“While you were purchasing a gun for your son and leaving it unlocked, I was helping her finish her college essays. When you knew the gun was missing, you called the police, knowing it was your son that took it. I was having family call every hospital describing what she looked like. While you were hiding [from the police], I was planning her funeral.“

The negligent parents of a high school mass shooter get 10 – 15 year sentences.

… Corning Museum of Glass. Taken on UD’s morning walk in that sweet city. Tomorrow she goes to Sedona, AZ.

Subpoenaing Gosar and Biggs

Makes me break into jubilant jigs.

Bizarros of MAGA

Don’t get any more gaga.

Let’s watch them and break out the cigs.

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

(Yes, subpoenaing contains every vowel.)

As opposed to an inward-looking, navel-gazing, ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious, increasingly authoritarian and illiberal Turkey, the dream of a secular, democratic, pluralistic, inclusive and modern Turkey is still very much alive. [The incoming mayor of Istanbul posted:] “As we celebrate our victory, we send a resounding message to the world: the decline of democracy ends now. Istanbul stands as a beacon of hope, a testament to the resilience of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism.” … [In] these elections the proportion of locally elected women has almost tripled… [One new female mayor] was applauded enthusiastically by crowds chanting, “Women, life, freedom”, in an emotional reference to the plight of women in Iran… “The essential doesn’t change,” says one of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play. But sometimes it might. 

Background here.

… for the eclipse.

… the tree.

But this one wasn’t about solitary pleasures; my friend and neighbor Tammy came along, and we talked and talked about art. As usual, UD liked all the muted-color paintings (browns, blacks, tans, grays) like ter Brugghen’s Bagpipe Player. The garish reds (robes, blood) of the big Christian canvases do little for your blogueuse.

87’s amazing. But let’s go for a hundred! You’re not going to kill scads of our kids as long as the number of guns in private hands here is a mere four hundred million plus. Our under-eighteen cohort will only be shot to death when there’s at least one gun in easy reach everywhere in this country – school, home, church, car, playground, public transportation, airports, campus, boardwalk, amusement park, zoo, corporate office, library… Handguns need to be liberally sprinkled about for teenage suicides, gangbangers, and the criminally insane to get hold of instantly.

I’m not worried about the private home or the high school. Guns are already strewn about with abandon at many of these locations. I’m more worried about places like airports, where they actually search you for guns.

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

True, airports do a poor job of screening for weapons, but technology is improving all the time. The one thing we have going for us is significant increases in gun purchases. More guns, more deaths by guns, and this under eighteen group is arguably our most fertile killing field, because a lot of them are really young and they don’t even realize what’s happening when they find a gun and play with it by killing their sister. It’s simple to think of tons of scenarios like that among toddlers and the like, and all you need is negligent gun-strewing parents, which describes millions of Americans.

[Photo Michael Noble, Jr. NBC News]

Kristi Balden chairs Enid OK’s Social Justice Committee. It’s prob got like seven members, prob all of them women. (Enid’s only got around 50,000 people.) Not sure where the men of Enid are on the fight against fascism front.

When Balden discovered that a City Council member was as close to a card-carrying Nazi as you can get, she mobilized bigtime and put up with a lot of shit from a lot of townspeople, AND threw the fucker off the Council. Little Hitler (“I JUST CANT FEEL SAFE IF IM NOT PACKING AN AR WITH A 100 ROUND DRUM AND SPORTING MY SWASTIKA ARMBAND.”) just got voted out.

While UD sits on her ass and reads Timothy Snyder on the fight against fascism, Kristi Balden gets up and fights and wins against it. I salute her.

“If you don’t believe in God, something’s wrong with you… [P]eople don’t really understand that our path was divinely ordered. And the order was for us to be national champions on this day… For all those crushed in defeat by the favor of God having been exclusively directed at my team, I will pray for you to rebuke Satan, to get Satan out of your lives, so that someday you can experience what I am feeling – the glory of having been singled out as one of the elect, and the sincere desire, from my mountaintop, to help infernal losers like you up the path to victory.”

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

Okay, only some of that was Miss Christian Visibility 2024; UD embellished a bit.

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

RETREAT FROM RELIGION

CONTINUES SWIFTLY

_________________________

Gee. Wonder why.

_________________________

And… Mr Christian Visibility Day!

LOL diversity statement counseling but as ever UD stands amazed and impressed by the money-agility of capitalists. Now that even Harvard academics are reduced to pledge-reciting Girl Scouts (I promise to do my best to help other people at all times, especially those at home.), it’s time to cash in on coaching.

But let’s see what else Randall Kennedy, Harvard prof and man of the left, has to say.

Such pressure constitutes an encroachment upon the intellectual freedom that ought to be part of the enjoyment of academic life… By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself… I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice. The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince. The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond.

But hey whoa! Not only are arrogant snobs like Kennedy (‘make me wince’) shutting down TWO viable industries (DEI statement generation/enforcement, and DEI statement coaching), they are also impeding the suicide mission of Democrats as the coercive, “easy to parody DEI lingo” makes us look like assholes to the world and thereby makes the world safe for Donald Trump.

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

More of the same.

“Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison,” Fairfax-area Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said in a statement to POLITICO.

… Asked if he had any response to the legislation, an aide to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) replied: “lol.”

**********

Apparently a breakaway group of SuperMAGAs in the House proposes the Vladimir Putin International Airport.

Praise the Lord. I’ve been looking at that endowment and really worrying. Where’s the next fifty billion coming from?