Things are getting shaky for the Genius of the Carpathians.

What’s happening in these nine [New York City] ZIP codes should have been no surprise. Three ingredients for the spike in cases we are now seeing have existed for months: a deficit of scientific literacy, a mistaken belief that April’s horrendous morbidity and mortality resulted in herd immunity and a longstanding distrust of outside, secular leadership borne of generations of collective trauma.

All of which can be summarized in two words: incivility and imbecility. Incivility with an emphasis on the word’s origin, having to do with one’s identity as a citizen of a shared polity, not merely a member of a small isolated sect; and imbecility having to do with the long-standing refusal of your sect to educate its children to mandated national standards. The failure of governments to insist that you adopt those mandates is shameful, to be sure; but the failure of your sect to instruct you in basic moral responsibilities toward people who don’t happen to share your mindless faith in things like herd immunity is the real scandal.

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These foolish people are suing. A law professor weighs in:

Covid-19 kills some and permanently injures others; the threat to human life is real and immediate. Those who flout the rules endanger everyone around them, and this is sufficient reason for regulating even a worship service… Nondiscriminatory rules to protect human life can be applied to the exercise of religion.

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Oh and look at that. The judge says would you please please stop??? Case dismissed.

The state argued the new restrictions do not unfairly target the Orthodox Jewish community and it is not a constitutional violation to acknowledge that religious gatherings have a higher risk of spreading the virus.

The judge agreed, stating she could not ignore the compelling state interest in protecting the health and life of all New Yorkers.

Whatever it takes.

“IF MY DISGRACEFUL ATTORNEY GENERAL DOESN’T IMMEDIATELY ARREST PRINCESS VICTORIA of Sweden AND HER HUSBAND PRINCE DANIEL, Duke of Västergötland, I PLEDGE TO FIRE THE MONSTER THIS AFTERNOON. HE’S GOT ALL THE EVIDENCE HE NEEDS. EVERYONE IS WONDERING WHY THEY HAVEN’T BEEN INDICTED. LOCK. THEM. UP.”

… and she’s delighted he’s scheduled to be standing next to Pelosi today, introducing legislation that would trigger the 25th amendment, replacing an incapacitated president. This announcement will push the Sitting Paranoid further into what UD believes will likely be, unless help is forthcoming, a suicidal rage.

Nice image.

He has this disease because he’s more afraid of not being seen as a man than dying… I don’t think he’s afraid of killing himself if the price would be to avoid what he feels is the humiliation of wearing a mask and submitting to common sense and care for others…

Didn’t take much time for UD to find a commentator who agrees with her about DJT’s suicidality. Giridharadas’s theory of the president’s self-destruction tracks precisely with theories about why so many macho men in Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana (America’s BIG suicide states) kill themselves. (This blog has covered our suicidal macho/nihilist states forever.) Angry, isolated, obsessed with projecting strength, these are men who, like Trump, can look back on sordid personal lives that make unavoidably graphic the lovelessness they feel and inspire. Care for others, in Giridharadas’s words, is felt as a humiliating depletion of their strength; rage at others for … for obscure reasons, I guess having to do with others trying to draw love out of these men… ? … eventually finds its way inside the man himself and attacks him. As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump is “dead inside apart from regular swoons of rage and resentment.”

Goes without saying that these same presuicides in our reddest states represent the very heart of Trump’s voting bloc, his demographic par excellence. Everyone noticed, during the last campaign, that Trump’s most solid support unerringly came from America’s most pilled-up, ginned-up, gunned-up, nihilistic counties and states (see, for instance, West Virginia).

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Look at it this way: These guys really need their guns, since they’re probably going to want to use them on themselves. They really need a president who supports the NRA.

A New Republic writer identifies Trump as the leader of the “Flailing Masculinity Death Cult.”

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And Trump’s other high-profile, 80% support demographic? Self-destructive ultraorthodox Jews – many of whom, by the way, share the heartland presuicide’s love of violence (this group spent last night rioting, burning masks, and assaulting people on the streets of New York) – cultish enclaves seemingly unmoved by the many covid infections and deaths among them.

How unsurprising that these two morbid, isolated constituencies are viscerally drawn to our nihilist in chief, whose “psychotic unraveling [is there] for all to see.”

If you listened closely, you could hear them:

As flies to wanton boys were we to Donald Trump;

He killed us for his sport.

I dread very deeply the idea of this tormented soul remaining at the head of the country for another three months. I find some relief in Nancy Pelosi just now having announced that she and her colleagues will discuss the 25th amendment tomorrow. I actually think we run the risk that Mr Trump’s mania combined with his rage will prompt him to kill himself. That will certainly be a first. The first American president to kill himself while in office. “After watching the interview, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Trump has come completely undone.”

Pelosi spoke after Trump was interviewed on Fox Business Network in a frenzied almost hour-long interview where he suggested Gold Star families may have infected him with COVID, claimed again he was ‘cured,’ equivocated over whether he is still on powerful steroids, demanded AG Bill Barr indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama and twice called Kamala Harris a ‘monster.’

With remarkable persistence, New York’s ultraorthodox have kept their children fatally ignorant.

It’s the only chance you’ll ever have to see a word in any way similar to “virtue” next to Trump’s name.

… gets the Lit Nobel. I’ll look at one of her poems after my Instacart shopper and I conclude our brief affair.

And put an umlaut over her U, dammit.

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Since Halloween is close, here’s “All Hallows.”

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

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So Glück writes brief lyrics in the key of longing. She’d prefer a world infused with religious spirit (one where cinquefoil is not merely a plant but – remember? – a common decorative motif in churches), but will take, with a sigh, the secular modern one she was handed. All Hallows is typical of this attitude, evoking an all-hollowed-out landscape – but hollowed almost in a gesture of propitiation: I’ve assembled a pure world of new possibility for you, oh hallowed ones: Come!

Or: Once you see precisely how nakedly dispirited this world is, you’re going to be compelled to respiritualize it!

And one of the saints does: a soul creeps out of a tree — ready, with the turn of the season, to respond to the imminent reseeding of the world.

The farmer in other words stages the landscape in order (holding treats in her hand) to coax the dubious soul-kitten out of the tree.

It’s all very Veni Creator Spiritus, in other words. If you’d prefer a more… ample version of this come-hither, go here.

By setting himself against masks, largely on aesthetic grounds, Trump … opened himself up to charges that he doesn’t take the virus seriously.

Respect? No. Slavish obedience. That’s very different. You can respect someone and at the same time be aware of the limitations of their intelligence — and act accordingly, for the sake of your and your family’s health. Cultic loyalty to rabbis unable to understand the germ theory of disease is nuts, man. Time for the New York Times and other local papers to be less diplomatic in dealing with people who are rioting, assaulting, and burning.

We’ve followed the supremely dumb sports programs at Notre Dame on this blog forever (first post is about the cathedral; scroll down); but who knew the campus altogether – from its infected president on down – was so fucking stupid?

Several people in fact wore masks at the Rose Garden event (check out a photo). Notre Dame’s leadership seems keen to model a herd – lemming? – mentality for its students.