… it’s SO much like this one – so much like hunderts of ‘merican boy deaths – that I thought I’d throw it into the mix.

A man, [who had earlier consumed alcohol and taken a Percocet pain for which he didn’t have a prescription], admiring a friend’s pistol during a gathering of friends, accidentally shot and killed another man with it …

[The shooter] had asked to hold a visitor’s pistol, which was loaded but did not have a bullet in the chamber. While admiring the gun, [he] pulled its slide back and simultaneously squeezed its trigger, police said, citing the witnesses’ accounts.

One of the visitors said he tried to warn [him] that he had loaded a bullet into the pistol’s chamber when he pulled the slide back, but it was too late — he had already fired the gun.

Vivia Chen was there. (Background here.)

If [Judge Loretta] Preska’s deployment of sarcasm is any indication, I’d say that the Dershowitz team should be sweating. The judge asked pointed questions to both sides but I thought she was a lot more skeptical of the arguments that Dershowitz’s legal team was putting forward.

A number of times, Preska said to Dershowitz’s lawyers, Howard Cooper and Imran Ansari, about their arguments, “I don’t get it.” For instance, Preska asked why Dershowitz failed to raise the conflict issue about Boies Schiller’s representation of [Virginia] Giuffre in previous litigations related to the Epstein matter, though the professor made noises about doing so. (Dershowitz claims that Boies Schiller has a conflict because its partner Carlos Sires had offered to represent him after Giuffre accused the professor of sexual abuse, and that he had sent the firm confidential information as a result.)

When Dershowitz’s lawyer Ansari argued that he’s now raising the conflict issue because he’s being directly sued for defamation, Preska was unimpressed and shot back, “What difference should that make?”

Nor was she impressed by Ansari’s suggestion that Boies Schiller used dirty tactics. “Why are you telling me this?” Preska asked. “I don’t care.”

And she seemed even more unconvinced that Dershowitz had established a client/lawyer relationship with Boies Schiller that would merit the firm’s disqualification. She noted that when told by Sires that the firm could not represent him, Dershowitz replied in an email: “Darn. I was really hoping that you could come on board.”

Preska hammered away at that response.

“It’s the subjunctive,” she said. “He’s not writing back and saying, ‘Holy Moly, you said you’d represent me.’ He’s saying, ‘I was hoping you could do it.’”

At that point, Ansari looked stumped. He reminded me of myself as a law student during moot court. Scared.

Transcript of Rudy Giuliani’s remarks to his soon to be third ex-wife.

No, wait. That was him on Fox today.

Israel’s religious parties: Scripted by Woody Allen.

Not in Pakistan it don’t, babe. Shush. Stay in Saudi.

Not that Saudi is safe from the evil intentions of women who insist on being free.

If you truly wish to live where all the women wear burqas, there’s always Al Hol.

The 81-year-old Harvard Law School professor angrily poked the defense table — where he sat alongside his pack of five lawyers — passed notes to his attorneys and seemed to argue with them every time one of them jumped up to address the judge.

He’s in a courtroom, and very angry, because he’s being sued for libel by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slaves. The brilliant jurist’s defense against claims that he has called the former sex slave – who says she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz – a serial liar, a prostitute, an extortionist, and a lot of other not very nice things is that sure he said all that shit but it was a long time ago and the statute of limitations yadda yadda. But what about the fact that he said the same shit and worse about her very recently? Well, see, precisely cuz he said the same shit before, the same statue of limitations applies. So he can, in the judge’s words, “repeat potentially libelous statements for eternity”? Oh yes your honor, respond his attorneys; absolutely. For eternity…

Er, but this interpretation of the law gives people “license to be serial defamers,” the other side points out to the judge, who seems to agree. Hence Dersh’s angry table poking…

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

‘Course he wouldn’t be in this tight spot were it not for his much earlier alleged poking…

“We were looking for things that were new and exciting,” [one parent] said. “You can only buy so much cookie dough, cheesecake and wrapping paper. We were looking to be unique in our offerings the best we could.”

… you get American deaths like this one, of a Colorado State University student. Both he and his armed to the teeth housemate seem to have been shitfaced when they started playing around with the housemate’s … let’s see…

… military-style AR-15 carbine, a Remington pump-action shotgun, a Springfield .45-caliber handgun and a Glock 34 9 mm semi-automatic handgun with a mounted flashlight and 17-round magazine.

Strange brew… see what’s inside of you — drugs, alcohol, and… hey… a fatal bullet! How about that!

Who cares. The police initially believed the beyond-bogus story the housemate concocted about how you know a young man with his whole life before him and no history of depression just up and marched into his room, took his Glock (conveniently loaded) and shot himself through the head with it. Case closed! Kids these days.

