Quebec is considering expanding Bill 21, which already keeps public sector employees from wearing religious clothing/objects while on the job. Not only teachers, for instance, but also students, would, in this proposed expansion, not be permitted to wear hijabs.

Of course the Muslim community spokesman in my headline reveals the problem: Secular legislation is wildly popular in secular Quebec. Banning religious garb is indeed a surefire way to bolster your poll numbers. So the question at issue is whose “fundamental rights”? UD, for instance, considers it a fundamental right of secular countries, states, and provinces to protect their secularity in certain restricted realms (government schools being one of them). Further, she fully admits that her support for restricted secular laws has to do not only with respect for the strongly expressed will of people in some localities that the secular nature of their sense of themselves as a culture be enshrined in law, but also with her belief that schoolgirls too young to have any say in the matter should not be draped head to toe. This obviously repressive form of fundamentalist religious expression offends her liberal sensibilities; it degrades the promise of equality at the heart of democratic regimes. I don’t think parents have a fundamental right to wrap their eight year old daughters in head and body sheeting before they can go outside.

Altogether odd and beautiful weather this spring, back and forth from sunny and warm and calm to gray and cool and windy. I’ve tossed Magical Flames and Firestart onto the grate, and on top I’ve piled old woody grapevines that sheared off a tree in one of the windstorms. Mr UD got the black statues when he worked for the UN in East Timor. The tan camels we brought back from India, and to the right is a Corbu-themed quilt that students of Jerzy Soltan made for him.

UD reflects, looking at this fire and also at people/dogs walking on Rokeby Avenue, that though she’s done quite a lot of traveling (as you know if you read this blog), she likes best to be at her peaceful home, whose last owner was Munro Leaf. Ferdinand the Bull’s spirit remains here, decades after the death of the man who conjured him.

Yeah, that’s why a house full of loaded guns was just the ticket.

 Lee Grodzins, MIT professor, lived one of the great lives. Read the whole thing.

He got his favorite student evaluation … for a course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”

… Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems. 

… In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.

… an important GOP fundraising event, with Steve Bannon giving the keynote salute.

A Manhattan art advisor explains that she tries to make clients feel comfortable and not taken advantage of in the intimidating, arcane, art market. Then she steals all their money.

Fuck man I got four others.

BIG guns!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD

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And a reminder of his tragic homeland:

‘[Under Trump,]  they see an opportunity in their proximity to power. They’re not lonely figures, lonely prophets shouting at the margins, but they’re very close to the halls of power, and some are perhaps working within those halls of power right now, as we speak… Vermeule talks about using the bureaucracy, using the administrative state to nudge people in the right direction.’

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Wink wink nudge nudge is your administrative state a goer? Does it… you know… go? Mwoohohohohoo, ay? Hohohohohoho, ay?

“They want science to be part of the human — [their] philosophy [is] they want to say that mankind is creating the world,” [an ultraorthodox spokesman] said. “We say everything is by God.”

… [He] objects to the [NY] Education Department’s idea that it would be good, as he put it, to “open your kids to the world and teach them about everything.”

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Apparently the schools rejecting New York State education requirements are forming a new group: UUSF (United Ultraorthodox Schools Fund) with the motto A MIND IS A BEAUTIFUL THING TO WASTE.

Of course guns are all over every level of America’s schools, but most are in the hands of individual students.

UD has for years said on this blog that the inevitable progression will be toward the Columbine model – guns in the hands of two or more students in a conspiracy to take down the school.

Battery Creek High School was under lockdown for several hours Wednesday after two students were found with handguns. Beaufort County [SC] school officials said there was “no direct threat” made to students or faculty.

‘No direct threat.’ Right.

Police searched [one] student after receiving an anonymous tip about possible suspicious activity. Information from the first student prompted police to question another Battery Creek student, who was also found with a handgun about an hour later.

Take a bow, SC. You’ve got just about the weakest gun laws in the country, with particular liberality toward minors, who can buy all the guns they want without any parental oversight. No need to feel threatened.

Musk vacates UD‘s local mall.

… Greece, and one of those parties has drawn attention to itself by sending a couple of shock troops into the national museum and smashing to the floor paintings they felt were not nice to God.

To ol’ UD‘s perhaps jaded eyes, the works at issue look inoffensive – primitive pastichy picasso-y things, they smudge and mildly distort Madonna’s mug, but, you know, in a Francis Bacon world, there’s not much here to write home about.

A violent asshole storming and trashing your national museum (where were the guards?) — now that is indeed something to write home about.

The tykes at Liberty Elementary School are the beneficiaries of the tendency of the Baltimore school system not to do background checks. Their teacher Mr Britt’s a real live pistol packing criminal! His latest foray involved shooting at a bunch of policemen in the parking lot of their precinct building. Didn’t kill anyone, and didn’t get killed, so I guess after he’s done with the justice system it’s back to work.