‘Merica
Sixth-grader killed and five people wounded in Iowa high school shooting
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/04/iowa-high-school-shooting-perry
Deep into the “find out” stage:
Stonks!
Friday’s jobs report will be a big signal for a market looking for good news
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/04/fridays-jobs-report-will-be-a-big-signal-for-a-market-looking-for-good-news.html
Sprots!
Entering Paris Games, the top U.S. male Olympian isn’t a swimmer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/01/04/noah-lyles-paris-olympics/
If not friend why friend shaped?
The world’s deadliest cat is deceptively cute. Meet Gaia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/04/black-footed-cat-utah-zoo-gaia-deadliest/
Have a great weekend!
Cats are not your friends. They will feed off your corpse before the body is cold. They don’t care how many toys you gave them.
…but…they do look cool?
That’s what I said, sort of, more or less, in the wake of an earlier DOT. But then I was assured that cats can be very friendly and sociable but I’m not buying it. Nonetheless, we can’t go on like this, so when Faithful Hound goes, I think we’ll be wrapping this up. We’ll get a cat or two. It’s not fair to Better Half that he has to do all the hound-related chores. Even I can open a couple of cans of cat food and change a litter box. Believe me, I’ve done it.
The local news has more info on the shooting down in Iowa
Apparently it sounds like the 17-year old had been bullied for years, and recently kids started in on his younger sister, too.
Speculation, of course, but I wonder, if that was why the 6th-grader was killed.
https://kstp.com/associated-press/ap-us-international/17-year-old-kills-sixth-grader-wounds-five-others-in-iowa-school-shooting-police-say/
Retaliation for bullying has been a common theme with these shootings pretty much from the beginning back in the ’90’s. But, you know, we won’t deal with that any more than we’ll deal with the actual guns.
I was bullied by a guy in high school back in the Dark Ages. I’ll never forget this experience. We were all in the gym for some reason, there were hundreds of us, tail-end of the Baby Boom, and he and I ended up sitting next to each other on the top riser of—I forget what these are called. You see them at sports events and parades. He was on the end and I was second in. He had done something, I forget what, and I had gotten fed up and I shoved him over the side. Luckily I realized what I had done and with my sharp teenage reflexes I grabbed him so he didn’t drop to the ground and break his neck. But I almost killed a person. Has anyone else ever had an experience like this? No? It’s surprising how quickly homicidal rage can bubble up in a young person. Hormones, I guess.
There have been points in my life where I’ve wanted to.
I guess I was stupid with bullies. I did the “don’t let the bully get to you, until I snap and then I’ll do something terrible” thing (something mom instilled in me and the fact I was always the shortest and not physically fit boy in class.)
It was a pattern of behavior that followed me for a long time. It happened with former housemate and even Cokehead Narcissist except at the end. One of my sisters and my late good friend called me out on that stupid pattern.
That finally changed a bit when I committed “career suicide” several years ago. Instead of deferring to certain managers abuse during question period, I got aggressive and challenged them when defending my work in meetings. My “fave” once questioned my integrity (which is rich coming from a motherfucker who takes credit for other people’s work) and I promptly showed my work to his dismay. I then openly dared him to ask more questions in front of his peers. The arrogant motherfucker backed down and kept his fucking mouth shut after that.
It only took 46 years, but I sort of broke the pattern. At least I react much sooner to abusive behavior than say the moment I am hanging on to my job by my fingernails… for example.
And the thing was I was really popular, I’ve always been (this will come as a shock to some D/S readers) but this fellow had it out for me. He had a twin sister who was one of my best friends. That might have prompted it. He/they were Irish American so he was one of like half a dozen siblings and that wasn’t uncommon in my town. I should really hunt around and see if he’s still alive. “Hey! You remember me? I almost killed you.” Bleachers. That’s what they’re called. This lingering brain fog.
It seems like he was jealous of his sister and maybe even attracted to you. No experience as a gay male, but that follows the pattern of homophobic bullies.
I wasn’t the shy quiet kid hiding in the back, I was active and had friends. However I was smart (and knew it) as well as being the only non white kid in my class. I seemed to attract bullies.
I finally snapped, in my own way, during senior year of high school. By then, the bullying attacks had been mostly sporadic for about the past five years or so, but there were still one or two assholes holding out. I passed one of them while he was sitting on top of one of the benches in the junior-year locker area. (He had previously been in my year but had apparently been held back not too long before.) It was a Thursday morning, and I had just come back after being out sick for the first three days of the week. When he saw me, he instantly started laughing and slapping a limp hand against his chest to make the “cripple”/”retard” sign. In one of the few crucially bad moves I’ve made in acting before fully thinking things through, I went up to him and punched him in the face.
