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…
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.
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.
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.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
