Trump simply exploited what people were already feeling—feelings that, according to the data, are rooted in authoritarianism, racism, and social dominance orientation. He was always about a “vibe,” and that vibe was to hurt the people his audience thought should be hurt... [T]here is a strong, underlying desire for an authoritarian fascist to rule the country and … even those who aren’t true believers [will] simply go along with it, or disbelieve it altogether. These perfectly nice, ordinary, generous, pleasant people are no different from any German in 1933–1945…  Trump [is] merely the invitation. He [is] an outlet for an unspoken desire to seize control and remake the nation, hurting the people who [need] it along the way.  

Hurt, hurt, hurt. Yet the author titles this piece NICE ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN BE FASCISTS.

Which is it, babe? Is it nice to be a sadist? Me no think so.

I’d put it this way: Sadists can behave themselves a lot of the time, but they’re still sadists; and non-sadists, even in ‘nice’ dealings with sadists, may well sense the sadism.

There’s plenty of evidence, for instance, that the daughter in law of the nation’s sadist-in-chief, perky pleasant Lara Trump, is an extreme sadist, deriving real pleasure from the spectacle of hurt and humiliated people.

She will soon chair the Republican National Committee. Put her name in my search engine.

Indeed so intimately, so thrillingly attuned is her sadism to that of her father in law that UD feels sure we will eventually learn she and he have been going at it hammer and tongs and zip ties for years. I’ve seen and heard enough of Lara Trump to identify her as a pervert who, like Trump himself, shouldn’t be broadcast during family hours. But most people still see the perky mask.

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Edward Albee once wrote that his plays condemn “complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity; [they are] a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” His hyper-sadistic masterwork, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, considered by many the greatest American play of the later twentieth century, describes Americans (he names his two main characters George and Martha) as rage-filled self-loathers, pacifying their disgust at their stupid existence – everyone’s stupid existence – with alcohol, and, when that fails, attacking one another with a viciousness that definitely intends to destroy. Donald Trump is a kind of savior for these (tens of millions of) people – He’s doing their dirty work for them every day, eviscerating the world at a much higher level than they ever could.

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Like many of the most fervent evangelicals, these people just want the fucking shitty world to end, and they correctly identify Trump as the one who will get them there.

UD loves the phenom whereby the most bogus, most fraudulent, most stinky clinics and schools give themselves SOOOOPER religious names in an effort, I guess, to throw the government off the scent. Holy Health is scuzzy top to bottom but holy holy holy is their name. Sacred Heart of Jesus Most High Mighty Glorious Pure and Exalted Preparatory School (or whatever) exists solely to sell pretend high school degrees to flunkies whose sports skills have attracted the attention of college recruitment coaches.

But if even UD is on to the con, don’t you think the smarties at the DOJ etc are too? Me, if I were an investigator, I’d START with the holiest of holies.

Sports writers are outdoing themselves, describing the merdique behavior last week.

 At 1:28 pm, the stadium’s more sober patrons were already about seven drinks deep. They or their employers had paid good money — in some cases down-payment-on-a-house money — to see something depraved. A streaker who was still wearing pants wasn’t going to cut it… [In] the haze of Topo Chico strawberry guavas, Miller Lites and vodka sodas, the weed, the rain and the mud, the hooting, howling, and the grabassing, no one could be sure they were at a professional sports event. Every other data point suggested that, in reality, they had slipped into exactly where they wanted to be: a black hole of feral manhood… [T]he 10-drink cutoff was a very gentle suggestion. Bartender after bartender told group after group, “If you take care of me, I’ll take care of you.” I watched several men in their 40s and 50s tip hundred-dollar-bills after each round, and their wristbands were never scanned. For many, 10 soon became 20, which became face-planting into a urinal… To visit the toilets was to realize fully that no sporting event embodies its name as cosmically as the Waste Management Open. They stood in an unlit room at the end of a long, wet, musty, unlit hall. By 2:00, the plastic urinals — a green, eight-foot-tall structure where four men at a time pee toward each other — were overflowing, urine spilling onto mud-soaked All Birds. Nearly every Porta Potty around the perimeter was filled with cans of hard seltzers. 

What to do? Hm. Hm.

‘The PGA Tour has continually turned a blind eye toward drinking to excess at golf events, but after this week it no longer can... And if you’re wondering how important beer and alcohol sponsorship is to the tournament, the title sponsor of the Birds Nest, the off-course drinking and concert establishment, is Coors Light and the non-title sponsor is Jamison.’

On it, sir. Right on it.

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But hey. That’s nothin.

That pesky lil thang! Always forgettin bout it.

… but PQ was on my route back to the metro from the Natural History Museum…

… where UD failed to have anything like the spiritual experience she’s been having during her early morning visits to the National Gallery of Art, West Wing.

No surprise there: The art excites, room after room, the startle of beauty, which deepens into the shock of seeing …

Which in turn reveals the human all too human in flagrante.

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And although longtime readers know UD has a thing for geology, even the most, well, aesthetic rocks

fail to … transport your blogeuse. (Granite, With Orbicular Structure, Virvik, Finland) Even the karayzzziest calcite

leaves something to be desired in the coulda knocked me over with a feather department.

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The walk to the metro featured the much in the news office of the AG.

It was also instructive to pass the ugliest building in DC – the FBI.

