Down Under Disappointment

Australian voters have overwhelmingly rejected a referendum to give Indigenous people rights as a recognized group, because that would be racist against anyone who isn't a member of that class, you see.

Australia has overwhelmingly rejected a plan to give greater rights to Indigenous people in a referendum.

All six states voted no to a proposal to change the constitution to recognise Indigenous citizens and create an advisory body to the government.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said defeat was hard: "When you aim high, sometimes you fall short. We understand and respect that we have."

Opposition leader Peter Dutton said the result was "good for our country".

The referendum, dubbed "The Voice", was Australia's first in more than a quarter of a century. With almost 70% of the vote counted, the "No" vote led "Yes" 60% to 40%.

Its rejection followed a fraught and often ill-tempered campaign.

Supporters said that entrenching the Indigenous peoples into the constitution would unite Australia and usher in a new era.

No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

They were criticised over their appeal to undecided voters with a "Don't know? Vote no" message, and accused of running a campaign based on misinformation about the effects of the plan.

The result leaves Mr Albanese searching for a way forward with his vision for the country, and a resurgent opposition keen to capitalise on its victory.

 

So, Indigenous Australians will continue to not actually be Australians under the country's legal system, with fewer rights than other Australians, and that's what the 95% of Australians who are non-Indigenous voted for.

You don't have to work as hard as Republicans here in America have for the last 60 years to reverse the civil rights era if like Australia, you never actually have one. After all, we still have most Native American on reservations, and that's not going to change in my lifetime either.

There's no debating the racism in America or Australia (or the UK, Canad or New Zealand), the debate is over whether or not it's a bad thing, and for most folks in these coutries, the answer is no.

For those who actually are harmed by it, well, too bad, the majority has spoken.

Democracy!

The Passing Of Two Ambassadors

Two men who represented vastly different things, and yet were both ambassadors of worldwide renown, have passed. First, tropical rocker Jimmy Buffett, the Mayor of Margaritaville himself, has gone into his final sandy sunset. Buffett's fame was so pervasive that even President Biden noted his passing.

A poet of paradise, Jimmy Buffett was an American music icon who inspired generations to step back and find the joy in life and in one another.

His witty, wistful songs celebrate a uniquely American cast of characters and seaside folkways, weaving together an unforgettable musical mix of country, folk, rock, pop, and calypso into something uniquely his own.

We had the honor to meet and get to know Jimmy over the years, and he was in life as he was performing on stage – full of goodwill and joy, using his gift to bring people together.

Over more than 50 studio and live albums and thousands of performances to devoted Parrot Heads around the world, Jimmy reminded us how much the simple things in life matter – the people we love, the places we’re from, the hopes we have on the horizon.

A two-time Grammy nominee and winner of multiple country music awards, he was also a best-selling writer, businessman, pilot, and conservationist who championed the waters and Gulf Coast that he so loved.

Jill and I send our love to his wife of 46 years, Jane; to their children, Savannah, Sarah, and Cameron; to their grandchildren; and to the millions of fans who will continue to love him even as his ship now sails for new shores.

 

A second ambassador has also left us, former UN Ambassador and Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Bill Richardson, a two-term Democratic governor of New Mexico and an American ambassador to the United Nations who also worked for years to secure the release of Americans detained by foreign adversaries, has died. He was 75.

The Richardson Center for Global Engagement, which he founded and led, said in a statement Saturday that he died in his sleep at his home in Chatham, Massachusetts.

“He lived his entire life in the service of others — including both his time in government and his subsequent career helping to free people held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad,” said Mickey Bergman, the center’s vice president. “There was no person that Gov. Richardson would not speak with if it held the promise of returning a person to freedom. The world has lost a champion for those held unjustly abroad and I have lost a mentor and a dear friend.”

Before his election in 2002 as governor, Richardson was the U.S. envoy to the United Nations and energy secretary under President Bill Clinton and served 14 years as a congressman representing northern New Mexico.

But he also forged an identity as an unofficial diplomatic troubleshooter. He traveled the globe negotiating the release of hostages and American servicemen from North Korea, Iraq, Cuba and Sudan and bargained with a who’s who of America’s adversaries, including Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It was a role that Richardson relished, once describing himself as “the informal undersecretary for thugs.”

“I plead guilty to photo-ops and getting human beings rescued and improving the lives of human beings,” he once told reporters.

He helped secure the 2021 release of American journalist Danny Fenster from a Myanmar prison and this year negotiated the freedom of Taylor Dudley, who crossed the border from Poland into Russia. He flew to Moscow for a meeting with Russian government officials in the months before the release last year of Marine veteran Trevor Reed in a prisoner swap and also worked on the cases of Brittney Griner, the WNBA star freed by Moscow last year, and Michael White, a Navy veteran freed by Iran in 2020.

 

Both men made the world a better place with their decades of work.

 

Sunday Long Read: The Mountain Of Fear

This week's Sunday Long Read has The Believer's Joshua Hunt take us on a trip to Japan's Osorezan -- Mount Fear -- as he deals with the death of his uncle among the surreal landscape of the ancient temples, trails, and travails.

 

In January 2023, while waiting to board a plane in Stockholm, I saw how swiftly grief can take hold of a person. In a quiet corner of Arlanda Airport, it unfolded before me like a scene from a movie: an older woman answered her cell phone, listened for a few moments to the voice on the other end, then burst into tears. Her anguish was so immediate, and so visceral, that it could only have been the worst kind of news—the end of a marriage, a dream, or a life. Not just any life, though: one so precious to her that its end was immediately comprehensible.

It was this immediacy that struck me as cinematic, because in real life, or at least in my life, death is many other things before it is something I can cry about. Last year, when my uncle Bill died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven, months passed before I could even conceive of his absence. He meant more to me than any other man, including my father, and yet his death was not at once fathomable to me. It landed with no impact I could make sense of; robbed of the clarifying weight of tragedy, I experienced his death first as an inconvenience. An obstacle. A disturbance that immediately complicated my life, or at least my career, which is what I had instead of a life. The instincts that had helped lift me out of poverty had also made it hard to slow down, and so I lived as if on the run. Next stop: Tokyo, where I planned to cement my relationship with a big American magazine by writing the definitive profile of a major Japanese novelist.

These plans started taking shape in May 2022, when the lease on my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, was coming to an end. The rent was going up so much that renewing it seemed like a gamble I wasn’t likely to collect on. Instead, I decided to do the responsible thing: put my stuff in storage, fly to Tokyo, and spend three months living in a modestly priced hotel while I wrote the story. I’d lived in Japan before, and going back after two years away seemed like the best shot I had at shaking off my malaise. It was also my best shot at producing a story that might take my writing career to the next level—a level that would put me in a position to take the occasional rent increase in stride.

