Death by natural and cultural …

catastrophe.

Sing it

Just a baby’s gun at twilight
That dad forgot to stow
Her baby years have ended here
With the gun she found at twilight

Dad’s sad to know
His precious little tot
Picked up his gun and shot

After saying “Goodnight, Mama”
She climbed upstairs
Quite unaware
And said her prayer:

“Oh, kindly tell my daddy that he must take care”

That’s a baby’s prayer at twilight
From up in heav’n somewhere

“People have other irrational fears, like a fear of guns,” he said. “Dealing with that is a job for mental health professionals and not for me.”

There’ll always be a Montana.

But he’s an American! This is worse than the death penalty.

The conditions for the “bind-over” order include abstaining from possessing firearms and ammunition for 24 months.

La Kid, on her way to a Halloween party…

… in London.

She’s Barbie.

His final years were marked by a dignified and fully honest assessment of his physical and moral collapse.

He leaves behind a book and a set of interviews in which he graphically and eloquently describes/analyzes the death spiral of drug and alcohol addiction.

“The world might be shocked at his untimely death, but Perry knew that his addiction was going to kill him.”

The fatal extremity of dependency has rarely been put before us with more power.

And No Pence to Send Home to My Wife, Poor Wife.

Pence comes to the end of his song. History will show that his downfall lay in his dark unresolved love affair with Trump – a relationship observers have compared to that between Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in the film Night Porter. Pence came to love his murderer — much too kinky for the average American voter.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

But it gets worse and worse until you just want to brech.

Fuck ’em. Let ’em die.

Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”

Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.

‘Students, including a Jewish student who asked to leave but was not permitted to do so, were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, according to the lawsuit. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Students said they were told that those who did not follow the Bible would “face eternal torment.”‘

Welcome to the West Virginia public school system, where a high school principal forced all students to listen to a mentally retarded preacher while performing a mandatory Jesus Wave.

Guy probly knowd he shouldnt but the spirit of the Lord was too strong within him to resist offering escape from eternal torment TO EVERYONE. EVEN JEWS.

And you know what? Ifn he aint been fired he’ll do it again.

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

Even with this here lawsuit settlement, which institutes “a policy mandating annual religious freedom training” (LOL) and other shit like that, I’m figuring this principal – if he aint been fired – caint help hisself cuz ever time he looks at them poor Jews it just bout breaks his heart thinking of their organs dropping off into the fire.

Et tu, Buffy?

One of wee UD’s folk song idols.

Good career move

Law enforcement found Card’s body around 7:45 p.m. ET, Sauschuck said at a news conference Friday night, adding that he died from an a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His body was found near the Androscoggin River in the Lisbon Falls area, some 10 miles from Lewiston, where the Wednesday night shooting rampage unfolded.

It’s the sort of thing that happens in the most murderous state in America.

A university football player in Louisiana is shot to death, so traumatizing his team that the coach calls off the rest of the season and then resigns.

The thing about constant gun deaths is that eventually everything around them gets shut down. As we speak, Lewiston Maine is shut down; all of its citizens are crouching inside their houses. People in bloody Albuquerque routinely avoid public places. And Louisiana! Don’t get no bloodier than Louisiana.

Not hard to see that in a few years what UD calls Munitions Migration will occur on a large scale here. Of course individuals have always moved away from bullet-riddled neighborhoods in search of safety; I’m talking about a large social trend involving massive flight from fully gunned-up landscapes.

‘States with the weakest gun safety laws saw the rate of gun suicides jump 39% over the past two decades – from about 8 gun suicides for every 100,000 people in 1999 to nearly 12 in 2022… But in states with the strongest gun safety laws, gun suicide rates decreased slightly over that time — down from 3.6 to 3.4 gun suicides for every 100,000 people.’

Scroll down for the fantastic state by state graphic, which so dramatically gives Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska pride of place!

Good on ya, gunny states! You’ve got ’em dropping like flies.

Suicide in America

[T]he U.S. Supreme Court has been rolling back weapons restrictions, in effect turning the 2nd Amendment into a national suicide pact. Next month, the court will hear arguments in a case challenging a federal law barring a person under a domestic violence restraining order from possessing firearms. The case will concern the court’s bizarre dictate that no restriction is valid if it doesn’t have an 18th century precedent.

Domestic abusers are one of the few categories of people who experience tells us are more likely to commit gun violence. If we can no longer protect ourselves even from them, we will join the people of Lewiston, locked down in our homes, in fear of guns and the wide variety of our fellow Americans ready to use them against us.

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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.
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