The unplanted, stained planters. Fun burst of color from the traffic cone. Dead concrete wall, stage left; desperate flurry of flags stage right. Chain link fencing on the second floor is a nice touch, as is the uncompromising brutalism of absolutely everything. As soon as the FBI vacates (bet the people who work there can’t wait), we can look forward to the architectural finishing touch: demolition.

Not really a chorus; a very clear messaging system from tree to tree to tree.

They’re usually high up at some distance in our forest, but for the first time I heard one piercingly close call. Just one loud guttural repeated note; not the famous who cooks for you business.

“Too dark to see it,” said Mr UD as I grabbed my binoculars.

“I’ll try anyway,” said I, scanning nearby branches.

But it flew off, signaling with cooks for you and a whole bunch of other sounds that it was changing location.

And then — at least two other owls elsewhere in the woods answered this first one, with yet other songs.

And the whole group flew off.

A former Bush advisor who specializes in communications breaks the asshole barrier when referring to Trump, and he does it bigtime: On CNN’s State of the Union.

But he is quick to say the other thing: Millions of Americans like assholes, and the more their political assholes smell of shit the better.

Millions of Russians, as we speak, are pining for Stalin; millions of Italians for Mussolini, millions of Spaniards for Franco. It ain’t just Americans.

If some clever boots (Adam Phillips?) could figure out why millions of people absolutely adore assholes and follow their stench to the ends of the earth, it might be useful/interesting.

Regardless of Mr. Hur’s motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. 

Duh. The dude’s showing his age, and you bet we’re worried.

UD has no problem, btw, with Hur having spilled the already-opened beans. In fact she’s proud of the fact that we’re the sort of democracy where non-loyalists get appointed to important positions. That’s a good thing, mes petites.

Of course she will vote for the shaky irritable old guy over “a corrupt and confused 77-year-old who’s facing trial on dozens of felony counts in four separate criminal cases and has recently been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.” But, says today’s NYT editorial, “the combination of Mr. Biden’s age and his absence from the public stage has eroded the public’s confidence. He looks as if he is hiding, or worse, being hidden.”

I say do two things:

1.) Let the guy out. Let him misspeak and trip on steps and let him laugh about this and acknowledge that though he’s doing a very good job running the country (“In the most challenging moments of his presidency, in supporting our allies when they are threatened and in steering the U.S. economy away from recession, Mr. Biden has been a wise and steady presence.”) he’s old and sometimes it shows.

2.) Send him to the Naval Medical Center (couple of miles from Les UDs) and get him an honest, legitimate cognitive workup. My guess is that he’ll do okay. Not real well, but well enough. Time to stop hiding.

With its echt–DeLillo name and its alcohol-everywhere setting, the Phoenix Waste Management Open golf tournament has postmodern pandemonium written all over it.

I’m thinking a contingent of yesterday’s shitkickers was just coming off of the big Trump rally where he encouraged Russia to do whatever the hell it wants to NATO countries that underpay their dues. Fuck em! Kill ’em! This way-roused the crowd, a portion of which, still fired up, then moved on to the big golf game.

Whooooooops.

[O]n Wednesday, the Brevard County [Florida] school board held a meeting, in part to discuss a challenge to the books The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five. Only one Moms for Liberty member showed up.

All the other attendees spoke in favor of keeping the books on the shelves—and heavily criticized the parental rights organization. One attendee compared “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” in The Kite Runner to “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.”

UN Reno’s new engineering dean owns a business – a bogus journal that for a couple hundred bucks a pop from its, er, contributors, will pump out, say, a seven-sentence article with five authors.

No questions asked. Publication faster than you can say No peer review.

Many of the articles were authored by said dean, his son, and his son’s wife – the sort of family affair that puts UD in mind of Italian university departments where much of the faculty shares the same last name (“The University of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, springs to mind. The economics faculty must seem like a home from home for Professor Lanfranco Massari as he bumps into sons Lanfranco Jr, Gilberto and Giansiro, or his five grandchildren who work in the same department.”).

Nosy Andrew Gelman, hailing from a respectable university, brought the whole We Are Family thing to the attention of UNR’s student paper, which, as it takes down a dean, should be a contender for the same Pulitzer as that kid at Stanford.

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You know what’s gonna happen, right? After an indignant defense of the miscreant, the school takes forever to investigate. Eventually it issues a statement downplaying it all (“… made some mistakes…”), and then in a year or so it ever so quietly removes the dude from the deanship but keeps him in the engineering dept at the same salary (close to $400,000) he made as dean. Ta da!

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UPDATE: Students who spend $1,499 for Jones’s three-hour RFID certification course receive a free copy of his [self-published] book …

Gets better and better.

… at Drunk Shakespeare’s Macbeth. UD attended, with La Kid, this evening.

Monsieur Macho represented himself in his trial for defaming climate change scientist Michael Mann cuz NOT ONLY IS CLIMATE CHANGE A HOAX BUT … BUT… BUT … MICHAEL MANN IS JUST LIKE A PEDERAST!

And not just any pederast – Jerry Sandusky!

Mark Steyn has to pay Mann one million dollars.

… flaunt it!

Then go to jail.

“Nir spent more money than God,” said a former HFZ employee. “No one was clear where the money was coming from. What success had the company realized that we were unaware of?” Feldman’s complaint against Meir alleges that Meir’s monthly American Express bill often exceeded $400,000. Meir spent hundreds of thousands on wine and kept a stable of luxury cars including five Mercedes G-Class wagons and a 1996 Porsche 911 Turbo valued at $300,000.

Bad boy.