Soccer fans beating each other to death happens quite often in Greece, Brazil, Portugal, Indonesia, Argentina, Croatia… all over, really. But mainly in Europe.

Now we’re doing it too, at our football games.

I’m figuring security’s really really good at confiscating guns, because so far we’re just beating fellow fans to death with our fists. As soon as Americans figure out how to smuggle Glocks through the gates, we’ll start seeing mass shooting.

UD‘s been socializing like crazy at a wedding up in Vermont, and has had no time to blog. She’s now going through various essays/news items ISO something to say. Ne quittez pas.

No kidding.

… Chapel Hill.

Every week they sprint.

‘Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Decide to Sue New York

Over Having to Teach English, Science‘

A week after the ban was implemented, the level of opposition has been low.

There have been some acts of defiance – 67 girls refused to change out of their abayas on the first day of the new term.

But of a mass movement of resistance there is no sign. No mass-donning of abayas, no sit-ins.

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

There never is. I mean, there never is a mass movement of resistance – to burqa bans, hijab bans, abaya bans – anywhere in the world. Wonder why not. Wonder where the masses of women who adore being fully, or mostly, covered are… Hmm… hmm…

Well let’s see. First of all, a lot of these girls and women come from subcultures where — I mean DUH. Why do you think they’ve been all covered up since they were five years old? The whole point is to make them invisible! So nu – you’re expecting them to mass on the Champs Elysees and get their picture in the paper? Not bloody likely.

As for secular, jeans-wearing Frenchwomen donning abayas for a day to express solidarity… I mean, look at the statistic in my headline, mes petites. I believe it’s finally gotten through to that demographic — along with virtually every other demographic — that abayas are an appalling constraint on young women, and no self-respecting liberal state should countenance them in its public secondary schools.

Okay, so then where’s the Muslim Brotherhood when you need them?

Er, not sure they’re too eager to be seen, en masse, in public either.

I think this only leaves that blithering idiot, Jean-Luc Melenchon.

And of course down there “People are armed to the teeth.”

And from the comment thread on a 2021 NYT story that asks in its headline “WHY DOES LOUISIANA CONSISTENTLY LEAD THE NATION IN MURDERS?” :

Combine the [nation’s] highest rate of gun ownership with the lowest rate of education, sprinkle in some STRONG white supremacy and insurrection and that spells doom for all Louisianans.

There are close to five hundred comments on the article, many of them from Louisianans, and most commenters agree that while you’re free to consider variables like a history of violence and an engrained distrust of government and its institutions, the crucial element is simply stunning numbers of guns in the hands of hyperemotional (the motive is often ‘disrespect’) and unschooled people.

Equally stunning but absolutely predictably, the killers are getting younger and younger, as in the latest story out of the blood-soaked Baton Rouge area, involving a high school kid blowing away one schoolmate and injuring two.

On-field brawls abound these days; but this one, as a team was losing 0-24, stands out.

Apparently the losing team fought among itself — presumably due to frustration (“The Warriors are winless on the season and have been outscored by opponents 70-0 in two games.”); the opposing team seems not to have been involved at all.

So it turns out the whole high school has around 150 students, of whom let’s say half are boys; and of course a football team usually carries 40-50 players. Are we doing the math here?

Id est the school’s too small to field a competitive football team, but someone’s insisting on keeping the comedy going, paying a coaching staff (this is a poor part of Miss.), etc.

‘Bacon: I wasn’t sure about the Jesus Christ parts of the sermon… I was struggling with whether I believe this….

So if I could find a church, and this may already exist, where the Sunday school is very low on the beliefs of Jesus and very high on the community part, that’s what I’m looking for.

[I’d like a church] focused less on Jesus rising from the dead and more about being compassionate, caring people…

Martin: Do you think though, to even loosely wear the identity of a cultural Christian, don’t you need the resurrection part?’

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

America is secularizing at an astonishing rate, and this NPR interview with a young man raised in the Black charismatic church tells you part of the reason why — and it’s a very simple reason: Increasingly, the very content of the Christian faith strikes a lot of people as untrue.

Zat all you got? 2.5 kids a month plus at least one adult gun death a day by homicide or suicide? Give me a call when citizens’ brigades are mopping up twenty buckets of blood every morning in Civic Plaza and getting shot at while doing it! Okay?

Meanwhile, Guv, if you think a few pulverized brats justifies seizing our AKs, you are looking at a world of pain.

America’s Number One most dangerous city!

