… gaze from the back of Dave Almy‘s iconic green truck at parade spectactors. First Fourth I can remember when the weather was not just bearable, but actually pleasant. Photo: Bennett Roth.

No – at Penn State, we’re more about raping kids in showers than shooting guns into condos.

[Yesterday,] a [Massachusetts state] trooper stopped to help two cars pulled over in the breakdown lane. State Police said it appeared the two cars were refueling but the trooper noticed eight-to-10 people in the cars were wearing full military-style uniforms. Some had long rifles, some had pistols, and some had both. The trooper asked for driver’s licenses and proper licensing for the guns, but the group did not provide either.

While plagiarism accusations have proven a number one reason for political resignations in the Merkel era, they usually centre on politicians’ doctoral thesis. Baerbock’s [plagiarized] book, entitled Now: How We Can Renew Our Country, is a mass-market nonfiction title in which the Green politician lays out her political philosophy, ghostwritten by a journalist.

Somewhere, under the pile of plagiarism, ghostwriting, and vacuous title, lies – I think – a person, a Green party leader… Does she have a name, or did her parents hand that too off to a ghostwriter?

Oh, Baerbock. Does it say “Baerbock’s book” up there? In what way is a ghostwritten plagiarized pre-pulped poopoo platter Baerbock’s book? And since when does the Green Party endorse wasting paper on plumped up platitudes?

Their incoming fine arts school dean tweeted enthusiastic support of a man who has admitted to drugging women for sex, and whose conviction on aggravated indecent assault charges has just been overturned on a technicality. He continues to face multiple civil suits.

Now Howard University women get to worry that their new dean will bring her fierce defense of predators to their campus.

Its words are largely taken from this interview.

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

Water seeping in from thunderstorms made

Changes at the geologic level

Until the pillars of the pool arcade

Put paid to all our revel

… 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.

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

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. 

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

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.

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

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.