SO Iconic an American Scene that, if you Encountered it in a Novel, you’d Complain the Writer Overdid it.

Police responding to an adult overdosing in a car had to negotiate with a 10-year-old boy who was holding a loaded AK-47 that had the safety off, investigators said.

Crowley [Louisiana] police said they were called as Jeremy Leblanc was overdosing in the driver seat of a car in a Dairy Queen parking lot, KLFY reported.

Oberlin’s wife, who was seated in the passenger seat, gave police permission to enter the vehicle and told them that there was cocaine and fentanyl in a cup holder.

Officers found two 9mm handguns near four small children and an AK-47 rifle in a 10-year-old boy’s lap. The gun was loaded and the safety was off, investigators said. After a brief negotiation, officers were able to safely get the weapon from the boy’s hands.

“The child, of course, didn’t want to give it up, to probably either protect his family or didn’t know exactly what was going on. I mean it’s a very scary situation for a child, and officers spoke with him calmly and tried to gain his trust and everything. Of course, it wasn’t a huge struggle, but he was still not letting it go freely,” police chief Jimmy Broussard told KLFY. “It was loaded. It was not on safety, so if … the child [had] panicked and decided to pull that trigger, it would have been much worse of a scene than what we had.”

Leblanc was revived with Narcan. He was taken to a hospital and is in stable condition. He was later arrested on various charges, police said.

Child services were called to take custody of the children.

Jeremy Leblanc, of Oberlin, was arrested on two counts of drug possession, three counts of possession of a firearm in the presence of drugs; and four counts of drug use in the presence of a juvenile.

Crowley Police Chief Jimmy Broussard told Lafayette station KATC that a 10-year-old boy was holding the AK47 rifle with the safety off. The boy initially didn’t want to give the gun to officers, not wanting to give up something he believed was his.

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

I mean, really: Overdose, AK47, Dairy Queen, drugs in a cupholder, two handguns, Narcan, not one two or three but FOUR kids, one of them refusing to give the loaded AK47 to the police? Right. Pour it on.

What? Just cuz his two year old blew her brains out?

The man faces charges including first-degree child abuse, a felony violation of Michigan’s gun storage law, being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition and lying to a police officer in a violent crime investigation.

Flint police learned of the shooting after the man took the girl to a hospital. They found two guns in the bedroom of the man’s home: the revolver and a semiautomatic pistol. Both were unsecured and loaded. 

In 2008, UD wrote a ten-part series for Inside Higher Ed…

… on guns. For that series, she visited the palatial NRA headquarters in Virginia, a few miles from her house.

C’est fou comme le temps passe vite! The palace is on the market, from every pore the NRA is bleeding out, and that ol’ sweetie Wayne LaPierre has larceny issues.

Update. Details.

La Vie UD

A herd of deer in my forest.

Spring Breaking Point

There will always be scuzzy cities (hello, Myrtle Beach!) where spring breakers can continue to crash cars, rape, and shoot during those two special weeks in March. (This behavior is also all over Myrtle Beach when it isn’t spring break.) But when even SB locales as notorious as Panama City Beach introduce restrictions, you know the event’s really getting out of hand.

I mean, look at Miami Beach! Just look!

And you know it won’t change a thing. Kansas City had close to a thousand police at the Super Bowl shootout; the next Super Bowl celebration will have one National Guard member for each partygoer. But it’s just too easy to whip out your AK47. No one’s going to stop you. Same deal here.

As ex-terrorist Shamima Begum’s efforts to regain British citizenship go down in flames once again…

UD invites you to revisit my posts about a woman who indeed does seem to me too dangerous to return to a country she tried to destroy.

Her lawyers, I guess, will go to the Supreme Court, but they won’t get what they want there either.

Begum could have tried for Bangladeshi citizenship, but didn’t apparently bother to; her best move now is to gather a bunch of money from her supporters and try to buy citizenship somewhere.

UD’s old friend Peter argues that Begum should be repatriated to the UK here.

Alabama lawmakers introduce extrawombal special exception to frozen baby legislation

We think it’s – haha – well thawed out,” joked State Sen. Tim Melson, R-Florence.

This just in

ALABAMA SUPREME COURT RULES THAT

FROZEN BURRITOS ARE CHILDREN

MONTGOMERY, AL—In a case aimed at preserving what plaintiffs described as the sanctity of reheatable Tex-Mex fare, Alabama’s Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday in which it asserted that frozen burritos are children. “With this decision, the court finds that frozen burritos—be they beef, bean and cheese, chicken, or any combination thereof—are legally recognized as children,” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court’s majority opinion, claiming that at the moment the frozen burrito is placed in its plastic sleeve, it becomes human life made in the image of God. 

‘[T]he occasional crackle of the firing range is almost soothing.’

We’re getting there. The daily aural reality of a country with four hundred million plus guns in private hands, and well over a million held by local, state, and federal police forces, means that over time incessant artillery will be normalized here to the point of – in the words of a Rhode Islander who lives down the street from a police department shooting range – “almost soothing.”

Normalized? Romanticized:

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

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

Only here it will be

As far coastal as Freedom Tower,

And cold Minot, and starlit Carhenge.

Washington State University has consistently been one of the worst…

… universities this blog has chronicled. Go here for its perfect storm of corrupt athletics, inept leadership, give-a-shit board of trustees, demoralized faculty, homicidal frats, etc., etc. Go here for a sample post, from 2021.

Now – finally – 207 of its professors demand radical change. The school’s national ranking has tanked; its athletic debt is beyond belief; research faculty shrinks by the minute.

They want the clown president out, for starters.

A New James Joyce Museum

Buffalo NY not only has a massive James Joyce mural

and, at the University of Buffalo, the world’s largest Joyce collection. Now the university has received $10 million from the state for a James Joyce Museum, which is very cool. They are still looking for donations.

‘Le directed students in the Post-Master’s and Special Studies Certificate Programs to make tuition checks payable either directly to her, to a merchandiser from whom she purchased luxury items, or to leave the payee line blank.’ 

An administrator at UCSF’s nursing school stole a million and a half dollars by the simple expediency of directing students to give her their money.

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

Le hid her theft by removing students from enrollment rosters so no tuition would be expected or creating fake bank deposit slips to indicate received tuition and providing them to her supervisor, the memorandum said. Le also falsely documented tuition payments on an Excel spreadsheet. 

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

And as to how you get students to hand you blank checks... UD’s figuring most of the students Le chose to rob were just-arrived foreigners?

“35 teachers absent.”

The biggest high school in Massachusetts scares off gobs of its teachers and really can’t operate anymore with all the violence: A committee there has requested National Guard protection.

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

Antioch Library in Contra Costa County is in emergency shutdown: Same chaos/violence/crime/drugs/public sex as Brockton High. Staff scared witless. Details, if you can stomach them.

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

What? Whaddaya want me to say?

Here’s a couple of things.

Contemptible local/state politicians made it happen, outright deny it, or insist they had no idea and if they’d known they would of course have solved the problem lickety split.

Everyone at these two places knows it’s a matter of time before guns add to the fun. It’s amazing it hasn’t already happened.

Incarnate Word Loses It

Sing it.

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

O Christ. The Word Incarnate

Fucked up another game.

Their ranking’s at the bottom.

No fans or students came.

But onward Christian soldiers!

Attack the other team!

Show them the Christly beauty

Of Lord and God Supreme.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
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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...
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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...
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From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
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Tenured Radical

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