By the end of the first week in June, I’d made it only as far as Manhattan, where a friend had invited me to house-sit while his family was on vacation. I was in their downtown apartment when I got the phone call about my uncle Bill. In bed but not yet asleep, I picked up the second of two late-night phone calls from my mom. Crying, and almost certainly a bit drunk, she told me that her little brother was gone, and all I could say was “Oh no.” When our call ended, a little after midnight, I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to old voicemail messages from my uncle. The most recent one was dated December 25, 2021: “Merry Christmas, Josh. I love you. It’s Uncle Bill. Hope you’re having a wonderful day. Talk to you later. Bye.”

I was meant to visit him three weeks after he left that message, but on the morning of my flight to Juneau, Alaska, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’d contracted the virus while working on a story in New Mexico—my first profile for the magazine I hoped to impress by flying halfway around the world to interview a novelist. While listening to old messages from my uncle, I dwelled bitterly on two unfulfilled promises I had made when calling to say I couldn’t make it home in January: the first was that I would get to Alaska and see him again soon; the second was that he was going to love the profile I had been working on in New Mexico. It ended up being published ten days after he died.

With my flight to Japan booked, and my nonrefundable accommodations paid for in advance, I had a narrow window for making it to the potlatch that would serve as my uncle Bill’s memorial. In Tlingit culture—our culture—the memorial potlatch has traditionally served as both a funerary ritual and a proto-capitalist one; for centuries, our departed were sent on their way with singing, dancing, food, and an ostentatious display of the wealth they would leave behind for others. These days, the banquets tend to resemble any other family cookout, and not many of our people have much wealth to leave behind. A few years ago, I met a man who put off his dad’s potlatch long enough for the carving of a large memorial totem, which struck me as the height of Tlingit opulence. My uncle Bill had left nothing behind, though, because he’d had so little, and because he had shared what little he had so freely. His potlatch proceeded as soon as a small wooden box with an image of an orca was carved to receive his ashes. By that time, though, my window of opportunity for attending had closed.

My mom sent me an announcement for the memorial service, which I perused on my phone during a layover on my way to Tokyo. In a quiet corner of Los Angeles International Airport, a dull pain grew sharper as I stared at the photograph they had chosen. It shows my uncle Bill standing on a beach on the outskirts of Juneau, bathed in sunlight passing through the sieve of an overcast sky. It is October 28, 2021, and in a few hours he will drive me to the airport for the last time. First we drive back to town, though, and along the way a double rainbow appears in the distance. He slows the pickup truck, then eases it over to the side of the road. He makes a dumb joke and asks me to take a picture of the two rainbows. When I send it to him later, I include another photo I took just a bit earlier. In it he is standing on the beach, dressed in jeans and a Carhartt shirt, smiling like he can already see the rainbows waiting just up the road.

 

It's a good story. 

And tell the people whom you love that you do love them. Eventually you won't have that chance anymore.

Trump Cards, Con't

Congrats to Team WIN THE MORNING who have finally figured out what any ZVTS reader could have told you a decade ago: the only thing that matters to Republican voters is owning the libs.

 

The mesh trucker hats, “Bud Right” koozies and “Abolish the FBI” yard signs Republican presidential candidates are feverishly hawking are, on the surface, all about amassing enough small-dollar donors to qualify for the first debate.

But there’s something else revealing about the candidates’ emporiums of red meat. In the modern GOP, owning the libs is what sells.

“Forty years ago, it would’ve been ‘Free Ukraine,’ next to Reagan’s picture,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “Freedom and liberty for all is not … the incentive structure in our politics, unfortunately.”

In the merchandising arms race of today, it’s not the economy, stupid. It’s Ron DeSantis’ $37.47 “Build the Wall” trucker hat, Nikki Haley’s “Strong & Proud, Not Weak & Woke” t-shirt or a Perry Johnson “I identify as non-Bidenary” sticker.

Once the “party of new ideas,” the culture wars are the new platform, not simply a plank.

“We’re kind of anti-woke,” said Johnson, the businessperson and longshot presidential contender from Michigan who is selling a mug with the promise to “keep kids off socialism.” “In fact, I think the whole party is pretty much anti-woke.”

It’s not hard to understand why Republicans are emphasizing cultural issues — not Reagan’s image — in their sales. They’re following the example of a more recent president, who seven years ago turned his red MAGA hat into a ubiquitous symbol of the right. Whole wardrobes materialized in homage to his Hillary Clinton-inspired chants of “Lock her up!”

 

The difference as to why Trump is winning by 20 points in Florida over DeSantis in Florida, 30 points in South Carolina over Nikki Haley and Tim Scott and 30 points in Iowa is very simple. Trump's the guy who won't just own the libs, he'll destroy them using the power of the US government.

Trump voters want "those people" destroyed to the point where the Obama/Biden coalition never dares to lift a voice to speak, a hand to vote, or eyes to see. They're voting for Trump so that happens. They want revenge, retaliation, and revanchism. and Trump will give it to them. A war is coming and they want to be on the winning side.

Politico seems to think it's just about merchandising.

It is not.

Sunday Long Read: The Neighbors From Hell

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from the Washington Post's Tim Carman, detailing a small-town northern Virginia restaurant ran by a gay couple that was doing perfectly fine until their new neighbors moved in, and started a war against the idea that a restaurant ran by a gay couple in small-town anywhere should be allowed.

 

As soon as she spotted the lifeless vermin, Tiffany Foster had a hunch about how it appeared near the trash bins behind the Front Porch Market and Grill in The Plains, Va. The general manager went inside, pulled out her phone and reviewed security-camera footage. Her suspicion was confirmed: The dead rat had been tossed onto the property.

The suspect? Mike Washer. The businessman and his wife, Melissa, first complained to the Front Porch proprietors about pre-dawn vendor deliveries in 2019, not long after the conservative Christian couple moved their financial firm right next door to the restaurant, which flies a gay Pride flag. The renovated building doubles as the Washers’ residence, where they have a front-row view of the Front Porch’s operation.

By the time the rat appeared last summer, the relationship between the two businesses had devolved. A year earlier, the Washers had started filing complaints about their neighbor’s trash with the health department. Fed up with what they viewed as harassment, the Front Porch owners filed a no-trespassing order against their neighbors. The Washers responded by installing signs to prevent diners from parking in spaces the Washers own in the shared lot. They confronted or towed drivers who ignored the signs. Their attorney threatened legal action against the restaurant’s suppliers if their trucks continued to “trespass” in the lot. The same attorney wrote a town official, challenging the restaurant’s right to operate under its existing permit.


Still, when she spotted the rat last August, Foster was not prepared for what she saw on the video: Mike Washer flipping the rodent onto the Front Porch’s property and taking photos of it, in what she assumed was a staged effort to flag health officials about an infestation. Foster remembers thinking, “I cannot believe that someone would stoop so low to try to put someone out of business.”

