February 1st, 2023
Wotta shocker: Another mass shooting at a hookah bar down south.

A notorious gunplay destination. Its enraged and frightened neighbors repeatedly beg the city to shut it down. The city does nothing; the place lays on more security.

More security seems to guarantee more gunplay – I mean, all it seems to mean are more people in the hookah lounges with guns, so instead of the classic two-way shootout we get a three-way.

They killed a high school kid. [UPDATE: Two high school kids, both members of the local school football team.]

UD‘s really scratching her head here. All over the country, hookah bars are staging mass killings, and no one in authority does jack. Is it a form of amusement for city councils?

January 31st, 2023
‘The classroom where the shooting occurred will not be open for future instructions anytime soon. The district may use that room for other non-learning purposes.’

Apparently a deal has been worked out with state legislator Amanda Chase that the room will function as a JR-15 outlet, where students will be able to, in her words “purchase a gun that will get the job done.”

January 31st, 2023
Rats.

George Santos Won’t Serve on House Committees

January 29th, 2023
After disbarment, John Eastman will reportedly take a position as George Santos’ Chief of Staff.

If [John] Eastman is ultimately disbarred, it would be a sudden end to an ignominious legal career. He is not very good at reading the Constitution or the law. In 2020, well before he began plotting to overturn that year’s election, he published a widely derided op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris might be ineligible for that office because she was supposedly not a U.S. citizen at birth. You do not need to be a former Clarence Thomas clerk or a former Chapman University law professor, as Eastman is, to Google “Kamala Harris birthplace” and read “Oakland, California,” thus making her a natural-born citizen.

Eastman then suggested, however, that birthright citizenship itself might not be constitutional, a theory that characterizes much of his approach to the law during the 2020 election. The answer to any legal question is whatever John Eastman wants it to be, and if someone as misinformed as, say, the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees, they are also wrong and should correct themselves accordingly. This approach led him to conclude in an infamous set of memos after Election Day in 2020 that the Twelfth Amendment allows the vice president to throw out individual states’ electoral votes at his discretion and personally declare a winner. The point here is not to be right or correct—fortunately for Eastman, because he was neither—but to give a legalistic guise to a coup attempt.

The New Republic

January 28th, 2023
Beverly Crest! O Beverly Crest!

Incessant mass shooting

Is what we do best!

In 2020 we only killed one

2023’s already much more fun.

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 [Two of the women killed were in LA] to attend an album release party for a rapper.

Wotta shocker. Rap music associated with guns/violence.

Add the basically unregulated short term rental market to the mix, and voila.

January 28th, 2023
Oh, What a Lovely War!

Twas on the Crest of Beverly

The battle did commence

Among elite Air B&Bs

Each sparing no expense.

The glistening car, late model!

The air perfumed, and gated!

The party. Scattered bottles.

Late model guns, gold-plated.

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

The kick of upscale killing

On cool Pacific nights

Shall ne’er grow old – too thrilling

To aim Sig Sauer sights.

To watch the brain and vomit

Start pooling ’round your head

While a fine and rare green comet

Goes streaking overhead.

January 27th, 2023
‘She said that at the height of her mastery of a piece, the music emerges so naturally that she feels as if she had composed it.’

Longtime readers know some of UD’s musical enthusiasms: Among singers, Julia Lezhneva; among pianists, Yuja Wang. UD tried to score a ticket for Wang’s upcoming Rachmaninoff blowout but failed.

I love the observation Wang makes in my headline: When a genius is fully inside of a musical piece, it becomes hers.

In my own primitive playing and singing of Purcell’s song Music for A While, I’ve felt something (very distantly) like this: The notes and the emotions and the ideas sometimes flow out of you so spontaneously and deeply — in such a known way — when you’ve played (and in my case sung) a piece so many times, that the fact of a person named Sergei or Henry actually empirically sweating the thing out vanishes completely, and it’s you and this music that your throat and fingers and soul squeeze out. And shouldn’t that be what the geniuses who wrote the stuff want? They didn’t just generate a ditty; they moved a collection of notes and silences into some generous super-artistic realm of universal expressivity.

Think of what James Axton, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, says about the Parthenon:

 I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

In great art (architecture) there is some value-added thing, some permanent, accessible … cry for pity, say; and if you enter and listen hard and vulnerably enough, you can not only hear it. You can reproduce it. You can even feel as if you are generating it anew.

January 27th, 2023
Head of Education Association a Thief. But at least…

she’s illiterate.

January 27th, 2023
‘Former Chapman law school dean faces disbarment’

Helluva distinction for Chapman: How many DEANS are disbarred?

But then – how many deans are credibly accused of treason?

