September 5th, 2016
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Missouri legislators are furious: Football players at the University of Missouri can’t carry handguns. Coach says so.

Rep. Joe Don McGaugh, R-Carrollton, called the policy “unbelievable.”

McGaugh is clearly shaken. He will need time to himself before he’s able to focus on countermeasures. I’m sure his fellow legislators are in the same boat.

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Once McGaugh and other lawmakers feel able to act, UD can guarantee that the kids will get all the handguns they want. Relax.

September 5th, 2016
Calling the Shots

Caleb Helsley threw a touchdown pass to Taylor Armbristor to make it 14-0 after a missed two-point attempt with 7:36 remaining. He then ran for another with under a minute left as the Indians (1-0) led 20-0 at the break. In the fourth quarter, Helsley found Armbristor again to make the lead 33-6.

Gunfire on the McLain side of the stadium forced the game to be called with 2:30 remaining in the fourth quarter.

September 4th, 2016
Dinner on the Deck Tonight

20160904_182125

Because the weather is finally mild.

September 4th, 2016
At the very nexus of all things that make Florida State University a great intellectual institution…

… we find one of their specialized coaches – he’s solely about conditioning and strengthening the lads – paid the sixth highest such coaching salary in the country. With contract extensions and all, he’s well on his way to half a million dollars a year. (His most recent salary is a “126.25 percent increase from his initial [2010] $160,000 salary with the Seminoles.”)

Now I want you to put aside petty distractions about FSU that are all in the past: the rapes, the thefts, punching women in bars, animal abuse, the conniving local police force, blahblahblah… I want you to think about this hagiographic Showtime special on this great team, this great school, this great community.

Watch the trailer – it features this guy, this strength and conditioning coach. One of FSU’s heroes.

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So – the nexus? The very crux of what makes a great academic institution?

Well, you’ve got the coach, and you’ve got the Showtime special. Now you need that ineffable combination of elements that makes for scholarly excellence. Let us put these elements together.

Let’s have this coach get stinking drunk in his campus office with the Showtime crew and then pile into his car and crash into a stop sign.

AND let’s let this class operation give him a slap on the wrists and insinuate in its public statement that it was all the evil Showtime crew’s fault for forcing whiskey into the hands of this great good and innocent man.

Now you’ve got it. The life of the mind, Florida State University.

September 4th, 2016
Old, Hacked, Added, Manipulated. Character Assassination, Political Correctness, the Mainstream Media, Racism.

Trump surrogate Mark Burns offers a long list of excuses to cover his long list of lies about himself.

September 3rd, 2016
Robert Rochefort, a French, uh…

… Member … of the European Parliament, was innocently masturbating in a store, not far from a couple of young people also in said store.

Le vice-président du MoDem a été interpellé mercredi dans un magasin de bricolage [yes, that’s a “do it yourself” store] de Vélizy-Villacoublay (Yvelines). Il a été surpris par un vigile alors qu’il était en train de se masturber devant deux enfants. Robert Rochefort a reconnu les faits et a expliqué aux policiers avoir “besoin de se masturber” quand il était “en situation de stress”.

The police were called, and Member Rochefort explained to them that he’d (as you see if you read French) had to masturbate that very moment in that very place because he was currently in an unspecified stressful situation.

M. Rochefort, whose areas of concern in the Parliament include “Emission Measurement,” has been asked to step down from his high-ranking party position in France.

September 2nd, 2016
Not only that. It won’t be the Taconic State Parkway anymore. It’ll be the …

TACOnic State Parkway.

The founder of Latinos for Trump on Thursday warned that if his candidate loses, America faces an uncertain future in which Mexican food is far too easily available.

“My culture is a dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems,” Marco Gutierrez said in an interview on MSNBC. “If you don’t do something about it, you’re gonna have taco trucks [on] every corner.”

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With several predominantly Latino neighborhoods, Phoenix is a city used to seeing taco trucks on the corner. In the wake of Gutierrez’s comments, Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego decided to patronize one of them.

The Democrat posted a photo to his personal Twitter account of him ordering three carne asada tacos from his favorite taco truck for lunch Friday. The picture was accompanied by the tweet “about to assert my cultural dominance.” It has garnered hundreds of likes.

September 2nd, 2016
UD Can’t Wait for Trump’s Smokin’ Hot Insults on this One.

[George] Shultz [has signaled] that he [is] discussing issuing a joint endorsement of Hillary Clinton with Henry Kissinger.

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Trump’s campaign staff should get to work on their tweets asap, since there’s speculation the men might make the announcement on Labor Day.

One source for some great Kissinger tweets would be Christopher Hitchens’ book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Example:

[Americans] can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else.

Don’t say it’s from Hitchens, of course; I don’t think Hitchens would, uh, be supporting Trump.

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One danger of not citing the author, however, is that no one’s going to believe Trump knows the words egregious and impunity

Actually, now that I look at the thing, the rather lengthy sentence, and the well-deployed either/or formulation, are also deal breakers… Let’s see…

Kissinger: War criminal! Lawbreaker! Sad!

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A second set of tweets could feature the advanced age of both men.

Kissinger! Shultz! Sharing a condo in Seizure World! Sad!

