From Ghislaine Maxwell’s just-released 2016 deposition.

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Did any of the masseuses … perform sexual acts for Jeffrey Epstein?

I have just answered the question.

No you haven’t.

I have.

No you haven’t.

Yes I have.

You are refusing to answer the question.

Let’s move on.

I’m in charge of the deposition. I say when we move on and when we don’t. You are here to respond to my questions. If you refuse to answer, the court will bring you back for another deposition.

In every country that has passed one, ideologues tried frightening people about how destabilizing it would be. Riots street violence blah blah. Country after country has seen calm and orderly implementation of a law that no doubt makes many otherwise swaddled women and children very grateful.

As for the fanatics out there who can’t imagine life unswaddled, or whose husbands threaten them unless they swaddle, there are so few of them that they are, I suspect, simply pitied and accommodated.

If I were anointed the PM for a day, I would put a ban on burqa and hijab for women in the country. … During my posting in Sawai Madhopur, I used to see women draped in burqa walking with four kids in scorching heat with their husband.

It was disgusting to look at their plight as her shameless husband walked along with her with all the unwanted and unnecessary pride. I always used to think if I can ban the burqa for these women …

A media executive in India gets it said. There’s no way around the word “disgusting” in regard to such sights, and it’s good to see her use it.

Rudolph the Big Attorney

Had a very shiny chode

And if you ever saw it

You would even say it glowed

All of the other lawyers

Used to laugh and call him names

They wouldn’t let poor Rudolph

Join in any lawyer games

Then one dark and stormy night

Borat came to say

“Rudolph with your chode so bright

Won’t you join my film tonight?”

Then all the lawyers loved him

As they shouted out with glee

“Rudolph the Red-Chode Trumper

You’ll go down in history”

One imam apologised today after his mosque shared details of [Samuel] Paty and his school on Facebook following a campaign by an outraged Muslim father. 

‘Given what happened we regret having published it,’ said imam M’hammed Henniche…

School song, Bois d’Aulne Secondary School:

Joy to the world, the teacher’s dead

We barbecued his head

What happened to his body?

We flushed it down the potty

And round and round it goes

Until it overflows

And rou-ound and rou-ou-ound and round it goes

UD’s mother’s favorite film was I Know Where I’m Going, featuring a conventional, materialistic young woman waylaid in her money and status ambitions by a dashing young man and the phantasmagoric Scottish island culture that surrounds him.

Early in the film she observes a friend of the man’s acting bizarrely. She turns to the man and says:

“He’s a bit odd, isn’t he?”

And the man answers:

“Who isn’t?”

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

As the Cheshire Cat says, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

But there’s conventionally, universally, prosaically, woman-in-the-street mad, and there’s bedlam-mad. Our current president is arguably a confirmed bedlamite.

Gail Collins, in this post’s headline, dares to anticipate a new, non-crazy president in three months. Like many pundits, psychiatrists, and ordinary people, she has concluded that Mr Trump is mentally ill, and UD‘s inclined to agree. Immaturity, hyper-irritability, petulance, grandiosity, mendacity, manipulation – these are character flaws, but not necessarily signs of pathology. We have watched DJT exhibit them all with increasing frequency and intensity as the election looms, and though they clearly designate a horrible person, it hasn’t been – at least for me – until the last week or two that they begin also to designate a clinically unbalanced one.

For me the tipping point came when I realized that he hates everyone. Watching the president, I keep thinking of that line from Ubu the King, when Ubu describes his political plans (If you put Ubu in my search engine, you will see that from the beginning of the last presidential campaign, UD has identified Trump as “Trubu,” the Ubu of our day):

I shall soon have made my fortune, and then I’ll kill everybody and go away.

Everybody – everybody – Trump meets every day — Leslie Stahl, Anthony Fauci, his followers (he calls them “disgusting”), debate moderators, debate commissioners – he hates. Everyone’s a monster, an idiot, a catastrophe, a zero, a disgrace, a joke, pathetic, stupid, vile, sickening… It’s the nihilistic sweep of his rejection of humanity (I’m thinking Melania gets the absolute worst of it, which explains why she wisely absents herself from as much of their life as she can – she’s America’s most invisible first lady) that gets you thinking that you’ve got something schizy and not merely misanthropic. He’s killing everybody before he goes away.

If he is going down, he wants to bring everyone and everything down with him. He has no hesitation to break laws or destroy people. Democratic institutions and principles mean nothing to him.

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

Yes, I’m saying that Trump’s mental violence – again, see Ubu – threatens to become physical in these last days. Remember when he confined his violence to fantasies? Remember his comment about the 2016 Democratic National Convention?

“You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”

Pretty fucking graphic for purely mental violence, huh? Do you really have a lot of trouble imagining a moment during the next debate (if Trump actually agrees to it), when the moderator mutes the president’s mic, and this so enrages the president that he punches the moderator – or Biden? Remember how he physically stalked Hillary Clinton during their debates? Can actual physical contact – under far more pressurized circumstances – be far behind? Can’t you hear him shrieking at Biden?

