Yuval Noah Harari addresses a pro-democracy rally in Tel Aviv.

… and deciding that, say, any story about a gun found in a school (elementary, middle, high) is no longer worth covering (see? a pointless infinite scroll down).

Gunplay among neonates in hospital bassinet rooms will continue to be covered, but only with fatalities.

Examples of still-newsworthy gun incidents would include one airplane passenger carrying in his checked luggage

a. one ASP expandable baton;
b. one spring loaded knife;
c. one Axon taser X26, bearing serial number X00-051402, which contained three deployable prongs;
d. one .40 caliber Glock 22 handgun, bearing serial number XMC085;
e. one .308 caliber DPMS Panther Arms rifle, bearing serial number 13827.

And carrying on his person

two .40 caliber Glock magazines, each containing fifteen rounds of .40 caliber ammunition. A further search … revealed a ballistic vest carrier that displayed the words “Deputy Marshal.”

It’s a list of categories UD introduced in 2012, and it has held up well over the years. Details of each type here.

The case of busybusybusy USC professor David B. Agus – known hereafter as David B.OGUS – seems overwhelmingly to have been ATELIER; his downfall, that is, probably involves his having hired an atelier of underlings to write his books for him cuz he’s too important to actually sire the little whippersnappers himself.

But, as UD always has occasion to say on these, uh, occasions, you can’t get good help these days. You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think, as Dorothy Parker pointed out; likewise, you can pay an atelier to write your book, but you can’t make it not plagiarize.

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

A little Keck School of Medicine context: This school has the world’s most comically disreputable faculty: Drew Pinsky, Rohit Varma, Carmen Puliafito (oh wait; he wasn’t faculty: he was DEAN), etc etc etc; the larger institution has been right there out in front of the Varsity Blues scandal, a humongous political bribery scandal, and of course SCADS of sports scandals.

I mean to say that USC cannot really afford its latest Dr Bogus. But it’s got him.

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UPDATE: Cherchez la femme! The big mean lady who wrote books with my name on their covers is responsible for

more than 120 cribbed passages in three titles, some of which went on for pages. 

So UD was right – it was Atelier.

Her advice for Dr. Bogus should he try for a fourth title: Read your employees’ work before you append your name to it. Use a plagiarism-detector. Seek new hired help.

Texas Tech, one of America’s scummiest schools, recently hired, at an incredible multimillion salary, a basketball coach who quotes Bible verses to black players about slaves serving their masters, and who spits on players who annoy him.

Beslaved and bespitted players have complained to the AD about the dude, and he’s been suspended, but he sure as heck ain’t apologizing for citing the Good Book, which of course has WHAT to say about slaves, and the spitting was cuz he had a cold and was, er, dribbling.

TTU’s national ranking has gone from 176 in 2018 to 219 today. Solution: Spend more money on sports!

Why this tidbit shows up at the very end of a long piece detailing 2022’s especially barbaric spring break is beyond me. Surely, as we enter this year’s fun, the escalating arsenal in the hands of drunk, massed, seventeen year olds belongs in the first paragraph.

We expect midday rapes on the beach, lethal blotto-toppling from balconies, car crashes, blah blah. What we really need to look for this year, as the country hoards four hundred million guns, and as every popular SB destination announces that armed law enforcement plans to show up against the revelers, is, well, warfare. Europe has Ukraine; the United States has Myrtle Beach.

I’m talking about a two-front war: Not just the established business of wasted guys blowing other wasted guys away in open street warfare because rivals find the same woman attractive, but battalions of wasted people blasting away against the police.

What makes you think the hordes of drug dealers who expect to do a… bang-up business at these week-long events won’t protect their turf the same way they do on city streets?

Local bars are furious about the imposition of early closing hours, stepped up i.d. harassment, blatant police presence, etc., etc. What makes you think they and/or their patrons won’t start shooting?

Babe, this is America.

Here’s some wisdom from a very young juror:

James said that the prosecution’s argument that there was a “perfect storm” gathering, and Murdaugh was on cusp of a devastating financial reckoning was a good theme – but wasn’t a persuasive motive.