The Washers don’t deny Mike’s actions but dispute the motivation: They say they have no interest in closing the Front Porch. They claim the rat was first dumped near their back door by restaurant employees, and Mike was returning the favor.

What’s more, the Washers say, the dead rat was just one more insult that the couple, who once planted an “all lives matter” sign in their front yard, have endured since moving next door to a restaurant owned by a gay couple. They are not the harassers, the Washers argue. They are the harassed. They say they are being treated unfairly because they are conservative. They say they have been insulted by staff, including Foster, have lived with a bright security light shining into their home, and have found used chewing tobacco next to their car doors.

“We still feel like somebody put it there to, excuse me, eff with us,” Melissa Washer said about the rat. “Because they had done so many other little s---ty things to us.”

This conflict has dragged on for years, creating friction where friendships used to be and often forcing residents to pick sides. The conflict has dragged on so long that some people in The Plains, population 250 or so, have been left to develop theories about what’s driving it, some perhaps more rooted in reality than others: Some fear the Washers’ actions could break the town financially with hearings, lawsuits and paperwork. They even fear the couple’s legal challenge could end up compromising The Plains’ ability to maintain its old-world charm.

“Part of what makes our community special are long-standing social networks and special traditions built on trust,” the Rev. E. Weston Mathews, rector of Grace Episcopal Church in The Plains, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

“But like so many places in our country, our community is not immune to dangerous conspiracy theories, extremism and tribalism,” Mathews continued. “In my view, what began as a difficult dispute between two neighboring businesses has become something much greater, is accelerating through social media and is damaging our sense of trust in each other as neighbors in a close-knit village.”

The Washers — the newcomers in a village where families that have lived there 20 years still feel like outsiders — say they’re misunderstood. They love this tiny town. They’re not out to destroy it, or remake it.

 

This is a story of the classic conservative "I'm the real victim here having to put up with those people!" fight that consumed an entire village. One side of the fight is an older Gen X gay couple making pancakes and the other side is an older Gen X straight couple who went to DC on January 6th, 2021. Not even the WaPo's bothsiderism can hide the level of pure hate radiating from the right-wing assholes here. The rat was just one part of it.

As a bigger picture in America of the 2020's, this one is going to stick with you.

Border Line Insanity, Con't

At least eight people are dead after an SUV plowed into a group of migrant workers waiting at a bus stop in Brownsville, Texas, and indications are the act could very well have been deliberate.

 

Brownsville police investigator Martin Sandoval said the crash happened about 8:30 a.m. local time. The driver, Sandoval said, is a Hispanic male who was hospitalized for treatment of injuries before being taken in to police custody on charges of reckless driving. More charges are expected soon, he said.

Sandoval said the cause of the crash has not been determined, but that police are awaiting results from a blood sample taken from the driver to see if he was under the influence. The driver, apparently injured when his silver Range Rover overturned in the crash, is not cooperating with officers and had not yet been identified, he said.

The death toll climbed by one Sunday after a victim succumbed to their injuries at the hospital, Mayor Trey Mendez said Sunday evening in a statement. “We have had one more casualty as one of the injured tragically passed away from their injuries at the hospital,” Mendez said. “The total lives lost is currently 8 and several more remain critical.”

Luis Herrera, who was among those hit by the SUV, said in an interview that many of the victims already had tickets out of Brownsville, some to reunite with their families. Herrera, 33, who suffered a broken arm and was released from the hospital Sunday afternoon, said the driver was taunting people standing at the bus stop, driving past them and yelling insults.

“He crossed the street and he hit the gas and he drove by my legs, and hurt my arm,” he said in Spanish. “The others, he killed almost all of them.”

He recalled the driver yelling: “You’re invading my property!”

Sandoval said the driver allegedly ran a red light and plowed into a group of people standing at a local bus stop in this border city in southeastern Texas. The victims were standing outside the Bishop Enrique San Pedro Ozanam Center, a migrant and homeless shelter in the border town.

Those injured were taken to hospitals, Sandoval said, including one who was airlifted.

“He just hit the people,” he said.

Police were still trying to confirm the names and ages of the victims. Sandoval said some were migrants from Venezuela who recently crossed the border. The bus stop serves migrants and U.S. citizens in this city of 190,000 residents.

“This is a public bus stop,” he said. “So we don’t know if some residents of ours were there.”

Police are awaiting help from the U.S. Border Patrol to identify the victims, since some may have been recently processed at the border. “Definitely, there were some migrants there,” Sandoval said.

The homeless shelter had been housing several recent border crossers. Brownsville is one of the areas receiving large numbers of migrants as the federal government prepares to lift pandemic travel restrictions Thursday and reopen the border to asylum seekers.

Video obtained by The Washington Post showed the driver running the red light about 100 feet away from where the victims were waiting for a bus.

Witnesses said the driver tried to run away afterward, Victor Maldonado, director of the Ozanam center, told The Post. But the witnesses stopped him from leaving the scene, Maldonado added. Some witnesses said he appeared to be driving under the influence, Maldonado said.

 

Maybe the driver was drunk, maybe he wasn't, but eight people are dead, several of them migrant workers. We still have a gun problem for sure, but yeah, there are other ways to commit mass killings in America.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Another day in Gunmerica Saturday as an armed man with an AR-15 killed eight and injured seven more at a Dallas-area outlet mall before a police officer arrived to "neutralize" the shooter.

 

Authorities responded to the Allen Premium Outlets to investigate a shooting Saturday afternoon that killed eight victims and sent others to hospitals, with a victim as young as 5 years old.

The Allen Police Department said one of its officers responded to the outlet mall for an unrelated call, when they heard gunshots just after 3:30 p.m.

That officer "engaged the suspect and neutralized the threat," police said.

There were nine people who died, including the shooter. Seven were pronounced dead on scene, while two others died at the hospital.

The Allen Fire Department transported nine victims, but others may have been transported by other agencies or driven to a hospital by friends or family.

Police said there are three victims in critical condition and four in stable condition.

A spokesperson for Medical City Healthcare said eight victims ranging from 5 to 61 years old are being treated at their facilities.

There were multiple agencies that responded to secure the scene, including the Allen Police Department, Collin County Sheriff's Office, FBI, and ATF.

Police said there is no active threat at this time, and they believe the shooter acted alone.

"We were outside the Converse store and we just heard all this popping," said Elaine Penicaro, who was shopping with her daughter. "We kind of all just stopped, and then a second later, just 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,' and there were sparks flying like it was right in front of us."

 

A five-year-old victim, and we will do nothing. If anything, the message in permitless, open carry Texas is the victims who died did so because they didn't exercise their own 2nd Amendment rights in a building where guns were prohibited.

