Sing it.

Have you heard about the data dump?
It comes from the land of Trump 
Have you heard about mortality gap?
Red states have really got zapped

'You can take all the Medicaid you sent
From the evil folk inside the government
And shove it all up Soros's ass
Same place you shove Fauci's mask'

That is your leader, D. Trump (what's he got?)
A country full of dead and dying chumps (big chumps!)
He killed a million cowboys in the west;
He knows no rest

… the insane clown posse. Update here.

Especially when the school’s a mere five miles from UD‘s house.

I mean of course UD knows that this is just one loaded gun that this one school happened to find; schools all over her neighborhood (elementary, junior high, high school) are she assumes bristling with weaponized babies who will eventually not only get through security but kill everybody and then kill themselves blahblahblah, and indeed UD rather doubts the measured, well-intentioned letter that the latest shocked principal sent out to parents asking them not to send weaponized babies to school will have much impact.

I mean dear mom and dad you might not know this but you shouldn’t send your troubled twelve year old to school with a loaded Glock… What I mean is did you know this? Did you know you’re supposed to secure your guns, especially when your kid has fucked up badly enough to be removed from the regular school system and placed (as in this latest case) in a special school? Just how did your troubled fourteen year old get a loaded handgun?

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

And why oh why are the innocent children of America supposed to sit around while the vile parents of vile offspring fail to notice that their tyke is locked and loaded and ready to blow everyone’s head off?

Just sit there at your desk, little one, and wait, while some maggot bursts in and kills you with his daddy’s gun.

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

UD feels absolutely certain that when details of this latest baby shooter come out he will be notoriously frightening, notoriously violent, at his school, well known to the well-meaning principal who remains in denial about the homicidal nature of some of his weaponized charges. Just a tyke! Our job at our compassionate and enlightened school, after all, is to turn such people around.

Actually, these days your primary function is to fucking notice which of your students is likely to be a killer, and to remove those students for the safety of all. (There’s the possibility of legislation that might help you, but we’ll see.) Letters to parents asking them to put their guns away will do two things:

1. Scare the shit out of most of the parents, since they’re unlikely to own any guns at all.
2. Have no impact at all on the people raising a kid with loaded guns lying all over the house. Your job isn’t to persuade crazy motherfuckers to act responsibly. Your job is to get the future mass killer unlucky enough to call these people his parents the hell out of your school.

“[Mary] Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.

It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.

We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in…

The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.”

If it bleeds, it leads.

[O]fficial organs of the Republican Party [see] their job as covering for Trump, even as evidence [has] emerged that he literally suggested that a Republican vice president should be lynched. The lessons of the interwar period, and indeed the long history of mainstream conservative parties’ dalliances with radicals, seem entirely lost on the Republican leadership.

And this, in the end, is why using fascism as a framework for understanding January 6 is worthwhile. This explicit alliance of political violence to an effort to seize power through force is shocking — so shocking that it deserves comparisons to what’s universally seen as the darkest moment in the history of Western democracy.

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

The more details emerge, the more ashamed I am as an American. At some point, faced with our nation having made DT president, evasion, irony, and humor all fail, and what one feels – what I feel – is shame.

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

The sheer scale of Donald Trump’s’ depravity is unmatched in the history of the American presidency, and the Republican party made it possible.

Pence’s attempt to salvage the Republican Party won’t succeed. It will fail not because of any intrinsic problem with the party itself—political parties are merely vessels for the will of the people—but because the problem with the Republican Party is Republican voters. They’re the ones who wanted Trump. They’re the ones who approve of January 6. They’re the ones who insist that Trump actually won in 2020. They’re the ones who are clamoring to nominate him again in 2024.

Republican voters view all of the terrible outcomes from the first Trump administration—the political violence, the white nationalism, the fiscal irresponsibility, the COVID death tolls—not as bugs but as features.This is what they want.

Yet have I left a daughter:
Tifferil, fruit of a brief affair.
Then get thee hence, vile Ivankan!
O Proud Boys, take me there.

Tifferil will love the father
That all his kingdom sings
And I will have my vengeance
Yes I shall do such things...

… is withdrawn from contention for a literary prize.

