As a big fancy Reb yada yada
I declare you persona non grata.
Dare not darken the door
Of my prayer room no more
Or I'll curse you forever to Yahweh. 

Guns are creating an America in perfect harmony.

[P]ublic defenders argue that, historically, permits have been issued unevenly, and that still today, in many places, it is easier for whites and members of the middle class to get permits than it is for people of color and the poor. And they argue their clients should have guns just like other Americans do. In other words, the progressive left has met [the] far right in describing dangerous streets and the need to be armed on them.

… [This] nihilism … echoes the far right champions of the men we have seen on trial. Instead of taking guns out of the hands of the Rittenhouses and McMichaels of the world, these progressive public defenders want to level “up”— to make guns more readily available to their clients, to all of us. Their vision, if realized, would make the self-defense claims of Mr. Rittenhouse and Mr. McMichael unremarkable, not only in red states, but across the country.

The audacious position taken by these New York public defenders should give pause to anyone tempted to understand, and maybe even discount, the Rittenhouse and McMichael defenses as essentially conservative arguments playing to conservative juries in conservative states…

… [U]nregulated guns escalate violence across ideological lines.

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

‘All of us,’ by the way, needs to include America’s youngest shooters. As our headline has it, it’s a small world, after all; and the smallest among us, whose gun play is increasingly part of the country’s media landscape, also deserve self-defense in what’s coming to be called the Tot-on-Tot-Shot scenario. The only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good five year old with a gun.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted. 

DR. FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

In the case of Bernie Madoff, it was Harry Markopolos, who knew instantly, easily, that he was looking at a Ponzi scheme.

In the littler case of Temple University’s Moshe Porat, who wangled a number one ranking for the university’s business school by similarly brazen malfeasance, it took John Byrne, founder of Poets & Quants, no time at all for grotesque numbers to jump out at him.

[O]nly 16% of students at the University of Maryland’s business school had submitted scores on the GMATs or GREs. At the University of North Carolina’s business school, only 15% did. Both schools show large enrollment increases that year…

“Contrast these numbers with number one Temple,” [John Byrne] wrote. “Temple was able to increase its online MBA enrollment by an impressive 57% to 546 students from 351. Yet, the school claimed that 100% of the incoming class provided either a GMAT score or a GRE.”

Of course, that 100% figure turned out to be false. It was actually 42 of 255 students, or 16%.

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

UPDATE: Guilty.

Porat [and others] falsified how many students had taken standardized test scores to get in, faked incoming students’ GPAs, made it appear the college was more selective than it was and lowered how much its graduates owed in loans, according to the indictment.

The Toronto superintendent explains:

“We disinvited Nadia Murad from our speaker series because of what she went through to get the prize. Torture, rape, sexual slavery: It’s not Canada Nice. We can’t have our teenage girls asking questions about ugly things; our job is to protect them from the sort of stuff that comes from unpleasant parts of the world. Under our new guidelines, invitees will be drawn from women who have created tasty new tea brews and/or monetized their cat videos.”

… Rath.

… a la vida.

… à l’Américaine.

… and we drown.

November 22nd 1963 marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of catastrophes: political assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the denial of Civil Rights and the revolts that occasioned, youth revolt in American cities, right up to Watergate. When I was starting out as a writer it seemed to me that a large part of the material you could find in my novels – this sense of fatality, of widespread suspicion, of mistrust – came from the assassination of JFK.

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

And baby, look at us now.

… R. Kelly!

This has a kind of Rose Mary Woodsy feel to UD.

It instantly made me think of the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice.

One onlooker summed it up.

“Right now, I’m just angry. It seems everywhere we turn, it’s just another violent day in the U.S.”

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

Doesn’t seem to have been terrorism; just a typical domestic atrocity, in which a violent person who should be in jail is driving around killing people.

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

Just makes you puke.

All wrapped up nice and pretty for the Trumpians to use in the next election.

Chesa might be recalled. Maybe you’d like his retail theft record in your community.

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

[I]n 2014 [California] classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.

In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”

UD‘s on Amazon’s German site, enjoying the not-quite-there English.