Background here. Thieving agriculture ministers were found out, and then they were both promoted. This is Greece, after all.

But okay now the government is dumping them, which is the sort of clean hands gesture one doesn’t expect of Greece...

… Ig Nobel Prize committee.

The Bloomberg School releases 2023 gun statistics, and once again the most passionate gunny isn’t the bad boy blasting away in the bar, but the quiet little depressive barely visible over there in the corner, gently cocking his Glock.

For the third straight year, gun suicides reached a new high: 27,300, or 58% of all gun deaths, were suicides. And more than half of all suicides in 2023 involved a gun... “Suicide is a growing crisis in the U.S. and guns are driving that crisis,” says study lead author Rose Kim, MPA, assistant policy advisor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions... [R]apid increases in gun suicides among some groups align with increased gun ownership rates that began in 2020...

That’s why our suicidiest states are all the ones with the most guns: Wyoming, Montana, Alaska. “Wyoming led the nation with about 19.9 gun suicide deaths per 100,000 residents – nearly 10 times the rate of Massachusetts, which had the lowest at about 2.1 per 100,000.”

Asked about his way-gunny state’s very high suicide rate, the Oklahoma state GOP chair responds: “Everyone dies. That’s life.”

This was my first encounter with Léon Krier — his obnoxious, hilarious, response to a fellow architect’s presentation of his latest project:

I don’t imagine the much-laureled Tadao Ando was too upset; but I enjoyed Krier’s contempt. He hated the vapid deadly form of modernism Ando embodied, and didn’t mind showing it.

Krier, who has died, enjoyed his own renown, though he drew more than he built, in part because he wanted large urbanist projects rather than single structures, and these were hard to get developed. But you can find his work at Seaside FL, site of the Truman Show, and a pricey, popular, resort town/tourist draw. And, in England, at the equally successful Poundbury:

[U]nlike so many lifeless developer-built estates, it combined industrial space, stores and small workshops among the housing, now employing 2,600 people in 250 businesses. It has worked: house prices are up to a quarter higher than the surrounding area, while 35% of the homes are affordable, scattered throughout the development, rather than corralled into separate blocks.

Derided as reactionary, nostalgic, and authoritarian, Krier was an enemy of capitalist excess who realized, rightly, that most people prefer living a grounded existence (rather than a remote, abstracted, skyscraper one) in a meaningful town with architecturally recognizable shops, libraries, churches, schools, cafes, and the rest within walking distance. Many of his realized projects, like Seaside, are, again, madly popular, which UD thinks vindicates his earthy, historically grounded, daily social mixing, instinct. The larger, well-known movement, New Urbanism, that he inspired, has been hugely successful here and in Europe.

Of course UD‘s own Garrett Park has many of the characteristics Krier championed; but a town a few miles away from her – Kentlands – was directly conceived in his New Urbanist style, and has been a big hit.

Krier understood and loathed and elaborated upon the perversion of the penthouse, the social sickness of sky-high surveillance states like Monaco and parts of NYC, and for that alone I am grateful.

I think this is the guy. Two of his four FB pictures feature him showing off a gun. Seems to have believed that you’re not safe if you’re not armed all the time.

But you better stay awake if that’s how you roll, cuz while you sleep one of your always-available guns might be taken up by someone else, see, like the curious toddler who toddled into your bedroom while you slept, found the gun, fired it, and killed you dead.

The only consolation we can draw from this tragedy is that a young gun enthusiast-to-be has, thanks to you, had a chance to test a gun and set out – very early – on his own gun journey. Let that be your epitaph.

If veiling is, at its core, about controlling women — and if it rests on the idea that men aren’t responsible for their actions — then refusing to challenge it isn’t tolerance. It’s surrender… We must face Islamist misogyny in the UK, eye-to-uncovered-eye.

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Some say the vile theocrat running Iran may be replaced under pressure of current circumstance. Maybe the next person will toss the mandatory hijab law.

Dude lives three doors down from your blogueuse in Garrett Park. Does not like Jews.

