… to see exactly what UD sees almost every time she looks out the window. It’s always a female ruby throated.

As the photographer writes, bee balm is a “magnet” for hummingbirds.

See this post for background.

And note that I’ve gotten new information since the first draft of this post, which I’ve incorporated into it.

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Peter Galbraith, long a champion of the Kurds, has been able to use those connections to free (so far; his activities are ongoing) 47 women and children out of Kurdish-controlled Syria. This is substantially more than what most Western governments have been able to do. And thousands of those governments’ citizens— most of them children— still languish in Kurdish-run prison camps.

Most recently, Peter brought out a Canadian woman who had rejected the Islamic State and cooperated with US law enforcement. In March, he freed the woman’s four year old daughter from Roj prison camp in Northeast Syria. The child now lives with her aunt in Canada and will soon reunite with her mother. In November 2019, Peter brought out a German woman, her three children, and an American orphan. This woman too rejected the Islamic State and now studies at a university in Germany.

Peter has reunited fourteen Yazidi women with their twenty children. ISIS abducted these women—teenagers at the time—in 2014 and sold them to ISIS fighters as slaves. When ISIS fell in 2019, the children born of the rapes were forcibly taken from their mothers and placed in an orphanage in Syria. No one— not the UN, not the local governments, not NGOs—was willing or able to help these women. Peter got the children, signed for them at the Syria/Iraq border, and delivered them to their mothers. He brought out two more mothers (with four children) who, because they refused to give up their children, had been kept under de facto house arrest in Syria.

Peter rescued a three year old boy from a German woman who was abusing the child. The child was not the German’s but the child of her husband’s Yazidi slave.

The Canadian woman whom Peter was able to bring out provided a huge amount of valuable information to US law enforcement that will support the prosecution of US citizens (or persons in US custody), and assist in the recovery of kidnapped American children.

I wasn’t sure, in my last post, whether Canada would take this woman back, but it probably will. It has said that it will provide consular services – including repatriation – to any citizen who reaches an embassy, and Peter has apparently arranged for her to be in contact with the Canadian Embassy office in Erbil . The Syrian Kurds have investigated her and found no evidence of crimes or of her committing terrorist acts. 

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Peter has also weighed in on Shamima Begum, with whom he has met and talked, and about whom I’ve had what to say on this blog. “I’ve talked to Shamima – she is part of the group of women who have absolutely rejected the Islamic State – I know enough about her to feel quite confident that she’s not a dangerous person.” In this, Peter is at odds with the British intelligence services, who have called for her repatriation to be blocked because they believe she indeed does continue to pose a threat to their country. It’s possible Peter has better sources than the Brits.

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University Diaries readers got there before Globe and Mail readers.

… like Andrew Sullivan, attempts to get at the fatal disconnect between liberal culture and critical race theory.

Critical race theory is not the same thing as Marxism, but some of its more facile popularizers share with Marxists the deep conviction that their way of seeing the world is the only way worth seeing the world. Moreover, some have encouraged people to behave as if this were the only way of seeing the world. The structural racism that they have identified is real, just as the class divisions once identified by the Marxists were real. But racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person’s heart at all times. More to the point, any analysis of American history or American society that sees only structural racism will misunderstand the country, and badly. It will not be able to explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation, a Civil Rights Act, a Black president. This is a major stumbling block, not so much for the legal scholars (some of whom actually merit the title “critical race theorist”) but rather for the popularizers and the scholars-turned-activists who want to force everybody to recite the same mantras.

You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh while he lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.

… amazement and admiration, and here he goes again. After arranging, last March, the release of a Canadian child from a camp in Syria holding ISIS women and children, Peter Galbraith has arranged the release of her mother from the same camp. The woman is in Iraq, and it’s not clear that she’ll be allowed into Canada.

What’s most important, I think, is that Peter goes to some trouble to justify the woman’s release:

“This was a special case,” said Galbraith, “because [she] was one of a group of women who had very much broken with the dominant Islamic State ideology in the camps, wearing Western clothes and rejecting it, so she was at risk.”

