America now suffers from a mismatch between the lethal weaponry which is currently endemic in its public schools, and the level of intelligence among some of the people who run the public schools. I mean to say that the level of intelligence is not adequate to deal with the lethality.
Compounding the insufficient intelligence problem are three further problems:
School leaders are incentivized to retain students.
School leaders are often ideologically twisted in ways that make them not want to “give up” on vicious, mentally ill, people.
Some school leaders are themselves in various ways violence-friendly or at least violence-tolerant. America is a violent country. It has a lot of violent people in it. Some of them are running our schools.
Schools are all about putting happy faces on everything. While superintendents and principals sit in their offices sketching school spirit happy faces, students and parents are out front in the parking lot sobbing in each other’s arms as police shut down their killing field for the rest of the week. It’s a strange duality, but one that won’t change, because of hardwired truths about some of the people who become public school administrators. Everyone can read the guns on campus numbers, the shootings/killings on campus numbers, all the way down to the elementary schools. (“The [Denver] shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.”) UD assures you that, given the situation on the ground, they will only grow.
And no, UD is not picking on administrators. They are only part – though a crucial part – of the witches’ brew. Depraved parents whose children have easy access to AR-15s? Check. Fragile mental health plus growing up in a violent country? Check. Inept local police forces? Check. School districts that haven’t gotten the message that in a country with four hundred million guns their buildings have become armed camps and have to start looking like them? Check. There’s lots of stuff we could talk about. But the person in charge of keeping the schools safe holds ultimate responsibility.
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Read this background. The multiply-shot-up school at issue is simply a dumping ground. Disgusting.
UD is pleased to say that the Fox/Dominion defamation trial (taking place down the road from Les UDs, in Wilmington), has already provided courtroom merriment, as the hapless attorneys for Fox do their thing:
[Fox’s attorney also] said that Dobbs’ decision to promote a press conference where [fulminating madwoman Sidney] Powell made outlandish claims was akin to CSPAN placing video of the event on its website.
[This] prompted [the judge] to cut in and ask whether she was asking whether Dobbs, known as a very conservative host whose opinion bleeds into his show, was akin to CSPAN, which is staunchly neutral, prompting some laughter in the courtroom.
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Everyone incorporates in Delaware, for obvious reasons, and Les UDs sometimes entertain each other with speculation as to where people like Eisner and Ovitz stay when legal catastrophe forces them to spend time in unspeakable Wilmington.
The best hotel there is some historic whatnot charging reasonable rates, so that’s out.
We wondered about boutique hotels, and after concluding there aren’t really any, we settled on coptering up to NYC each night.
Yeah what the hell. On any given middle or high school day in Albuquerque, you figure there are maybe twenty guns in backpacks or in administrative offices or whatever, around the school system… Students and staff bring them onto campus for… whatever stupid reason! It’s certainly not our job to figure out why the children of New Mexico are menaced with death in the location that ought to be safest. What we can say is that the reasons are … whatever. Stupid.
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Today’s butcher’s bill. And this one’s just like the one in Newport News – both involved shooters so well known as incredibly dangerous that both schools had elaborate security arrangements just for them. Today’s for instance had to be patted down every time he entered the building; and this time while being patted down he pulled out his gun and started shooting.
Uh.
Duh.
Why is a public school system putting itself and all its children directly in the line of fire? What twisted “retention” philosophy (beyond the cynical financial one) is in play here? You designate a bunch of untrained victims-to-be to surveil, pat down, and discipline determined killers, so that… ?
So that you get dead people, wounded people, and WHOPPING lawsuits.
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Update: The shooter killed himself.
The shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year.
You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.
Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.
And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!
… and even though his name still emblazons the Arkansas State Medical Board website (he appears twice!), his apparent practice of billing the government – always at the severest level of illness – for patients he’s reportedly never seen has attracted the attention of the Attorney General.
Maybe update the web page? Maybe not so cool that the just-resigned CHAIR of your state’s medical regulator has all this time possibly been a bigtime Medicaid fraudster?
Crime-ridden SF suffers from – along with everything else – constant smashing of car windows to grab anything worth grabbing. A CNN reporter wrote that
her rental car was broken into outside City Hall even with hired security monitoring the vehicle. [Another person shared] a story from a visiting friend, who purportedly lost $10,000 in valuables and is now “scarred forever.”
A local pol ridicules the “scarred forever” thing cuz getting your car smashed and your valuables taken is nothing – this dude’s been car-smashed repeatedly, as have his friends, plus he has friends who have been murdered, for fuck sake! So you lost ten thou and there’s glass everywhere! Big deal! SF = crime, babe, and if you don’t like it move to the suburbs where a bunch of weasels want their families to be safe!
