… spied at The Wharf, where UD and her

sisters strolled yesterday, in spectacular

mild sunny winter weather.

Dick Morris: We need more like him.

Political strategist and best-selling author Dick Morris told Newsmax Friday that he’s predicting a mass extinction event for Democrats in the November midterm elections.

“I’m predicting something more than a tsunami, more than a tidal wave, more than an earthquake,” Morris said during an appearance on Newsmax’s “American Agenda.” “Do you remember, in the history books, how the theory is that a meteorite hit the Earth right around where the Caribbean Sea is and that the resulting dust killed all the dinosaurs and made them extinct? Well, that’s the magnitude of what I think is going to happen.”

Host Bob Sellers said, “Typically tsunamis come when the party out of power has 170 seats or something like that,” pointing out that Republicans currently hold 212 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“I think they may go up to 270,” Morris said. “I think they may pick up 60 seats. That’s why I likened it to that prehistoric event because what I think you’re really dealing with, to a certain extent, is the extinction of an entire generation of Democratic wannabees, Democratic candidates, where they’re basically going to lose their whole freshman and sophomore class.“

October 2022.

There’s Joyce DiDonato’s voice, on display the other night at The Hours:

 [I]t is hard to focus on anyone else when DiDonato is onstage, often standing magnetically still. Her voice is clear in fast conversation, as she darkly relishes the words. Then, as the lines slow and expand, her tone grows smoky yet grounded, mellow yet potent. She plays Virginia [Woolf] as solemn and severe, but with a dry wit; if anything, she comes off as almost too robust to make paralyzing depression entirely plausible.

DiDonato is a commanding enough singer and presence to render persuasive what had seemed in [an earlier production] like bombastic overkill: a booming fantasy of London, a crashing evocation of incapacitating headaches. It’s only at the very top of its range that her voice tightens a bit; all in all, though, she gives a generous, noble portrayal, at its peak in her crushing delivery of lines from Woolf’s suicide note.

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

I mean. If this doesn’t give you goosebumps with today’s roast goose…

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

A U. New Mexico basketball recruit has fled campus cuz of all the bullets whizzing by her in the dorm.

Due to the [two] shootings that have occurred at my apartment complex, as well as the on-campus shooting, I am saddened to say that I will be leaving the University of New Mexico. My family and I feel this is the best decision for me and my safety. I will be entering the transfer portal …

******

[Brooke] Berry’s mother, Amy Berry, told Ken Sickenger from the Albuquerque Journal that Saturday’s incident was “the last straw.”

“Brooke really likes the basketball team, and she wanted to stick it out, but she was scared,” she said. “She called us Sunday morning crying and said, ‘I want to come home,’ so her dad and I drove down 14 hours to get her. If something happened to her, we’d never forgive ourselves.”

Berry arrived in New Mexico from Billings, Mont. She lived at Lobo Village, a student-housing complex just west of the UNM basketball arena, otherwise known as The Pit. The two previous incidents happened close enough to Berry for her to be concerned for her safety. 

“Brooke called when a shooting was happening, and she was hiding in the bathtub,” the mother told the Journal. “I was thinking, ‘This is crazy.'”

***********

The university has released a statement.

Brooke’s being a real GIRL about this… Everyone at UNM has hidden in a bathtub during a gunfight outside their room! BFD! What a baby.

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

The traditional New Mexico State/University of New Mexico men’s basketball rivalry game has been cancelled. The latest dorm killing was between members of the rival teams, and since NMSU killed a UNM guy the rivalry’s been settled: NMSU wins.

The two schools are working out a new money-saving arrangement in which the big game will not take place at all anymore. The schools will share the cost of weapons and ammo and let the guys work out the rivalry by killing each other every year at this time.

Meanwhile, though: GO NMSU!!!!!

‘Younger evangelicals are clearly rejecting their evangelical parents’ politics. Growing numbers of young evangelicals and former evangelicals are questioning or rejecting the movement’s teachings on a range of social issues, including sexual abstinence (so-called “Purity Culture”), LGBTQ equality, patriarchy, racism and climate change. They are more politically liberal than their parents and are “losing interest in the culture war.”

For some time now, “younger white evangelicals have become more permissive of abortion, (even as) older ones have moved in the opposite direction,” supporting more and more stringent abortion bans.

As a scholar of religion, I have long believed that pursuing a political strategy to change the Supreme Court has deformed evangelicalism, making it a political movement more than a theological one. When evangelicals supported Donald Trump by more than 80% in 2016, some students of the movement were surprised. How could the party of “Family Values” support a man who has five children by three different women? How could they continue to support him even after hearing him laugh about grabbing women by their private parts on the “Access Hollywood” tape?

