... Darwin Award.

… Committee.

A reminder, from a New York Times review of Alice Birch’s “clear-eyed and comfortless” new play, of the value of art that goes against the grain.

… Die Fledermaus at Northwestern University. His favorite song: the Watch Duet.

Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, currently enjoying his three minutes of fame onaccounta this concentration camp witticism, offers Alan Dershowitz serious competition in the Most Fucked Up Harvard Law Professor contest.

Since converting to Catholicism, Vermeule is now an advocate of integralism, a Roman Catholic political doctrine which calls for the abolition of the division between church and state, in order that the resulting state – which integralists deny would be a theocracy – can promote a religiously-determined “Highest Good” in place of the personal autonomy of a liberal democracy. Their ideal is to create this new confessional Catholic regime through “strategic raillement,” or transformation from within institutions and bureaucracies, rather than by winning elections. The groundwork for a full integralist regime would then be in place when liberal democracy dies. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens.” To achieve this end, Vermeule advocates giving confirmed Catholics priority in immigration, allowing them to “jump immediately to the head of the queue.” Vermeule describes this as being essential to “the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.”

Gloriosky.

Fraudsters have something in common – the brass balls that come from the conviction that other people are so stupid one will always be able to get away with the fraud. Whether you’re Madoff calmly contemplating the 65 billion dollars you’ve stolen, or whether (at the other end of the fraud spectrum) you’re Sharonda Avery, commandingly handing down a diagnosis of autism to every single child brought to your pretend doctor’s office, the thing you’ve got, the unique, echt trait, is an arrogant, once more unto the breach, have at it, caution to the wind, only go around once, ah fuck it gall. That, plus endless delight in considering the many splendor’d ways in which you’ve ruined the lives of hundreds of families.

Prosecutors said Avery’s ruse started to unravel when a school psychologist in Spotsylvania started to become suspicious because Avery kept diagnosing children as autistic.

Of course the fraudsters are absolutely correct in their determination of the stupidity of the world. Madoff’s scheme was obvious to anyone with an ounce of grey matter, and some of those people shouted the truth to the treetops for over a decade.

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Stafford [Virginia] prosecutors said when state officials notified the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office [of Avery’s scheme], they did not take action.

Right – I meant to add give a shit nothingness to the stupidity. Rural Virginia and all. Who cares. Most everyone around here’s a fraud of one sort or other. Big deal.

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UD thanks her sister.

The postmodern American death (details here), and the ultimate postmodern headline.

Once again the ultraorthodox come through. Now that Robin Williams is dead, UD finds herself increasingly dependent on the ultras for her deepest, most life-affirming laughter.

Speaking at at the launch of the United Torah Judaism election campaign last March in the well-known Lederman Synagogue in Bnei Brak, Rabbi Aviezer Filtz, a prominent figure in UTJ and head of the religious seminary Yeshivat Toshia in the southern village of Tifrah, delivered a fiery speech on the importance of separate-gender seating on public buses.

“Start to organize, to ride separately,” he urged his listeners, then explained that the principle was so fundamental that even the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust obeyed this policy.

“Even the Nazis, may their names be erased, understood that there has to be separate housing for women and men, but here [in Israel] it’s forbidden!”

It’s the folks at NPR this time, tut-tutting over Indonesia’s refusal to take back female and as well male ISIS people. The women were not, we are told, “seasoned fighters.” Why? By definition, I guess. Women can’t be seasoned fighters. They just can’t. They’re too frail to be fighters, much less seasoned. Sing it, Leila!

An interviewee assures NPR that ISIS women were merely “jihadi chattel married off to the next militant after their husband was killed,” so don’t worry about bringing them back to live among you! They’re just like Donald Trump and Elizabeth Taylor: serial marriers… Harmless, comic figures, really…

This blog’s focus on universities means that it has mainly looked at the way admitting violent whack-jobs to your school because they whack people on football fields can have unfortunate consequences. The situation is really grotesque in public junior high and high schools, where a toxic brew of incompetence, indifference, and ideology seats hardened criminals next to schoolchildren in classrooms. We’ve already seen it in my coverage of a local high school’s gang rapes on the football team; now there’s another local school – Clarksburg – where we’ve got a twofer: A fifteen year old tyke brings a handgun to school (that part’s like so fucking what… they’re in every other locker.), shows it off to his gang in the school bathroom, and a member of the gang steals it. LOL.

So … let’s see…

Despite having an “extensive criminal history,” one of the five suspects in Monday’s handgun robbery at Clarksburg High School was allowed to remain enrolled, raising questions about the school system’s top-down disciplinary policy.

According to court documents obtained by ABC7, Tyson Brown, 16, of Clarksburg, is well known by law enforcement, with prior criminal charges including armed robbery, robbery, and second-degree assault.

• March 11, 2019: Police arrested Brown for possession of stolen property linked to an armed robbery in Germantown.
• September 2019: Police implicated Brown in a series of “pizza robberies.”
• September 5, 2019: Police served a search warrant on Brown’s Clarksburg home, confiscating a Glock pistol magazine from his bedroom.
• January 2, 2020: Grand jury indicted Brown as an adult on six criminal counts including armed robbery, conspiracy to commit armed robbery, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery and two counts of participation in a criminal gang. The case, filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court, is scheduled for a three-day trial in late April.

