On NY’s Upper East Side, a twenty-year old, probably suffering the onset of schizophrenia, gets hold of a gun and staggers about here and there, pointing it at random people.
There are many ways to freak out, but in the US – even in states with some gun-control – it’s just so easy to scare the shit out of the world as you go down.
He eventually fired the gun at the police, which ended the incident and his life.
You might just take a gander at my FORMS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE category to see some of the reasons.
This December 13, in the afternoon (don’t yet know exact time), I’m giving a talk on Jane Austen (it’s the 250th anniversary of her birth) at the Georgetown Public Library. This will be my fifth library lecture – I’ve talked about poetry and James Baldwin there. Please join us!
https://www.dclibrary.org/plan-visit/georgetown-library
UPDATE: The talk (Jane Austen: The Enigma of Her Endurance) will be at 2:00.
… the grotesque Dan Snyder house undergoes more than a mere reduction; it thins all the way down to nothingness. For the price of a pre-war Manhattan studio with a Central Park view, you can now boast a home the size of Dulles Airport.
Will anyone bite? This will be fun to watch.
More clarity from the clergy.
A British artist is looking into suing our Border Patrol cuz some of its guys had the unbelievable gall to take a pic of themselves in front of one of his public sculptures in Chicago.
A member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts notes the failure of the country’s H-H infrastructure:
“Drought, water crisis, and reduced rainfall are signs of God’s warning to awaken us from negligence and inattentiveness toward Him. The Islamic Revolution is built on the blood of martyrs, and it is not right that our streets become a parade ground for open sin, unveiled women, and public immorality. These behaviors have consequences…”
Goodrum told detectives that the night before the incident she had been drinking alcohol and grabbed her handgun, an arrest affidavit states. She said she was not wearing clothing that had a waistband and placed the gun under the couch cushion in the living room, according to the document.
Goodrum said she forgot to remove the gun from underneath the cushion.
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Mom hits the bottle and Dad’s a convicted felon in possession of firearms. Surely someone can take their already bullet-riddled kids away from them before this pair finishes them off.
‘Davis v. Ermold, the case that SCOTUS swatted away on Monday, was always a long-shot appeal. Many Americans likely remember the petitioner, a Kentucky clerk who refused to grant a marriage license to a same-sex couple in the wake of Obergefell, citing “God’s authority.” Many may recall that she was briefly jailed in contempt of court, becoming a cause célèbre among anti-gay Republicans. But few know what happened next: One couple whom Davis discriminated against sued her for violating their civil rights, and a jury ordered her to pay $360,000 in damages for attorneys’ fees.‘
On Wednesday, in response to the “blue wave” which swept over the Mountain State’s neighbor to the east, West Virginia Sen. Chris Rose, R-Monongalia, released a statement announcing that he had “introduced a Resolution inviting Virginia and Maryland counties to join the Mountain State.” Rose referred to this resolution as “An Appeal to Heaven.”
Down, net worth, down! Have you no shame
That after all my worthy Gift-Acclaim,
My Virtue, presto! up you raise
A billion more, and stand at gaze?
Poor online shopping shares, sworn to reach
More billions, and effect a breach -
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So that in the breach you multiply!
… after they’ve seen the modern era?
Theocracies like Iran can can pule about purity all they like. They can even kill selected non-hijabis. Secular modernity happened, babes: try twisting your way back to pre-modernity, and you’re only going to twist yourself.
“The Islamic Republic is about to lose one of its three pillars; the other two [anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism] will also crumble in time,” writes Arash Azizi. Id est, the mandatory veiling pillar is currently a pile of dust.
This blog has long chronicled one of the most notorious pathologies of billionaires — the compulsion to generate perpetual domestic construction noise. Infinite implosion, enlargement, elaboration, further enlargement, and finally reimplosion as the results fail to satisfy, or as the municipality makes the billionaire take it all down because he was too arrogant to get permits… Then the lengthy lawsuits resulting in further, somewhat amended, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, deconstruction…
Imagine having spent a lot of money to live in a classy discreet Manhattan co-op only to discover that the hedgie next door is deep into a lifelong wall-explosion frenzy. Imagine (see my headline) living on Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto street and trying to deal not only with endless thundering construction zones but daily traffic from his illegal personal Montessori school, as well as from his restlessly coming and going non-specific serf-army. “Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said…“Except for noise and construction debris.”
Building private institutions (schools, churches, synagogues, and health clinics are popular) is another billionaire pathology, part of the paranoid journey whereby withdrawal from the public world into a hypersecure fully equipped private world completes itself.
The incoming mayor of a metropolitan area rife with billionaires and close-to-billionaires won big in the last election in part because billionaires have made themselves detestable. If Andrew Cuomo thought he could turn things around by taking gobs of money from … billionaires, he was a real idiot for thinking so.
We could spend time, I guess, analyzing the root causes of the two behaviors that make everyone who shares their world hate billionaires – total withdrawal from the public realm without the decency to shut up about it. The rest of us must hear and witness the cacophony of their world-contempt, their mad, haughty, removal from humanity. Howard Hughes had nothing on these guys. But he in his day was a one-off. In places like NY and CA they constitute a society – a loud, rule-flouting, society, for whom what lies outside the wall implosions exists to be ignored or exploited.
For all its seeming withdrawal, the ethos is one, obviously, of naked aggression.
A cool ten million is awarded to the elementary school teacher bloodied almost to death by her six year old student, a demented child in possession of a gun his now-jailed mother made available to him.
The assistant principal who ignored an obviously lethal situation will… what? Find ten million dollars? So the legal stuff will drag on.