He stopped laughing, sure. But then he grabbed me and starting yelling, “Oh, you stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. . . .” I don’t believe he ever got around to using a noun there, but he was going more for the language of brutality anyway, by punctuating every enunciation of stupid with a punch to my own face, in a way that I could still feel for years whenever I remembered it. One of the cool kids pulled him off me (and made sure to credit himself for doing when I talked to him on the phone sometime later). Someone else nearby handed me back the glasses that had flown off my face. Another one, whom I asked in a panic if I was bleeding, just nodded nervously. (I apparently left at least a partial trail of blood on the way to the nurse’s office.)
Anyway, I obviously didn’t go back to school that day – or for the next few days, as I got an 11-day out-of-school suspension. As the letter from the superintendent subsequently stated, I wasn’t allowed back on campus for any extracurricular events or activities, either – although by then that would’ve been basically a formality to say as much. I didn’t contest the suspension at the hearing held at the alternative high school, although my dad did on my behalf. (I walked out of there and saw the asshole sitting in the hallway waiting for his own hearing, looking truly terrified.) He supposedly got 90 days but was apparently reinstated before the semester was over, as I passed him once more during the lunch hour, gloating over wailing on me to whatever girl he was with at the time. There was most likely a racial element to this, as he was black and I was not. (This was during the waning days of the O.J. trial, and in fact the “not guilty” verdict was announced on one of the days when I was suspended at home. I remember being glad I was.)
For me, it was almost like an extended vacation – and, between going out for lunch everyday and working from home (and, if memory serves, applying for college during that time), even a preview of the kind of routine that I’d be doing between a decade and a quarter-century later. I’ve had two different therapists laud me for standing up for myself, although I’ve come to feel more neutral about the incident myself. I mean, the time out of school is one of the best I had that year, although I should probably do something at some point about the deviated septum it left me with.
Oh, yeah. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t have access to guns, too – or else it would’ve been a far different story, if things had even gotten to that point.
I am also glad I didn’t have access to any sort of gun.
I do regret the couple of split lips and bloody noses I got from fighting back, but I don’t regret actually fighting back. My dad would say later that he kept mom from freaking out when I came home hurt. He wanted me to learn to deal with bullies (sink or swim is probably not the best process for getting kids to understand bullying, but that was how he did it when he was a kid.)
If I’d grown up a couple of decades later I probably would have been a school shooter. There were plenty of unsecured guns in our house but it never occurred to me to take one to school and blow my bullies away. Instead, one of them would inevitably push me too far and I would beat him until he was a bloody mess. One kid in particular I almost choked to death before a teach pried me off of him. There would be a blessed period of several months where everyone would leave me alone, but then they’d forget about it and the cycle would start up again.
This is a little post-dated now, but this would have thrilled Tetris-obsessed 10-year-0ld me (and made 40-something me smile): https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-someone-finally-beat-nes-tetris-121503520.html
And of course, every conspiracy theorist’s wet dream are the Epstein papers (No Jimmy Kimmel, alas for Aaron Rodgers): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/jeffrey-epstein-associates-numbers-names-b2473785.html
The complete lack of Jimmy Kimmel proof is going to be the ultimate proof for Aaron Rodgers types.
Tetris was the bane of my existence in 1st year uni because I loved that game. I ended up dreaming of Tetris in my sleep.
When that happened I knew I played too much.
Yes, but America’s “First Black President” ™ (what the hell were you thinking, Toni Morrison? You couldn’t have waited for Barack Obama and not beclowned yourself with that comment?) shows up an astonishing 83 times. How horny can one cracker ex-president be? And David Copperfield! Who didn’t Jeffrey Epstein lure onto his “Lolita Express” private jet and fly off to the private island with? I’ve seen photos of the compound. I would have gone, I think, but obvs I would have left the young girls alone. I might have made a play for a pool boy or a lifeguard, but I would have made damn sure that they were of age.
David Copperfield was a known creeper (at least from what I read in Spy Magazine) so I’m not surprised there.
Jimmy Kimmel, for one!
It’s also real weird how Donald Trump being named in there too just doesn’t seem to register with anyone.
Well, who would have been surprised by hearing that Donald Trump was involved in this sordid mess? His affiliation with sex workers is well known. But I was a little surprised by Bill Clinton because he’s a well-known horndog, but women used to throw themselves at him, or he’d throw himself at them. The cigars…ugh. Anyway, why would he need to board the Lolita Express? And obviously Hillary never really cared, except when the Drudge Report revealed the Monica Lewinsky affair and threatened his Presidency.
I read something really interesting about that whole kerfluffle. That story was originally given to “Newsweek” and a reporter, his name was something like Itzkoff or something, but “Newsweek” was in the bag with the whole Clinton administration and refused to publish it. So the leaker, whoever that was, turned to the Drudge Report out of frustration. I know that that was my first experience with Matt Drudge. And the page views went from the low thousands into the millions. I think it has subsided, but there was a time when it was one of the most widely read “news” sources in the world.
I don’t think that was what Al Gore envisioned when he invented the Internet and Tipper was going around slapping Parental Advisories on rap CDs.
The jobs report:
US adds 216,000 jobs in December as stronger than expected rise caps robust year
Voters will continue to ignore the good news, of course.