The Bible has been removed from all elementary and middle school libraries throughout the Davis School District [in Utah] after someone challenged its contents.
A committee tasked with reviewing books that fall under review for sexual content last week determined that the Bible will be retained at district high schools, but removed from all elementary and middle schools…
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So predictable. Once you let people challenge library books, the sky’s the limit.
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In the day since this decision was announced, the Davis School District has also received a request for the Book of Mormon to be reviewed for inappropriate content.
[Conscience-stricken gunshop owner Jon] Waldman said that if he hadn’t already decided to close his shop, another reason presented itself six weeks ago when a customer wanted to buy 4,000 rounds.
Even 1,000 would have been reasonable, but four times that amount, Waldman said, made him question his field.
“If you had ordered 200 to 1,000 rounds, that’s fine. Anyone who shoots regularly, you’re going through a thousand rounds in a month,” he said.
“But when you order 4,000 rounds, the kind of stuff that goes through engine blocks, refrigerators and vests that police officers wear, I just can’t sell that,” he said.
A rational voice at the Taos News poses the question: WTF????
A violent incident like Saturday’s might not have been an inevitability at Red River’s rally, but it sure wasn’t a remote possibility — and everyone involved in putting it on has known that for years.
Even before this year’s fatal shootout, even when biker gangs haven’t rolled into town, the Red River rally has often been a drunken, perverse, dangerous event that has created major headaches for all county residents and first responders, while benefiting a minority of business owners and public officials, mostly only in Red River itself. In previous years, road accidents involving drunken motorcyclists have been commonplace, and have sometimes been fatal.
Drunken, perverse, dangerous… UD wouldn’t mind knowing exactly what the writer means by perverse (‘Perversion is a form of human behavior which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although the term perversion can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive.’ Do tell!), but anyway the list ain’t pretty and it definitely makes one wonder about the perversion of a municipality that would, year after year, subject its 500 residents to the roar of 28,000 bikes, fatal traffic accidents, the street fights of warring gangs, a constant atmosphere of weaponized menace, the choking smoke of weed and worse (I’m guessing on this one), the need to flee town or lock your doors for the duration. ‘The warning signs were there. Add in excessive alcohol consumption, a little cocaine on the side, and the potential for violence should have been anticipated.’ Red River needs to appoint a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose brief would be to review this inexplicable behavior, find a way to apologize for it, and make a clear break with a long shameful chapter in town history.
UD’s effort to account for the unaccountable goes something like this.
The Red River town council has been colonized by bikers and their allies. Every year rational voices try to curtail/end the bloody mess and are shouted down by the bikers/barkeeps/drug dealers/gun dealers/fleabag hotel owners running the town. They don’t talk about money but rather the beautiful freedom of rebels who to be sure might make some people uncomfortable but this is America we get to be free free free as the wind and if you’re not on board why not remote start your Prius and move to Martha’s Vineyard.
Good luck with that, lady. Talk to Ocean City, Maryland. You can wave your mayoral wand and declare certain deadly events over, but, by their very nature, groups like bikers are likely to ignore you. There’s a reason they call themselves Outlaws and shit like that: They do what they want.
And they’ll probably want to keep coming back to little Red River and there’s nothing you can do about that.
You’ve whipped yourself up some real sorcerer’s apprentice type stuff, in other words. And it don’t help none that New Mexico is biker gang central. One of the top five states for biker gangs. These killers are your neighbors.
AND it don’t help that the current trend in America is for everyone to own and carry multiple crowd-pulverizers. I mean, way gun-friendly states like your beloved New Mexico don’t get to just rest on their cowboy laurels and enjoy their mass murder toys at gun ranges and all; folks are gonna wanna kill people with them, aren’t they?
