Another mass shooting

This time, at Brown University. It’s deja vu all over again. For some of the students, this was their second school shooting.

As the deadly attack unfolded at Brown University, leaving students hiding under desks and reeling as gunshots rang out, the scene was eerily familiar for at least two students.

Years earlier, Mia Tretta, 21, and Zoe Weissman, 20, had both survived school shootings. “What I’ve been feeling most is just, like, how dare this country allow this to happen to someone like me twice?” Weissman told the New York Times.

Two people were killed and nine others wounded on Saturday after a man dressed in black opened fire during final exams at one of America’s most prestigious colleges. Hundreds of police spent the night scouring the campus and nearby neighbourhoods as the suspect remained at large.

I’m working on some simple statistical problems for my genetics course — you know, basic stuff like the probability that two rare mutations would simultaneously occur in a single individual, etc. I’m not going to set up any problems around this kind of event in America, because this has become too real and too close to home. Also finals are an easy target: students are under stress, they’ve been openly studying (and complaining!) for weeks, and the finals schedules are easy to find online. It’s like we’re advertising that a herd of students will be gathering in a large space at precisely Day X and Time Y, and nobody plans on bringing a gun to such an event, other than cowards with nefarious intent. Maybe we need to start being more secure and confidential with this kind of information.

This story ends with another coincidence. Every story about a mass shooting somehow ends with a fairly typical and familiar conclusion.

Saturday’s attack has again cast a spotlight on longstanding calls for gun control in the US, where gun laws rank among the most permissive in the developed world. So far this year, there have been 389 mass shootings across the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines incidents where four or more victims have been shot. Last year, more than 500 mass shootings were reported.

Yeah, how weird that every story has to end with a conclusion deploring the USA’s insane gun policy.

I have another familiar part of the conclusion: nothing will be done.

For the capitalist parasites: they’re asking for it

The right-wingers are fighting among themselves again, inspired by Hegseth’s bombing of boats. Claire Lehmann, the terrible racist founder of Quillette, starts the bickering by complaining about the sinking…not that she opposes murdering random people from South American countries, but that it doesn’t look good and you should be more quiet about the slaughtering:

This is really grotesque.
(And look I get it that sometimes hard men need to do ugly things. But if you’re going to do this, don’t broadcast it, & don’t brag about it. FFS)

Billionaire Joe Lonsdale responds. If you’ve forgotten who he is, he made his fortune by starting out under Peter Thiel at PayPal, and then got really rich with Palantir, the company that profits from spying on your internet usage all around the world. Later, he was one of the founders of the University of Austin, the fake college for far-right and libertarian freaks. He wants more publicity for extra-judicial murder.

She’s just wrong. Leftist schoolmarm leaders cause violence and evil in our civilization.
Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals.
Killing bad guys is DoW job. He should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.

He’s a good example: bold, virtuous men failed to deter Joe Lonsdale. He might be on to something here, that maybe it’s time to hang a few billionaires to teach a lesson to those greedy parasites. He wants more than killing a few “narcoterrorists” (who haven’t been tried and convicted of anything), just public hanging for lots of crimes.

If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law.
We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.
Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.

For future reference, this is how billionaires want to run their utopia, in a “masculine” fashion with lots of public violence. I say we should hang them first. Viva la revolución! Give them what they want.

Jesus would have bombed those boats!

The NY Times did one of those things they’re so fond of: take an unscientific and inadequate sample of a subpopulation of voters, and ask them what they think of a recent policy decision. This time, they asked 6 Republicans what they think of bombing Venezualan boats. I’m not sure what the point is, except to let us know that Republicans are assholes.

Edward Padron, 67, thinks in principle that killing people in boats is OK, but killing survivors is wrong.

“I don’t agree with the second shot,” Mr. Padron said. “I do agree with them being stopped.”

Warning: Mr Padron holds the moral high ground in this group. It’s all downhill from there.

Erwin McKone, 55, has reservations about killing low-level guys in boats.

“If we were serious about the cartels, we would probably try to cut off the head of the snake,” he said, speculating that many of those who have been killed are “poor Venezuelans that see this as an opportunity to feed their families.”

I suspect he’d be fine if we just openly declared war on Venezuela.

Charles Vaughters, 25, favors killing alleged drug traffickers without much evidence.