That's surely what people who witnessed the massacre will be told by police, friends, and family. "Maybe if you were armed and trained that five-year-old would still be alive today. Maybe you need to be the person who acts next time. You need to be the good guy with the gun from now on."

Just another day in Gunmerica. Texas Republicans have done nothing but offer thoughts and prayers and that's all they'll ever do the next time a massacre happens.

 

For his part, President Biden wants Congress to send him an assault rifle ban, but this will never happen as long as Republicans keep being elected, and voters decide to change that.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow

If you're still wondering why Republicans are trying to exterminate LGBTQ+ America now, it's because they are a major part of our future.

 

About 1 in 4 high school students identifies as LGBTQ, according to a report the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday, using data from 2021.

In 2021, 75.5 percent of high school students identified as heterosexual, the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) found.

Among high school students, 12.2 percent identified as bisexual, 5.2 percent as questioning, 3.9 percent as other, 3.2 percent as gay or lesbian and 1.8 percent said they didn’t understand the question.

The CDC says the number of LGBTQ students went from 11 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2021.

The health organization said a potential reason for the increase in LGBTQ students could be from their wording around students who are questioning their sexuality.

“Increases in the percentage of LGBQ+ students in YRBSS 2021 might be a result of changes in question wording to include students identifying as questioning, ‘I am not sure about my sexual identity (questioning),’ or other, ‘I describe my sexual identity in some other way,’” the report reads.

 

Gen Z is asking questions that Republicans don't want answered by anything other than brutality, collective punishment, and genocide. Even if the number is just those who question their sexuality, 1 in 4 Gen Z kids is 25% too many.

 

The GOP knows it has no future in an America that increasingly is not straight, not white, and not Christian. The rest of us have to be cowed or destroyed for that shrinking minority to continue to rule over half the country.

 

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Black lives, Black History, Black experiences still matter, even when white Republicans try to erase us.

 

Louisiana Republican Party officials want state lawmakers to forbid the study of racism at colleges and universities, arguing in a resolution approved Saturday that classes examining "inglorious aspects" of United States history are too divisive.

The resolution, passed by voice vote with no discernible dissent at the state party's quarterly meeting in Baton Rouge, asks the Legislature to pass laws removing diversity, equity and inclusion departments and agencies "within any institution of higher learning within the state." Without citing evidence, the resolution asserts that these programs have bloated budgets and inflamed political tensions on campuses.

The move comes amid efforts by Republican lawmakers nationwide to exert more control over educational materials and curricula, including books containing LGBTQ+ themes and classes about racism. They hope the effort will endear them to the GOP’s grassroots base as the party recovers from its 2022 midterm losses and prepares for the 2024 presidential election.

The Louisiana GOP chapter has remained mostly aligned with the national party's far-right factions, rallying in support of former President Donald Trump ahead of his arrest this month and endorsing Trump acolyte Jeff Landry, the state attorney general, for governor. That stance has repeatedly stirred controversy for local party leaders.

In approving Saturday's resolution, state party officials urged the Legislature to take steps similar to those of other conservative states that have considered curtailing programs deemed to increase tribalism and hostility on campuses.

The resolution targets both classroom content promulgating critical race theory and efforts to improve diversity in higher education staffing and campus programming. It criticizes LSU and University of Louisiana System programs run by Claire Norris, a UL system administrator, for dedicating money and staff to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, offices.

The measure argues that "DEI bureaucracies" act as "divisive ideological commissariats" and that critical race theory makes students feel less rather than more welcome.

The resolution drew a rebuke from University of Louisiana System President Jim Henderson, who in a written statement called the depiction of life on campuses "so foreign to the reality at our institutions it defies comment."

"We make no statement on the inner workings and platform development of political parties. That is their business," Henderson said. "That said, the naming of an invaluable member of my staff is unnecessary and inappropriate. She is an exemplary professional and an asset to Louisiana and higher education."

Louisiana Commissioner of Higher Education Kim Hunter Reed said in a statement that the Board of Regents stands by its programming.

"Programs that support student success and strengthen a sense of belonging on campus and in the wider community are important and impactful, yielding positive results in student completion," Reed said.

 

As I've said before when you outlaw a culture's history, when you outlaw learning about the dark aspects of that history, when you make teaching about that history illegal, you erase that culture, and you erase that people.

And then the injustices that happened then, happen again.

Black Lives Still Matter.

 

Sunday Long Read: Power Dril Nation

This week's Sunday Long Read is Nate Rogers's profile of legendary Twitter zeitgeist poster Paul "dril" Hochney in The Ringer, the man behind one of the most surreal and witty accounts of the last decade, making the trenchant observations of a digital world one shitpost at a time.

 

Dril is a real person, or so I had been told. Sitting in the House of Pies in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I was waiting for him to join me in a booth—but I didn’t know who was actually going to show up.

It was the quiet midafternoon hours at the diner, which is a relic of when the area was less upscale, and it still partially attracts an off-key clientele of misfits and bozos, some of whom are alone and in no hurry to leave. (As I sat, an older man in oversized overalls walked by carrying a seat cushion; it was unclear whether he worked there.) This venue was the most readily available approximation of Dril’s world that I could think of.

While I waited, I pulled up Dril’s Twitter account and looked at a recent post: “The fact is,” he wrote, “people arent doing a good job wiping their ass these days. And its attracting all manner of stray dogs and coyotes to our towns.” The likes were ticking up and up in real time as they moved toward their eventual zenith of almost 17,000. By Dril standards, this wasn’t even a particularly popular—or deranged—post.

With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet. Active since 2008, the Dril account—simultaneously known by the profile name “Wint”—with its grainy Jack Nicholson avatar, has been responsible for countless viral posts, just as beloved for the vivid scenes they induce as for the baffling grammatical and spelling errors they contain. Many of his tweets have become part of the permanent online lexicon: “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”; “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’”; “i am selling six beautfiul, extremely ill, white horses. they no longer recognize me as their father, and are the Burden of my life.”

To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.

For almost 10 years, he was entirely anonymous. Like a decent number of the people in the so-called “Weird Twitter” scene that Dril is still vaguely a part of, he doesn’t put his real name on the account—but as time has gone on and his popularity has grown, it’s become nothing short of miraculous that he’s kept up the mystery. He’s a pyramid-obsessed phantom. He’s banky. Still, over the years, some of his digital curtain has begun to part—largely spurred by his being doxxed in 2017, when his identity was revealed to supposedly be that of a man named Paul.

Around the same time, Dril started a Patreon, released a book, Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection, and had an Adult Swim television show, TruthPoint—a surrealist Infowars parody in which he manifested behind a cheap old man mask and bantered with self-professed “manic pixie stream boy” cohost Derek Estevez-Olsen. Dril also began doing an interview here and there, but never anything substantial, and always in character. I reached out to him via email, and when he replied, the name attached to the account was “paul d.” But I still wasn’t totally sure that he wouldn’t walk into House of Pies with his mask on, throw a plate against a wall, and then walk out.

