… in UD‘s woods.

… boasts a DA who learned everything she knows from Chesa Boudin. Durham’s DA doesn’t typically prosecute felons with violent pasts who are found with guns cuz it’s just so not nice.

It’s always good to remind ourselves that America’s daily butcher bill is brought to us courtesy of the political left as well as the political right.

O give your fucked up kid a gun, a gun
Let her practice neath the setting sun
And then when inner sounds command
She'll traverse o'er this gunny land.


Because she feels a little riled
She'll kill a teacher, kill a child
Tis what you raised her up to be
Your psychotic mini-me.

… UD likes the name so much she’ll go ahead and use it to identify the stuff she found on a branch during this morning’s walk.

I’m not saying there won’t be moments of levity in the next few years.

Gevalt. When the concept of personal liberty makes its way into the mullah population, you can bend over and kiss your theocracy goodbye. All self-respecting religious states want to lead people to paradise by force — it’s what they do. Going to paradise isn’t, like, a travel choice, one destination among others, in theocracies… It’s not like people in theocracies read Conde Nash Traveler and say hm Bali yes Melbourne no Paradise maybe… It’s more like Gershwin —

I’ll build a stairway to Paradise
With a new step ev’ry day!
I’m gonna get there at any price;
Stand aside, I’m on my way!

Any price! Which definitely includes the price of your basic freedoms. It’s an effing theocracy!

But now it begins to look as though the Iranian government is losing its commitment to forcing paradise down peoples’ throats, which means among other things it’s actively considering not beating non-hijabis to death.

Little tyke w/ a handgun kills two and injures more than that at Abundant Life Christian School.

Wonder how the – what? – fifteen year old got the guns. She had two. Thinking it has to do with maw and paw. Who probably should be preparing themselves for their involuntary manslaughter trial.

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Female shooter.

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While her parents look for a defense lawyer, the school prepares itself for a big ol lawsuit from the parents of dead and injured students.

 [C]ameras in the building [are] regularly monitored, but the school [does] not have metal detectors. [S]tudents who attend the school [are] “visually scanned” as they arrive on campus each day. 

A party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color is almost by definition going to find it impossible to defend American democracy…

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[The future] requires a flexible Democratic Party platform that is willing to compromise on various social and economic issues (immigration, trans rights, tax policies) in the short run to protect democracy in the long run. It requires an ideological pivot toward more moderate voters who may not always agree with socially and culturally liberal whites.

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One theme that repeatedly emerges in the comments of political analysts is the need for the Democratic Party and its candidates to regain the center and to avoid the adoption of more extreme cultural and social policies that alienate the middle and working classes.

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

From the comments section on this opinion piece:

The problem now is Democrats never have found a successor to the New Deal policies to mitigate wealth inequality and, as a result, leaned into the more successful cultural element until it literally became self-parody, possibly cresting in 2020 with calls for free health care for illegal immigrants and taxpayer paid …. gender affirmation treatment for prison inmates.

Until the Democratic party recenters on cultural issues to a simple, non-strident goal of fair and equal treatment for all self-identifying groups and finds its voice, and policy prescriptions, addressing the growing economic disparity, they won’t have a viable philosophy of governance – just an amalgam consisting of a combination of radical cultural advocacy groups and lawmakers passively supporting the economic status quo with small tweaks that fall far short of what is needed.

Yup, and it’s what UD‘s always saying: Read Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. It’s short. It’s a terrific elaboration on this comment, and, for UD‘s money, remains the best account of the suicidality of the left.

What shouldn’t be in dispute, however, is that the status quo regarding crime, mental health, and homelessness is intolerable… [P]eople suffering from severe mental illness are, in fact, more likely to commit violent crimes…

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Bring back involuntary commitment.

I understand that some varieties of this exist in some states. But look around. They are too lax, too complicated.