STAR FINDER

The evening birds quieten, and now it’s the owl,

And fireflies.  And stars.  And fireflies that somehow,

With their buglight, compete on an even playing

Field with the stars.  These stars are, somehow,

Constellated, and I hear my mother’s ghost saying

I left you my old field guide.  The quiet dark allows

All of her to come inside. She’s clearly conveying

The ease and importance of learning the constellations.

Sing it, sister.

UD is agog at the names of the real estate agents representing a new beach resort community. Tiffany, Misty, and Whitney? Did the development hire on a first-name only basis?

That’s one word for it. Others that come to mind: Contemptible. Sickening. Lowest of the low. And above all: Unbelievably stupid.

When you add to this the fact that one of history’s most disgusting and prolific plagiarists continues to lie out of his lying ass about not at all having intentionally plagiarized huge gobs of his novel, you have to conclude that the Nobel laureate the fucker plagiarized (that’s her reaction to the extensive theft in my headline) was far too mild in her use of the word outrageous.

Consider also the sacred nature of the subject matter in (of course) both books: The unspeakable suffering of women during the Second World War. I mean, why don’t I just lift actual agonized testimony and stick it in my work and call myself its author.

Let’s sweeten the pot even more: The plagiarist has been nominated for Australia’s highest literary prize.

And why do I say stupid?

How many times must I explain this to you. If you are going to plagiarize, you need to squirrel around until you find an entirely obscure book published in 1923 in another language… The book has been moldering on the shelves of the Lower East Winnipeg Public Library for generations, waiting for you to translate it and publish it as a work of fiction written by yourself. Get it? Let’s review: Author long dead so not able to read your plagiarism and label it outrageous. Author totally obscure so not a Nobel laureate everyone is going to pay attention to. Crossover from one language to another just to make absolutely certain no one will find the plagiarized source. Are you getting all of this down?

… shifting in Wyoming, are you? A Wyoming senator is

… “surprised” that her office was flooded with calls [after the Uvalde massacre] from constituents expressing a deep desire to do something to stop the spate of mass shootings across the country…

Yeah what a shocker! She certainly assumed they didn’t give a shit.

[Cynthia] Lummis said callers to her office generally have not declared themselves for or against specific policy proposals, but have expressed a “willingness to be open to suggestions.” She also said they may be motivated to act by Wyoming’s high suicide rate.

“The surprise to me has been the number of people that have weighed in, not with particular solutions that they support, but with a willingness to be open to suggestions,” she said. “They’re worried in large about, as I’ve said, the mental health issue, and Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the nation.”

You could knock her over with a feather. Significant numbers of people in her state are upset about the SCADS of her constituents who use their guns to turn their own heads into tomato soup. How could Senator Loomis ever be expected to anticipate an upset reaction, much less, as Senator, do anything about all the gun suicides? Wyomingites love their guns!!!!! But jeez! Okay! If you insist…

Ivanka Trump had spent much of the day trying to keep her father from going too far. She had refused to address the rally on the Ellipse but at the last minute was so concerned by her father’s anger toward Mr. Pence that she decided to accompany him there in hopes of avoiding a worse clash. Over the following hours, as rioters rampaged through the Capitol, she ran up and down the stairs in the West Wing from her office to the Oval Office hoping to persuade her father to issue stronger statements calling off the attackers.

Let’s Hang on to Farkhad’s Yacht

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

There ain’t no good in our untyin’

The super sloop we made ours and my-en

But he’s cryin’…

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

Let’s hang on to Farkhad’s yacht!

Don’t let go now, we’ve got a lot

Got a lot of yacht between us
Hang on, hang on, hang on, to Farkhad’s yacht

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

He says that he and Vlad are gonna have a sit

Gonna end Ukraine and make the Russians quit

Make it up (Yes Putin really said it!)

Make it up (He says we won’t regret it!)

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

That little slip of army in Ukraine –

You give your personal word it won’t be back again

But you know it’s hard to believe

But you know we think you might deceive

Farkhad don’t you know

We don’t want the yacht to go

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

Let’s hang on to Farkhad’s yacht

Don’t let go now we’ve got a lot

Got a lot of yacht between us

Hang on hang on hang on to Farkhad’s yacht…