NRA says: WHOOHOO. Let’s go for 10.

You can’t make this shit up.

Pity the reporter who had to pack all of this into her lead.

A Seattle doctor whose medical license was suspended after she participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was shot and killed after pointing a gun at two people delivering paperwork at her West Seattle home on Tuesday. 

Which sounds like a lot. But there’s more.

Tuesday’s shooting happened less than two weeks after Towers Parry’s home was foreclosed on and scheduled to be sold at a Sept. 20 auction, King County housing records show. Towers Parry had failed to make about $24,000 in mortgage payments and still owed more than $225,000 on the home, which she previously shared with her ex-husband, according to the records.

A photo taken of the house on Tuesday showed a large U.S. flag hanging from the home’s front window underneath the word “QAnon,” the name of a far-right conspiracy theory that gained traction online after the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump.

Her pissed ex-husband filed a complaint about her failure to pay on the house:

“[My ex-wife] has demonstrated that she is unwilling to execute the documents necessary to alleviate me of the debt on the Hudson property. She has simply chosen to ignore the issue, and instead traveled to Washington, D.C. to be part of an uprising to overthrow the government.”

It’s normal, he explained in his defense against a criminal sentence for planning a child’s genital mutilation and then forced marriage to him (he’s 47; his would-be slave is described only as a child, but knowing this world as UD does after years of blogging about it, I’m gonna guess she’s around nine), normal to perform sexual amputation of a child and then marry her.

Can you imagine more total possession of a slave? And of course he’s right. Hundreds of millions of little girls around the world have their sex organs pulled off and are then married off. 230 million have had FGM done, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Well, but Europe. Hm, Europe. Everybody knows it goes on in certain neighborhoods, but it’s hard to prove if the child-slayers don’t leave chatty messages about it on their phones, the way this guy did.

America? Remember Johns Hopkins’ finest – Jumana Nagarwala. And we couldn’t even convict her. I’m sure she’s long since sharpened her scalpel again.

Deprave‘s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

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To alter Andrew Marvell.

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“Deprave” is such a fine word, intimating dark and private vileness — vileness twisted and extended beyond the capacity of most of us to comprehend it. A survey of its use turns up, again and again, two characters in particular — Josef Mengele, and Kim Jong Un. Which is to say, we tend to reserve the word not only for the perverted evil people among us, but for high-level, solo practitioners: Mengele, Kim, and our obviously more constrained but nonetheless, as in Liz Cheney’s remark yesterday, depraved Donald Trump.

None, I think, do them embrace; all are radical isolationists, slashing depravedly about all by themselves; and indeed, as in the now-notorious Jan 6 moment, telling all the decent frightened normal people around them who beg them not to be depraved to fuck off. “Depraved” carries a sense of morally lost, far outside the recognizable human ambit. Lone wolves.

Depraved indifference. There is a head-scratching oddness and excess about depravity, as in What’s the percentage in it? Why? Questions that only the non-depraved would ever ask; but the answer must involve some deep, positively mystical, gratification, a well of delight into which one dips again and again with each unimaginable (for us. for us unimaginable) cruelty. Part of the sensation is one’s cosmic singular power – you alone have the freedom to torture children, entomb a country, end democratic life. You come to recognize yourself as a charismatic godlet, a Caligula for our times. You feel this, excitingly, in your blood: The willingness of the world to let you enact and then exceed one viciousness after another; the voyeuristic thrill you inspire in millions who lack the depravity to do the things you do, but who would dearly love to do them. I am, Trump declares, your retribution.

Is there ever any content to depravity? Can it have a purpose beyond lurid sexual or power gratification?

The worst form of depraved behavior presents itself as purposive: Mengele’s experiments; Pol Pot’s revolutionary communism. To the extent that any intellectual/ideological something adheres to the worst of which humans are capable, we are merely that much more shaken, hollowed out, terrified, by its emergence. Only when we understand the facade that “ideas” offer pure sadism are we able to put monsters like Mengele and Pol Pot in their proper place.

