Get used to it.

Where humility is the greatest of the virtues.

A mother of school age kids worries about an already benighted state censoring hundreds of classic literary and historical works — I mean, they’re basically dismantling their school libraries down there…

Choosing to be dumber rather than smarter is, I guess, odd; but some people’s motives seem to ol’ UD pretty clear. If what props you up in life is the inerrancy of the Bible, the errancy of vaccines, and the advantages of authoritarianism over democracy you’re not gonna want to disturb that scaffolding.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach [out] to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

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Too right. But UD ain’t optimistic about things changing.

Yeah, well a kid already died of measles because unfortunately for the kid he/she lived in a state that thinks freedom means ignoring everything primitive cults within the state do (go, Texas!) — wouldn’t want to interfere with the fringe-Mennonite cluster out there that doesn’t educate or vaccinate its children. Too cute! Leave ’em be! It’s Trump DEI.

And just wait til a lot of other anti-vaxxers in Texas and New Mexico get a load of the effects of HUGELY contagious measles on their children.

Yes look out one of this country’s midget Madoffs is about to get sprung! See my 2009 post about psychogreedbeast (go to ‘Assets’) Marc Dreier, who served sixteen of the twenty years he got for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from I guess the same cohort that thought investing in Bernie M. would be a good idea. He’s featured prominently among the clemencied in this roundup:

Several white collar offenders are among those receiving clemency, including notorious BigLaw Ponzi schemer Marc Dreier, formerly of Dreier LLP, who in 2009 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling forged promissory notes and stealing from clients, in a scheme that cost investors and clients $400 million.

As the judge in his case pointed out, he got caught before he was able to steal Madoffian billions, so couldn’t be sentenced to 150 years like Bernie; but I’m not sure freeing him short of his full sentence was a good look, especially because the old guy no doubt has even at this late date much more larceny in him. Lock up your money.

A fifteen year old student packed heat at the school; mere days before, a fight involving a pretty large number of Bethesda Chevy Chase high school students plus gunfire took place in the middle of Bethesda. As administrators/security begin to crack down, they will certainly discover that the gangs at the school and/or isolated mentally disturbed students bring guns to campus on a regular basis.

But will there be a crackdown? Does BCC have, like, a principal? Is this person doing anything?

Authorities said they found 47 weapons, including the gun from Ferguson’s ankle holster, and more than 26,000 rounds of ammunition at the home.

Ugh.

What can I say. In America, that’s how you define a successful gathering of college students.

Friday for a change a little more lockdown…

The song is beautifully written and scored, Flack’s piano has the right drift/heft for the theme, and of course her strong expressive voice carries exactly the power and pathos the poetry of the piece demands.

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At this late date, UD has lost much of her tolerance for pathos; as she has explained on this blog, she now prefers movies that feature crowds of terrified Manhattanites fleeing monsters (see Cloverfield) to films where you actually have to get to know suffering particular individuals. But for this hugely pathos-ridden song (its triple-sads usually only work when floating on a torrent of vitriol/wit) UD still makes an exception – maybe because, again, at this late date, the words evoke much-beloved actual thwarted young men living and dead (for instance, her ‘thesdan playmate David).

see the sudden smile

someone they can hold

for just a little while…

while a grimy moon

blossoms up above

all the sad young men

they cry

and making love and making love

misbegotten moon

shine for sad young men

let your gentle light

guide them home again

all the sad sad sad young men

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How powerfully she sustains the final me-e-e-n…! How she brings erotic comfort to fierce lost souls. Only the very best performers can save this song from its almost unbearable – almost inartistic! – pathos. Roberta Flack – RIP – could do that.

Sorry. Her widower has told anyone who will listen that she had severe, longstanding, mental illness marked in particular by profound clinical depression. I’m sure it’s true that no one was capable of imagining she’d shoot bullets directly into the heads of her four children; but just as surely her husband, and her close friends like you, were aware that she manifested the perfect confluence of symptoms for suicide/attempted suicide. Anyone with eyes in her head would have taken one look at the loaded weapons in that house and tried to remove them.

I hear you. In Wyoming, even with no weapons inside, she only needed to stroll to the sidewalk in front of her house and ask any of the passersby dripping with Destroyer Carbines if she could borrow one for a sec. But this unusual behavior might at least have tipped off her two older daughters that mommy was really losing it now and they should flee.

UD‘s sick, in this blood-soaked country, of people, post-massacre of the innocents, looking everywhere — nasty mysterious God, the lethal difficulty of childrearing — but at the fucking guns.

A full week!

Leopold Bloom does a fart walk through Dublin at the end of the Sirens chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff. Oo. Rrpr.

Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. Written. I have.

Pprrpffrrppfff.

Done.

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A century plus later modern science informs us that an evening fart walk should be part of our health regime. And not only that.

There are alternatives to fart walks as well. As long as the physical activity is vigorous enough but not too vigorous, it can suffice. So, fart texting, for example, probably doesn’t move enough of your body around enough. But fart cycling (as long as it is not too vigorous), fart yoga, fart squats, fart lunges or fart marching could do the trick.