“I don’t think I’d ever be able to answer why somebody would do something like that,” he said. “But I know that there are people in the world that don’t make sense, and they do things without making it make sense. So I don’t know that there is an answer other than that it happened and that it shouldn’t have.”

Yup. Here’s UD‘s take, FWIW:

Since that morning, when his firm’s financial officer confronted Murdaugh about his extensive theft from the business and its clients, he had been in a deepening, increasingly unmanageable, panic. Thoughts of his family’s ruination, and the ruin, at his hands, of the proud Murdaugh legacy, gripped him more and more tightly.

I don’t think that when he summoned his family to the rural property (Buster was too far away to summon) he did so with any clear motive of killing them; I think he was simply at wit’s end and wanted their help in some way. Or maybe he wanted to confess to them, the way Bernie Madoff gathered his sons to his office and confessed, as the FBI circled, his Ponzi scheme. I don’t think Murdaugh knew what to do; I think he was melting down, and he, in an unspecified atavistic way, wanted his family around him.

Reveling in the beautiful normality of hanging around with Maggie and Paul, with the dogs and the birds, Murdaugh was suddenly overcome with the pointlessness of it all, the loss of it all, the oncoming nothingness of his shattered existence. This was not excruciating self-punishment, or self-hatred; if it were, of course, he would have grabbed one of the hundreds of available guns and killed himself. It was a bleak nihilistic vision of a demonic world all of whose denizens, including his own wife and son, were committed to destroying him. His wife and son, after all, had been getting into his pills, and they were demanding a family conference in which they clearly intended to give him a hard time about the oxy. His drunk out of control son, who’d already racked up booze-related legal problems – hell, who’d already killed someone – could only benefit from having his existence ended. His wife was a nervous wreck about the tens of millions of dollars the bulldog lawyer the dead girl’s parents had hired was promising to get out of the Murdaughs; and she’d already been driven out of the neighborhood of their primary residence because of the horrible publicity about the lethal boat wreck. All that, plus his unmasking, that morning, as a career larcenist…!

Everyone here, he thought, in his nihilistic panic, would be better off dead.

So in the darkness, in the night, facing trusting heedless loved ones, he grabbed his weapons and began blasting away at Paul and Maggie. Make them go away. Make it all go away.

When it came to it, he couldn’t complete the nihilistic horror. He couldn’t turn the weapons on himself. He knew the rest of his life would be litigation and imprisonment but he simply couldn’t end his life. Narcissism, cowardice, whatever. Couldn’t do it.

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But. When all is said and done, remember that great scene in Black Widow, when Debra Winger (as an FBI agent) says to her motive-sniffing boss: “Don’t you understand? No one knows why anyone does anything.”

Good ol’ Mississippi. As we always say of it, somebody’s gotta come in last.

The Mississippi Senate has passed a bill that will stop electric car companies from opening their own dealerships in the state, ensuring that the state famous for being last place in many rankings of all 50 states remains there… [W]hen confronted with a rapidly growing industry – which is currently eyeing the South for billions in investment with new battery and car factories, bringing long-term job prospects and prosperity along with them – Mississippi looked at their neighbors, and at their own last-place rank in everything, and said: “Nah, we’re good here.”…  

[Mississippi also imposes] an annual $150 tax on electric vehicles, far above the amount of taxation that a hypothetical similarly efficient gas vehicle would have to pay. This charge is approximately equivalent to the amount of gas taxes a similarly efficient gas vehicle would pay if it drove 100,000 miles in a year. Meanwhile, gas vehicles benefit from tens of thousands of dollars of incentives over their lifetime, in terms of ignored health and environmental costs of pollution, which harm the health of Mississippians and everyone else in the world.

The University of Georgia admissions committee selects for vehicular homicide, drunk driving, drag racing, and beating people up. These guys are highly selected: scholarships, campus heroes. What a school.

And if you’d care to do the entire long Georgia Football Walk of Shame, go here.

One of the jurors who convicted Alex Murdaugh has broken his cover to tell how it took the jury just 45 minutes to find him unanimously guilty of double murder. 

