A recent Gallup poll gives greater detail to a back and forth UD and her buddy Rita had not long ago about whether college applicants might begin avoiding schools in states with medieval abortion laws. Looks as though they well might.
“The fact that 74% of Republican unenrolled adults say, ‘I would consider enrolling [in] a state that had greater access’ is, I think, a really impressive number,” [an official at the Lumina Foundation, which cosponsored the poll,] said.
And, you know, it ain’t just abortion. Some representatives in zero-abortion, lock ‘er up, execute her, states are now moving on to trying to ban non-standard sexual practices, contraception… And what sort of … emotional reality do you suppose pertains in campus health clinics in the nation’s Junior Anti-Sex League territories? Many students show up with an STD now and then – or maybe anxiety about an STD – and I wonder how comfy they’ll be discussing such matters with whatever medical crew hasn’t yet run off to New York? With a crew that thinks zygotes have voting rights and unmarried women who aren’t virgins are sinners? This isn’t about abortion only; it’s about sex, sexual ethics, sexual ethos, sexual conversation, sexual atmosphere. “[T]he University of Idaho [has warned] employees that promoting abortion while on the job could be viewed as a felony offense.”
“If you go to a state that doesn’t allow you to have autonomy over your body, then that is not only not appealing, that is offensive to many women,” [the Lumina official] said.
UD ain’t denying that there’s a minority of women who’d revel in the repression of their bodily autonomy, who’d get off on lectures from campus doctors about the importance of keeping their legs clenched. But she thinks it’s a very small minority.
[C]ollege applicants are looking closely at the cultural climate of places where they could spend four—or likely more—years studying and exploring their lives as young adults. Red states were already having a tough time attracting talent among students and professors alike, and veering to the right on abortion is only going to make retaining their rankings and prestige more difficult.
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[An] exodus of college students from states with abortion bans could join a string of other consequences that abortion bans have brought, amid reports the laws have also driven physicians out of states where they face the threat of felony charges for providing care, impacted recruitment and training at medical schools and caused employees to seek transfers to different states.
All of America’s pig-calling states have among the highest number of guns, the laxest gun laws, AND by far the nation’s highest suicide rates. SOOEYcide!
Alaska
Wyoming
Idaho
Montana
Y’all come on down when you’re ready to blow your head off!
You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.
Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.
And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!
… as I read updates on the reported Idaho killer. So many accounts of the suspect suggest an intellectual interest in what it would feel like to kill someone, coupled with an arrogant sense of one’s exemption from ordinary morality. Both murders involve[d] lengthy strategic planning and stalking; all victims died by slashing (shooting lacks the up-close visceral thrill of feeling yourself putting someone to death), and all perpetrators went to impressive lengths to get away with the crimes.
L&L were wealthy brilliant elitists who arrived at their fate via a peculiar take on Nietzsche’s superman; Kohberger’s homicidal fascination drew him toward formal study in criminology. Just as crazy people can be drawn to psychiatry (see, most famously, the fictional Hannibal Lecter), so mass killers may be drawn to criminology, a field in which they can spend all day luxuriating in lurid details.
One hundred years after L&L, Kohberger has the cultural advantage of a zillion slasher films/video games, etc. etc. It will be interesting to find out if he is a fan of these.
… and therefore a popular early theory about the U Idaho students knifed to death in their beds seems plausible: It was a random ugly encounter, during a night of barhopping, with someone who turned out to be a vicious asshole, who followed them home and killed them.
PhD student, criminology, Washington State University.
He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser.
Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.
He has been in bad physical health. It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.
Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment. He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“
How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.
I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.
************************
Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest. Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden. Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”
This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies). There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.
What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.
********************
There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.
*******************
Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.
Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.
The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…
*******************
Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.
*******************
Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.
*****************
How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.
… So I’ll trust you to go to YouTube and watch Sophia Rosing do her thing; I’d rather link you to this narrative by one of the long-suffering U Kentucky students attacked by this drunk violent racist.
About the video: It’s too bad for the worst among us that everyone’s got a camera these days and knows how to use it. This particular docudrama makes for irresistably engrossing viewing, so it’ll rack up a lot of views.
“Kiss your entire future away, babe,” says the camerawoman as Rosing spews it and spews it, and then hits everyone, including the policeman who shows up. Certainly her future at UK (Kentucky always makes the top ten most racist states lists, and for personal safety as well as reputational reasons, the school is going to have to let this … dynamic … white supremacist go); but she has looks, gumption, and the sort of straightforward approach to the race problem that guarantees her a political future in any number of Idaho congressional districts.
