Sad that we keep having to learn this lesson.

‘Miami Design Preservation League walking tour waits while firefighters hose the blood off the Ocean Drive sidewalk from this morning’s fatal spring break shooting.’

Here’s some wisdom from a very young juror:

James said that the prosecution’s argument that there was a “perfect storm” gathering, and Murdaugh was on cusp of a devastating financial reckoning was a good theme – but wasn’t a persuasive motive.

“I don’t think I’d ever be able to answer why somebody would do something like that,” he said. “But I know that there are people in the world that don’t make sense, and they do things without making it make sense. So I don’t know that there is an answer other than that it happened and that it shouldn’t have.”

Yup. Here’s UD‘s take, FWIW:

Since that morning, when his firm’s financial officer confronted Murdaugh about his extensive theft from the business and its clients, he had been in a deepening, increasingly unmanageable, panic. Thoughts of his family’s ruination, and the ruin, at his hands, of the proud Murdaugh legacy, gripped him more and more tightly.

I don’t think that when he summoned his family to the rural property (Buster was too far away to summon) he did so with any clear motive of killing them; I think he was simply at wit’s end and wanted their help in some way. Or maybe he wanted to confess to them, the way Bernie Madoff gathered his sons to his office and confessed, as the FBI circled, his Ponzi scheme. I don’t think Murdaugh knew what to do; I think he was melting down, and he, in an unspecified atavistic way, wanted his family around him.

Reveling in the beautiful normality of hanging around with Maggie and Paul, with the dogs and the birds, Murdaugh was suddenly overcome with the pointlessness of it all, the loss of it all, the oncoming nothingness of his shattered existence. This was not excruciating self-punishment, or self-hatred; if it were, of course, he would have grabbed one of the hundreds of available guns and killed himself. It was a bleak nihilistic vision of a demonic world all of whose denizens, including his own wife and son, were committed to destroying him. His wife and son, after all, had been getting into his pills, and they were demanding a family conference in which they clearly intended to give him a hard time about the oxy. His drunk out of control son, who’d already racked up booze-related legal problems – hell, who’d already killed someone – could only benefit from having his existence ended. His wife was a nervous wreck about the tens of millions of dollars the bulldog lawyer the dead girl’s parents had hired was promising to get out of the Murdaughs; and she’d already been driven out of the neighborhood of their primary residence because of the horrible publicity about the lethal boat wreck. All that, plus his unmasking, that morning, as a career larcenist…!

Everyone here, he thought, in his nihilistic panic, would be better off dead.

So in the darkness, in the night, facing trusting heedless loved ones, he grabbed his weapons and began blasting away at Paul and Maggie. Make them go away. Make it all go away.

When it came to it, he couldn’t complete the nihilistic horror. He couldn’t turn the weapons on himself. He knew the rest of his life would be litigation and imprisonment but he simply couldn’t end his life. Narcissism, cowardice, whatever. Couldn’t do it.

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

But. When all is said and done, remember that great scene in Black Widow, when Debra Winger (as an FBI agent) says to her motive-sniffing boss: “Don’t you understand? No one knows why anyone does anything.”

Speaking of The Stupids: Stupid people on trial for double murder should definitely not take the stand.

Murdaugh’s lawyers begged him not to; but because he’s stupid he figured he do right good at it, y’all.

Walter Benjamin welcomes you to the Formula One Exhibition.

Straightforward, clarifying words, as ISIS terrorist and all ’round sweetie Allison Fluke-Ekren awaits sentencing.

UD ain’t sure why garden-variety mentally challenged racist anti-semites like Ye, who will never do anything, get all the attention, while an existentially imperiling American like F-E gets quietly carted off to jail without anyone paying her the sort of attention she deserves if we’re going to protect ourselves from our bloodiest.

Kanye is safely all over the place (Christian/ Midsommarian/ Satanistian/ Nurembergian… Next up: Quilting Bees), while F-E has displayed, over decades, remarkable ideological stability, discipline, and resilience; she’s a real, highly trained, soldier, and she wants to kill all of us. She has killed quite a few of us, and UD thinks a long jailhouse interview, conducted by someone like Stephen Biddle, would be a service.

For UD, this is the most important exchange, so far, reported to the January 6 committee.

From Lara Trump’s giggling dismissal of a reporter’s question, long ago, about violent chants at Trump rallies (People are just “having fun.”) to Eric Greitens’ RINO butchery (Like Lara Trump, he says the ad was all in fun.), violence – and now escalating violence – has run through Trumpworld. I think we owe a debt of gratitude to John Eastman for cutting out the all in fun bullshit and simply stating the obvious. Far from disavowing violence, Eastman here schools Herschmann on the excellent history of violence in America. Indeed you can sort of see Eastman shrug and then smile patiently at Herschmann as he explains, in the way of Robespierre explaining things to less bloodthirsty comrades, that you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

LAST two people I thought would divorce!

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So. Let me tell you the truth. I’m not surprised. The mistake Murdoch made this time was marrying someone so old. He’s on a quest never to die, via marriage with the younger set. (One of his models seems to be Sumner Redstone.) This latest pairing, with Hall already in her sixties, made no sense to me, given the sex serum regimen he’s on. Number Five will be in her thirties, and this one will guarantee that Murdoch will never die.

Only two channels these days: You can watch Johnny Depp fall to pieces, or watch Vladimir Putin fall to pieces.

High-steppin’ strutters now limping into old age, grandiose world-conquerors who’ve lost it all, both of these woman-haters currently bloat and tremble on the global stage as their badly over-played machismo bites them in the butt. Women, says Depp, famously, are “cum-guzzlers”; Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton represent, in their freakish rise to male power, a personal insult to Vlad.

To be sure, one of these people might destroy the world, while the other has merely a film career to nuke (if you want to throw in Will Smith – currently staging a reincarnation in India – go ahead), but both offer the riveting and enlightening spectacle of the power of delusion and the delusions of power. Putin pursues a hopeless war; Depp presses one hopeless lawsuit after another, with profound carnage along the way. Our role is to be disgusted (and, in the case of Putin, afraid) as we fail to take our eyes off of the very worst outcomes of a reactionary ethos.

[T]here’s also the element of his personal hatred for Hillary Clinton, and it’s not just hate her. I think it’s like Hillary Clinton was impossible as a U.S. president. To imagine that he would have to deal with her as a senior partner, a woman—I mean, he already has to deal with [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel. The lengths that he has gone to to assert his masculine dominance over Merkel is amazing. He literally sicced dogs on her. He has made indecent jokes in front of her, just to try to discomfort her. He hates dealing with a strong woman, and one as president of the United States would be just awful.

… UD sings Tom Lehrer.

Zemmour is every bit as much of a violent nihilist as his loverboy Putin; these tiny Napoleons both dream of blowing everything up. (Which reminds me: Congrats, Vlad, for reducing Kharkiv to rubble!)

Putin’s getting his wish in this regard, but the world just might be able to stop him.

As for Zemmour, his poll numbers are tanking. There aren’t enough violent nihilists in France to put him over the top.

Stephen Cohen. If you seek his monument, look around you in Kharkiv.

Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians have become anti-Russian.