Scathing Online Schoolmarm finds this a nice, pithy description of America’s own Genius of the Carpathians.

Evan McMullin said it.

… the hero whose hero page will never be taken down because he’s SUCH a hero, seems to have assaulted his way out of a professional career. I guess ASU liked being assaulted when Vontaze was a (cough) student there. It certainly continues to celebrate and boast about its close association with a notoriously violent asshole. Turns out, however, that the NFL does have some limits when it comes to truly crazy shits in the league.

Not that it doesn’t love them! It does love them, and it gives them lots of money and makes them team captains (Vontaze was a team captain!). Fans adore them; they’re paying for the big hits. But things are getting so wussy out there, with concussion bs and all, and the teams are under incredible pressure to suspend (Vontaze is ALWAYS being suspended) and even dismiss people like Vontaze.

… and I suspect she did so because of her father’s suicide. It’s a meditation on Handke’s mother’s suicide. I don’t own the book, but Jeffrey Eugenides’ introduction brought the thing back to me:

[This is] … a rigorous demonstration of the failure of language to express the horror of existence. The American postmodernists gave up on traditional storytelling out of an essentially playful, optimistic, revolutionary urge. Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer despair.

… There is something funny about nihilism, and about super-depressing artworks by German members of the Generation of ’68. But this darkness arises directly out of German and Austrian history, a welter of grief and guilt that is only now, half a century after the German genocide, beginning to lift.

Oh good.

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Lots of good stuff about Tokarczuk here.

It isn’t clear whether Trump considered his request for [Rex] Tillerson to intervene [in a criminal case] to be improper or was just testing the bounds of what he could do as president on an issue that could provide diplomatic benefits while also helping Giuliani, a longtime supporter…

Tillerson has said publicly that the president frequently asked him to do things that were illegal.

“So often, the president would say ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way,”’ Tillerson said in an on-stage interview with Bob Schieffer in Texas last year. “It violates the law, it violates treaty you know and he just, he got really frustrated when we’d have those conversations.”

UD‘s old friend Peter, long a friend of the Kurds, talks about the situation.

If Turkey does take the battle to the 70,000 men and women who make up the Kurdish forces in northern Syria, it will be a bloody fight, Galbraith said.

“It will not be easy,” he said. “A lot of people are going to die.”

He can also be seen here.

Many good things may come out of our current political mess. This is one of them.

It’s not ol’ Boris calling burqas stuff like this. I found these references here.

Why is it not appalling that the common name for this, the most torturing of all burqas, relies on its resemblance to a shuttlecock, and appalling that Boris noted a resemblance between burqas and letterboxes? Shuttlecock! How dehumanizing.

And it ain’t Boris concluding that “we are seriously fucked up as a society” because we put schoolgirls in “coffins.” It’s ordinary Pakistanis, millions of whom have reacted with horror and resistance to some POS in some province mandating shuttlecocks for schoolgirls. The mandate has suddenly been withdrawn. Wonder why.

We can laugh openly at our Genius of the Carpathians.

Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.

OCTOBER: MY FOREST OWLS

It's on its own, the black wind of autumn,
The start of autumn, after long summer. 
I know it's started, because the night world 
Is suddenly cold, unapproachable, 
A planetary blank that fronts my face
When I slide back the door to the owl's cry.

Two owls, in fact, working on their marriage
Against a black backdrop, against darkness.
Anxious call, anxious response.  On their own.

Trump, Giuliani, and Dershowitz, our purple-faced mountain majesties… Let’s first check in on Dersh, chatting not long ago with a reporter.

Alan Dershowitz won’t hang up the phone. He’s breathing heavily into the receiver. It’s August 10, the morning Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. At first Dershowitz wants to go off the record, and I agree. He doesn’t say anything interesting, just the same protestations that he’s made on Twitter and television for years. But when I start asking questions, he begins to berate me. “We’re on the record now,” I tell him. “You don’t get to insult me off the record.” 

So he begins breathing into the phone. He will not hang up. He does not know what to say. 

“If you don’t want to talk, you can hang up,” I say. “But I am not going off the record if you are just going to call me ‘fifth rate.’”

Silence. Breathing. “I won’t have it written that I hung up on a reporter!” He’s shouting. We do this a couple more times. I take notes. He’s livid that I won’t go off the record. He threatens to sue me. Tells me I am a nobody... Dershowitz later [again] threatens to sue me …

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Giuliani… Oh, just read this. UD‘s favorite mention is Soros. Soros is behind it all. He is always behind it all.

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Purplest of them all? George Soros in league with the Queen of England made him turn over his tax returns.

Yes, he’ll appeal. But we’re getting there.

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One more thing. Because he’s handling so many incoming… challenges, Trubu is behind on his personal insults. In particular, he has not yet caught up to Susan Collins. A week after she said something not nice, he is still working on his obscene alliteration for her. Scathing Online Schoolmarm proposes Cunty Collins.

Even Argentina’s beginning to worry about it, but American football pays through the nose to do the on-field tango with Richie Incognito, Antonio Brown, and Vontaze Burfict. Audiences love their moves; at a time when NASCAR carnage is at an all-time low, there’s nothing like football to keep the crushed-skull statistics steady. Crowds went wild, most recently, for beaten-comatose Mason Rudolph, dragged upright off the field because no one could manage to scare up a stretcher (each NFL team is only worth around three billion dollars so there are budgetary issues).

Vontaze has been suspended and Brown dropped. Looks as though it’ll take a few more Incognito attacks for the Raiders to do something about Richie. But even if the team has to give up Richie, Americans also love watching the legal and recruiting moves that ensue after the insane giants that bestride our game fields are removed from play. How will their appeal or lawsuit go? Which lucky team will now welcome the big bad head case?

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Above all, American football needs to do something about Juju Smith-Schuster and players like him.

[Ruldolph’s agony] was so upsetting that teammate JuJu Smith-Schuster was in tears on the field.

We don’t need crybabies out there making the audience think there’s something wrong with kicking the shit out of people’s brains.

[Indonesia’s] apparently progressive President had been compelled to install one of the nation’s most famous conservative figures, Maruf Amin, as his vice-presidential candidate. [They subsequently won the election.] As chair of Indonesia’s most powerful Islamic council, Maruf oversaw fatwas against religious minorities, calls for the death penalty for gay sex and the support of female genital mutilation as “a form of honour for women”.