1.) A dismissed faculty member has had a psychotic break and has issued death threats against faculty, students, the whole school really. How well has the campus responded in terms of security?

2.) When did the school become aware (through student complaints, his Rate My Professor page, his social media, etc.) that Harris is a violent, mentally ill person? Did it act quickly, or did it drag its feet?

3.) How well has the administration kept students and faculty informed about the ongoing threat, and what people should do about it?

4.) The acutely psychotic condition of Harris makes me suspect that his madness was visible long before he began ranting about mass murder. Did anyone warn the philosophy department about him before they hired him? Did the department have reservations about hiring him which they decided to overlook?

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Oh. And don’t forget. 5.) “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.” UCLA must certainly proceed on the assumption that Harris enjoys a massive violent arsenal to match his massive violent mental illness.

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UPDATE: “[A] former instructor in a philosophy department is alleged to have sent members of the department threatening messages and was revealed to possibly have a history of problematic interactions with students, and possibly was observed in the past as problematic by superiors at institutions which (for reasons unknown) do not appear to have effectively responded to the situation or informed relevant others of it.”

… Opening day of Allison Fluke-Ekren’s trial, complete with the mug shot heard round the world.

Really spoils the party.

… Day! A wonderful opportunity not to toast the covering of sexually provocative women’s, girls’, and of course babies’ bodies the world over.

On the same date as World Hijab Day, you can instead celebrate No Hijab Day, when you express solidarity with millions of women and children around the world desperate for freedom and autonomy.

When you give thought (and this Yale student is right to worry that you’re not giving thought) to your freedom not to veil, and, more importantly, to the ongoing withdrawal of that freedom for huge numbers of people in other countries, you are less likely to consider the hijab – and other marks of submission – something to celebrate. It’s something to tolerate, to be sure – but we do not set aside annual holidays to celebrate – and even wear! – that which we tolerate. Freedom is something to celebrate, and No Hijab Day celebrates it.

Free women and men of the secular west most recently had their say after the Council of Europe’s ill-fated attempt to foist a celebrate the hijab advertising campaign on them.

Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” [French] Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

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Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

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Don’t celebrate women who force their eight year old daughters under hijabs. When you wear one, you’re saying that this is okay. Celebrate No Hijab Day.

Yes, well, I think that’s rahtha obvious.

You’re certainly not going to catch any news outlets calling F-E an ISIS bride. All the world’s media love to call ISIS females ISIS brides, because it’s ever so important to assure both us and themselves that girls are sweet and boys are beasts. Boys evolve violent ideological commitments. Girls are too dumb for this and only want to be brides and have babies. So we certainly shouldn’t prosecute these dumb lost souls should we capture any of them.

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F-E should definitely help people with their ISIS bride problem. An American who started out as a Kansas schoolteacher (I am not making this up), F-E came to recognize, accept and finally embrace her spectacular bloodthirstiness, sprinting up the ISIS career ladder until she was conducting classes in how to kill large numbers of people.

But F-E did not merely teach; she was able to attract funding.

… Ms. Fluke-Ekren had a plan in 2014 to attack a college in the United States using backpacks filled with explosives. Prosecutors did not reveal which college she had wanted to target. The criminal complaint said her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State at the time, who approved it for funding.

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I’m not saying F-E could never assimilate back to life in the United States. There are indications, in fact, that in some respects she’d fit in quite well.

[O]n one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle.

So that’s promising; but I think we probably should put her in prison for some period of time because she’s been trying to kill, and get other people to kill, LOTS of Americans; and she still appears determined to do this.

So maybe we should give her life imprisonment. She seems almost as dangerous as… as a man!

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Are prisoners allowed video games? I can’t see F-E keeping her spirits up without Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, aka A La Recherche des Décapitations Perdus.

… a red fox and her kit came loping along the pavers.

I’ve never seen two foxes before. And in the snow. Quite a moment.

One: Mayor withholds funding (funding which is not his to withhold) from his town’s library until all books with homosexual content are removed.

Two: The story quickly jumps to the national media, including People magazine.

Three: The Mayor is discovered hanging out in a stall in a boys’ bathroom in the town elementary school, waiting for a lad to fellate.

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Three hasn’t happened quite yet. Hold on.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I think of my in-laws.

Jerzy Soltan, “spindly and peppery ex-cavalry officer who … spent the war as a [Polish prisoner of the] Germans,” and his wife Hanka, who, with her parents, in their apartment near the Warsaw ghetto, hid a little Jewish boy until the war was over.

(“Borucinski, Michal and his wife Zofia and their daughter Hanna Soltan“)

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It was George Patton’s 3rd Army that liberated Jerzy’s camp, Murnau.

