… it’s hard to leave. Les UDs had a wonderful, freezing, oceanside dinner with friends last night (the firepit, plastic sheeting, and heaters made it bearable), and now they’re on their way back to ‘thesda.

… have the sort of fog that lends

everyone a French Lieutenant’s

Woman nimbus.

Everyone is suddenly a melancholy enigmatic apparition. Stepping out of the mist – – but then beaches and oceans have always been ghostly settings for UD, where her dead step out for a boardwalk up-and-back with her, and where she’s perfectly willing to engage them in the old themes, the old questions. People’s lives end and in so doing become closed narratives; and UD tells and retells the tales she makes of these rounded lives, because she wants to understand. “Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind,” says a character in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. And okay, c’est entendu, but it doesn’t discourage the search for meaning.

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose…

The dead on the boardwalk with me listen as I try to finger just what that something was for this one and for that one; it’s like Ravelstein telling Chick that he has a fatum:

It’s hard, all in all, to find a less prudent person than you, Chick. When I consider your life, I begin to be tempted to believe in a fatum. You have a fatum. You really are one for sticking your neck out.

For everyone maybe, then, some heavy through-line over which they have no control. They can only play it out. It’s harder to credit fate in the modern affluent settings in which UD grew up — choice and privilege and freedom seem to abound — but this seeming good fortune probably just hides the hidden thing that much more deeply.

But that leaves plenty still available to kill your kid.

On piano, James Levine.

A Thank-You Note from Marjorie Taylor Greene,

to Guam

To our faraway enemy, Guam:

We all loved the cookies (nomnom!)

I put some in a cozy

As a gift for Pelosi

And delivered the rest to my mom

Yeah, Roof was twenty-one years old too – just like our latest massacrist – when he sat in a chair and point blank killed a group of black Bible students. 22-year-old Elliott Rodger didn’t like women, so he shot and killed a bunch of women. Latest guy’s thing was Asians (information is preliminary, but UD‘s going to presume this motive). Mentally unbalanced hate-monger young ‘uns armed to the teeth: What a grand American achievement. Couldn’t have done it without the NRA.

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

“Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”

And fortunately for the mass killer, Georgia has no waiting period, no cooling off period, before you can walk out with a gun, so this kid was instantly able to act on his … feeling kinda bad yesterday.

Who would have thought a 21 year old would be impulsive? Now that he’s slaughtered all those women I’ll bet he feels better. Probably the mood passed.

He bought the gun hours before he started ripping people open.

She’s stuck in a rancid ISIS prisoner camp, and England won’t take her back. Intelligence services believe that this fanatic (she says that’s all over) continues to represent a threat to the country.

Here’s her attorney on the subject:

What happened to Christian forgiveness? Does it not apply to a woman — and a dark-skinned one at that? It seems that different rules apply… Is it perhaps that some of us are more British than others of us? Shamima is of Bangladeshi descent, does that change her right to British nationality? I am tempted to think it does…

SOS says: Manifold are the ways one can speak up on behalf of one’s client. Admittedly, this attorney has a superjumbo problem on her hands, since her client not only renounced her British citizenship when she embraced Islamic State citizenship, she also committed vile acts (suicide vest sewing; slave-ownership; public support of mass murder in Europe and beheadings in the caliphate, etc.) and has expressed little remorse for her extensive blood-thirstiness. But SOS wonders whether lazily pushing certain buttons is the best one might do for Begum.

The lawyer’s weakest button is the Christian thing. Not sure she’s looked around at England lately, but it’s the land of empty churches. It rivals France for empty churches. If you’re going to go the Christian route, try getting her American citizenship. We’re the land of full churches…

But, you know, 135,000 slaughtered Assyrians later, I’m not sure you’re going to have much success in that direction either. Better drop the whole Christian thing.

That leaves sexism and racism. UD readers already know my take on the there there little woman you can come back cuz you’re a stupid harmless li’l thing approach to this problem. The sexism in the Begum story locates itself firmly in defenders who believe – claim to believe – that women are just too nice to be mean, and too dense to form serious, protracted, ideological commitments.

There are of course many light-skinned people among those that various countries have refused to repatriate. ISIS enjoyed a broad appeal.

Finally, yes: Begum is of Bangladeshi descent. And it is to Bangladesh that her lawyer should direct citizenship claims.

