In a column written just before it passed, Polly Toynbee writes:

The assisted dying bill’s final Commons vote today is no abstract debate about slippery slopes or what God wants: to do nothing is to inflict torture on many… Only God [some say] ordains the time of our entrances and exits. [But] his word cuts very little mustard in a country where 53% have no religion…

[The assertion that my position is a] ‘cult of death’? That sounds more applicable to those willing to let others die in painful agony…

[P]olling of those with disabilities shows 78% in favour [of] assisted dying, in line with the rest of the population…

No, as some hope, morphine is not a kindly drug wafting you away – it can’t remove all pain. Enough people have witnessed bad deaths that public opinion is strongly behind the right to die…

If it passes, it goes to the Lords, where 26 bishops will do their damnedest to stop it, reminding us why they should be removed along with the hereditaries.

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Well, it has passed, so cue the bishops… For UD, this issue is as clear a case as any that religion can really be a wild and crazy thing, peeling off penis parts and blanketing women in black and insisting that people dying in protracted agony must keep shrieking cuz the Lord who loves you also likes the sight of suffering or something.

Bizarre. Not just a minority opinion. Downright microscopic, since most people put basic humanity before dogma.

The Pompeii Archaeological Park has just unveiled the restored Garden of Hercules (so named for a statue of the mythical hero uncovered at the site), freshly planted with 1,200 violets, 1,000 ruscus plants, and 800 antique roses, as well as vines and cherry and cotton apple trees. The botanical display is intended to mirror how the garden appeared 2,000 years ago, based on the findings of botanist Wilhelmina Jashemski, who identified pollen, spores, and plant fossils in the area in the 1950s.

Dr Jashemski worked in Pompeii for decades past the 1950s, and my mother sometimes accompanied her, digging for roots in the hot sun. Both of them would be thrilled by the gardens that have now been rebuilt.

Family members told CBS Los Angeles the victim was a man and that he was shot [and killed] during a celebratory end-of-college pool party.

Can fun and guns mix at Utah events following deadly shootings?

Judge talks to 11 year old who brought sixty rounds of ammo and a gun to school.

… near you.

One of the gunniest, dyingest, states in the union generates yet another dad kills son by accident story cuz I dunno he was holding a loaded gun and fuck I dunno…

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It’s quite something to watch local commenters blame dad-on-kid killing on people who want gun control. See my headline? What exactly is the argument here? That if psycho-gun-death states like Utah had stricter gun laws they wouldn’t start having way fewer dad on kid deaths, the way states like Massachusetts — that make it harder to whip out your gun and let fly — do? That controlling some kinds of gun purchase, some kinds of gun purchasers, and some kinds of lethal behavior with guns doesn’t decrease gun deaths?

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[A] 46-year-old man was showing family members a new barrel he had purchased for his Glock handgun...

The gun had a round in the chamber, and it went off while he was showing the gun to members of his family … Additional details on what may have caused the gun to fire remain under investigation.

[T]he man’s 18-year-old son, whose name has not yet been released, was sitting on a couch in the living room with other family members and was shot in the head. The father was standing across from him.

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What caused the gun to fire was dad. Gather round, entire family, and lemme show off my new Glock barrel! Sonny, you just sit right there on the couch and I’ll stand right across from you, with the gun level with your head. [BANG] Whoooooooopsies…..

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Later that same day…

See dat? Cops just threw out the whole “accidental” thing and arrested the – not father; stepfather – for manslaughter. The original story stank to high heaven.

I can’t do justice to this story, which makes the Murdaugh thing – three hours away in the same great state of South Carolina – look like small potatoes. Pretty girl done shot her ex in cold blood — and I mean like really cold like she just sat there at her trial and it took the jury less than two hours to convict her cuz in broad daylight with her coroner bf she jest drove over to the victim’s place took out her gun and blasted and blasted til he were daid daid daid. Fuck the four kids they had together.

