“Representative Tillman, Sellers, and Hendrix, we went to the Speaker. We begged the Speaker, ‘Listen, Birmingham is a blood bath every day. Can we try to move this Glock switch bill?’”

How legislation gets done in Bama.

The city council. They’ll approve effing anything, especially lounges (bloodbath background here) full of killers.

The mayor has begged them not to, but they all just laugh, y’know? UD doesn’t know whether lounge owners are bribing council members, or whether members just like it in principle when new abattoirs open up, but, you know, welcome to Bama.

News reports … said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers… Birmingham was [in fact] short [only] 63 “patrol officers,” [insisted the mayor]… [Later that day he admitted] the number was actually 172 patrol officers… That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders. 

… Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.

That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.

The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.

By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.

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Bama thinks it can pass laws making guns of any kind available to people of any kind, at any time, and NOT have trouble attracting police to its municipalities. You got idiots shooting off guns all over the place, and you think rational people will take jobs that put them in the way of all those bullets every single day? Bama is SOOOO STOOOOOPID.

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

If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1 p.m. NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?

Because of his comfort level and presence in the neighborhood, [Anthony Ford] knows a lot of people, including security staff at the bars surrounding [the hookah lounge that was the massacre site,] Hush. And that means he often gets called over to help break up fights.

Ford said he’s broken up fights at Hush Lounge at least five times, and intervened in dozens more arguments. Last fall, he said a patron at Hush ran out, jumped in his car, pulled up in front of the lounge and pointed his gun at Ford.

“I’ve been telling folks that Hush needs to be shut down for a long time, and folks need to get on board,” he said. “We’ve never had this kind of problem. There was never this kind of energy there until Hush came along.”

Why wasn’t Hush hushed? What is wrong with Birmingham?

After crunching the numbers, the large [American] city with the highest cost of crime [for 2023] was Birmingham, Alabama. The violent crime rate – which includes instances of murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault – in Birmingham was 1,682 per 100,000 residents. The property crime rate – which includes burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft – was 4,173 per 100,000 residents.

If you stopped brunching every time people were blown away by machine guns in Birmingham, you’d never get anything to eat. As for the streaks of fresh blood on the restaurant walls, look away look away Dixieland.

People don’t know about Birmingham, cuz, you know, Chicago; but it’s time we paid it some mind. It is trying to tell us about American gun laws and American gun love.

… 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…”

Saturday night’s Five Points South shooting outside of Hush Lounge, marks the fourth reported shooting in the City of Birmingham at or near a nightclub in 2024... 38 people have been shot, 11 dead, and 27 injured in the shootings.

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Another day spent hosing gobs of blood off the streets of Birmingham!

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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.

1. Late weekend night.
2. Entertainment district.
3. Proximity to a university.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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.
7. Virtually no gun restrictions of any sort in the state.
8. Glock Switches, which make your weapon vastly more vicious.
9. 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.

“We had five homicides in the first five days of July.”

To bring the point home, Mayor Randall Woodfin displayed the city’s armes de choix:

At one point, Woodfin swung [an] AR-15 in a way that caused some council members to ask him to not point the weapon in their direction. “Council, I apologize – I didn’t mean to,” Woodfin said. “I’m sorry.”

When he picked up [a] Micro Draco, he said, “Finger’s not on the trigger, everybody,” to calm any nerves. “Nowhere near it.”

A public protest – now in its second day – outside a mosque with an FGM-friendly leader.

This is the only way you’ll end it – a combination of public protest, and punishment in the courts.

I thought university football was already “truly professionalized,” but according to this, there’s much more to come.

UD has predicted that most physical campus life will disappear as everyone goes online; but she has also – naively – said that the only place on campus where students will continue to congregate in real time will be the football stadium. Wrong.

Even though college football is as steeped in its history and culture as any sport in the country, with the amount of money flying around the sport, it’s just more efficient to play games in these huge stadiums, sold to the highest bidder. The strange thing is that—national title games aside—these stadiums are often empty, particularly for conference championship games. (None of the major conference championships—the Pac-12, Big Ten, or SEC—is expected to sell out their games at neutral sites this weekend.) That doesn’t really matter for the people selling these games: Television stations, particularly ESPN, who just need the programming. (The fans in attendance are essentially just atmosphere—extras.) This is the ongoing trend, too: Fewer and fewer students are even showing up to campus games anymore. In the future college football world, you won’t even need them: These games might as well be played on sound stages.

I mean, yes, UD has been blogging for some time about disappearing students; she just thought that … you know… while they’d be totally gone from physical classrooms, there’d still be “the few, the proud” in the stadiums. (Thanks, Andre, for that link.) Apparently not.

(Silver lining: They’ll still show up for the tailgate and the riot.)

That being the case, UD will make another prediction.

It’s very embarrassing to the schools, these empty televised stadiums. (“[On] average, only 8 percent of U.A.B.’s 18,600 students attended home games this year.”) Soon many universities will revamp their entire admissions systems. They will seek above all in a student the willingness and ability to sit – not too drunk; reasonably excited – in a stadium for the entire duration of a football game. Extras Scholarships will go out to students who can document (via admissions portfolio videos of their high school game attendance) their capacity to simulate being a fan of the university’s football team.

Required reading for the credit-bearing freshman-fan training course will be DeLillo’s White Noise, and in particular the simulacral German nuns scene:

“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.”

Real fans are gone; no one cares about a fake tv spectacle. But a large group of people must sit in the stands looking like students who give a shit. Someone must appear to care.

[C]ollege football has been accused of being an unpaid farm system for the NFL. This winnowing of the ranks [of universities with football teams], and the increased ability of Power Five schools to compensate players, could make it that much closer to a formality. If we accept—as the Northwestern [University] union lawsuit claims—that these players are more “athletes” than “students” (and thus more employees than subjects) then they’re essentially professional leagues already. You can see this eventually—maybe not as early 2025, but someday—becoming standard operating procedure, and having the Dallas Cowboys go ahead and make Baylor or Texas A&M their “farm” team.

The effect on academics? Well, first of all there will be a synergy with the movement of the university’s teaching business to online. There won’t be any angst about academic integrity, because everything will be invisible. Nothing to see here! And the new honesty about the tv-run, paid-player, farm-team, nature of the university, coupled with the obsolescence of the NCAA itself (“one of the last connections any of these athletic departments have to ‘academics’ at all”) will truly clear the way for more and more American universities to drop the whole “university” pretense and get down to business.

… and introducing them to the thoughts of certain zealots… all at taxpayer expense! – so that when they get to university they’ll be ready to be forcibly sex segregated while listening to the zealots…

Here in the States we complain about all sorts of ridiculous stuff our taxes go toward; but turning our daughters into compliant … the favored term is sisters … is not, I think, one of them.

Concerned parents are speaking out after more than a dozen fights broke out during the Parker vs. Ramsay football game at Legion Field, an event meant to celebrate non-violence.

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Hey but no one fired a gun. In Birmingham Alabama, that counts as non-violence.

You sleep, and the white noise is gunshots... That’s fucking poetic.

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How I stay young!

Willie Ann, 81 … has a routine for gunshots. She reaches for her cane, tries to rush toward a carpeted floor near her bed and gently lies down on her right side, where her arthritis does not flare up. When the shooting stops, she reaches for the top of the bed and hoists herself up.

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And remember: Always have more than one sofa.

During drive-by shootings, neighbors wedge themselves between sofas.

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?