Teams often act in concert, and this togetherness can be very intense. So in Iran at the moment, you have two featured teams:
Team Mullah, composed of hundreds of bullet-spraying gray-bearded men wearing gowns and turbans and granny glasses.
Team Football,composed of eleven handsome robeless turbanless non-bullet-spraying young men.
TF is on the world’s screens at the moment, arms locked, refusing to sing Iran’s We are some wild and crazy religious nutbags national anthem at the World Cup; boos can be heard throughout the stadium, where men and women wear shirts with the names of women murdered because their hijabs were askew.
TO: MSU Publications, Trey Nowak, Head, Pub Office
SUBJ: 2023-24 University Brochure
Hey Trey hope you’re having a great day. With this email, SF!G is excited to present our revision/addition to MSU’s student recruitment brochure.
With the university’s recent push to get students to gamble, we brainstormed how we can exploit this new initiative, which promises to be very attractive to impulse-challenged teenagers across the country. Since MSU is one of America’s few fully-operational student-driven gambling businesses, we need to seize control of this market while we continue to enjoy a dominant position.
This is why we recommend the following image for the cover of the new brochure, with the accompanying copy:
MICHIGAN STATE: IT’S SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST LATE NIGHTS.
To anticipate your comment: No, he’s not holding a cigarette. We can easily add this, probably in front of the whiskey glass (once you decide which distillery you’d like to feature, among those with whom MSU partners, let us know and we’ll add a bottle with the relevant label). We also plan to edit in a large fraternity ring on his hand – probably the notorious Delta Kappa Epsilon haha! (Is it still under suspension?)
I don’t think we want to mess with the nice simple clarity of this image more than that (aside from, obviously, taking the gray out of the guy’s hair and thickening/tousling it a bit), but let us know if any other images (the muzzle of a gun between his fingers, in the context of gambling, would be an intriguing reminder of Stephen Paddock; but would it look too… suicidal?) seem attractive to you.
As always, we look forward to working closely as we optimize MSU’s advantages in the student-recruitment market.
You know… UD always thought it was pretty cool that as the bona fide spawn of a Jewish mother, she has automatic Israeli citizenship. Yet never until now has she been seriously interested in taking it.
UD has always found strict gender separation and all the other abuse that accompanies it… uh… well, let’s just say that from the moment she watched the handcuffs scene in Goodbye Lenin! (?) she has found the idea of living in chains irresistibly exciting.
Yet she always thought she’d have to seek the realization of this fantasy in no-go Iran or Afghanistan. Now she can live in cosmopolitan Israel, where, for instance, if she gets bored with the daily staging of her masochism she’s free to leave.
‘Whatis an established fact is that Jones had previously drawn the attention of law enforcement and university officials.
There was agun conviction officials at the state’s elite flagship university only recently learned about as a result of a hazing probe, the details of which were unknown. There were also attempts to buy a rifle and a pistol that placed Jones under the scrutiny of Virginia State Police.
… University Police Chief Timothy Longo told reporters the university’s “threat assessment team” had learned about Jones in September after a third party, who was not a student, reported that he spoke about having a gun. He said the school’s student affairs office interviewed Jones’ roommate, who had not seen the suspect with a gun.
It wasn’t clear if the school’s internal investigation of Jones possibly having a gun ended with that roommate’s interview.
Jones had also been involved in the campus hazing probe, which was closed due to uncooperative witnesses, Longo said.
… [U]niversity officials admitted they learned Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor for a concealed weapons violation in 2021.
… [O]fficials said they realized only after Sunday’s shooting that the report of his conviction was never relayed to the University Judiciary Committee.
… [Said one observer:] “It’s like a series of cracks that he slipped through.”’
But this certainly makes the University of Virginia look – if possible – even worse. This is a student who had an active university judicial case pending against him (and pending… and pending…) for gun stuff. He’d been engaged in other criminal activity, but for some reason it was all suspended sentences. His father knew he was “extremely paranoid,” and I’m thinking people on campus had noticed too. Professors? Others in his dorm?
To ask the bloody obvious: Why didn’t the school do anything about this heavily armed paranoid with a rap sheet?
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Details here about how any fucking asshole can buy an arsenal in the gun-happy state of Virginia.
One of the country’s safest locations suffers a mysterious bloody mass killing of four college students in their shared off campus house. Quite a few days later, with the community so afraid that many students are fleeing the school, the local police have still released extremely little information. What we do now know (assuming the information they’ve allowed out is correct) is hard to make sense of.
