Don’t worry. No one in the country can pick him out of the crowd.

Here’s their hero’s page, their big man on campus, the pride of ASU. How do you get a hero’s page at ASU?

Burfict was … benched during his time with Arizona State after several penalties for illegal hits. One of those hits essentially cost the team a game against Stanford in 2010 after an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty gave them a first down inside the 10-yard line. Stanford then scored what would be the game winning touchdown.

They’ve kept the page up through his recent attempt to decapitate another player, and through all fourteen of his suspensions from NFL play. An icon of the American university! He kicks the shit out of other people’s brains; he’s just about the dirtiest player ever, a violent wingnut; but they worshipped him at ASU and he’ll be back in the professional game (How do you get to be team captain in professional football? Be Vontaze Burfict!) after this latest suspension cuz man can he hit. They want him to keep at it until he succeeds in decapitating someone. Then, with reluctance, they’ll hand him over to the American justice system.

Helluva game, football, and, as always, a terrific look for our universities.

[Vontaze] Burfict is simply out of control. When he was at Arizona State, he racked up 22 personal fouls in 37 games, and saw his draft stock slide in part because of his volatility.

ASU’s hero! Read his hero page!

Jessye Norman, who has died, sings UD‘s beloved Purcell.

We knew that others would enter the fray of the fraying prez. And so it is that two knowledgeable sources tell the New York Times
Trump

pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation…

Nice comment from a NYT reader:

Maybe Trump can ring up the ambassador to Nevis and see if he has any dirt on Alexander Hamilton. That way, he can undermine and discredit this pesky thing called the U.S. Constitution.

Recognizing Trump as pure Père Ubu, this blog in 2016 featured some posts imagining a new American version of Jarry’s great play whose main character is Trubu. Trump’s Grand Victory silenced UD‘s parodic energy, but the powerful reemergence – under impeachment pressure – of the man’s ubuesque character has me, if not penning an additional scene or two of Trubu Roi, at least turning to one of Ubu’s greatest perceivers, Roger Shattuck.

(A comment of Timothy Snyder’s on the Rachel Maddow Show had me thinking Trubu thoughts again; he described Trump’s “scorn for the idea of law… [For him,] there isn’t really law. It’s just a joke.” Instantly I pictured vile, hilarious, obscene Ubu rolling around the stage slashing and burning because everything except his power over other people is a joke.)

Shattuck:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

In other words:

Keep smiling through
Just like you always do
‘Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

Now that he’s gleefully invoked an oncoming civil war, the leader of the free world has inspired a tsunami of some of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite words — from Republicans as much as Democrats. These are strong, uncompromising words; these are words that do not mince words. These are not words like inappropriate, questionable, offensive; they are words like disgusting, repellent, and repulsive. Vile, abhorrent, contemptible. Ghastly, loathsome, fetid.

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

And about that civil war…

Everyone calls the Isettes “brides” – jihadi brides, ISIS brides, I.S. brides… Sheer sexism, mes petites; a way of cutesying them and why? Everyone knows it’s Always a terrorist; never a bride; everyone gets that it’s like the first page of DeLillo’s cult classic (if you will) Mao II, which describes a mass Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium: “grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl.”

Anonymous commandeered fuck-couplings (‘Ms Begum said her only role in the caliphate was to “make babies”) don’t really strike UD as very bridey…

Maybe you’re different. Maybe when you think of a filthy tenth century setting in which brainless degenerates deposit sperm after getting themselves sexually excited by watching beheadings you picture a dewy girl in a gown, catching her breath before saying I do… Ms Begum spent her nights fucking men she was directed to fuck and her sweltering days swaddled in black – you can call this way of life many things, but the adjective “bridal” doesn’t pop to mind.

You know why everyone cutesies them. Despite everything, people only want to think of men as criminals. If Marsha Edwards had been Mark Edwards, would he have shared a funeral with the children he shot to death, a pretty photo of him up on stage next to pretty photos of the people he killed?

Marsha gets to be not a murderer. She gets to be Mom.

As the debate over repatriating some of the most dangerous people in the world proceeds, UD hopes that the press will gradually phase out the whole bride thing.

(Also featuring Jeffrey Epstein, but that’s for a different post.)

[Before Hunter Biden’s legal but unethical activity in Ukraine,] there was already a template… for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit … a [government] crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Yes, she’s talking about Professor Andrei Shleifer, whose greed cost Harvard millions, but all is forgiven.

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

UD wants very badly to see the end of Trump.

Yet she also thanks Chayes for focusing on a particularly disgusting practice.

Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.

Crazy old farts never die; they simply go to seed in public. Whether you’re singling out Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Moscow Mitch, Alan Dershowitz, Placido Domingo, Bill Cosby, Robert Byrd, or Strom Thurmond (I think the last two are dead) for your viewing pleasure, there’s always something clinically fascinating about old fart flame-out.

As the walls close in on him, expect to see Trump, like Ronald Reagan with Nancy, clutching Melania’s hand and calling her Mommy.

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

“Power has driven him mad.”

Bless him. Go fund him.

When you see all the numbers, it’s astounding that it’s taken this long for the idiotic authoritarianism of the haredim to be pushed aside in Israel.

[A] solid majority of Israeli Jews wants government policy to be far less influenced by Jewish law than it is now.

A total of 64 percent of respondents want there to be separation of religion and state in Israel, while 68 percent want Israel to recognize civil marriages.

Sixty-four percent do not want any religious body to have governmental authority in Israel, according to the poll. At present, Israel’s Orthodox Chief Rabbinate controls marriage, divorce, burial and other affairs in Israel.

A total of 62 percent want Israel to recognize a range of Jewish conversion ceremonies — not just Orthodox ones.

“It is undisputed that Rick Singer prayed on Stephen [Semprevivo], and parents like him, in his 25-million-dollar racketeering bonanza, that to some real extent makes Stephen a victim,” [the Varsity Blues parent’s lawyer] wrote.

Intriguing essay about the quite rapid rise of atheism in America.

Carrying a gun isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I learned that most people I encountered actually didn’t feel better knowing that I had a gun. And, though I tried to keep it concealed in a hip holster under a shirt or jacket, the people who inevitably did glimpse it frequently wondered why I had it and whether my gun or my presence put them in danger — like the staff and customers who panicked at that Walmart in Missouri. Even the people who knew and trusted me — knowing that I was a responsible gun owner who had been threatened — wondered if being near me in public exposed them to … danger …