Only after all sorts of shouts and cries from the dead guy’s family have the police who I mean nu? I mean every day around here some hopeless jerk with a gun kills his kid boohoo you expect us to sit up and take notice when another one bites the dust? So the guy keeps changing his story, his timeline, his alcohol consumption, his everything – I guess that’s why he failed two lie detector tests…

[He eventually admitted] he posed for a couple of Snapchat photos with [his housemate] before the incident, which contradicts his initial statements to police that [he housemate] came into his room without warning, picked up the gun and shot himself… [He also made] four calls to family, … removed the 17-round magazine from the Glock 34 and ejected the round from the chamber and put the gun in [his housemate’s] lap before police arrived. He also moved [his housemate’s] marijuana pipe from the room and cleaned up several beer cans.

So a guy’s lying mortally wounded in front of you. What do you do? … Hello muddah, hello faddah, here I am at…

… got murdered in broad daylight for his troubles. The paid degenerates who did the deed will certainly be convicted (finally, after a five-year delay).

It’s equally important that the rich degenerates who paid the killers go to prison too. But that’s for after the state of Florida puts the paid degenerates away.

… United States of America.

The hotly recruited pride of the University of Wisconsin. Go, Reggie!

Hey but Reggie: “Nearly” doesn’t count. Let’s see some real action next time.

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

UPDATE: Well, bust my britches:

You don’t have to drive far in a typical American town before you see it: A pictographic image of a child (implied to be a boy), perhaps chasing a ball, perhaps poised in midstride, perhaps atop a seesaw, perhaps with a jaunty cap, perhaps with a companion or parent. And then, some variation on these words: “Slow: Children at Play.” … Despite the continued preponderance of “Children at Play” on streets across the land, it is no secret in the world of traffic engineering that “Children at Play” signs—termed, with subtle condescension, “advisory signs”—have been proven neither to change driver behavior nor to do anything to improve the safety of children in a traffic setting. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program, in its “Synthesis of Highway Practice No. 139,” sternly advises that “non-uniform signs such as “CAUTION—CHILDREN AT PLAY,” “SLOW—CHILDREN,” or similar legends should not be permitted on any roadway at any time.”

Now here I was, all excited cuz this cute sign certifying the innocent fun-filled nature of my little corner of the world just got put up, and here’s this article telling me it’s a baby killer!

…. But wait. Read on, UD…

It’s also not uncommon to see “Children at Play” signs in the presence of 35 mph speed-limit signs, which is roughly akin to trying to put out fire with gasoline. It’s not simply that fatality risks begin to soar at impact speeds of more than 20 mph, but that, as a study by John Wann and colleagues at Royal Holloway University in London has suggested, children, until well into their teens, are unable to detect during a normal crossing of the street the approaching speed and distance of cars above a threshold—also 20 mph. This study adds legitimacy to the increasingly popular idea, as introduced in the U.K. in 1991, that residential areas be designated as 20 mph zones. (Research by the Transport Research Laboratory has found, among other things, a 60 percent crash reduction during the “after” period in 20 mph zones.)

And hold on! I’m going out there right now to take another picture!

… provide her with a birthday balloon during a case team pirate-themed murder mystery party. (La Kid figured out the murderer.)

… an “adequate supply” of AR-15s for the general population here. When Colt announced it was discontinuing them, UD worried that there might still be inadequately supplied pockets of America; but Colt assures us that it has carpeted the country in consumer rifles and will now concentrate exclusively on the “military and law enforcement.”

I guess I should believe them, but I’m concerned that my own little town of Garrett Park, for instance, may not in fact have its quota of semi-automatic rifles in case of guerilla warfare or a fascist overthrow.

Note to UD: Talk to the mayor.

There’s another problem with what Colt has done. Right now the weapons advantage seems on the side of the criminal and the insane; won’t this new policy shift the balance?

The ‘culture problem’ at MIT boils over.

Or whatever.

She loves the mad things they say, the mad things they do – in airplanes, on city streets, in schools, at archeological sites… She has been able to count on them for madcap anti-democratic action lo all these years.

Nor does she think the very bad outcome for them in the latest Israeli election will stop them from wrapping themselves in cellophane on jetliners or spitting at insufficiently orthodox eight year old girls and calling them whores, etc., etc. After all, God calls them to this behavior.

No, now that they’re cornered by a secular country that hates them, UD expects the ultras to go positively batshit with rage and paranoia.

But, as one observer points out, the election results have thrown a wrench in Bibi’s effort to shut down Israel’s Supreme Court (“Netanyahu does not have the votes to get himself a government that will … tinker with the Supreme Court“), which means that the extreme and endemic law-breaking of the ultras will be punished. And that will be fun to watch too.