SOS says: She’s surprised to see the revert back mistake in the NYT. Just as the phrase chai tea is redundant, so all things that revert revert back, since the meaning of the word is to go back, to return. Chai (it means tea) does the job alone, and so does revert.
I mean, it’s not exactly a mistake; it’s just gauche, like saying irregardless.
And meanwhile, get a load of the incredibly convoluted latest iteration of a settlement with the opiate pushers Purdue/Sacklers. The litigation has been going on for years. We’ve covered in particular here the suffering state of West Virginia, as it dealt with insanely massive over-prescription of Oxy Contin. A disgusting tale.
How tonally appropriate that the composer whose works were wiped out in the Pacific Palisades fire was Arnold Schoenberg. His famous atonality swept us away, said Leonard Bernstein, from Keats’s “poetry of the earth,” from our innate, universal, position in a world which sings harmonically to us, to a weird mystical alien otherwordly place. A place whose utterances we do not understand, but which can generate in us an undifferentiated anxiety.
This is in fact the anxiety of homelessness. Just as the homes of Schoenberg’s son and his neighbors have been swept away, making world and psyche rootless and afraid, so most of the composer’s work literally abandons the home note, the first note of the scale, which we leave and return to in harmonic, non-dissonant, tonal, music — which is to say, in virtually all of the music, classical or popular, we all know. The server who approached UD in a Matera restaurant and asked her to join in with him in singing Volare (he had overheard me singing something else at our table) assumed rightly that UD knows the song because of its simple, strongly rhythmic, redundant lines, inanely reassuring lyrics, and sweet, strong, resolution. On vastly more complex levels than this, our innate tonal drive seems to demand that we be housed in a structurally sound musical universe, that the architecture of music be grounded and sheltering.
We can manage the radical ambiguities of Mahler, but the unambiguously ungrounded atonalities of Schoenberg are a musical bridge too far for most people. He seems to have burned down the musical house.
I understand that some varieties of this exist in some states. But look around. They are too lax, too complicated.
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When I look at Goya’s picture of institutional life in 18th century Spain, I see human beings haunted by terrifying delusions, left to waste away in the dark, the dank, and the cold—but this resembles nothing so much as the current state of affairs in our subways, underpasses, and public parks. Contrary to the medical reality of Goya’s day, or the imagined setting of Cuckoo’s Nest, we do have the power to beat back severe mental illness in a patient’s brain, in an environment that is safe, clean, and calm. Not every patient will get better, but many will, and every single one deserves that chance. The bottom line is that inside of treatment, some of these people will get better. Outside of it, almost none will.
If I had one wish One dream I knew would come true I’d want to speak to all the people of the world I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform First I’d sing a song or two you know I would Then I’ll tell you what I’d do I’d talk to the people and I’d say “It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world Well, you know And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common And it’s something everyone can understand All over the world sing along
I just want you to hurt like I do I just want you to hurt like I do I just want you to hurt like I do Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”
... You may see a shooter You may see a shooter Across a crowded room And somehow you know ... You're watching with stealth ... Hey this guy! He slaughtered The head of U. Health!
Sat there with my buddies Burghers of Altoona Munching on McGriddles Inside a crowded room And then in a flash As strange as it sounds I looked at his eyebrows My heart set to pound!
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons Wise men never try. Some McDonald's breakfast When you find Mangione Chewing on his hash browns Across a crowded room Then call 911 And capture your man Or all through his life he Will slaughter again
Once you have found him Never let him go Once you have found him Never let him go!
Muddy the waters is a nice way to put it. Y’all keep trying to parse this politically, but Mangione warnt even into his big boy pants before he killed a guy so stop flattering him. Could barely eke out three pages of ooh manifesto ooh and so far it sounds like Patty Hearst circa Symbionese Liberation Army. He is 26 years old, and his experience of the world encompasses private school, hikes in Hawaii, and computer games. When the police cornered him he reacted with the Moro Reflex. And minutes ago baby had a BIG tantrum.
I grant that he is radically handsome with the bright set of chompers you’d expect of his demographic, but killing someone in NYC (in itself a banality) and completing a pre-writing exercise falls short of Antonio Gramsci. Better to understand him with a typically bogus but let’s go with it anyway psychiatric diagnosis: Post-traumatic Embitterment Disorder. Onset was when he tried to take a surfing class but his bad back screwed it up. Since then his chronic pain has him gunning for the American health care industry.
