… (it’s long since over, the murderer put away for life) features the testimony of Cynthica Schulz, a lost soul who has lived rough for the last six years, and who believes cell phones are poisoning her.

Despite her mental frailty, she was a sharp and articulate witness — before she fell apart, she was a school teacher in California.

Schulz lives alone in a remote state park sometimes, and she had the terrible misfortune of discovering the murder victim in one of them. More trauma for an already traumatized person.

To which we can add giving lengthy testimony about the body. She wept quietly throughout.

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But okay here’s what got to UD.

As Schulz took the stand, the judge said We know you have difficulty with certain devices, so I’ve already asked everyone in the room to turn phones, etc., off, and I’m repeating that request now for anyone who didn’t hear my earlier request. Please everyone turn all your devices off. Thank you. We can proceed.

Schulz thanked her, and UD teared up, thinking about human vulnerability and human kindness.

Like others in the European parliament, France’s most popular politician embezzled from it. Transferred money meant for administrative staff to her party. Just got four pretend years in prison (two suspended, and for the rest she has to don some hardware), AND can’t run for office for five years, so that means she can’t be in the next presidential election.

With wonderful French hauteur, she left the courtroom before the judge finished announcing the sentence. I burst my pimples at you and call your be punished for breaking the law request a silly thing.

Greedy Nicholas Sarkozy, another bigtime French politician, is as we speak trying to avoid his own jail sentences for multiple financial crimes. It’s un petit peu grody over there à ce moment-là.

… Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule invokes his triune Godhead: Giuliani, Eastman, and Clark. Where, he asks, was the rule of law (which his colleagues worry about in their letter) when those great and good men were trying to make the world safe for Donald Trump?

And as to what Vermeule means by the rule of law – listen as he lays out his law-ruled ideal state:

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Yup. Right outta 1984. ‘He loved Big Brother.’ This is the rule of rulers, not the rule of law.

Another feather in Wharton’s financial criminals hat!

Background on this remarkable school here.

Weawy? How good a fit is that? A hijab/chador body/head covering Iranian doesn’t shout ‘gender equality’ to ol’ UD: She shouts modesty for women but not for men. Yet she ran a gender equality project at Yale. Kinda funny.

Less funny is her reported affiliation with the naughty sexist pigs at PFLP. Yale asked to talk to her about this; she said fuck you; so out she goes.

“Knowledge must be in the service of the oppressed,” she writes. I trust part of Doutaghi’s intellectual portfolio is in the service of her Iranian sisters sweltering under viciously imposed hijab/black robe mandates.

Since she writes that she “stands with” Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, I guess not.

Pretty little street of half million dollar houses in Tacoma, Wash., including a senior living village! Sweet how old and young (one of the dead was sixteen) meet on this all-American bullet-riddled court. “Several shell casings are scattered throughout the street and two weapons have been located.” In the autumn, scattered leaves; in the spring, scattered casings…

And Granny just stumbled over an AK47!

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A 27-year-old man repeatedly discharged a gun on a residential street in his home community of Charleston, authorities allege.

Nicholas Scozzari was arrested three days after the episode, which lasted about a half hour starting around 4:15 a.m. on March 9 in the vicinity of his home on Sonia Court near Bloomingdale Road, according to the criminal complaint and police.

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Oh, what a beautiful mornin!

The jury found that [she] conspired in 2021 to trick the country’s largest bank out of $175 million…

Turns out the thing is “heavy [and] cumbersome [and] impede[s] her work as a fitness instructor… [It causes] Ms. Javice physical pain, has impeded her work as a fitness instructor, and has resulted in delays and complications at TSA screening when she travels.”

Who knew stealing $175 million would have serious implications?

Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley are getting the hell out. Canada ho!

Like perifascist Hungary, we are beginning to experience a brain drain, mes petites.

Corporate larcenist Ira Rennert, this blog’s favorite vile billionaire, found himself in court one day (he often finds himself there), and his lawyer demanded (begged the judge) that jurors be kept from viewing his massively obscene Long Island spread. One look and they’d hand him the death sentence.

UD gets rage at the trashy super rich. Especially now, with so many of them acting out, rage is fine, perfectly fine. Boycott whatever they sell. Rage against them in print. Organize groups to shout and hold signs in front of their headquarters. But retail theft? Really? Talk about trashy. What a disgusting thing to do.

Business Insider chats with the well-heeled Whole Foods thieves and duly collects all the bullshit they say by way of justification, and it’s the same bullshit the ill-heeled thieves who show up on Facebook reels getting arrested in front of Target say. The world is full of asshole police and billionaires and traffic cops and tax collectors and meth dealers all of them cheats out to get me so fuck em the least I can do is steal their goods if they’re in business or spit in their face if they’re cops. I’m a sovereign citizen no laws exist no laws apply to me the world’s rigged against me fuck you all.

Well, this is the way you get San Francisco, if that’s what you want.

“Why doesn’t Jeffrey Goldberg disclose to readers in his stories that he is a registered Democrat?,” [Donald Trump] Jr. tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. “His wife also worked for Hillary Clinton and has donated nearly $25k to Democrats.”

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… “Great question, Don. Why did Pete Hegseth share classified military intelligence with a registered Democrat in an unsecured Signal chat?”

… “[T]op Cabinet officials added a registered Democrat to their war plan chat on an unsecured app?” 

… “So the Trump administration is talking about classified information on a commercial app on their private phones — and they added a registered democrat to the conversation without noticing it?”

… police department?

Good ol’ Jackson.

An official from a Mississippi gun group flatly states that restrictive laws have no effect on injuries and deaths from firearms. She doesn’t give a shit that states with gun control rank highest on safety, while states like hers, Mississippi, with virtually no gun control, rate – er – dead last (except for White Power Wonderland Idaho).

I think when your state, for decades, ranks last or almost last on all measures of education, health, and welfare, a weird inversion sets in, and your abject failure becomes a point of pride. Ole Miss did it again! No other state has our sweet synergy of ignorance, paranoia, and hoplophilia. Y’all come down, y’hear?

The morning sun lights up the late March greening of UD’s forest.

That’s the top of the MARC commuter train, whizzing through a ravine at the end of UD‘s woods.