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.

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 …?