None of [the gun control] efforts … have been as instantly effective as [Dmitriy] Andreychenko’s stunt [ – entering a WalMart in body armor and holding a semi-automatic rifle – ] in making the point that wearing military protective gear and carrying a semi-automatic weapon should perhaps not be considered an acceptable way to behave, during peacetime, around people who are shopping for paper towels.

… is a nascent movement born of the latest attack on gun rights – the rollback of open carry while grocery shopping. Studies show that absent regular visual and physical access, inside and outside the home, to AR-15s, Alaskans’ impulse to detonate their heads will be significantly mitigated.

As famed for red pulp as Florida is for orange, we Alaskans have stood at the top of America’s suicide rate until recently, when we were very slightly overtaken by Montana. As local legislators keep an anxious eye on that slippage, POSR joins ranks with the Alaskan Independence Party to militate for nationhood, and the self-determination that accompanies it.

Meanwhile, join with us in singing our anthem:

TO HIS COY PULPER

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s aim and that gun’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I reach for thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet barrel finger’d such pulping brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

… were the only dystopian elements of the otherwise utopian Glenstone Museum and grounds in Potomac, Maryland – a short ride from Garrett Park. We reserved the visit months in advance cuz the place is madly popular and they keep the numbers low to make the visit meditative… Come to think of it, there was a third less than utopian aspect to the place, though Mr UD disagrees — an audio installation in the forest, which UD enjoyed but found a wee hokey (‘what a forest might “hear” over the course of hundreds of years.’). Twenty eight minutes of natural and unnatural sounds bouncing around your ears ended in Arvo Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis, which UD will admit was pretty cool, the high soprano at the end piercing the trees.

On the dead hummingbirds: The big windows surrounding this tranquil water garden in the main pavilion (which featured a whitewashed room full of Cy Twombly sculptures) are, one of the gray-outfitted art guides confided to me, fatal to them.

The Patio cafe, which does not take cash, had trouble today with its card reading machines; we gave up on it and went to the other cafe on the grounds. On the way, Mr UD gave me his lecture on why it’s appalling that some places refuse to take cash. “A lot of poor people can’t go to these places.”

… ‘D.C.’s new must-see art museum.’ Glenstone.

They’ve got some Cy Twombly sculptures. UD loves Cy Twombly.

Roland Barthes on Twombly.

But it’s the kind of stunt that could catch on. That would be fun to watch.

Is the niqab/burqa, as this New York Times reporter writes, the sort of thing you will wear (and make your female children wear: “A small girl of perhaps 7 or 8 was sitting atop a pile of humanitarian food aid boxes, clad in the black abaya and jilbab of a grown woman, but in miniature…” ) if you are a rigid, strict, fundamentalist, literalist Muslim? Actually, Mehdi Hasan makes a compelling argument that ISIS isn’t Islamic at all, but rather a cultic perversion of the faith. Plenty of others have observed that ISIS people tend to know shit about Islam and present instead as nihilists who like violence. ‘“I’m struggling to reconcile the two things, wanting to look at them as displaced people and human,” said Dareen Khalifa, an International Crisis Group analyst who has visited [a women’s detention] camp; but some of the women are “very ideological, and the atmosphere is very ripe for all sorts of indoctrination…”‘ It’s maybe the best thing about us, qua humans, that we struggle like hell to see fanatics, who unapologetically enslave, rape, and behead, as fellow humans, as sufferers, as (trying our very hardest here) confused and fragile victims…

UD remembers, thirty years ago, sweeping her eyes over images of bloated bodies on a hill in Guyana and feeling (along with a sense of witnessing inassimilable grotesquerie) almost unbearable pity for the suicidal stupidity of the Jonestown fanatics.