If pundits had missed the signs that evangelicalism had traded its core theological values for political gains, its younger members seem to have figured it out.

Now, many young people are rejecting the label evangelical altogether, with some declaring themselves to be exvangelicals. Having lost sight of the core meaning of their movement, evangelicals are losing their children, first as voters, then as co-religionists.’

Valerie Cooper, Duke University

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

Soon Trump will command only the demographic that SPECIALIZES in being dumb, reactionary, and hypocritical: The ultraorthodox.

And since most of them – UD predicts – will be moving to theocratic Israel, in flight from American officials who might soon put real pressure on them to allow their children to go from subliterate to marginally literate, UD will now make another prediction.

Realizing that he cannot win the presidency, Trump will take his adherents to the promised land, where he will work out a power-sharing arrangement with Netanyahu and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who will already have moved his flock there.

Richard M. Fierro said he was at a table in Club Q with his wife, daughter and friends on Saturday, watching a drag show, when the sudden flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub. His instincts from four combat deployments as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan instantly kicked in. Fight back, he told himself.

In an interview at his house, where his wife and daughter were still recovering from injuries, Mr. Fierro, 45, who left the Army in 2013 as a major, according to military records, described charging through the chaos at the club, tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun…

[H]e raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him…

The gunman, who Mr. Fierro estimated weighed more than 300 pounds, sprawled onto the floor, his military-style rifle landing just out of reach. Mr. Fierro started to go for the rifle, but then saw that the gunman had a pistol as well.

“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Mr. Fierro said…

As the fight continued, he said, he yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels. The whole time, Mr. Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter’s head while the two men screamed obscenities at each other.

When police arrived a few minutes later, the gunman was no longer struggling, Mr. Fierro said, and he feared that he had killed him…

Teams often act in concert, and this togetherness can be very intense. So in Iran at the moment, you have two featured teams:

1. Team Mullah, composed of hundreds of bullet-spraying gray-bearded men wearing gowns and turbans and granny glasses.
2. Team Football, composed of eleven handsome robeless turbanless non-bullet-spraying young men.

TF is on the world’s screens at the moment, arms locked, refusing to sing Iran’s We are some wild and crazy religious nutbags national anthem at the World Cup; boos can be heard throughout the stadium, where men and women wear shirts with the names of women murdered because their hijabs were askew.

FROM: SpartanFans! Graphics, Lansing

TO: MSU Publications, Trey Nowak, Head, Pub Office

SUBJ: 2023-24 University Brochure

Hey Trey hope you’re having a great day. With this email, SF!G is excited to present our revision/addition to MSU’s student recruitment brochure.

With the university’s recent push to get students to gamble, we brainstormed how we can exploit this new initiative, which promises to be very attractive to impulse-challenged teenagers across the country. Since MSU is one of America’s few fully-operational student-driven gambling businesses, we need to seize control of this market while we continue to enjoy a dominant position.

This is why we recommend the following image for the cover of the new brochure, with the accompanying copy:

MICHIGAN STATE: IT’S SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST LATE NIGHTS.

To anticipate your comment: No, he’s not holding a cigarette. We can easily add this, probably in front of the whiskey glass (once you decide which distillery you’d like to feature, among those with whom MSU partners, let us know and we’ll add a bottle with the relevant label). We also plan to edit in a large fraternity ring on his hand – probably the notorious Delta Kappa Epsilon haha! (Is it still under suspension?)

I don’t think we want to mess with the nice simple clarity of this image more than that (aside from, obviously, taking the gray out of the guy’s hair and thickening/tousling it a bit), but let us know if any other images (the muzzle of a gun between his fingers, in the context of gambling, would be an intriguing reminder of Stephen Paddock; but would it look too… suicidal?) seem attractive to you.

As always, we look forward to working closely as we optimize MSU’s advantages in the student-recruitment market.

ORTHODOX PARTIES DEMAND

LEGALIZATION OF GENDER SEGREGATION

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

You know… UD always thought it was pretty cool that as the bona fide spawn of a Jewish mother, she has automatic Israeli citizenship. Yet never until now has she been seriously interested in taking it.

UD has always found strict gender separation and all the other abuse that accompanies it… uh… well, let’s just say that from the moment she watched the handcuffs scene in Goodbye Lenin! (?) she has found the idea of living in chains irresistibly exciting.

Yet she always thought she’d have to seek the realization of this fantasy in no-go Iran or Afghanistan. Now she can live in cosmopolitan Israel, where, for instance, if she gets bored with the daily staging of her masochism she’s free to leave.

Depends!

When appointing high court justices, do you avoid

1. liars?
2. hypocrites?
3. religious fanatics?