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The writer and cultural historian Mark Harris, posting on Bluesky, described Mr. Mangione as “a very recognizable type of young male ideology tourist” — a “This Explains Everything addict” untethered to a coherent belief system.
[Mangione] called for the banning of “custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in [Japanese] Don Quixote grocery stores.” He wanted the return of traditional Japanese culture, including karate, and an emphasis on athletics in school. In other posts he called for [American] porn to be regulated “no less than alcohol, cigarettes, and travel.”
A fine fascist in the making – read further in the little pisher’s writings – whose trajectory was interrupted only by his fateful entry into the Altoona Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
Mangione verbally pushed back against two claims from prosecutors in court — first a claim that because Mangione was found with $8,000 in cash on him that he was trying to evade authorities.
An officer asked him to pull down his mask and recognized him as the suspect from the New York shooting. When an officer asked Mangione if he had been to New York recently, he “became quiet and started to shake.”
His grandfather owned a way-rightwing talk radio station; his cousin is the voice of Trump in the Maryland legislature. Luigi Mangione – the likely killer of the United Healthcare guy – has impeccable, historic, far-right, family credentials.
He seems to have peeled off from the family and acted from lefty motives, but ideologically it’s all a bit murky. Look what happened when les héritiers de Limbaugh attacked Mangione’s murderousness as clearly coming from/cheered on by the left.
[Ben] Shapiro and [Matt] Walsh harshly condemned liberals for cheering on the assassination in respective episodes of their eponymous podcasts, titled “The EVIL Revolutionary Left Cheers Murder!” and ” Why The Left Is Really Celebrating The Murder Of A CEO.”
But their followers disagreed with their criticisms and defended the left, arguing that they felt the same way about Thompson’s death …
“The fact that [M]att is trying to paint this as a left wing issue, when there’s clearly bipartisan celebrations going on, just goes to show how out of touch [wealthy] celebrities are, whether on the right or left, with regular everyday ordinary people,” one user said...
A third told Shapiro, “Just because ‘the left’ likes something doesn’t mean you have to instinctively hate it. Wake up and read the room bro.”
Disgustingly, portions of both left and right in this country seem pleased with what Mangione has done.
Luigi Mangione is in custody because a fast food employee in Altoona PA recognized his face from the pictures we’ve all been studying.
Once at the police station, the sources said, officers discovered Mangione had a gun similar to the one used in [Brian] Thompson’s killing, as well as a silencer and a fake New Jersey ID. The suspected gunman allegedly used a fake New Jersey ID when he checked into a Manhattan hostel last month.
Two senior law enforcement officials say Mangione had the name “Marc Rosario” on his fake NJ ID. Three sources familiar with the matter say the suspected gunman checked into the Upper West Side hostel using a fake NJ ID with the name “Marc Rosario.” Other fake IDs were found on Mangione Monday as well, investigators say.
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Kaczynski with good looks.
[Mangione is] an anti-capitalist Ivy League grad who liked online quotes from “Unabomber’’ Ted Kaczynski — and seethed in a manifesto, “These parasites had it coming.”
Tech whiz Luigi Mangione, 26, originally from Towson, Md., apparently hated the medical community because of how it treated his sick relative, sources said.
… Mangione was valedictorian of his 2016 high school graduating class at the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he played soccer, according to online sites. High school tuition at the all-boys school is nearly $40,000 a year.
He said at the time of graduation that he planned to seek a degree in artificial intelligence, focused on the areas of computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, according to an interview with the Baltimore Fishbowl.
The tech hotshot graduated cum laude from the private Ivy League institution in Philadelphia with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), Computer and Information Science in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He also completed a Master of Science in Engineering (MSE), Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, his profile states.
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Definitely the sort who thinks he can get away with murder.
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His parents own two country clubs, one of which, Turf Valley, UD and her sister drove around not long ago, after lunch in the area. He seems to share a grandfather with this Maryland politician. Very wealthy family.
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By the by: If you were his cousin – the politician – and you saw this all over the media —
wouldn’t you consider alerting the authorities? Did the guy’s enormous and apparently close-knit family cooperate?
“Now the cops just need to narrow down their list of suspects to anyone in America who hates their health care plan and has access to guns… This guy [wrote on his bullet casings because] there’s so many bullet casings on the streets of New York … he wants to make sure we knew which ones were his.”
… the closer Brian Thompson’s assassin possibly gets to suicide. Recall the very similar broad daylight ambush of Gianni Versace; his killer offed himself as the police zeroed in.