But ISIS is homicidal, mass homicidal, which makes the business of pitying (looking at them as displaced people and human) very much more difficult. Even those who haven’t literally killed, let’s say, but only enslaved… It’s like – well, here’s another memory. UD remembers trying hard to feel something human toward Hedda Nussbaum, who watched two children being tortured (one to death) by her partner and did nothing, and who at his trial claimed to have been afraid and herself brutalized, etc. Highly educated, an editor at Random House, a successful Manhattanite, Nussbaum asked us to believe this…

UD finds more worthwhile, in these and associated matters, to pose Ron Padgett’s question: What makes us so mean? Padgett writes a long, amusing poem, inconclusively pondering this. But having read lots of interviews with/memoirs by ISIS and other degenerates, UD is at least willing to conclude this: Sadism – watching it, taking part in it, even being the object of it – is for many people terribly, terribly, exciting.

Once a year I’m lyin’ here
Stuck in a firing line
Momma’s pissed herself with fear
And the kids begin to whine
I see the cops I’m all worn out
All I can do is pray
I paid ten bucks
To park my truck and watch the bullets spray

    If you ask me why I go
   I would answer I don’t know
  Maybe we’ll stop going there
  Next year oh god forbid
   They’ll maybe kill my kid
   That hot, cheesy, way sleazy
   My Minnesota State Fair

‘Coastal HS football roundup: Williamson wins game marred by gunfire’

Yeah, who won? And how many shot?

Ten.

***********

Violence-porn-viewing here. The true south: Guns, Football, and (children screaming out to) God.

***********

If you have any doubt that ending a high school or college football or basketball game with gunfire has become a ritual in parts of this country, like a cigarette after sex, put the words football and shooting in my search engine.

*************

UPDATE: And in Texas:

POLICE ACTIVITY ROUNDUP: TRAFFIC STOP MARRED BY GUNFIRE

… that UD has a thousand news sites from which to choose a link for you. As usual, though, she’s drawn to Deadspin, whose commenters are a sight to behold.

Much of Deadspin‘s Tyler Skaggs thread involves writers comparing notes on the opioids Skaggs took; in particular, they try manfully (UD figures they’re almost all guys) to describe what it’s like to take oxys.

I had liquid oxy after throat surgery and I felt like a rainbow over a lake filled with titties.

Large numbers of students boycotted a lecturer at Trinity College who declared that mutilating the genitals of little girls can be, you know, more than fine under the right circumstances. He was denounced by every doctor in Ireland, and by the head of the Muslim community there. A professor of medicine at the school said he’d quit if Trinity didn’t infibulate Mr Calm Down Little Girl It Ain’t So Bad.

Well the dude was an adjunct and easily removed, but of course he’s suing now for back pay or whatever. Apparently he wants to be made intact again.

Time was ’round here in Nevada you’d see a AK-whatever and 2,000 or so rounds of ammo in a parked car at a university and walk on by. People have a right to defend themselves! Guns are no big deal! It’s the west ’round here! Et cetera.

Well now everybody’s scared cuz of what’s his name that guy that killed all those people in Las Vegas and some snowflake went and reported the stuff in the car to the police and now they’ve arrested some poor guy just trying to go to class.

And he forgot! When he saw the cops around his car he explained that he just forgot about the gun and ammo being there.

So now you’ve punished a guy just trying to go to class. Nevada needs campus carry.

I mean, the latest anxious freshman eighteen year old preparing to mass kill if he failed to get into a frat made a point of leaving gun-unfriendly Boston (where he went to a real expensive private school) and coming to Highpoint University in North Carolina because, he explained to the authorities, it’s easier to get guns in that state. Acquaintances from the private school recall his obsession with guns and mass killing; he clearly made a logical decision to move to a place where – unlike Massachusetts – that would be easy. Crazed reject loner mass killers like the guy down the street at the University of North Carolina Charlotte last April just seem drawn to North Carolina, whose state motto appears on this shirt…

Yeah.

Today’s crazed eighteen year old family-slaughterer is a real religious dude. And God is good! Only gave him a rifle. If he’d had a better weapon, he could have killed the whole neighborhood.