… DID YOU KILL TODAY?

If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1 p.m. NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?

Gotta hand it to places like Natrona County WY, where they rustle up many more suicides a year than almost anyplace else in this country, but where the sacred word GUN never crosses their lips. “Our statistics in this county are worse than what you’ve heard,” says a commissioner and whoo boy that’s quite a number but Natronites have guns coming out their wazoo and the more guns the more suicide. Get it? Is this too difficult a concept? The Suicide Belt is about gun belts. The gunniest states have the suicidiest citizens. Reduce suicide by reducing or temporarily removing or properly locking up GUNS.

But no. In this latest pile of horseshit about it, you got politically correct weenies brought to the county to talk about how the words “commit” and “suicide” are no-nos and everything will be better when we all start saying kill himself instead. Weawy?

Here’s more pointless crap from a local pol:

“It’s very frustrating, and I don’t know where else to go with that. I want to continue to talk about it. There are people fighting, people working and it’s something that we are talking about in our field and it is a very, very difficult situation and it’s a crisis that we have. Anyway it’s just kind of on my heart right now.”

Blahblah. What’s on people’s hearts is the carbon steel barrel of a Glock, fella, and by the way you sound like a girl.

The perennially offensive U Penn law prof, Amy Wax, has been sanctioned by that university: A year suspension, at half pay. Background here.

Loyal readers know that UD – for obvious free speech/academic freedom reasons – disagrees with sanctions and thinks the better path involves students boycotting her classes, and the university denouncing her at every opportunity.

Actually, he hasn’t yet done that, and UD wonders why, since pretty much all politicians whose fake piety and authentic degeneracy are revealed to the world immediately compare themselves to Jesus. They are innocents crucified and suffering — just like Christ. They have come to live among us to bring peace and reconciliation and a better world — same as the savior. Their reward is to be spat upon and destroyed by the godless rabble. Ditto Jesus.

Trump himself does the Jesus self-comparison something chronic, and since Robinson learned his whole shtick from Trump, he should certainly by now, his life in tatters, be pressing the Jesus button hard. I’m Jesus I’m Jesus I’m Jesus GODDAMMIT LISTEN UP I’M JESUS.

Let’s see if he goes there.

[T]he Republican insistence on nominating crazy people … affects us all. If you nominate and elect Tommy Tuberville to the United States Senate, we all have to pay a price. If you allow rancid weeds like Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene to grow at your grassroots, cut them off before I have to put up with them. I remember when it looked like Nevada was going to inflict Sharron (The Chicken Lady) Angle and Maryland was going to hand us the famous non-witch Christine O’Donnell, and I thought that truly was one step beyond. Turns out there is no Beyond. Mark Robinson is proof of that. He should stay on the ballot. He is the perfect GOP candidate for 2024.

SING IT.

Sacred the cause that McConnell’s defending–
The freedom we cherish, and love of our home
Ruthless the ruin that MAGA’s extending–
Their latest depravity McConnell has blown.

On with McConnell then,
Fight the old fight again,
Son of Nebraska
All valiant and true:
Make the vile Trumpers feel
Freedom’s avenging steel!
Strike for your country! McConnell, hurroo!

Sing the Juan Manuel Corchado Song!

The rector of the University of Salamanca has been, since 2017, picking up – at remarkable speed – citations to his work:

 Corchado’s resume was “artificially” embellished starting in 2017, when he lost the election for rector of the University of Salamanca on his first attempt. At that time, the already veteran professor of computer science and artificial intelligence had just 4,750 citations, a number that suddenly jumped to 15,000 in 2018, then to almost 31,000 in 2020, and 44,000 by March 2024…

How’d he do it?

Twas not the work of a day. Various complex schemes, combined with simple threats and bribes (or so it appears; it’s not easy to figure out exactly how he got everyone he knew to throw his name repeatedly into any piece of research they cooked up), achieved his rector-winning outcome.

