Albert Finney, the consul in the failed film version of UD‘s beloved Under the Volcano, has died.

Sing it.

Billionaire — I should go around weeping
Billionaire — I should go without sleeping
Strangely enough, I sleep well
‘Cept for a dream or two
But then I count my keep well
Assets so deep can lull you to sleep
So I should care, I should let it upset me
I should care but it just doesn’t get me
Maybe I won’t be as moral as you
But I don’t care and fuck you

… Purge.

[The UNH football players] became involved in a large brawl at Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. The brawl sent one person to the hospital with minor injuries.

The fight reportedly began when one of the SAE fraternity brothers refused to let a football player into a party.

Deputy Police Chief Rene Kelley said the person who was involved left the house and assaulted several other people.

… Kelley would not confirm or deny reports that the people who joined the football players in the attack were wearing masks similar to those in the movie “The Purge” or that some of those individuals were football players visiting from the University of Connecticut.

“Playing in an empty stadium due to fan trouble, Marseille defeated 10-man Bordeaux 1-0 in a postponed French league game on Tuesday.

… Marseille was without Florian Thauvin and Kevin Strootman due to suspensions.

The normally boisterous Stade Velodrome was uncharacteristically quiet after fans were banned due to disturbances at Marseille’s home game against Lille on Jan. 25, when a firecracker thrown from the crowd landed near linesman Nicolas Danos. The game was delayed for around 40 minutes before play continued, and Marseille went on to lose 2-1.

The 18th-round game against Bordeaux had been delayed due to complications arising from France’s yellow vest protests.”

… recall UD‘s Tripartite A Scheme for plagiarism — i.e., plagiarism almost always falls into the category Atelier, Ambition, or Addicted (details), and it should be pretty easy for you to conclude that Jill Abramson is Atelier. Very busy successful high-profile people (Jane Goodall, Alan Dershowitz – and a raft of other Harvard law school profs – Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, Rand Paul) have ateliers of assistants who do much of their work for them, and … you know … it’s hard to find good help.

Wow. UD‘s been looking for a succinct summary of modern athletics, and there you have it! Well done.

… color of my political establishment...

… by primitive cults overwhelming the state and making life impossible for normal people. This blog has for years tracked the Iranization (everyone compares emergent ultraorthodox Israel to Iran, so I’ll do it too) of Israel, as it shows itself unwilling to intervene in its future majority’s caveman dreams.

I mean, they’re all over the world… caveman dreams… but they’re usually somewhat constrained by official agents of civilization. Not in Israel.

... father-in-law.

One of his naughty etchings, in our front hall.

(My title comes from this 1963 essay.)

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Everyone’s laughing at Schultz’s request not to be called a billionaire; instead, he asks that we use the phrase ‘people of means.’ Some of the more amusing responses to his ‘billionaire’ problem:

I prefer ‘wealth extractors’

[how about] ‘money hoarders’

‘poverty profiteers’

Thank you Howard Schultz for calling out the dehumanising label ‘billionaire’ applied to people merely for causing vast swaths of the world to live in absolute, crushing misery. I vow to do better

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Why would a billionaire not wish to be called a billionaire? I can’t think of instances where millionaires asked not to be called millionaires. Michael Hiltzik wrote a recent column titled America is Falling Out of Love with Billionaires, so there does seem to be a problem of some sort. (“The plus side of Howard running is he’s making more people hate billionaires.”) What could it be?

Let’s start with Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs:

The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

Millionaires can be pointlessly and destructively greedy, but only to a certain, reasonably comprehensible, extent. Billionaires can – nay, many of them, it appears, must – really go to town, in a way that strikes the rest of us as simply mentally ill. There will always be no-limits wealth defenders to tell us we’re envious or we’re going to destroy personal enterprise; but it’s hard to know how to be envious of people who desperately unenterprisingly do things like this:

Last week it was reported that Daniel Snyder, the owner of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, was spending $100 million on a 305-foot super-yacht complete with an on-board IMAX screening room. It’s his second yacht, after a 220-foot version.

