[Sing it.]

If you’re young and armed.

For it’s hard with your skills

To resist random kills
If you’re young and armed
You can go to extremes
With big massacre schemes

You can laugh when your dead
Have a hole for their head
And life gets more exciting
With each passing day
And hate is either in your heart

Or on its way
Don’t you know that it’s worth
Every treasure on earth
To be young and armed
For as rich as you are
It’s much better by far
To be young and armed

And if you should survive to 105
Look at all you’ll destroy
You adorable boy
And here is the best part
You’ve had a head start
If you are among the very
Young and armed

LOLOLOL.

Je dois dire I too am stunned that courts all over Europe are currently dragging this poor man into aggravated rape proceedings. Sure everyone knew big deal he got violent with the sex slaves brought to his hotels if they refused to be raped! But mon dieu who’d have thought this Oxford don actually raped? Coulda knocked me over with a burqa.

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

The Ramadan file.

Giuliani [allegedly] demanded that [his then-staffer] give him oral sex as he took speakerphone calls from then-president Trump.

She’s suing.

Austrian authorities have now issued an explanation: Rep. Paul Gosar is visiting the country this week.

There are 16 counties in the United States with populations of at least two million residents. Eleven of them were less religious in 2020 than they were a decade earlier...

Just saying.

“If I don’t act fast enough to save your life, prevent you from getting septic, I could be liable for civil cases … malpractice. But if I act too quickly and I’m not 100% certain that the patient is going to die from the complication she’s sustaining, then I could be guilty of a felony.”

… [Idaho] allows certain family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000 if the procedure breaks the abortion law.

Doctors in those cases also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges and even prison time.

Beyond that, Idaho’s governor also signed a law that says anyone helping a minor travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy – without parental consent – is guilty of a crime.

… [F]ive of the nine remaining full-time maternal-fetal medicine physicians in the state will have left by the end of this year.

… Jim Souza, the chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, told CNN: “We’re at the beginning of the collapse of an entire system of care.”

… And because there are no ob-gyn residencies in Idaho, finding doctors willing to relocate given the abortion laws on the books is a real challenge.

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

But God never closes a door without opening a window! Idaho will soon be America’s ground zero for diploma mill grads! Recent graduates of the Lake Natron School of Medicine will flock to the state, where desperate hospitals will snap them up. And all will be well.

Commencement at MAGA takeover site New College, Florida will be… interesting. Student response to having a MAGA maniac shoved down their throats as speaker has been to organize an altogether alternative event.

Students seem to have hoped for $20,000 or so in donations toward renting a space, catering, etc., but in only a few days the number has zoomed to over $122,000 (note that I have to keep changing this number; nothing like theocrat bullies to get the bucks flowing), so they are now collecting not just for the event but for other fuck DeSantis activities.

UD donated $100… I can’t think of a purer act of local democratic/intellectual resistance than this ingenious counter-staging. Here’s hoping the representative from Hillsdale College will be speaking his lies into a void.

Or, even better, to a bused-in crowd of not-yet-jailed January 6 insurgents who will hoot and holler throughout, and then – cuz it’s a college – set all the school’s books aflame in an enormous bonfire.

That’s the opening line of Baudelaire’s spectacular poem, Anywhere Out of the World, which UD reproduces below. But first, a small event which suggests that at least the USA, if not all of the world, is becoming a hospital: Texas legislators have introduced a bill that would train eight year old school children in battlefield trauma care — tourniquets, chest seals — so that during and after the various massacres that take place in their classrooms they can aid the wounded. (UD thanks Andrew for the link.)

A couple of thoughts about this. A lot of Texas parents are horrified by the idea; they say that children that young can’t be expected to do this kind of wound treatment.

But not so fast, says UD. The parents are assuming a one-shot deal, but especially in Texas one can assume that each child will experience multiple massacres; and with each massacre they will become more battle-tested, to the point where their weak and clumsy fingers will become expert binders of wounds. Give them time to become seasoned, and you’ll see how well they do.

Other parents point out that AR-15s don’t leave wounds; they leave broadly disseminated body parts at best and, at worst, deep pools of blood here and there with some flesh/organs/brain matter floating in them. Imagine the frustration of a highly trained eight year old as she scans the classroom for any X to tourniquet to any Y! Can’t be done.

So UD proposes revising the legislation: The state of Texas will fund/mandate elementary school field trips to Israel, where members of ZAKA, the organization that collects blood and body parts after terrorist bombings, will walk Texas children through the discovery, identification, and gathering process. Is that your BFF Jessica under her desk, or parts of her mingled with Jodie? Children will learn how to quickly discriminate among remains, based on fragments of clothing, pairs of glasses, blood spatter directions and locations, etc., etc.

