Know hope.

… via a hijabi who took offense at an image of Muhammed shown in the classroom. The professor was immediately fired; the school is now, in its public comments, backtracking like a bat outa hell but it’s too late. They won’t have to pay the prof (who is, correctly, suing) as much as Oberlin had to pay that bakery, but the same cretinous reflexive bullshit did in both schools and as Joan Baez plaintively asked so many years ago when will they ever learn?

‘Lisa had to do this procedure over and over because of her drug relapses … doing this program, so she’ll magically not want to do drugs anymore. If Elvis was alive, he would never, ever have let his daughter endure torturous purification rundowns, sending her to ethics, handing out morality punishments. And all the stuff she endured for 35 years, the absolute Scientology indoctrination, leading nowhere, with no result. … Scientology got tons of money out of her. Scientology touts itself as making you this high ethical spirit – you’re more aware, you have more morals, you have more ethics, you’re practically a Superman, you’re more healthy. Well, she died a drug addict after being in Scientology 35 years.’

When you’re born deep within a confederacy of mercenary dunces, you don’t have a chance in hell. Not a chance in hell.

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Randy Newman wrote her In Memoriam:

Close your eyes now, little girl
They don’t want to hear you cryin’
You never had a chance
You never had a chance

It’s a great, big dirty world
If they say it’s not they’re lyin’
Sandman’s coming soon
You know he’s coming soon

Close your eyes and dream a little dream for you and me
Dream yourself a place where you can go
Baby, you never know

Close your eyes now, little girl
Go to sleep my little baby
Sandman’s coming soon
You know he’s coming soon

Paul Auster describes the photographs – showing the sites of many mass killings in America – in his book, Bloodbath America.

Take a bow, Bryan! You really know how to pick ’em! Darius Miles is so hot he’s got the whole campus running to get out of his way!

Look at those Alabama students run!

LOL.

The trend of hookah bars down south featuring mass shootings with AK-47s is hotting up SO much that there’s now a new designation for the shooter venues: They are Hookah Bazookas, bars that can’t promise opportunities to use your weapons, but can certainly be said to have set up optimal conditions for armed street battle.

In order to get the designation, hookah lounges must be able to show that at least one mass shootout – with fatalities – has occurred in or near their property. Kulture Hookah, Melody Hookah, Hooka Lounge, and now Lounge 33 (scroll down) – all can boast mass death via massive firearms as part of the fun; these and several others are America’s Hookah Bazookas.

Where can you find them? Like I said, it’s ALL down south: Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Virginia. Folks at Lounge 33 are pretty fucking excited to join the Hookah Bazooka list, having lit up the streets of Houston with fifty – count ’em, 50! – ratatats from AK-47s last night.

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To be fair, a search of Hookah Club Shooting turns up locations across the great US of A.

Idaho Republican Apologizes for Comparing Women to Farm Animals

Pity the investigators who had to go searching through the whole vomitous scheme, which, most simply, featured ultra-pious ultraorthodox men stealing tens of millions of dollars from the most vulnerable, the neediest, small children of New York City, so that the ultra-pious could use the children’s funds for late-model SUVs and high-end condos in Florida.

As the ongoing NYT series of exposes demonstrates, you don’t get this, and other endemic forms of government fund theft/vile deprivation of desperately needed goods, without … well, it takes a village. People continue to be shocked by endemic welfare fraud in ultraorthodox communities; for some reason they don’t want to accept a world in which purely self-interested, civil authority hating cults steal our tax money. It seems to have taken a no-holds-barred NYT investigation to attract the attention of the civilized world as well as state and federal authorities to these crime-ridden communities. As any good Freudian will tell you, our deep denial of this reality, our bizarre stubborn insistence on regarding this community as worthy of our respect, will take a long time to change. Meanwhile, we will hand our hard-earned taxes to the lowest of the low. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

... I read about Lisa Marie Presley‘s death. Both born and bred to LA madness, where scads of family and friends drugged and drank madly… You often read these days of uber-LA celebs moving everyone out of there (Australia seems the go-to spot) to avoid a culture where so many are pickling in chemicals.

Fisher made it to 60; Presley died at 54. Both hopelessly drugged up their hearts.

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As a university-chronicler, UD sometimes wonders about the almost-total absence of university education in Mad LA, something Ricky Gervais cruelly pointed out at an awards speech (“You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than [17 year old] Greta Thunberg.”). It’s not that you can’t become a walloping addict and have gone to Cambridge (see Stephen Fry), but it is possible that temporary removal from mad LA to a location of some discipline and reflection (note the title of B. Giamatti’s book on universities: A Free and Ordered Space) would have helped some of LA’s victims.

The occasion couldn’t be more banal: A recently appointed school superintendent plagiarized her dissertation, and the community wonders what to do about a flagrant academic cheater overseeing the academic progress and ethics of the community’s children.

A local newspaper

“examined and cross-checked the 164-page paper” after receiving a tip that the manuscript contained “questionable credits and attributions.”

So, point one: A 164 page doctoral dissertation? Even in the benighted field of education, this is pretty pathetic, given that around half (?) of that is going to turn out to be intro, notes, dedications, etc. Let’s assume actual writing takes up 85 – 90 pages. This is far from thesis length.

Even so, the author felt compelled to lard it up with stolen language.