“I’m Paul,” he said, once he found me and after I began by asking whom, exactly, I could say I was speaking to.

Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity.

He opted to stick with water—not a terrible decision at the House of Pies, but also, I worried, a choice that theoretically allowed him a quick exit at any point. For a while, I got the sense that he might have been deciding how much to reveal to me in real time, based on how the conversation went. But one thing he was clear about from the beginning: It was all right to end this game of living in the digital shadows.

“I mean, my name is already out there,” he said, acknowledging the fact that, after the doxxing, he had at separate points confirmed his name on both Twitter and Reddit. “It’s in my Wikipedia article. Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”

In some sense, anonymity has served a creative purpose. “Practically, it’s a good tool,” Estevez-Olsen told me later in a phone interview, “because when you make a post, you don’t want to be like, ‘From Paul Dochney, I fuck flags’ or whatever. You want to have some distance from it.” (He would know: “Estevez-Olsen” is itself a TruthPoint stage name that he asked me to use for reasons of privacy.)

But the secrecy has also lingered because of the types of personalities Dril naturally attracts to his orbit. “Most people are normal,” Dochney explained. “But there’s, like, three or four weirdos who just ruin it for everyone.” Jon Hendren, a fellow titan of Weird Twitter who is known by his subtle handle, @fart, told me that he had seen some disturbing messages people had sent Dochney in the past—that he wasn’t being paranoid or dramatic. “It’s gotta be kind of surreal,” Hendren said. “And it’s got to be kind of difficult to live with.”

 

Before Elon Musk brings Twitter to a grinding halt with pieces of it falling off like a cartoon Ford Pinto, it's nice to know that yeah, social media in the 2010's and early 2020's was pretty good with people like dril in it.

 

Right before, you know, it all went to shit.

Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Another school shooting, another seven dead, including the assailant, the place, a Nashville Christian private school, the shooter, a 28-year-old former student.

A shooter who killed three 9-year-old students and three adults at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville Monday had maps of the school, left behind writings and scouted a second possible attack location, police said.

Police identified the shooter as Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old former student at the school, and called the attack targeted. Hale was shot and killed by police during the attack, which was the deadliest school shooting in nearly a year.

Hale, armed with three firearms, entered the Covenant School by shooting through a side door, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at a news conference.

Hale fired multiple shots on the first and second floors of the school, police said. A five-member team of police officers heard the gunfire, went to the second floor and fatally shot the suspect, police spokesperson Don Aaron said earlier Monday.

The first call about the shooting came in at 10:13 a.m. and the shooter was dead 14 minutes later, Aaron said.

Nashville police identified the victims Monday afternoon as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all 9-year-old students at the school; Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61, who were all working at the school.

Koonce was the head of the school, according to Covenant’s website, which also lists she attended school in Nashville at Vanderbilt University and Trevecca Nazarene University, along with getting her master’s degree from Georgia State University.

Hill was a custodian at the school, according to Aaron. And Peak was working as a substitute teacher at the time of the attack, he said.

Police say the suspect was a student at the school at one point but didn’t elaborate. A vehicle located nearby gave clues as to the shooter’s identity, Drake said.

After the attack, authorities found Hale had “maps drawn of the school in detail, surveillance, entry points,” Drake said.

“We some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this day, the actual incident,” Drake said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

 

So, a targeted and planned attack with two rifles and a handgun, by someone who clearly wasn't afraid to die. Cops didn't hesitate to kill the shooter when they arrived on the scene, none of this Uvalde cops hiding in the halls bullshit, in Tennessee will kill our school shooters, goddammit.

 

Tennessee Republicans of course are in the process of making it easier to get two rifles and a handgun and ammo so that you could walk into a school and shoot up the place, making it legal to carry a rifle like an AR-15 with a concealed carry permit at age 18.

More guns, at a younger age. That's the solution, of course.  We have a generation of kids who will become adults in the age of active shooter drills and in some states, permitless open carry, and the expectation is they will become regular customers of the firearms industry for years to come.

Right up until a bullet end their lives, but that's everyone else's problem for not carrying.

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is planning to expand the state's "Don't Say Gay" laws to high schools, which would mean banning all Florida school classes from discussing or even mentioning sexual orientation or gender in any way.

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ′ administration is moving to forbid classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades, expanding the controversial law critics call “Don’t Say Gay” as the Republican governor continues a focus on cultural issues ahead of his expected presidential run.

The proposal, which would not require legislative approval, is scheduled for a vote next month before the state Board of Education and has been put forth by state Education Department, both of which are led by appointees of the governor.

The rule change would ban lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity from grades 4 to 12, unless required by existing state standards or as part of reproductive health instruction that students can choose not to take. The initial law that DeSantis championed last spring bans those lessons in kindergarten through the third grade. The change was first reported by the Orlando Sentinel.

DeSantis has leaned heavily into cultural divides on his path to an anticipated White House bid, with the Republican aggressively pursuing a conservative agenda that targets what he calls the insertion of inappropriate subjects in schools.

Spokespeople for the governor’s office and the Education Department did not immediately return an emailed request for comment.

Last year’s Parental Rights in Education Act drew widespread backlash nationally, with critics saying it marginalizes LGBTQ people and their presence in society.

DeSantis and other Republicans have repeatedly said the measure is reasonable and that parents, not teachers, should be broaching subjects of sexual orientation and gender identity with their children.

Critics of the law say its language — “classroom instruction,” “age appropriate” and “developmentally appropriate” — is overly broad and subject to interpretation. Consequently, teachers might opt to avoid the subjects entirely for fear of being sued, they say.

 

Consequently, banning all Florida school classes from mentioning sexual orientation at any grade level is exactly what critics said would happen when the law was passed originally banning K through 3rd grade classes. 

Of course it means that teachers, principals, guidance counselors, school nurses and coaches can't talk about this either with students for fear of retribution, which means LGBTQ+ kids are on their own in Florida unless their parents are understanding and supportive, and not all parents are.

So yeah, this is going to end up getting LGBTQ+ kids hurt and killed, which I guess is the point of the law.

Sunday Long Read: On Like Pong

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from Charles Russo at SFGATE as he covers the oral history of the first mass market video game ever made: the ubiquitous Pong, the creation of video game company Atari as it celebrates its 50th anniversary, and the world that changed as a result.

 

Nolan Bushnell had a glimpse of the future on his hands.

So in a savvy marketing maneuver, he decided to package it in a 6-foot-tall shell of amorphous yellow fiberglass. It smelled of noxious chemicals but exuded science fiction. He called it Computer Space.

