… after the success of their committee room storming, Republicans are planning a second action, this one a knitting circle. Apparently the congressmen will sit together just outside the hearings room, each of them knitting a panel revealing a dystopian America if Democrats win the White House. Steve Scalise, for instance, will depict an America where James Hodgkinson is unable to buy a gun.

Now that its quarterback has been filmed calling a woman over to his car and telling her to help him finish masturbating, UNM – one of this blog’s venerable favorites – is in the news again. UD has long argued that a state as corrupt and fiercely anti-intellectual as New Mexico should give up on the whole public university thing, with its Dave Schmidlys and Mike Locksleys and a host of others running this hopelessly shabby show. But on it goes; the curtain … or whatever … keeps going up…

Her neighbors live in rural Arkansas, ground zero for nihilism, American-style. Their worst enemy is Elizabeth Warren, the Plan lady who not only thinks she can improve rural education and health care, but who thinks people in rural Arkansas want to improve them. Au contraire: they appear to like the chaotic destructionism of Trump. “[M]any here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them.”

The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called “chaos voters” helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.

As for caring whether Trump betrays Kurds and Ukrainians: “It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.” If they’re not going to care about their neighbor, imagine how they feel about Kurds and Ukrainians.

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Matt Taibbi puts it like this:

Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.

  The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it.

Think of the final scenes of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The world is ending (nuclear annihilation), so the inhabitants of the last city the fallout will reach stage endless insane suicidal car races, where drivers who have nothing to lose gun their engines until the final spectacular flame-out.

Leaving nuanced definitions to the philosophers, I would define nihilism as a combination of three basic elements: a refusal to hope for anything except the ultimate vindication of hopelessness; a rejection of all values, especially values widely regarded as sacrosanct (equality, posterity, and legality); and a glorification of destruction, including self-destruction—or as Walter Benjamin put it, “self-alienation” so extreme that humanity “can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” Nihilism is less passive and more perverse than simple despair. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation,” according to Albert Camus, “but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.”

A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the “aesthetic pleasure” of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law.

Another go at it:

[Evidence suggests a] significant share of Trump supporters are as nihilistic and destructive as Donald Trump himself, [which] supplies a sort of Occam’s-razor answer to all the questions about why they put up with him: His worst traits are a feature, not a bug, for those who take pleasure in chaos.

Democrats still don’t understand it, says Taibbi. Okay, so let’s zoom in a bit:

Self-destruction is apparently many Arkansans’ middle name. If they’re not panting piously after the end of days, they’re offing themselves with opiates, or putting one of their abundant guns to their heads. They make the Sex Pistols look like the Lennon Sisters. The Donald Trump Show is what they’re laughing at on tv while kissing their ass goodbye, exactly like their fellow end-stagers from states with similarly massive gun ownership/suicide rates (Montana, Alaska, Wyoming). We’re killing ourselves! But before we do, we’re voting Trump.

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And on that chaos thing. UD has always liked William Arrowsmith’s comment about an education in the humanities:

[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

So, you know, distrust higher education all you like. But be aware that it’s trying to make some serious moves against your chaos, that its novels and poems both acknowledge the foundational reality, and exploit the generative energy, of that chaos as we seek to emerge from it, on occasion, into form and order. Into organized life.

His student, Naomi Wolf, who tried to get major mileage out of claiming Bloom sexually aggressed against her, has been writing really bullshitty books for decades, as UD’s new heroine, New York Times reviewer Parul Seghal, notes. And finally one of them has been pulped.

Wolf is the left’s Donald Trump – a veteran flim-flammer, with his patented brew of insolence, narcissism, self-pity, and mendacity. Moi, I doubt Wolf even penned her last book – the pulped one – because its childish ignorance is the sort of thing you get when you assign the actual research and writing to some hastily assembled slave class and then slap your name on it without bothering to read what they came up with.

Oh, but who cares. It’s Auburn.

The way-Catholic Cardinal Ritter
Is standing knee-deep in the shitter.
But what can they do?
That fucking tattoo.
At least you can't call the team quitters.

[A] cellphone video, shot by [a player], … allegedly showed [Coach John] Roanhaus walking in the locker room and taking two $20 bills from a black wallet before stuffing that cash into his sock, according to an arrest warrant.

For weeks, players had been mysteriously losing cash from their wallets… It had gotten so bad that players had been suspecting each other of the thefts and Roanhaus claimed to be a victim too, parents said.

Roanhaus had even made players run extra laps at practice as punishment for one of them allegedly stealing, the parents told KOB.

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Miyamura High School’s football team has won just twice in nine games this season — though the Patriots did win their first game after Roanhaus’ arrest.

If Trubu wins in 2020.