George and Henry sittin’ in a tree… IN SEIZURE WORLD. Sad!

There are many variants of these. You might mention Ronald Reagan. I leave it to the imagination of the Trump campaign.

August 31st, 2016
Peter Levine, Mr UD, and Tetyana Kloubert, at the 2016 European Summer Institute…

DSC06564 (2)

… of Civic Studies in Augsburg, Germany.

August 31st, 2016
Holey Thesis

A Catholic university said the president of Mexico met the requirements for graduation with a law degree, while acknowledging parts of his 1991 thesis were plagiarised.

Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City issued a statement late on Sunday, saying the thesis submitted by then-student Enrique Pena Nieto – elected president in 2012 – conformed with the standards of the time.

“The thesis introduced original ideas” and used outside ideas with and without citations, the statement said. “The (current) general regulations of our institution are not applicable to former students.”

August 30th, 2016
UD has covered her share of contemptible coaches on this blog, but Western Michigan University Football Coach P.J. Fleck has to be the absolute rockbottom worst.

He recruited a criminal onto his team. Nothing to notice there; virtually all universities take risks on certain players. But when this freshman immediately got to work at WMU, attacking a woman at gunpoint before suiting up for even one game, the feckless Fleck broke out with torrents of bullshit about what he’d done by bringing this man into the WMU community. Let’s listen.

Let’s listen, keeping in mind that it took a local news station less than an hour to find the player’s criminal record. WMU says it doesn’t do that… It doesn’t look at players’ criminal records because I dunno who ever heard of criminal behavior among football players? Why waste your time with that? WMU says it’s considering doing that now, going forward and all.

You dig as much as you want, you can say you have something, you don’t have something, you can dig as a head coach as much as you want and it is what it is at this point, and you just have to be able to use it for the future players as you continue to recruit them… There is zero tolerance for anything like that within our culture. Zero… I brought those two gentlemen [there were two WMU football players involved; this guy’s teammate “ordered the victim to take her shirt off, while holding a gun to her forehead, according to the testimony.”] into our culture and if I would have told you I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have obviously done that because that’s not what our culture’s about. I feel like I failed because I couldn’t work in their lives to get them to not make that decision. We do everything we possibly can, every single day, to teach and promote decision making and we will continue to do that.

Ya gotta admit that in years of my recording scummy things scummy coaches say, this drivel (produced by probably the highest paid person at that university) rules. The big lie pompously reiterated (Zero. Zero.). Reiterated use of a voice one can only call the subliterate subjunctive. The obscene hypocrisy.

That’s what you pay your university coach for though, ain’t it? You’re after a guy who doesn’t give a shit about importing dangerous people to university towns if they can play football.

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UPDATE: I mean, really. Why has Fleck not been fired? Jesus.

August 30th, 2016
Snapshots from Home

Irrationally proud of

20160830_145508

my pepper plants.

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Lemon cake at Black Market Bistro

20160828_112419

shared three ways with friends.

August 30th, 2016
“Notre Dame will kick off its 128th season of football Sunday in a primetime match-up at Texas. This life-long Fighting Irish fan is finding it difficult to care very much.”

Like Catholic, football-obsessed Boston College, Notre Dame of all places is beginning to show signs of spiritual strain. More and more fans confess that the school’s squalid football program – which slimes along its merry way accompanied by a tireless chorus of We’re godly from the school – is so squalid, so hypocritical, that they just can’t do it anymore. Notre Dame is a choir boy gone rancid, and while most of the congregants have decided through an effort of will to grip their hymnals ever tighter and ignore the stinky lad, some have become overwhelmed by the smell. They may still buy tickets to the games, but they’re “finding it hard to care very much.” They’re finding it hard to forget six player arrests in one night, and blahblahblah you know the picture. You know it from forthrightly filthy programs like University of Miami, and you know it from equally but not at all forthrightly filthy Notre Dame.

Notre Dame is Blanche DuBois flouncing around a dump, twirping about her moral purity and her clean bright Southern manse. You just want to look away.

August 29th, 2016
Message: I Care.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday that his party’s nominee knows that he must inject a little “humanity” into his rhetoric if he hopes to win the presidency…

“…Donald Trump understands that with every position that is taken and as you get closer to the White House, a degree of humanity and decency is part of every decision that needs to be made… [He] wants to do the right thing and wants to take every position that he’s talking about and pepper it with decency, dignity and humanity.”

In every race that must be run
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job’s a game

And every task you undertake
Becomes a piece of cake
A lark! A spree! It’s very clear to see that

A pinch of humanity helps the messaging go down
The messaging go down-wown
The messaging go down
A spoonful of decency helps the messaging go down
In a most delightful way!

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A cypher running to be prez
Cannot be bothered what he sez
While hurting people cuz he doesn’t care
But now his polls have got so bad
He’s had to add a tad, a crumb, a grain
To flavor his campaign — for…

A speck of humanity helps the messaging go down
The messaging do down-wown
The messaging go down
Just a hint of humanity helps the messaging down
In a most delightful way!

August 28th, 2016
Narrow Path to the Presidency; Independent Path to the Presidency…

psychopath to the presidency.

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