… (they’ve been out of touch for years) just won the Democratic US House primary in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Twenty-five years ago, we all traveled to the Greek island of Santorini and rented a house during the meltemi winds season. Sometimes the house rocked like a little boat in the labored, hours-long gusts.

That was strange: The beyond-brilliant sun, the faint caldera out to sea. And the bright blue water in the swimming pool turbulent, taking a beating from the air.

When things calmed down, we piled into the open top jeep Scott rented and drove the treacherous island roads to a black sand beach or an obscure diner or the chic shopping district.

We celebrated my birthday at a restaurant high high up on the white cliffs — the lot of us hypnotically suspended over a world of ocean.

His Open Society Foundation, under unceasing harassment from Hungary’s paranoid, reactionary government, will leave Budapest and move to Berlin; his Central European University, also based in Budapest and also under unrelenting official harassment, will stay. For now.

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Berlin’s gain.

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But UD must say… I mean, on the matter of Hungary… On one level she’s forced to admire the belligerent and thoroughgoing regressive approach to global coexistence coming out of that country. It’s the Saudi Arabia of Europe.

That’s the moment that would have done it for me. Not my professor rather obnoxiously complaining about my decision to give a presentation in front of class wearing short shorts, but the yutz who felt free to tell the presenter (in their public presentation class at Cornell) that she was an immoral woman because of her short shorts.

There’s a long distinguished history of women protesting various forms of repression by, en masse, taking off their clothes, and Letitia Chai, Cornell undergrad, made the perfectly reasonable decision, in this classroom atmosphere, to join that movement.

Rather than obey the young man who scolded her for immorality, Chai – and a bunch of other students whom she invited to join her – presented in bra and underwear. And then of course she went viral with the protest via her Facebook page.

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What did the male international student do in this shocking situation?

UD trusts he drew his burqa more tightly around his face so as not to see.

Of course the Onion was there first.

But as Saudi Arabia (insert world’s largest quotation marks around the following word) liberalizes, we will be able to enjoy many real-life versions of this story.

They’ve already convicted her husband of terrorism.

She has

sued the police for damages over the raid [on their house], alleging violence and assault in the course of the search.

The family lost, and were ordered to pay $250,000 in court costs to the Australian Federal Police and the New South Wales Police.

Her thing is that she refused to give crucial exonerating evidence because the court – after the judge tried a variety of accommodations which she rejected – wouldn’t let her testify in her burqa and damned if she was going to let some man see her face – or her hands — or anything — even for a few moments.

Now she’s racking up more legal and other expenses by appealing that decision…

And I gotta tell you. That appeal will not end well for her. So that’s more money she’s going to have to find…

But it’s all good, ain’t it?

1. As long as she makes legal noise, she keeps her attractive way of life in full view of all Australians via news coverage. Good advertising.

2. She is a martyr for her faith, something fanatics tend to want.

3. She is shaming many other countries – like France, Canada (just the province of Quebec so far, actually), Belgium, and Germany (where currently you can’t drive while in a burqa, but it looks as though more severe measures are coming) – who fail to see the gothic beauty of actual living women inside of coffins.

… a noble reformist Muslim and an equally noble reformist ex-Muslim (Maajid Nawaz, Ayan Hirsi Ali) by putting their names on their “haters” list.

Logically enough, Nawaz sued for defamation; but the immensely wealthy SPLC is standing by its judgment, refusing to back down, digging into its deep pockets to defend…

Um.

No.

Someone lobs a lawsuit at them and the moral conscience of a nation immediately rips down the entire list, hurls itself to the ground, and goes veery veery quiet… Me wee mouse in little hole me not squeak to press…

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SPLC has gone underground to consult the ghost of Joseph McCarthy on how to bring a new haters list back online.

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More on this organization.

… UD enjoys this video (scroll down) from a Harvard talk about the blinding muting burqa as a vehicle of female empowerment.

Yet another state enacts a death with dignity law. That makes eight.

Getting there.

… and beating her to a pulp for refusing the client.

… read and learn. This is the way ambitious university women are cut down to size – pretty much, in this case, the minute they get to campus – by powerful, institutionally inept men and their, er, micro-aggressions.

UD imagines almost every woman who has gotten anywhere in this country has dealt – verbally or in writing – with this particular condescending Big-Man-to-Small-Girl thing.

In this case, the president of one of America’s shabbiest, most ill-run universities received a letter of complaint from a student. No biggie: She just didn’t have anywhere to live — no housing, because Howard University boasts a long history of global administrative incompetence paired with surly treatment of desperate unhoused students. In response to her reasoned letter, Howard’s president wrote this:

Your tone and tenor is inappropriate.

