… 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.

When she’s not singing opera, she’s making olive oil from her own grove in Greece.

“I cry when I come home. Whenever I board the plane, the tears begin. I need the sun as an inspiration.”

Trump would Eat Torn Up Documents

in the Oval Office,

ex-White House Aide Claims

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If you haven’t read Ubu the King yet, for goodness sake, do. Here’s the whole thing in pdf. Read and understand. It will put the latest revelations – and so much else – in perspective.

This rally tells UD all she needs to know about the future of this country. If the youth of deepest darkest West Virginia have the clarity, have the balls, to defend our fundamental principles this fiercely, if they still believe, despite all, that their teachers and administrators and superintendents are educable, WE ARE GOING TO BE OKAY.

You want to see a true revival assembly? This is a true revival assembly. Someone send this to Timothy Snyder, so he can stop worrying.

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And a shout-out to the science faculty at Huntington: Your required preacher, Nik Walker, has a lot to teach your students about empirical method!

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UPDATE: The superintendent will investigate, yada yada. Keep in mind this is the second time this school has foisted a mentally challenged fanatic on its students, so it’s clear we have a … structural problem.

The principal attended the required revival, so if the reason this keeps happening is that the person calling the shots keeps making it happen, this person must I think be put out to pasture.

This is what you call highly fertile University Diaries territory, and ol’ UD has been firing up her keyboard fingers, with special attention to the little fucker who left the fun to go to his car and take his gun out of his glove compartment.

UD was further fired up at the thought of letting it rip in regard to Leonid Brezhnev, WVU’s Director of Fraternal Values and Leadership, and his priceless comment on the event:

[W]e’re viewing this as an opportunity for us to collaborate and prevent it from happening again.

(I may have his name wrong.)

But then she went and checked out Garrett Boehme’s social media pages, and this took the wind out of her sails or the fire out of her fingers or whatever. She had such things planned for the shooter! She was going to do a whole riff on Garrett being a direct descendant of the great mystic Jakob Böhme who influenced Coleridge and Yeats and all and from whose Wikipedia page I took the following image, which reminds me so much of the work of my late friend Paul Laffoley:

But there was long-limbed, nature-loving Garrett grinning out from his Instagram, sharing his love of flowers and white water rafting and the National Guard.

I’m serious – if we can – armamentally – train him up in the difference between Taliban militants celebrating their takeover of the Panjshir Valley, and American soldiers targeting Osama Bin Laden, Garrett will be a crucial part of the homeland defense infrastructure that allows UD to sit securely in her bedroom, gazing at flowers.

A gift from my sister.

For a dead wintry garden, this doesn’t look half bad.

And it’s warm out there.

Google News is full of the Good News this morning. It’s all over the place!

Try it in your community — Just take one public school, stage a religious revival meeting, and lock students out of their classrooms so they have no choice but to attend. It’s that simple.

[One former Duke philosophy student described meetings with faculty about Matthew Harris] “as mostly unproductive.”

Faculty, for example, suggested that they hold more professional development sessions for graduate students. 

“We were a little bit upset about this because this wasn’t a matter of professionalism,” the current student said. “This was a unique graduate student who was troubled and required over and above the typical graduate student’s needs.” 

A madman in the department is behaving in a demented way and threatening the lives of various people.

Okay! Let’s hold another session on how you should dress for the MLA convention.

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And then there’s the curiously confused thesis director/recommendation letter writer. In two news outlets now, he has described Harris as a total weenie, a terribly shy harmless sort; yet he also acknowledges that Harris wrote things like “[this thesis is] dedicated to the immediate death of all those who oppose or slow the rise of the black man” in a draft of the dissertation that ended up online.

“I don’t really know how to describe it other than just incoherent, ranting and raving,” says the thesis director.

No kidding.

When you read this, you – what? – put a red line through it and wrote Maybe needs revision …?

In an essay about how he’s downsizing, minimizing, buddhizing, living more modestly, happily, mindfully and meaningfully, Arthur Brooks writes this:

We’d moved two years before, from Bethesda, Maryland, a power suburb of Washington, D.C., to a small town outside Boston. I’d resigned from a chief-executive position to teach and write, trading away virtually all day-to-day contact with political and business elites—and was quickly forgotten by most. I hadn’t hidden the reason for the move, and my family was fully behind it: I was taking my own advice, published in these pages three years ago, to find a new kind of success and a deeper kind of happiness.

See how he starts with UD’s ‘thesda? See that? Good move, because nothing’s quicker shorthand for wealth, power, and prestige obsessed than ‘thesda.

And l’il ol’ Needham! (Needham’s where he lives now.) Thready needy little Needham, inelite downpowered Needham!

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The graphic ‘thesda/Needham contrast jumps out at you in the raw numbers, a disjunction in human fates that instantly brought to UD’s mind Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England:

Estimated 2007 median income for a family in Needham: $144,042

Estimated 2007 median income for a family in Bethesda: $168,385

And not only that!

