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

Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians have become anti-Russian.

Madeleine Albright on the butcher.

As the race concluded, “a car fishtailed into onlookers — including young children — after it crossed the finish line. There were no barriers beyond the finish line.”

Yeah, cuz once the cars are done, they go from 100 mph to 0 in seconds so you don’t need barriers there.

Two kids were killed and five people are seriously injured, including a three-month-old.

And big rich Norway couldn’t find a way to put him in prison for a long time? Is it Norway’s policy to wait until radicalized career criminals kill five people and injure three others to jail them? How long will he stay incarcerated this time? Six months?

It doesn’t take a genius to understand the social function of university fraternities in America: They exist to shape the character of postmodern capitalism’s most successful predators. The in-group viciousness you learn at Sigma Alpha Epsilon – with special attention to homicidal acts against losers – leaves you in a state of hyper-readiness for Goldman Sachs.

“[T]he violence … is more than mildly sickening in its scale, its graphic presentation and its calculated gratuitousness. Well before the hero, Gi-hun (Lee), was playing the titular game in the final episode with a steak knife sticking through his hand, I’d had enough. Apologists can argue that the combination of businesslike dispatch and cartoonish exaggeration in the killing has aesthetic and thematic resonance, but nothing onscreen supports that take. There is little dread and even less emotion, just the logistical satisfaction of the body count…

[S]tylistic panache and mordant wit [allow some directors] to make outré violence feel like an organic element in their stories. In “Squid Game,” it’s just empty, bloody calories.”

And someone who is insane, and requires 24 hour police surveillance. But they didn’t watch him closely enough, and he grabbed a knife in a supermarket and started stabbing people, some of whom remain in critical condition.

Legal procedures for dealing with terrorists in New Zealand are also insane.

… that at least one, and as many as three, Republican congresspeople plan to immolate themselves inside the Capitol as an act of protest against (in words that some are attributing to them) “Anthony Fauci’s slaughter of millions of innocent people, and Nancy Pelosi’s terror attack on this sacred building.”

Inspired by this iconic Buddhist monk, Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rand Paul (these are apparently the most likely names) will set themselves aflame in the center of the Senate, in an effort, also, to distract attention from the ongoing testimony of policemen present at the January 6 insurrection.

Louie Gohmert, rumored to be a third self-immolater, has, according to some sources, said that he “no longer wants to live in a world in which Jake Ellzey beats Susan Wright.”

Obviously, if this rumored event actually happens, it will be an unprecedented trauma for the country, the ultimate twisted act of fidelity to Donald Trump. Whatever your politics, you’ve got to hope that their families and colleagues are able to dissuade these men from this grotesque act.

Update/recap of the idjits in Louisiana who maintain that state’s distinction: America’s highest murder rate, now for the 31st year.

“People are armed to the teeth.”

I know you’re thinking New Orleans, but don’t forget Baton Rouge, home of LSU.

Her communications director has resigned! We are about to get this iconic American voice unfiltered, and UD cannot wait.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (not to be confused with Lorena Bobbitt) is an American original, a tax-noncompliant, QAnon-slinging, gun-slinging, rumored insurrectionist. Boebert is the embodiment of the Capitol-Trashers: Multiple arrests for violent behavior (to be fair, not all of it was her; some of it was her two big pit bulls), refusal to show up in court, violent hatred of authority, general propensity to violence. Boebert tweeted Nancy Pelosi’s movements during the insurrection.

A glance at Boebert’s impressive rap sheet reveals l’essence de Capitol-Trasher lifestyle: Nasty dustups with hubby when they both get a little, uh, hot under the collar; fights with neighbors; fights with cops; Defiant Oppositional Disorder when people request that she take her guns out of their face. Cap-Trash lifestyle means looking to pick a fight while bombing around in your pickup, Barrett M107s bouncing in the bed, pit bulls howling. That’s our Lauren; and why you wouldn’t want to be her communications director I have no idea but anyway she ain’t got one no more and hon LET. IT. RIP.

Trump must be thrilled – he actually got to watch one of his fanatics die of a chest wound on the evening news. Talk about Reality TV! A red letter day for our death-delighting (look at all them covid corpses) president.

With any luck, the MAGA contingent that defies the curfew, hits the streets of DC tonight, and starts killing people, will also be something Trump can watch from home.

Many of the 81,283,485 Americans who voted for Biden would have taken to the streets — I would have been one of them — and probably stormed the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court. Trump would have called out the military; the National Guard, directed by governors, would have split over this, and we would be plunged into civil war.

That is the sort of fire these people are playing with. Of course, they know it — which makes the efforts of Hawley, Cruz, Johnson and their ilk even more despicable.

Thomas Friedman, NYT.

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I think the coup-plotters find the prospect of the national violence they are trying to trigger exciting. Clearly many Trump voters find the prospect of national violence exciting. Kill and be killed. Let your hair down. “It’s the fantasy of violence that has captured the GOP,” writes Jeff Sharlet. ‘“If you don’t fight to save your country with everything you have, you’re not gonna have a country left,” [Trump said at a recent rally]. He appeared to be past caring whether anyone listening heard that as a call to violence.”

Cuz there’s nothing duller than domestic tranquillity.