“It’s very scary, and then you’ve got police officers telling you don’t come down here without a gun. I just won’t come anymore because if you have to go somewhere with a gun, why do you go?” the witness said.

Another man, who did not want to be identified, brought his wife and three small children downtown to enjoy the new playgrounds in Tom Lee Park. He said he heard a gunshot while they were walking back to their car, and when they got to the parking lot on Wagner Place, he saw the shooting victim next to his vehicle.

“It’s actually normal down here. It’s crazy in broad daylight,” he said.

Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.

A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.

Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.

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

So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.

Andrew Sullivan (no link) tells Biden to step aside, and he’s got a point.

Yes, Trump is almost as old as Biden. But he has the energy and stamina and obsessiveness of the truly mentally ill. I started to read his interview this week with Hugh Hewitt, and yes, it was a festival of delusion and lies and occasional decent points. But what struck me also was the zeal, untempered by time, the persistent, angry passion, the untiring drive to regain power. He is not what he was, and, appearances to the contrary, is mortal. But up against Biden, he seems like raw energy.

…  Trump now has the aura of the American outlaw, a victim of the Biden DOJ, a man on the run. Look at that mug shot. He’s trolling the Constitution. I once wrote about Trump in the context of Shakespeare’s Richard III: it’s hard not to root for the monster in some mischievous way. 

I get all that. I don’t quite get this:

 [W]hen I think of the presidency right now, it feels like an empty space. The drift so many now feel as religion recedes from American life, as social media eats away at any sense of the common good, as all the worst elements of society are replayed on our phones over and over, is palpable. 

I’m not palpating it. I see plenty of healthy civic activism – environment, reproductive rights, gun control – in large parts of this country. And since when does the recession of religion equal destructive drift? Looked at Norway lately? Looked at any list of the best countries in the world by any measure you’d like? Not a non-secular one among them. OTOH I won’t waste your time listing the God-fearing catastrophes. I mean, break it down by state. Among the worst elements of our society are the fundamentalists and the bigots breathed air into by Trump, and I agree with Sullivan that Biden’s a dangerously weak candidate to go up against them.

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

UD‘s very keen, if we’re talking Biden-subs, on Buttigieg, and not just because he’s read Ulysses (his father was a Joyce scholar). Unflappable, likes a good fight, smart as a whip, likeable, YOUNG, serious, military background, politically experienced, sense of humor. Americans are even willing to vote for intellectuals lately (Obama)! But I fear they’re not yet, in sufficient numbers, willing to vote – at the level of the presidency – for out gay people.

“And your defense for that,” Vivek Ramaswamy’s interviewer continues, “is that you didn’t have the money to pay for law school. Even though you had already made over a million dollars at the time.”

It is hard to understand: A rock-solid Trumpian with virtually homicidal hatred of George Soros — because, as Rudy Giuliani has explained, Soros was pulling the strings at Dominion Voting Systems, which allowed Biden to steal the election!! — Ramaswamy never returned/denounced the Soros money he got even though he didn’t need it… He hasn’t even expressed regret for a youthful mistake, or whatever.

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

You don’t have to dig too far to figure this one out. Scramble the letters in the word VIVEK and then drop the duplicative V and what do you get?

KIEV.

Who is one of the strongest, richest, and most powerful defenders of Ukraine? George Soros. What is his next move after successfully stealing the election from Donald Trump?

In a classic Manchurian Candidate move, Soros has, over many years, through gifts of unimaginable sums of money, taken over Vivek/Kiev, and planted him smack dab in the middle of the Republican primary. Where did the dude come from? everyone’s asking. Who the hell is he?

He is the creation of the brilliant and visionary George Soros. Thoroughly brainwashed, exquisitely programmed, Ramaswamy awaits activation as an assassin of whatever Republican rises to presidential candidate.

A small handful of students at French public schools have refused to remove their full-body-swaddling abayas in response to a new government mandate. But even though it’s obvious that compliance is happening, people who think it’s fine to force veiling on children are squawking. Parents should be free to swaddle their ten-year-olds!

It’s such a grossly bad argument. Of course UD understands that some little girls who’ve been blanketed by their parents from birth because of their obscene female equipment must feel pretty shitty, pretty scared, at the prospect of anyone catching a glimpse of their ankle. I’m sure it makes them feel whorish and evil. But that feeling will pass; and after all they can still swaddle at will (at their parents’ will) outside of school hours.

No one ever said educating reactionaries in the principles of equality was easy. For some of them, you never will get there. But you can certainly educate their daughters.