“Drug traffickers are criminals who rape, murder and kill people, and they are dedicated to getting the product to Americans,” Mr. Vaughters said. “They don’t care if it harms Americans. I don’t think we should be feeling much sympathy.”

Rachel Uecker, 53, has a pragmatic perspective.

“​​If we take them to the courts, we’re going to have to pay for that and support them in prison,” she said. “If they’re bringing drugs into our country, I don’t care who gets rid of them.”

Brian Kozlowski, 41, wants more violence.

Brian D. Kozlowski, who is a strong Trump supporter, said the U.S. military should be used “more proactively to keep Americans safe.” He blamed the Biden administration for what he described as not doing enough to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the country.

He’s a lawyer. Let’s get rid of that troubling concept of presumed innocence.

But my very favorite example of twisted moral reasoning comes from Naomi Villalba (no age given), who cites the Bible as justification.

Ms. Villalba said the second strike was also justified, and she does not believe the United States is indiscriminately targeting boats.

“They should have done that strike regardless,” she said. “Every human being does have value, but if you’re caught up in something that’s very detrimental to society, I think that you should die.”

She compared these strikes to a story in the Bible, when Jesus healed someone on a Sunday, contradicting religious rules that forbid work on that day. Some laws are worth breaking for the betterment of mankind, she said, just like the biblical story was trying to show.

Well, yeah. If Jesus could break one of the ten commandments to heal someone, then Pete Hegseth can also break one of the commandments to murder two people clinging to wreckage in the ocean. Same thing. Every human being does have value, but….

Does being caught up in something detrimental to society also include evangelical Christianity and MAGA?

I take back my disparagement of the NY Times’ methods of taking the pulse of the country. I did learn something after all.

Merry MAGA Xmas

It’s a typical scenario this time of year: Ol’ Grandpa has a festive wreath on his door, delivery driver drops off a package at his door, Ol’ Grandpa emerges to call ICE and 911 because the driver speaks Spanish.

Ol’ Racist Grandpa explains that this is Wyoming, not Colorado, while the driver says “thank you,” and just tries to get in his car and leave, which Ol’ Racist Grandpa doesn’t allow.

I think someone ought to call the police on Ol’ Racist Grandpa.

Ol’ Racist Grandpa needs to be arrested and fined for wasting the time of 911 services.

Ol’ Racist Grandpa needs to be retired to an old folks’ home, before his hatred hurts someone.

I hope Ol’ Racist Grandpa isn’t allowed to have a gun in his home, although this is Wyoming, they probably allow it.

MAGA has really poisoned the country, hasn’t it?

Mission for our next president: institute the damnatio memoriae

In yet another pointless sop to his ego, the president has renamed the Institute of Peace after himself.

The Trump administration has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after President Donald Trump and has planted the president’s name on the organization’s headquarters despite an ongoing fight over the institute’s control.

It’s the latest twist in a seesaw court battle over who controls the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on peace initiatives. It was an early target of the Department of Government Efficiency this year.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it renamed the organization to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” The new name could be seen on its building, which is near the State Department.

This is the first I’ve heard of the US Institute of Peace — apparently it was founded by Reagan, has floundered ineffectively for decades, and was recently gutted by DOGE, so I can’t be too wound up about this renaming. It’s still yet another transparent ploy by Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and I’m disgusted by the game he’s playing.

Our next president had better be motivated to expunge the Trump name from every building and every document, unless it is to damn him to hell. Our national shame is being advertised everywhere, and I hate it.

You mean Legally Blonde was not a documentary?

I wish I could say that I hope Trump is learning something, but I doubt that he is. It seems that appointing attractive young women to high positions in his legal team has drawbacks — not that he should discriminate against young women, but that being blonde is not sufficient qualification before the law.

So the Trump administration’s cases against Letitia James and James Comey have been thrown out, on the basis that the lead prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan was not qualified, and that she was illegally appointed. She was sternly rebuked by the judge, which must have been embarrassing for her.

Then a panel of judges disqualified Alina Habba straight out of her job as the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Trump hadn’t bothered to get congressional approval for her appointment, as part of his ongoing campaign to become the authoritarian emperor who doesn’t need laws, legislatures, or courts.

Their qualifications seem to have been being attractive enough to catch the king’s eye, and then being slavishly sycophantic. Please, can Pam Bondi be next in line for public disgrace?