More common is the simple vacuity of what Cheney isolates in Trump — most depraved people don’t bother trying to sketch even the primitive outlines of a meaningful world view, much less a politics. The enormously attractive – charismatic – role they play for us is draughtsmen of mental darkness, drawers-up and drawers-out of private primal places within us of sadistic rage, obscene curiosity, physical aggression, and bloody nihilism.

Witch, pumpkin, and ghost, all in one. On our afternoon walk.

UD gets how you don’t want to admit– smiley-face principal that you are — that the high school you lead is a very violent institution which needs to be militarized (nothing smiley-face there) in order to continue to function without killing people. Vicious fights are common at Oregon’s Gresham High, and now loaded guns stalk the halls, in the possession of sixteen year old sociopaths.

The combination of a doofus who thinks all conflict can be resolved by chats/hugs, and plentiful weaponized assholes, will almost certainly produce beatings/mass shootings galore.

Parents, teachers, and students beg the principal to see their school as the killing field that it is becoming, rather than the Experiment in Loving Co-Learning that her narcissism seems to want it to be.

Guns being what they are in America, this country can no longer afford to assign school leadership positions to feel-gooders who are on their way to enabling the shooting deaths of students and teachers.

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Today’s walkout.

WE ALL GOTTA GO SOMETIME

[A] social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol [told] supporters that Mr. Pence had let them all down. [Jack] Smith [has now] laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should merit Mr. Trump’s prosecution.

After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.

Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?”

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

THE NIGHT WHEN THE VOTE WENT OUT IN GEORGIA

Mr. Smith’s brief also portrayed Mr. Trump and some of his allies — like his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — as making wild claims about election fraud in public while other aides close to him doubted the same allegations in private.

In early December 2020, for example, Mr. Giuliani appeared at a hearing of state legislators in Georgia and proclaimed that as many 10,000 “dead voters” had cast their ballots in the race.

At that same moment, however, the brief contends, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows and one of the former president’s lawyers were exchanging text messages doubting the assertion, sharing with each other that only 12 votes in Georgia had been attributed to dead people.

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BIRDS DO IT BEES DO IT EVEN EDUCATED FEMALES DO IT

When … lawmakers told Mr. Trump that he had lost the election in Michigan because he had underperformed with “educated females,” the brief said, Mr. Trump was not pleased.

The lawmaker could tell by Mr. Trump’s “body language,” the brief recounts, “that he was not happy to hear” the assessment.

… pricks.

… Association. It is addressed to owners and residents, and expresses gratitude to everyone involved in making life in this pricey Florida high-rise so pleasant.

And, for the association president himself, so lucrative: He was just arrested for embezzling over $1.5 million from the place. Over many years. The same absenteeism that gave him a free hand (“He was able to pull off the schemes because many residents were absentee owners.”) will presumably leave this sweet thank you note in a prominent position on the building’s website for some time, a real advertisement for anyone thinking of buying (“May I speak to Mr Arzumanov?” “Hold for the Miami-Dade Jail.”).

Consult this for the many bogus businesses, intimidation of anyone who threatened his scheme, and Dead Mrs Bates strategy, that made it all work…

Dead Mrs Bates?

Arzumanov had rent payments being made out to his deceased mother, despite no building units being in her name.

Norman would understand.

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Update:

During his court appearance Wednesday morning, Arzumanov’s attorney, Sam Raymond, asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Mindy S. Glazer to lower his bond.

“He’s not a flight risk, he’s a U.S. citizen.”

… Also present during Arzumanov’s court hearing was Assistant State Attorney Elvia Medina Marcus, who argued that he would be a flight risk.

“He has three passports from Georgia, Russia and the United States,” she said. “He has flown solo. He takes flight lessons. Part of the allegation is that he would charge airline fuel to the association using the association credit card.”

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

LOL. You know, mes petites, this one’s a keeper. Stay tuned.

“I can say it’s a historical day. We’re very happy,” said a resident. “What I can tell you is that we were living a daily nightmare, being persecuted daily by the board that was absolutely corrupted.”

The local police chief apologizes:

“I do apologize for taking so long, but this was an intricate fraud case, where he took over not just the building, but all, everything going on around the building, every asset used in and around the building. It was a complete takeover. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career.”