Sing it.

Only forty-five minutes to Guilty
Think of the changes it brings;
For the short time it takes
What a diff’rence it makes
In the ways of the people and things

Oh! What a fine bit of justice
Oh! A decision to cheer
Yes the jurors made hay
Took much less than a day —
Only forty-five minutes to clear

If it’s UD’s Garrett Park, it means that yesterday morning there’s a knock at the door by a man identifying himself as “the town arborist.” Of course UD knows Phil Normandy, who leads regular town walks where he updates GPers on newly planted trees, dead and dying trees, rare and exotic finds, etc.

“Margaret, letting you know the town’s planting two trees in front of your house.” The town right of way extends fifteen feet into what you might call our front yard. It’s up to the town what it does with it, and what it’s doing with it is planting — free of charge to Les UDs, of course — two very beautiful trees for us to gaze at from our front windows:

1. American Fringe tree, female (with blue berries!)
2. Siebold Magnolia, variety Colossus.

The gunny, sexually perverted basketball team is of course only the most obvious sign of thorough institutional squalor.

Current and former employees the AP interviewed described scenarios in which top-level administrators refused to hold themselves or others accountable, both inside and outside the athletic department. One said the “guardrails” designed to protect students and faculty — from everything from retaliation for whistleblowing to sexual improprieties — had all but disappeared.

“Because there’s so much churn in our upper administration, we never get to the point of hammering out who is actually accountable for upholding policies,” [one insider] said.

In one instance, a lawsuit last year filed by a Jane Doe alleges a longtime professor with ties to the athletic department “harassed and groomed female students for years, coercing them into sexual relations and bragging about the same” while school officials looked the other way. The plaintiff alleges she was sexually assaulted by the professor.

Another case alleges that two professors who blew the whistle about hiring practices they claimed flouted human-resource policies had their complaints intercepted by an administrator involved in the hiring, who then pushed for disciplinary cases to be opened against those professors. One has been demoted from his deanship.

[The] Office of Institutional Equity, which handles Title IX and other discrimination complaints and should have been on the front lines of the hazing allegations, [was] marginalized, with administrators ignoring some recommendations produced by the office and putting others off.

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Uh lets see what else.

1. misappropriation of funds
2. unethical hiring
3. humongous lawsuits filed by the latest set of massively overpaid now-fired shitskis
4. the decision to end a policy that “student-athletes would be dismissed if found guilty of (or pleaded no contest to) a felony. That allowed one player to remain on the team at the time the rules were changed. It also furthered New Mexico State’s reputation as a place where athletes and coaches get second chances — perhaps without accountability.” Nice way to put it. Perhaps without.

Look. Tons of universities in this country have forged winning basketball/football teams by scouring the junior colleges for naughty numbskulls who play really well. It’s a beyond-belief sordid thing for a university to do, but tons of them do it. Many come to grief as the bad boys launch crime sprees, start fights on the field/court, get involved in academic cheating scandals, rape people, blah blah. Small price to pay, says a school like Nebraska, which has an AMAZING record of recruiting crazyass assholes. It’s one way to field winning teams and who cares if players beat the shit out of students ahead of them in line for pizza just cuz they’re getting impatient.

UD will admit that, in a strong field, NMSU has distinguished itself. But the indecent tale of school-destruction is one it shares with many cohorts.

‘Apple Permanently Close[s] Down a Store

in a North Carolina Mall after 3 Shootings

at the Mall in just 75 Days‘

Ah, but unlike those other institutions, Harvard struggles with a 54 billion dollar endowment, and cannot be expected to overcome the legal and sand blasting hurdles that other institutions have overcome.

… the most recent criminal gang to attract the attention of law enforcement includes a woman. True, her sentence for stealing federal funds meant for underprivileged children, and using them to buy high-end SUVs and Florida condos, will be merely time served, whereas the big boys are getting bigger, man-sized sentences. But they dealt her in, even though she’s a girl! This is where gender equality begins.

Harvard’s oddest lays out the glorious Cathophate-to-Come.