January 26th, 2023
We’ve followed the JR-15 gun, an AR-15 downsized for toddlers-to-six-year-olds, for some time on this blog.

Here’s a primer on it. The Newport News six year old who almost killed his elementary school teacher last week failed in his mission simply because he had to use some random pistol his parents had lying around the house for him. It’s true that his teacher’s mental health has been permanently shattered; plus since surgeons had to leave the slug in her, the student has the satisfaction of having left a permanent souvenir inside his teacher’s body. But killing her – and everyone else in the room, like the better-equipped boys at Columbine – eluded him because of his primitive weaponry. The JR-15 is the solution to all of these problems.

But the deep state can’t keep its hands off of the gun. Big news conference today where demo-rats called the gun disgusting and sick and grotesque and unconscionable blahblah. Blahblahblah.

January 25th, 2023
Stupid Pet Tricks

DOG SHOOTS AND KILLS HIS OWNER

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

UD thanks David.

January 25th, 2023
See now Japan is currently demonstrating the problem with being a patriarchy. I mean, go right ahead, be a patriarchy, but when you patriarchically decide to lecture the little ladies on how they have to figure out a way to get their husbands to fuck them so as to be impregnated by them or else the country’s going to shrivel up and demographically die… they might not listen to you! They’re downtrodden, see, you downtrodded them, and they hate you because you’re the fucking Japanese patriarchy. See? So when they tell you to shove it up your ass you shouldn’t be too surprised.

When they tell you YOU get knocked up and make Japanese babies you stupid motherfuckers, you shouldn’t be offended because you’re the ones who make life hell for Japanese women and now you want to make it more hellacious by burdening them with children in a nauseatingly patriarchal state.

I mean, take a look at Hungary, boys! Same deal. How’s Hungary doing as it frantically tries to get its dick up the national vaginal canal?

Short answer: Not well.

January 25th, 2023
Ever see one of those furtively filmed documentaries about North Korea?

They leave you shaken; the graphic terror on the faces of the tour guides, and even more so on the faces of ordinary citizens who somehow fail to get out of the way of the tourists and are forced to interact with them… Reading accounts of daily life in Richneck Elementary School under Superintendent George Parker, I thought of North Korea.

Read today’s accounts of terrified weeping children, frightened teachers desperately texting family members, staff people trying to get out of the way of a psychotic armed child, and see if you don’t think of some surrealistically horrifying police state full of traumatized, trampled, people.

January 25th, 2023
Out of “little pockets” come big lawsuits.

His parents belong in jail, and let’s hope that’s where they’ll go, in the same cell with these creeps.

But as for lawsuits!!!

[S]chool leaders were warned three times that the boy might have a gun, … including by a student who tearfully recounted seeing the gun at recess.

[A] series of escalating warnings [occurred] on Jan. 6, when the police say a 6-year-old boy took his mother’s gun from home, brought it to Richneck Elementary School and fired at his teacher…

By about 12:30 p.m. on the day of the shooting, a teacher had searched the boy’s backpack, believing that he might have a gun … No gun was found, but the teacher reported to the school administration that she believed the boy had put the gun in his pocket before going outside for recess. 

Instead of searching the boy, …an administrator dismissed the threat, saying that the 6-year-old “has little pockets.”

Around 1 p.m. — an hour before the shooting — another teacher reported that a student had come to the teacher crying, saying that the boy had shown him the gun at recess and threatened to shoot the student if he told anyone…

A third teacher also asked for permission to search the boy, … but was told to wait, because the school day was almost over.

Hell, I’m up for a beer in half an hour, give it a break!

January 25th, 2023
‘Much of the anger was directed at [the Newport News Public Schools Superintendent], who was also criticized after two earlier school shootings in Newport News in a little over a year.’

Oh, so now just because there’s been a third school shooting, you’re gonna throw him out?

On Tuesday, the Newport News School Board posted an agenda for a special meeting on Wednesday, saying it will vote on a separation agreement and severance package for Superintendent George Parker III. 

It’s not his fault the third shooter was six years old! That sort of thing gets global attention. The last two were teenagers, and that’s so routine it never makes much of a mark. If he’d been able to isolate the bloodbath to junior high and high school all would have been well. Give the guy a break and hope the killing goes back where it belongs – to the upper grades, among more mature and competent marksmen.

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

Meanwhile, if they do fire the dude, he’ll get an enormous severance for keeping his trap shut about all the other violent and nonviolent scandals in the school system; plus, there are TONS of public school abattoirs (start with the Baton Rouge public schools!) where Parker’s bloody ways will fit right in. Don’t worry about Parker. Wave of the bloody future.

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