The arrest of prof. Dairon Garcia for drug trafficking is the latest of too many to count instances of high-level sleaze. Feast your eyes on this blog’s coverage of the nation’s dirtiest med school.

Adam Gopnik has in mind people like raving lunatic John Sawchak, who for fifteen years — thanks to the give-a-shit Minneapolis police — terrorized his neighbors and finally shot one of them. The cops’ argument seems to be that they didn’t arrest him because they’re afraid of him, which is one hilarious argument, mes petites, but anyway, incredible as it is, the city authorities just let Sawchak endlessly slash and burn his way around the streets surrounding his house despite everyone begging them for help.

Only when he almost shot to death a guy trimming a tree did the police sit up and take a little notice.

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Sawchak’s just like that crazed old dude who brought Atlanta to a halt the other day while blasting various guns off his balcony. Neighbors confirmed he was a well-known, very heavily armed, berserko, but the apartment/city decided the best thing to do was continue allowing him to arm himself and only act when he did a Charles Whitman. One thinks also of Stephen Paddock, who carried an army’s worth of guns and ammo to his Las Vegas hotel room without anyone stopping him and asking why he was taking so many enormous packages over many days onto the elevator.

See my thing is if you WANT 450 million guns (and growing) and no serious gun laws, something’s gotta give. And that thing is personal liberties. The country can’t afford non-militarized high schools. It can’t afford non-institutionalized aggressive crazy people. Fifteen year olds didn’t back in the day carry loaded guns to school; now they do, on a very routine basis. Crazy people didn’t routinely amass armories and take aim at crowds of people from balconies and other locations.

Charles Whitman used to be something of a novelty.

If Paddock wasn’t as overtly nuts as those other guys, he was a well-known weirdo at the casinos, and he was known to own massive numbers of guns. He should have been under active surveillance before he killed sixty and wounded 413. It’s amazing that gun-mad America ignores its gunny and mad population.

Our beloved friend immortalized.

… a neighbor under a pumpkin, at Black Market Bistro, Garrett Pk.

More precision later.

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Oh. Okay.

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He’s with Marcin Brykczynski!

… finds a charming poster while getting out the vote in

York, PA.

Dahm really helps us put this in perspective.

Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war… Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico all have higher firearm mortality rates than Mexico, where decades of violence between state forces and rival drug cartels has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and left more than 115,000 people missing… [F]irearm-related death and injury is not synonymous with an increase in crime [in the US]. Violent crime fell 15% from 2023 to 2024, according to the FBI. More than half of all firearm-related deaths (56.1%) in 2022 were from suicide.

It’s an All-American Halloween, featuring an insane heavily armed Nazi wearing a scary mask and shooting his guns off left and right from the balcony of his well-appointed apartment.

It’s fun to think of this guy going violently mad and accumulating weapons in the privacy of his residence while all around him neighbors are paying one to four million for the privilege of going into lockdown and listening to an hour of crazed screams and booming gunshots from his unit. Talk about amenities! You get a fully loaded schizofascist down the hall – a man with well-known mental issues – who no one – until this rather striking event – considered enough of a threat to evict.

That’s what happens when everyone packs a lot of heat. It doesn’t ever seem a strange or risky sort of thing, even when the heat packer is an obviously dangerous lunatic.

The somewhat circular dirt path begins to take shape.

SING IT!!

That's life (that's life)
That's what all the people say
 I'm ridin' high in April, shoot my brains out in May
But I know I'm gonna change that tune
When I'm up in heaven with the good Lord in June

I said that's life (that's life)
And as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks
Turnin' gray matter into whipped cream
Whipped cream with red chunks floatin' down
What a treat for the wife and kids when found

I've been a dropout, a drunkard, depressive, divorcee, 
A self-hating thing
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing
Next time I find myself
Losing the race
I'll pick up my Glock and 
I'll shoot off my face

Yeah that's life
I can't deny it
I got a brain
And I just wanna fry it
Do you wanna watch me?  Come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up
In a big ball and die

UD‘s trying to figure out precisely how gunny the massacred Humiston family was. Do a lot of Americans bring their guns to work? Washington State employers are allowed to prohibit weapons at the workplace, but maybe Humiston worked at a place where it was okay to carry…?

As for the highly populated death scene that greeted a detective, he describes a “splintered” bathroom doorframe, “as if it had been locked, then forced open,” so we know that the killer’s mother got to hear him kill her husband and children, and then got to hear her son/killer forcing the bathroom door she’d locked in a desperate effort to keep living.

There seems to be a house rather close to the death house. Did no one next door hear her screaming? She must have been screaming.

I’m going to assume the state will try him as an adult. I’m not feeling too confident about his attorneys, whose first public statement shares that he “enjoys mountain biking.”

Multiple news outlets are reporting the impending bankruptcy/abandonment of Portola Valley, California, where housing prices are starting to crash (“In July, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems reportedly sold his Portola Valley mansion for $35 million—which was 65% less than the $100 million it was initially listed for in 2018.”), and where the city council despairs of paying even basic bills. Perhaps they can apply for federal emergency funds. A GoFundMe page?

… authenticate a newly discovered Chopin waltz.