… hope.
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And:
Never have I been so ashamed of my country as on February 24 this year…. Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, to live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity.
Russia’s ex-representative to the UN in Geneva writes a Dear Vlad letter.
… for another couple
of weeks. Mr UD has
finished his semester,
the dog is off to the
kennel, and we are set
to leave.
Blogging continues,
as always, at the seaside.
… this photo in the New York Times, part of an ad campaign for Parachute, an upscale bedding company. (There’s a Parachute store a thirteen-minute walk from La Kid’s trendy DC apartment.) What strikes me is the dirt on the bedroom floor, and on the pants of the person troweling.
In the bedroom. Troweling in the bedroom.
Other elements of the image – washed-out whites, distressed terracottas, and palely flowering plants – are familiar from the hyper-minimalist, organic design world, and UD herself is a paid-up member of that world… Often, when UD visits her neighbors’ houses, she thinks They put everything in. I take everything out…
**************************
Mr UD is fond of this guy… something of a crackpot … named Bede Griffiths, who just kept getting more and more and more ascetic in his spiritual life, and for sure that ain’t me. Like only wearing a loincloth and sleeping under the stars. But I recognize myself, somewhat, in this pallid pictorial. Remember that Mr UD’s father was a noted Corbusierian, so there’s that influence in our (midcentury) house, and its simple pollinator gardens/unrefined forests, as well. We’re definitely on the spectrum.
Anyway, there’s above all the devil-may-care, so-what-if-I’m wearing-white-slacks thing to note in this image. I get the whole bringing the garden indoors trend, but wow. Does this woman not have a cat/dog to gambol in the loam and track it all over the house? Or am I supposed to be too cool to worry about that? Is it bourgeois to worry about that? Croyez-moi, I don’t care when stuff in the house gets dirty and dog-haired, etc.; but I’m thinking I draw the line at potting plants on my bedroom floor.
Don’t never get tired, ’round these blog-parts, of reading and writing about university football.
Take Texas A&M, jest about the filthiest jock shop in America. Up in that there headline its athletic director is ahuffin and apuffin cuz filthy U Bama coach Nick Saban said tother day Texas A&M was (lawdy!) corrupt. How dare he! We is going to the filthy SEC and making a formal complaint because I never!
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Saban also badmouthed filthy Jackson State, and their coach (he’s the highest paid person on campus and doesn’t know that the past tense of pay is paid) is also on fire with righteous indignation…
But hold on. Let’s avert our eyes from this latest dust-up and look hard at the home of Jackson State University, cuz that’s where the big news story is, only no one gives a shit about some obscure state capital shooting itself to death.
Did you know that Jackson Miss has the highest gun homicide rate in the entire nation?
In gunny America, that ain’t no story. It’s gotten virtually no coverage. But ol’ UD thinks it a better use of your time to consider why Jackson is shooting itself to death than to follow the mutual insults of a couple of rich old hicks.
**********************
Not that it’s all that mysterious how Jackson got there. First, lose most of your cops and make it impossible for the ones left to mess with anyone holding a gun. Make sure your court system is backed up to the point of paralysis, and headed by judges who don’t put people away. Encourage absolutely everyone to open carry the most astoundingly powerful weaponry.
Your state has America’s weakest gun laws and – how bout that – its highest gun death rate!
Reduce your civic life to total gun culture, so that even thirteen year olds carry and kill. You start at thirteen, and even if you’re caught you don’t go to jail. Many years of carnage lie ahead of you. Even if you get blown away by, say, 23, that’s still ten years of killing in the streets of Jackson.
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Why wouldn’t you send your kid to Jackson State?
Trump-Backed Candidate Who Said Christ Would ‘Reign in Idaho’ Loses Primary
Okay, but where are the op/eds from rafts of Western women intellectuals, and from jolly burqa wearers all over Europe, saying Well of course there shouldn’t be an edict, but burqas are beautiful empowering expressions of piety and selfhood and you’re all defaming them just as much as Johnny and Amber are defaming each other … ?
I mean, everyone’s dumping on the burqa lately… It’s almost as if people think there’s… something wrong… with a heavy agonizingly constraining black full body bag robbing wearers of sunlight and peripheral vision, and featuring a heavy cloth strip over the mouths of women and little girls as if I mean is there some sort of symbolic value there…? That mouth thing?
So where are its defenders? They’re noisy enough when countries begin voting for burqa bans. They organize big pro-burqa marches and they tell us we’re Islamophobes for objecting to burqas. Where is all that moral passion now that everyone’s acting as if burqas are obviously atrocious? I’m waiting.
A remarkably rich, all-female, artistic ferment is on view right now in Kabul galleries, where women painters from all over the country are putting on canvas their perspectives on the world. One group show in particular – Fade to Black – is attracting global attention and acclaim.
“It’s long past time the world heard the voices of Afghan women,” commented Sotheby’s contemporary art specialist Franchetta Settembrini. “Until now, we’ve known little of the specific outlook and experiences of this hidden population. Now they’ve emerged, to tell their story on museum walls, and I’ve found it exhilarating.”
“The movement reminds me of the famous ape artist in the Jardin des Plantes,” she continued. “Vladimir Nabokov was inspired by the ape’s story, and talked about it in an interview about Lolita.” ([“I was] prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”)
Settembrini announced a forthcoming catalogue (BACK TO BLACK: STUDIES IN MESH) featuring the most prominent of Kabul’s neo-impressionists. “Few lay on total cave darkness as masterfully as X,” Settembrini remarked. “X has the technique, vision, and sheer physical strength to place layer after ‘noir’ layer on the canvas.”
X? “Oh, they’re all X. Wouldn’t want to get beheaded, would we?”
Bidding for a single X Series painting will begin at $500,000.
What if they gave a country and nobody came?
We cannot control ideas or speech and should not attempt to do so even if we could. But we could reduce access to the weaponry that converts ideology into atrocity. At least, other advanced countries find themselves able to do so. Almost every country on Earth has citizens filled with vitriol, but no comparably advanced country has a gun-violence epidemic quite like America’s…
[T]he American exception that bathes this country in blood and grief again and again and again is not that we are uniquely susceptible to racism or jihadism or veganism. The American exception is the unique ease of access to weapons.
…Americans die by the gun in such terrible numbers because Americans live by the gun with such reckless disregard.
… that, but the Pennsylvania Republican slate can also purchase guns.
