… that “gun suicide drives overall suicide rates and make[s] clear that reducing access to firearms is a critical element in helping prevent suicide.”  States where everyone’s got guns in all the rooms in the house dominate – surprise! – all the national suicide numbers.

As in: “AW FUCK,” says a sixtyish MAGA guy in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County**, as he watches some woman mop the floor with his hero on national tv. “WHY GO ON.” Grabs the Glock on the dinner tray.

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

** “This is a norm — people die by suicide,” said [child psychiatrist Kelly Irons,] who moved to Anaconda in 2019. “Everyone has someone in their family here who has died by suicide. That boggles my mind. That’s not the same as other places.”

[Lauren] Bolton, an Anaconda native who has been public health director since 2022, said the community has long accepted suicide as a local peril.  

“I grew up knowing that we had high suicide rates,” she said. “There’s a little bit of desensitization. It’s something that we always knew happened.”

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

Acceptance, norm, desensitization – get the picture? They love guns more than themselves. Hell, maybe they got a lil romance going with suicide. Be just like the government to try to break it up.

photo vahid salemi

I have access only to the headline, but that says it all – Oregon State U, after an unconscionably long time, has finally rid itself of galloping fakeroo Qwo-Li Driskill, outed by actual Native Americans, and by the students he reportedly bullies and demeans.

“We will of course appeal this rogue judge’s ruling. The women of North Dakota deserve closed obstetrics units and obstetrical hemorrhage.”

Go, Laura!

Daily Beast

Felipe Rodriguez, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former detective sergeant for the New York City Police Department, slammed the officers who interviewed [mass killer Colt] Gray.

“They walked in there like it was their first day out of the academy,” said Rodriguez of the way the deputies took what the 13-year-old said at face value. “Good cops get facts and you corroborate it. When you don’t corroborate it, that’s when you drop the ball and then we look like idiots.”

A crucial failure, he said, was not getting into the house where they could have verified the elder Gray’s guns were inaccessible or checked the house for cleanliness and whether there was enough food – red flags that would have prompted a call to child services. 

[The] officers failed to ask either Gray for details on their answers or present the elder Gray with facts concerning the family’s own run-ins with the law, from 911 calls to an eviction a year earlier. 

Rodriguez also said Colt fit the profile of a mass shooter: a young, white, male, loner.

“We’re getting mass shooters left and right, you have to do whatever you can,” Rodriguez said. Instead, “they were talking and joshing like the kid stole a cupcake.”

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A photograph of the encounter shows the father wearing a humongous cross on his chest – could the “idiots” have done what George Bush did with Vladimir Putin, and assume that anyone who wears a big cross is too Christian to do anything naughty?

Insisting that he was widely respected, Trump invoked the support of Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, who has dissented from Nato’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and shares much of the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“Viktor Orbán is known for destroying Hungarian democracy using techniques Trump has tried to copy,” said David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, who has written on the capture of democratic institutions by autocratic leaders. “It was surreal to hear Trump cite Orbán’s praise as validation of his own leadership.”

In the good old days, Tariq Ramadan lectured non-Muslims on Islam’s beautiful treatment of women, and I guess a lot of people bought it cuz Oxford, televised debates, best-selling books on the subject, etc. etc. When women started complaining that he was raping and torturing them, one of his friends was shocked, and mounted this moving defense:

“That [Tariq Ramadan] had many mistresses, that he consulted [porn] sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned,” [Bernard Godard] told French magazine L’Obs.

Compelling as this defense was, courts were undaunted, and just today he was sentenced to three years in prison, two suspended.

… hellscape.”

… Whoops — that’s La Kid.

SING IT.

Concepts of a plan
Concepts of a plan
Into debate we’re thrown
Into a flop full-blown
Like a Haitian-eaten dog
Like a madman monologue
Concepts of a plan

There’s Kamala on the road
My brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Took a long holiday
All my concepts went astray
If you give this bitch a ride
Sweet Jesus you will die
Concepts of a plan

MAGA gotta love your man
MAGA gotta love your man
Concepts of a plan!
I know you understand!
My world on you depends
Our greatness never ends
Gotta love your man, yeah

Michael Steele.

they.”

Trump’s team has asked for a box of hankies at the next debate.