‘What is an established fact is that Jones had previously drawn the attention of law enforcement and university officials.

There was a gun conviction officials at the state’s elite flagship university only recently learned about as a result of a hazing probe, the details of which were unknown. There were also attempts to buy a rifle and a pistol that placed Jones under the scrutiny of Virginia State Police.

… University Police Chief Timothy Longo told reporters the university’s “threat assessment team” had learned about Jones in September after a third party, who was not a student, reported that he spoke about having a gun. He said the school’s student affairs office interviewed Jones’ roommate, who had not seen the suspect with a gun.

It wasn’t clear if the school’s internal investigation of Jones possibly having a gun ended with that roommate’s interview.

Jones had also been involved in the campus hazing probe, which was closed due to uncooperative witnesses, Longo said.

… [U]niversity officials admitted they learned Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor for a concealed weapons violation in 2021.

… [O]fficials said they realized only after Sunday’s shooting that the report of his conviction was never relayed to the University Judiciary Committee.

… [Said one observer:] “It’s like a series of cracks that he slipped through.”’

No surprise there. This is the USA.

But this certainly makes the University of Virginia look – if possible – even worse. This is a student who had an active university judicial case pending against him (and pending… and pending…) for gun stuff. He’d been engaged in other criminal activity, but for some reason it was all suspended sentences. His father knew he was “extremely paranoid,” and I’m thinking people on campus had noticed too. Professors? Others in his dorm?

To ask the bloody obvious: Why didn’t the school do anything about this heavily armed paranoid with a rap sheet?

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

Details here about how any fucking asshole can buy an arsenal in the gun-happy state of Virginia.

One of the country’s safest locations suffers a mysterious bloody mass killing of four college students in their shared off campus house. Quite a few days later, with the community so afraid that many students are fleeing the school, the local police have still released extremely little information. What we do now know (assuming the information they’ve allowed out is correct) is hard to make sense of.

We are told that in the wee hours of the morning, with two other students asleep (?) in the house through the entire insanely violent attack, four students were knifed to death with an enormous “Rambo-style” knife. Only hours later the next day did someone call 911. Huh?

On the face of it, this is nuts. How can we possibly make sense of it? How can the surviving students not have awakened; how can they have waited hours (assuming they made the 911 call) to report the massacre? Did the killer tell them he’d come back and kill them too if they told anyone anything?

Okay, let’s assume sheer paralyzing terror plus drunk out of their minds? I mean, I’m digging deep here to find a mental condition that would allow them to be passed out through the thing, or motionless for a long time (who knows when the attacker(s) left?) in an attempt to save themselves. Could their paralytic terror have lasted into the next afternoon? No use of their cell phones? Why did neither of them, assuming a window anywhere near, hurl themself out of a window and run?

The killings were “targeted,” we’re told; which stands to reason. This sort of homicide is, as they say, personal. Robbery makes zero sense. At the same time, the word “grudge” seems absurdly inadequate.

Let’s say the killer wanted to kill only one of the four, but the others tried to defend him/her. Okay.

But then the question is how did one person with a knife (was there more than one?) overpower and destroy three other able bodied people? You would expect one or two to escape, screaming their lungs out and alerting the neighborhood. If the killer controlled the students by tying them up, why aren’t we being told they were tied up? UD understands that police withhold information for perfectly good reasons during the course of an investigation, but this seems strange nonetheless.

One way to go is to imagine that one or both of the surviving students did all this. They controlled the situation by quietly, methodically moving from room to room, taking on one student (or maybe two) at a time. But we know from the coroner’s report (she’s being very uncommunicative, but I think this is confirmed information) that bruises indicate one of the students fought like hell.

Since this sounds rather unpremeditated (rather, because the killer might have planned it for a very short time – let’s say hours), and viciously impassioned, I’m going to assume an abundance of forensic material. The killer, for instance, must also have bled somewhat, and must have (have had; he’s had plenty of time to shower) blood all over himself, bloody clothes, etc. Blood spatter must also be on walls and other surfaces. If there were sexual assaults, that might be another source of leads.

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

Here’s one possibility.

All of the murdered students spent the night on the town – parties, bars, other social spots. During the course of this activity, one or two of the four got into a drunken nasty encounter with some random but dangerous/crazy other drunk person. Did some guy hit on a girlfriend and did that provoke one of the Idaho students? Something like that.

Let’s say the guy’s a member of one of Idaho’s many biker gangs. No sissy university student’s gonna humiliate him in front of his friends, he thinks, fingering the Rambo 9410 in his pocket… He follows them home and waits outside until they’re asleep.

R vous fucking kidding?? We can do WAY better!!!