‘Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, former chair of the World Zionist Organization, writes, “Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.”‘

‘Adam Turck, 35, was shot Saturday morning while intervening in a domestic dispute he came across while walking his dog in Shockoe Bottom. When Turck intervened, a 19-year-old male produced a gun from a backpack and shot him.‘

Turck was a high-profile, much-beloved actor in the local theater scene; Shockoe Bottom is the most notorious neighborhood in a bunch of notorious violent Richmond neighborhoods. Note that his killing took place in the morning; you don’t have to wait until dark to get blown away in Richmond.

Read this for the cultural reality behind the killing.

‘Many [young people] aren’t coming for the clubs or bars. They’re just there, hanging out in the streets and often armed. There’s no event, no promoter, no leadership. Just music, cars, and open carry.

From a public safety standpoint, it’s a mess. From a business standpoint, it’s a slow death.

… One of the biggest changes? Guns.

Open carry is legal in Virginia. And the kids know it. The result is a flood of social media videos: AR-15s slung over shoulders, Glocks waved on Snapchat, drill videos filmed just blocks from where someone might be trying to have a date night.

“It’s not even about protection anymore,” [says one observer]. “It’s status.”

… . “People don’t feel safe,” he [says]. “And when that happens, nobody comes downtown.”

The deeper fear, though, the one no one wants to say out loud, is that one of these nights, it won’t just be posturing. It’ll be a shootout.‘

‘Trump’s Rewriting of Reality on Jobs Numbers is Chilling, but it Could Backfire‘

… is still alive?

Sing it.

1.) Presentation, Socialism 2025 conference, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi:

“I don’t care about this institution. Like I don’t—like fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord.“

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2.) Abdelhadi comment to the university newspaper, a few days later:

 “I love my life at the University of Chicago.”

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You may also sing:

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Or is it more complex than this? Recall Geoffrey Firmin, the main character in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano:

 “I love hell. I can’t wait to get back there.”

“Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,” [Helen] Macdonald says, “which, of course, is bullshit. That’s not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.”

And speaking of suicide, I’m thinking the reason the shooter hasn’t, hours later, been found may be cuz he done did the deed and it’s harder to find a half-buried corpse or whatever than a live guy driving (what else) a white Ford F-150 pickup.

Motivewise, why does a guy who lives next door to a bar kill four people in it at ten AM?

I’m thinking this is the way you handle ongoing noise ordinance issues in Montana. There’s a presentation to the city council, and there’s The Way of the Glock.

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He had “mental issues for a long, long time,” says a neighbor. Same neighbor also says he saw the dude coming out of his house this morning with an AR 15…

Crazy guy with a semi… Call the cops…?

Why, no ma’am. This is Montana.

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You have to admire their capacity to be shocked.

Says here they’re even in shock.

Weawy? Open carry, permitless concealed carry, everybody armed to the teeth, drifts of drunk depressed delusional army vets dotting the hills like a host of golden daffodils … My dears, you’re awfully easily shocked…

And now that they’ve found his ditched pickup, are you going to be super shocked when they find his body?

And let’s say they don’t find him. Presumed dead.

How long does Anaconda/environs stay locked down?

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Oh plus everyone’s saying he was elaborately ostentatiously mad as a hatter but simply couldn’t find a mental hospital, therapist, psychological help OF ANY KIND.

He “suffered from significant mental health challenges, including schizophrenia and PTSD from serving in the Army.”

Says here there are three veteran-focused public mental hospitals in the state, and though a lot of the people listed here are all wrong for a vet with trauma, the list is very long. I understand the distance problem, but he clearly should have been resident in a hospital while getting treatment and of course someone should have taken his guns away if he was so dangerous to others. Are we going to be hearing from any of his family?

Okay. Family claims relevant hospitals turned him down. Need for more detail here. No primary care doc to prescribe meds? And why does a delusional schizophrenic who scares his family have guns? Why did the NFL shooter have guns? Why did this absolutely insane woman who killed her four daughters have guns?

Fact is, states like Montana get their high gun violence (suicide and homicide) rate because people there care much more about personal liberty than community safety. There’s a reason we call it the wild west.

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Leftwing version of this.

[A]ny intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting Will Shut Down’

… comes another trial. Another dazed degenerate shuffles stripe-shirted into court to explain why gifting his insane issue multiple semiautomatics was just what the doctor ordered.

… for people to stop castrating five year old girls.

… Roger Craver has a nice take on it.

… millipede. As I walked around the garden this morning.

When the Vineyard's most off-putting fogey
Demanded his share of pierogi
The seller said, "Alan,
You're just not my pal, and
I think you should move to Muskogee."

UD covers gun news closely and can assure you that all over America every day men, women, and children walk easily about with small medium and large guns all over them. Of course some of this happens in open carry states, where everyone sees the gun, but no one (cough) responds…

As for the lack of response in midtown Manhattan — the area immediately around the shooter in the plaza is curiously devoid of people, so I’m assuming the response was run away. My response would certainly have been Give this person PLENTY of room.

I would also have called 911, and I’m assuming some people in fact did, but there wouldn’t have been a quick enough response to 911 to stop him.

Psychologically, there may have been denial/disbelief/maybe someone is filming a movie scene here... There may have been, in other words, human all too human tendencies to normalize/vaporize a twilight zone sight in the middle of the day.

Just as more Americans need training in active shooter drills, so more Americans need to be taught to lead their daily public lives with a heightened degree of paranoia.

Introduction, THE SHITS ARE TRYING TO KILL US, PEOPLE. GET IT INTO YOUR HEAD THAT THERE ARE FIVE HUNDRED MILLION GUNS IN THIS COUNTRY. Meets Wednesdays, basement of St Mark’s Episcopal, 7:00. Refreshments served.