Female genital mutilation is …. think of it as cultural rape. England ain’t happy to be hosting so much of it, and its health secretary has just announced a bunch of new clinics across the country dedicated to dealing with this grotesque import.

What [Orwell] knew … was that there was a filthy secret at the heart of power, and that secret was in a sense a pornographic secret – that some people don’t even need [an] excuse to wield power – they won’t even say we’re doing it for your own good or to civilize your colony, or to save you from communism, or to save you from fascism or to liberate you from capitalism… We’re in power because we like it. We’re in power because we enjoy punishing people. We’re in power because we enjoy owning people. We enjoy telling them what they can do. We enjoy telling them when we feel like having sex with them and when we don’t. We do this for its own sake. The pornography element of power is a very important thing to understand… It’s an exercise of sheer cruelty, and I think it was a tremendous advantage to Orwell as a writer to have understood this from the start…

… where things got violent between burqa and non-burqa factions on a college campus there. Burqas have now been banned from the school. It would be good to know who started things. If the model for this sort of outbreak is Tunisia, yikes.

[USC] had to deal with the notorious “Varsity Blues” scandal this spring which heavily-involved [Lynn] Swann’s athletics department. Throw in basketball assistant Tony Bland getting caught up in the college basketball corruption trial and Swann’s seat was getting awfully hot.

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

Carol Folt’s letter to candidates to replace USC Athletic Director Lynn Swan: Sing it.

This overload …

I can hear your cleats clicking on the sidewalk

Beating to the rhythm of my heart

Caught up to you

You’re the only one I want

I follow you home every night

Just to make sure that you get there alright

Baby it’s true

Can’t think of anything but you

And what I need baby

Is a little bit of sympathy

I’m down here on my knees

It’s a twenty-scandal night

And I can’t live without your help

Won’t you help me cure this overload

Won’t you help me cure this overload

Won’t…yeh!

Oh, Varsity Blues

And basketball is nothing but skooz

Doesn’t that say something

Scum has taken hold of me, yeah

Baby I need you

You’ve got to see me through

Can’t take another scandal-night without you

Honey it’s true I am so hung up on you, yeah

Hamas has reportedly called the NRA’s lawsuit strategy “a mistake,” and urged instead that they focus on strengthening the charitable arm of the organization.

… United States; and he wants to leave Sarah.

This concludes the family values portion of your broadcast.

She killed both of her adult children – and then herself – with a gun (or guns) she had in her house. Why did Marsha Edwards have guns? The police are saying very little – not about guns, or a final note, or substance abuse issues, or psychiatrists… With the exception of one neighbor who apparently called her a “very, very unhappy woman,” we got nuthin. We got lots of the use of the word “tragedy,” and lots of Give God the Burden, which UD finds mighty odd for a double murderer. Of her own children.

What is it about some women who kill? UD‘s reminded of ol’ Amy Bishop, who shot her brother to death and was sent home to mommy. I understand you can’t do anything to Marsha Edwards now (Bishop, decades later – after she mass-murdered her University of Alabama colleagues – was indicted for the fratricide), but we should at least find out why a murderously deranged mother was able to buy a gun and kill her kids with it. She lived in a wealthy, ultra-safe, gated community… Why the gun? Can we ask when she bought it, or if she got it from a friend, or whatever? It’s the thing that ended three lives – shouldn’t we know something about it?

As the Marsha Edwards story vanishes into that tragic woman plus the cosmic mystery, it leaves the stink of the normalization of a household appliance able to be used with stealth, ease, and one hundred percent fatality.

“People tend to drink a fair amount of alcohol when you don’t have many other sources of entertainment. Everybody has guns. You get the stress of a poor crop, of tariffs, and you can’t sell your wheat for what it costs to put in the ground. Cattle prices may or may not be good. The bank’s knocking at your door. Your kids are moving away because of brain drain. So people a lot of times tend to deal with it with a single bullet.”

A Montana psychiatrist sums it up.

