… but close.

Visiting Harvard Law prof was firing a pellet gun at rats, not the Brookline temple he was standing outside [of] at the start of Yom Kippur, police say

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Wow. Details at once disturbing and hilarious.

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He shot at and shattered a car window!

So… to get serious for a moment. There are a number of sad possible explanations.

1. Friday night. He was very very drunk/high. He’s lonely, missing Brazil, missing girlfriend who stabilizes him, whatever.
2. Psychotic break. Shooting at car windows at night because you think there are rats outside your house is a very psychotic breaky thing to do.
3. Of course it’s possible it had something to do with hating Jews.

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OTOH: A rifle-packing Harvard prof could go far toward bridging the cultural gap between the Trump administration and that school.

Tyler Robinson, resident of Utah (death penalty? yes), seems to be the dude. “A family member saw the photos of the suspect and turned him into police,” says here. 22 years old.

Apparently his father (a pastor? not all of this information is confirmed) turned him in. He seems to have won a big fancy scholarship to Utah State University a few years ago.

WAY Story of O.

‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting Will Shut Down’

… that it’s not pronounced Gizzlane. All of America will learn the delicate French pronunciation. Gheelen.

Can fun and guns mix at Utah events following deadly shootings?

Louisiana Republican Points to ‘Big White Lines’ From Planes as Proof Government Is Manipulating Weather

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Burnishing its reputation as the dumbest state in the country (okay, fourth dumbest, but this successful legislation may be just what they need to put themselves over the top), Louisiana goes after evil chemtrails.

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While Louisiana faces an insurance crisis, a crumbling coastline, and one of the highest overdose death rates in the country, state lawmakers have decided their latest priority is… chemtrails.

Not fixing the Sewerage & Water Board. Not stopping insurance companies from fleeing the state. Not funding addiction treatment programs. No, instead, our legislature is spending precious time and taxpayer dollars debating a bill—Senate Bill 46—based on a completely debunked internet conspiracy theory that claims airplanes are spraying chemicals like aluminum and barium into the sky to manipulate the weather. The theory has been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from pushing it through the House by a vote of 58 to 32.

… We could be talking about how to prepare for another brutal hurricane season. We could be debating how to keep teachers from leaving the profession in record numbers. We could even be discussing how to rein in Entergy as utility bills skyrocket across the state. But instead, our elected officials are chasing clouds—literally.

… If you’re wondering why our roads flood when it drizzles, or why your homeowner’s insurance bill just tripled—look no further. The same people who think Delta Airlines is controlling the weather are the ones writing our laws.

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Not unexpectedly, Louisiana yet again was ranked as the absolutely rock-bottom worst state in America, 2024.

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Baton Rouge and Shreveport are the only other cities of note, and both are crime-ridden. We could throw in Lafayette as well. That’s one reason the magazine ranked the state at #50 in crime and corrections. According to the FBI, New Orleans had the third-highest homicide rate in 2023 of all U.S. cities…

… Crime is heavily weighted in these studies. According to the FBI’s final report of 2022 (the latest available), Louisiana had the worst homicide rate in the country — 16.1 homicides per 100,000 people. Of the 408 homicides that year, 266 took place in New Orleans.

Crime is a symptom of poverty, lack of education, and unemployment, to name a few. And Louisiana falls flat on its face in all dimensions.

The 2023 state budget produced a surplus of $325 million. Much of that will go toward paying down the state’s debt. None of it was allocated for elementary and secondary schools…

… at the same moment, California guv tells all state municipalities to get going on the removal of all homeless encampments, and the PM of GB announces the country’s becoming an “island of strangers,” and needs new severe crackdowns on immigration.

Civic life, national life – What do these mean? We can toss that around all day, but at the end of the day, big majorities of people living in most countries/regions want a successfully assimilated population of people who don’t inject in the street.

Inside the closet? Like behind a closed door?

And now a newer version of events has the dog in a crate in the bathroom. In the bathroom? Is that where you crate your dog?

You remember the mysterious deaths of a young California family out hiking. It took some time to figure out how they, their baby, and their dog, died. Theories abounded, but it turned out to be the most likely: Extreme heat.

The Hackman deaths present an even greater puzzle, the first piece of which, for UD, is: Why did almost two weeks elapse before someone (not family; a maintenance man) found them? No housekeeper? No calls from the kids? Hackman was a frail 95 year old.

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Here, FWIW, is one scenario. Hackman’s 64 year old wife decided to kill herself after finding him dead (of a heart attack or whatever).

Authorities reportedly discovered Hackman’s body in the mudroom, in a similar state of decomposition [to his wife]; a deputy on the scene said it appeared he had “suddenly fallen.”

So he collapses and dies, and she, distraught, runs to the bathroom:

A deputy found [Betsy] Arakawa dead and lying on her side on the floor of a bathroom, a space heater near her head and scattered pills and an open prescription bottle on the counter. 

In a sudden, hysterical, decision, she hurls a bottle of pills down her throat and falls to the floor, or lies down on the floor, and stays there until she dies.

Ugh.

LOL.

Midair collision of an army helicopter and a commercial flight.

Rescue operations ongoing in the Potomac River.

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Just stood on my back deck, eight miles from the airport.

The sky is pretty clear; visibility isn’t bad. But it’s seriously cold out there.

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Apparently no survivors. Kennedy Center cameras captured the crash, and you can see a fireball and then broken fragments falling into the water.

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Images like this make it very real.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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“Some of those onboard were figure skaters flying from Wichita, Kan., which had hosted the U.S. Figure Skating Championships earlier this month.”

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.

Preliminary reports suggest a failure of the hotel’s fire alarm system, and a slow response from emergency vehicles.

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.