‘Arizona Republican audit finds

even bigger lead for Biden

in 2020 election‘

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

Republicans are looking into a possible repeat visit of the Phoenix Lights, with the use of lasers able to seek out and neutralize Trump votes.

UD’s been compiling, during this Suicide Prevention Month, the many forms of writing out of Wyoming about that state’s appalling suicide rate that never mention guns.

Though firearms are the third-most common method for attempting suicide, they are responsible for the largest share of suicide deaths because they are so lethal. Nationally, nearly two-thirds of all deaths by firearm are due to suicide, and Wyoming has had the highest rate of suicide by firearm of any state over the last 15 years. Studies have linked higher rates of gun ownership with increased risk of suicide death, but in Wyoming, which also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country, this is an unpopular topic. As Tom Morton of the Casper Star-Tribune put it in a series of articles about Wyoming’s suicide epidemic, guns and suicide are the “third rail of Wyoming culture.”

So for instance a University of Wyoming news page yesterday touted the work on Wyoming suicides of one of their psychology professors. Let’s take a look.

‘[Carolyn] Pepper’s research team at UW’s Stress and Mood Lab is using nationally collected health data to understand what factors are specific to the Mountain West’s suicide rate. The stoic, individualistic Western mindset is one possible explanation… The Stress and Mood Lab initially studied demographic factors such as age, race, urbanization level and gender. Although all of these were elevated factors in the Mountain West, they did not explain why suicide rates are so high. The research team is now shifting focus to the cultural factors of living in a state with a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality.’

Hm yes that bootstraps thing… You see it in ‘Deer Hunter’ states like Pennsylvania too, but they have strikingly fewer guns and less suicide than Wyoming…

‘“I kept thinking someday I should study suicide, but I was sure that someone was already doing this research,” Pepper says. “I waited and waited, but no psychologist was looking at suicide in Wyoming.”’

She was sure cuz… you know… when they’re dropping like flies in your state… when some counties in your state – like Platte – are just stupendously suicidal… you figure the best social scientists around are hard at work on it. But that third rail! Why bother? Just keep ignoring the Uberti in the room and you won’t piss off anyone.

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

Let’s pile on. When you add to all of this Wyoming’s insanely low covid vaccination rate, with the sort of death rate that goes along with that, you have to conclude that the whole state’s got a death wish.

… Stanislaw Soltan, features in this announcement of an upcoming conference sponsored by the National Museum, Gdańsk.

Nice work if you can get it.

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

Eastman is, somehow, both a lawyer and a senior fellow at a research institute. He’s also a disgrace to the profession. His memo [arguing that Pence should simply declare Trump re-elected] is at once rife with falsehoods, childlike in its reasoning and deadly dangerous in its proposed application. Eastman needs to face consequences. State licensing authorities should review his fitness to practice law. Congress needs to demand answers, issuing a subpoena to compel Eastman to testify if necessary. And the Justice Department must, at a minimum, open a criminal investigation to determine whether Eastman’s proposed actions constituted conspiracy to violate federal election laws. If nobody takes action, then Eastman will fade into memory as just another unhinged conspiracy theorist who proposed dangerous abuses of power to serve Trump’s whims, and then walked away unscathed.

Nice work if you can get it.

Like many Americans, UD tends to consider the US more interesting/amusing than Canada. But, curled up with Mr UD last night to watch the Canadian election returns, she heard for the first time about MLA Will Amos (shouldn’t have been the first time, but the story was, typically, under-reported here) who on a parliamentary zoom session paraded nude in front of that, er, body.

He apologized for the incident, and then, shortly afterward, on another parliamentary zoom session, he whipped it out again and peed into a coffee cup.

This time, his, uh, staff reported, he was going to receive “help for stress and time management.”

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

Yes, yes, a high-profile American journalist masturbated on a zoom session, and qua act, public self-abuse earns more points than public self-exposure/micturation. Unfortunately for us, however, Jeffrey Toobin’s lack of imaginative scope (he did the deed in front of a smattering of colleagues and interview subjects, not in front of, for instance, the US Senate) lands his act squarely in second place.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon law's bitter cruelty;
For cash still rules the Ivy Leagues, 
And rules the schools almost as good; 
It rules the fate of our dim babes
And all rich dishevelled wandering spawn.

Here’s a typical article, and believe me UD has read many of them. Not a word about taking guns away from troubled friends and relatives, or at least securing them more responsibly, or something… State by state, suicide rates track closely with gun ownership, and Wyoming also leads the nation (at the moment it trails Montana – also Suicide Central – by a bit) in gun ownership… So you’d think experts and commentators there would have what to say about all those instant death appliances lying around the house, beckoning…

But the state of Wyoming seems to consider it rude to mention that guns in that state are FAR more about suicide than self-protection or homicide. Just bad form.

He’s ABD at way-Christian Hillsdale College, and already Baylor, America’s premier Baptist University – the best campus in America for a college student to get shot at, or, if she prefers, merely raped – has hired him to teach kids how their natural God-given rights preclude the wearing of masks during pandemics.