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When I look at Goya’s picture of institutional life in 18th century Spain, I see human beings haunted by terrifying delusions, left to waste away in the dark, the dank, and the cold—but this resembles nothing so much as the current state of affairs in our subways, underpasses, and public parks. Contrary to the medical reality of Goya’s day, or the imagined setting of Cuckoo’s Nest, we do have the power to beat back severe mental illness in a patient’s brain, in an environment that is safe, clean, and calm. Not every patient will get better, but many will, and every single one deserves that chance. The bottom line is that inside of treatment, some of these people will get better. Outside of it, almost none will.

Sing it.

Along the trail you'll find me lopin'
Where the hospitals ain't open
In the land where there ain't no OBs.

Mid the sagebrush and the cactus
Don't got no one to practice
In the land where there ain't no OBs.

I will flee the bleed-out halls
Where the cruelty appalls
I will leave the land of no OBs
So forward all my mail
I don't want to go to jail
In the land where they got no OBs

… rendered by Randy Newman.

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If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I’d want to speak to all the people of the world
I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform
First I’d sing a song or two you know I would
Then I’ll tell you what I’d do
I’d talk to the people and I’d say
“It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world
Well, you know
And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan
But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common
And it’s something everyone can understand
All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”

Major LOL on all fronts.

On DEI and its current inevitable dismantling: Human beings tend to learn by making glaringly obvious mistakes and then backtracking from them. UD doesn’t know why this is. In principle, advanced societies should feature people who anticipate that many procedural paths are in error, and these people would therefore avoid these paths.

One crucial, all-American pitfall on this particular path involves our national tendency to overdo. We can’t leave well-enough alone; we seem compelled to pile on to whatever idea we’ve got hold of, until it’s not just a policy or a program anymore — it’s a calling, an obsession, a nasty insistency.

Anyone with even modest brains should have known that imposed DEI regimes were disasters waiting to happen, but, lemming-like, our universities went there. Now we must pick up the lemmings from the bottom of the cliff, dust them off, and encourage them not to find another way to rush the cliff.

[S]cam culture thrives amid the insecurity our health care system creates! One thing alternative medicine does is make people feel like their needs are being seen and addressed, even if they’re being addressed in bogus ways. There’s a direct link between people’s disgust with the health care system and the dangerous rise of R.F.K. Jr.

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[S]ince when did a troubled young American man need a coherent political theory to start shooting? 

An occasional UD feature, tipping our hat to people who cleared his path to victory.

In an Instagram story that went viral this week, Julia Alekseyeva, an assistant professor of English and media studies [at U Penn], appears to refer to Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Penn grad, as the “icon we all need and deserve.” 

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“I have never been prouder to be a professor at the University of P3nnsylvania,” Alekseyeva wrote in a post on TikTok. 

You know, cuz U Penn was the school what made Mangione what he is today.

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If killing CEOs is so important to Julia Alekseyeva, why doesn’t she do it herself? The woman certainly presents herself as a badass feminist. But oh no: She stands around waiting for a MAN to do the deed.

For the future, she needs to read Valerie Solanas, who, like Alekseyeva’s MAN, wrote a famous manifesto and killed important people she didn’t like, and unlike Luigi was a woman.

Or… well… typical woman! She tried to kill three people but the little flibbertigibbet fucked it up and only managed to injure Andy Warhol. But she was a woman. And she had guts!

Cowardice advances the cause of women not one bit.

... You may see a shooter
You may see a shooter
Across a crowded room
And somehow you know ...
You're watching with stealth ...
Hey this guy!  He slaughtered
The head of U. Health!

Sat there with my buddies
Burghers of Altoona
Munching on McGriddles
Inside a crowded room
And then in a flash
As strange as it sounds
I looked at his eyebrows
My heart set to pound!

Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons
Wise men never try.
Some McDonald's breakfast
When you find Mangione
Chewing on his hash browns
Across a crowded room
Then call 911
And capture your man
Or all through his life he
Will slaughter again

Once you have found him
Never let him go
Once you have found him
Never let him go!