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Now, for reasons unknown, your little town kept inviting tens of thousands of heavily armed biker gangs to hang out with you every year. I mean, it was great for business — the bars, the motels. The bars. And I’m sure some of your bar owners are even as we speak saying basically oh okay a few dead guys in the street. Cost of doing business! Don’t shut down the rally. Few bad apples. Get more police protection. Etc. The mayor will ignore them, but, again, it won’t matter. Chances are excellent massive waves of drunken louts with big guns will be back next year.
And lady, not to be mean, but you and your fellow New Mexicans created, and sustain, the gunny gangy world in which the Barbarians thrive. That’s why they choose to live in your state.
The mayor says they had a heads-up of about 500 Bandidos members heading into town. However, she says there was double that and Bandidos members haven’t even been at the rally since 2019.
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After-Action Review*:
[One visitor said he] had felt uneasy Saturday before the shooting.
”There was so much tension. You could feel it,” he said. “We didn’t really want to walk around. There were wall-to-wall [motorcycle clubs].”
[He] said he walked on the street rather than on the sidewalk, “because if you walked on the sidewalk, every other person you passed, you bumped into. If I see people who wear the [biker gang] colors, I’d rather not bump into them and create anything. I’d rather walk in the street. I’m good with that. I don’t know why they let the colors come back. That was their first mistake, lifting the color ban.”
”It was so thick here yesterday, you couldn’t even walk around, [said another visitor]. They were just posted up everywhere, on every corner. When they’re hanging out like that you just have to be careful.”
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*Note for next year’s family fun biker rally: Enrich everyone’s experience with multiple bullet-proof barriers/holding pens for each warring gang, surrounded by hundreds of officers holding AK-47s. Along the barrier walls, posters with identifying gang colors should be plainly visible to all visitors.
Local Red River NM pol Craig Swagerty is being too modest. His town’s annual biker rally has long also featured drug arrests (everyone knows about biker gangs and the drug business), fights, property damage, weapons charges, and forced temporary migration/home detention of scared locals …
But, you know… Red River folk consider tens of thousands of fucked up armed bikers packed onto their streets for days as a positive, and they keep welcoming back the boys — and the boys bring their kids, too, so this year the little ones got to be part of the hysterical stampede of people trying to get out of the way of bullets. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said another resident. “I was told not to go out [as soon as the rally began] and so I was staying at a friend’s house. It honestly sounded like a whole clip was unloaded. It was a lot of gunshots at once.” Yep, must be quite a sight for one of the 500 permanent residents of tiny Red River to see/hear 28,000 heavily armed people outside her door. Town sure don’t need to worry about adequate policing with them numbers!
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So now everyone’s talking about this year’s blowout – the bloodbath is all over the national and international news and I mean Craigwhodathunkit?? Who could have foreseen that 28,000 drunk assholes carrying 40,000 weapons would shoot some of them off? What’s America coming to?
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In these Great Carnage days, you’d think a few people would look at and think about the lowest hanging fruit, the locations where mass shooting is practically guaranteed. Apart from the obvious – urban drug turf – UD will now helpfully single out two places guaranteed to generate routine atrocity:
Hookah lounges
Biker rallies
There are plenty of other places you, like the Red River resident smart enough to get the hell out of the way of the rally even before it started, definitely ought to avoid if you dislike open air gun battle. The boardwalk in Myrtle Beach or Ocean City MD… Public high schools in Glocksucker states… etc etc etc yada yada yada. I mean, do you read the news at all? Ain’t it kind of obvious?
NOT that UD‘s offering even a whiff of a suggestion that guns should be restricted or you should have check points in locations guaranteed to kill people repeatedly! Perish the thought that you and your family shouldn’t be free to perish at the hands of a drunk, high POS with a Glock! NOOOOO. I’m only saying we should designate these places, with big easy to read signs, Most Likely to Murder, so people can choose to stay away, or, as some folks in places like Myrtle Beach and Red River do, leave town until event season is over. Rather than the town of Red River promoting bike rallies on its tourism website and promising fun for the whole family (current town policy), you’d have the mayor say something like this (she made the comment to the Taos newspaper — Taos: the classy town, forty miles away from trashy Red River, that along with everyplace else anywhere near Red River went into lockdown right after the shooting):
“Everybody needs to understand that this really isn’t an event that we promote. There’s not really an event sponsor; it’s not a town-sponsored event. It’s something that occurs every year. It’s an event that’s grown and happens and we do our best to manage it.”
