What, you ask, is the opposite of a DeLillo death?

Man Dead after Gun Discharges

in Parking Lot at Dolly Parton’s Stampede

in Pigeon Forge

Vermont: Where you’re never too crazy to…

… hit people in the head and threaten to shoot them with the 9-millimeter gun you own. In a hospital’s emergency department.

Many certifiable lunatics are shooting at us. Ask the White House Correspondents.

Little Miss Rural Vermont and SOOOO many like her get little to no press coverage. But they’re busy resolving their rage issues at the local hospital and environs as we speak. Take care.

‘[I]nitially the correspondents’ association said it intended to continue the event. The idea that the show would go on – that people would come out from hiding under tables in a tux after a shooting – struck a chord about the regularity of gun violence in American life.’

Walk on through the slugs, walk on through the rounds! Though your guts be tossed and blown…

So many mass shootings, constantly, the media has begun dividing them up in terms of setting.

Sunday’s shooting comes exactly a week after another mass shooting near the University of Iowa, another Midwest Big10 school.

This one, at Indiana University, happened a couple of hours ago.

So the big shot mentalist Oz Pearlman didn’t foresee gunshots at the Correspondents Dinner?

I mean, he was sitting right up there with the president and all and his sensitive equipment picked up nothing?

Fuck, man, this is America. You don’t even need sensitive equipment to anticipate bangbang in any public setting. Shopping malls are shuttering across the United States cuz of all the exchange of fire (one local reporter was cruel enough to quote a chamber of commerce person about a dying mall: “[Nancy] Hafford said the crime rate is actually on the decline, and crime should not be a deterrent for mall shoppers.”); and even the expertly surveilled power structure of the free world can’t get through a dinner without pistol play/hysterical hiding under tables. Not very seemly, but when everyone’s got a gun [current number of guns in private hands 500 million plus], what do you expect?

Surely you’re not surprised that three kids from a local private school got shot to bits cuz they went shopping at the local mall?

It’s Baton Rouge (I call it Sang Rouge)!

Lookee here. Let’s not have any fake surprise that the gunniest city in America’s gunniest state utterly expectedly produced a bunch of teenagers (ages 13 – 16? I’m guessing.) butchering the innocent.

Sang Rouge is SOOO bloody, so beyond bloody, so bodaciously bloodsoaked! Nuther big mass bloodletting jest tuther day (in Shreveport; those victims were from a few months to eight years old) in that dripping red state; and now Massacre at the Mall.

Hold onto your hats – gonna be a lot more Louisiana blood running red.

Politicians have hired speechwriters to come up with new ways for them to say Message: I care but fuck gun laws. “Draft 52 distinct tweets for me – one for every week of the year. No redundancy and keep it Christian.”

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

Some nice detail here:

After shots echoed through the food court and sirens began blaring outside, shoppers sprinted out of the mall. Some women donned nylon capes as they darted out of the JCPenney hair salon, their hair half-done.

Nylon capes is good. And this paragraph answers the question What do Baton Rougeans do for exercise? Sprinting, darting.

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

“We’re not going to have this in Baton Rouge,” says the mayor. Babe, you’ve had it for years and you’ll have it til the next Great Mississippi Flood washes the city away.

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

Court records show that during a hearing Tuesday, Commissioner Jermaine Guillory allowed Washington to stop wearing a GPS ankle monitor and instead placed him on telephone-based supervision.

It’s beautiful to watch how no gun laws plus morally degenerate judges work together to insure that bloodthirsty bastards remain in circulation. Hat tip also to this gunny’s high school, which seems not to have expelled him despite a criminal history that included stealing a gun that went off inside a classroom.

”Guillory said when the 18-year-old returns to court in July, he wants to see him with his high school diploma, a job, safe, healthy and out of jail.” Ain’t dat sweet!

He’s on the state bar board of governors! An inspiration to us all.

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

Oh. Well! Why didn’t you say so in the first place, Guillory?

‘The few people inside the mall Monday told The N&O that shoppers will likely shy away from Triangle Town Center in the wake of the violence, but they also noted that both Crabtree Valley Mall and Streets of Southpoint in Durham have experienced shootings.’

LOLOLOL.

For Earth Day…

… Tracy Nelson, Mother Earth.

“When kids see people from diverse religions and ethnic groups, we teach them respect. We teach them tolerance. …. By limiting the people they’re exposed to, we are also limiting that tolerance and awareness and respect.”