We are told that in the wee hours of the morning, with two other students asleep (?) in the house through the entire insanely violent attack, four students were knifed to death with an enormous “Rambo-style” knife. Only hours later the next day did someone call 911. Huh?
On the face of it, this is nuts. How can we possibly make sense of it? How can the surviving students not have awakened; how can they have waited hours (assuming they made the 911 call) to report the massacre? Did the killer tell them he’d come back and kill them too if they told anyone anything?
Okay, let’s assume sheer paralyzing terror plus drunk out of their minds? I mean, I’m digging deep here to find a mental condition that would allow them to be passed out through the thing, or motionless for a long time (who knows when the attacker(s) left?) in an attempt to save themselves. Could their paralytic terror have lasted into the next afternoon? No use of their cell phones? Why did neither of them, assuming a window anywhere near, hurl themself out of a window and run?
The killings were “targeted,” we’re told; which stands to reason. This sort of homicide is, as they say, personal. Robbery makes zero sense. At the same time, the word “grudge” seems absurdly inadequate.
Let’s say the killer wanted to kill only one of the four, but the others tried to defend him/her. Okay.
But then the question is how did one person with a knife (was there more than one?) overpower and destroy three other able bodied people? You would expect one or two to escape, screaming their lungs out and alerting the neighborhood. If the killer controlled the students by tying them up, why aren’t we being told they were tied up? UD understands that police withhold information for perfectly good reasons during the course of an investigation, but this seems strange nonetheless.
One way to go is to imagine that one or both of the surviving students did all this. They controlled the situation by quietly, methodically moving from room to room, taking on one student (or maybe two) at a time. But we know from the coroner’s report (she’s being very uncommunicative, but I think this is confirmed information) that bruises indicate one of the students fought like hell.
Since this sounds rather unpremeditated (rather, because the killer might have planned it for a very short time – let’s say hours), and viciously impassioned, I’m going to assume an abundance of forensic material. The killer, for instance, must also have bled somewhat, and must have (have had; he’s had plenty of time to shower) blood all over himself, bloody clothes, etc. Blood spatter must also be on walls and other surfaces. If there were sexual assaults, that might be another source of leads.
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Here’s one possibility.
All of the murdered students spent the night on the town – parties, bars, other social spots. During the course of this activity, one or two of the four got into a drunken nasty encounter with some random but dangerous/crazy other drunk person. Did some guy hit on a girlfriend and did that provoke one of the Idaho students? Something like that.
Let’s say the guy’s a member of one of Idaho’s many biker gangs. No sissy university student’s gonna humiliate him in front of his friends, he thinks, fingering the Rambo 9410 in his pocket… He follows them home and waits outside until they’re asleep.
Thomas L. Friedman makes me think about the limits of words in contexts of unlimited atrocity. You feel him straining, in this rather flamboyant, Faulknerian sentence, to arrive at, to be adequate to, to express verbally, the actually inexpressible horror of a man of no conscience who continues to command the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans. Up against evil embraced by millions, Friedman’s words seem weak.
Some writers resolve the inexpressibility problem by jumping over it into psychopathology. Trump is a high-functioning insane person (a contradiction in terms, no?), an hysterical narcissist, an infantile disordered etc. etc. Their writing goes toward elaborating his dangerous lunacy rather than, as with Friedman, his moral obscenity.
But approaching Trump in himself, whether your approach is ethical or clinical, seems a bit beside the point at this late date in his democracy-ravaging career. The point is not so much Trump as the capacity of so many Americans to adore him, in the way millions of Italians still adore Mussolini, and Russians Stalin. The pertinent pathology is ye olde escape from freedom.
The New York Post relegated Donald Trump’s declaration of his candidacy for president on Tuesday night to page 26 of this morning’s edition of the paper, hinting at the announcement on the front page with the demeaning teaser “Florida Man Makes Announcement.”
“They just kept coming, more and more gunshots – just wouldn’t stop,” Lynch said, adding the gunman then “just sort of walked or skipped off the bus.”
(Probably stopped because he ran out of bullets.)
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So here are some details. Apparently he didn’t even know the people he killed. He acted strangely throughout the trip and reportedly muttered crazy shit about video games as he shot up the bus.