Bushnell and his business partner Ted Dabney had created the world's first coin-operated video game as a side hustle while working in Silicon Valley for electronics heavyweight Ampex. They completed a prototype in the spring of 1971, a decade before arcade classics like Donkey Kong, Frogger and Ms. Pac-Man would fully capture America’s imagination (and quarters). In fact, at the time that Bushnell and Dabney wheeled a working version of Computer Space into Stanford University hangout the Dutch Goose, very few Americans had ever seen a video game before.

"We just had one little rocket ship on the screen, but it was impressive," Bushnell told SFGATE. "I thought we had a huge win on our hands."

Computer Space never quite took off into the stratosphere, but the two aspiring entrepreneurs knew they were on to something. They had formed a futuristic-sounding startup named Syzygy and departed Ampex in pursuit of an industry that did not yet exist. Informed that a candle-making company on a hippie commune in Mendocino was already operating under the name Syzygy, Bushnell rebranded with a Japanese term akin to the phrase "check" in chess. Their scrappy Silicon Valley startup was now known as Atari.


After soon setting up shop in a small facility in an industrial section of Santa Clara, Atari created a new game that was as captivating as it was simple — and that would effectively launch the modern video game industry to the world.

Aiming for a name that was catchy and succinct, the innovators at Atari simply called it Pong.

It’s easy to underestimate just how massively lucrative the video game industry is today. A recent New York Times report stated that it was worth “nearly $200 billion in 2021 — more than music, U.S. book publishing and North American sports combined.” If that seems hard to fathom, consider that Microsoft is right now trying to acquire A-list video game company Activision for the colossal sum of $69 billion. The sheer size of the proposed purchase price is staggering, going well beyond — for comparison's sake — what Elon Musk spent to purchase Twitter ($44 billion) or what Disney paid to acquire the Star Wars and Marvel franchises ($4 billion each).

This month marks 50 years since Atari released Pong as an arcade game nationally to the American public. It was created and first released months earlier here in the Bay Area, before quickly having a much wider cultural and economic impact.

“Pong proved that there could be a market for a video game industry,” author and pop culture historian Tim Lapetino told SFGATE. “It demonstrated that there could be companies and whole ecosystems based around video games.”

In many ways, Pong was the big-bang moment that occurred after early gameplay pixels had begun to form together for years prior. A key pioneering moment in that regard occurred at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, shortly after Digital Equipment Corporation gifted the school its latest state-of-the-art computer, the Programmable Data Processor-1. Weighing over 1,500 pounds and taking up the space of a small automobile, the PDP-1 boasted a whopping 9 kilobytes of memory. Yet its most notable characteristic was that it operated through a monitor, a new and innovative feature that made for a uniquely user-friendly interface.

A few of the bookish (read as: nerdy) members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club immediately began experimenting with the PDP-1. Underclassman Steve Russell, an avid science fiction reader, suggested that they design a game that could play out on the monitor. By January 1962, Russell had finished his prototype of Spacewar, a two-player game in which a pair of rocket ships battled in a cosmic landscape. His classmates improved upon the gameplay with their own design upgrades, and before long, Spacewar was so popular that the faculty had to limit the hours that students were allowed to play it.

“Spacewar was just one of those things that captured the imagination of what could be,” says Lapetino. “It caused a shift in the understanding of what computers can do.”

More than just creating one of the very first video games, Russell and his classmates had developed a template for video game systems. Beyond the game itself, they had designed an external handheld control pad so they no longer had to bang endlessly on a keyboard. Better yet, they realized that the code for Spacewar could be copied and played on other computers, so it soon spread to other elite computer science programs around the country.

"If you were going to play Spacewar in the '60s," Bushnell explains, "there were four places in the world you could do it: MIT, Champaign-Urbana, Stanford and the University of Utah."

 

Having grown up on the venerable Atari 2600 as a kid in the early 80's, I was there when Atari became a home console behemoth, and then burned itself out, leaving the market open for a new path as Apple and Commodore joined the fray, and then Nintendo and Sega years later. I've always been a gamer, and none of it would have started without Bushnell and Pong. 

Here's to the oldest of the old school.

Where The Books Come Burning Down The Plain

We've reached the point now where Republicans are openly banning library books, not just for kids, but for adults too.

 

A Republican-driven Senate bill limiting reading materials in school districts and public libraries has passed and is now on its way to the House floor.

Senator Warren Hamilton, R-McCurtain, is the author of Senate Bill 397.

He said the intention of the bill is to protect younger generations from reading inappropriate and “pornographic” material.

“This bill is not an attempt to ban books. It’s certain things you can’t get at school,” Sen. Warren said before the vote. “School boards, you ain’t exactly been hitting it out of the park lately. Maybe you could use a little help from some community involvement, some community empowerment.”

The bill would require schools and public libraries to inventory their current books both online and print.

Those books would then be categorized into so-called “ratings.”

Those ratings would include: Elementary (Pre-K through 5th grade), Junior High (6th-8th grade), Under 16, and Juniors and Seniors.

Some of that reading material would also require a legal guardian’s permission before being checked out.

“I think this is a good step in the right direction on making sure inappropriate materials stay out of the hands of kids, give guardrails to educators so they don’t go outside those and lose their job and inability to teach in Oklahoma when we struggle everyday to get new teachers,” said Sen. Rob Standridge, R-Norman.

Sen. Roger Thompson, R-Okemah, called the bill an “overreach of state government.”

Sen. Thompson said these types of decisions should be left to the school board and parents.

The bill doesn’t just outline minors, though.

Anyone over the age of 18 would also have limitations when checking out a book at a public library.

“No print or nonprint material or media in a school district library, charter school library, or public library shall include content that the average person eighteen (18) or older applying contemporary community standards would find has a predominant tendency to appeal to prurient interest in sex,” SB 397 reads.

Those books deemed inappropriate by community standards will then be removed, according to SB 397.

 

And pretty soon, the next step will be the sale of these books at all in the state, or the reading of them. Like I keep saying, Republican want a permanent end to the Civil Rights era and need a scared, uncurious populace to manipulate.

Last Call For The Failbert Files

Author, cartoonist, professional racist shitbag and "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams went on a racist tirade on his YouTube channel that was so vile that it actually got him fired from the funny pages and the bookstores.

 

Andrews McMeel Universal, the company that syndicates “Dilbert,” said it is cutting ties with the comic strip’s creator, Scott Adams, after his racist remarks about Black Americans led hundreds of newspapers across the country to drop the satirical cartoon.

In a joint statement, Andrews McMeel Chairman Hugh Andrews and CEO and President Andy Sareyan said that the syndication company was “severing our relationship” with Adams and condemned his remarks, saying “we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”

The publisher of a forthcoming book from Adams also said Monday that it would no longer move forward with publishing the title.