On the first Friday of Baylor’s fall semester, a political science professor refused to wear a mask in at least one of his in-person classes, forcing the university to move the class online…. Three of the four students [Baylor newspaper] The Lariat interviewed claimed that in his first in-person class, [Stephen] Goniprow said that he refused to wear a mask and that because he wasn’t going to, he didn’t expect his students to wear them.

Fuck the state, kids! God made you free, and if you listen closely Jesus is telling you to ditch the mask.

Just as I am, without a mask
To rid my face of this I ask
To thee whose blood can heal disease
O Lamb of God, I sneeze, I sneeze

And that’s Jordan, kiddies.

[John] Wilson, who heads a Massachusetts private equity firm, is charged with paying … $1 million to buy his twin daughters’ ways into Harvard and Stanford.

“Barr Warned Trump He’d Lose Election

Because Suburban Voters Think He’s a

‘Fucking Asshole’, Book Says“

“They don’t realize there is a danger to spending more time in the operating room,” [Roberta] Clarke said. Most patients, too, she said, don’t know their doctors are performing concurrent procedures. “This is not transparent,” Clarke said.

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

Bee-dle-dee bee-dle-dee dee,

Three surgeries.

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.

Three surgeries.

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
And I’m the only surgeon!

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
I like it.
Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
Much money.
Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
The stiffs don’t know!

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
Four surgeries.

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
Five surgeries.
Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
And I’m the only surgeon.

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
You lie there.

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
You die there.

Bee-dle-dee dee dee dee.
More dough for me!

The United Kingdom’s new culture secretary has been accused of Islamophobia over her views on Muslim women and description of the burqa as a “medieval” dress code.

Accused by whom? The article doesn’t say. By the author of the article I guess, and one or two others. But since totally covering up women is way pre-medieval, the secretary is certainly guilty of medievophobia.

[Nadine] Dorries [has] called for a ban on the full-face veil.

This is added to the article to signify that, like the following miscreants, Dorries is Islamophobic:

“The following nations have introduced full or partial ban of the burqa: Austria, France, Belgium, Denmark, Bulgaria, the Netherlands (in public schools, hospitals and on public transport), Germany (partial bans in some states), Italy (in some localities), Spain (in some localities of Catalonia), Russia (in the Stavropol Krai),^[4][5][6]Luxembourg,^[7]Switzerland,^[8]Norway (in nurseries, public schools and universities),^[9]Canada (in the public workplace in Quebec),^[10]Gabon, Chad, Senegal, the Republic of the Congo, Cameroon (in some localities), Niger (in some localities),^[11][12]Sri Lanka,^[13]Tajikistan,^[14]Uzbekistan (ban on all personal religious symbols),^[15]Azerbaijan (in public schools),^[16]Turkey (in the judiciary, military and police),^[17]Kosovo (in public schools),^[18]Bosnia and Herzegovina (in courts and other legal institutions),^[19]Morocco (ban on manufacturing, marketing and sale),^[20]Tunisia (in public institutions),^[21]Egypt (in universities), Algeria (in the public workplace),^[22] and China (in Xinjiang).^[23][24]“

“Many [Islamic women] aren’t even allowed to keep their genitals,” [Dorries has written], referring to female genital mutilation (FGM), an outlawed practice in the UK. FGM predates Islam and Christianity, but is carried out by a minority of adherents to several faiths.

That’s so cute that the Al Jazeera writer puts it that way! FGM is overwhelmingly Islamic, and is practically universal in, among other places, Egypt. Check out all them 90%s, babe! Or how ’bout that 200 million? How Islamophobic to dismiss a deeply rooted, insanely popular practice that in Luxor, for instance, is carried out on newborns! Never too soon to keep a female chaste, and we know all about infantile sexuality from Freud.

Of the about three million Muslims in Britain, it is widely understood very few women wear the full-face veil, though there are no official statistics.

As with FGM, it would behoove Al Jazeera‘s writer to do a tad of research. As far back as 2007, the NYT reported that “the number of women [in England] wearing the niqab has increased in the past several years,” and the trend has continued. With England one of the last countries in Europe or Asia with no restrictions on the burqa, the place has made itself a magnet for tourists and residents who wear the burqa/niqab.

The burqa, the writer continues, only “captures the national attention when politicians or public figures comment on it.” No, the burqa captures the public attention all the time, because most citizens of liberal democracies object to it, whether or not they favor bans. The thunderous silence that has followed Dorries’ comment, and many others like it from public figures, conveys the profound unpopularity of female invisibility cloaks, abundantly on view of late in that most Islamic of places, Afghanistan.

You got our traveling band of secret clit slashers out of trouble once; but now the feds are after us again with a whole new set of charges! Alan, as pious as we, understands that God wants – demands! – circumcision as much for our girl babies as for our boy babies, and he put his whole heart and soul into our first trial. Our worry is that Alan’s personal struggle against sex trafficking charges will make him less available than he was before. But our hope is based upon the fervency of his defense of child circumcision.