Corchado gave instructions to his employees to add dozens of citations to himself in their studies over a period of years. 

“Gave” is nice. Given that they were his utterly beholden underlings, maybe “told” or “ordered” or “commanded” would be better?

The Ethics Committee of the Spanish National Research Council, an independent body created by the government and Spain’s autonomous regions, urged the University of Salamanca on June 11 to exercise “its powers of inspection and sanction” in view of “the alleged seriousness” of the practices of its rector. The response of the Salamanca institution was to commission a report from the historian Salvador Rus Rufino, an old acquaintance of Corchado who had even defended the rector in public. On September 9, Rus Rufino presented a superficial and exculpatory analysis, which was unanimously rejected by the 11 members of the committee…

LOLOLOLOLOLOL.

 [The] rector [is not only] accused of “systematic manipulation” of his credentials, but also [of] those bad practices having spread to other university bodies such as Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and the Library Service, ultimately responsible for the deletion of some 200 documents. 

Oh, did I mention he also got his slaves to delete incriminating docs? And…

… Corchado has deleted the texts from his blog, in which he boasted of being the fourth-best scientist in Spain and one of the 250 best in the world in the field of computing.

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UD thanks Elizabeth.

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More UD posts on citation cartels are here, here, here, and here.

[I]t’s a little unclear why Republicans think [Robinson’s Nazi posts] should be a career-ender for a MAGA politician. It all just sounds like a typical dinner conversation at Mar-a-Lago. 

…  It’s not like Robinson’s comments on [various fascist /pornographic forums] differ in substance from what’s coming from the top of the ticket, even if he sometimes used more blunt language. 

… Trump hasn’t publicly engaged in Holocaust denial, but he did make sure to be seen dining with prominent Holocaust denialist Nick Fuentes, along with the notoriously anti-semitic rapper Kanye West. Tucker Carlson, who gave a fascistic speech at the Republican National Convention, also recently championed a Holocaust denier, without losing an ounce of support from Trump. Trump also enjoys genocidal rhetoric, bragging that his proposed mass deportation of millions will be “bloody.” 

… In everything Robinson said under his pseudonym, there’s a parallel in mainstream MAGA culture.

Because of his comfort level and presence in the neighborhood, [Anthony Ford] knows a lot of people, including security staff at the bars surrounding [the hookah lounge that was the massacre site,] Hush. And that means he often gets called over to help break up fights.

Ford said he’s broken up fights at Hush Lounge at least five times, and intervened in dozens more arguments. Last fall, he said a patron at Hush ran out, jumped in his car, pulled up in front of the lounge and pointed his gun at Ford.

“I’ve been telling folks that Hush needs to be shut down for a long time, and folks need to get on board,” he said. “We’ve never had this kind of problem. There was never this kind of energy there until Hush came along.”

Why wasn’t Hush hushed? What is wrong with Birmingham?

After crunching the numbers, the large [American] city with the highest cost of crime [for 2023] was Birmingham, Alabama. The violent crime rate – which includes instances of murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault – in Birmingham was 1,682 per 100,000 residents. The property crime rate – which includes burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft – was 4,173 per 100,000 residents.

If you stopped brunching every time people were blown away by machine guns in Birmingham, you’d never get anything to eat. As for the streaks of fresh blood on the restaurant walls, look away look away Dixieland.

People don’t know about Birmingham, cuz, you know, Chicago; but it’s time we paid it some mind. It is trying to tell us about American gun laws and American gun love.

A brunch restaurant [above Hush, the hookah lounge where the mass shooting happened,] was full of guests eating and drinking [on the morning after the massacre].

They were unaware or unfazed by the fact that hours before, people were cleaning blood off the pavement.

Those walking around the streets still closed off to traffic could see the bullet holes.

They were in planters along the sidewalk.

They were going up a staircase along the street.

They were in the walls of Pickwick Place alongside blood smeared on the walls.

