… addresses the Judaism of one of her colleagues.

“I have a good surgeon if you ever want to get your nose done.“

… would I guess be a good poetic form of address to UD’s beloved country at the moment (the phrase titles a 1925 poem by Robinson Jeffers). The Murder of Kirk becomes a singular, symbolizing, culmination, an event that rises above the murk of our bloody country’s bloody every day. Give me back my son; he was only thirty-one wails Kirk’s father at his memorial site, a one-man tragic chorus that cuts through all of it.

Our streets are pocked with juvenile assassins, skinny boys with fat rifles, schizophrenics with steady fingers. Our bottomless gun-greed means we won’t be saving ourselves anytime soon – not under a president who won election based on his own bullet wound. Thus America makes choosing our leaders easy: Not the ones with the fatal neck wounds; the ones with the non-lethal neck wounds.

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No parades, don’t you see; no sunny tented gatherings of the sort that killed Kirk. We Americans must crawl over blood and glass into bunkers while keeping an eye on the roofs and windows from which the Kirk killer and Stephen Paddock and the rest of them aim at us. We must eye one another as potential shooters.

Democracy cannot really survive the absolute death of the public realm, a realm as imperiled by our insane willingness to let incredibly dangerous people roam the streets as it is by our gun-greed. Americans continue to recite the NRA’s mentally retarded litany – “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” – even though Utah Valley University is an open carry campus, meaning plenty of people in Kirk’s audience were armed. Lots of good guys with guns. But hey turns out they can’t do anything about a sharpshooter on a roof! Huh!

Reminders from FIRE.

What a nice idea. Some gun laws.

UD stopped watching MSNBC when she realized she’d been an idiot for believing their smug insistence that Trump would never win. So she wasn’t watching when Matthew Dowd, one of their commentators, said Charlie Kirk was responsible for his own demise:

 [H]ateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions… You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place…

Dowd has been fired, which is fine, but there’s more where that came from at MSNBC.

Never a dull moment when every insane dipshit in the country has a gun. Don’t know yet whether Kirk, a prominent conservative sitting on a stage waiting to give a speech and then slumped over and bleeding from a neck wound, will survive. Or whether, if he does survive, the bullet has damaged his brain.

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Active shooter, Colorado high school. I think we’re almost up to one a day.

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Kirk has died.

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Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.

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Oh, and the Colorado school shooting: Two students in critical condition. A mother at the scene:

“I think if I’m being honest with myself, I always knew it was ‘When, not if?’”

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Oh, and back to Utah: It’s an open carry state, colleges included, and it’s so routine to see people carrying guns that I doubt the killer – even if his AK 47 or whatever was slung in front of his chest – attracted much interest.

Commentary from one of the encampment’s residents: “There’s a school right there. It looks bad, people leaving needles all over and there’s people nodded out … like it’s just gross.”

Yeah, looks bad, elementary students walking around syringes and deadheads to get to their school building… Unfortunately, the mass murder of other local schoolchildren meant a delay in a scheduled meeting about the problem…

She has absolutely no memory of it. She just discovered this photograph – taken in the late ‘seventies, I guess – in the University of Chicago archives.

https://www.threads.com/@profgalloway/post/DOUUz-BiEJM/media?xmt=AQF0KH1VTARZsSurzmxkyIQtP2TeJiUqeSoQ79ojhfq8Yg

Silly boy. Make that utterly unbelievable effects. But after all your field is psychology, currently riddled with fraud, and given all that fraud, you should have acted on your suspicions about those two AMAZING PERSONALITIES, F. Giro and D. Ariely. You worked with them, after all.

Killing field cities are full of… certain… bars… Bars that do everything they can (you should look at their advertising!) to attract extremely stupid, jumpy, armed, people. The MO is to pack them in very very tightly, make them drunk and high, make them bump into each other (Fuck you for bumping into me BANG), make them fight for the prossies, make them, you know, fight. In the bar world, fighting without a firearm is like a day without sunshine, so mass shooting’s guaranteed.

So now here’s a tussle in Cleveland where a fight at or near one of the skeezy bars shot up six people, three of whom might die. The mayor’s pissed, embarrassed, whatever, and has not only closed the bar in question, but boarded it up. The owner is definitely pissed, and swears all the bullet holes were elsewhere.

Laws don’t mean shit if you don’t enforce them.

… makes Puerto Rico look good.

Turks and Caicos lies very close to Haiti.

At Yale, Performative Males ( “These guys perform femininity to attract women without actually giving a fuck about the feminine perspective.”) vie for the title Most Performative Male. The winner:

Marco Getchell ’29, … claimed his residential college was the Women’s Table, [and] called being a performative male “a lifestyle.” He arrived more than 15 minutes early, armored head to toe in thrifted garb for the afternoon festivities. He clutched a copy of Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a brown teddy bear, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art tote bag which held a vinyl copy of Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” and a speaker blasting “Perfect Pair” by beabadoobee, an indie artist.

LOLOLOLOL

UD ain’t a huge fan of Jane Fonda, but her response to the dainty NPR interviewer who referred to Fonda’s mother having “passed away” is so wonderful.

UD ain’t a huge fan of psychotherapy, but when Fonda said she has started going again to “figure out why I’m not a better person,” UD also found that wonderful.