 … 35 sections of the dissertation matched the phrasing from sources “word-for-word” and are misidentified or unidentified. The paper fails to properly quote from The Journal of School Nursing, The Journal of School Health, a U.S. Surgeon General’s Report and other sources, according to excerpts highlighted in the newspaper’s article. The story also featured a trio of interviews with professors with expertise in plagiarism — with two saying the exact matches of sentences indicate copying and the third saying they believed the dissertation should at least “be corrected if possible.”

This ain’t just plagiarism; it’s Potty Plagiarism, it’s Brown Spots on the Wall by Hoo Flong Dong, it’s lemme hurl words here and hurl words there and let my utterly indifferent and irresponsible dissertation committee figure it out. Cuz yeah responsibility here is shared by the tenured layabouts who didn’t bother reading this and just went ahead and passed it and therefore passed this woman along to her date with destiny in the form of a group of reporters who actually examined the thing.

The plagiarist refuses interview requests – who can blame her? – but does treat the school district she oversees for $226,000 a year to some of her actual prose by way of defending herself to them. Here goes, kiddies.

 I’d like to be as open and transparent as possible on a topic that reminds me being in public leadership requires perfection (and undue scrutiny and judgment), sometimes at the expense of the progress and grace that I often encourage our community to extend to self and others. I only hope that I can model what I expect of our community, display the capacity to adjust, and take the Michelle Obama approach … ‘When they go low, we go high.’

S’wonderful the way she opens by announcing she’s about to be as open and transparent as possible, and then immediately plunges into thickets of nothingness. Where is the word “plagiarism”? What the fuck is she talking about?

We’re not going after her semi-literacy here; she wouldn’t have woven her thesis of many colors if she were able to write. We’re going after her contemptible self-flattery (“My title, accolades, credentials, years of experience and degrees only matter on my resume.” Which is why I’m bleating about them here.) and victimization and plagiarism of the integrity of Michelle Obama in service of her own ass-covering. No one says her job requires perfection, and there’s nothing undue about scrutiny that reveals a person just hired to supervise the ethics of hundreds of schoolchildren has the scholarly ethics of an alleycat. “Grace” is fine, grace is excellent, grace is preparing us for: Whatever I’ve done Jesus forgives me. They go low – those hellish scum had the gall to uncover my plagiarism – but I will go high! I will point my finger to heaven where all is forgiven!

Harvard’s goal of a one hundred billion dollar endowment is in serious jeopardy this morning, as outside pressure on the Kennedy School threatens to alienate donors. The school denied a fellowship to a distinguished human rights advocate for fear that his critical remarks about Israel would offend Jewish benefactors, which would in turn significantly set back the Hundred Bill. for Harvard! campaign. But free speech advocates are fighting back in defense of the controversial candidate for the fellowship.

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Lord knows why anyone is critical of Israel.

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Harvard’s response to the controversy has been quick. “We’re already well on our way to 55 billion,” commented Gerald Symington, head of the HBH campaign, “and doubling that is far from an impossible dream. Imagine what just one school with a modest enrollment could do with that sort of money! We can’t afford to let Israel critics derail us from our dream.”

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Oh, okayyyyy…. We’ll give him the fellowship after all. But he better watch his mouth!

Born into a gunny house, Mother Shooter’s son
Six years old and shooting off your guns at everyone

Shoot inside your first grade class, make that teacher run!
Listen to the pretty sound of bullets as she flies

Find you in your empty class, Mother Shooter’s son
All the kids fled; just you and Mommy’s gun

Bang bang bang! Mother Shooter’s son!

Really? A six year old pulls out a loaded gun in his elementary school class and pops his teacher with it, and we don’t get to know who his parents are? If you lived anywhere near degenerates who leave loaded guns around the house (and this is the best scenario, right? maybe they gave the kid a loaded gun to take to school), wouldn’t you want rather desperately to know about that? Wouldn’t you really – for the sake of your family – have an absolute right to that information?

Who are they? Where do they live? How did they create a six-year-old mass killer? Think of how small the hands of six year olds are. How did they make a six year old who can whip out a gun and kill people with it? Even Dylan Klebold waited til he was seventeen to shoot up Columbine. Even Adam Lanza waited til he was twenty to shoot everybody at Sandy Hook. SIX years old and already at it?

Of course this is the evolution of bloody America. Not long ago you had to be a teenager to get a gun and kill everyone; now you can be six. We don’t yet have any laws to deal with our baby massacrists because we didn’t think they were possible. Silly us. We have an arms industry making smaller and smaller guns. We have computer games designed (ask Adam Lanza) to make killers out of lunatics and babies.

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And here you are, a family unable to afford to take your kid out of the public school killing fields and how do you feel about that, folks? How do you feel about living somewhere near unidentified degenerates who put guns in the hands of their small children?

At the very very least, the names and addresses of sick fucks who give their babies guns need to be published. I mean, yes, we’re totally as a country losing this battle anyway. But every little bit helps.

Bowing to pressure from the student and faculty community, NYU has decided to replace the controversial conspiracy theorist with the high-profile lawyer whose radical ideas about the American electoral process have shaken up the world of legal theory.

Insiders have suggested that the real reason Bartiromo has been removed involves enormous financial penalties she is expected to incur when she loses various multibillion dollar defamation lawsuits filed against her by voting machine companies. NYU trustees are appointed largely on the basis of their ability to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the school.