Good luck with that, lady. Talk to Ocean City, Maryland. You can wave your mayoral wand and declare certain deadly events over, but, by their very nature, groups like bikers are likely to ignore you. There’s a reason they call themselves Outlaws and shit like that: They do what they want.
And they’ll probably want to keep coming back to little Red River and there’s nothing you can do about that.
You’ve whipped yourself up some real sorcerer’s apprentice type stuff, in other words. And it don’t help none that New Mexico is biker gang central. One of the top five states for biker gangs. These killers are your neighbors.
AND it don’t help that the current trend in America is for everyone to own and carry multiple crowd-pulverizers. I mean, way gun-friendly states like your beloved New Mexico don’t get to just rest on their cowboy laurels and enjoy their mass murder toys at gun ranges and all; folks are gonna wanna kill people with them, aren’t they?
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Now, for reasons unknown, your little town kept inviting tens of thousands of heavily armed biker gangs to hang out with you every year. I mean, it was great for business — the bars, the motels. The bars. And I’m sure some of your bar owners are even as we speak saying basically oh okay a few dead guys in the street. Cost of doing business! Don’t shut down the rally. Few bad apples. Get more police protection. Etc. The mayor will ignore them, but, again, it won’t matter. Chances are excellent massive waves of drunken louts with big guns will be back next year.
And lady, not to be mean, but you and your fellow New Mexicans created, and sustain, the gunny gangy world in which the Barbarians thrive. That’s why they choose to live in your state.
The mayor says they had a heads-up of about 500 Bandidos members heading into town. However, she says there was double that and Bandidos members haven’t even been at the rally since 2019.
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After-Action Review*:
[One visitor said he] had felt uneasy Saturday before the shooting.
”There was so much tension. You could feel it,” he said. “We didn’t really want to walk around. There were wall-to-wall [motorcycle clubs].”
[He] said he walked on the street rather than on the sidewalk, “because if you walked on the sidewalk, every other person you passed, you bumped into. If I see people who wear the [biker gang] colors, I’d rather not bump into them and create anything. I’d rather walk in the street. I’m good with that. I don’t know why they let the colors come back. That was their first mistake, lifting the color ban.”
”It was so thick here yesterday, you couldn’t even walk around, [said another visitor]. They were just posted up everywhere, on every corner. When they’re hanging out like that you just have to be careful.”
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*Note for next year’s family fun biker rally: Enrich everyone’s experience with multiple bullet-proof barriers/holding pens for each warring gang, surrounded by hundreds of officers holding AK-47s. Along the barrier walls, posters with identifying gang colors should be plainly visible to all visitors.
Local Red River NM pol Craig Swagerty is being too modest. His town’s annual biker rally has long also featured drug arrests (everyone knows about biker gangs and the drug business), fights, property damage, weapons charges, and forced temporary migration/home detention of scared locals …
But, you know… Red River folk consider tens of thousands of fucked up armed bikers packed onto their streets for days as a positive, and they keep welcoming back the boys — and the boys bring their kids, too, so this year the little ones got to be part of the hysterical stampede of people trying to get out of the way of bullets. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said another resident. “I was told not to go out [as soon as the rally began] and so I was staying at a friend’s house. It honestly sounded like a whole clip was unloaded. It was a lot of gunshots at once.” Yep, must be quite a sight for one of the 500 permanent residents of tiny Red River to see/hear 28,000 heavily armed people outside her door. Town sure don’t need to worry about adequate policing with them numbers!
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So now everyone’s talking about this year’s blowout – the bloodbath is all over the national and international news and I mean Craigwhodathunkit?? Who could have foreseen that 28,000 drunk assholes carrying 40,000 weapons would shoot some of them off? What’s America coming to?
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In these Great Carnage days, you’d think a few people would look at and think about the lowest hanging fruit, the locations where mass shooting is practically guaranteed. Apart from the obvious – urban drug turf – UD will now helpfully single out two places guaranteed to generate routine atrocity:
Hookah lounges
Biker rallies
There are plenty of other places you, like the Red River resident smart enough to get the hell out of the way of the rally even before it started, definitely ought to avoid if you dislike open air gun battle. The boardwalk in Myrtle Beach or Ocean City MD… Public high schools in Glocksucker states… etc etc etc yada yada yada. I mean, do you read the news at all? Ain’t it kind of obvious?
NOT that UD‘s offering even a whiff of a suggestion that guns should be restricted or you should have check points in locations guaranteed to kill people repeatedly! Perish the thought that you and your family shouldn’t be free to perish at the hands of a drunk, high POS with a Glock! NOOOOO. I’m only saying we should designate these places, with big easy to read signs, Most Likely to Murder, so people can choose to stay away, or, as some folks in places like Myrtle Beach and Red River do, leave town until event season is over. Rather than the town of Red River promoting bike rallies on its tourism website and promising fun for the whole family (current town policy), you’d have the mayor say something like this (she made the comment to the Taos newspaper — Taos: the classy town, forty miles away from trashy Red River, that along with everyplace else anywhere near Red River went into lockdown right after the shooting):
“Everybody needs to understand that this really isn’t an event that we promote. There’s not really an event sponsor; it’s not a town-sponsored event. It’s something that occurs every year. It’s an event that’s grown and happens and we do our best to manage it.”