He also said she’d been instrumental in helping officials locate a missing Yazidi child in one of the camps. 

These are the sorts of conditions which UD (who has been unsympathetic to some internees as they ask for repatriation) expects to see when, special case by special case, releases from the camps begin to accelerate. This woman put the interest of her child before her own; she cooperated in important ways with officials; and she has been very overt about her rejection of ISIS doctrine. We can never know for sure, of course, that any given adherent or former adherent won’t go back to ISIS; but we can certainly demand an extremely high level of evidence that they won’t.

AMERICANS SHOCKED TO LEARN THAT GIULIANI HAD LAW LICENSE

(Onaccounta he just lost his law license.)

Brandi wins big.

On its fiftieth anniversary, everyone’s talking about Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue. (Go here.) UD, who listened obsessively to the thing throughout her unhappy freshman year at Goucher College, hasn’t much to add – beyond random unhappy personal things – to all the superannuated hippie nostalgia out there.

As in – her roommate that year, Marian Dillon, was lively, beautiful and came from a wealthy, private school background (UD, remarkably clueless for someone from Bethesda, didn’t know what a private school was until Marian explained it to her). Marian hadn’t brought her horse to college, but Courtney down the hall had (can’t remember her last name, but she was closely related to Philip Roth and looked a lot like him), and UD should have been tipped off from the campus stables and horses and Courtney’s horse scrapbooks that Goucher really wasn’t a good UD fit… But I digress. The sad personal thing is that UD idly searched Marian’s name a few months ago and she died at 52.

That year was also sad because David Kosofsky and I were tumultuously on and off; he’d show up from College Park, we’d thrash around trying to make sense of our hopeless relationship, and then he’d drive back to school. Laurie Fleischman, his true love, was somehow (too long ago to remember) in the background of all of this. And that’s two other sad personal things: Both Laurie and David also died young. “WHAT LIVES ARE IN STORE FOR 2 SUCH AS US!” she wrote him from the Bronx High School of Science. Bizarrely, I ended up with her love letters/sketches/pressed flowers to David.

In one of them, she nastily alluded to wee UD as (yes) “Joni Mitchell.” (David had attended performances I’d given, in high school and synagogue, of Joni Mitchell songs.) For Laurie, Joni Mitchell was short for Not Charlie Parker, Not Hip, Not Jazz, Not… Blues. Joni Mitchell was short for Sylvia Plath – a suburban pipsqueak with the pseudoblues.

UD wonders if, over the years of Mitchell’s artistic development, Laurie felt more generous toward her.

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So picture ol’ UD, years later, tears welling up as she reads Laurie’s letters to David and thinks on the bitter reversal of all that beautiful passionate arrogant youth.

I guess the Blue song for this is The Last Time I Saw Richard.

A New York Times writer found this pun so nice, she used it twice.

Insanely invasive and on its way to seven feet tall, this … thing is all over UD‘s garden.

Note that it has begun to put out small daisy-like flowers.

UPDATE: Aska Gardener informs me it’s a weed, and a nasty one. They can’t precisely identify it, but they are familiar with it, and it must be destroyed. So this morning, with the ground still wet from storms, UD lifted, roots and all, every stalk of mystery weed she could find. ANOTHER UPDATE: I think it’s an evil variety of goldenrod.

Well, this Israeli didn’t grow up in a theocracy, so he finds the ways of theocracies unnerving.

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With its latest fragile, semi-rational, government, maybe Israel will suspend its theocratic ways and police its ultraorthodox hoodlums, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t expect the state to get in the way of mobs of men hurling hot coffee at women trying to pray, calling them whores, and ripping up their prayer books. That’s just the way they roll in a Zionist country running scared from violent anti-Zionists.

Don’t try to understand. And don’t hold your breath.

Unbelievable.

