self-immolation will be the only way MAGA fanatics will be able to attract our attention.

They’re all over the news, and they’re of two kinds:

1. The reasonably explicable variety, which features people unable to sustain high levels of isolation and rigor, as in the recent rash of suicides on a navy ship. The numbers got so high that the navy evacuated the ship. These suicides share traits with prisoner suicide.
2. The more mysterious phenomenon of highly successful people destroying themselves at the height of their power and influence. Here we might think of the 2019 death of Alan Krueger; more recently, several young women athletes, all of whom had just won tournaments and awards, killed themselves. A highly promising young tv star just killed herself. On the verge of her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd killed herself.

The cases of Judd and Krueger seem to involve a kind of existential exhaustion after years-long struggles with clinical depression. The powerful drugs, the endless therapy sessions, the setbacks – everything takes a toll on someone already fatigued and undermined. OTOH, although many young suicides have already exhibited some signs of being troubled, there’s nonetheless an impulsive – almost panicked – feel to some of these deaths. Bizarrely, their fate doesn’t seem gradual, but rather the outcome of a sudden access of horror at the thought of existing for one more second. Their end resembles a psychotic break featuring an insupportable hatred of being.

UD covered it on this blog; Love’s drunk jealous on and off boyfriend kicked in her locked (to keep him out) off campus house door and bloodily beat her to death, for which he’s currently serving a 23-year sentence. And now Love’s mother has won a $15 million damages case against him.

Okay, back to the current legal drama coming out of an arrogant gin-soaked world…

She’s wilded her front lawn, so no lawn guilt. She’s actually not keen on azaleas (too many of them; too pastel), but a lot of her garden is gifts from her mother’s garden, and she’s sentimental about keeping the gifts, even if they’re not what she would have chosen. The above-ground wires you see always make me remember my big-shot developer Uncle Mario, who found this ancient technology shocking.

This is UD‘s front garden; dedicated readers will also be familiar with the back, which features a recently installed pollinator garden plus lots of woodland. Photos of that when it does something interesting.

My representative, Jamie Raskin:

The leaked Alito draft opinion “would apply also to the right to privacy in contraception… [It’s] an invitation to a Handmaid’s Tale-type legislation all over the country… [It] makes us in the image of Hungarian illiberal democracy… [It will] carve out and destroy the rights and freedoms of the people.”

This massive international art exhibit has opened with surrealistic performance art from Russia: Sergey Lavrov gave an “absurd” interview on Italian television, in which he called Hitler a Jew.

… decided that name wasn’t quite … appropriate … or … haha… decided it was too appropriate… there’s been a dynamic linguistic reappraisal going on in the sports world generally.

For instance, now that Little Leaguers all over the country have been dropping and rolling on the field as bullets fly, we’re beginning to revisit some baseball slang that, if used, could cause pandemonium.

Words and phrases currently being assessed include:

bang-bang play

battery

dead red

fireman

five-tool player

heat

moon shot

platoon

twin killing

bleeder

base hit

hit and run

shot

slugger

Gevalt.

… as Gerard Manley Hopkins would put it if he were writing his famous poem today. How could anyone who knows, even a little bit, our simulacral world, be surprised that the notorious Washington Post opinion piece currently ruining April Heard’s life wasn’t even written by her?

Over the past decade, more than 1,000 crime guns have been traced to Firing Line Inc., a gun store in South Philadelphia that federal inspectors have cited for failing to stop straw purchases, losing track of weapons, refusing to run timely background checks and a lack of reporting on suspicious buyers.

In 2017, after several warnings, A.T.F. officials concluded that the owner “failed to maintain accurate information,” but they allowed the shop to remain in business, in part, because inspectors must prove intent to shutter a licensed dealer. Since then, 399 new crime guns have been traced to the location, according to Brady.

[In perhaps the most shocking declaration about a nuclear holocaust delivered on Russian television in recent months, Simonyan concluded that the idea “that everything will end with a nuclear strike, to me, is more probable than the other outcome. This is to my horror, on one hand, but on the other hand, with the understanding that it is what it is. … We are all going to die someday.“]

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From a Russian documentary about Nikolay Chernyshevsky:

Nihilist: Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski. Nossing. And tomorrow ve come back and ve cut off your chonson.

The Dude: Excuse me?

Nihilist: I said we’ll cut off your johnson!

Nihilist #2: Just think about that, Lebowski.

Nihilist: Ja, your viggly penis, Lebowski.

Nihilist #3: Yeah and maybe we stomp on it and squoosh it, Lebowski.

… in which she versifies words found in a newspaper article. Other examples.

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INGENUITY HELICOPTER

The parachute, intact,
Its suspension lines
Trailing from the back-
shell, lies in olivine
Along the rocks.

The salmon surface pocks.

This otherworldly wreckage
Has a supersonic message.

My detachment, while alarming,
Shows no obvious signs of charring.
You and your scribe study chaos control.
All to calm my fiery roll.

… both young brilliant athletes – leaders on notable college teams – and both suicides. Meyer died last month, Bernett just the other day. Also last month, a young runner at the University of Wisconsin – Sarah Shulze – killed herself.

Shulze’s parents wrote that her effort to balance “athletics, academics and the demands of every day life … overwhelmed her in a single, desperate moment.” And impulsivity is indeed the mark of most youthful suicides; the same incredible energy that propelled many of these people to academic as well as athletic heights turns against the person herself when she – who knows? – suddenly and catastrophically falls short of her self-demands. Or is it that a hyper-intense life is vulnerable to collapse when for whatever reason the intensity flags, the adrenaline drops?

When I say who knows, I really mean who knows. We can mark these recurrences, common characteristics, etc. But the act itself remains shockingly obscure.

Bullet-riddled baseball is a uniquely American rite of passage, from the big boys of Congress to the Little Leaguers.