I won’t bother linking you to anything. Just put the name of the Mafia’s bank in your news search and enjoy.

2/22/22

We practice progressive stacking when calling upon people to participate in class discussion. .. [If] you are white, male, or someone privileged by the racial and gender structures of our society… we will often ask you to hold off…

UD has tried to find out more about the Binghamton University professor who put this on her syllabus, but for some reason she has been 404’d by the school, and as for her home page, fuggedaboutit.

There’s this – hasn’t been taken down yet, but now that I’ve linked to it, it might be.

The school has made her take the language off the syllabus, but it’s probably too late for Binghamton to do anything about the (legal?) complaints it’s going to be fielding. As for embarrassment about the bigot on the faculty, well, you hired her.

No one pulled out a gun and killed everyone. It was just a huge brawl, started by the University of Michigan basketball coach. By current American standards, it was sportsmanship of the highest order.

But then, UM is a very classy school.

A Supermarket in California!

A Walmart in Waukegan!

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What thoughts I have of you tonight

Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg

As I scan the parking lot

Of the Walmart in Waukegan

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Two strangers in SUVs met

On that fruited plain

They blew each other away

With their Glocks

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As one they shot; as one staggered

Into their SUVs

As one staggered

Into the local emergency room

As one were arrested

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O Whitman, O Ginsberg! O Walmart Waukegan parking lot!

I stagger beside you, dreaming of the lost America of love

Past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage

[The Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted] Cabell County Schools administrators in 2017 and 2019 regarding religious activities taking place in schools. … “Despite FFRF’s prior warnings, … adults have continued to promote religion to Cabell County students during the school day, including through religious assemblies,” the lawsuit states.

Three strikes you’re sued, I guess. And it’s about time. No fan of promiscuous litigation, UD nonetheless has long argued on these pages that hopeless recidivists – and fanatics just can’t help it – can only be controlled, in many cases, via the legal system.

Horny haredim, for instance, are always going to stand up on airplanes and demand seating that does not torment them through the proximity of female flesh; and the only way to control this behavior has been to throw them off the airplane when they do their thing.

I mean, the only way for an airline to avoid endless $500,000 a pop successful lawsuits brought by harlots publicly forced to change their seats is to throw the haredim off the plane. Or threaten to do so. Which now routinely happens.

Similarly, it’s quite clear from the incorrigible behavior of Huntington High School’s principal that he perceives his teenage charges as lambs of Christ whether they like it or not, and no heathen “foundation” is going to stand in the way of his herding and revivaling them. Only the principled removal of the principal, plus painful financial penalties against the school district, will begin to perform the miracle of making the blind see in West Virginia.

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‘Course ol’ UD is also waiting for the part where it turns out the principal’s receiving kickbacks from Nik, the mentally challenged revivalist in question, per teenage hellion butts the principal puts in seats. Or whatever. There’s got to be some form of money corruption at play here; it wouldn’t be Jim Bakker-style revivalism without it. Let’s wait and see.

More depressed drunk dudes with forty guns in their house blast their heads off in Wyoming than in any other American state, and the state aims to keep it that way. A pathetic suicide hotline, virtually no psychiatrists, guns up the wazoo, stoic lonely cowboy culture, no interest even in talking about it – Wyoming has refined the suicide brew to the point where its national blasted-head dominance is unquestioned. Rates in the US are around 13 suicides per 100,000 people; it’s not unusual to find counties in Wyoming where rates are over 50 per 100,000.

So here’s a typical (rare) article about suicide in Wyoming. The graphic shows the one demographic least likely to do the deed – a white woman. The article itself fails to put guns front and center, even though it’s clear to the densest idiot that suicide rates are way higher in states where gun ownership is highest, and lowest where ownership is lowest.

But of course Wyoming doesn’t want to go there; it doesn’t want to say anything negative about our bestest bud Mr Beretta.

Sing it:

4,000 luxury Porsches and Bentleys

4,000 luxury roadsters so boss

4,000 highest-end sports cars submerged

How do you measure so tragic a loss? …

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One hundred twenty three thousand brand new Boxster Spyder

Its frozen-berry metallic all up in smoke

4,000 innocent hearts of America

Now and forever bereft and broke

We’re fierce. We both scored in the 400’s, and, despite a few points difference, we called it a tie.

So nu, so far John Wilson is just a capitalist, and a morally exemplary one at that. He doesn’t seem to have, for instance, stolen billions of dollars from poor Malaysians. He just bribed a dude to make sure his three dumdum kids got into good colleges. By prevailing Goldman Sachs standards, his lying, cheating, and depriving actually worthy applicants of a seat at Stanford, is petty crime at best.

So he got a pretty petty sentence – a year and some change in jail.

Ken Kurson, a veteran member in good standing of the crazyass criminal Trump circle, must have thought his presidential pardon meant smooth cyberstalking; but turns out “Presidential pardons do not shield against state charges.” And the state of New York has successfully gone after the creep for spying on his ex-wife.

And here’s a fun fact!

[Mr. Kurson’s legal problems began when he] was nominated for a seat on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2018.

Those pesky background checks! But hey. Speaking as an English professor, I gotta say: He don’t even got a BA! And while he’d be a natural at reviewing paranoid fiction proposals, he seems a mite surprising, overall, as an NEH guy.

And I’m following the mess closely. I haven’t written about it yet because I need to know a lot more about the particular circumstances, regions, histories, politics, before I venture an opinion. I’m reading, reading, and reading.

… book, especially the one about driving in foreign countries, made UD laugh hugely.

An excerpt.

P.J. O’Rourke has died.

… die Forelle.

America gets Shubert’s die Prostituierten.

Rama Yade rose to the position of a junior minister in a recent center-right French government; she even ran for president. But when she failed to win that election, she left France for good and got a think tank job here in DC.

In France, in other words, she had a high-level government position; in the States, she’s an administrator at one of dozens of research firms. Why did she leave France?

When Ms. Yade — born in Senegal in a Muslim family — was appointed a junior government minister in 2007, she believed it would be a “starting point.” But after an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2017, she left for the United States.

“My glass ceiling was political,” said Ms. Yade, 45, who is now senior director of Africa at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

For a lot of people, a ministerial position wouldn’t be a bad ending point for a career, but let’s go with her reasoning. Because she couldn’t get past the barrier to being president of France, she left the country and took an administrative position here…

Sorry, I can’t go with her reasoning. The current French government has a respectable number of high-ranking people who were born into Muslim families, or who have some form of Muslim identity, including the Interior Minister. It looks as though Emmanuel Macron will be re-elected, so there would seem to be opportunities for Yade – and Macron is center-left.

So here’s the deal:

To [Rama Yade, a junior minister for human rights during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy], the [current French] presidential race’s focus on immigration was the “consecration of 20 years of deterioration” in a political culture obsessed with national identity. She had quit her political party — for which [Valerie] Pécresse is now the candidate — because, Ms. Yade said, it had become “very hostile to anything that did not represent a fantasy version of French identity.”

Yade is certainly right to notice a rightward tendency among some in the French public, and indeed growing hostility toward Muslims. Millions of ordinary French Muslims have taken the hit for terrorist bloodbaths in the center of Paris, and for the growing religious radicalization of cities and towns located in one of the most proudly secular countries on earth.

For many non-Muslim French, it’s an obsession with religious identity that has messed things up; and as for fantasy versions of French identity — all nations pump themselves up with glorious versions of themselves, and I’m not sure the French form of this syndrome is worse than anyone else’s.