October 21st, 2025
“[T]o normalize the sound of gun fire, that’s not good.”

Hell man, get with the program. Normalizing the sound of gunfire is America’s middle name.

October 21st, 2025
Limerick
Ex-Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia
Appears to be rather a Nazia
Although not Trump's first
And far from his worst
For his loss we can only say grazia

October 21st, 2025
Wow! Wyoming begins to intuit that there might be a connection between all them guns and the nation’s highest suicide rates.

Usually suicide reporting out of the Dead Cowboy State fails to mention guns AT ALL; but the local public radio station is at least willing to quote some guy on the subject.

Getting somewhere, Wyoming!

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

But don’t get too excited.

October 20th, 2025
‘Some [Chicago] politicians talk of killings as they might of the weather, an implacable force.’

[T]he city’s political leadership—which Democrats have dominated for nearly a century—has tolerated disorder for far too long… Trump doesn’t entirely miss the mark when he lambastes generations of political indifference to so much suffering. When he deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., crime fell.

October 19th, 2025
Those pesky bullet stains just keep coming back!

“It’s hard to hold your head high and do the right thing and fix up these properties and put the money into them to make them a nice and attractive place to live when this city is so rough,” said [an Indianapolis landlord]. “It’s just going to get shot up and your hard work is going to be destroyed. It’s disheartening.”

October 19th, 2025
‘One reason for secularism’s endurance as an issue is that most Quebecers feel passionate about it.’

Respect for all forms and practices of religion is so engrained in us that passionate defenses of secularism may feel bigoted. But for strikingly secular countries and provinces (France, Quebec), the rejection of burqas in the public realm, for instance, expresses a reasonable desire that the lived reality of their laicité, the laicité of the courts, schoolrooms, and streets, be maintained. How secular is your culture if city thoroughfares feature large outdoor prayer?

Some religious practices are disgusting (FGM) but difficult to stop because imams preach their necessity from the pulpit; some are objectionable to modern people (gender segregation, face/body veiling) because of their graphic derogation of women. The reason you see so many European countries banning burqas and arresting people who cut off children’s clitorises is because they feel passionately that some forms of behavior denominated religious range anywhere from unacceptably uncivil to outright criminal.

Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture. A girl’s body does not belong to her father, her family or her community. Her integrity is not a token for tradition, not an ornament for family honor and not a site for control. It belongs to her alone. 

Beating women and stoning women, as well, is no special scandal to high-profile Muslim intellectual/rapist Tariq Ramadan. He is far from alone.

So yeah, Quebecers are passionately secular, and this blog doesn’t have a problem with their being so. Details here.

October 19th, 2025
‘The taught film is presented almost entirely through police bodycam footage, filmed over a couple of years in a Florida suburb.’

Er, no.

October 19th, 2025
This was way too easy.

Dress like a construction worker, carry chainsaws and a ladder, and you can walk off with jewels of inestimable value from the Louvre. Wow.

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

Update:  [T]he thieves could have got out with a Chardin still life, a Rogier van der Weyden, an ancient Mesopotamian statuette… [T]hieves who executed a robbery that ignored all the Louvre’s cultural treasures for these brainless items are ruthlessly interested in the precious materials from which they are made…  I think the French culture minister must have had to suppress a snigger while claiming these items have “immeasurable heritage value”.

October 19th, 2025
Myrtle Beach does No Kings

 [O]fficers from the Myrtle Beach Police Department observed an individual in a vehicle brandishing a firearm while traveling near the … demonstration.

Another one.

“And that’s just the ones they caught,” Mr UD points out.

October 18th, 2025
‘At a demonstration in Habima Square this summer, a man erected a papier-mâché statue: an Israeli soldier carrying an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student across his back.’

Art distills.

October 18th, 2025
Mr UD, this morning, No Kings rally.

October 18th, 2025
Refuses to remove her burqa. Refuses to pay her fine.

Why should she have anything to do with the so-called laws of so-called Switzerland? This, mes petites, is what people mean when they refer to the failure of (cough) ‘integration.’ She’s like the ultraorthodox in Israel, who see that “country” as the enemy against which God commands them to resist.

Deep Salafist pockets will pay her fines – she will continue to rack them up – until the state decides that the system of fines isn’t working. Next step: A social worker tries to reason with a fanatic. Then jail?

October 18th, 2025
“We had over 30 Chicago police officers on the street at the time of the shooting,” [a local alderman] said. “It just shows how blatant and bold these criminals are that they will open fire with an automatic rifle in the presence of over 30 police officers. That didn’t seem to intimidate them at all.”

Chicago.

October 17th, 2025
‘[S]ociologist James Tuttle uses “Murder Valley” to describe an area of 21 contiguous counties that includes the cities of Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, and much of the Arkansas Delta and Mississippi Delta. If the area were its own nation, Tuttle writes, it would have the fifth-highest homicide rate in the world: better than Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Haiti, which are ranked 6th and 7th, but worse than Ecuador and South Africa, which are ranked 3rd and 4th.’

‘[A gun control advocate in Mississippi] said Tuesday that he often reminds his colleagues in other parts of the country that “what they go through don’t even compare to what we have to go through in the South. Because in the South, guns is like having a bottle of water [sic]. Everybody got it. And then it’s a right-to-carry state. It’s a castle doctrine state. It’s constant gun shows every other week in Mississippi somewhere. So guns are just bloody in Mississippi…. Get us all together. You bring in alcohol. Then you bring in all the crazy drugs they got these days, and you got a state where everybody got at least 10 guns. What you asked for? You asked for violence.”’

October 17th, 2025
Portugal will ban the burqa…

… and one of its political leaders uses remarkably strong language against the thing.

“[I do not accept that women should be forced to] walk the streets as if they were animals or merchandise.”

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