What makes this one amazing is the killer and her bf work as coroners/body transporters! They make a living driving all over Horry County picking up people after they die. (Headline, Independent: “A coroner and his mistress met while moving corpses.”) Body calls, death calls, removal technicians, the language is rich indeed and so is the aspect of the thing where after they did the guy they just shoved his bloody bod in the same van in which they trundle all over town all day waiting for the body call. Expertly they bound him but instead of the funeral home or hospital they dumped him in the Little Pee Dee River. Could that name be any cuter?

A lot more good shit in this one. I can’t keep up with it, as I said, and W Faulkner and A Rice are dead, and J Berendt’s 85, and who else is equal to this multilayered deep south squalidity? The trial “consisted solely of witnesses called by the prosecution,” cuz why bother man. Her daughter trembled and wept through the most grotesque testimony about one’s mother – any mother – imaginable, and then wrote this eloquent victim statement.

This crime has torn apart my family, others’ families and friends beyond any measure. My siblings and I have all suffered greatly, not only from the loss of my father but the loss of a mother, too. This trial and getting up on the stand has been one of the most heartbreaking and painful things I’ve ever had to do. It has also been one of the most relieving and rewarding things. I finally got to say what has been sitting in my brain the last four and a half years.

Sitting in my brain is very good.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Says:

To propitiate is to “win or regain the favor of (a god, spirit, or person) by doing something that pleases them: ‘the pagans thought it was important to propitiate the gods with sacrifices.'” Squint as hard as you like at Tennis World‘s use of it in my headline and you’re still not gonna get there.

SOS thinks the writer might have meant precipitate?

South Carolina. LOL

Bullying, threatening sports parents we have always had with us, but now that everyone’s got a gun, watch out.

Offended that his kid didn’t get enough time on the playing field, a NJ father subjected coaches and principals to extensive verbal violence/threats, because of which he’s been banned from the kid’s high school graduation. Boring details here.

One of the great things about everyone packing is that comments like you better watch your back and you wanna fight? have gone from irritants to declarations of war. People who used to be regarded as manageable assholes now present as terrifying machine gunners, and quickly the police are called in.

This particular asshole has announced he might watch the graduation standing atop a big truck in the street next to the event. Who will be surprised when this latest shit from the guy includes him pointing his AR15 at the happy families?

… Prince George’s County … implemented a youth curfew last year following [several violent] incidents involving [large gatherings of] teens.

“We haven’t had any problems since,” said Prince George’s County Council Chair Edward Burroughs, who backed the county’s curfew. 

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Apparently sometimes they do work.

Brilliant writers, they brought steely accuracy and lyricism to their writing. Both carried to their prose a broody disposition, capable of being lifted up at times to a kind of gallant stoicism. Like Albert Camus in his Lyrical Essays, they infused their language with an undifferentiated but basically spiritual sadness, drawing the tragic nature of existence along as a drone through everything they wrote.

It didn’t matter whether the manifest subject was split elevators on an EgyptAir flight, or the way silos look against the flat fields of Kansas. They brought to their superb prose an ambient sensibility which I’d characterize as an incessant sensitivity to the enigma of earthly lives.

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Langewische, on the 2001 EgyptAir crash:

A computer captured what [Ann Brennan,the ATC] would have seen—a strangely abstract death no more dramatic than a video game. About two minutes after the final radio call, at 1:49:53 in the morning, the radar swept across EgyptAir’s transponder at 33,000 feet. Afterward, at successive twelve-second intervals, the radar read 31,500, 25,400, and 18,300 feet—a descent rate so great that the air-traffic-control computers interpreted the information as false, and showed “XXXX” for the altitude on Brennan’s display.  With the next sweep the radar lost the transponder entirely, and picked up only an unenhanced “primary” blip, a return from the airplane’s metal mass. The surprise is that the radar continued to receive such returns (which show only location, and not altitude) for nearly another minute and a half, indicating that the dive must have dramatically slowed or stopped, and that the 767 remained airborne, however tenuously, during that interval. A minute and a half is a long time. As the Boeing simulations later showed, it must have been a strange and dreamlike period for the pilots, hurtling through the night with no chance of awakening.