But she was his mother, so we can’t charge her with anything! I mean, after all, her son simply shot out the school’s door, exchanged gunfire with police, and then killed himself. He didn’t kill all his classmates, which was his intention…

Hey wait. Lookee here.

The felony charges against [Mary] York relate in part to [her boyfriend’s] gun-storage locker located in her basement. It was easily breached by [her son], nearly allowing the massacre to occur.

Maybe things are actually changing. She’s been charged with six felonies. Good. Now we’ll see if a jury has the sense to send her to jail. If American gunnies want to have a zillion weapons in circulation, they’re going to have to accept the consequences.

Having dropped the idea of using his Florida resort for the G7 summit, the president has now proposed Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. “It’s enormous. It’s beautifully furnished, I can tell you. It’s a stately, storied, residence. Central location! Whaddaya want?” he tweeted.

His plan was to grind up squid sex organs and squirt them into the water to get squids to mate with the camera lens.

Big trees, little house: After years of ignoring them, Les UDs are finally having three immense trees taken down. We’ve watched our neighbors get hammered in various storms; our jokes about our impending death-by-tree have become threadbare. Time to part with the big bucks and end this.

When you inhale out there, the air is very wood-chippy.

The thud of falling limbs repeats.

Tree guys are chain smokers. Big cigs hang out of their mouths while they work.

England, Australia, and America’s fight against female genital mutilation is, er, cutting-edge civilizational work. All three nations are fighting the good fight against this appalling and popular practice, and I gotta tell you. It ain’t easy. Here in America we’ve got brilliant baby-cutting defenders like Alan Dershowitz enduring very bad publicity to advise our own homegrown, Johns Hopkins educated (!) cutters on how to avoid prosecution. England is also having a devil of a time prosecuting mothers who abuse their little girls in this profound and repulsive way. But, like Australia, both countries are getting there.

Indeed, the latest Australian case is instructive. All of these court systems need to keep in mind that the mothers are going to lie through their teeth. I didn’t do it what are you taking about I’m a simple ignorant woman this is all over my head it didn’t happen my daughters are making it up someone else must have oh their clitoral hoods are missing wherever can they be I know they’re around here somewhere… A Somalian mother of two daughters took them to her home country to have some mindless stone-wielding person destroy them for life; when she got back she was arrested for “removing a child from the state for female genital mutilation.”

Having traumatized the girls for good by hacking off their genitalia, their mother destroyed them again by coaching them to lie in court and deny what they told social workers – that they were brutally hacked at in Somalia, with their mother standing next to them. Um, oh no, we just made it up cuz a stepsister gave us money to lie…?

The stepsister in question denied she asked the girls to lie to police or that she bribed them.

She maintained she had tipped off Child Safety services after learning of the mutilation seven months later, when the family returned to Australia.

I gotta tell you. Everyone deserves a defense in a court of law. I know, I know. But you’ve really gotta be desperate for money, or as …….. (you choose the adjective) as Dershowitz to defend people like this.

The mother was convicted.

…for President Warren.

UD is a tea freak (as faithful readers of her blog know), so she’s stood around watching for decades as people predict this country’s Big Tea Breakthrough. Here’s the latest on that, from a writer who went to a tea convention.

…The tech and gaming worlds have embraced tea as both a nerdy cool hobby and a type of a natural wonder drug to help with focus whilst on all-night coding/gaming soirees, and that has created a marketplace for a certain type of high-end buyer who didn’t exist before…

[At the convention,] I had tea made from the avocado leaves, and adaptogenic teas (“Big with endurance athletes!”) that contained CBD and turmeric, and white champagne raspberry tea, and a Belgium lemongrass chai tea and Kenyan purple tea, and red rooibos tea, and Lapsang Souchong black tea and Darjeeling black tea and Assam black tea and Ceylon black tea and moringa tea and Sri Lankan mango iced tea and “Got Nitro” iced tea slush, and something called “duck shit fragrance oolong,” which is a real thing. I had Psychic Teaz from a man named Dr. Brains (a name Oprah gave him, FYI) who used to travel with the Grateful Dead and other musicians in the ’70s to help them maintain their health while on long tours, and Lover Tea from Vietnam with a college-aged translator who told me it grows in craters made during American bombing missions during the Vietnam War, and Matcha Kaori tea blended with what looked like a shaving cream brush by Japanese tea farmer Kunikazu Mochitani…

Tea is the perfect cultural drink for right now. It has such a big tent — you can like it for the caffeine kick, or the rituals, or the scientific experiments in brewing time and temperature, or the cool hobbyist gear, or the Eastern religious undertones, or the dietary benefits, or matcha’s Instagram friendly coloring. You can like it because it separates you out, or pulls you into a new community, because it makes you feel simultaneously like an outsider and an insider. 

UD has sequential tea enthusiasms. Right now she’s mad for this, which as you can see she buys in bulk (through Amazon).