Hovertext: You could also do history by unboxing artifacts.
Today's News:
Red Button mashing provided by SMBC RSS Plus. If you consume this comic through RSS, you may want to support Zach's Patreon for like a $1 or something at least especially since this is scraping the site deeper than provided.
At least four people are believed to have been killed and approximately 30 more were injured in the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, although it’s unclear how many of the injuries are from gunshot wounds, according to law enforcement sources.
This information is preliminary and is subject to change.
A suspect, who is of student age, is In custody, but it’s unclear if the person actually attend the school, according to the sources.
All schools in the district were placed in lockdown, and police were sent out of an abundance of caution to all district high schools, but there are no reports of secondary incidents or scenes, according to the sources.
Some of the critically injured were removed by helicopter, and additional helicopters are on standby.
Back in April, in Ireland, my nephew Luke made his first communion alongside his school classmates. I did much the same thing myself in much the same place about forty years ago. My brother tells me that the preparation nowadays is a little more humane than the version we enjoyed. But there is as much anticipation beforehand, and no less excitement on the day. Luke’s little suit lacked the stylish navy-blue velvet panels mine sported in 1980, but in essence the event was the same in its purpose, its form, and in most of its details. A first communion inducts a child into one of the sacraments of the Church, having them take a step towards adulthood in expectation of the regular re-enactment of the event throughout the rest of their lives.
Sociologists like me often highlight these rituals of childhood in our writing and teaching. One of the founders of our field, Émile Durkheim, made them the centerpiece of his work. Institutions, he argued, are rituals that bind people to one another as a group. In a ritual, each person finds their place and does their part, and expects everyone else to do the same. Crucially, those involved all see one another participating in the event. By doing so, they enact their collective life in view of one another, demonstrating its reality, expressing its meaning, and feeling its pulse in their veins. That, Durkheim thought, is at root what a society is.
In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers. They are always frightened. Some will be crying. But almost all of them know what is happening to them, and what to do. Mass shootings are by now a standard part of American life. Preparing for them has become a ritual of childhood. It’s as American as Monday Night Football, and very nearly as frequent.
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
A fundamental lesson of Sociology is that, in the course of making everyday life seem orderly and sensible, arbitrary things are made to seem natural and inevitable. Rituals, especially the rituals of childhood, are a powerful way to naturalize arbitrary things. As a child in Ireland, I thought it natural to take the very body of Christ in the form of a wafer of bread on my tongue. My own boy and girl, in America, think it natural that a school is a place where you must know what to do when someone comes there to kill the children.
Social science also teaches us something about how rituals end, although not enough. The most important step is to kindle a belief that there are other ways to live, other forms that collective life can take. That can be surprisingly hard to do, because a side-effect of ritual life is that participation in it powerfully reinforces its seeming inescapability, even when people are uncertain or disbelieving of the sense or meaning of what is happening. That is why change, when it comes, often comes suddenly and unexpectedly, as people finally acknowledge not just privately in ones and twos but publicly to one another that what they have been doing amounts to an empty parody that no-one really believes. A further difficulty is that this sort of sudden, collective collapse is in many ways the good outcome. A worse one is when solidarity is replaced with its bitter sibling, schism. Instead of competition or conflict within some framework that opponents are nevertheless bound to, real schism yields much of the febrile, effervescent energy of collective solidarity, but delivers few of its stabilizing benefits.
It’s traditional to say that there are “no easy answers”, but this is not really true. Everywhere groups face the problem of holding themselves together. Every society has its enormous complex of institutions and weight of rituals that, through the sheer force of mutual expectation and daily habit, bring that society to life. But not every society has successfully institutionalized the mass shooting. Only one place has done that, deliberately and effectively. The United States has chosen, and continues to choose, to enact ritual compliance to an ideal of freedom in a way that results in a steady flow of blood sacrifice. This ritual of childhood is not a betrayal of “who we are” as a country. It is what America has made of itself, how it worships itself, and how it makes itself real.
The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.
“It’s not the way it used to be,” Old Man Warner said clearly. “People ain’t the way they used to be.”
“All right,” Mr. Summers said. “Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave’s.”
Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr., opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.
“Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.
“It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. “Show us her paper, Bill.”
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.
“All right, folks,” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly.”
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”
The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
The UK’s last coal plant will close this month, ending 140 years of the use of the fuel for electricity.
London saw the world’s first coal-fired power plant in 1882, and the UK will likewise become the first G7 country to remove coal from its grid.
