When students are contacting the FBI about one of their instructors, it’s a subtle hint that maybe something’s wrong with the instructor.

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This is a drip-drip-drip story. We’re starting with information from his students; eventually we’ll work up to his dissertation committee and the administration at Duke University.

[The instructor was] speaking haltingly, changing his syllabus willy-nilly and spending the first four weeks of his “Philosophy of Race” class without once showing his face over Zoom.

Things got weirder as the term progressed, students said, leading up to a final exam that included an essay question about the hate-filled manifesto of Christopher Dorner, a former LAPD officer whose 2013 shooting rampage killed four people and wounded three others. Students were asked to consider the “oppression, disrespect and loss of dignity” suffered by the homicidal ex-cop.

… here’s some required reading on the subject.

So nu? How did Harris get to UCLA? Does his dissertation advisor, Andrew Janiak, have anything to contribute?

Were there other faculty in the Philosophy department who may have known, or suspected, that they were handing along a dangerous person to UCLA?

For him to land at that distinguished school, his letters of recommendation must have been excellent. All written by people with no negative knowledge of him?

Did this bit from his brief autobiography at the end of his dissertation not seem strange to anyone?

[H]e also gave lectures about his innovative philosophical research to crowds at Stanford University, Cornell University and Princeton University.

How could any adult American, let alone a school superintendent, say this? Little kids take out their ghost guns and execute each other on the sidewalk in front of your school, and you tell your community it’s hard to understand the “incident”?

No event could be more pedestrian, more transparent, and more expected. It happens very, very frequently – more and more frequently – in the junior high schools and high schools of the United States. (I’m afraid this list is not up to date, but it will have to do.) Happened a few days ago at a high school nine miles from my house.

There are about four hundred million guns in the US, and some of them are in the hands of the parents of the superintendents’ students. They’re all over their living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. How many is the superintendent herself hoarding?

Some of these households have fifty guns and more. These are arsenals, and children are growing up around them. Guns, these children come to know, are there to solve problems. And they are ridiculously accessible, either by taking them from one’s home arsenal, ordering a ghost gun and assembling it, or borrowing one from a friend.

Teenage guys fight all the time. One of the most amazing accomplishments of this country is that while until recently they’d deal with these utterly routine “incidents” with their fists or a pair of scissors or something, we’ve now made it that they can pick off a couple of the folks’ Glocks and kill their enemy.

Get with the program, superintendent. People are going to start laughing at you if you keep saying stupid things.

… feeds a bird brioche in Cozumel.

Michiganders, vote for Soldano and make sure not one sperm is wasted.

Nice as a bomb on the Fourth of July!

No more a smart little girl with no heart,
I am on a mass-murdering high!

I am in an atrocity dither,
With an atrocity star in my eye.
And you will note there’s a lump in my throat
When I think of that wonderful guy!

I’m as tight and as packed as a suicide belt

A bloodbath just for you.

I’m fanatic and fucked as a loon

And real soon a grenade’s coming due!

I’m as corny as ISIS in August,
Nice as a bomb on the Fourth of July.
If you’ll excuse an expression I use,
I’m in love, I’m in love,
I’m in love, I’m in love,
I’m in love with a wonderful guy!

1.) A dismissed faculty member has had a psychotic break and has issued death threats against faculty, students, the whole school really. How well has the campus responded in terms of security?

2.) When did the school become aware (through student complaints, his Rate My Professor page, his social media, etc.) that Harris is a violent, mentally ill person? Did it act quickly, or did it drag its feet?

3.) How well has the administration kept students and faculty informed about the ongoing threat, and what people should do about it?

4.) The acutely psychotic condition of Harris makes me suspect that his madness was visible long before he began ranting about mass murder. Did anyone warn the philosophy department about him before they hired him? Did the department have reservations about hiring him which they decided to overlook?

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Oh. And don’t forget. 5.) “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.” UCLA must certainly proceed on the assumption that Harris enjoys a massive violent arsenal to match his massive violent mental illness.

