… appears in UD‘s frigid garden as she takes her first walk in a month — since (almost) recovering from bronchitis.

It took a judge ruling Matthew Harris too insane to go on trial to stop the upward trajectory of this man’s academic career.

 A trail of red flags about his behavior toward women followed him throughout his academic journey to UCLA. In online class reviews, interviews and emails obtained last year by The Associated Press, current and former students at all three universities alleged negligence by the schools for letting Harris slide, despite his concerning conduct.

Here are my posts about him. An extremely obvious crazy person, sending out vile threats to female students, leaps from one great academic job to another. How ’bout that. UD thinks a class action suit might help all of these schools focus productively on their negligence; she also thinks the enthusiastic dissertation chair in the case should be handed a punitive year away without pay, during which he must take a basic criminology/psychology course in the characteristics of psychopathology. The bit where the model student/psychopath whips out his gun and blows away all the women in his class didn’t have a chance to happen in this case, but there may well be other dangerous madmen, and the dissertation chair needs help before getting enthusiastic and passing those along too.

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The lad was found with ammunition, but

[Harris] attempted to buy a “bodyguard revolver” at the Silver Bullet Shooting Range in Wheat Ridge, Colorado.

The purchase was denied.

So the gun was still a work in progress. But you and I know that, if the law hadn’t come sniffing around, he would have gotten one somehow.

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As for the larger academic village that made the world safe for this madman… oy. UD is currently tossing her hands up in the air. A whole lot needs to change for professors and administrators to acquire the balls to identify and dismiss politically trendy psychopaths.

A notorious gunplay destination. Its enraged and frightened neighbors repeatedly beg the city to shut it down. The city does nothing; the place lays on more security.

More security seems to guarantee more gunplay – I mean, all it seems to mean are more people in the hookah lounges with guns, so instead of the classic two-way shootout we get a three-way.

They killed a high school kid. [UPDATE: Two high school kids, both members of the local school football team.]

UD‘s really scratching her head here. All over the country, hookah bars are staging mass killings, and no one in authority does jack. Is it a form of amusement for city councils?

Apparently a deal has been worked out with state legislator Amanda Chase that the room will function as a JR-15 outlet, where students will be able to, in her words “purchase a gun that will get the job done.”

George Santos Won’t Serve on House Committees

If [John] Eastman is ultimately disbarred, it would be a sudden end to an ignominious legal career. He is not very good at reading the Constitution or the law. In 2020, well before he began plotting to overturn that year’s election, he published a widely derided op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris might be ineligible for that office because she was supposedly not a U.S. citizen at birth. You do not need to be a former Clarence Thomas clerk or a former Chapman University law professor, as Eastman is, to Google “Kamala Harris birthplace” and read “Oakland, California,” thus making her a natural-born citizen.

Eastman then suggested, however, that birthright citizenship itself might not be constitutional, a theory that characterizes much of his approach to the law during the 2020 election. The answer to any legal question is whatever John Eastman wants it to be, and if someone as misinformed as, say, the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees, they are also wrong and should correct themselves accordingly. This approach led him to conclude in an infamous set of memos after Election Day in 2020 that the Twelfth Amendment allows the vice president to throw out individual states’ electoral votes at his discretion and personally declare a winner. The point here is not to be right or correct—fortunately for Eastman, because he was neither—but to give a legalistic guise to a coup attempt.

The New Republic

Incessant mass shooting

Is what we do best!

In 2020 we only killed one

2023’s already much more fun.

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 [Two of the women killed were in LA] to attend an album release party for a rapper.

Wotta shocker. Rap music associated with guns/violence.

Add the basically unregulated short term rental market to the mix, and voila.

Twas on the Crest of Beverly

The battle did commence

Among elite Air B&Bs

Each sparing no expense.

The glistening car, late model!

The air perfumed, and gated!

The party. Scattered bottles.

Late model guns, gold-plated.

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The kick of upscale killing

On cool Pacific nights

Shall ne’er grow old – too thrilling

To aim Sig Sauer sights.

To watch the brain and vomit

Start pooling ’round your head

While a fine and rare green comet

Goes streaking overhead.

Longtime readers know some of UD’s musical enthusiasms: Among singers, Julia Lezhneva; among pianists, Yuja Wang. UD tried to score a ticket for Wang’s upcoming Rachmaninoff blowout but failed.

I love the observation Wang makes in my headline: When a genius is fully inside of a musical piece, it becomes hers.

In my own primitive playing and singing of Purcell’s song Music for A While, I’ve felt something (very distantly) like this: The notes and the emotions and the ideas sometimes flow out of you so spontaneously and deeply — in such a known way — when you’ve played (and in my case sung) a piece so many times, that the fact of a person named Sergei or Henry actually empirically sweating the thing out vanishes completely, and it’s you and this music that your throat and fingers and soul squeeze out. And shouldn’t that be what the geniuses who wrote the stuff want? They didn’t just generate a ditty; they moved a collection of notes and silences into some generous super-artistic realm of universal expressivity.

Think of what James Axton, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, says about the Parthenon:

 I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

In great art (architecture) there is some value-added thing, some permanent, accessible … cry for pity, say; and if you enter and listen hard and vulnerably enough, you can not only hear it. You can reproduce it. You can even feel as if you are generating it anew.

… she’s illiterate.

Helluva distinction for Chapman: How many DEANS are disbarred?

But then – how many deans are credibly accused of treason?

Here’s a primer on it. The Newport News six year old who almost killed his elementary school teacher last week failed in his mission simply because he had to use some random pistol his parents had lying around the house for him. It’s true that his teacher’s mental health has been permanently shattered; plus since surgeons had to leave the slug in her, the student has the satisfaction of having left a permanent souvenir inside his teacher’s body. But killing her – and everyone else in the room, like the better-equipped boys at Columbine – eluded him because of his primitive weaponry. The JR-15 is the solution to all of these problems.

But the deep state can’t keep its hands off of the gun. Big news conference today where demo-rats called the gun disgusting and sick and grotesque and unconscionable blahblah. Blahblahblah.

DOG SHOOTS AND KILLS HIS OWNER

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UD thanks David.

When they tell you YOU get knocked up and make Japanese babies you stupid motherfuckers, you shouldn’t be offended because you’re the ones who make life hell for Japanese women and now you want to make it more hellacious by burdening them with children in a nauseatingly patriarchal state.

I mean, take a look at Hungary, boys! Same deal. How’s Hungary doing as it frantically tries to get its dick up the national vaginal canal?

Short answer: Not well.

They leave you shaken; the graphic terror on the faces of the tour guides, and even more so on the faces of ordinary citizens who somehow fail to get out of the way of the tourists and are forced to interact with them… Reading accounts of daily life in Richneck Elementary School under Superintendent George Parker, I thought of North Korea.

Read today’s accounts of terrified weeping children, frightened teachers desperately texting family members, staff people trying to get out of the way of a psychotic armed child, and see if you don’t think of some surrealistically horrifying police state full of traumatized, trampled, people.