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar station received its last shipment of fuel in July, and its boilers, which reached 1,000°C (1,832°F) when working, are cold.
The UK’s move away from coal has been rapid: In 1990, it was still the source of most of the country’s electricity, but it has been phased out by the growth of gas and renewables. Those two sources now account for roughly a third of the country’s power each, with nuclear and bioenergy making up the rest.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday charged several Hamas leaders with kidnapping and murdering American citizens during the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
It marks the first step by the DOJ to prosecute the Gaza-based group for orchestrating the attacks, which killed almost 1,200 people, including 40 Americans.
Unlike its response to the war in Ukraine — where the DOJ mobilized an entire team to investigate war crimes — the Justice Department has been largely silent on the Gaza war, despite experts agreeing that it had a strong case against Hamas in US courts.
“The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a video statement. “These actions will not be our last.”
Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance said at a campaign event on Wednesday that he thinks Vice President Kamala Harris “can go to hell,” adding to the increasingly personal attacks former president Donald Trump’s campaign has lodged against the Democratic presidential nominee in recent days.
A reporter at the campaign event asked Vance about an altercation involving Trump campaign staff that took place at Arlington National Cemetery, which the former president visited Monday to mark the third anniversary of the Islamic State bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members during the evacuation from Afghanistan.
Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries and as The Washington Post previously reported, a cemetery employee tried to enforce the rules as provided to her by blocking Trump’s team from bringing cameras to the graves of U.S. service members killed in recent years, according to a senior defense official and another person briefed on the incident. A larger male campaign aide insisted the camera was allowed and pushed past the cemetery employee.
Vance said at his campaign stop in Erie, Pa., on Wednesday that the press was “creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one.” He said the family members of fallen service members in attendance “invited [Trump] to be there and to support them.” But the Ohio senator, a military veteran, then used the question to tie the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal to the Democratic presidential candidate.
“Kamala Harris is disgraceful. We’re going to talk about a story out of those 13 brave, innocent Americans who lost their lives? It’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened,” he asserted, though there have been extensive federal investigations into the Abbey Gate bombing.
Follow Election 2024
Vance accused Harris of criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery, saying: “And she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up? She can — she can go to hell.”
Harris, who began a two-day bus tour in Georgia on Wednesday, did not bring up the issue on the campaign trail. In an interview with CNN that aired earlier Wednesday — before Vance’s campaign events — Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said the cemetery incident was “pretty sad” but “not surprising coming from the Trump team.” The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment about Vance’s comments about the Democratic nominee.
Trump and his allies have been known to push past the boundaries of political norms during the former president’s nearly decade-long political career. But the type of crass language Vance used to condemn a political opponent Wednesday is particularly unusual in modern politics.
Defense officials said the confrontation occurred when an Arlington National Cemetery staff member warned people employed by the Trump campaign that while they were permitted to take photos and videos in the cemetery, they could not do so in Section 60, the final resting place for many U.S. service members killed in recent conflicts.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded to the first report of the altercation, from NPR on Tuesday, by baselessly accusing the employee of “suffering from a mental health episode.” Defense officials said the employee was trying to do her job and the claim of a mental health episode was false. On Wednesday, Cheung said the employee “initiated physical contact that was unwarranted and unnecessary.”
Cheung also said the campaign would release footage to support his claim, but it has not. The Trump campaign on Wednesday posted a video to TikTok that was recorded at the cemetery; in it, Trump is seen at the Tomb of the Unknowns and walking among marble headstones as soft guitar music plays and the former president’s words are heard criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal.
Vance’s harsh language Wednesday came hours after Trump went on a posting spree, sharing increasingly conspiratorial and sometimes vulgar posts on his Truth Social profile aimed at Harris and his political opponents.
Trump shared another user’s post with an image of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Harris, amplifying a vulgar joke about a sex act — an apparent reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Harris’s short-lived romantic relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Another repost showed an AI image of his political opponents — including Harris — in prison. One image called for military tribunals aimed at former president Barack Obama. He also reshared other users’ three QAnon-related images and posts, including an image depicting Trump holding a “Q+” symbol.
QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory that imagines Trump in a battle with a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Its devotees shared their claims in online conservative forums during much of Trump’s presidency, and the radical ideology has been credited for helping fan the flames of extremism that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Many of the posts Trump shared were related to the case — including one that superimposed red eyes and horns over Smith’s face and another saying Smith should be prosecuted.
Dan Lamothe, Hannah Knowles and Alex Horton contributed to this report.