Course they do promote it. It’s right there on their website… Oh wait! Someone done taken it down!
Not only that, but lookee here what sober rule-bound Red River’s doing now!
“For everyone, there will be zero tolerance from this point forward,” [the local police captain] said at a [post-massacre] news conference. “That is traffic violations for 1 mile an hour over, seat belts, jaywalking. We are going to stop and talk to everyone if they violate any law — traffic or criminal.”
Look sharp, lad! From now on we fuckin promise it’s gonna be Pyongyang around here! And cut your hair!
Believe me when I say that I, like many people who have been burned by the Texas GOP’s seemingly endless appetite for cruelty, ignorance, and hypocrisy, felt a certain satisfaction as I watched yesterday’s coverage of it setting itself on fire. Top moment? When the first group to appear outside the Capitol in Austin in response to [corrupt, impeached AG Ken] Paxton’s call for supporters to turn out was around 100 people preparing for the “Trot for Trans Lives,” a 5K run held in support of transgender Americans affected by the waves of anti-trans rights legislation passed in recent years, including by Texas lawmakers.
Les UDs have watched in amazement as a new house fifty feet from Garrett Park’s two big, beautiful town swimming pools installed its own quite large pool.
Garrett Park is rich, yes; but we’re not Malibu. Not every house installs its own tennis court/swimming pool complex. I mean, almost no house does.
Indeed, along with gorgeous, never crowded, beautifully landscaped pools for the use of Garrett Parkers, the town has two beautifully landscaped, never crowded, tennis courts. And a terrific basketball court (a house just down the street from the basketball court does have a private indoor one).
Anyway, we’ve scratched our heads about the private pool steps from the town pool, but okay.
It is only mid-spring, but already dozens of pools in and around Maryland’s most populous county have been listed for rent on Swimply, which launched in 2020 as people sought alternatives to public pools that shut down because of the pandemic on the heels of the wild success of apps like Airbnb and Uber. Hosts set hourly rates anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour to access private backyard pools that bypass lines and crowds.
… Many homeowners are eager to earn easy money by renting out a backyard pool …
A … group of 36 county residents from Chevy Chase, Rockville, Montgomery Village, Kensington and Rosemary Hills, wrote a letter opposing [a proposed bill regulating the practice] and asking the county instead to outlaw the amenity rentals altogether. The group argued that the rentals turn quiet residential neighborhoods into bustling business districts, without the infrastructure to support commercial activity. They raised dozens of concerns, largely over the added nuisance of strangers pouring into their neighborhoods because of the apps, congested roads, scarce parking, and noise and safety.‘
Now, Kensington… That’s getting much too close for comfort. Next town over. So now UD‘s wondering if this oddly situated and surprisingly large private pool in her town is a rental. Yikes.
UD‘s been blogging about NM for years and ain’t surprised it came out on top on this and on other intelligence measures; but it’s always good to be able to point to evidence, and the recent decision to stage a huge public rally in a tiny town among warring biker factions will do nicely.
The mayor of Red River is shocked at the mass shooting (three dead so far, several injured) that ensued, cuz you’d NEVER expect fine folk like these to have gotten drunk at Red River’s bars and to have used their big big big guns to kill each other. Unprecedented!
How could such a thing have happened? Bikers were supposed to be at “a live music event by Warning Shot” (not making this up) but instead just blew past the whole warning thing and started killing each other. Coulda knocked the mayor and tourism director over with a feather: 28,000 armed bikers that hate each other! And now you tell me this didn’t bode well. Hidesight is 50/50 dude!!!!
