“Indian Creek [Florida] is a great extreme example of trying to pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” [one observer] says. “The more you enclose yourself, the more you’re reminding yourself of a sense of risk.”
It’s kinda like the paradox of the burqa; you walk around proclaiming you want to “pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” but the gesture is so pathologically extreme that it actually rivets the attention of the rest of the world directly onto you.
Indian Creek has given itself an absolutely magnetic North Korean aura (like Pyongyang, the place is eerily empty; like the DPRK altogether, Indian Creek is paranoid and massively armed, etc. etc.); the reason Business Insider and scads of other publications can’t stop writing about it is because of its nutso exoticism, its collective-insanity charisma. Paranoia being bottomless, the more Indian Creek elaborates its high tech bedlamite withdrawal, the more the rest of us will want to figure out a way to approach it and get a sniff of this Nabokovian Nova Zembla, its superweird existence-loathing technologies, on view right here in the USA.
Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: “Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.” The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women.
The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.
UD rarely passes along rumors… But she’s heard that “retorts” are not the only thing Vance is “firing off” in his free time. In line with his crippling anxiety about American birth dearth, and inspired by his colleague Vladimir Putin’s order that birth dearthy Russians have procreative sex during work breaks, Vance has been secreted away in fertility clinics, masturbating to beat the band, in an effort to inject his sperm maximally into childless cat ladies.
… that its mayor scared the shit out of the city council/citizens at a recent meeting by waving around an AR-15 and a Micro Draco (weapons of choice in that blood-soaked setting) and wondering aloud why everyone was shooting at everyone with them.
His bootless cries about the blood were answered last night with atrocity on so grand a scale that it’s all over the international and national press — and since we’re popping off bodies from kinders to coots at a quick clip all day long in this country, you can imagine how atrocious the American body count has to be to snap anyone to any sort of attention. Four have died and at least twenty are lying on emergency room tables.
“The mass shooting, one of several this year in the city…”
*********************************** Another day spent hosing gobs of blood off the streets of Birmingham!
************************************
Now, the elements of this massacre are deeply familiar to this blog’s readers. Put them together, in fact, and you’re all but guaranteed piles of young people bleeding out on the pavement.
Late weekend night.
Entertainment district.
Proximity to a university.
Hookah lounge (this one’s really important – you’re not going to get the numbers that feature on a headline in Buenos Aires unless you’re gathering shooters/victims in a hookah lounge. From a 2020 review of the club where it happened: “This place is a HOT mess — insert gun shot sounds.”). Also a local government that will not shut down hookah lounges, even when they are notorious abattoirs.
Immense armed security in and around the club (this does nothing to avert bloodbaths, and may make them worse/trigger them by throwing out/turning away certain vindictive heavily armed people).
An already-criminalized clientele (not everybody, duh, but enough of ’em), many of whom, despite the immense armed security, have figured out a way to smuggle guns into the club. And some of whom are in inane ongoing fights with other gunny attendees.
Bored, stupid, high, violence-obsessed, incredibly young/immature people in tight little gangs, desperate for opportunities to get themselves excited/destroy other people/gangs by shooting the guns they’ve gone to so much trouble/expense to hoard/steal.
You really can’t do anything about any of this if you’re Alabam. Hell, their United States Senators are stupider, I promise, than any of the shooters (who the police can’t find), so don’t go looking anywhere in Bama for anyone willing to close a deadly hookah lounge or restrict guns or educate people or anything. You want that sort of shit, move to Massachusetts.
After their son was arrested, the parents were taken into custody on outstanding warrants…
The sixteen year old planned mass shootings at schools all over town; acting on a tip, police found him at one of the schools, toting a backpack with a fully loaded gun.
The parents were reportedly present when the teen was taken into custody, and … they went back to the father’s home to take their son’s backpack full of ammunition and hid it in the mother’s home in an attempt to conceal it during the police investigation… [The] backpack … “held multiple high-capacity magazines and ammunition.”
But this story – career criminals enabling a son just on the verge of a mass shooting – will never rise above very local news coverage because it’s a real yawn. Something like it happens every day. Even if he’d carried out the killings uninterrupted, it might have made a few NYC papers. Certainly not the BBC.
****************
And… police didn’t check the criminal background of the parents when they first arrived to arrest the son?
Former Secret Service agent and gun range owner Thom Bolsch said it’s not uncommon for gun owners to forget they’re carrying a gun in their purse, backpack or luggage.
Mes petites: You can go ahead and say tens of millions of Americans are dumb as fuck. But forgetting a deadly weapon in your purse, backpack, luggage? THAT dumb? On a not uncommon basis?
Mark Robinson really is a poor person’s Donald Trump. While Trump is paying off porn stars, Mark Robinson is paying to watch porn stars. Both have multiple bankruptcies. Donald Trump lost his casinos. Mark Robinson lost his house. Donald Trump built his profile of outrageousness through shock jocks and tabloids. Robinson built his through social media, both looking for a applause and clicks. Both appeal to evangelicals as defenders against those who belittle them. Both lie as easily as they breathe.
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.
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.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