A blank canvas, after all, is better; and there won’t be any obnoxious Italian bureaucracy to tussle with. The absolute quiet, and the big views of ice-floes drifting along the Arctic, will conduce to shared visions of the Cathophate to come.

The reemergence of Tony Fauci, for instance, is one way. For UD, though, you see it even more compellingly in the reinstatement and promotion of people like Yevgeny Vindman.

… Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman, who was the senior ethics official at the National Security Council and its deputy legal adviser from July 2018 to February 2020 … [was] fired from the NSC a year ago by Trump, escorted out of the White House and sent back to the Pentagon.

Yevgeny Vindman is now on a list of colonel promotions that has been approved by the White House and is going to the Senate for formal confirmation…

Vindman chose to hit back hard against the motherfuckers.

Vindman filed a complaint last August with the Pentagon inspector general alleging he was retaliated against by his former White House counsel’s office bosses, John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis, for reporting misconduct by Trump. He also lodged allegations of ethics violations by former national security adviser Robert O’Brien for allegedly using NSC staff’s official time for personal errands and “demeaning and demoralizing sexist behavior against … female NSC professionals.”

Of course the Pentagon has more consequential stuff to worry about now. Complaints and ethics violations are all well and good; allowing domestic terrorists to attack the Capitol of the United States sounds like real trouble.

Making use of his deep Kurdish ties, Peter found a Canadian child at one of the Kurdish-run ISIS prisoner camps and repatriated her. Agonizingly, the child’s mother (an ISIS adherent; one assumes she no longer is, but the Canadians at the moment will not have her) had to agree to give her up, and she did so. This selfless gesture makes commendable an otherwise pitiable fanatic, and will perhaps stand her in good stead in case of a Canadian judicial review.

Another intriguing angle on this: Peter’s father, John Kenneth Galbraith, grew up in southern Ontario (he wrote a book – The Scotch – about it); bagpipes and Auld Lang Syne figured at his funeral. Perhaps Peter’s father’s deep Scottish-Canadian ties also helped.

Just after one burqa ban passes (Switzerland), another is announced: Sri Lanka, having suffered hideously at the hands of ISIS, attempts to deradicalize its citizens — taking on not merely the fundamentalist burqa, but also unregistered madrasas that refuse to teach the national curriculum.

He still can’t really see it; he’s been squinting at an enlarged image of it for some time.

So as Mr UD grapples with the concept of camouflage, eats the egg and sour dough slices I fried in olive oil, and packs for the beach, UD lets you know that she will be blogging from the president’s summer home for the next week.

‘MAKE EYE CONTACT AND SMALL TALK. [This is part of] being a citizen and a responsible member of society.‘

Burqa enthusiasts simply don’t care about this; for them, the total blacking out of women on the streets of their cities represents a higher value than responsible citizenship, than the open mutuality of open faces. An outfit designed to repel interaction – an outfit which, most shockingly and insultingly, features mesh over the mouth of a woman (small talk? no talk), fits perfectly, as Snyder’s argument suggests, in a tyrannical setting like Saudi Arabia. It has no place in a democracy, and, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid’s very long list of democratic – and would-be democratic – countries where burqas are outlawed suggests, more countries and municipalities realize that every day. Switzerland is only the latest; it will not be the last.

Again and again on EasyJet flights, stinky ungodly women are forced to change their seats so as not to infect any pure ultraorthodox men who may, through the machinations of some diabolical force, have been seated next to them.

If the women refuse, other passengers — far from, say, acknowledging overt gender discrimination — put pressure on the women to make them move.

Of course this goes on all the time on EasyJet and non-EasyJet to-and-from Israel flights, but only occasionally does a woman resolve to turn down, for instance, the one cup of free coffee that EasyJet offers as compensation and instead contact IRAC, which sues on her behalf and makes all sorts of money for her. The discrimination is so comically obvious, and enjoys so wide an audience, that when these particular suits come forward, airlines simply pay up. The latest beneficiary is Melanie Wolfson.

Since this is such a slam-dunk, UD proposes the following source of income in these uncertain covid times: Groups of women organize themselves to “seed” selected haredim-heavy flights. Inevitably, on any given flight, a number of these women will be seated next to out-of-my-sacred-space-godless-harlot men. Every one of these women files a lawsuit (knowing what will go down, the group will include someone designated to film events on board) and thereby earns for herself and her co-conspirators compensation in the tens of thousands. Takes more time to make than a coffee, but is more satisfying, and lasts longer.