I’m gonna predict that maw and paw will bring out the jesus brigade to wrap her in their love and forgiveness. Cry like Jimmy Swaggart, Soph! If this happened a little further north, the folks would find some psychiatrist to attest to her years of emotional struggle; but it’s the southland, so I’m thinking it’ll be the jesus brigade.
It’ s not dad’s fault that the kid’s massacre-hopes, in the actual event, fall short of expectations. Dad’s done his bit, enabling the little one to get AK-47s and everything else he needs for really widespread butchery; but once the bullets begin to whirl, wounded people have a way of hiding/running off, or, say, sacrificing themselves to save their children, and these behaviors, plus the imminent arrival of the authorities, will drive your total down for sure.
You try to do everything for your son, give him the best training and the bloodiest guns, yet his kill is pathetic compared to older, more seasoned psychotics like the Las Vegas shooter, whose toll puts all of America’s teenage/twentyish massacrists to shame.
Dads, for starters tell your mad shooters to look for a closed open space. What do I mean by this? The Las Vegas shooter chose an outdoor concert venue, for sure, but there were walls and gates aplenty, making it seriously difficult for people to get away and for authorities to get in. The concert space was also a good distance from stores or other interiors in which one might find shelter.
Another pointer for dads: At a concert, people are all tightly packed together, which makes a far better target than a sequential parade. Also – and here’s a fun fact – Paddock waited until night, when it’s much harder for people to see around them, and to figure out what’s going on.
I don’t want the Highland Park shooter’s father to feel more disappointment in his child than he already does, but Paddock killed 60 and wounded or injured one thousand.
True, your kid did better than the massacrist not far from UD‘s town, who, had he not chickened out, might well have shot to pieces my old friend Di, who was walking to the grocery store on the street right below him as he tried to get up the nerve to kill everyone.
UD proposes that, as soon as gunny dads realize their kid is psychotic and wants to accumulate guns and bombs so he can kill everyone, they ship the kid off to an Idaho militia camp. The state of Idaho is hugely friendly to massed psychotics with guns, and these groups will straighten these kids out in no time.
Hours spent reading reflections on America and the latest elementary school massacre have led me back to Christopher Hitchens writing about George Orwell. I very much want to believe – I plan to act in various ways in accordance with the belief – that there are enough clear-eyed and ethical Americans to start nudging us away from the nightmare the country begins to resemble.
From the simple, psycho, devotees of violence gathered in Idaho militias, to the less organized, more complex population of assault weapon adherents, we have a problem from hell, and must think calmly about how to solve it.
We must start at ground zero: NMAA.
No Motive At All. The older man who killed 58 and injured 1,000 in Vegas had absolutely no discernible reason for doing it, which serves to remind us that some people from vicious parentage/upbringing do what they do (Bernie Madoff, son of two financial criminals, had no discernible motive – he was already legitimately vastly wealthy) for deep-lying atavistic reasons.
The Vegas killer was the son of a big-time crook. Say he had it in his DNA; say he was one of those rare human animals living in a state of bestiality which he kept more or less under control for fifty years or so, but decided to let rip as he reached the end of his life. Although rare, such people really hit the jackpot when they’re born into a culture that begs them to collect massive assault arsenals.
We think Paddock killed a lot of people, but be assured that eventually two friends will do the same thing, shooting out of adjacent windows, and they will have learned a lot from Paddock’s errors.
I suspect for people like this, as with the two notorious Los Angeles bank robbers in the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout, the real satisfaction lies in the long, elaborate preparation — these people took painstaking years to prepare their climaxes.
In terms of sheer body count, NMAAs are our biggest challenge. I think serious intelligence organizations rather than local police forces/the FBI, should be involved in the identification/tracking/detention of these supremely dangerous people. At least until we figure out a way to stop arming them like high-functioning terrorists.
He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser.
Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.
He has been in bad physical health. It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.
Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment. He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“
How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.
I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.
************************
Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest. Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden. Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”
This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies). There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.
What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.
********************
There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.
*******************
Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.
Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.
The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…
*******************
Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.
*******************
Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.
*****************
How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.
“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends,” [Utah Senator Mike] Lee said. “Think of [Trump] as Captain Moroni. He seeks not power but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.”
