And she’s lawyering up.

Here’s a possible reason why.

Of course the madman (read his manifesto) had lots and lots of guns; and this being the States he probably got most of them himself, legally. But what if his mother provided some of them? Is this going to turn out to be a version of Adam Lanza or Kip Kinkel, homicidal madmen whose parents (one or both of them) believed that giving their psychotic, gun-obsessed children guns would be therapeutic?

Surely the latest shooter’s mother is aware that parents of mass murdering people are going to prison for providing some of their weaponry; and it may be that, you know, she’d rather not go to prison.

A writer for the local paper covering the Donna Adelson trial (the Adelsons seem to have worked together in some fashion to rid themselves of Dan Markel) is determined to raise this trashy tale all the way up to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Repeatedly in his article, he compares the farkakte Adelsons to the Macbeths or something … But for starters you need to start out high and be brought low to have a tragedy, which is why although Bernie Madoff’s end in prison was awful, we do not say it was tragic cuz he started out every bit as scummy as he ended. I don’t think anyone said of Bernie’s demise O what a fall was there.

This is why when seeking literary analogues for America’s last all-engrossing blood-soaked family (the Murdaughs) we landed not on Shakespeare, but on William Faulkner, troubadour of trash.

The Adelson story is not The Tragedie of Charlie, Orthodontist of Boca. Yet “It was another day of Shakespearean Tragedy in Courtroom 3G in the State of Florida v. Donna Adelson… The facts and witnesses in this case have many twists and turns that are consistent with a well-written tragedy, Unfortunately, this is not fiction and the case is the result of a brutal and heinous murder.  [SOS is not even going to bother with the illiteracy of the article.] In true Shakespearean fashion, Donna’s children could be the reason that she may spend the rest of her life in prison.”

Since Donna is closer to Linda Richman than King Lear, SOS is thinking Shakespearean analogies are non-starters.

Original play, 1895: ‘I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.’

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2025: [Ibn Demps’ lawyer told the court that he shot a fellow card player in the stomach at point-range due to] “some sort of misunderstanding.”

‘Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them.’

Only America.

Only America.

Only America.

Only America.

Only America.

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In every country, people get into arguments, suffer from mental health issues and have extreme views — all common explanations for shootings. But in America, these people can much more easily pick up a firearm and shoot someone. When a country makes something easy to do, people are more likely to do it.

Children! During Catholic mass! Sounds as though the shooter killed a lot of them. This sort of thing the bullet-addled American press will notice.

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Addition to the engraving on the building:

THIS IS THE HOUSE OF GOD AND THE GATE OF HEAVEN AND THE HELLSCAPE OF GUNS

[photo tim evans reuters]

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“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”

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“We are dealing with gunshot wound injuries from a high-velocity weapon.” Good to know that people are working hard as we speak to make and sell much higher velocity weapons. They’re particularly explosive on the bodies of young children. At Uvalde, there was very little left of some of the children. Pulverized.

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“The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children, it’s absolutely incomprehensible.”   Oh fuck you police chief. You’re the police chief. This is the sort of thing that happens in this country, so comprehend. Grasp mentally. Understand. Minneapolis doesn’t pay you to flutter your little handkerchief and say you don’t get it. If you don’t get it, get another job. Stop using words every bit as empty as thoughts and prayers. State that you are angry that violent psychopaths have access to military grade weapons in America, and that everyone should be angry. Say something that means something.

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Minneapolis has seen a string of violence in the past 24 hours. The shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church was the fourth in the city since Tuesday, and the second near a school. In total, the attacks have left at least five people dead and 25 injured, according to the police.

Duh. Can’t catch my breath.

First off, it’s got a good title, one that sardonically covers the theme of the piece: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PRINCE ANDREW.

Next, note how the writer’s basic point – that this new book has killed, not merely covered, the prince – establishes itself with morbid, hilarious, language, and sustains the morbidity. Will Lloyd doesn’t jump from death metaphors to other figurative stuff; he keeps it going, avoids having it get boring, and gives the piece depth and shapeliness. First paragraph:

Prince Andrew must be dead already. Biographies about breathing men have an inconclusive, interim quality. There are years to be lived: decisions to be made; books to be written; marriages to end; wars to be fought. The biographer whose subject is still with us apologetically and necessarily punts real judgements about them into the future. But in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of York, there is none of this sense of suspension, only the sound of the biographer’s axe falling, again and again, on the ragged bodies of Andrew Mountbatten–Windsor and Sarah Ferguson.

You know, not just the point that the book’s not a hit piece but an execution, but vivid and funny over the top (“axe” and “ragged” are very good) death knells. Second paragraph:

The first subheading in the book, clinically regarding Andrew when he is barely out of the crib, is called “Baby Grumpling”; the second, surveying his years at Heatherdown Prep School, is called “A Tiresome Little Shit”. According to Lownie, Andrew was a bad baby, who became a bad boy, who became a very bad man. We knew Andrew, following revelations about his relationship with the late child-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was disgraced. Lownie shows us that the Duke’s predicament is even more funereal, a living death. 