The Holy Land is of course a blood-rich environment, and after their training children may wish to trace the bloody Via Dolorosa, and similar sites.

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

ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.
It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul.
‘Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you think of going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and there you would invigorate yourself like a lizard. This city is on the sea-shore; they say that it is built of marble and that the people there have such a hatred of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There you have a landscape that corresponds to your taste! a landscape made of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!’
My soul does not reply.
‘Since you are so fond of stillness, coupled with the show of movement, would you like to settle in Holland, that beatifying country? Perhaps you would find some diversion in that land whose image you have so often admired in the art galleries. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships moored at the foot of houses?’
My soul remains silent.
‘Perhaps Batavia attracts you more? There we should find, amongst other things, the spirit of Europe
married to tropical beauty.’
Not a word. Could my soul be dead?
‘Is it then that you have reached such a degree of lethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness? If so, let us flee to lands that are analogues of death. I see how it is, poor soul! We shall pack our trunks for Tornio. Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible; let us settle at the Pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and increases monotony, that half-nothingness. There we shall be able to take long baths of darkness, while for our amusement the aurora borealis shall send us its rose-coloured rays that are like the reflection of Hell’s own fireworks!’
At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: ‘No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!’

An eight year old with a loaded handgun. Big deal. The six year old in Newport News didn’t just smuggle in a loaded handgun — he shot his teacher with it! Maybe Grand Rapids is eyeing the forty million dollar lawsuit she’s filed against the N.N. school district; maybe Grand Rapids figures if it’s caught four handguns it’s almost certainly failed to catch another twenty or so.

Whatever. It has made the right call by banning backpacks: As UD has been saying, our public schools are currently living in a fool’s paradise, and until they look like armed camps they’re asking for a bloodbath. Guns are all over the schools; and of course they’re all over the schools’ surrounding communities. Inside and out, everyone’s a target, and as the wee Nashville massacrist demonstrated (using the same technique as the wee Sandy Hook guy), all you have to do is shoot out windows to get into a locked building. Which means the schools might want to take a look, first of all, at their windows. The safest schools won’t have windows at all (don’t laugh: did you think we’d see the end of backpacks?) but will look like the medieval fortresses they now need to be. Adding to the pre-modern feel will be a general arming of teachers and administrators, all of whom will now be able to solve work squabbles via shootouts.

And you know what? We’re going to see a large rise in home schooling — motivated not by any particular ideology, but simply by a desire to see your kid not be eviscerated by an AR-15. I mean, broadly speaking, the saturation of public life by guns means the end of public life – public schools, public shopping malls, public libraries – too dangerous. America is already overrun by gated communities with extensive private security. Get ready to see much, much more of that.

[al.com]

Cornered by a tough question, Trump first gets surly, and then descends even more deeply into the sewer.

The Florida Senate rejects one of the guv’s hand-picked nominees for New College trustee. Herr Eddie Speir is the architect of A WHOLE NEW WORLD! He has announced his plan to fire THE ENTIRE FACULTY, JA? JA! His main activity once he’s done that will be informing students that Jesus Christ is King and that vaccines and climate change are anti-Christian conspiracies.

A whole new world
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no
Or where to go
Or say we’re only dreaming

Tomorrow belongs to me!

Here’s the long version, from the relevant campus paper.

She’s, like, totally innocent and only claimed the identity cuz ma and pa told her she had it; it never occurred to her to, like, confirm it before she began reaping its bennies. Whoops!

[O]thers are … skeptical of [Elizabeth] Hoover’s intentions… [Another academic of confirmed Native American extraction] has “long been baffled” by Hoover’s claim to Native American descent, and … Hoover’s statement comes as “no surprise” to herself and many other Indigenous scholars. [She commented that] “it is bizarre if not unconscionable” to claim to be Indigenous without confirming genealogical relationship or legal connection to a first nation … “She deliberately misrepresented herself,” [another Native academic] alleged in a statement. “Hoover was facing calls for accountability in American Studies back at Brown University... It is deeply upsetting to think of the higher education resources—from Williams College to Brown and now Berkeley—that could have supported the professional advancement of a young Native woman scholar instead… It’s important to note that Hoover never apologized for wrongdoing in her statement.”

“We are still in the fight of our lives to defend American democracy and freedom against the rampaging autocrats, kleptocrats, plutocrats and theocrats … “

Cratwise, UD’s rep, Jamie Raskin, gets it said.

Chacun à son goût, of course, but UD‘d say, crat for crat, theos are the worst.

… a postmodern revision of Malcolm Lowry’s modernist masterpiece, featuring protagonist George Santos:

The criminal charges follow a mountain of scandals that have weighed Santos down since before he was sworn into Congress in January.