Course they do promote it. It’s right there on their website… Oh wait! Someone done taken it down!
Not only that, but lookee here what sober rule-bound Red River’s doing now!
“For everyone, there will be zero tolerance from this point forward,” [the local police captain] said at a [post-massacre] news conference. “That is traffic violations for 1 mile an hour over, seat belts, jaywalking. We are going to stop and talk to everyone if they violate any law — traffic or criminal.”
Look sharp, lad! From now on we fuckin promise it’s gonna be Pyongyang around here! And cut your hair!
Believe me when I say that I, like many people who have been burned by the Texas GOP’s seemingly endless appetite for cruelty, ignorance, and hypocrisy, felt a certain satisfaction as I watched yesterday’s coverage of it setting itself on fire. Top moment? When the first group to appear outside the Capitol in Austin in response to [corrupt, impeached AG Ken] Paxton’s call for supporters to turn out was around 100 people preparing for the “Trot for Trans Lives,” a 5K run held in support of transgender Americans affected by the waves of anti-trans rights legislation passed in recent years, including by Texas lawmakers.
Les UDs have watched in amazement as a new house fifty feet from Garrett Park’s two big, beautiful town swimming pools installed its own quite large pool.
Garrett Park is rich, yes; but we’re not Malibu. Not every house installs its own tennis court/swimming pool complex. I mean, almost no house does.
Indeed, along with gorgeous, never crowded, beautifully landscaped pools for the use of Garrett Parkers, the town has two beautifully landscaped, never crowded, tennis courts. And a terrific basketball court (a house just down the street from the basketball court does have a private indoor one).
Anyway, we’ve scratched our heads about the private pool steps from the town pool, but okay.
It is only mid-spring, but already dozens of pools in and around Maryland’s most populous county have been listed for rent on Swimply, which launched in 2020 as people sought alternatives to public pools that shut down because of the pandemic on the heels of the wild success of apps like Airbnb and Uber. Hosts set hourly rates anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour to access private backyard pools that bypass lines and crowds.
… Many homeowners are eager to earn easy money by renting out a backyard pool …
A … group of 36 county residents from Chevy Chase, Rockville, Montgomery Village, Kensington and Rosemary Hills, wrote a letter opposing [a proposed bill regulating the practice] and asking the county instead to outlaw the amenity rentals altogether. The group argued that the rentals turn quiet residential neighborhoods into bustling business districts, without the infrastructure to support commercial activity. They raised dozens of concerns, largely over the added nuisance of strangers pouring into their neighborhoods because of the apps, congested roads, scarce parking, and noise and safety.‘
Now, Kensington… That’s getting much too close for comfort. Next town over. So now UD‘s wondering if this oddly situated and surprisingly large private pool in her town is a rental. Yikes.
UD‘s been blogging about NM for years and ain’t surprised it came out on top on this and on other intelligence measures; but it’s always good to be able to point to evidence, and the recent decision to stage a huge public rally in a tiny town among warring biker factions will do nicely.
The mayor of Red River is shocked at the mass shooting (three dead so far, several injured) that ensued, cuz you’d NEVER expect fine folk like these to have gotten drunk at Red River’s bars and to have used their big big big guns to kill each other. Unprecedented!
How could such a thing have happened? Bikers were supposed to be at “a live music event by Warning Shot” (not making this up) but instead just blew past the whole warning thing and started killing each other. Coulda knocked the mayor and tourism director over with a feather: 28,000 armed bikers that hate each other! And now you tell me this didn’t bode well. Hidesight is 50/50 dude!!!!
… and you too might pen a No Thanks letter to a university in one of America’s LGBTQ (Lawless Glocksucker Barbarian Tenureless Quisling) states.
UT-Austin tried to hire a game theorist for its new free-enterprise think tank. He turned down the job because of fights over tenure.
‘I must admit I have been closely following the activities of the Texas Legislature for the past couple of weeks, which has highlighted to me some potential risks that were not in the front of my mind at the outset of this process… If I moved from my current job, which is a decent job, to UT, what kind of intellectual community can I build there? … When you go somewhere as a senior faculty member, you’re thinking about, OK … how am I going to build that department? If I go there and I have tenure, but they don’t have tenure — and what I want to do is build a group in my field — that sounds very difficult because junior faculty wouldn’t want to come.’ …
Daniel Brinks, chair of the government department at UT-Austin, told lawmakers at a public hearing earlier this month that he made six job offers to fill two positions this spring and was turned down every time.
“People turn down jobs for lots of reasons, but from what these candidates told me, the uncertainty around tenure was a big factor in our failure to hire this year,” he told the House Higher Education Committee.
Might could be them real big guns yall got hangin off everybody too.
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
