They shut down the high school and all; I mean… your sheriff is a cold blooded killer, guys…

Nobody saw anything a little… off… about Sheriff Stines?

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

And now everybody’s like what was his motive? Why did he do it?

And mark UD‘s words: It’s onaccounta the judge disrespected him. Wait and see if I’m not right. Dude surrendered at the scene, so we’ll know pretty soon.

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

I mean, it could also be a George Moscone sort of thing:

Dan White’s motive for assassinating San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978 was anger at Moscone’s decision not to reappoint him to the city board.

And just like White, Stines will probably, in the fullness of time, kill himself.

‘[W]e’ve essentially dumped a now virtually impossible task on the lap of federal agents and told them to figure it out. That task, to guard the lives of their protectees in outdoor settings, including in the 31 states that allow citizens to walk around displaying a gun, in a nation with 20 million assault-style rifles, defies logic. 

… [P]eople who should never have a gun are walking around with high-powered weapons… The man arrested in Sunday’s incident had been charged more than 100 times by police in North Carolina, including charges of possessing a weapon of mass destruction and a fully automatic machine gun, resisting an officer, and hit and run. 

… Donald Trump in February promised at the NRA convention that if re-elected, “No one will lay a finger on your firearms,” and, boasted that while president he “did nothing” to curb guns. Now, Trump has been the target of two attempted assassinations in close to two months, with both assailants carrying an assault-style weapon. 

A nice little PhD student in nice little Nottingham arranged to have the clitoris and vaginal lips of a child ripped off, after which he would force her to marry him, a 47 year old male stranger.

He will go to jail.

My clients don’t cook. They entertain. They have a show kitchen outfitted in marble or other beautiful materials, and there’s a second kitchen where people can actually cook for them. They don’t want cooking in the main kitchen. I design a lot of homes with two kitchens. 

From the iconic 1976 original, through its 2002 and 2023 adaptations, the film ‘Carrie’ continues to frighten and fascinate American audiences. Carrie IV: Carrie Got Her Gun (2024) features the same demented teenager with the same religious mother, but this time it imagines what Carrie might do when she is able ‘to use a 3D printer to make … an AR-style weapon.’

Screenwriters took their inspiration from the Clendaniel story:

Federal prosecutors are seeking an 18-year prison sentence for Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, who pleaded guilty to trying to blow up power stations around Baltimore to destabilize the government in a white supremacist plot… Clendaniel and a confidential informant [were] trying to obtain a high-powered rifle to shoot through substations in Reisterstown, Perry Hall, White Marsh, and more locations.

“If we could do all these in a day…it would completely destroy this whole city,” Clendaniel said in the recordings. 

She told the informant, “It would probably permanently, completely lay [Baltimore] to waste.”

… “No matter where she is, whether she’s incarcerated or not, I do believe god will pour his spirit out on her. His will will be done, and I’m hoping that his will is done in all of our lives in this country,” [her mother] said. …

[If] the plot had not been foiled, it would have caused $75 million in damage to the electrical system and left much of Maryland in the dark. 

Hitlerian, religiously self-righteous and into sexual threesomes, homophobic, book-burning, and now headed up by a Jan 6 rioter who’s been lying a hot streak to the authorities about the rioting, Moms for Liberty offers madcap comedy that just – er – keeps coming.

Guardino initially told law enforcement that she was at Trump’s rally but, after its conclusion, returned to her hotel room. She later admitted to law enforcement that she returned to the Capitol grounds — and saw no barriers blocking her path and that there was one broken window. She said she did not see or smell tear gas.

Guardino said she entered the Capitol and found it to be “peaceful,” “akin to a tour,” and “open to the public.” She later admitted that this was not a “public tour,” as there were no security screenings or metal protectors, nor was she asked to show identification.

The federal complaint has several images of Guardino entering the Capitol grounds. They also traced her cell phone inside the building — and further photographs of her filming the scene. They also have pictures of her in the mob of people just outside the building.

Around 3:17 p.m. that day, officers closed the window Guardino had entered through and told her and other rioters to exit the building. Guardino complied and left, but images show her re-entering the building at 3:21 p.m. She started filming again but was redirected by law enforcement to leave. She did so at 3:24 p.m.

Law enforcement officials concluded in the complaint that there was “probable cause” that Guardino impeded and disrupted the orderly conduct of government business. There was also “cause” that she “willfully and knowingly uttered loud, threatening, or abusive language once inside the Capitol.” She also remained in a “restricted building and grounds without the lawful authority to do so.”

Now that she’s been arrested, she can transfer the job of lying to her attorneys.

‘A man … arises from the underbrush … about two hundred yards from the golfers. [It’s] evident he holds a weapon in his right hand, a semiautomatic rifle.’

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

Don DeLillo already wrote this latest event, though he was off by two hundred yards:

Mr. Trump was perhaps 400 yards away from the armed man, Sheriff Bradshaw said.

An AK-47-style rifle with a scope was found…

I like the pessimism of this, and in particular the “eagerness for political violence” thing, though it should be amended to eagerness for violence tout court. Watch any interview with a Trumpist; survey the brainless at play on Jan 6 footage; for that matter, listen to their leader try to form a thought. The power of the movement is that it’s now way past impediments like ideology. Take megaMAGA donor Leonard Leo. As Katherine Stewart points out, “Leo and his cronies have never really cared about ideas, because the one idea they keep repeating is that they care about America’s constitutional government. And yet, they have put their weight and money behind a man, Donald Trump, who attempted a coup, and they are filling our courts with judges who seem keen to enable the MAGA project of destroying the Constitution.”

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

Trump has always been little more than a sadist, and he has succeeded in molding the movement entirely into his image. It’s basically just sadism now.

Trump himself has no political convictions, and though various fanatics, like Vance, Vermeule, Deneen, and the rest of the Cathophate Party, attach themselves to him, they will always find their cynicism misplaced — as, for instance, when Trump backtracks on abortion (their paramount issue) because he’s never given a shit about it one way or another and only cares about winning an election.

As with his having most recently set the hounds loose on Springfield, Ohio, Trump represents little more than a goad to violence, most famously on display on Jan 6, but abundantly obvious in other venues. Yet while his followers cleave to their sadism, Trump himself lately displays low-energy sadism/inspiration toward crowd-sadism. It is perhaps a bad sign for his current presidential campaign that the bloody shrieks of lock her up from his first campaign are much less evident in this one, and that his sickening on-stage stalking of Hillary Clinton has been reduced, against Kamala Harris, to surly, staring straight ahead, nihilism.

All of which is to say that even world historical sadists get old. To be sure, second generation Trumpian sadism thrives in his sons, and most notably in La Pasionaria Lara Trump, but Trump himself looks more like Humbert Humbert at the conclusion of Lolita: a washed-up roué who has trouble getting it up even for the debauching of a nation.

The legacy for which he will have to settle is the creation of dread, in half the country, that if he loses this election his followers will set the place on fire. Think of all those guns he has helped put in the hands of all those sadists.

It’s all right here.

And yet SOOOO rich is the United States – there’s so much incredible (often unconscionable, IMHO) wealth in private hands – that the numbers somehow, amazingly, fail to impress.

***********

UD thanks her sister.

… 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!