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UPDATE: “[A] former instructor in a philosophy department is alleged to have sent members of the department threatening messages and was revealed to possibly have a history of problematic interactions with students, and possibly was observed in the past as problematic by superiors at institutions which (for reasons unknown) do not appear to have effectively responded to the situation or informed relevant others of it.”

… Opening day of Allison Fluke-Ekren’s trial, complete with the mug shot heard round the world.

Really spoils the party.

… Day! A wonderful opportunity not to toast the covering of sexually provocative women’s, girls’, and of course babies’ bodies the world over.

On the same date as World Hijab Day, you can instead celebrate No Hijab Day, when you express solidarity with millions of women and children around the world desperate for freedom and autonomy.

When you give thought (and this Yale student is right to worry that you’re not giving thought) to your freedom not to veil, and, more importantly, to the ongoing withdrawal of that freedom for huge numbers of people in other countries, you are less likely to consider the hijab – and other marks of submission – something to celebrate. It’s something to tolerate, to be sure – but we do not set aside annual holidays to celebrate – and even wear! – that which we tolerate. Freedom is something to celebrate, and No Hijab Day celebrates it.

Free women and men of the secular west most recently had their say after the Council of Europe’s ill-fated attempt to foist a celebrate the hijab advertising campaign on them.

Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” [French] Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

************

Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

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Don’t celebrate women who force their eight year old daughters under hijabs. When you wear one, you’re saying that this is okay. Celebrate No Hijab Day.

Yes, well, I think that’s rahtha obvious.

You’re certainly not going to catch any news outlets calling F-E an ISIS bride. All the world’s media love to call ISIS females ISIS brides, because it’s ever so important to assure both us and themselves that girls are sweet and boys are beasts. Boys evolve violent ideological commitments. Girls are too dumb for this and only want to be brides and have babies. So we certainly shouldn’t prosecute these dumb lost souls should we capture any of them.

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F-E should definitely help people with their ISIS bride problem. An American who started out as a Kansas schoolteacher (I am not making this up), F-E came to recognize, accept and finally embrace her spectacular bloodthirstiness, sprinting up the ISIS career ladder until she was conducting classes in how to kill large numbers of people.

But F-E did not merely teach; she was able to attract funding.

… Ms. Fluke-Ekren had a plan in 2014 to attack a college in the United States using backpacks filled with explosives. Prosecutors did not reveal which college she had wanted to target. The criminal complaint said her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State at the time, who approved it for funding.

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I’m not saying F-E could never assimilate back to life in the United States. There are indications, in fact, that in some respects she’d fit in quite well.

[O]n one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle.

So that’s promising; but I think we probably should put her in prison for some period of time because she’s been trying to kill, and get other people to kill, LOTS of Americans; and she still appears determined to do this.

So maybe we should give her life imprisonment. She seems almost as dangerous as… as a man!

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Are prisoners allowed video games? I can’t see F-E keeping her spirits up without Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, aka A La Recherche des Décapitations Perdus.

… a red fox and her kit came loping along the pavers.

I’ve never seen two foxes before. And in the snow. Quite a moment.

One: Mayor withholds funding (funding which is not his to withhold) from his town’s library until all books with homosexual content are removed.

Two: The story quickly jumps to the national media, including People magazine.

Three: The Mayor is discovered hanging out in a stall in a boys’ bathroom in the town elementary school, waiting for a lad to fellate.

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Three hasn’t happened quite yet. Hold on.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I think of my in-laws.

Jerzy Soltan, “spindly and peppery ex-cavalry officer who … spent the war as a [Polish prisoner of the] Germans,” and his wife Hanka, who, with her parents, in their apartment near the Warsaw ghetto, hid a little Jewish boy until the war was over.

(“Borucinski, Michal and his wife Zofia and their daughter Hanna Soltan“)

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It was George Patton’s 3rd Army that liberated Jerzy’s camp, Murnau.