A sweet little propaganda morsel in the Bennington Banner instructs us that women covered head to toe in black is beautiful. We are to find this beautiful.

Nowhere in her celebration of invisible women does the propagandist remember to add that we are also to find children – just little girls, of course – covered head to toe beautiful; or that we are to find compulsory female covering in Iran and other countries beautiful. Varied, beautiful, and you’re going to jail for a long time if you and your children don’t veil.

“Many modern nuns have abandoned” their black coverings, the author notes, and I wonder why. And I wonder why it doesn’t occur to her that there’s a difference between modern nuns free to abandon old ways and millions of Afghan and Saudi women (ordinary women, not people who have joined religious orders) who face imprisonment and even death if they throw off their robes. Who at the very least face physical attacks on the street from men who see them uncovered.

The author tsk-tsks all the weird unwoke anti-burqa legislation coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but never inquires about whether that legislation means anything other than (as she believes) visceral hatred and fear.

“Within our own country and around the world, religious garments say, ‘I believe this.”

Sometimes they say that. Sometimes they say I revile what I’m wearing but I can’t do anything about it. Sometimes they say There are places in the world where men can legally fully cover women, or intimidate them into being fully covered, but this secular republic shouldn’t be one of them.

And it matters what this is, doesn’t it? Are we really not allowed to judge people who say “I believe apostates should be killed”? What about people who say “I believe we should bring back burning at the stake”?

One way to avoid writing propaganda is to read a little bit about your subject. The question of veiling is not solved by agreeing to judge something that a lot of people find appalling beautiful. The matter is complex. One might start here.

An update from the New York Times on deliberations about repatriating ISIS women and their children. Are they still ISIS adherents? Impossible to know. Are they – as their advocates insist – poor fools who got trafficked and deserve sympathy? Well, but then they’re poor fools who got trafficked and can get trafficked again. (Those who’ve talked for the record, like Shamima Begum, tend to deny the trafficking bit and admit the ideology turned them on.)

[Belgium’s justice minister] said that any of the women wanting to return to Belgium would have to prove that they mean no harm to the country. “If they have not distanced themselves from ISIS ideology, they will remain on site,” he said.

Sounds a little naive, doesn’t it? Will Belgium ask them to recite the Scout’s Pledge?

So my thing is that France already has plenty of ordinary anonymous hardworking people/ISIS fanatics preparing the next attack on Paris, and one assumes the French state spends large sums of money tracking them and their circle. At the very least, returning demonstrated, way-hardcore ISIS adherents to the country who are really sorry now means far more, and far more extensive, surveillance work.

Well, it’s actually a county lockup, but UD finds the tongue-twister irresistible.

Yes, the dusty Sandusky story needs to be dusted off for a moment while we note the failure of Graham Spanier’s endless efforts to avoid incarceration for his role in the child abuse scandal at his university, where coaches buggering little boys in the locker rooms was all in a day’s work.

The whole sordid tale, you recall (it’s okay if you don’t have the stomach to recall) was a testimony to the institution-enhancing greatness of big-time university football.

In honor of history’s biggest tax evader, Jesse Jones has renamed itself The Jesse James School!

As Fran Lebowitz notes, you earn a million; you steal a billion. And the honorable Robert Brockman has devoted his life to demonstrating the truth of that statement, hiding record-setting billions in Switzerland and other fabled havens. Sudden-onset dementia unfortunately gripped the man the moment the indictment came down, and now he’s apparently staggering around trying to find his ass with two hands. Forget finding the money. What money. Let the man die in dignity.

The 39-count indictment includes wire fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and destruction of evidence, among other charges. These crimes make up a nearly 20-year plot to conceal income in offshore accounts.

He sat on lots of university boards, and while some, like the Baylor School of Medicine, seem to have gotten out in front of the story (speaking of which, lucky Centre College! The whole school might well have been renamed for the world’s biggest white collar criminal.), Jesse James still has his big-shot page up.

Brockman, known for being rather reclusive (wonder why), also gives big money to Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. His name is as prominently plastered on Rice campus buildings as the name Kapoor is at Binghamton, Wyly at Michigan, and Kozlowski and Brennan at Seton Hall.

The Brockman Hall for Opera stands next to the existing Alice Pratt Brown Hall, forming the Brockman Music and Performing Center. Additionally, in 2011, President David Leebron and Rice Board of Trustees Chair Jim Crownover thanked the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust for its centennial gift at the unveiling of the Brockman Hall for Physics.