Jesus told Ridgeland, Mississippi Mayor Gene McGee to kick all the queer books out of the town’s library.

Like his political mentor, Kim Jong-Un (plus this guy), Mayor Gene McGee thinks “governance” means everyone acts in strict conformity with Gene McGee’s personal whims. He is withholding taxpayer funds marked for the library until every book Jesus tells Mayor McGee to burn is burned.

While the city’s aldermen … approved the funds, … the mayor alone … is withholding [them]. “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen. And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” [the director of the county’s library system] said.

I CAN HAVE THEM MAKE THAT DECISION.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS.

Jesus told Mayor Gene McGee to Run away! Run away! when the library board held a meeting to discuss the issue; and, with growing national attention directed to McGee and his town, McGee has also received a Jesus-directive not to respond to press inquiries.

One grateful townsperson does speak to the press.

… this morning’s Wordle. It took me five moves.

… AND one of the highest-profile, most powerful, orthodox Jews New York has ever produced, we do well to revisit Jeffrey Goldberg’s ruminations on consistently high rates of various forms of criminality among this extremely pious group (Silver’s son-in-law, a Ponzi schemer, not long ago was released from prison). Some of his thoughts also appear in this Google book excerpt. (Here are my Sheldon Silver posts.)

He theorizes that “insularity plus a hyper-legalistic approach to life” creates illegal conduct.

Can observing the ritual so fastidiously blind someone to the fact that there are a whole other set of laws governing the way we’re supposed to act toward our fellow man? … [Why do significant numbers of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox seem] to have contempt for non-Jews? … [They seem to have] transferred their attitudes from Europe to here, never contemplating for a moment that government here is fundamentally different.

Les Suissérables

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty jets and covid breaches
Now António’s dead and gone

He diverted to the Maldives

Just to have some harmless fun
And the bank paid for the Cessna
Which is — just the way it’s done…

But then nasty jealous voices

Spilled the beans on Chairman Tón
They objected to his privilege
And his seats at Wimbledon

I can hear his weeping now!

The very rules that he had broken
Became his last communion
On his final private flight
At dawn

‘Credit Suisse, oh Suisse, forgive me
That I drained you and am done
There’s much more I could have taken
But those dreams are dead and gone’

Phantom pilots at the cockpit
Phantom stewards at the door
Empty seats on empty Cessnas
Where António sits no more

The suspect was not a danger to other students; police determined there was not an ongoing threat. “It wasn’t an active shooter. There was no other threat to the school community.”

Magruder High sits eight miles away from Les UDs, and in the wake of an almost shot to death student found in one of its bathrooms, the authorities comfort the community with the assurance that a seventeen year old asshole (here’s another one – a few years older) shooting a gun off in the halls of a high school “was not a danger.”

Oh – you mean isn’t a danger now cuz he’s in custody until he gets released to his parents and sent back to Magruder High School? You mean he wasn’t a danger all that time he was packing heat before he decided to use it to shoot someone? You mean all the other fuckers carrying guns at Magruder High School are not a danger?

You mean we should feel okay because he wasn’t an ‘active shooter’ – he wasn’t roaming the halls randomly killing everyone in sight… He was, you know, just after this one guy… Take it easy…

“There was no other threat to the school community.”

Doesn’t everyone else who packs a gun into their backpack every morning constitute a threat? Does Magruder have any idea how many guns are in the school? How do guns get into the school? Does Magruder have Bring Your Guns to School days?

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UPDATE: That’s more like it. Principal apologizes for saying no threat. There was plenty of threat. And, this being America, I’d say that the threat level at a bad public school like Magruder remains – will always remain? – reasonably high. Apparently there are violent fights rather often there. Who can be surprised that things eventually escalated to attempted murder with a ghost gun? And who – with any choice, any money, or any capacity to get their kid financial aid – would keep their kid in an environment like Magruder’s?

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ANOTHER UPDATE: Bunch of other people were in the bathroom when the shooting occurred and not one said a word to a teacher, or called the police. Omerta, you know. Far more dangerous to talk than to shut up. Let the kid bleed to death while you go back to class.

And really – you want your kid to go to school there? If you have no options, I understand, and you have my sympathy. But if you have ANY options at all, get the hell out.

Amelia King, 42, told a school board meeting on Thursday, during a discussion of face masks in school, that ‘I will bring every single gun loaded and ready’. On Friday she was charged with making a terror threat, and released on a $5,000 bond. King, a dental hygienist from Luray, Virginia, apologized and insisted she was speaking figuratively.

More footage.