‘An estimated 32 million children in the United States live in homes with firearms, nearly 7 million of whom have at least one firearm in the household that’s unlocked and loaded.’

All universities have sandblast embarrassments.

This blog has covered tons of schools on the receiving end of what turn out to be criminal donations.

When the eminent donor, whose name may emblazon an entire school, emerges into the light of day as a dirty little rat, there’s much to be done. Sandblast his name, for sure; but damage control will be far more than this. There’s not merely the obvious pr disaster to negotiate; there’s the matter of the school now having to return what might be tens of millions of buckaroos. That hurts.

Temple University for some reason is always blasting its walls, rescinding its honorary degrees, and forcing bad boys off the board of trustees.

The latest miscreant.

That was March of this year, and, if you read the whole thing, the feds were already sniffing around.

They got him.

Orpheus with his loot made trees   
And the mountain tops that freeze   
  Bowed themselves when he did bring   
To massive plants and flowers   
Private jets and rotorcraft, as sun and showers 
  There had made a lasting spring.   
  
Everything was brought by crane  
E’en the baobabs of Barbary.
  We shook our heads and then lay by.   
In grasping music is such art, 
  Prompting care and grief of heart … 
  We fall silent, or hearing, die. 

https://poets.org/poem/orpheus-0

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/style/the-latest-wealth-flex-big-trees.html

… or you think this a twisted and destructive point of view. You think the message this transmits to a child – your primary identity is as a dark sexual object which, for the sake of erotically uncontrolled men, must be veiled – is wounding and perverse. You also think, more generally, that parents have no right to impose things like porny veiling on children who have no say in the matter.

For folks like UD, and for the people of Austria, a hijab ban on schoolgirls under 14 is an obvious and humane law, and as of a couple of days ago, it went into effect.

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Meanwhile, the dummies in England…

For background, and for ground rules, go here.

In this example, the expensive car is featured in the headline; The Grove, an expensive eatery, appears in the second paragraph, and, in many accounts, Fairfax, the expensive neighborhood where it happened, is prominently mentioned.

… Manassas.

They sue on behalf of professors whose free speech rights have been violated by mindless ideologues at universities. Professors like this computer science guy at U Wash who made fun of the land acknowledgement language that the university urged instructors to put on all their syllabi. Said jesting made somebody significant there vewy vewy mad and the school put the prof under investigation and tried to fire him for harassment blahblahblahblah.

“The University of Washington settlement shows the price of campus humorlessness.”

FIRE of course won its suit, and the university had to settle $600,000 on him — money which by rights should have gone to the head football coach, who only makes $7.5 million plus a million and a half of bonuses if he figures out how to cheat the team to respectable grades (the school’s president makes a little under a million).

‘[W]hat jobs remain in essay writing are mainly for “humanizers,” who edit papers written by A.I. to avoid detection from the cheating software used by many universities.’

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For years people considered ol’ UD … old, cuz she insisted on handing out blue books and making students write essays in class. Now of course blue books are bombing back.

‘Gas Sensors Clipped to Underwear Logged 32 Flatus Events a Day, Double the Textbook Figure’

… the church/state separation remains intact.

So much depends (to quote WC Williams) on swinish theocrats being hogtied by judges, and the way Maine recently affirmed that truth was inspirational.

A divorced mother took her 11 year old daughter to a church where the pastor told the child her father would rot in hell for eternity, which – astonishingly – severely distressed her. Ol’ Mom of course never informed her ex that she was dragging the increasingly anxious and depressed kid to these vicious precincts, though apparently the woman did tell her ex that under the guidance of this cult she would never give vaccines or antibiotics to their daughter.

The Maine courts have granted the sole parent with any mentation – any morality – sole control over religious and medical decisions.

… in Palm Beach.

Johnson’s [extensive violent] conduct was … flagged for an Extreme Risk Protection Order, which would have meant Johnson had to turn over his guns. Additional evidence review found insufficient evidence to file the ERPO.

An evidence review didn’t find sufficient blahblah. A human being reviewing the evidence didn’t find sufficient etc. Why put this sentence in the passive voice? A human being looked at an asshole with decades of gun violence on his record and said Eh. No biggie.

And you know why? You know why decades of judges and ‘officials in various county and city agencies’ didn’t take this mass killer’s guns away? Because guns in America have the same status as a pair of scissors. Everyone owns multiples of them and yeah they can bleed you or whatever but basically at this point they’re just routine domestic objects. Remember When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns? Now it’s When guns are everywhere, everyone has one. Review boards don’t even see them, if you know what I mean. Handguns are boring little geegaws, tricked out nothings all over the house and the car and who the fuck cares.

You want to know how this country gets its amazing kill rate? That’s how.

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Oh and drop “shocking” from what I quoted in this post’s title, if I may make an editorial suggestion. No one even remembers it happened 48 hours later because it’s been abundantly superseded by other atrocities.

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Those against releasing [extreme violence] data [on prospective tenants] believe it will be too restrictive for people finding a place to live.

BWAHAHAHAHA

A hotshot named Dan Ariely

For decades has been kind of smelly

His results don’t repeat

Onaccounta he cheats

And there’s more where that came from —whoa, Nellie!

Enraged, he returns to the scene of his humiliation with his Glock, blows everyone away, and, when police get too close, shoots his head off.

It’s a classic American story, and one wonders if there’s any way it might have a less bloody outcome…

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I mean, qua story it’s no good at all, since it offers no suspense: Obviously the dude will storm some location or other and kill everybody. Anyone can see that. It’s why frightened people are always throwing him out. Duh.

One judge after another has been letting him off with a couple of anger management courses, which, given his manifest danger to the public and – in the latest story – his residing in a state that actually has Extreme Risk laws – affords a bit of comic relief, I guess, but otherwise it’s a common, grim, predictable, and dullsville little tale.

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The only way it can end without multiple bodies strewn in the hallway is the judges. I mean, it seems to me it comes down to the judges. If they refuse to put this person away in some institution or other for quite a stretch of time – and this latest guy had already done more than enough to earn years off the streets – then the story plays out the way the story plays out.

We used to be close, but things got complicated and we lost touch. Our two families took a spectacular trip together to Santorini back when.

Scott’s Wallace Global Fund has always supported anti-FGM activity in Africa, and now he’s made a very high-profile contribution.

Today, a catalytic new fund supporting the frontline movement to end female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) was launched at the landmark Justice for Girls convening, a gathering of 150 movement leaders from 36 countries. Seeded with $14 million from Wallace Global Fund, Her Horizon Fund is the largest known philanthropic commitment backing the frontline organizations working to end FGM/C.

… “My mother, Gordie Wallace, devoted her life to ending FGM/C, beginning almost 50 years ago, when governments, UN organizations, and private donors were all ignoring the issue,” said H. Scott Wallace, co-chair of Wallace Global Fund’s Board of Directors. “She was inspired by the passion, courage, and commitment of the FGM/C movement and its frontline leaders, a focus that has always guided Wallace Global Fund’s grantmaking.”