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After which, in a final snippy and princely sentence, he told her he’d copy her letter to the ‘appropriate’ offices at Howard.

So… you’re nineteen years old, just arrived at an expensive college you and your parents can barely afford, and the highest representative of that college has just told your roofless self to fuck off and learn how to address the boss man. How to worry not about a place to live, but that you’ve been insufficiently cringing in your approach to a rich, powerful man’s university-destroying greatness.

What can I say, girlies? Rather than scrutinize pathetically your pathetic humiliated female self, the thing to do is EXACTLY what this woman did: Put your letter and Mr Big’s letter side by side on social media, and watch it all go beautifully viral. Brava.

Britain’s most senior woman judge has called for tougher rules on compelling women who wear the Muslim veil to show their faces when giving evidence in court.

Baroness Hale of Richmond, the deputy president of the Supreme Court, said “ways have got to be found” to ensure that the Islamic face coverings, such as the niqab, are removed for key parts of a court hearing.

Eventually Britain will join the civilized world and ban the burqa/niqab altogether. These are some of the steps one takes toward it.

… you know there’s hope for that religion.

A big win for our side.

… in that country. She has been interviewing large numbers of women who fully veiled their face and body and now, under pressure of the new law, have stopped doing that. Details of motivation from the two women she features here are sad – even pathetic – and confirm my belief that many full-veilers, far from the principled, autonomous people we’re invited to imagine, turn out to be troubled and confused and acting under various forms of male Salafist pressure.

Once ardent defenders of the right to wear the niqab, both women have now completely abandoned it. But the transition took place gradually and was accompanied by a growing distance from extreme Salafist ideology.

Despite the law, by the way, they could have continued wearing the niqab/burqa – a local businessman has been paying the fines of any woman who wants to continue wearing in France. Or of course they could have buried themselves in their houses, given their professed belief that any woman who ventures outside not fully covered is an infidel.

A woman who wore the niqab for five years and “was one of the most radical women I’d ever met,” is now into tight jeans and “living again … after years of being locked up.”

After repeated rapes by her father-in-law, says the other woman, she veiled herself to “escape from the trauma of rape. … The niqab protected me, I liked hiding from men.” She was loosely affiliated with a terrorist group.

One of the women, Alexia, “has even become a fierce opponent of the Islamic veil and Salafism.” Yet after being under the thumb of extremist men, she needed another man – also an extremist, but not a niqabist – to tell her to take off the thing.

When he saw my physical condition, he asked me to remove the niqab – he feared for my health. I had worn it to please Allah, but because of the lack of sunlight I wasn’t synthesising vitamin D any more – my health was failing.

Interesting that the vitamin D deficiency argument against the burqa/niqab – typically ridiculed by freedom to fully veil enthusiasts – looks to be (obviously – if you get no sunlight, you get all kinds of physical and mental problems… Sunlight being pretty basic to land-based animals… ) correct.

This also goes to the masochism – the niqab/burqa as equivalent to the Christian hairshirt – UD has also long noted in the wearing of a garment that tortures and sickens. My rickets will please Allah.

Shockingly, this woman says: “When I took the niqab off, I felt like I was getting out of jail.” Who da thunk it.

… but the woman does have balls. She was courageously reality-based in her remarks to the baying CPAC crowd.

“I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women, and because he happens to have an ‘R’ by his name, we look the other way, we don’t complain,” said Charen, a senior fellow for the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

… “The Republican Party endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama, even though he was a credibly accused child molester,” she said. “You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that.”

At that point, boos erupted from the crowd. “Not true! Not true! Not true!” one person yelled. “Prove it!” shouted another person in the crowd.

But Charen wasn’t done. She took aim at CPAC for inviting Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a French politician and the latest member of a far-right French political dynasty to come to prominence. Le Pen was well-received in her speech on Thursday praising Trump’s “America First” agenda.

“The only reason she was here is she’s named Le Pen, and the Le Pen name is a disgrace. Her grandfather is a racist and Nazi. She claims she stands for him,” Charen said.

The crowd then broke out into loud boos, but Charen wasn’t fazed. “The fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace,” she said.

If Charen plans to hang around the conference, UD recommends this innovative ballistic package.

Ronan Collins calls for no half-way measures – not a harmless nick here and a harmless nick there – but full surgical removal of the faculty member at Trinity College who loves him some mutilated female genitals.

Collins says: “I will be handing back my academic title of clinical associate professor [of medicine] if I feel the university’s response is not clear and firm in dealing with the matter.”

Especially if you’re a professor of medicine, the realization that there’s another professor somewhere at your university, in a position of authority and respect, who thinks torturing and mutilating little girls is a good idea — it’s simply too disgusting. Unbelievable, actually. Bravo, Collins.