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Update: Wilson’s site now says it’s down due to extremely high traffic (the earlier lie was that it was under maintenance). Ain’t that the truth.
This piece has idiotic graphics and calls university students kids, but look past that. It lists five ways to avoid swine flu on campus.
Summary: Don’t take some sniveling miserable person to bed with you. Wash your hands compulsively, and spray anti-bacterial stuff on shared surfaces (classroom desks, cellphones if you pass them around, etc.). Avoid salad bars; don’t share food. Ixnay on the moronic drinking games. Keep your spliff to yourself (the article forgets to mention this).
And don’t touch your face!
… a few riled Cornellians aren’t such a big deal.
The hot Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, fond of mid-rise buildings with holes in them, designed the CCTV Tower annex (headquarters of Chinese tv) in Beijing,
and now that it’s up, hundreds of millions of Chinese think that if you really look at the primary tower and the nearby annex, it’s obvious that together they “were meant to look like a penis, next to a bent-over woman.”
Here are a couple of
efforts to make the case.
Koolhaas has had to give an interview denying it all, etc.
Meanwhile, his design for new architecture workspace at Cornell has annoyed many faculty there, who think it’s too expensive, and insufficiently environmentally minded. A government professor writes to the campus newspaper:
This $55-60 million building project comes at a time of deep cuts to core academic programs in many other departments… It is not fancy buildings that attract people to a university. It is faculty, research funding, graduate stipends, library collections. And ideals … like a genuine commitment to sustainability… The architect Rem Koolhaas has made no secret of his contempt for sustainability… He belongs to that old fraternity of starchitects who brook no human or natural interference with their artistic ‘vision.’ So we will get an absurd set of glass boxes projecting forward and backward (because the projecting glass box is this architect’s signature), instead of a future-oriented building of the sort other Ivy universities are building, at LEED platinum standards, beautiful to look at and work in, and concordant with the movement to fight climate change.
[SOS says: Lose the contemptuous quotes around vision. You’re attacking Koolhaas for being contemptuous; you shouldn’t be contemptuous in return.]
Having looked at all sorts of images of Milstein Hall [click on the images for a slide show], UD would have to agree that it ain’t pretty. To her eye, it looks like an awkward over-sized fill-in (the task was to connect established buildings and close a gap).
UD‘s got nothing against its break from the historical context of the buildings around it. Rather, it’s the severely flat-topped, too-big feel of the thing she dislikes.
As for the overhang – UD‘s spent decades driving under (being driven under) the Kennedy Center overhang, and it’s just deadly. Dark, loud, creepy. Why do it if you don’t have to?
LONG ARM OF THE LAW FINDS
HOLLOW LEG OF THE LAWLESSOfficers located dangerous drugs in the prosthetic leg of an arrested subject.
Daily Sentinel, Nacogdoches.
A 2007 article in the New York Times last year takes us inside America’s Syrian Jewish community:
… At the end of this past August, Jakie Kassin, a community leader, grandson of the author of the Edict and son of the current chief rabbi [This man, the current chief rabbi, was arrested today, along with other rabbis from the same community, for money laundering. “[T]he rings were led by rabbis who used charitable, nonprofit entities connected to their synagogues to ‘wash’ money they understood came from illegal activities.”], received a laminated wooden plaque measuring 4 feet by 2 feet for his inspection. It was the most recent incarnation of the Edict. The original Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories. The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders, testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.
“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”
… In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family — even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them — not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened, to make sure there are no gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. In addition, all prospective brides and grooms must take marital purity classes…
… Syrian Jews have always regarded advanced secular education with something like suspicion. Not only does it promote outside values, it also distracts a boy from his proper role as an apprentice in the family business.
… SY females are expected to stay home, rear children…
… [Israeli] Rabbi Ovadia Yosef … has found financial backers for his theocratic Shas Party. Jakie Kassin claims, in fact, that the party’s seed money was raised in his living room in Deal, N.J., in the early ’80s. [Shas shares the enlightened attitudes toward higher education we see in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn.]
… For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.
Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison…
… Solomon Dwek, … universally known as “the rabbi’s son,” is … the scion of a prestigious clan. His father is a highly regarded spiritual leader in the SY summer enclave in Deal, N.J. Solomon, still in his early 30s, made a name for himself as a high-stakes real estate developer in Monmouth County, N.J. Then, one memorable day in April 2006, according to an F.B.I. statement filed in federal court, he rolled up to the window of a PNC Bank branch in Eatontown, N.J., deposited a personal check for $25.2 million and later wired out by telephone $22.8 million against it. After the check bounced, Dwek was arrested by the F.B.I. for bank fraud. [Dwek is now the man of the hour — the cooperating witness who has brought down the leading rabbis of the community. They did the perp walk today because of Solomon Dwek…. But Dwek’s family doesn’t have any gentile characteristics, so I’m sure the community will forgive him.]