Needham and Edgartown [will now] join Nantucket, Chilmark, Weston, Aquinnah, Wellesley, Dover, Newton, Vineyard Haven, Belmont, Brookline, Lexington, Winchester, and Lincoln [as places that] Zillow defines [as] “$1 million cities” [–] those with a typical home value of at least $1 million.

As he huddles in his Harvard office (Brooks is at Harvard), far from America’s elites, then shuffles back to his humble hamlet, Brooks can take comfort in the knowledge that he has decisively traded in grasping predatory ‘thesda for a kinder gentler world.

UD’s been posting for a few days on the appalling Matthew Harris story, in which a notorious and dangerous madman has been handed on from one excellent university to another, first as a grad student and then as a lecturer.

For years, several people at these schools have known or suspected that Harris is a serious threat to society, but nonetheless he has been able to leap from one academic pinnacle to another, stopped only by behavior so terrifying that he’s now in jail.

How can we account for this series of events?

Let me first quote a bit from the latest story about him.

[C]urrent and former students at all three universities alleged negligence by the schools for letting Harris slide previously, despite his concerning conduct… [H]is behavior was well known within the small [Duke] philosophy program [but two students who were in the department at the time said they] did not feel they would have been supported by faculty if they’d come forward.

Whoa. Why the hell did they feel that way? I mean, if his threatening behavior was well known, why would faculty have failed to support people who formally reported it? What a condemnation of the Duke department.

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Did the students worry they would be accused of racism if they complained about Harris?

And what of the four professors who approved Harris’s dissertation, and the professors who wrote letters of recommendation glowing enough to get Harris a job at UCLA?

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A little more speculation here, if I may. I’m going to guess that no one read the thesis with much care, or indeed interacted much with Harris.

And a tad more speculation, please. I’m going to guess that influential people at Cornell and Duke championed Harris in a way that may well have made complaining about him seem not worth the hassle.

There’s much, much more to this story, and it will almost certainly come out. We will see if UD‘s guesses have any merit to them. Meanwhile, expect lawsuits. Expect faculty resignations. Expect professors having to testify at Harris’s trial. This one’s a real mess.

The parents have pleaded not guilty to four counts of involuntary manslaughter and remain in jail, each unable to post a $500,000 bond. They face as many as 15 years in prison on each count.

Joyce Vance reviews the charges against the parents of one of our hundreds of school shooters; she devoutly hopes both parents get thrown in the slammer for a very long time.

UD‘s not sure she agrees with Vance that jailing depraved parents will discourage other depraved parents from arming their psychotic little ones. Depraved is depraved: If you love love love guns and violence and gore you’re going to do your thing with your kiddies whatever the cost. Think of Nancy Lanza. Her adoration of large and powerful weaponry all over the house rivaled even that of her mad murderer. I don’t think she would have been put off by some jail time.

However, in terms of sheer justice, let’s all hope the shooter’s disgusting parents are found guilty.

A life well-lived.

Once her giggling fit subsided, UD , a Jew, gave the matter some serious thought…

“Maroon me on a desert island with nothing to read but First Things.“

Such as this 2015 event at the University of Chicago, which wee UD only just discovered.

Let me frame my remarks by recalling this comment from Christopher Hitchens:

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

One of the heroes of free expression I’ve found through writing this blog is Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the U of C. I’ve had two occasions to feature him, one when he defended Laura Kipnis against silly Northwestern, and another when he shared an email exchange he had with American Nazi Richard Spencer. Stone is a wise calm rational defender of pretty much unfettered free expression, and he introduced the guest speaker on my cosmic convergence youtube, which – I dunno – already the combination of Stone and the U of C – a school which welcomed wee UD generously and lovingly for her graduate education – had UD warm and runny…

This is from Stone’s introductory remarks:

We the people acting individually … get to decide what we think when we think it. We do not allow a government or a university or a corporation or a religion to make those choices for us. That’s the essence of what it means to be free.

Stone goes on to introduce the U of C undergraduate who unwittingly set in motion a big event at the school. Eve Zuckerman, president of the school’s French club, wanted to invite heroic free speech advocate Zineb El Rhazoui to speak to the club. But getting a person living under five thousand fatwas to the United States ain’t exactly a matter of paying for a flight from Paris. Zuckerman ended up needing serious help (help which was happily provided) from lots of French and American government and security officials, some of whom ended up attending El Rhazoui’s talk. So that’s impressive and heartening.

Yet more impressive was the tough, articulate (in her fourth language), non-negotiable defense of free speech and free thought launched by El Rhazoui, who has been particularly visible in the French media lately because of the notorious “dolls without faces” documentary which features the apparently Muslim-radicalized French city of Roubaix.

It’s funny how these dolls, on sale at a toy store there, have taken on a powerful symbolic life across France — I guess because they’re a simple, very graphic evocation of the social reality whereby some Muslim children are trained up very early indeed in a sense of their nothingness, their invisibility. Veiling is hardly scandalous, even to a six-year-old, if you’ve always understood yourself to be without even a face.

Anyway, there it all was: The University of Chicago, Stone, El Rhazoui. What a pleasure.

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UPDATE: The president of UD‘s George Washington University might want to watch the Stone/El Rhazoui youtube.