… about squat — Carolina Squat, that is — but she seems to have covered the story on her blog back in Sept 2021, so let’s keep going.

South Carolina is banning the “Carolina Squat,” which is when people raise the front of their trucks and SUVs several inches higher than the rear end. The ban comes after legislation was introduced months ago, but drivers will now receive warnings through the next 180 days. After that time, South Carolina police will be issuing fines and suspending driver’s licenses.

North Carolina done already done it; now the Low Country (famous for the Murdaugh clan) will also have to go lower.

UD is quite taken by Jalopnik’s defense of La Squat:

[M]any people seem to hate the Carolina Squat solely because of the way it looks. Check out all the bigoted comments on the Change.org petition that aims to outlaw the vehicle modification… I think it’s safe to say that few folks see a jacked up car and say: “I’m really concerned that that driver may not be able to see over the hood.” No, the criticism is usually one of simple disgust, and while I can’t assert with confidence that socioeconomic prejudices are at play with the general sentiments towards Carolina Squat trucks, I will say that anytime we notice scores of people hating something immediately upon learning about it or seeing it, we should all take a step back and try to improve our understanding… I’m just always a bit concerned when I see vitriol directed towards any misunderstood car subculture…

The American nightclub.

… as Americans read up on their vermin.

Some billionaires will stop giving.

“You’re legitimizing one of the most barbaric laws” by agreeing to wear the hijab.

Yeshiva University a few years ago ran a lot of slick ads in the New York Times intended to attract a more cosmopolitan applicant pool. Notre Dame has long presented itself as a respectable liberal arts university. But something always happens to put parochial schools back in their places, and no one who watches these schools with any care should be surprised when they show their true colors.

As in: You really shouldn’t be surprised at evidence that important Notre Dame groups are trying to get rid of a professor who supports reproductive freedom. And that its administration has been outright hostile to the professor. Why do you think illiberalist Patrick Deneen left Georgetown for Notre Dame? He rightly identified the place as really, really Catholic.

As Opus Dei fan Rick Santorum rails against democracy and what he calls “sexy” issues like abortion, keep in mind that the super-funky BDSM his version of the faith boasts out-sexies anything ordinary people can come up with.

… appears, UD likes to post this great James Merrill poem:

ISLAND IN THE WORKS

From air seen fathom-deep
But rising to a head –
Abscess of the abyss
Any old night letting rip
Its fires, yearlong,
As roundabout waves hiss –

Jaded by untold blue
Subversions, watered-down
Moray and Spaniard…
Now to construe
In the original
Those at first arid, hard,

Soon rootfast, ramifying,
Always more fruitful
Dialogues with light.
Various dimwit under-
graduate types will wonder
At my calm height

Vapors by then surmounted
(Merely another phase?)
And how in time I trick
Out my new “shores” and “bays”
With small craft, shrimpers
Bars and rhetoric.

Darkly the Old Ones grumble
I’ll hate all that. Hate words,
Their schooling flame?
The spice grove chatted up
By small gray knowing birds?
Myself given a name?

Waves, as your besetting
Depth-wish recedes,
I’m surfacing, I’m home!
Open the atlas. Here:
This dot, securely netted
Under the starry dome.

(Unlike this page – no sooner
Brought to the pool than wafted
Out of reach, laid flat
Face-up on cool glares, ever
So lightly swayed, or swaying…
Now who did that?)

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Analysis.

More analysis.

Three women have been arrested for allegedly physically assaulting a hijab enforcer in an incident in the Tehran Metro.

According to Abbas Karami-Rad, the head of the Tehran Metro Police, the incident occurred on Saturday afternoon when one woman approached three others to admonish them regarding their hijabs. 

He stated that the situation escalated, leading to the three women “attacking her and physically assaulting her.” Subsequently, the three women were taken into custody.

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Expect more of this. Passive resistance is of course all over the country; huge numbers of women won’t wear the hijab. Active resistance is a thing too.

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Great pic!

Easy peasy.

Voters in Derby, Conn., decisively rejected the Republican nominee for mayor, Gino DiGiovanni Jr., who was charged with trespassing at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. DiGiovanni placed third behind Joe DiMartino, the Democratic mayor-elect, and Richard Dziekan, the Republican incumbent who was running as an unaffiliated candidate…

… Ohioans enshrined abortion and other reproductive rights into the state constitution.’

And that’s Ohio, mes petites.

Related. And more.

When wee UD studied at the Medill School of Journalism, we often discussed the qualities of a good lead sentence; in particular, you want to pack a lot of information in without creating a run-on feel to the thing.

The AP writer who had to pack all of the repulsive behavior at New Mexico State into her lead had quite a task, but she acquitted herself well, finding a place in one sentence for the guns thing AND the cock-grabbing thing. Actual shooters (of guns) among team members appear a little farther down in the article. When there’s this much material, you have to be selective.

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For the venerable history of this institution, go here.

… the absurdly obvious murderer of FSU law professor Dan Markel. That’s an awfully long time.

Markel, you recall, had to die for the sin of wanting to share custody of his children with his ex-wife. Had to bleed out, alone, in his car, from two gunshot wounds to the head.

While his body was still warm, his ex-wife – sister of his murderer – whisked the kids away to another part of Florida and instantly dropped their Markel last name and changed it to her name. I mean, didn’t miss a beat.

And was she – not to mention her mother – also involved in the murder? The prosecutor’s closing statement points in that direction. So maybe the opera ain’t over.

Anyway. UD would love to know WHY Adelson got a decade of freedom before his life sentence. Did it really take that long to establish a case against an absurdly obvious murderer?

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Um, and if the rest of the family was in on the murder, don’t you think child protective services should pay the Adelsons a visit? Markel’s parents and sister live in Toronto, and seem to UD a rather better custody choice than a pack of… well, we’ll see.