So… sorry, but here you have clear evidence of concealed ownership of guns (weep for the people on that bus – no one thought it worthwhile to tell them they were traveling with someone who had a criminal past with guns), plus serious madness (his father knew he was a gun-toting angry paranoid and did nothing).
But of course it all went down in America, and you know how that goes.
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UPDATE: Wednesday’s [court] hearing also revealed that Jones was charged and convicted of a reckless driving and hit and run in 2021 and had a concealed weapons charge the same year. He received suspended sentences for all of the offenses.
It will not be easy to dislodge Mr. Trump. His bond with his supporters is personal — it is based on the promise of humiliating … enemies… The … current Republican Party … is depraved …
Insufficiently depraved MAGA lasses – Ivanka Trump, Kayleigh McEnany – are jumping ship post non-tsunami, leaving the head of the ladies’ auxiliary open to the woman who has long desired and deserved it — the yugely sadistic pasionaria Lara Trump, who UD believes has a clear path to leadership, not only because of her personal qualities, but because she is the likeliest answer to the question Bill Maher recently posed.
Politically ambitious, an absolutely savage lover of violence, Lara blows wannabe brutalists like Kari Lake and Sarah Palin out of the water. Unlike Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lara’s no buffoon; she’s always calm, smiling, and camera-ready. Unlike Kimberly Guilfoyle, who will never live this down, Lara would never let her fervency reduce her to a national joke. On the contrary, her frank, rational disclosure of the charismatic malignity of the Trump revolution seems likely to move her into a commanding position vis-a-vis Trump himself. Bitter and sedentary, he can hardly compete with a perky marathon runner who tirelessly carries the torch he lit but can no longer hold aloft.
Lake, Palin, Boebert, Greene, Guilfoyle – these will form the core of Lara’s Lasserators. Many more will follow.
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UPDATE: Details on Lara’s master plan are beginning to come in. Here’s what we’re hearing.
A lot of people are saying that her hush-hush relationship with her father-in-law (see above) has to do with blackmailing him to make her his VP: A Trump/Trump ticket.
A lot of other people are saying that she won’t even have to blackmail him. She is in her own right the perfect candidate: Absolutely fully committed to the MAGA agenda. Young, to pull in the youth vote. Smart, articulate, fearless, with the patented Trump cruelty. A woman and a family member whose enormous enthusiasm will counteract Ivanka’s refusal to be involved in the campaign. This blog will provide updates as this intriguing story develops.
Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, as Adam Gopnik writes.
The father of the UVa killer knew his son was ‘really paranoid’; he almost certainly also knew he had guns. (How many guns does the father own?) How many other people knew the killer was going nuts? UVa knew he told people he had guns on campus; the school knew as well that he’d been arrested for gun violations. No one did shit as an armed paranoid stalked the campus, and now a significant portion of the school’s football team is dead, in critical condition, or in recovery.
Here’s a close parallel: The sister of Phillip Adams knew he was, in her words, “aggressively” mentally ill – paranoid. He also had shitloads of guns.
Pretty much everyone knew Adams was right round the bend, but no one did shit.
“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life,” writes Nathan Heller.
Like the UVa killer, Adams had been a college football player — at South Carolina State, which even after his mass murder of an entire family, including toddlers, maintains his hero page. Good ol’ Phil! He did it his way.
Another country might look at CTE ravaged paranoids with guns and restrict their access to weapons. Another country might find a way to commit them to long-term hospital care. America looks at them and says BRING ON MORE GUNS.
Great cast of characters there, and I’m sure she would have won if she’d added John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell. Where were her campaign advisors?
[The shooter] had been investigated by campus officials in September after someone reported [he] made a comment about owning a gun…
[The shooter] was also involved in a hazing investigation on campus …
[A spokesman further noted the university] learned of a prior criminal incident involving a concealed weapon violation that occurred outside the city of Charlottesville in February of 2021…
[The shooter] was required to report that to the University, but he never did. The University’s judicial council took over the case and the results are still pending.
Blah blah this and that this and that and we’re kinda still kinda looking into it. Told people about his weaponry; involved in hazing; criminal incident involving concealment lalalalala….
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This is what happens when guns are absolutely everywhere. When there are practically four hundred million civilian-owned guns in your country, you’re unlikely to give the issue your, uh, full attention. For many Americans, guns seem to have about the status of a household appliance. I mean, who cares.
