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.

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.

How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.” …

[W]e talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”

Biggest protest in US history.

LOLOLOL

There’ll always be a South Carolina.

Bloomsday is tomorrow, and I suppose UD‘s little contribution to it would go like this:

Leader’s bio of Ellmann, who himself wrote the great bio of James Joyce, is currently much talked about. Ellmann was a friend/colleague of my then-boyfriend (and I mean then! we’re talking about what? the early ‘seventies?) at Northwestern University.

One afternoon Ellmann came over to our place to ask him a favor.

Ellmann had written a long angry defense of himself against some hostile reviewer – my memory is that the review appeared in the NY Review of Books, and Ellmann intended the defense to appear there? – and he wanted my bf to submit it under his name. As if he had written it!

Wee UD sat on a couch by the fireplace, listening to my bf, a professor much-junior to Ellmann, agree — uncomfortably — to do this. I recall the two of them reading over the letter together, my bf making occasional edits, and then the official handing off of the thing from Ellmann to my bf.

I was shocked! Tried talking to the bf about it and he shrugged. Let’s not talk about it.

It was a strange early lesson for UD (must have barely been in my twenties) in the ways of the world. The ways of some worlds.

The United States of America: Where we give everyone a gun and then watch what happens.

The focus on 2025 Ocean Boulevard shootings [in Myrtle Beach] began on April 26th when 11 people were sent to the hospital in a police officer involved incident where the juvenile who fired into a crowd was killed.

Several Ocean Boulevard shootings on successive weekends have happened since. Day trippers from towns approximately 100 miles in circumference to Myrtle Beach cause much of the violence … downtown on Ocean Boulevard.

Unsupervised teenagers ranging from 16 to 18 carry guns with them to the beach. Despite the pattern, Myrtle Beach police have yet to come up with a system for dealing with these unsupervised teens before the violence begins.

SC does not have truancy laws enabling MBPD to detain unsupervised juveniles until their parents retrieve them. Even when they identify potential violent teens, their hands are tied until the shootings start.

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Can this really be? A police force can’t detain suspicious people? They have to stand there waiting for them to start shooting?

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1AeWQsfZJV

… Garrett Park’s NO KINGS protest this morning. Good turnout, and tons of honks, raised fists, waves, and thumbs up from cars.