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.

Another day, another heaping helping of disaster for Arizona’s reigning queen of the Make America Great Again movement.

When this election is over, Republicans really should begin asking themselves when and if they ever want to win again — because if it wasn’t clear after already losing two Senate seats and every key statewide office, it’s about to become undeniably clear to all but the fiercest MAGA diehards.

Violate me in the violet time

In the vilest way that you know

Desecrate, savage me, utterly ravage me

On me no mercy bestow

UD‘s old friend has been immensely honored in Poland, and here’s the latest thing!

He was a quiet gentle giant of a man, engrossed in his painting, in love with his wife, and, in his off time, busy maintaining his one hundred upstate NY acres, and the beautiful house/pond at their center. A lover of the night sky (like UD), he built himself an observatory. He and Magda drove around most weekends finding the quirky Americana that filled the house. They often had guests (not in the winter!), many of them famous Polish artists, and Magda cooked everyone spectacular meals, topped off with dusky strolls through the woods.

Then we’d all sit on the big front porch and gaze at the pond Fangor made until we started falling asleep.

“About damn time,” tweeted former Senate staffer Jim Manley.

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[A]ttorney Philip T. Kingston wrote: “Do you know how hard it is to get disbarred?”

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“You lie and make false statements in court to try and overturn ONE lousy election, and suddenly people are all mad about it,” [wrote] civil attorney Daniel Aguilar.

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Coming attractions.

If you’re in a hurry to get your pain pills and you pull your car in front of other people waiting in the pharmacy drive-through and the people in one of the cars object to what you have done, you can brandish your loaded gun right in their faces as they approach your car window! That’ll shut em up. HAHAHAHAHA

‘Kinda tricky and gross cuz lots of glass and blood at the scene plus two messed up and I’m pretty sure dead bodies but main thing is FREE GUN IN ONE OF THE CARS.’

“While this incident occurred on a school campus, it was not directly related to Skyridge Middle School activities,” officials wrote in a press release Wednesday.

Whew. I can’t stand middle schools where 11 year olds brandishing guns is part of official school activities.