The art of losing isn’t hard to master

[The loss of art is quite another matter]

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster

[Surely not “God Made the Firmament”?]

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[I lost a hall, a lovely one. And, vaster,

Sweet symphonies are gone, their music spent.

I miss them, and their loss is a disaster.]

The writer forgets raging misogyny.

One of the billionaires whose support put Bo French over the top in his primary runs a church where women may not speak and certainly may not have anything to do with the church beyond silently appearing at Yahweh’s homestead.

They must cover their sinful flesh, with special attention to cleavage.

UD can’t detect much difference, culturally, between this and, for instance, Wahhabism, which of course this dude hates with as murderous a passion as his man Bo does. Yet he shares misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc., with reactionary Islam…

… at Chapel Hill beyond belief.

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“I’m hoping this will be the start of a conversation amongst the board members of how we can remain competitive in athletics, but not, in the long run, at the expense of the academic mission.”

LOLOLOLOL

Another fascinating auction, this one Michael Dell’s never-used Boston penthouse, bought ten years ago and empty all that time. He can’t unload it, so the opening bid is 6.5 mill – a forty percent discount over the asking price all those years ago.

”The parents had several guns, including an AR-15 rifle, that were stored unsecured.”

Cuz you never know when the final battle’s gonna blow, so you need the big artillery at the ready.

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

But, see, guns are many things. Aren’t they? Your paranoid parents see them as apocalypse-busters; you, not so much. As you get more and more pissed with ma and pa, you eye the family arsenal with affection, for therein lies your revenge for the disciplinary shit the folks dish out.

Maybe to a non-15 year old, slaughtering the whole family seems excessive, but presumably the thinking here is that once you’ve reduced your primary targets to shuddering humps of blood, you’ll need to deal with four hysterical children running around shrieking while one of them calls the police or runs to the neighbors. They’ll have to go too, which means that you create a scene every bit as apocalyptic as your parents predicted.

I mean, they had in mind government and social, while you meant domestic, but the result, as far as your parents went, was the same: the sudden bloody shutting down of their entire world.

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

As for what the legal system representing by far the world’s most gunned-up location will do with an unstable kid who plucks an unsecured household annihilator and does a doomsday… Well, it’s a slow process. Two years after he did his thing, the courts are just beginning formal proceedings. Should he be tried as an adult? That’s the latest, and UD assumes the answer will be yes. But what does she know.

Hm. Hm.

… Florida Man.

Baa baa Bo French

They checked your DNA

How you look Euro

We really cannot say.

One side is Arab

A quarter’s Chinese

The rest is Texas incest

Please telephone police

The most galling part of their argument is the recurrent invocation of—and self-righteous cloaking of their argument in—the language of democracy. “The decision whether a type of arm is too dangerous for ordinary Americans to possess,” they wrote, “is one that the people are entitled to make, not one that courts are empowered to make for them.” They say this, to be clear, in a brief asking the judges of the Supreme Court to make the decision about what weapons can be possessed over the decision of voters. Because the lower courts upheld these laws, the challengers want the justices to tell the citizens of Connecticut, Chicago, and other jurisdictions like California and New York that they cannot make fundamental judgments about public peace and safety...

It seems that judges are empowered to second-guess the decision of the American people if, and only if, gun-rights proponents don’t like it. After all, the American people voted for these laws in more than a third of the country. Connecticut citizens saw an AR-15-style weapon slaughter innocent 6-year-olds and acted to expand their law. The challengers, on the other hand, would have the Supreme Court foreclose that pathway of democratic choice...

It distorts the concept of democracy to cloak oneself in the rhetoric of protecting decisions by “the people” while urging an insulated cadre of educated attorneys to tell the parents who buried their children and then devoted their lives to the prevention of gun violence to shut up and sit down; your voice and your vote do not matter here, the challengers demand the court to decree...

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson expressed the matter best when he wrote for a majority of judges upholding Maryland’s assault-weapon ban: “We shudder to imagine the hubris with which a court would disable representative government at the very moment that lethal technologies are proceeding at an accelerated and indeed unprecedented pace.”

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

Spectacular writing.

By this dude.

The use of pejorative terms here (‘severely rat-infested’) by Berkeley health officials is both insensitive and offensive. The hundreds of rats in the RV mentioned were pets that the two occupants (one died of leptospirosis; the other almost did) bred; their chosen form of animal companionship, while not perhaps yours – or the larger society’s – is neither illegal nor immoral. It is a free choice. Recall Nellie Bowles:

Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents...

[It’s] a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, …the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

I would urge SFGate, in its next article on the outbreak, to try phrases like lively melange of rats, or bustling brood of rats.

Bo On Skid Row.

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

Plunging, that is.

… the trustees of the Kennedy Center have transformed it into a facsimile of that state.

To honor WV’s most notable accomplishment — it’s the only US state with a smaller population today than it had in the mid-twentieth century — the trustees have completely emptied the KC of people, except for the board, which will itself disappear once they shut it down.

The derelict status of WV’s most famous county – McDowell – is featured in the ongoing physical collapse of the KC structure.

Finally, the trustees reportedly intend to allow the empty building to be overrun by addicts, a striking evocation of WV’s position at the forefront of American opioid deaths.

They just passed a law lowering the age for gun possession, so teens can rest easy that they can join the bloody back and forth that is civic life in Louisville. And for those who love the spectacle of the state’s little ones bleeding out on Main Street, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that social media types are more and more frequently filming and posting the last breaths. Just show up with your camera along Whiskey Row on a weekend night and you’ll probably get something.

The bad news is the summer’s almost over! With cooler weather come fewer bleed outs.

Mama, you are so wrong. In free societies, teachers strive to keep their convictions away from the front of the class, so that liberal, exploratory discourse can prevail.

This woman – who has lost her teaching job because she refuses to take off her hijab while in front of a room of students in Belgium – thinks God commands her to express her religious convictions, and model female modesty, at all times. Her conviction of this is so intense that she – unlike many Muslim women – would never think of removing her scarf for the duration of her classes. She would rather ruin her life than follow the law on this. The law is secular, and in this instance that doesn’t count.

Recall Boucar Diouf:

“How would an immigrant of Palestinian origin, contesting a conviction, feel in front of a judge wearing a kippah? Inversely, how would a young driver wearing a kippah feel faced with a policewoman wearing a hijab who just gave him a ticket?”

Recall also a recent German case.

The same anxiety pertains in the free classroom (not of course in the parochial classroom, which is set up to proselytize). How free would a budding feminist in a middle school feel to talk about cultures that hide women under hijabs and heavy robes, and call for sex-restricted swimming and other forms of gender separation?

The hijab/thick body robe is a powerful symbol of submission. Impressionable young women shouldn’t be subjected to that symbolic power from a person of authority in the formal setting of the classroom.

Odd enough that the chair of the Sussex County Republican Committee is gaming out the apocalyptic American warfare coming to New Jersey; more perilously, he brought his gun to a recent road rage incident and scared the shit out of some people.

He’s in custody facing multiple charges.