Weawy? Are you sure? This hijabi, who runs a hijab-heavy day care center in Montreal, counsels us that restricting almost-total face and body veiling at public centers like hers is naughty and bigoted and will turn out insufficiently tolerant people. When young girls see other young girls, and older women, swathed en masse because they think God tells them that women and only women should hide themselves because otherwise they will inflame the raging lust of men… Is this sort of reasoning worthy of our respect? Does it tend to produce an egalitarian society?

Babe, as soon as people can start to reason for themselves (assuming they’re being raised to reason rather than obey their imam) they can perceive the regression of the burqa/hijab in the context of a free and equal liberal order.

Wow. The New Orbanism became the Old Orbanism real fast.

Even in the pages of theocrat-friendly First Things, they’re already pissing on Viktor’s grave…

I mean, dat was fast. Integralism, with its coercive religious state replacing liberal democracy, is not even being afforded a proper funeral, for chrissake, and both its Menchevik and Bolshevik wings are flailing. Orban was their ticket to a gender-adjusted, permapreg USA, and now the Federalist Fertility Clinic is leaking sperm deposits out of every pore. GOING OUT OF WHIZNESS.

Orbán’s illiberal democracy, which he has spent the past sixteen years embedding in the institutions and culture of Hungarian national life, looks set to be dissolved by a successor keen to embrace all the European Union diktats Orbán’s ascendancy was predicated on opposing. On how a postliberal order can be developed into a society organized around material and spiritual virtue, integralism has few convincing answers. On how such an order would be maintained against the vicissitudes of democracy, it has no answers. 

Well, that last question at least has an answer. Duce Waldstein will burn at the stake as many heretics as it takes to maintain God’s kingdom.

And hey look at the dude’s last paragraph. Turns out – wait for it -the secular liberal state is your best bet if you want to be a big ol’ Catholic! Whodathunkit.

Integralists will not like hearing it, but there is already a means by which to live faithfully, extol the doctrines of the Church, and contribute to the forging of a common good society. Their old enemy, liberalism, properly understood, gives the Catholic holder of public office the freedom to live a life integrated to the eternal verities and ordered to virtue, while exercising temporal power under the law with ex officio neutrality, and promoting a culture conducive to religious devotion in which the faithful are secure from coercive state secularism. It is an imperfect model, it does not always deliver victory, and its concepts and mechanisms have been directed to un-Christian and anti-Christian ends and will be again. That is all the more reason to fight for the proper understanding and application of liberalism, and thus the right and ability of the faith to flourish in “enemy” territory, rather than taking the political Catholic tradition out of the mainstream and into the coercive, authoritarian fringe. 

Granddad would be so …

proud.

Honored to have inherited from my friend Susan…

… her wonderful Joyce collection, accumulated over many decades.

Yup. Every single one of ‘em. That y’all and shut ma mouth land. The Land of the Rising Gun.

Mass shootings in 2026

Incident DateStateCity Or CountyAddressVictims KilledVictims InjuredSuspects KilledSuspects InjuredSuspects ArrestedOperations
April 19, 2026LouisianaShreveport355 W 79th St82100N/A
March 22, 2026TexasAmarillo1901 NW 14th Ave44100N/A
February 28, 2026TexasEdinburg10500 block of Hwy 10742000N/A
February 10, 2026FloridaSarasota4822 Fallcrest Cir60100N/A
February 7, 2026TexasPlainview2700 block of Upchurch St40100N/A
January 23, 2026GeorgiaLawrenceville1031 Brook Ivy Ct40001N/A
January 9, 2026MississippiCedarbluff123 David Hill Rd60

Another staggeringly obvious gun-loving loon wanders through no-gun-laws Louisiana drunk, getting arrested a lot, challenging people at gunpoint, telling do-nothing relatives he’s seriously fucked up…

.. and, once he reaches the breaking point he TOLD people he was reaching, he takes one of his guns (Louisiana is certainly not going to deprive violent insane gunnies of their guns) and murders eight children.

One of them was found on a roof, having tried to escape.

‘“Repeated horrors like this don’t happen anywhere else but this country… [It is a] total moral failure.’ [Gavin] Newsom’s press office said the National Rifle Association ‘and their lackeys in Congress are complicit in this madness.’”

Ah, Shreveport. Ah, Louisiana. Insane massacrists go down as easy as a mint julep in ol’ Shreveport, Land of the Rising Gun.

Dominedominedomine let’s pray our little heads off.

Ahhhh. That was great.

Back to the pistol range.

Next Page »

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

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