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?”

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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.”

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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.)

The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.

None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.

They know.

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Half of America. Half – by this account – is morally diseased, crooked, grotesque, depraved, tortured, or in league with the same. One hundred sixty-six million five hundred thousand people in the country are malicious nihilists, or positively attracted to them.

Say it’s true. How in the world to account for it?

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Ol’ UD says it’s that tasty German plate, Cheesy Nietzsche. “It’s the absence of surprise to life that harrows the head of everybody American you know,” wrote Thomas Pynchon, and it’s arguable that their always-entertaining, always a radical new stupidity/insult/outrage/lie, candidate puts a welcome spring in the step of otherwise enervated folk.

These people are looking for a specifically MAGA transvaluation of values. Yes, you can call it dime-store nihilism (it’s très Trumpian to kill yourself); at a slightly higher level, you can call it dollar-store dionysianism, but the point is a puborectalis-tightening encounter with the illicit, with an outrageous and ongoing public display of norm-nihilating. All That is Solid Melts into Hair.

Coastal elites like UD might prefer their boredom-suspending transgressiveness to take place with innocuous irony on the fart patio of Portlandia’s vegan cafe, but it’s not for her to decide how heartland Americans want to play this thing. All she can do is vote against it and pray.

Suicidal impulses can last only briefly, but easy access to a gun makes the urges more difficult to survive. In Montana, 67 percent of suicides in 2022 involved a gun, according to the Times analysis. Nationally, guns were used in about 55 percent of such deaths.

But in a place where guns are embedded in the rugged, frontier ethos, there is little political will to prevent people who are at risk of harming themselves from owning a gun. 

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Montana. Increasingly known to demographers as Morticia. It is of course UD’s view that the accomplishment of apocalyptic state suicide rates indicates a death-wish – a romance with the brain-blaster world-enders that have been enigmatically smiling at you from your bedside and from the movies since you were a kid. Whenever you’re impatient with yourself because of your latest bad bout of boozing, whenever the America-is-complete-shit rants of your heroes Trump and Vance make you despair, thar she blows! With her come-hither gleam guaranteeing an end to your convoluted, entirely unsatisfying, world-conspiracies. They’re just not adding up. It’s just not making sense. You fear your neighbors; your wife doesn’t get you. You’re sleepwalking through life and it’s time to stop walking and just sleep. No one cares if you blow your head off because no one from the state legislature all the way down to your family and friends is doing anything about your personal armory even though it’s obvious you’re WAY fucked up. You’ve never forgotten the look of absolute peace in the eyes of the first doe you killed when you were eight. I’ll have what she’s having.

Brought a loaded gun and ammo into a hospital.

 Has a revoked Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) card and no concealed carry license.

The McHenry County [Illinois] State’s Attorney’s Office filed a petition to detain Reyes pending trial, calling him a real and present threat to the safety of the community, and a judge granted the petition to detain Reyes in the McHenry County Jail.

McHenry County Judge Tiffany Davis later released Reyes from jail [four months later,] in December 2023, only for prosecutors to file a petition to revoke his release after they learned he was arrested in January 2024 for a domestic battery incident in Cook County.

Davis denied the request to revoke Reyes’ pre-trial release after saying there was insufficient evidence to justify the request.

Prosecutors filed another petition to revoke his release earlier this month after Reyes was arrested on an aggravated battery to a peace officer charge.

Davis again denied the request after saying there was insufficient evidence to justify the request.

Court records show Reyes appeared in court on Tuesday where he was expected to enter into a plea deal.

He showed up in court while smelling strongly of alcohol and admitted to consuming alcohol. His blood alcohol content was 0.319 and Davis found him in contempt of court and sentenced him to six days in jail.

Eventually the judge managed to eke out three years, which means he’ll be out and ready to go back to the hospital in six months.

More guns means more murders … Murders carry some of the stiffest criminal penalties and are more likely to result in an arrest and imprisonment than other crimes. As a result, some experts draw a line between America’s large number of guns and its incarceration rate, which is among the highest in the world.

… [There’s a] hiring crisis for police officers. People don’t want to start a career in a field that seems so dangerous. “This proliferation of civilian weapons makes policing much less attractive,” John Roman, a criminal justice policy expert at the University of Chicago, said. (A similar argument, he added, applies to teachers, given the proliferation of school shootings, although the on-the-job death rate for teachers is, of course, much lower than it is for police officers.)

Steve Dillon directs the UW School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice, but said he spoke Thursday as a citizen and teacher. 

He said that when he first moved to Laramie he encountered men in orange hats with guns at a trailhead. They’d asked him what he was doing, and he told them he’d just moved there and wanted to go for a hike. 

“They raised their guns, pointing them at my chest and said, ‘You just moved here? Go the F back where you came from,’” Dillon said. 

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Part of a campus discussion about whether concealed carry should be allowed on campus.

Looks as though strong majorities don’t want to go to a school where anyone you see might be carrying a big gun. But they’ll get concealed carry. Will they ever get it.

Year or two after that, they’ll get open carry at the University of Wyoming. Already got it in the rest of the state. Permitless. Only gotta be 18.

… fascist.

RIP

Big ol’ rap sheet, just a really dangerous person, and he has a kid who’s allowed to live with him? He got ten years in 2016 for malicious wounding etc etc, and he’s not in jail? Thinks it’s funny to put a loaded gun in his six year old kid’s school backpack? Why does this convicted felon have guns?

Lemme tell you. It’s hard enough for gun-soaked Americans to protect themselves from quiet schizy little nobodies who decide to shoot up schools; shouldn’t it be easier for us to defend ourselves from shriekingly rampant criminals among us? Easier to defend innocent children from them? WTF.