“They want science to be part of the human — [their] philosophy [is] they want to say that mankind is creating the world,” [an ultraorthodox spokesman] said. “We say everything is by God.”

… [He] objects to the [NY] Education Department’s idea that it would be good, as he put it, to “open your kids to the world and teach them about everything.”

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

Apparently the schools rejecting New York State education requirements are forming a new group: UUSF (United Ultraorthodox Schools Fund) with the motto A MIND IS A BEAUTIFUL THING TO WASTE.

Of course guns are all over every level of America’s schools, but most are in the hands of individual students.

UD has for years said on this blog that the inevitable progression will be toward the Columbine model – guns in the hands of two or more students in a conspiracy to take down the school.

Battery Creek High School was under lockdown for several hours Wednesday after two students were found with handguns. Beaufort County [SC] school officials said there was “no direct threat” made to students or faculty.

‘No direct threat.’ Right.

Police searched [one] student after receiving an anonymous tip about possible suspicious activity. Information from the first student prompted police to question another Battery Creek student, who was also found with a handgun about an hour later.

Take a bow, SC. You’ve got just about the weakest gun laws in the country, with particular liberality toward minors, who can buy all the guns they want without any parental oversight. No need to feel threatened.

Musk vacates UD‘s local mall.

… Greece, and one of those parties has drawn attention to itself by sending a couple of shock troops into the national museum and smashing to the floor paintings they felt were not nice to God.

To ol’ UD‘s perhaps jaded eyes, the works at issue look inoffensive – primitive pastichy picasso-y things, they smudge and mildly distort Madonna’s mug, but, you know, in a Francis Bacon world, there’s not much here to write home about.

A violent asshole storming and trashing your national museum (where were the guards?) — now that is indeed something to write home about.

The tykes at Liberty Elementary School are the beneficiaries of the tendency of the Baltimore school system not to do background checks. Their teacher Mr Britt’s a real live pistol packing criminal! His latest foray involved shooting at a bunch of policemen in the parking lot of their precinct building. Didn’t kill anyone, and didn’t get killed, so I guess after he’s done with the justice system it’s back to work.

But the Gryphon said no.

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

“Aha,” said Mr UD. “Clearly Justice Roberts must be impeached.”

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

As for the judge in question, he is what my Aunt Goldie would have called a fency schmency person — snooty private schools, Yale, etc.

Fun tidbits:

Took a gap year and coached women’s basketball.

Shakespeare freak who “played a crown prosecutor in The Trial of Hamlet that was presented at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.”

Oh, and the dude ruled in Trump’s favor in the case involving whether he could maintain the privacy of his tax returns.

The correct social attitudes, plus a fierce Second Amendment defender.

Postmodern surveillance technology maintains a medieval state.

Strange brew.

Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse…

In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university…

In some deep sense, the university [has] lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos…

In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. 

... proposed legislation:  SB 84 requires all performers
within the state to open carry guns on stage.  Failure to do so
will result in penalties up to and including closure of
shows.

Again the city has had to call off a match in progress because home fans were burning down the stadium.

His assisted suicide in Switzerland last year “had to appear premature,” he wrote in a final note to friends and family; after all, the point was to end his life before debility and suffering set in. At ninety years of age, an excellent, accomplished, and long run behind him, the time was right. A man whose entire work revolved around decisions, made his.

He’s only in the news today because he asked that his manner of death be kept quiet for awhile. The people who loved him obliged. It was only just revealed.

I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. 

It’s Spring Break in America!

Keepin’ ’em healthy The Texas Way!

The writer – a native South Dakotan – seems to think there’s something noteworthy about a man openly carrying this

(that’s a Dad picking up his kid at the airport) in the sweet idle setting of a summer fair. Massive overt personal weaponry seems wrong, somehow, in places like summer fairs, airports, churches, hospitals, schools…

But steely-eyed thin-lipped SD Sen. Mykala Voita

presses hard and successfully on the legislature to arm South Dakotans everywhere – in particular, on college campuses and in bars.

Instead of letting any student keep a handgun in their dorm room and carry it to class if they wish (as the original bill, unbelievably, would have done and as Voita made clear she still prefers), SB 100 now allows only gun owners who have qualified for an enhanced concealed carry permit to have a pistol on campus. 

Now, see, again, that “unbelievably” – this is from the same SD’an who thinks it’s really something to see a man openly toting an AR15 at a summer fair – tips you off that this writer is out of step with her state and should probably be living in godless gunless Garrett Park with UD. As should Republican Senator Steve Duffy (Rapid City), who not only voted against arming bar patrons but said, “This is crazy. When you mix booze and guns I don’t know how you can expect anything good to happen. Sooner or later, there’s going to be trouble.”

But hey this is fuckin Deadwood South Dakota! Sure there’s gonna be trouble, and Voita knows that, but it’s the wild fuckin west so let ‘er rip. Nihilism, ho!