She’s the woman in the blue tee. Starting at 1:40. SO PROUD.

Police say Corey B. Ward pointed a handgun at people on College Street before officers found the weapon buried in mulch.

Will be named “Lindsey” in honor of Lindsey Graham.

‘Here is the earl on his Diana book, which he has called Swan Song: “At heart, this is a brother’s simple tribute to an extraordinary sister.” Mmm. And simply bound, very simply, into paginated form as a precious, simple keepsake that also functions as one of Penguin Random House’s lead titles for autumn and the run-in to Christmas. Favourite charming tribute from today’s serialisation in the Mail? Probably the bit when Diana drags Spencer for lunch in the London restaurant San Lorenzo to announce: “My husband is in love with his valet”. Nkay.

… [J]ust as it is possible to simply get up in the morning and decide not to post something on social media that makes you look like a complete shit, it is also possible to simply not do a whole book of this stuff.’

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Marina Hyde on Charles Spencer’s new book about Diana.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master

[The loss of art is quite another matter]

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster

[Surely not “God Made the Firmament”?]

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[I lost a hall, a lovely one. And, vaster,

Oratorios are gone, their music spent.

I miss them, and their loss is a disaster.]

The writer forgets raging misogyny.

One of the billionaires whose support put Bo French over the top in his primary runs a church where women may not speak and certainly may not have anything to do with the church beyond silently appearing at Yahweh’s homestead.

They must cover their sinful flesh, with special attention to cleavage.

UD can’t detect much difference, culturally, between this and, for instance, Wahhabism, which of course this dude hates with as murderous a passion as his man Bo does. Yet he shares misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc., with reactionary Islam…

… at Chapel Hill beyond belief.

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“I’m hoping this will be the start of a conversation amongst the board members of how we can remain competitive in athletics, but not, in the long run, at the expense of the academic mission.”

LOLOLOLOL

Another fascinating auction, this one Michael Dell’s never-used Boston penthouse, bought ten years ago and empty all that time. He can’t unload it, so the opening bid is 6.5 mill – a forty percent discount over the asking price all those years ago.

”The parents had several guns, including an AR-15 rifle, that were stored unsecured.”

Cuz you never know when the final battle’s gonna blow, so you need the big artillery at the ready.

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

But, see, guns are many things. Aren’t they? Your paranoid parents see them as apocalypse-busters; you, not so much. As you get more and more pissed with ma and pa, you eye the family arsenal with affection, for therein lies your revenge for the disciplinary shit the folks dish out.

Maybe to a non-15 year old, slaughtering the whole family seems excessive, but presumably the thinking here is that once you’ve reduced your primary targets to shuddering humps of blood, you’ll need to deal with four hysterical children running around shrieking while one of them calls the police or runs to the neighbors. They’ll have to go too, which means that you create a scene every bit as apocalyptic as your parents predicted.

I mean, they had in mind government and social, while you meant domestic, but the result, as far as your parents went, was the same: the sudden bloody shutting down of their entire world.

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As for what the legal system representing by far the world’s most gunned-up location will do with an unstable kid who plucks an unsecured household annihilator and does a doomsday… Well, it’s a slow process. Two years after he did his thing, the courts are just beginning formal proceedings. Should he be tried as an adult? That’s the latest, and UD assumes the answer will be yes. But what does she know.

Hm. Hm.

… Florida Man.

Baa baa Bo French

They checked your DNA

How you look Euro

We really cannot say.

One side is Arab

A quarter’s Chinese

The rest is Texas incest

Please telephone police

The most galling part of their argument is the recurrent invocation of—and self-righteous cloaking of their argument in—the language of democracy. “The decision whether a type of arm is too dangerous for ordinary Americans to possess,” they wrote, “is one that the people are entitled to make, not one that courts are empowered to make for them.” They say this, to be clear, in a brief asking the judges of the Supreme Court to make the decision about what weapons can be possessed over the decision of voters. Because the lower courts upheld these laws, the challengers want the justices to tell the citizens of Connecticut, Chicago, and other jurisdictions like California and New York that they cannot make fundamental judgments about public peace and safety...

It seems that judges are empowered to second-guess the decision of the American people if, and only if, gun-rights proponents don’t like it. After all, the American people voted for these laws in more than a third of the country. Connecticut citizens saw an AR-15-style weapon slaughter innocent 6-year-olds and acted to expand their law. The challengers, on the other hand, would have the Supreme Court foreclose that pathway of democratic choice...

It distorts the concept of democracy to cloak oneself in the rhetoric of protecting decisions by “the people” while urging an insulated cadre of educated attorneys to tell the parents who buried their children and then devoted their lives to the prevention of gun violence to shut up and sit down; your voice and your vote do not matter here, the challengers demand the court to decree...

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson expressed the matter best when he wrote for a majority of judges upholding Maryland’s assault-weapon ban: “We shudder to imagine the hubris with which a court would disable representative government at the very moment that lethal technologies are proceeding at an accelerated and indeed unprecedented pace.”

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Spectacular writing.

By this dude.

The use of pejorative terms here (‘severely rat-infested’) by Berkeley health officials is both insensitive and offensive. The hundreds of rats in the RV mentioned were pets that the two occupants (one died of leptospirosis; the other almost did) bred; their chosen form of animal companionship, while not perhaps yours – or the larger society’s – is neither illegal nor immoral. It is a free choice. Recall Nellie Bowles:

Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents...

[It’s] a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, …the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

I would urge SFGate, in its next article on the outbreak, to try phrases like lively melange of rats, or bustling brood of rats.

Bo On Skid Row.

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Plunging, that is.