But the Gryphon said no.

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“Aha,” said Mr UD. “Clearly Justice Roberts must be impeached.”

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As for the judge in question, he is what my Aunt Goldie would have called a fency schmency person — snooty private schools, Yale, etc.

Fun tidbits:

Took a gap year and coached women’s basketball.

Shakespeare freak who “played a crown prosecutor in The Trial of Hamlet that was presented at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.”

Oh, and the dude ruled in Trump’s favor in the case involving whether he could maintain the privacy of his tax returns.

The correct social attitudes, plus a fierce Second Amendment defender.

Postmodern surveillance technology maintains a medieval state.

Strange brew.

Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse…

In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university…

In some deep sense, the university [has] lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos…

In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. 

... proposed legislation:  SB 84 requires all performers
within the state to open carry guns on stage.  Failure to do so
will result in penalties up to and including closure of
shows.

Again the city has had to call off a match in progress because home fans were burning down the stadium.

His assisted suicide in Switzerland last year “had to appear premature,” he wrote in a final note to friends and family; after all, the point was to end his life before debility and suffering set in. At ninety years of age, an excellent, accomplished, and long run behind him, the time was right. A man whose entire work revolved around decisions, made his.

He’s only in the news today because he asked that his manner of death be kept quiet for awhile. The people who loved him obliged. It was only just revealed.

I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. 

It’s Spring Break in America!

Keepin’ ’em healthy The Texas Way!

The writer – a native South Dakotan – seems to think there’s something noteworthy about a man openly carrying this

(that’s a Dad picking up his kid at the airport) in the sweet idle setting of a summer fair. Massive overt personal weaponry seems wrong, somehow, in places like summer fairs, airports, churches, hospitals, schools…

But steely-eyed thin-lipped SD Sen. Mykala Voita

presses hard and successfully on the legislature to arm South Dakotans everywhere – in particular, on college campuses and in bars.

Instead of letting any student keep a handgun in their dorm room and carry it to class if they wish (as the original bill, unbelievably, would have done and as Voita made clear she still prefers), SB 100 now allows only gun owners who have qualified for an enhanced concealed carry permit to have a pistol on campus. 

Now, see, again, that “unbelievably” – this is from the same SD’an who thinks it’s really something to see a man openly toting an AR15 at a summer fair – tips you off that this writer is out of step with her state and should probably be living in godless gunless Garrett Park with UD. As should Republican Senator Steve Duffy (Rapid City), who not only voted against arming bar patrons but said, “This is crazy. When you mix booze and guns I don’t know how you can expect anything good to happen. Sooner or later, there’s going to be trouble.”

But hey this is fuckin Deadwood South Dakota! Sure there’s gonna be trouble, and Voita knows that, but it’s the wild fuckin west so let ‘er rip. Nihilism, ho!

Excluding Tesla purchases from his province’s electric rebate policy as an antiemetic. LOLOLOLOL

The UN has set a ridiculous target of ending female genital mutilation by 2030, and it’s time to get honest: If you can’t end the practice, at least end that target. In the few countries where the village butcher faces possible (faintly possible) criminal charges, much of the activity has simply been medicalized: doctors do it in their offices, like America’s own Hopkins med grad, Jumana Nagarwala, who did it right here, in and around Detroit, and who, with the help of Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, beat the charges against her, and I assume is still at it.

Hell, Gambia almost legalized it last year. Entire religious communities in Africa and Asia make FGM the very core of their tribal practice: No initiation without it. European countries with significant immigrant/Muslim communities are always putting this and that set of parents in jail, or deporting this or that young man found to have transported his twelve year old bride to be back to the homeland for cutting. It don’t make no nevermind – the global slashing at clitorises and vaginal lips and surrounding tissues thrives.

And yes, yes – keep funding grassroots efforts… But UD wonders whether an additional effort might be a good idea. Among Western elites, a depraved form of relativism, plus an understandable eagerness to look away – far away – from this repellent and disturbing behavior, has meant that people with money and power have long since backed off from FGM. Of course they don’t want to think about the fact that huge, huge, numbers of people in the world believe female sexuality to be an unspeakable abomination which must be rooted out, dug out, ground out, gutted, at the cost of lifelong pain/debility and grotesque deformation. And the sooner the better – there is no lower age limit to the practice. Britain has seen several cases of parents slashing their infants.

***********************

It’s I dunno you know just really uh icky … almost kind of unbelievable that hundreds of millions of men in the world think the possibility of women deriving sexual pleasure is a demonic nightmare which must be fought with every sharp stone we can muster. Think of Norman Bates slashing at Marion Crane, only for Marion Crane substitute an unanesthetized splay-legged eight year old being slashed repeatedly between her legs. Yuck. You and I live in a pretty world where we’d really rather not…

What if the anti-FGM forces targeted us? Made a real effort to make us care?

‘[John] Adamo was known for being “very obnoxious,” and frequently sat in his garage blasting heavy metal at extremely high volumes.

“There were definitely arguments [with his closest neighbors] that led up to this,” [a neighbor] said.

Adamo was a “combative alcoholic” who ripped down a surveillance camera mounted on [his neighbors’] home before squeezing off the first round [of gunfire that practically killed the husband and wife who made him angry]…

[T]he dispute [has] been simmering for years, and … it involved multiple cameras pointed at Adamo’s home, as well as a sign out front, reading, “PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING,” with the words, “Mr. and Ms. Adamo!!!!” handwritten underneath.

“It’s been a running feud,” another neighbor told the Post. “And John’s a nut. There was always friction… This has been going on for years.”

Adamo, too, had cameras pointed at [his neighbors’] house…

Adamo, a Brooklyn native who used to work on Wall Street but was reportedly doing construction work in recent times, was estranged from his family due to his drinking and friction involving his late father’s estate…‘

******************

After a standoff with police, Adamo was found in his bedroom, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Of course a man like John Adamo had guns.

No surprise to readers of this blog.

Husband: “Across UW-Madison, … less than 3% of employees annually receive bonuses. In [DEI chief Levar] Charleston’s division, he approved bonuses to 85% of his staff without consulting senior leadership. [M]ore than half of the division’s 71 employees had already received a bonus in the previous year… Between Dec. 1, 2023, and Nov. 30, 2024, Charleston also approved salary increases ranging from 10% to 23% for 12 employees… Charleston’s division spent the most on travel, training and events of any unit on campus — about $11,000 per employee in 2024. Other divisions averaged about $3,300 per employee.

… Travel and event spending rose sharply compared to previous years. The division spent $1.2 million in 2019. This ballooned to $1.7 million in 2023 and $2.65 million in 2024.

Supply spending also increased, from $326,00 in 2019 to nearly $600,000 in both 2023 and 2024. Some of the expenses were questionable, [a] report said.

Among the charges: $18,000 for student massage therapy services, $21,000 for a senior leadership retreat at a Lake Geneva resort, $14,000 for Maui lodging costs for seven students and staff for recruitment purposes.

He also faces accusations of research misconduct.

********************

Wife: Faces credible accusations of plagiarism.