The Don

We would be ignorant as The Don
That has looked down
And called us old and ugly clowns
Fat short grotesque buffoons
We love the withered man who saw
Past our pathetic ruse
And recognized our love of self-abuse
The girls freak out when The Don comes
And calls them animals and scum
We would be ignorant as The Don
Who upright stood loosing a gob of spit upon
Our raised expectant faces
We would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw —
Ignorant and wanton as The Don

Buyer’s remorse has more than a few Trump donors looking to cancel their recurring donations.

But the Trump website won’t let you. (Hillary’s will.) ‘Tis in vain, says Vanity Fair:

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that donating money to a political candidate is a form of free speech. Imagine being forced to scream for an hour once a month, and you get a pretty good idea what disillusioned Trump supporters must be going through.

Here’s the right way to look at it. Your unstoppable donation to America’s Übermensch is part of the hideous Eternal Recurrence in every human existence. Nietzsche argued that the strongest person, the person most able to affirm life, is able to say Everything in my life – all the suffering and confusion and humiliation – if you told me I would have to live it over and over and over again, I would rejoice to do so!

It is only the weak who, like Woody Allen, say:

Nietzsche … said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

Your donation to Donald Trump is your Ice Capades.

Be strong.

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UD thanks dmf.

… about an allegedly corrupt school superintendent in Florida, you know that lots of people in that system must have been aware of his activities for years, but until a brave administrator finally called him on it (she has already been “locked out of her school district email and can no longer access her data”) he just kept at it. I mean, it’s Florida… He must have figured…

And he did enjoy a long run. You can sort of trace the guy getting more and more imperial as time went on, to the point where he was allegedly “forcing staff to write papers that he used to complete his Master’s Degree.” He’s also alleged to have, with astonishing abandon, labeled students learned disabled, since the system gets extra funding with each such student.

Also, since you don’t have to include these students in determining graduation rates, graduation rates look much better…

I like the eugenicky feel of this guy, with his manipulation of populations for the betterment of his budget and his salary (higher degrees earn you more). UD is settling in for what will certainly be Further Tales of the Superintendent.

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

PS: The Superintendent comes from an interesting family. His old man, Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant, is famous for alerting the citizenry that the people behind the Common Core idea want “every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”

His mom’s pissed because she and the old man were just found guilty of Homestead Exemption Fraud – onaccounta they claimed the exemption for a property they don’t, you know… exactly live in.

Madame Van Zant’s defense is a real brain twister. UD‘s been swirling it around in her head for some time. Although the property has sat abandoned for eight years,

“We’ve been anticipating moving back very shortly for a long time,” she said.

This reads to UD like one of those Chomskyian sentences you need to diagram, but even after you diagram them they don’t yield up their meaning…

From his USA Today article about the Rio Olympics:

[T]he IOC accepted pledges [from Brazil] that were almost laughable in their implausibility, like transforming the polluted bay into a model of water treatment purity in a few years. After pledging $1 billion to clean up its cesspool, Rio later announced it would cut that budget down to around $51 million. One Brazilian expert put it simply, “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Typos matter.

… Wisconsin.

“The financial-services people, as much as many of them would like to see more deregulation, are also deeply frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency,” [Elizabeth] Warren said. “Nuclear war is bad for business.”

… barrier.

… Disorders, with its at-least-one-guaranteed-billable-disorder-for-every-American (put DSM in my search engine), but she has never denied that in cases of grossly obvious and damaging psychological imbalance it can provide clarity about characteristics and treatment.

Representative Karen Bass, a politician with a background in health care, has launched a petition calling on “mental health professionals to publicly urge the Republican party to conduct an evaluation of Mr. Trump and officially determine if he is mentally fit to lead the free world.” Citing in detail the DSM’s criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Bass suggests that Trump seems indeed to have been so debilitated by NPD that he should be replaced at the top of the ticket — pending professional confirmation of his condition.

… campaign.

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

Plenty of private rooms available.

Funny, you’re a team that likes raping.
That’s a disturbing sign.
Funny, but you also like stalking.
Waco, isn’t it? Baylor, isn’t it?

…poetry.

…Twilight Zone.

UD has already employed Sartrean nausea to evoke the feelings of many of us in this election cycle (go here); now the President of France, Francois Hollande, has made things more explicit.

Trump’s excesses, Hollande said in a press conference this afternoon, “make you want to retch.” The verb there was “vomir,” which makes all sorts of sense; but, expanding on his theme, Hollande also referred to said excesses giving him haut-le-coeur.

Who knew that in French the beautiful phrase high heart actually means ready to puke?

Scathing Online Schoolmarm reminds you to learn the difference between lack of interest and disinterest. The incorrect use of disinterest in this opening sentence of a Politico piece has its authors saying the opposite of what they mean. Not a good way to start an article.

SOS realizes that some dictionaries use, as a second definition for disinterest, the state of not being interested in something. But really she would argue that the first and only meaning of disinterest is the condition of being neutral about something.

The constant misuse of disinterested for uninterested is breaking down a very useful distinction of meaning.

To be uninterested is to be lacking in any sense of engagement with the matter:
Sallie is uninterested in algebra.

To be disinterested is to lack bias:
Let the company call in a disinterested mediator to settle the dispute.

Republican candidates are not neutral in regard to campaigning with Trump; on the contrary, they are strikingly biased against campaigning with him. They are “expressing a growing lack of interest in hitting the campaign trail” with him. They are not cool calm collected and above it all in the way of, say, a disinterested judge; they’re actively sweating at the prospect of being even remotely identified with Trump. They are the very opposite, in other words, of disinterested parties.