“Indian Creek [Florida] is a great extreme example of trying to pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” [one observer] says. “The more you enclose yourself, the more you’re reminding yourself of a sense of risk.”

Worth reading in its entirety.

It’s kinda like the paradox of the burqa; you walk around proclaiming you want to “pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” but the gesture is so pathologically extreme that it actually rivets the attention of the rest of the world directly onto you.

Indian Creek has given itself an absolutely magnetic North Korean aura (like Pyongyang, the place is eerily empty; like the DPRK altogether, Indian Creek is paranoid and massively armed, etc. etc.); the reason Business Insider and scads of other publications can’t stop writing about it is because of its nutso exoticism, its collective-insanity charisma. Paranoia being bottomless, the more Indian Creek elaborates its high tech bedlamite withdrawal, the more the rest of us will want to figure out a way to approach it and get a sniff of this Nabokovian Nova Zembla, its superweird existence-loathing technologies, on view right here in the USA.

Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: “Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.” The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women.

The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.

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David Frum, “This is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like,” Atlantic Magazine.

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UD rarely passes along rumors… But she’s heard that “retorts” are not the only thing Vance is “firing off” in his free time. In line with his crippling anxiety about American birth dearth, and inspired by his colleague Vladimir Putin’s order that birth dearthy Russians have procreative sex during work breaks, Vance has been secreted away in fertility clinics, masturbating to beat the band, in an effort to inject his sperm maximally into childless cat ladies.

New campaign song.

… that its mayor scared the shit out of the city council/citizens at a recent meeting by waving around an AR-15 and a Micro Draco (weapons of choice in that blood-soaked setting) and wondering aloud why everyone was shooting at everyone with them.

His bootless cries about the blood were answered last night with atrocity on so grand a scale that it’s all over the international and national press — and since we’re popping off bodies from kinders to coots at a quick clip all day long in this country, you can imagine how atrocious the American body count has to be to snap anyone to any sort of attention. Four have died and at least twenty are lying on emergency room tables.

“The mass shooting, one of several this year in the city…”

Saturday night’s Five Points South shooting outside of Hush Lounge, marks the fourth reported shooting in the City of Birmingham at or near a nightclub in 2024... 38 people have been shot, 11 dead, and 27 injured in the shootings.

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Another day spent hosing gobs of blood off the streets of Birmingham!

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Now, the elements of this massacre are deeply familiar to this blog’s readers. Put them together, in fact, and you’re all but guaranteed piles of young people bleeding out on the pavement.

1. Late weekend night.
2. Entertainment district.
3. Proximity to a university.
4. Hookah lounge (this one’s really important – you’re not going to get the numbers that feature on a headline in Buenos Aires unless you’re gathering shooters/victims in a hookah lounge. From a 2020 review of the club where it happened: “This place is a HOT mess — insert gun shot sounds.”). Also a local government that will not shut down hookah lounges, even when they are notorious abattoirs.
5. Immense armed security in and around the club (this does nothing to avert bloodbaths, and may make them worse/trigger them by throwing out/turning away certain vindictive heavily armed people).
6. An already-criminalized clientele (not everybody, duh, but enough of ’em), many of whom, despite the immense armed security, have figured out a way to smuggle guns into the club. And some of whom are in inane ongoing fights with other gunny attendees.
7. Virtually no gun restrictions of any sort in the state.
8. Glock Switches, which make your weapon vastly more vicious.
9. Bored, stupid, high, violence-obsessed, incredibly young/immature people in tight little gangs, desperate for opportunities to get themselves excited/destroy other people/gangs by shooting the guns they’ve gone to so much trouble/expense to hoard/steal.

You really can’t do anything about any of this if you’re Alabam. Hell, their United States Senators are stupider, I promise, than any of the shooters (who the police can’t find), so don’t go looking anywhere in Bama for anyone willing to close a deadly hookah lounge or restrict guns or educate people or anything. You want that sort of shit, move to Massachusetts.