… Seventy years after the promulgation of the Edict, it seems fair to say that, taken on its own terms, it has been an almost uniquely successful tool of social engineering. The enclave grows and thrives beyond the dreams of its founders. It offers a secure economic future and a sweet family life to those who remain within its confines. As for those who could not or would not fit in, well, every fight for survival has its collateral damage. [The New York Times reporter really nailed it. Successful, thriving, secure, and sweet, the Syrian enclave has today really done itself proud… The reporter seems to have missed an earlier article in the NYT about the same community, whose writer who found things less sweet: “Although it is made up of ordinary city streets, the area has something of the flavor of a gated development in Los Angeles, with vehicles bearing the insignia of private security companies on patrol. The reporter was stopped on the street by two men in a car belonging to a company called City Investigations Security…”]
“People have to make a choice,” Jakie Kassin told me. “Sure, it’s rough sometimes. But I’ll tell you something — we should be an example to others. We’re building the No. 1 Jewish community on planet Earth, right here in Brooklyn.”
I gotta take a break from surfing sports headlines.
Faithful readers know that UD doesn’t do child porn profs. Too many. And what’s it tell you about universities? Nothing.
I mean, if a university, like Cambridge University, which has a convicted, way twisted child porn prof on its faculty, does nothing, then UD will cover it. That’s what you call a scandal.
But generally, for libertarianesque UD, a sex on campus story has to be really something for her to provide coverage.
A faculty member and high-ranking administrator accused of selling his five year old son [UD thanks Jason for the fresh link] into sexual slavery makes the cut. A university which still hasn’t taken down this person’s webpage makes the cut. The irony of a man who teaches a course in the American health system and who may also have been involved in the total destruction of the health of his child makes the cut.
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UD thanks The Professor for the link.
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What? You’re looking for words of wisdom? I ain’t got no stinkin’ words of wisdom.
No way can a university know it’s harboring evil. If the man were overtly psycho, Duke would’ve been on it. But he’s obviously functional. So you can’t go after Duke, unless they fail to respond quickly and intelligently to the debacle.
This will be a big story. The child was adopted, and this is the ultimate nightmare of adoption agencies, so expect some discussion about parent selection standards. Otherwise, assuming that no one warned Duke about this person, and that there were no clues about him available to the university, I wouldn’t expect this to become a Duke story.
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Update: Lombard’s Duke page has now been taken down.
BURKA MAKES WOMEN PRISONERS, SAYS PRESIDENT SARKOZY
President Sarkozy threw his weight behind attempts to bar French Muslim women from covering their faces in public, calling their full-body dress a “debasement of women”.
Mr Sarkozy made his attack on a small but growing number of fundamentalist women in a “state of the nation” speech that was the first by a French President to both houses of Parliament since 1873.
… “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said to applause in the Parliament’s ceremonial Versailles home.
“The burka is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement,” he added. “It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”
Mr Sarkozy was adding his voice to a strong consensus that has emerged this month against women in France’s five million-strong Muslim community who wear the full or nearly-full cover of their bodies and faces…
… government troops attack universities.
There are reports that a number of Iranian professors have resigned in protest against government brutality against students.
Photo from Tehran University blogger.
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Shirin Behzadi, 45, university professor, on Enghelab Square yesterday morning: “It’s very surprising that the whole world is silent now. I don’t understand why the international community just ignores what’s happening right now in Tehran. Why don’t they react and help hopeless Iranians? I’m quite confused why even the United States has not paid enough attention to the obvious vote fraud in Iran. I’m now thinking maybe the world’s big powers like Ahmadinejad. We are losing our semi-democracy in Iran. We had a very poor democracy and now we are losing everything we had. Why doesn’t the UN help Iranians? Everybody in the world is just concerned about the nuclear issue in Iran. Why is the world silent now when Iran is in turmoil and enduring a semi-coup?”
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Andrew Sullivan is following events with great care and thoroughness.
… in Tehran, commenting on events in Iran:
“Iranian people took up opposition and used an open space to express what they want. Their vote was not just against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad but [against] what he stood for.
… But the most amazing thing is just that so many people came out into the streets to demonstrate and protest.
And for me personally, the most important thing was that [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had taken up reformist slogans which he had previously fought against. I was there at the beginning and I was thrown out of the university that Mousavi shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.”
[Interviewer]: You’ve talked about and write about the importance of literature and culture in the fight for human rights and liberty in Iran and around the world. But is art, culture, literature ever going to be more powerful than religion? Is it enough to start a revolution?
“If you look at it in the long term – yes it is. [I’ll] never forget when Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher, came to speak in Iran. He was an eighty-year-old but was treated like [the American rock star] Bon Jovi.
At one point the minister for Islamic Guidance said to him: “People like us [politicians] will vanish but you people will endure.” That will always remain with me. We don’t remember the king who ruled in the time of [14th century Persian poet] Hafiz, we remember Hafiz.
… I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. [The interview’s translator makes a mistake here. It’s canaries in the mine. But UD‘s enchanted by canaries of the mind.] If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women.”
… rise up in Iran. Follow it on Andrew Sullivan.
Shooting reported at the Holocaust Museum here. Man with a rifle got in, shot a security guard, and then was shot by another guard. It all happened too recently – around twenty minutes ago- for any of this information to be guaranteed.