… after they’ve seen the modern era?

Theocracies like Iran can can pule about purity all they like. They can even kill selected non-hijabis. Secular modernity happened, babes: try twisting your way back to pre-modernity, and you’re only going to twist yourself.

“The Islamic Republic is about to lose one of its three pillars; the other two [anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism] will also crumble in time,” writes Arash Azizi. Id est, the mandatory veiling pillar is currently a pile of dust.

… yellow stars.

This blog has long chronicled one of the most notorious pathologies of billionaires — the compulsion to generate perpetual domestic construction noise. Infinite implosion, enlargement, elaboration, further enlargement, and finally reimplosion as the results fail to satisfy, or as the municipality makes the billionaire take it all down because he was too arrogant to get permits… Then the lengthy lawsuits resulting in further, somewhat amended, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, deconstruction…

Imagine having spent a lot of money to live in a classy discreet Manhattan co-op only to discover that the hedgie next door is deep into a lifelong wall-explosion frenzy. Imagine (see my headline) living on Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto street and trying to deal not only with endless thundering construction zones but daily traffic from his illegal personal Montessori school, as well as from his restlessly coming and going non-specific serf-army. “Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said…“Except for noise and construction debris.”

Building private institutions (schools, churches, synagogues, and health clinics are popular) is another billionaire pathology, part of the paranoid journey whereby withdrawal from the public world into a hypersecure fully equipped private world completes itself.

The incoming mayor of a metropolitan area rife with billionaires and close-to-billionaires won big in the last election in part because billionaires have made themselves detestable. If Andrew Cuomo thought he could turn things around by taking gobs of money from … billionaires, he was a real idiot for thinking so.

We could spend time, I guess, analyzing the root causes of the two behaviors that make everyone who shares their world hate billionaires – total withdrawal from the public realm without the decency to shut up about it. The rest of us must hear and witness the cacophony of their world-contempt, their mad, haughty, removal from humanity. Howard Hughes had nothing on these guys. But he in his day was a one-off. In places like NY and CA they constitute a society – a loud, rule-flouting, society, for whom what lies outside the wall implosions exists to be ignored or exploited.

For all its seeming withdrawal, the ethos is one, obviously, of naked aggression.

A cool ten million is awarded to the elementary school teacher bloodied almost to death by her six year old student, a demented child in possession of a gun his now-jailed mother made available to him.

The assistant principal who ignored an obviously lethal situation will… what? Find ten million dollars? So the legal stuff will drag on.

It’s always a big story when one of our football gods kills himself. A very young NFL player who recently scored his first career touchdown, Marshawn Kneeland wore his mother’s ashes around his neck. Was he unable to get past her death?

Next thing you know he’ll say we shouldn’t have trillionaires; and today’s Elon’s big day!

Password to Louvre’s Video Surveillance System was ‘Louvre’, According to Employee

Florida’s gunny venues power-wash the sidewalk blood right away after shootouts, but Ohio is slower. So here you’ve got this guy who lives across from a Cincinnati abattoir-hookah club complaining that it’s still all red and smeary outside when he gets up in the morning. It’s like that scene in War of the Worlds when the hero goes outside and the aliens have gooped all the trees.

Headline of the day.

Republican Mike Lawler plugs ‘lying sack of shit’ Andrew Cuomo for NYC mayor — as ‘lesser of two evils’ over Mamdani

Sing it.

The Prince to me a royal pain doth give,
So saith the throne, else cannot live.
To see the fairest Fergie ne’er again!
Oh yay oh yay (etc.)

A King who reigns, yet keeps his brother nigh,
Must love reject where power best apply
To keep the crown from ruin once again.
Oy veh, oy veh (etc.)

Embedded in his lust, Prince Andrew would instead
Much rather be dethron’d upon his bed,
But once beneath the royal counterpane,
The princeling by his ruler, Sex, is slain,
And so he must be booted to Bahrain.
Inshallah, Inshallah (etc.)

The footage, which WTKR has chosen not to release, depicts a frenzied, bloody scene, with [Abigail] Zwerner lying on the ground while officers perform life-saving measures.

Four different people came forward with concerns to [Vice Principal Ebony] Parker about the student on the day of the shooting, the lawsuit alleges.

During opening statements, [the teacher’s attorney] claimed that Parker did not act on her authority to search the student or remove him from school…