You’re the head of the worst criminal family in the entire history of the country! Someone has to stop you before you take control of the country! Turn my mic back on or I’ll hit him so hard he won’t know what the hell happened!

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

A couple of additional points: Is this suggestion at odds with my earlier claim that the president is possibly suicidal?

Of course not. Suicide is homicidal aggression directed against the self, but no one’s surprised when suicides first direct their aggression outward and pick off the people closest to them. They do it quite often. Nihilists loaded with rageful death instinct can go either way, or both ways.

Also: It wouldn’t even be strategically dumb for Trump to become physically violent, given the enthusiastic violence of many of his most devoted followers. I don’t just mean the bloodthirsty LOCK HER UP LOCK HER UP crowd; I mean the Proud Boys and all the other big ol’ shoot ’em up gangs. Nihilists love nihilism, babe.

Hitchens told France, long ago, how your country gets to a place where its teachers of free speech are beheaded in school courtyards, in front of crowds of children.

What happens to children who watch a man film their headless civics teacher, in order to delight Islamists and terrify secular France with it?

In time, the French Rate My Teacher app will feature, alongside “hotness,” a beheaded body emoji.

This much we know: It is always too late to take seriously the statements that religious fundamentalists make. They tell you until they’re blue in the face that they will kill people who act on their belief in the freedom of speech. Y’all just think they’re joshing.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for years,” Iannis Roder, a historian and teacher, told French radio. “I hope this is a turning point in recognising the reality of what happens on the ground.”

I fear it’s too late for any turning point.

Some nibble a bit on a Reuben

Some slyly puff-puff on a Cuban

But if you assume

You can hide that from Zoom

You’ll end up like Jeffrey Toobin

… back in the ‘sixties, gets (UD confers upon him) the Ignaz Semmelweis Award. Harassed and ridiculed to the point of madness (he died in an asylum) for telling idiots who didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease to wash their hands before delivering babies, Semmelweis stands for all humane, rational human beings who spend their entire lives up against arrogant, vindictive, and even violent degenerates.

Although our most idiotic and disastrous president ever has now called the world’s most distinguished infectious disease expert an idiot and a disaster, Fauci will remain in his covid-fighting task force position as long as he can – the health of the nation being more important than ongoing scrapes with a verbally violent psychotic. At any moment this paranoid could make his move and replace Fauci with … no one, since there’s no covid problem? Or with, say, Jon Voight… but Fauci, like Semmelweis, will continue to fight the good fight as long as he can.

… was even more gobsmacking than the first. Thursday night fogged up around the edges, so Cherry Springs’ vast dome, while fully dark on top, was fluted with white along the rim. The satellites and meteors and thick constellations – and of course Mars – gradually, gradually emerged, leaving the hundred or so people on the pitch-black expanse gazing with big eyes and closed lips. Blankets and alpaca coats and white wine kept us warm.

Saturday night was absolutely clear. No moon. Only stars, dripping from every edge of vision and piercing the heart at the zenith. Cloudily the Milky Way set itself as backdrop. Now there were hundreds and hundreds of people on the mountaintop, wearing their red beam headlamps and murmuring to one another about the heavens. My sister wore a coyote skin coat and kept her hands dug into its deep pockets; I wore a tight tshirt, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, a thin black winter coat, and my alpaca over the coat. Also a thick scarf and a wool hat that said Corning Museum of Glass.

As the hours passed and the stars whirled, we broke off pieces of baguette and cheese and drank more white wine. Somewhere a child announced she spied an alien and everyone laughed. Marijuana smoke floated about and I thought I’m at Woodstock for the Stars. Yes, because it was a celebration, in a muted raptured way; we were gathered, dark-adapted, for galactic observance, with all the spirit and fear in the moment.

The incident was one of a number of attacks on journalists in Israel and the United States, as they reported on the high virus transmission rates in ultra-Orthodox areas and the mass gatherings that may be helping fuel that rise.

Actually, after this latest one there was yet another one, reported only a few hours ago. Ultraorthodox men – and women – in Israel and the United States are beating up anyone they perceive to be a threat to their illegal gatherings.

Virtually all cults, as you know, eventually devolve into violence. (“LOCK HER UP LOCK HIM UP LOCK EVERYBODY UP”) Ultraorthodox Jewry is textbook cult.

This is what heresy is ’round those parts.

Ultra-Orthodox ‘Hidden Heretics’ Believe in Science, Reject COVID Rebels

Barbarism:

1. absence of culture and civilization.”the collapse of civilization and the return to barbarism”

2. extreme cruelty or brutality.”she called the execution an act of barbarism”

Who the fuck is France letting in to its country? Why?

Covid, says Michelle Goldberg, seems to be making the difference.