… shows that we’ve moved from late night sketchy gunfight locations (hookah bars) to wholesome kids’ dance class locations. Look at the Facebook page for this once-wonderful, now utterly bloodied, place.

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Four dead, many injured, most in their teens. UD‘s gonna go ahead and guess that what got the fight going was the same old shit – two guys arguing over a girl. But now, along with fists, lots of kids have got a gun.

And it was so innocent a place – a dance studio for kids – that I’m sure no one thought they’d need to pat people down for weapons.

Yet surely they knew that everyone in this story lives (died) in the seventh most gun-friendly state in America. Guns per capita: 33.15. Look at this list! Do people in Alabama look at these lists??

Not to be mean, but what the fuck sort of thing do people think is going to happen.

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Keenan Cooper, the DJ at the party, told WBMA-TV that the party was stopped briefly when attendees heard someone had a gun. He said people with guns were asked to leave, but no one left. 

See how it is? No security. “Asked to leave.” WTF. Alabama has to accept what it is – 33.15 guns per capita – and act accordingly. No place is even a little safe with 33.15 per capita. Get it?

Nope. Deadville’s nihilist mayor says “trying to control guns would prove … futile … .”

Ten percent!

BOOK BANNERS ARE NOW TRYING TO CLOSE PUBLIC LIBRARIES

A Nashville, Tenn., florist is refusing to serve a Republican National Committee (RNC) fundraiser featuring former President Trump in protest over lack of action on gun control laws… [The shop calls for] other Nashville businesses to refuse money from the RNC “until they begin to make the changes to gun laws that most Americans are calling for. … Our community has just lost seven people, including three young children, to yet another school shooting. At this moment I cannot ignore the work that the RNC has done to create this tragedy and so many others like it… The Republican Party has wasted taxpayer money and precious legislative will on banning drag shows, rather than assault rifles that are being used to murder children in their classrooms.“

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UPDATE: The GOP responds.

“We already found another place.”

If you can read all the way through this without laughing out loud, you’re a better man than I am.

The $3million coral art Sphinx destroyed when a 66-year-old Florida woman smashed her Rolls Royce into it was designed by British artist Damien Hirst and owned by hedge fund magnate Steven Tananbaum.

You may recall an earlier DeLilloesque headline:

Florida ferry accident off exclusive island results in deaths of 2 socialites as Mercedes rolls into water

All postmodern headlines must include:

1. an accident, preferably involving cars
2. the car must be a luxury car, and its make must be specified in the lead or headline
3. there must be at least three wealth-markers packed into the headline (Rolls Royce, Hirst, hedge fund; exclusive, socialites, Mercedes).

Both of these headlines would have appeared in DeLillo’s White Noise had he written it more recently.

Let’s start with delight: One of UD‘s heroes, Steven Pinker, has started a defense of free speech group among faculty there. Everyone’s got an eye on Stanford and Oberlin and multiple other stagers of politically coercive campus melodrama, and all self-respecting centers of free inquiry need to take an explicit stand against these enemies of freedom. UD’s beloved University of Chicago is a pioneer here; Harvard and other schools follow UC in strong unmitigated statements, rules, and organizations deployed to resist right and left ideologues – some of whom, grotesquely, were hired by these same universities – who are always trying to shut/shout down free thought and free expression. Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom (which includes econ prof Jason Furman, whose Cambridge house UD knows well, because for years it was owned by her buddy Peter Galbraith) rightly anticipates, and readies itself to fight, mindless and destructive fanaticism.

On the disgust front, there’s yet another greedy egomaniac who can’t think of anything to do with three hundred million dollars other than give it to an institution worth significantly more than fifty billion dollars in order to get his name on a building and get some tax benefits. Vomit.

Not to mention.

‘[Kim Jong-Un is] top of the line. Really smart. As a young man at 24, even though he sort of inherits it, most people when they inherit it they lose it… He has total dominant control. That’s not easy.‘

House Republicans expressed alarm after an increasingly unhinged Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaed himself to testify before Congress.

In a blistering statement, the House Judiciary Committee chairman demanded that he comply with his subpoena and called himself a “toadying Soros-backed flunky.”

“The message to Jim Jordan is clear: you can run, but you can’t hide,” Jordan said.

The Ohio congressman warned that, if he refused to testify, he would have “no other choice” but to call for himself to be jailed.

… but everyone else has. UD assumes the paper of record wants to make ENTIRELY sure that Trump intends to sue Michael Cohen for five hundred million dollars onaccounta he shouldn’t have talked about Stormy Daniels.

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

There you go.

Steinhardt eventually got tossed from the BOT for being a comprehensive, all-’round, all-inclusive, across the board POS. Bartiromo – not a criminal, but certainly a national freakshow – remains on the board.

As the hilarious Fox/Dominion trial proceeds, and the judge gets madder and madder about the effort on the part of the Fox attorneys to hide things like the depth of Bartiromo’s conspiratorial delusions, observers at NYU are going to start asking – especially in the wake of the Steinhardt scandals – whether the school really wants to keep her seat warm. It’s obvious that more documentation of Bartiromo’s panting, I’ll do anything, Trumplove – an orientation somewhat at odds with her representation as a respectable journalist – is forthcoming, and it’s going to make NYU look even nuttier for retaining her.

It’s not about her politics – she’s free to love Trump. It’s about whether NYU wants Blanche DuBois helping to run the school.

… where gun ownership is mandatory, has begun to attract attention from social theorists as well as policy makers due to its sudden, exponential, growth.

The so-called ‘Flakellants’ (pronounced “flak,” not “flake”) derive their identity from the medieval Flagellants, groups of religious fanatics who marched – and march: flagellants continue to exist – through the towns and cities of Europe half naked, scourging themselves bloody with penitential whips in a public, masochistic act of self-mortification.

Contemporary “Flak”ellants – in a behavior reflecting what David French describes as “a form of gun idolatry or gun fetish that treats a gun as a quasi-sacred object” – march semi-nude in public thoroughfares while scourging themselves with guns in the shape of crucifixes.

Last week, a three thousand-strong contingent of Flakellants took to the streets of Provo (for modesty’s sake, women Flakellants wear flak jackets), their numbers increasing as local citizens spontaneously grabbed their own guns, attached heavy ropes to them, and pistol-whipped themselves.

All Flakellant marches end with at least one public suicide as an act of ultimate sacrifice/penitence; these are apparently never planned but rather the result of an overflow of spiritual/gun-bearing fervor. “Of course, it’s a sin,” one of the Provo marchers commented to a reporter covering the event, “but you can’t stop someone determined to bow to the power of the gun. For us, the pouring out of their blood in front of us is a communion as powerful as the Blood of the Lamb. We wet our fingers with this sacred outpouring and mark our foreheads and our gun crosses with it.”

The next Flakellant march (co-sponsored by the Catholic organization Rifle-Scopus Dei) will be in two days, in Salt Lake City, led by Tennessee Representative Andrew Ogles. It is expected to attract at least ten thousand participants.

‘A Round-Up of

Today’s Massacres and

Attempted Massacres:

Another Monday in the United States of America.’

… the town of Garrett Park (which is an arboretum) goes in as we speak.

It’s a Siebold magnolia, variety Colossus.