He was president of the North Orange County Bar Association (“Join us on Wednesday, October 23rd @ 5PM, at Madero 1899 (formerly Matador) in Downtown Fullerton for an in depth look at Restraining Orders.”), and his face still shines proudly from their Past Presidents webpage. Drinks like a fish. Took one of the 47 and shot his wife to death while watching Breaking Bad. Still a judge pulling down a salary but for some reason they’ve taken him off the bench.

According to police radio transmissions, a caller reported around 10 a.m. that a group of roughly 20 kids were fighting on the street in front of Chase Avenue Urban Park before they heard one gunshot, after which the group scattered… [A video shows]  two male teenagers fighting one another while other male teenagers watch. Other members of the group join the fight and begin yelling and hitting one another. As the group continues to fight, the teens move into the street. At one point during the fight, one person can be heard yelling to others to back up and another can be heard saying “it’s loaded.” A gunshot is heard, but isn’t seen on the video, and the group scatters.

Happened a couple of hours ago.

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Update: The mob with at least one gun fired was largely made up of students from Bethesda Chevy Chase high school – a school that used to have a good reputation.

Update: Shooters arrested. Meanwhile, parents able to afford private school withdraw their kids from armed-gang-location BCC.

It’s been a hell of a long slog, but New York is finally beginning to defund private schools that fail to teach basic literacy and that say fuck you to state education staffers who try to work with them. Three ultraorthodox Brooklyn Yeshivas

will be cut off from all public funds — for child nutrition programs, transportation, textbooks and other services — in what advocates suggested was a new phase of a yearslong effort to ensure all students graduate with basic skills in core subjects, such as English and math.

Schools that guarantee to produce idjits who go right onto the welfare rolls is not what the state has in mind, and it’s a really old scandal getting older by the day.

LOL.

They gave this fucker four years for conspiring to commit female genital mutilation, but under the Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme it’s been increased to seven years. I trust England will deport him after he’s served his sentence.

It’s coming! Are you ready? Are you getting excited?

Now that Spring Break is all about guns, beach towns across America are mustering troops and building beach-adjacent jail cells (not kidding), plus preparing to reroute traffic, close beaches, charge $150 for parking, etc etc etc.

When even dinky Presidents Day has ’em shooting up a storm, y’all know that a whole week of Spring Breakoutthebullets is gonna be a challenge. The really big venues, like Miami Beach, have released a bunch of slick ads the last couple of years featuring younguns looking at the camera and wondering why everyone hates them and their Rugers. Even ultimate trash location Panama Beach is starting to say whoa.

With his bullet-size-matters black shirt and his firepower ever-ready, this resident of a pleasant, planned community in Florida chats with the police as he enters, handcuffed, one of their cars.

They picked him up because his obnoxious honking at a guy in front of him in a parking lot – a guy who was simply waiting while someone pulled out of a spot – drew the guy out of his car. In a casual, polite way, the guy asked if the honker would be patient and stop honking at him. All of this was captured on security cameras.

The honker pulled out his handgun and aimed it right at the guy’s face. While screaming unspecified “vulgar” things.

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I think the big-bullet guy is this dude. Retired to Florida for sun and gun.

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Under pressure from a hostile regime, DC begins to get going on its homelessness problem. The mayor notes that of course “the encampments are not technically permitted in the District.” And yet the last time UD returned home via Union Station, the waiting area was overwhelmed by homeless people, many sleeping in seats meant for travelers. A woman in one of the seats nastily told me to give her money, and, when I didn’t, followed me into the bathrooms and got nastier. Er – technically – this is not permitted.

Read Nellie Bowles for a bellyful of the ‘progressive-libertarian nihilism’ DC’s headed for.

[A]ny intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

Not the world’s best headline.

Well, pickles are new ones on me. Perverted locker room attacks on rookies usually feature brooms.

‘After the aircraft came to a standstill, “we were upside down hanging like bats,” [a passenger] said.’

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

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imag-
ination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try
to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables
one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s
mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the sur-
rounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound
signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by
one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not
very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave
as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I
am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those re-
sources are inadequate to the task.

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

Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” suggests that there are limitations to the simile.

Welp, the last of her kids that Tranyelle Harshman shot in the head (after which Harshman killed herself) has now, after suffering for a few days, died.

Tranyelle, notoriously mentally unbalanced, killed all four of them pointblank with a handy household gun that her family saw no reason to take out of the house despite her madness. “Though his wife had been undergoing treatment for her fragile mental state for several years, she hadn’t been able to move past it, [her husband] said.”

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No, hubby up and took a temporary job in California, leaving Tranyelle alone in their rather isolated Wyoming house – just her, her insanity, four little kids, and a Glock.

A Glock? Whatever. Maybe she used an AK-47 and really blasted the babies’ brains out. Why haven’t the authorities identified the firearm?

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Welp again: This is BIG news, and outlets all over the country have what to say about it, but virtually no one – and absolutely no one in gunny, astoundingly suicidal, Wyoming, has anything to say about a quadruple familicide made easy peasy with unlocked loaded guns fully available to a maniac.

Let us look at how our fellow Americans are rendering this event. “Olivia gained her angel wings yesterday,” announced the family at number four’s demise and OH MY. There are easy and hard ways to gain them, I guess, and God decided Olivia would do it the hard way, absorbing an agonizing slug from her own mother, and then laboring under a swollen bloody brain for days until her heart collapsed.

God wanted you for an angel. You, your sister, your other sister, and your other sister. And your mother?

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It’s the Godswerve. A lunatic with a gun bloodies up the house and — cue angels.

Exactly like gun-fanatic madman Olin Johnson, who took one of his billion household firearms and blew his wife and himself away.

Immediately after the bloodbath, his Mormon community invited everyone to a celebration of his life, asking that they bring “goodies to share” and “warm memories.”

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Or think of Andrew Humiston, 15 year old massacrist – killed 5! family members and only missed a sixth because she played dead – who took one of his father’s conveniently located guns to kill everybody. What was God on about, letting Andrew stalk and slay one screaming pleading family member after another? Why did the rest of the Humiston family lovingly note, in everybody’s obit, that they are survived by their murderer?

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All of these atrocity-reactions are best seen as bizarre subcultural self-comfortings, communities of people absolutely insistent on looking away from the carnage and swerving pronto to the angelic order. UD doesn’t begrudge them whatever all is forgiven God works in mysterious ways thing gets them through it; but how can the rest of us, how can a whole country bleeding from guns, play along? The focus has to be on the idiocy and negligence that put those death-dealers in the hands of maniacs.

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Update: So many other examples.

“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life.”

… finds Under the Volcano books

in Mexico City! It’s one of UD‘s

favorite novels. My Lowry posts.

… on the one-year anniversary of his death.

[Photo: Alexander Nemenov]

“I think the Democrats’ brand is really bad, and I think this was an election based on culture,” [said Democratic Senator Mark Warner]. “And the Democrats’ … failure to connect on a cultural basis with a wide swath of Americans is hugely problematic… I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack.”