Today is Monday, December 16, 2024. It’s been awhile, but the country experienced another school shooting today, this time with it occurring in Madison, Wisconsin, at a Christian school called the Abundant Life Christian School, where the gunman was identified as a 15-year-old girl who died of a self-inflicted gunshot. This terrible news is covered in an online CNN article written by a spate of journalists entitled “Authorities identify suspect in Madison, Wisconsin, school shooting.” The police chief who identified the lone gunman is revealed to be Police Chief Shon Barnes who said the female killer died of a self-inflicted gun wound.

The shooting left one student and one teacher dead and six injured, including two people who are facing life-threatening conditions, Barnes said.

The school is a K-12 school that serves about 420 students, according to an administrator. It planned to close for Christmas vacation after this week. Tragically, this incident has left those who go to this school reeling from this horrible incident.

What is equally difficult to comprehend is that a second grader at the school called 911 to report the shooting today. A second grader! Can this soak in for a minute, folks, that we have allowed what should be a safe haven for our children to become instead the most deadly place for children to be right now, given the frequency of these mass shootings? In citing statistics, the attack is at least the 83rd school shooting of 2024, surpassing 2023 for the most school shootings in a single year since CNN began tracking such shootings in 2008. This is a most shocking statistic, but as I’ve constantly written in this space, this sobering reality will not propel any lawmaker to urge common sense gun legislation to be even considered in the short term. And now that we have a dolt like Donald J. Duck as president-elect, don’t expect any – any -changes in this situation to occur during his watch over the next four years. We should probably expect a worsening situation to develop, I hate to say.

In reading another online article on the tragedy, I see that the age of the female gunman was pegged at being 17, not 15, so I’m not sure how old the suspect was. It’s still abundantly clear that this student had issues with the school and was motivated so strongly that she wanted to kill either other students or teachers. What is also clear is that this shooting has “rocked” the Abundant Life community, which sees itself as a large family, according to authorities.

The little ray of good news, in my opinion, today is the ruling made by a New York judge, Juan Merchan, to not toss Donald Dump’s felony conviction in the New York hush money case just because the radical, extreme Supreme Court gave this president-elect blanket immunity for things done while he was president.

Merchan’s decision rejected one of several avenues that Dump’s lawyers have taken to try to dismiss the felon’s May guilty verdict on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The judge’s 41-page decision focused on the question of presidential immunity.

What is sadly inevitable about this case, given how horrible Dump is, is that his fucking lawyers are most likely going to appeal the judge’s decision anyway, one of several potential motions for dismissal that could leave the case tied up for months or even years. By then, Dump could be an octogenarian, ready to be put out to pasture. Again, because voters elected him a second time, his date with justice is furthermore delayed. Which is a fucking shame!

Today was a relaxing one in that we stayed close to home after our busy weekend with Elliot’s daughter and her family. Also, it rained almost the whole day, so there was really no place to go other than to remain indoors for most of the day.

In the evening, we sat down to watch the sequel to Joker on Max, called Joker: Folie a Deux and I can unfailingly say not to watch it. I thought this sequel to 2019’s Todd Phillips-helmed Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix who won a deserved Oscar award for his role as the mad jokester of crime would be good, but I was sorely wrong. This is the worst sequel – bar none – that I’ve seen in many years.

This effort costarring Lady Gaga is just a mishmash of musical numbers that go nowhere (Phoenix sings here, but he’s definitely no singer), a disappointing love story, in which Gaga plays Harleen Quinzel (aka “Lee”) at Arkham Hospital, as a fellow inmate who claims to have grown up in the same neighborhood as Fleck (Phoenix is Arthur Fleck aka the Joker) and burned down her parents’ apartment building, and courtroom drama in which Fleck eventually defends himself after being charged with five murders from the original film. The whole picture suffers from sluggish pacing and really no action – until a car bomb blows up the courtroom towards the end just as the jury forewoman is declaring the verdict against Fleck. At this juncture, I noticed a grave error of continuity: in the forewoman’s verdict, she declares the “state of New York” finds Arthur Fleck guilty of the crimes charged against him, but in a radio spot airing just a few minutes later after Fleck escapes the courtroom, the announcer says the city is “Gotham,” not New York. So isn’t this an error then? Oops, did I tell you too much here? I really am not recommending this film for you to watch, so if you know what transpires here, you really don’t need to see it. I almost turned it off at some point, but I was determined to stay until the bitter end.

And so it went!