Why don’t our “beautiful sunsets go viral”? Why does it have to be these petty crimes that after all are a structural part of urban life everywhere?
A Catholic university puts its ethos front and center, and suffers particularly acute derision when three of its students act with such rank cruelty as to attract the attention of the nation.
A double amputee had left her wheelchair near a set of stairs in the bar where the Mercyhurst hockey players were drinking (she was using the bathroom), and one of them – a star player, son of a famous player – pushed it down the stairs, messing it up.
So there’s an everyday human reality. A woman who can’t walk nonetheless negotiates the complicated, difficult business of getting out of the house and socializing with friends; in order to go to the toilet, she has to put her chair aside and be carried into the Ladies’ by one of her friends, placed on the seat, helped to wash her hands, etc, etc. After this challenging feat, she is eager to reclaim her chair, but it’s messed up at the bottom of a stairway.
Here’s another everyday reality: Three beautiful, young, able-bodied, drunk athletes who play at the highest collegiate level in what is routinely called the world’s cruelest sport notice a wheelchair at the top of some stairs in a bar. They don’t notice the camera directed precisely at them. Too drunk, too stupid.
One of them – son of a Canadian ice hockey legend – is therefore filmed hurling the chair to the bottom of the stairs and then returning to steady soaking with his buddies.
Forced by outraged bar personnel to apologize, he perfunctorily does and then says: “Do I still have to go?”
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All three have been suspended from the school’s team, but the suspension won’t last long. They have also been barred from the bar. These are of course small things.
Global press attention, with all the gory details and the viral video, is not a small thing. The contempt of their community is not a small thing.
The mandated sensitivity sessions to which they will be subjected are not small things, but they’re not that big.
The lawsuit we might expect from the woman, reasonably enough claiming humiliation and other forms of injury, is a big thing.
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For people to respond very intensely to cruelty, it needs to come in, as it were, bite-sized form. We have trouble truly grasping mass cruelty; we have no problem whatsoever, since we viscerally, intimately, feel it in our own bones, grasping singular cruelty. The arrogance, the nonchalance, with which this guy dispatched that woman’s lifeline, her dignity, her absolute necessity, and then turned back to the bar, is just too bloody manifest, I’m afraid. In this matter, the whole world’s a stage. Da guy’s a regular Iago.
Having been unveiled, he will have to live his unveiling. The next time he trods the boards, he might want to prepare for boos.
Here’s a thing UD has learned about UD as UD has gotten up there in years.
Time was she loved poignant films featuring tender damaged people brutalized by the world (A Patch of Blue,Forrest Gump); now she has trouble handling the vulnerability/cruelty thing (zillions of films feature this theme), and instead leans toward disaster films where thousands of extras go SPLAT under asteroids.
She seems done, that is, with main characters we deeply glomb onto and watch disintegrate; now she wants a smoking hulk of an earth inhabited by five families who manage to get to the shelter or to Planet New (Greenland, Knowing).
She’s zooming out, in other words, of the whole condition humaine thing…
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And when she reads articles like the one I’ve quoted from in my headline… When she feels the desperate pathos behind names like People Matter Festival…
When she realizes that both the cease fire and the mass education in basic compassion campaign are taking place in Miami-Dade Florida in preparation for Spring Break, she feels that familiar, heavy, useless, unbearable empathy creeping in upon her… An entire American city pleads for a temporary putting down of guns, knowing the gesture is hopeless and that multiple young people will be shot to death during what used to be a fun innocent week… A city government – again, hopelessly – reminds its populace that you really shouldn’t shoot people to death because PEOPLE MATTER…
UD can’t handle how pathetic this is. UD can’t wait til Greenland 2 comes out and she doesn’t have to think about this shit.
You know, there are many things you can do to “close” your city to violent, unmanageable, crowds. You’ll need cooperation from owners of bars and hotels; you’ll need a temporary shift in traffic patterns, coupled with a huge uptick in traffic enforcement. You’ll need a lot of help from police around the state; they’ll have to come in and help you.
You will need to place portable jail cells along beaches and boulevards, so you can immediately arrest high, drunk, armed, dangerous people as they shoot into crowds. Not a very pretty picture; not a very festive picture. But modular cells make sense when lethality overwhelms your city. Remember that when you attract scads of young people, you attract rival drug-selling gangs. These are responsible for some of the killing and much of the menacing/fighting/unrest. If you attract a smaller crowd, you’ll attract fewer gun-bearing drug dealers.
Do not forget social media: Get the message out strongly and early in the game that – as Miami’s mayor keeps saying – your city doesn’t want spring break. It simply endures it.
