… DARES you to deny that Ulysses is the greatest twentieth century novel.

Garrett Park Fourth of July parade, whose theme this year is The Novel.

Photo: Frances Eby

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of guns, University Diaries lands us, tonight, in adorable Hidden Springs, Idaho, an Ada County planned community way out in the foothills of some mountain. Hidden Springs sits way out there all by itself, neat farmhouse style homes in pristine nature, and who can blame it for boasting of its many amenities?

But nowhere on its website will you find disclosure about gunfire from an illegal shooting range just down the road a tad.

For that you have to consult the local press which, in a series of articles, has followed the range owner’s belief that the “government” (whatever that is) has no power whatsoever over my private property, fuck it, and if I want to charge people hither and yon to fire their guns on my private property any old time I can fucking well do it and don’t come at me with shit like permitting applications and public hearings.

 In response to complaints from Hidden Springs folks, the range’s owner says “residents shouldn’t be surprised to hear gunfire because the discharge of firearms in rural Ada County is common.” Suck it up MAGA world the noise I’m making is a drop in the noise bucket of all the daily bangbang here see and you know it. Live by the gun or move away.

I don’t wanna be around when the inevitable (cough) ‘visit’ from the local police happens… I’m thinking Ruby Ridge…

‘To an American like me, appalled by the practice [of female genital mutilation] and allowed to listen in [to what West Africans say about it], the conversation reflected something hopeful — not only [a girl named] Sesay’s resistance but also the way that more girls are pushing past the taboo of talking about female genital mutilation, or F.G.M. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to report on the practice, because traditionally it has been unmentionable, but it seems to be losing its silencing power. In a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, I found some young women were reluctant to discuss the topic, but many others were willing to candidly discuss it...

[I]nfections are common but often go untreated because of the insular nature of the societies. Girls sometimes die … and then are buried quietly and secretly…

F.G.M. is so horrific and widespread that it should be much higher on the global human rights agenda. To their credit, organizations like the United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and U.N. Women have long spoken out against the practice, as have many aid groups…

When someone like Sesay opens a biology textbook, she learns about infection and scar tissue and trauma. But she also absorbs a far more dangerous idea in the eyes of the cutters: that she has a right to say no. And that is the quiet revolution already underway — in classrooms, in whispers among friends, in small communities like Sesay’s, where a daughter brings to the table the talk of girls’ rights.‘

In 2021 … 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans — 56 percent — favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology…

[F]ighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.

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U Penn has now rescinded trans swimmer Lia Thomas’s medals.

… Same old pints of blood all over the pavement!

‘The same block was also the scene of a mass shooting in November 2022, when the same nightclub was known as Hush Lounge. One person was killed and three others wounded after a group that had been thrown out of Hush started fighting.

Police shut down the Hush nightclub after that shooting, and Artis Lounge later opened in the same location.‘

But bring it on!!

BamaCarry Inc., an organization advocating for gun rights, announced Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against the city of Selma for the detainment and removal of one of its members who carried a gun into a “gun-free zone.”

“This is Alabama—not New York City,” [said the group’s president].

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Datz right yall! BamaCarry is enraged that a city that’s not New York — not sure what they mean, since per capita there’s much more shooting in Selma than NY — should have any gun laws. They’re going to keep carrying in gun free zones, and they’re going to sue sue sue, because the people of Selma deserve an absolutely open forum for future mass killings.

True-blue American terrorist gets life in prison. Good.

The [police] chief … worked a shift on April 6 and observed a man, who had been in a fight, walking down the street with an AR-15. [The chief] pulled him aside.

“I was like, ‘why are you walking back with a rifle in your hands? You know, the police could have shot you. Someone else could have shot you.’ And he just said, ‘It’s my right to have a gun. I’m not hurting anyone.’ … While I was standing and talking to him, I noticed the outline of another firearm in his waistband. I seized that; thus I was subpoenaed to testify today [on] a charge of a concealed weapon.”

Brave police chief! But get a job somewhere else. Richmond’s a mess, and it’s trying to kill everybody. Know why huge numbers of Richmond police are leaving the force?

“I have worked this [city’s] most violent neighborhoods for 18 years. I have never in my career seen people with guns in their hands confronting police officers. I personally observed a man with an AK pistol in his hand waving it around, saying we couldn’t stop him because he only has 20 rounds in the magazine,” [Anthony] Catoggio wrote in the email, which was obtained by CBS 6 through a public records request.

He added, “What are we gonna do when [there’s] an accidental discharge and the whole crowd opens fire? The chief will give an officer’s family a nicely folded flag and be like, sorry we have no idea who killed your loved one because there [were] 100 cartridge casings.”

Whoa. The police chief’s talking about “stricter laws surrounding guns.” That’s crazy talk! He’s out of a job soon. This is fucking America. In America we have crowds of drunk mentally retarded AR-15 shooters waiting for a little shove, a little pat, a little bit of guff, to set off the whole fireworks display.

