… the UM faculty pages, and that’s because the school is as slow at 404ing as it is responding to fraudulent research. Professor Lestat… er, Lesne, has resigned in disgrace after heading up multiple dirty Alzheimer’s studies. It’s all the rage.

LOL. We all enjoy watching a tool who used to tool around in a $300,000 Ferrari fall totally and publicly to pieces. It’s interesting and even feels sort of instructive to watch the self-decimation of a compulsive liar/gambler/asshole etc etc etc.

Better too when he splats, with cartoon loudness, from a great height (Supreme Court arguments! Akin Gump!).

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But where is Alan Dershowitz, Guardian Angel of the Gruesome, in all of this? Shouldn’t he be rushing to the defense of the great and good Tom Goldstein, down the street neighbor (okay he lives a couple of miles away) of none other than Les UDs? “The Justice Department harassment of this man is nothing more than envy of success.” UD predicts that’s the next thing that happens to this uber-greedy, tax-evading, income-hiding, fake-jobs-creator-for-his-bedmates, little shit. Alan Dershowitz to the rescue.

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But no. He’s going to represent himself.

Which can be risky (see 3:57)

A heady mix of martinis, machine guns, and masses of paying underage partiers (no guest list – you simply respond to flyers advertising it all over town) just exploded — whodathunkit? — into mortal combat! A sixteen year old is dead, and a bunch of other kids are injured, and somebody filmed the fun, with tons of people racing and screaming down the driveway into the night.

Here’s the house, in case you also want to pack a bunch of armed strangers into a random unguarded location and get them drunk.

As with the late-night lounge massacres UD tracks on this blog, the megamansion massacres have become routine; but just as no one wants to shut down the lounges, so no one seems interested in messing with the bullet-spewing big houses.

Maybe the extremely wealthy neighbors of mansions like this one? Does it bother them a tad?

UD also wonders about the people who build insanely massive houses like this one. Did they intend for some rich person to buy it, and when that didn’t happen they decided to rent it out to swarms of teenage shooters? Me don’t get it.

The gang used to be a recognized JMU fraternity, but its lethality/perversity was too much even for a southern frat school, so JMU took away its recognition. Right away, under a different name, and now free from school rules, the frat reconstituted itself and kept up the killing.

It killed two members, and one would-be member, in a car crash, and the parents of the dead boys are suing the gang and each of its members.

JMU should have taken action against the reconstituted gang as soon as it learned of it. As twisted as it is for a university to have to police and surveil itself in this way, if you’re going to let frats go wild on your campus, as JMU notoriously has, you have an obligation to understand that eventually one or more of these groups is going to go very seriously rogue, and that before multiple students of yours are drugged unconscious, dumped in a car, and driven into a tree, you need to rid your campus of the killers.

Au contraire. We’re all poo-pooing the food here. We have no choice.

Salman Rushdie Attacker will not get Fair Trial as Jury has No Muslims, says Lawyer

Fielding Mellish got there first.

The Post’s coverage of the big game reminds me why I don’t subscribe.

Ah cmon wheres yalls sense of fun.

You sleep, and the white noise is gunshots... That’s fucking poetic.

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How I stay young!

Willie Ann, 81 … has a routine for gunshots. She reaches for her cane, tries to rush toward a carpeted floor near her bed and gently lies down on her right side, where her arthritis does not flare up. When the shooting stops, she reaches for the top of the bed and hoists herself up.

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And remember: Always have more than one sofa.

During drive-by shootings, neighbors wedge themselves between sofas.

… Pelzman Age.

… stripped pretendian Buffy Sainte-Marie of the Order of Canada.

UD lives for this shit. See also.

This passage from Love’s Work, Gillian Rose’s meditation on love and death, comes to mind as I read about the creeping, escalating de-creation of the island of Santorini, where “homes break apart” in the earthquakes.

Rose’s own disaster – the cancer that would kill her at 48 soon after she finished Love’s Work – generated her argument that life was best lived as an agon, an unceasing passionate losing heroic beautiful struggle toward clarity, justice, and bliss, against the forces of if you like subduction — error/fault, leading to destruction and death.

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UD’s favorite poem, James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, dances just this passionate expiring dance on the most beautiful of the world’s islands (Santorini is insanely beautiful because of its history of unimaginable natural catastrophe) at the very end of the long verse. The poet/poem dances

a grave dance - as if catastrophe
could long be lulled

A grave dance – serious, but also morbid, a dance danced over the centuries of bodies that lie under the island’s volcanic catastrophes. Merrill, visiting the island just having had his own radiation therapy for a cancer on his foot, is dancing on his own grave, and he is as much aware as Rose that the special spiritual passion ignited by the aesthetic bliss of being on gorgeously morbid/passionate Santorini merely damps for a time the subterranean fires. “No foothold on the void,” writes Merrill.

Or not really merely. If Rose and Merrill are right, that lulling dance over one’s grave is the finest expressive substance of our lives, the best that existence has to offer.

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Merrill’s poem is obsessed with the business of boundaries, of avoiding both the crippling madness of what he calls “psychic incontinence,” when you let too much of the world in and are overwhelmed, and “cemented boundaries,” when, in terror of the fires that underlie, you close off the self in self-protection. [Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness, Saul Bellow’s Herzog thinks as he regards his aunt’s non-life balking death through sheer inactivity. Between the madness of too much and the deathliness of too little you find most of us working our way toward how much of our aliveness – to quote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips – we can bear:

[E]verybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves… We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem, in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. Drinking becomes a problem, but actually the problem is what’s being cured by the alcohol. By the time we’re adults, we’ve all become alcoholics. That’s to say, we’ve all evolved ways of deadening certain feelings and thoughts. One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense — as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us. It reminds us of sensitivities that we might have lost at some cost. Freud gets at this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It’s as though one is struggling to be as inert as possible — and struggling against one’s inertia.

Santorini is always reconstituting itself amid the undermining that is its own violent, beauty-making dissolution, and this is the ideal the poet pursues for himself and for us. The poet “tighten[s] by a notch/The broad, star-studded belt Earth wears to feel/Hungers less mortal for a vanished whole.” This is Rose again: Stop hungering for a vanished whole; you and Santorini are nothing but gorgeous fragments, and that contingency is all you ever will be. Be like the poet and stud the earth with aesthetic jewels:

Our lives unreal
Except as jeweled self-windings

The poet’s words on windy Santorini are

bellowed to recycle
The bare, thyme-tousled world we’d stumbled on

We bejewel the bareness; we break what’s frozen, or quench the fires. Silent Santorini can only live in

imbecile 
Symbiosis with the molten genie

Our symbiosis is verbal. Ours are self-windings – they emerge from our human individual expressive battles between stasis and agon; and what our noblest battles produce will be the spoken truth of the broken beauty of being.

With RFK jr incoming, this is just the beginning!

Not only did no one at a New Haven area abattoir report a bloody shooting there to the police; even the owners are refusing to talk to authorities.

UD is aware that she needs to adjust her brain cells — Guns are everywhere and shootings boringly routine. Why report them. Why be surprised when no one reports them.