At the same moment, hedge fund owner Ken Griffin was disclosed as the buyer of the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).

Titanic, duplicative, restless, vacuous greed unsettles us; it makes the ethical grotesquerie of one human being holding fourteen billion dollars extremely graphic. “Why,” asks Farhad Manjoo, ” should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?” What sort of people has our, uh, country of means spawned? Consider the vast antiquity of Robert Hughes’ 2004 comment on the billionaire art buyers of his day:

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

$104m? Try $450m.

Billionaires, notes Merryn Somerset Webb, typically exist

as a result of mismanaged monetary policy (free money can do a lot if you use it right); badly thought-out regulation; politically unacceptable rent-seeking; corruption; asset bubbles; a failure of anti-trust rules; or some miserable mixture of the lot.

Hiztlik quotes Keynes going deeper into the obscenity Hughes describes. Keynes found the emergent form of what he called “the money motive” repulsive, and hoped for an end to “many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. [T]he love of money as a possession [has become the goal] — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life. [This behavior] will [someday] be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Billionaires represent the compulsive masturbators of their day, and more and more of them are doing it in public. Schultz knows this.

If anything proves the theory football is becoming a gladiator sport of the poor performing for the rich, it’s the billionaire president who says the NFL isn’t violent enough also declaring he doesn’t want his son playing the sport… Trump, who has declared he wants more hard hitting in football, said: nope, I wouldn’t want my 12-year-old son Barron to play.

… American-style. The NRA is currently funding studies on how to arm fetuses for a fair fight.

… became a thing recently for a lot of people inside and outside that country because of a University of Toronto professor’s refusal to cooperate with a new regime under which his very pronoun use was subject to sanctions.

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

Now there’s poor Frank Bauer, who comes from the Netherlands, where burqas have of course been banned for years. Head of a refugee assistance group in Alberta, Bauer finds himself part of a strange new world, within whose boundaries even an expression of discomfort with the burqa gets you labeled “racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic.”

What precisely did Bauer write in a social media post?

“I am a strong advocate for being welcoming, inclusive and respecting all cultures and religions, however find full face covering in public a notch too far,” Bauer wrote on Red Deer Local Immigration Partnership’s Facebook page in a discussion about religious accommodation.

“I would not feel comfortable in conversations no matter what the topic is, and believe this is an area where newcomers need to respect and adapt themselves to the Canadian culture and norms.”

Hiding behind a symbolic burqa, anonymous members of the organization’s staff filed a grievance against this bad bad man.

Bauer’s abject apology would have fit right in at a Stalin show trial.

An occasional series of pain-pensées- — from the addicted and formerly addicted.

Somewhere along the way we all started to confuse — disastrously — the eradication of pain with the eradication of suffering. Freedom from suffering should, indeed, be a basic human right. No one should have to endure unbearable cancerous or post-operative pain, and the patients-rights movement was an undeniable marker of progress. Somehow that turned into let there never be a moment of discomfort. The problem there, of course, is that any mild irritant can become unbearable. We build no tolerance to life.

‘Tis a fine country that makes sure 19-year-old lads have full access to the latest in firearms.

Only 19, Texas Tech student Hollis Daniels stepped up to a campus policeman sitting at a desk typing a report and blew his head right off. OOOOPS! said wee Hollis. “I fucked up.”

Only 19 and U. Central Florida student Max Chambers kept in his car on campus an

AR-15 modified to shoot fully-automatic.

Police said Chambers also had manufactured three drop-in auto sears, which can convert a firearm to shoot multiple bullets with a single trigger pull. Chambers told police he made the devices in December and had tested one earlier this month .

A UCF police spokeswoman declined to say how detectives believe he made the devices, citing an ongoing investigation. He told police he knew the devices were against the law, but said he doesn’t like laws, according to his arrest report.