Columbia University has far more serious problems these days than a not too expensive settlement of a class action suit. But since we’ve followed, on this blog, the story of one of that school’s own math professors who ran the numbers and figured out the place was gaming its rankings, we should take note of the way Columbia has resolved the matter.

Columbia University agreed to pay $9 million to settle a proposed class action by students who claimed it submitted false data to boost its position in U.S. News & World Report’s influential college rankings.

The latest on this smokin hot monk is that the University of Innsbruck has had a change of mind, and has decided that it does not want to host his habilitation thesis.

Apparently the school lacks faculty expertise in carbonizing flesh.

Perhaps Waldstein should pursue his interests here, for instance, rather than at Innsbruck.

Only in Texas, mes petites. Only. Texas.

 Killeen Police Department data … shows at least 57 service calls made to Club Krush’s address since January 1, including 22 criminal incident reports tied to aggravated assault, weapons investigations, and narcotics trafficking.

Klub Krush would be better, but okay let’s go with Club Krush. Round it off to sixty calls to the police in six months. Plus, as they used to put it back in thirteenth century Texas, sumer is icumen in, y’all.

Sample review:

[One star] “My friend died here.”

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The club, already under scrutiny after a separate shooting incident in March, confirmed the death of a man identified only as “Lil Fred” in their statement on Instagram. The post offered condolences to the victim’s family and noted that the venue had “cut ties” with several employees due to what it called “bad work actions.” The club also pledged to increase security moving forward.

Bwahahahahaha now I don’t want y’all ever to wonder what they mean by Don’t Mess With Texas.…

Whoever published this headline could use it.

So frequent are mass shootings in this country that we’re beginning to see a trend of police/government spokespeople trying to worm their way out of admitting that it has happened in their locality.

While the [most recent] shooting meets the definition of a mass shooting, [Springfield Ohio] Police Chief Allison Elliott emphasized that it was not like what people typically think. She said this was “an isolated incident.”

“Not that that makes it any less tragic or concerning for our entire community and those involved, but this appears to be, at this time, an isolated incident that stemmed from some sort of argument or disagreement at the party,” Elliott said.

I mean, this is a twofer. Cops love to do the “isolated” thing, even though it’s meaningless. What would non-isolated be? Part of a pattern? There’s no particular pattern, but places like Springfield certainly have multiple mass shootings. And the other thing is the “not like what people typically think” thing. Huh? Exchanges of fire at big house parties where idiots get in fights and lose their lives over women or some such pathetic bullshit, are the very definition, the very archetype, of the mass shootout. What happened in Springfield is exactly what we typically think.

Trying to get a hold on the new massive roundup of health care crooks is like trying in any real sense to comprehend the size of the universe. Hundreds of criminals, billions of stolen dollars, all over the country and the world… So we will focus on only one miscreant, a young white male registered Republican who lived (pre-forfeit) in a massive McMansion in a gated equestrian community in Florida.

Florida of course being the global epicenter of Medicare Medicaid Mediwhatever’sleftoverafterMedicareandMedicaidfraud fraud.

Sean Alterman ran a

 $52 million scheme to bill Medicare for medically unnecessary genetic testing. As alleged in the information, Alterman owned two laboratories through which he billed Medicare for doctors’ orders that he procured through kickbacks. Specifically, he paid call center operators to generate the orders by running deceptive telemarketing campaigns to persuade the Medicare beneficiaries to agree to the tests. The call centers then would “doctor chase” the beneficiaries’ physicians to sign orders for the tests by sending them faxes containing false, fraudulent, and misleading representations designed to induce them into ordering the tests. 

Buhblahbuhblahbuhblah much more where that came from but you get the general idea. What’s poignant is that this crook, who lived a ghost life, hiding always his dark larcenous self from the sunny legit world of horses and golfcarts, has had to forfeit (wait for it) his Rolls Royce Ghost.

… what with everyone killing everyone and all… Editorially speaking, with the American family a shooting gallery, it’s awkward to know how to formulate things when dad kills sonny or sonny kills the whole family or hubby kills wife and then himself or mom kills her four girls… All with guns, natch…

What’s nice is the shooter almost always gets a mention… Not as the shooter haha! Don’t no one, in these obits, put in the er circumstances of the deceased getting deceased… Shooter’s just one of the survivors (if he survives), a member of the grieving family…

Like this latest one, where Haven, who sounds like a sweet, wonderful, kid, was blown away by his stepfather who’s now on trial for manslaughter. Wouldn’t want that detail to mess up the warm family circle you’re drawing on the decedent’s legacy page, so here again the shooter appears you know just as dad! Dad, dad, dad, who smoked the kid while he was sitting on the living room couch (Haven “died at home”) and will go to jail for it…

I mean, you don’t gotta say killed by his dad or anything! Might could consider leaving the name of the killer out of the obit…