The Penguin Random House imprint, Portfolio, said it won’t publish Adams’ upcoming book, “Reframe Your Brain.” The book was set to release in September.

“My publisher for non-Dilbert books has canceled my upcoming book and the entire backlist,” Adams wrote Monday on Twitter. He also said his book agent “canceled” him.

Portfolio published Adams’ previous titles, including “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” and “Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America.”

 

Observations:

 

1. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA this is the funniest this guy has been in the entire 21st century so far!
2. Asshole.
3. No seriously, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
4. Adams has been a MAGA jackass for years now if anyone had bothered to notice, and Dilbert was pulled from nearly 80 newspapers the last time he went on a racist tirade back in September.
5. He claimed that his UPN Dilbert show was canceled in 2000 because he's white.
6. If you haven't seen the Dilbert Show, it was Rick and Morty for Gen X. We thought it was edgy back then and for 2000 it was. It got canceled because the ratings were terrible, even for UPN.
7. Asshole, still.
8. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA what an asshole. Even Ol' Teddy Beale despises him.
9. Racist ASSHOLE. 
10. Why wasn't he canceled sooner after finally, after three decades, introducing the first Black character in the strip as Dave, the engineer who "identifies as white" back in May? Guess we'll never know.
    

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump, "bastion of free speech" that he is, had pathetically thin skin white in the White House and still does to this day.

 

IN EARLY 2018, the American national security apparatus was fixated on reports that North Korea was building nuclear weapons that could reach the U.S. or that Russia was plotting chemical weapons assassinations in Europe. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was busy targeting his idea of an enemy of the state: late night host Jimmy Kimmel.

The then-president, according to two former Trump administration officials, was so upset by Kimmel’s comedic jabs that he directed his White House staff to call up one of Disney’s top executives in Washington, D.C., to complain and demand action. (ABC, on which Jimmy Kimmel Live! has long aired, is owned by Disney.)

In at least two separate phone calls that occurred around the time Trump was finishing his first year in office, the White House conveyed the severity of his fury with Kimmel to Disney, the ex-officials tell Rolling Stone. Trump’s staff mentioned that the leader of the free world wanted the billion-dollar company to rein in the Trump-trashing ABC host, and that Trump felt that Kimmel had, in the characterization of one former senior administration official, been “very dishonest and doing things that [Trump] would have once sued over.”

The incident was so bizarre that news of it spread around the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Other administration officials who had nothing to do with the pressure campaign began hearing from their contacts at Disney about how confused they were that the White House kept telling them Trump wanted Kimmel to tone down his anti-Trump humor.

“At least one call was made to Disney [that I know of],” a third former official, who worked in the Trump White House, recalls. Sources spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely and to preserve ongoing relationships in Trumpworld and conservative circles. “I do not know to who[m], but it happened. Nobody thought it was going to change anything but DJT was focused on it so we had to do something…It was doing something, mostly, to say to [Trump], ‘Hey, we did this.’”

Rolling Stone was able to identify one target of the White House’s ham-fisted, destined-to-fail pressure campaign: former Disney top lobbyist Richard Bates. The sources say Trump’s staff reached out to Bates to convey the president’s anger regarding Kimmel’s monologues and jabs. Bates, who served as a prominent Disney executive and was a Washington fixture for over 30 years, passed away in December 2020.

The pressure campaign ultimately failed, but the previously unreported effort marked yet another moment in which Trump showed an eagerness to wield the immense powers of his office for personal gain and highly petty reasons. (Indeed, one of Trump’s two impeachments was caused by this very impulse.)

And now, as Trump campaigns for the White House once again, there is no sign that his desire to use federal power in this way has ebbed an inch. In a recent radio interview, the former president said he’s entitled to a “revenge tour” if he wins the presidency in 2024 while claiming he wouldn’t avail himself of the opportunity in the event he’s reelected.

But throughout his presidency, Trump devoted inordinate amounts of time toward threatening late night television shows and celebrities over their jokes about the famously thin-skinned former game show host.

 

Remember, Trump wanted FCC chair Ajit Pai to pull CBS's broadcast license over Stephen Colbert's constant Late Show mockery of Trump as "obscenity", as well as NBC's Saturday Night Live for the same reason. Now we find out they went after ABC and Jimmy Kimmel too.

 

You'd better believe that in a second Trump term in 2024, criticism of Tang the Conqueror on the nation's late-night airwaves won't be dismissed so easily. 

Last Call For In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions, Con't

The great Kroog asks:

 

Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?

 

Short answer: No.

Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism. As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters; but this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.

But is this shift permanent? Can anything be done to assuage rural rage? 

Long answer: After 30, 40 years of making white rural voters hate everything that isn't a white rural voter? 

 

Hell no. Stop trying and move on already, we're deep into triage mode now. Save who you can.

 

Really Long Answer: Yes, but it's going to take a generation to undo the damage since the Newt Gingrich era, and we have to ask ourselves if we have the time and energy to do that before the fascists gain permanent one-party control of several states, and the hard data shows it's largely too late in places like Ohio, Florida, and Alabama. 

 

The process of reforming these states will take decades and while we have to get started on saving people, the greater good of the rest of the country's federal government has to take priority. 

 

Take it from a person in Kentucky, just one gubernatorial election this year away from one-party Republican rule for the next 20 years.

This has been In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions.

Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Another weekend, another deadly mass shooting in America, as police officials say an elderly suspect shot up a Lunar New Year's celebration in California before taking his own life.

Authorities have identified the man responsible for a deadly shooting inside a Monterey Park dance studio as 72-year-old Hemet resident Huu Can Tran.

Tran died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a strip mall parking lot, law enforcement sources said.

“We still are not clear on the motive,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said. “The investigation continues … we want to know how something this awful can happen.”

The manhunt began after the shooter opened fire inside Star Dance Studio on West Garvey Avenue around 10:20 p.m. Saturday, killing 10 people and injuring 10 others. It was Lunar New Year’s Eve.

About 20 minutes after the shooting in Monterey Park, Tran walked into Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in nearby Alhambra, officials said. “The suspect walked in there, probably with the intent to kill two more people,” Luna said. “But two community members disarmed him, took possession of his weapon, and the suspect ran away.”

At 10:20 a.m. Sunday, police located the white cargo van that was seen leaving the scene of the shooting near Sepulveda and Hawthorne boulevards in Torrance, Luna said. When officers left their patrol vehicle to make contact with the van occupant, they heard one gunshot come from the van.

At 1 p.m., a SWAT team determined that the suspect had sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound and he was pronounced dead at the scene. Authorities determined the man inside the van was Tran, the mass shooting suspect.

During the search, several pieces of evidence were found inside the van linking the suspect to both locations.