This case also gives us an opportunity to get up close and personal with the guy who instigated the Damascus rape:

[T]he ringleader in the Damascus High School rape case was expelled from Clarksburg High School during the 2017-2018 academic year after he targeted and robbed an LGBTQ student.

The 6-foot-1, 240-pound ringleader managed to enroll at Damascus the following school year, where he joined the storied football program. Initially placed on the varsity squad, the ringleader was quickly demoted to the JV team for bad behavior, court testimony in the criminal case would later reveal.

According to a civil lawsuit filed last week, during his less than three months at Damascus, the ringleader “physically assaulted” a special needs student. He also “intentionally physically struck” a female educator, injuring her. The lawsuit argues that repeated slaps on the wrist kept the troubled 15-year-old athlete among good, hardworking students, in turn, allowing him to perpetuate the Halloween Day 2018, locker room rapes.

Oooh, a lawsuit!

Your education taxes at work.

Awhile ago, I said on this blog that I wasn’t going to cover the big-ass burqa story going on in India, because so much of it is in fact motivated by bigotry; but I’ll make an exception for this exceptionally stupid statement by an Indian politician. As one of many amused Twitter responders puts it:

If Burqa … is “essential” for Islam, then how can it also be by choice for Muslim women?

Two headlines, one week, Jackson State University.

Reagan National [University] has connections to a different kind of troubled institution, via its ties to the University of Northern Virginia. 

In 2011, federal immigration officials raided UNVA, threatening to suspend the college’s ability to accept foreign students. The suspicion: that Northern Virginia was a so-called “visa mill,” a college accused of peddling a chance to live in the U.S. rather than offering a meaningful education. 

The Virginia government closed Northern Virginia in 2013 because it wasn’t accredited. It resurfaced the same year with a South Dakota address — the same one Reagan National used on business filings, plus the same agent, Xianhua Fan, spelled slightly differently from the name listed for Reagan National’s president.

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Reporters unearthed these disturbing facts about RNU; the accreditor missed them. It also missed a few other signs that not all is on the up and up at RNU:

RNU Motto: Crescat Scientia; Visa Excolatur

VISA: Official Card of RNU

Visasion Statement: We aim to be, visa-vi other schools, the very best.

School Song:

F-1 me you sweet sweet visable u

J-1 me cuz that’ll work for me too

Just one look at you my heart grew tipsy in me

You and you alone can get a visa for me

England really doesn’t want his daughter. She can exhaust every possible appeal, but it’s way unlikely that a British court will take her back. He’s living in Bangladesh where she can try claiming citizenship, and though Bangladesh doesn’t want this dangerous woman any more than England does, it just might let her in.

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The national security argument heard in court was that Begum had aligned with the Islamist group not only by travelling to Syria but by remaining until nearly the last days of the self-styled caliphate, thus showing a high degree of commitment to it.

Security sources have gone further, suggesting Begum was a member of al-Hisba, Isis’s morality police, during which time she carried a Kalashnikov and had a reputation for strictness. Begum also allegedly “stitched suicide bombers into explosive vests”. These are all claims the intelligence community stands by, arguing that women are as capable as men of actively participating in a violent regime.

Does one really have to argue this? Isn’t the correct word “noting,” rather than arguing? Do we have to drag little Irma Ilse Ida Grese and company out yet again? “Legal proceedings, [one of Begum’s lawyers argues], ‘fail to provide swift and practical answers to such acute human predicaments as this’.” You said it babe, and that means that just as there’s no way to confirm intelligence claims that she shouldered a big ol’ gun etc. etc., there’s also no way to confirm claims she warnt so godawful bad as all that … It IS a fucking predicament; but nowhere is it written that an entire citizenry has to shoulder the uncertainty inherent in returning atrociously depraved people to its midst.

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In a series of laws in the 00s, Labour allowed government to deprive anyone of citizenship, even if they had been born in Britain, if it was “conducive to the public good” to do so.

Poor Kenan Malik is deprived of his Right Wing Neo-fascists did it argument in yet another lame effort to urge that citizenship is a right that may under no circumstances be taken away. Labour signed off on the law allowing it to be taken away. “In 1870, MPs viewed citizenship as a right that should not be arbitrarily removed by the state.” Ah, the good old days. But of course no one is doing anything arbitrarily. It’s like saying, whenever a child is removed from grossly abusive parents, “parenthood is a right that should not be arbitrarily removed by the state.” I mean, there are justifiable circumstances in these matters, no?

A writer about Parkland makes George Orwell’s point for a world I doubt Orwell could have imagined: One where one country alone boasts 400 million privately held guns.

The 911 call transcript, Humvees disgorging SWAT teams, witnesses hugging and weeping, ambulances rolling away, candles lit at “memorials.” We never see a body. We never see what a .223 round of ammunition can actually do to a human. It has all been sanitized. When I hear a congressman call for a “moment of silence,” I hear him saying, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

We respond to gun violence in such a manner because the thing of which we speak is so hideous that we need to normalize it.