On his webpage, he announces his commitment to a “proto-feminist” “collective good.” Proto means ‘Primitive: … a basic or undeveloped state.‘ Zat really what you want?

There is something I know you want, and that’s attention. Man, you just waggled your dingus in front of an academic audience!

Thou shalt, however, remain America’s by far worst state.

“And I think it’s very important to maybe use this tragedy as some kind of positive, try and get people to understand how to avoid these kinds of things in the future.”

The charge of manslaughter is a second-degree felony, and could mean up to 15 years behind bars.

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Math ain’t my strong suit, but let’s see. If every household in a state has, well, multiple firearms, and if said state, like all states, has a certain number of idiots, immatures, insanes, and incompetents, how many of these here “tragedies” can we expect? I mean, go ahead and throw in suicidally depressed. That’s a lot of tragedies. What a sad and shocking fate for this noble defensive/sporting instrument.

All our gunniest states have immense numbers of suicides and immense, uh, misadventures like the one people in Utah are talking about, where some idiot brought out multiple loaded guns in the living room, surrounded by his family, and started showing off with them. Oh boohoo shot my kids head off I din mean it now can I go home?

No because, at some bloodsoaked point, accident bleeds into manslaughter.

I mean, this being Utah he’ll get a boys will be boys judge who will slap his wrists and free him to slaughter another family member and the state’s butcher bill will keep going up and up and up.

The EU agricultural funds were just sitting there!

All kinds of people tried to shut down this latest EU theft racket, but they either got fired by the ministers who ran the fraud, or

investigators encountered physical resistance from … staff while searching its premises. The government was then forced to fire the [farm] agency’s president for failing to cooperate and to announce it would shut down the organization.

These people fight. Physically.

And now the two ministers who seem to have run the fraud, having been duly promoted, are dealing, or not dealing, with press inquiries.

Makis Voridis, who was agriculture minister from 2021 to 2023 … is now migration minister, and Lefteris Avgenakis, who was agriculture minister from 2023 to 2024 … is now an MP.

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EU not happy.

In a column written just before it passed, Polly Toynbee writes:

The assisted dying bill’s final Commons vote today is no abstract debate about slippery slopes or what God wants: to do nothing is to inflict torture on many… Only God [some say] ordains the time of our entrances and exits. [But] his word cuts very little mustard in a country where 53% have no religion…

[The assertion that my position is a] ‘cult of death’? That sounds more applicable to those willing to let others die in painful agony…

[P]olling of those with disabilities shows 78% in favour [of] assisted dying, in line with the rest of the population…

No, as some hope, morphine is not a kindly drug wafting you away – it can’t remove all pain. Enough people have witnessed bad deaths that public opinion is strongly behind the right to die…

If it passes, it goes to the Lords, where 26 bishops will do their damnedest to stop it, reminding us why they should be removed along with the hereditaries.

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Well, it has passed, so cue the bishops… For UD, this issue is as clear a case as any that religion can really be a wild and crazy thing, peeling off penis parts and blanketing women in black and insisting that people dying in protracted agony must keep shrieking cuz the Lord who loves you also likes the sight of suffering or something.

Bizarre. Not just a minority opinion. Downright microscopic, since most people put basic humanity before dogma.

The Pompeii Archaeological Park has just unveiled the restored Garden of Hercules (so named for a statue of the mythical hero uncovered at the site), freshly planted with 1,200 violets, 1,000 ruscus plants, and 800 antique roses, as well as vines and cherry and cotton apple trees. The botanical display is intended to mirror how the garden appeared 2,000 years ago, based on the findings of botanist Wilhelmina Jashemski, who identified pollen, spores, and plant fossils in the area in the 1950s.

Dr Jashemski worked in Pompeii for decades past the 1950s, and my mother sometimes accompanied her, digging for roots in the hot sun. Both of them would be thrilled by the gardens that have now been rebuilt.

Family members told CBS Los Angeles the victim was a man and that he was shot [and killed] during a celebratory end-of-college pool party.