Again, this isn’t about their looks, although Trump definitely has a type — it’s about letting their appearance override their lack of competence.

Sorry, I’m going to be pessimistic again

Let’s see…we’re living in a country run by openly corrupt oligarchs. The educational system is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian fanatics. We’re almost certainly headed for an economic crash, as billionaires pour billions of our dollars into the AI fantasy. MAHA is similarly chasing illusions, that removing food dyes will correct systematic patterns of abuse by Big Food, and that autism is caused by whatever unlikely correlation Robert Felching Kennedy Jr names. The anti-war president is searching for a casus belli to blow up boats in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. What else could possibly go wrong?

How about another pandemic? How about a bird flu pandemic?

After a quiet summer, bird flu is on the move again, and experts say it poses an escalating threat. While the virus doesn’t appear capable of spreading from human to human, it has killed people exposed to sick poultry. This year, the United States saw its first death from bird flu, a Louisiana senior with a flock of backyard chickens.

Viruses are constantly evolving, and if a person catches bird flu while infected with a seasonal flu, the pathogens could mutate into a variant that infects large numbers of people. “The minute it transmits in humans, it’s done,” warned Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In our recent bird flu epidemic, for most of us it was a nuisance: egg shortages in the grocery stores, higher prices. But in the center of the epidemic, factory farms in Ohio and Indiana, it was far worse. Entire flocks of chickens had to be killed to suppress the spread. Farmers going out of business. Would you believe mass graves with millions of birds?

ProPublica has published evidence that the avian virus is spread by airborne contamination.

Our finding: The wind was at least a plausible explanation for how the virus could have spread from farm to farm.

We shared our analysis of the outbreak with eight experts in avian flu who agreed with that assessment. Several of them felt it was more than a mere possibility.

“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”

The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.

But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.

“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.

There has been talk of pre-emptively vaccinating chickens…but the idea is opposed by the chicken meat and egg industries. That might give foreign buyers the impression that American chickens are tainted, and we can’t have that! So instead we’ll dig trenches and bury millions of birds when the virus appears, which is our government approved strategy. You know who is behind this approach.

Adding to the headwinds is U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the virus should be allowed to burn through flocks so that farmers can identify birds with natural immunity, an approach public health experts have called “dangerous and unethical.”

That’s the same strategy many of these MAHA morons endorsed for COVID — let it burn through the human population until the virus was “done”. That would have been a disaster, but now they want to do the same thing for the poultry industry. Maybe they’ll get to do the experiment in the near future if the bird flu jumps to the human population.

We are so screwed in so many ways.

Somebody got paid

The US government hates drug dealers so much that they’re willing to blow up fishing boats to kill them extrajudicially — boats that might contain only fishermen, but because some are “narcoboats,” the Secretary of War believes he is authorized to “kill everybody”.

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Some current and former US officials and experts have said, according to the Post, that the Trump administration’s missile strikes in the Caribbean may be unlawful. To date, more than 80 people have been killed in the series of military strikes, targeting at least 22 more boats.

No wonder our president thinks telling our military to not follow unlawful orders is sedition — he’s eager to commit murder under the excuse that he opposes drug trafficking. Curiously, though, while he’s slaughtering low-level possible narcotics dealers without evidence that they actually are criminals, he’s showing mercy to rich, convicted kingpins of the drug trade who made millions of dollars shipping cocaine into the US.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024 was convicted for drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

What’s the difference between a poor South American guy working on a small boat in the ocean and a rich Central American who probably has many millions of dollars salted away in shady banks? I don’t think it’s geography. I suspect someone got an awful lot of money to whisper in a senile president’s ear. Said president might have also wet his beak in the bribe.

Hey, does anyone else think this whole business of presidents being able to circumvent the law and nullify the decisions of the courts to reek of royal privilege?

The most cutting burn ever

Also, the worst case of getting old ever. Dorothy Fuldheim was a well-respected and cutting edge newscaster from Cleveland from the 1930s until her death in 1984. She made the mistake of going on the Johnny Carson show in 1979, with Richard Pryor…and you can guess how that went. It was a classic example of clueless white person who doesn’t believe poverty is real meeting a black person who actually knows what the real world is like.

Suddenly, it’s clear how Ronald Reagan got elected.