Wyoming, UD comes to think, is our most peculiar state. In 2013, it was our fifth richest. It’s bilious with billionaires, but also boasts plenty of brick and mortar industry.

It’s got guns up the wazoo: “Wyoming has, by far, the highest number of guns per [shot off] capita. Of Wyoming’s 581,075 people, there are 132,806 registered guns.”

Shot off? What’s UD mean?

Waaal, you know… all them guns….

In 2020, 181 Wyomingites killed themselves. That’s a rate of 31 deaths per 100,000 residents, up from 29.4 in 2019, the highest suicide rate in the nation. The state’s suicide rate has remained high for years…

Round these parts, people say Let a smile be your umbrella. In Wyoming, they say Let a Colt be your bolt.

Or, as they say at the NRA: Guns don’t kill people; people with guns kill themselves.

And here’s another peculiar Wyoming statistic: It’s almost smack-dab at the bottom of states with the lowest covid vaccination rates. Only some of our poorest states (Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi) rank lower than wealthy Wyoming. (“Wyoming is currently ranked 4^th in the United States for its economic outlook.”) Ain’t dat something? I mean, when you put it all together: A gorgeous, well-off state with everything to live for, whose most noteworthy output is suicidal gun-hoarders who don’t give a shit about their health or yours. Paging Cormac McCarthy.

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And hey maybe UD finds all of this arresting because maybe she’s looking at the future. Where America’s cutting-edge, paranoid, venture capitalists go, there go I. There go all of us. To quote the title of that funny book about grammar: Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Andrew Sullivan has done the talking for me on the subject. Read it all. To the last paragraph.

To expose propaganda is to defend liberal education, and to defend liberal culture. I’m thinking that like a lot of big shiny new things our big shiny new-obsessed country embraces, this latest one’s not long for this world. But we can certainly hasten its demise by fighting it at every turn.

Ghost professors haunt community colleges, but they’re probably flitting around at four-year places with online courses too.

When you add covid to the myriad excuses online instructors already have to sorta drop out of the whole show up and teach thing, you get an Army of Ghosts phenom — which is to say, not the routine only-half-there, give-a-shittery some distance profs exhibit, but actual, significant, increasingly noted and discussed, disappearance. Not the lazy deceitful hand most of the work off to subcontracted anonymous drudges thing, but simple total cutting and running.

“They’re not teaching, you don’t see them, they don’t do Zoom, they don’t have office hours,” said Santa Monica College political science student Jonnae Serrano. “I’ve had office hours where it’s completely text — I’m texting my professor, and waiting for her to get back to me.” … [Students] complain of professors who’ve given them a list of YouTube videos, produced by someone else, and questions as the teaching for the entire semester. [One student] said a “ghost professor” in her history class kept his camera off the three times she attended his online office hours.“I just stopped doing it because it was just talking to a screen.” … [Another student offered the revolutionary thought that] “If you’re requiring your students to do work and be present in your class, you should be present as well.” …

“In the defense of some of these so-called ghost professors, many people, you know, don’t have the formal online training,” [one professor] said.

Yes, and the response to not having medical training is to make appointments to treat people, and to go ahead and collect payment, but not to show up. Because, you know, you don’t have the formal training.

In order of thrill:

1. DRAGONFLIES
2. HUMMINGBIRDS
3. SONG OF THE THRUSH
4. FIREFLIES

Totally off the thrillist:

1. DEER
2. MOSQUITOES
3. THE PROFUSE ANONYMOUS BROAD LEAFY WEED(?) THAT’S NOW SIX FEET HIGH ALL OVER THE GARDEN AND HAS TO BE HACKED BACK EVERY DAY
4. GRAPE VINES

UPDATE: And who knew how lucky I am to see hummingbirds, dragonflies, butterflies, bees, and fireflies all the time?

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I’ve been seeing this guy – a male whitetail skimmer – all day. (Tried to take a pic but it wouldn’t sit still, so this is from Wikipedia.)