Laughed out loud on tiresome little shit. Funereal, a living death, keeps us on the not a toff but a stiff track.

The book

reads as a nihilistic satire of Royal biography itself. The typical Windsorist book that parades birth, boarding, marriage, military service, foreign excursions, second marriage and so on, often written in threatless prose amidst an atmosphere of flummery, is not Lownie’s style. Less a biographer than a mortician, he has delivered a 456-page obituary for the Duke and Duchess of York. 

Nihilistic, Windsorist, threatless – these are fun, less familiar words… the phrase amidst an atmosphere of flummery has a pseudo fancy schmancy something to it which in itself reads as a nihilistic satire of royal pretensions. And then again the death thing. Look at that last sentence. It’s beautiful.

And then: The biographer’s three works on three royals represent a clutch of barrel bombs dropped on the Crown. “Clutch” is terrific; but notice he’s also produced some nice alliteration: clutch and Crown, barrel and bombs, with dropped and bombs assonantal.

“Fergie” as they call her, was a redtop hounded by the Redtops. Fun. Meghan Markle fled to Montecito. More fun. This is lively, playful, writing. The Ferguson family home, the balefully named “Dummer Down” … Who knew? And more fun alliteration!

There’s sly stuff, such as the tiny killing clause in the middle of this sentence: The Prince was lionised by the press that would later become, besides himself, the major antagonist of his life.  There are wonderful similes: Lownie moves like a basking shark through newspaper archives.

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To be sure, royalty has long been the ultimate satire target — all the more reason why doing it well deserves recognition.

It’s adjacent to an RV park and a golf course, and the bullets whizzed by the golfers and pierced the RVs and people got upset by this. So I enlarged my berm, and I paid for the RV damage.

A lot of us hadn’t even had our coffee yet, and right next to our local Jesuit high school a kid stops his Kia, steps out with his high-velocity .223 caliber rifle, and sprays a crowd of kids.

Now nighttime “blood showers” (as one observer put it) is one thing. That’s normal. Midday, it’s devastating to watch the streets of Minneapolis turn into the streets of Port Au Prince. At night, you really don’t see it… Not as vividly… not as, you know, in cold blood, as you see it in the afternoon…

That’s Kadgien's (SS) Lady, painted on the wall,
Looking as if she weren't stolen by a Nazi.  I call
That piece a wonder, now; the Gruppenführer's hands
Stole busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her?

A life crowded with incident, as Lady Bracknell would say.

To be killed in Mississippi is so common as to be a banality. It’s number one in the nation for homicides, with 23.7 killings per 100,000 people. Basically, entering into a conversation with anyone anywhere on any subject in the state of Mississippi stands a reasonable chance of blowing you away.

… as in, out of what possible world does this parody arise, take a look at this description of the August meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America.

[Membership] include[s] an inchoate collection of activists, and the organization [has become] a big tent for all manner of leftist tendencies—including many that lack any commitment to [founder Michael] Harrington’s democratic tradition, some even holding that elections [are] a capitalist-state apparatus that socialists should not use to come to power... Red Star, a self-avowed “Marxist-Leninist caucus” … openly supports Hamas and emphasizes “the role of the vanguard in organizing the revolution.” Whereas the likes of [Bernie] Sanders have long lauded the New Deal, this group condemns that model as “extending concessions to the white working class to secure their loyalty to the capitalist state.” Similarly, it faults the Green New Deal that Sanders and AOC have championed for failing to articulate “a clear commitment to dismantling the settler-colonial and American imperialist projects.” Another caucus, Marxist Unity Group, calls for DSA “to free itself from the Democratic Party” and “fight to overthrow the Constitution,” in an effort to “destroy every institution that denies the people an authentic popular democracy, abolishing the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the independent presidency.” …

Harrington … once complained about a “vocal, and regularly televised, fringe of confrontationists, exhibitionists, and Vietcong flag wavers who could plausibly be dismissed as freakish, or sinister, or both.” Democratic socialists who seek to run mass campaigns and attain power with elections are now encumbered by sharing an organization with “confrontationists” who hold fundamentally antidemocratic beliefs.

The Israel Defense Forces have launched a large-scale operation at Ben-Gurion International Airport. The goal is to identify and detain ultra-Orthodox men who are evading mandatory military service…

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No more seat assignments next to ultra-assholes who refuse to sit next to you because you’re a stinky gross woman. Hurray!

Um. Why wouldn’t they be? Why is this a headline? Why is this news?

Oh because another nut with a gun fired shots outward from inside the club.