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Strangely abstract, “XXXX,” metal mass, strange and dreamlike period… You can extract, if you want to be analytical about it, moments when the surrealist substructure of this prose pokes out of its essentially technical content, and if you’re UD you’re reminded of Don DeLillo, also on the subject of flight:

At the boarding gate, the last of the static chambers, the stillness is more compact, the waiting narrowed. He will notice hands and eyes, the covers of books, a man with a turban and netted beard. The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese… He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn’t feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese, his brief sleep calmed by the plane’s massive heartbeat.

In our time, when even the nights are engineered, our best writers will sweep the darkness up, right along with the technology, to which they will give a heartbeat. Langewische could do all of that.

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Just found his piece on the disappearance of Malaysia 370. Interestingly, the best writing in the essay describes the very same moment as the Egyptian Air flight: The pilot is at the controls, experiencing a surreal tranquility before the crash into the ocean.

“It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry. He would long since have repressurized the airplane and warmed it to the right degree. There was the hum of the living machine, the beautiful abstractions on the flatscreen displays, the carefully considered backlighting of all the switches and circuit breakers. There was the gentle whoosh of the air rushing by. The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home. Around 7 a.m., the sun rose over the eastern horizon, to the airplane’s left. A few minutes later it lit the ocean far below. Had Zaharie already died in flight? He could at some point have depressurized the airplane again and brought his life to an end. This is disputed and far from certain. Indeed, there is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane. Either way, somewhere along the seventh arc, after the engines failed from lack of fuel, the airplane entered a vicious spiral dive with descent rates that ultimately may have exceeded 15,000 feet a minute. We know from that descent rate, as well as from [recovered] shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.”

OTOH, it has an abundance of suicides by gun; and of course it features baby killing by open-carrying not-far-from-babies-themselves at events like adorable little village festivals.

Adorable little village festivals where we gather to celebrate how wonderful is our little village, where sixteen year olds open lethal fire on mothers and babies!

How amazing are we and our little village and our guns and our exchange of fire with police that even the New York Times covered our festival? How many little village festivals get NYT coverage? Our little village bloodbath got noticed by the premier paper in the country and maybe the world! We’re showing everyone how you hold a festival in gun country!

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“The violence and deaths at the WestFest celebration in West Valley are tragic and seem to be the result of youth violence,” Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson said.

No dear. Youth violence of various sorts is routine everywhere. Baby killing is the result of youth possession of guns. Which Utah specializes in.

The killer was sixteen years old.

Just another day at an American mall.

[In his second road rage shooting incident,] Joe Harvey fired off at least nine bullets in the busy shopping area around 11:30 a.m. … With the two vehicles just 10 to 15 feet apart, he stepped onto the running board outside his door and started shooting.

I wondered what those running boards were for. Good place to get your footing and stabilize yourself before emptying your weapon. Maybe provides some protection from incoming/being seen. Maybe he practiced this maneuver in his first road rage shooting.

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That was Georgia. Just down the road in Florida:

Candace Marie Naughton told police

she was involved in a road rage incident with the occupants of the victims’ vehicle. [Four people reported she pointed a gun at them.] She said she had two guns in her car, but they were both in holsters under the front passenger seat. When the GPD officer asked how the victims knew she had a gun if both guns were under the seat, Naughton said, “They must have seen it on my dashboard,” but she was reportedly unable to explain how the gun was moved from under the passenger seat to the dashboard, since she was the only person in her vehicle. She reportedly changed her statement and said she “always drives with firearms on her dashboard.”

The officer reportedly saw two 9mm magazines in plain view in the center console of Naughton’s vehicle and a live round on the floorboard.

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I could go on. Oh, I could go on. We’ve covered on this blog mainly school shootings, threatened shootings, loaded guns brought in by elementary school students, blahblah. It’s getting dull cuz twenty of these a day. Haven’t done much road rage with brandished gun cuz… I don’t know why. They make better stories than the gunny kids and their gunny parents who put Glocks in their lunch boxes. TOO common. Yawn.

Gunny road ragers are even more common, but their stories are often better cuz like this woman they be real dumb and they lie real bad.