… this, from the MIT Technology Review. It was an insider reckoning with the school’s Media Lab, which turns out to have been an Early Epstein Responder. But unlike a lot of people and institutions, the Lab, under its modest, unworldly, cerebral, founder (“[Nicholas] Negroponte said that he prided himself on knowing over 80% of the billionaires in the US on a first-name basis…”), kept on taking Jeffrey Epstein’s money long after he had been convicted of sex crimes. (“He wiped his reputation off with the dirty money [the Lab] took. Then he raped more kids.”) Of course they tried to hide what they were doing (wouldn’t you?), and now the story of greed, moral degeneracy, and coverup at one of America’s most burnished schools has jumped all over the place, esp. the New York Times and the New Yorker.

A writer for the Guardian draws out – way out – some possible implications of this big ol’ scandal.

The ugly collective picture of the techno-elites that emerges from the [MIT] Epstein scandal reveals them as a bunch of morally bankrupt opportunists… [A] “third culture” [was supposed to] replace the [university’s] technophobic literary intellectuals with [intellectuals] coming from the world of science and technology…

It’s not uncommon for intellectuals to serve as useful idiots to the rich and the powerful, but, under the “third culture”, this reads like a job requirement… [C]lose the Media Lab, disband the Ted Talks, refuse the money of tech billionaires… Without such drastic changes, the powerful bullshit-industrial complex that is the “third culture” will continue unharmed, giving cover to the next Epstein.

As a technophobic literary whatever, UD‘s thrilled at the prospect of threadbare morally serious professors taking their no money and no influence and bashing the brains out of the techies and their billionaire buddies… but this seems unlikely. The Guardian writer seems a bit over the top. After all, it ain’t just techies – look at what Stanford med school professors have been doing forever! The future belongs to the bullshit-industrial (industrial bullshit?) complex.

… Glenstone (see this post for details of UD‘s recent visit).

UD doesn’t know quite what to make of it. It’s an absolute copy of his style. Homage? Glenstone’s focus throughout is indeed early and mid twentieth century; but what can it mean that they decided to hire someone to construct a Corbu, as you might hire someone to write a Mozart sonata?

None of [the gun control] efforts … have been as instantly effective as [Dmitriy] Andreychenko’s stunt [ – entering a WalMart in body armor and holding a semi-automatic rifle – ] in making the point that wearing military protective gear and carrying a semi-automatic weapon should perhaps not be considered an acceptable way to behave, during peacetime, around people who are shopping for paper towels.

… is a nascent movement born of the latest attack on gun rights – the rollback of open carry while grocery shopping. Studies show that absent regular visual and physical access, inside and outside the home, to AR-15s, Alaskans’ impulse to detonate their heads will be significantly mitigated.

As famed for red pulp as Florida is for orange, we Alaskans have stood at the top of America’s suicide rate until recently, when we were very slightly overtaken by Montana. As local legislators keep an anxious eye on that slippage, POSR joins ranks with the Alaskan Independence Party to militate for nationhood, and the self-determination that accompanies it.

Meanwhile, join with us in singing our anthem:

TO HIS COY PULPER

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s aim and that gun’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I reach for thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet barrel finger’d such pulping brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

… were the only dystopian elements of the otherwise utopian Glenstone Museum and grounds in Potomac, Maryland – a short ride from Garrett Park. We reserved the visit months in advance cuz the place is madly popular and they keep the numbers low to make the visit meditative… Come to think of it, there was a third less than utopian aspect to the place, though Mr UD disagrees — an audio installation in the forest, which UD enjoyed but found a wee hokey (‘what a forest might “hear” over the course of hundreds of years.’). Twenty eight minutes of natural and unnatural sounds bouncing around your ears ended in Arvo Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis, which UD will admit was pretty cool, the high soprano at the end piercing the trees.

On the dead hummingbirds: The big windows surrounding this tranquil water garden in the main pavilion (which featured a whitewashed room full of Cy Twombly sculptures) are, one of the gray-outfitted art guides confided to me, fatal to them.

The Patio cafe, which does not take cash, had trouble today with its card reading machines; we gave up on it and went to the other cafe on the grounds. On the way, Mr UD gave me his lecture on why it’s appalling that some places refuse to take cash. “A lot of poor people can’t go to these places.”

… ‘D.C.’s new must-see art museum.’ Glenstone.

They’ve got some Cy Twombly sculptures. UD loves Cy Twombly.

Roland Barthes on Twombly.

But it’s the kind of stunt that could catch on. That would be fun to watch.