“I can confirm that there are no outstanding suspects,” Luna said.

The weapon taken by community members in Alhambra was a magazine-fed semiautomatic assault pistol, with an extended magazine attached, according to authorities. This particular firearm with an extended magazine is illegal to possess in California.

An advisory from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department identified the suspect as an adult Asian man, about 5 feet 10 inches and weighing 150 pounds. An image showed the man in a black leather jacket, beanie and glasses.

“I still have questions in my mind, which is, what was the motive for this shooter? Did he have a mental illness? Was he a domestic violence abuser? How did he get these guns, and was it through legal means? Well, those questions will have to be answered in the future,” said U.S. Rep. Judy Chu during a Sunday night news conference.

 

We don't know if it was a hate crime, a targeted killing, a random massacre, or what at this point, but what we do know is that the weapon used made it easy for the gunman to shoot 20 people and kill 10 of them, and that absolutely nothing will be done to prevent the next massacre.

 

No other country on earth would tolerate this level of wanton destruction, and make literally hundreds of millions of firearms available to the public to be used for harming others.

 

There was a separate nightclub shooting in Baton Rouge just minutes after the California shooting that left a dozen people wounded as well.

Welcome to Gunmerica. Flights to hell with a bullet leaving daily.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Kids have to be taught to hate, and kids have to be taught to shoot, too. Of course the Virginia elementary school teacher shot by a first-grade MAGA kid who brought one of his family's many, many firearms to school had her pleas that the kid was a time bomb ignored.

 

The Virginia teacher who was shot by a 6-year-old student repeatedly asked administrators for help with the boy but officials downplayed educators’ warnings about his behavior, including dismissing his threat to light a teacher on fire and watch her die, according to messages from teachers obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously unreported incidents raise fresh questions about how Richneck Elementary School in Newport News handled the troubled student before police say he shot Abigail Zwerner as she taught her first-grade class earlier this month. Authorities have called the shooting “intentional” but are still investigating the motive.

Many parents are already outraged over Richneck officials’ management of events before the shooting. Newport News Superintendent George Parker III has said school officials got a tip the boy had a gun that day and searched his backpack, but that staffers never found the weapon before authorities say the 6-year-old shot Zwerner. Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said his department was not contacted about the report that the boy had a weapon before the shooting.

Police and school officials have repeatedly declined to answer questions about the boy’s disciplinary issues or worrisome behaviors the 6-year-old may have exhibited and how school officials responded, citing the child’s age and the ongoing law enforcement investigation. The boy’s family said in a statement he has an “acute disability,” but James Ellenson, an attorney for the family, declined to comment on accounts of the boy’s behavior or how it was handled by the school.

School district spokeswoman Michelle Price said in a phone interview late Friday that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law protecting students’ privacy, prohibits her from releasing information related to the 6-year-old.

“I cannot share any information in a child’s educational record,” she said. “A lot of what you’re asking is part of the child’s educational record, and it’s also a matter of an ongoing police investigation and an internal school investigation. Unfortunately, some of these details I’m not even privy to.”

Screenshots of a conversation held online between school employees and Parker shortly after the shooting show educators claiming that Zwerner raised alarms about the 6-year-old and sought assistance during the school year.

“she had asked for help,” one staffer wrote in that chat, referring to Zwerner.

“several times,” came another message.

“Yes she did.”

“two hours prior”

“all year.”

The messages, which were provided to The Post by the spouse of a Richneck Elementary schoolteacher, do not detail what specific assistance Zwerner sought, or to whom she directed her requests. Zwerner and her family have not returned repeated messages from The Washington Post.

 

Again, this battle was lost ten years ago at Sandy Hook. If anything, guns in schools are far more prevalent today, because America fucking refuses to do anything about it, and anything we try gets blocked by the gun fetishists.

 

Even at the cost of kids' lives.

 

They all want to be Kyle Rittenhouse. They all want to kill liberals and get away with murder in "self-defense". 

And they won't be stopped by asking nicely.

Last Call For Throwing The Book At Them

North Dakota Republicans, ever the bastion of "freedom of speech and expression", are now considering throwing librarians in jail who refuse to enforce the state's proposed bans of LGBTQ+ material.

 

Books containing “sexually explicit” content — including depictions of sexual or gender identity — would be banned from North Dakota public libraries under legislation that state lawmakers began considering Tuesday.

The GOP-dominated state House Judiciary Committee heard arguments but did not take a vote on the measure, which applies to visual depictions of “sexually explicit” content and proposes up to 30 days imprisonment for librarians who refuse to remove the offending books.

The proposal comes amid a national wave of Republican-backed laws to ban books that feature LGBTQ subject matter — though usually those bills have been limited to school libraries, not public ones.

Supporters of the bill said it would preserve children’s innocence and reduce their exposure to pornography.

But critics said the measure is “steeped in discrimination” and would allow government censorship of material that is not actually obscene.

House Majority Leader Mike Lefor, of Dickinson, introduced the bill and said public libraries currently contain books that have “disturbing and disgusting” content, including ones that describe virginity as a silly label and assert that gender is fluid.

Lefor argued that a child’s exposure to such content has been associated with addiction, poor self esteem, devalued intimacy, increasing divorce rates, unprotected sex among young people and poor well-being — though did he did not offer any evidence to support such claims.

Stark County resident Autumn Richard also spoke in favor of the bill, giving examples of explicit content in the graphic novel “Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human” and the kids’ comic book “Sex Is a Funny Word” — both available in public libraries.

Richard argued the books might have beneficial knowledge about contraceptives, body image and abusive relationships, but many sections provide information that she said was harmful for minors.

Though supporters of North Dakota’s bill repeatedly called the sexual content “obscene,” opponents said the material in question is not actually considered legally obscene.

“Nearly 50 years ago, the (U.S.) Supreme Court set the high constitutional bar that defines obscenity,” said Cody Schuler, an advocacy manager at the American Civil Liberties Union of North Dakota, who testified against the bill.

Obscenity is a narrow, well-defined category of unprotected speech that excludes any work with serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value, Schuler said. Few, if any, books have been deemed obscene, and the standard for restraining a library’s ability to distribute a book are even more stringent, Schuler added.

The definition of pornography is also subjective, opponents of the bill said.

Library Director Christine Kujawa at Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library said the library has a book with two little hamsters on the cover. At the end of the book, the hamsters get married, and they are both male.

“It’s a cute book,” Kujawa said — but it would be considered pornography under the bill because the book includes gender identity.

Facing criminal charges for keeping books on shelves is “something I never thought I would have to consider during my career as a librarian,” Kujawa added.

 

Frankly, not only do I expect the Roberts Court to strike down obscenity laws and "leave those up to states" but I expect North Dakota won't have any libraries soon anyway, so this won't be a problem anymore. 

Right?