A postmodern cautionary tale, Да? When the cat’s away, the Russian mafia’s at play. Money + Nobody Home = ‘money laundering, grand theft, racketeering, organized fraud and credit card fraud.’ As long as one prominent pomo status marker is having so much property/travel/business activity/divorce complication/ongoing bankruptcy proceedings/whatever that you’re never there, that there’s no there there, local in-place larcenists will … larcen.

… Kari Lake has announced plans to shoot a puppy on live tv.

UDs’s old friend Rita Koganzon argues, in the New York Times, that colleges should stop coddling and controlling students, and instead start offering them an environment in which they need to be autonomous adults. Her colleague at UNC Chapel Hill, Jay Smith, launches an ad feminam attack in response, advising her in his last sentence to “look in the mirror.”

After all, Smith argues, Rita has herself been coddled by a conservative establishment (in the NC legislature and on the Chapel Hill board of trustees) which arranged a nice faculty position for her in a newly established conservative thought program on campus to which many faculty objected.

Though they would never admit it, the faculty of [this new program] benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse. Their candidacies for positions at UNC were made possible not by pure merit, which they may or may not possess, but by their membership in or adjacency to a well-funded conservative ecosystem saturated by euphemisms like “viewpoint diversity,” “civility” and “balance.” That ecosystem thrives on other built-in advantages. [The program’s] mission, like that of other similarly inspired centers across the country, is supported by the generosity of rich donors working to defend and disguise capitalism’s worst excesses, a gerrymandered GOP supermajority in our state and a university administration willing to accommodate the political goals of legislators and their minions on governing boards. [These] professors may well be the most protected people on our campus.

A far more intellectually honest direction of attack on autonomy at universities offered itself to Smith, and UD is surprised he didn’t take it. The university Rita is about to join permanently and luridly besmirched itself not thirteen years ago when a twenty year long fake courses/fake department/fake professors/dirty administrators scandal finally broke – hundreds of no-show student athletes were handed out As in non-existent courses engineered by corrupt professors and deans who were highly compensated by the university president and trustees, who themselves certainly knew all about the scheme, as did – one with equal certainty assumes – plenty of professors and – duh – students. “Investigators concluded that university employees were aware of the fraud and actively steered athletes and other struggling students to those courses.” It was “a clear and atrocious example of academic fraud.”

 [T]he university’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, … placed the university on a yearlong probation in 2015, ending in 2016, for violating seven accreditation standards, one of them being academic integrity. It was the strongest punishment the accreditor could deliver besides revoking accreditation entirely.

Because Smith’s university spectacularly betrayed the moral trust upon which the free and legitimate university rests, it lost its autonomy. In response to the scandal, the university initiated a policy whereby school officials will drop in unannounced at any time in any course to make sure professors are meeting their courses. Pretty humiliating, huh? Pretty nanny state, right? But Jay Smith’s school demonstrated its inability to be autonomous, and therefore all must be monitored.

And by the way – if Jay is worried about “capitalism’s worst excesses,” he can find those very close to home, in a university which continues to hand over huge amounts of its money to sports over academics, even though it’s easy to argue that if it had any integrity it would have shut down its athletics programs for a decent interval.

Fine writing about U Penn’s mistake in going after Amy Wax.

Those of us who are part of this increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan United States would once have seen the Waxes of the world as insurmountable obstacles to our success. But in today’s America, Ms. Wax’s resentment is more pathetic than powerful. 

… [U]tterances of bigotry by a crank academic like Ms. Wax are [not] going to threaten me…

 I’ve seen the tides of progress, even the old stomping ground of the Confederacy, and I’m confident that in the long run, the Waxes of the world will lose their fight against the diversification of America.

‘Derrick Anderson, an Army veteran, is attempting to flip a blue district red in 2024 after its current occupant, Abigail Spanberger, announced she would vacate to run for governor in 2025.

Anderson recently released a campaign ad that featured footage of himself with a woman and three children – what appeared to be a family photo – in an effort to play to women voters and family values.

However, the mom and three girls are in no way related to him with Anderson forced to admit they are the wife and three children of an old friend…

He … lives alone with his dog…‘

New College Ranking Drops Double Digits

Second Year in a Row

(Background here.)