You can dress a guy up in a Cybertruck, but when push comes to shove, it’s that most venerable form of American self-expression!

To the long list of shootings/mass shootings during homecoming festivities we can now add Tennessee State University, whose parade fireworks turned out to be – natch; it’s Tennessee – guns. Various celebrants are currently bleeding out in local hospitals.

Much of its asset base comes from accepting gobs of cash from international drug cartels, which you and I know as money laundering, but which at TD is considered plain old customer service. For ten years the bank (which sends transfer your accounts letters to Les UDs all the time — perhaps it has fingered us as people in search of a hiding place for criminal gains) has happily reached out and washed billions of dirty drug dollars; and now that it’s been caught it has to pretend that for a decade THE GOODIES at the bank had no idea, and THE BADDIES at the bank were ingeniously unspeakably undetectedly evil and we promise we’re going to fire all of them and pay a big fine and all.

But what you have to understand is that no one of any importance at the bank had anything to do with the drug shit. The entire insanely profitable and systemic scheme was hatched by a bunch of underling nonentities so don’t even think of putting any of the bank’s executives in jail or anything.

Pay no attention to that massive Ponzi scheme we were involved in last year, by the way! Again, we paid a big fine; a few underling nonentities took the fall, etc. etc. We are a dignified illustrious upstanding financial institution.

Well. Yes. A traumatized resident of bloody Birmingham poses the essential question. What sort of city routinely grants operating licenses to establishments expressly designed to attract killers?

… but one or both might have been alcohol-related accidents… Yet let’s assume they were suicides… Were they connected?

It seems so unlikely – two student suicides on the same campus on the same day – that one wonders if this was a dark love story or whatever.

Helpful hint: If your house looks like this, it isn’t a house.

This is a city with not even 200,000 people. Turns out nobody likes to get shot. And Alabama is ALL about guns.

A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of [gun] seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations... Even an exhaustive review of local news sources cannot account for guns carried into schools undetected, gun seizures never disclosed by districts and guns found on campuses located in communities underserved by news organizations... In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings. [That’s found, mes petites.]

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

Here’s the beginning of an official communication from a typically gun-soaked American high school: “While any weapon found in our schools is not a positive thing…”

Not a positive thing. Do you know how many principals don’t tell students and parents when a gun is found? Lots of ’em. I mean, it’s not a positive thing…

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

Hot off the press, here’s today’s high school killing field report, complete with all the blithering idiocy/pathetic denial that keeps kids going in for the kill.

America’s long luxurious gun-soak has reduced the reality of some high schools to that of hookah lounges in the deep south: Choked with human and techno security (which makes the experience of being there creepy and oppressive), they are nonetheless incredibly dangerous, as ways continue to be found to smuggle in weapons.

When there are five ill-secured guns inside many of your students’ homes, do you really think students are going to leave them alone? There are 450 million smokin’ hot guns in this country – whaddaya expect some sixteen year olds to do with that? Leave them alone?

So you’ve got this sick toxic thing of high school principals stubbornly thinking they’re high school principals rather than bouncers, and meanwhile students die or almost bleed to death or run screaming from armed psychos in restrooms pretty much every day all over America’s public school system.

The future is fucking obvious. In the next few years, we’ll get to 500 million guns – or more. And the weaponry will be much more lethal. Every news story about an insane sixteen year old blowing ten peoples’ brains out will inspire many more insane sixteen year olds to try their hand at it. Only insane parents will keep their kids in creepy oppressive public school. Private school/home schooling will be the only way out, and public high school as such will cease to exist.

Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

… Napolitana.

… on the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol Building.

[Photographer Bennett Waara.]

Taken at six AM this morning in my front yard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one poll. But a girl can dream.

Elites who read long eloquent essays in the Atlantic comparing George Washington and Donald Trump – the glorious first, the gruesome second – aren’t (if you ask ol’ UD) making very good use of their time, pre-electionwise. It’s by now a tired warhorse, the dangerous vileness of DJT, and one can certainly continue playing variations on it, as Tom Nichols has very prettily done all the way up and down the scale; but at this point the question is not How Existential a Threat is this Authoritarian to the American Republic? Or How Far Exactly Have We Fallen from George Washington?

The question is Why is Half of the Country Voting for an Authoritarian?

The release of a pseudo-memoir under the name of a presidential candidate’s wife can at best occasion jokey remarks (see above) by those tasked with pseudo-reading it. Some of the reviewers’ lines are pretty good.

Another reviewer pissed to have gotten the assignment quotes sentences from the book like this one:

 “Living my life with a core set of principles provides me with a foundation that leads to consistent and rational decision-making.”

The reviewer’s anger intensifies as she’s forced to rifle through the book for quotations for her review (wasn’t flipping through the fucker once enough?), and her final paragraph makes explicit what other reviewers merely signal: Vacuous people shouldn’t write memoirs cuz ain’t nothin to write.

We want to believe that whatever shallowness or stupidity that appears is a survival mechanism a woman had to take up when dealing with a misogynistic world. Well, sorry: sometimes women really are like Marie Antoinette’s pastries, … filled with nothing more complex than artificial fillers and dead air. 

Yet another pissed reviewer (“I let out an exasperated snort.”) excerpts/comments:

Melania Trump team[ed] up with a company run by “successful businesspeople” to introduce the American public (the “consumer base”) to a “line of high-end skincare products” because, after all, “people frequently asked me about my regimen, marveling at the health of my skin,” and so, you see, what she really wanted to do was find a way to “empower women,” and if that means charging you $150 an ounce to put fish eggs on your face, then so be it.