There’s a poignancy to all those music halls, because if Brockman’s co-conspirator hadn’t sung so loudly to the Justice Department he wouldn’t be going to jail.

Some world, huh? A notorious, spectacular, criminal cavorts about doing his thing for decades during which plenty of people squawk about him (just like they squawked about Yeshiva University treasurer Bernie Madoff!) but nothing happens except that he sits on high-profile university boards and has his name emblazoned for the ages on university buildings.

Put aside the ethical problems with professors who lie about their race/ethnicity, and thereby incalculably hurt other people and groups and the value of truth itself; ask yourself whether the problem with such people is not that they are contemptible, but that they are insane.

A person commenting on a New York Times essay on the latest identity fraud (this one’s a woman who claimed to be Native American to get ahead in academia) goes there: Is it not plausible that a person capable of spending her entire adult life pretending to be someone she’s not may be mentally unbalanced? Indeed, don’t we all expect to encounter Christs of Ypsilanti and Napoleons of Boca Raton only in institutions?

This woman, and Jessica Krug, and probably other fraudsters like them, went victimization-theft one better and harassed actual black and Native people they knew because the fraudsters found them inauthentic. Just as each of the three Christs impugned the Christness of the others.

Which is a real method in the madness thing, ain’t it? Talk about diverting attention from your own, er, lack of identity-evidence — look at that faker over there! And that one over there!

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

When personal, belligerent, enactment of minority identity becomes more important than intellectual legitimacy… well, you get what you wish for. You get the performative professoriate; you get high-kicking Jessica Krugs putting blackness over on… on almost everyone.

Yes – all of these tired pathetic tales feature non-insane observers attempting to point out that the political steam issuing from the head of the department firebrand is BS. But y’all know how love is…

We hired Jessie in a fever

Hotter than a pepper sprout

We been talkin about Jessie

Ever since the fire went out…

Yet many of you would hire her again; and the latest Krug remains in a good academic job, and keeps getting published by (wait for it) the same press that published Krug. Even though everyone at this point knows she’s a truly vile liar.

It’s kind of like – if American academia likes brazen amoral liars that much, what’s it got against Donald Trump? Why does it think academia is superior to Trumpland? Both places promote people – even nutty scuzzy people – who satisfy deep dark desires. Trumpland’s just more honest.

A long, beautifully written piece in The Guardian evokes the “it’s a small world, after all” charm of Marbella, Spain. The only thing missing from the picture is King Juan Carlos, currently in Abu Dhabi hiding out from the police.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s timely and urgent book reminds Americans – legally compelled not only to mask, but to wear seat belts – that we are one click away from genocide.

Starting tomorrow, Les UDs will be (where else?) in Rehoboth Beach, haunt of current presidents. Their leave-taking preparations, after many three-hour drives to the Bay Bridge and the long Delaware flats, feature the now-classic Can’t you take the dog to the kennel yourself? Why do you need me to ride along?, How bad do you think it will it be on the Bay Bridge?, Where’s the orange beach chair with the wide armrests that I like?, and (even though we’ve stayed there for decades) When is check-in time at the condo?

One distinctive element of this trip is the presence at the beach of tons of friends and family. Traditional Rehoboth involves much quiet gazing out to sea and to the container ships on the horizon, followed by twosomes along the boardwalk. This time, while our first week will be relatively quiet (various Garrett Park neighbors; Di and Steve Elkin), the week around Memorial Day will be a real blowout, with both of UD‘s sisters, various cousins, and gobs of buddies. UD is thrilled, but worries about crowd control, plus the difficulty of dinner reservations.

Nu, these are problems anybody would want. As is also traditional, UD‘s gratitude for life having rigged up something spectacular for her is at the full.

She will, as ever, blog from the shore.

As usual, Obama understates.

YOU LIKE TO THINK THE STARS ARE DRIPPING

You like to think the stars are dripping while
You sleep.  You like to think you'll snap awake
And step out on the deck, and in a while,
Your eyes ready, clusters will constellate
And then start dripping, just over the oak:
A weathered black and white Jackson Pollock
Whose silvers slap the cosmic curtain.


Like to think?  No - you're actually certain
That when you're not looking the universe
Loses its straight face and gets to mugging
Peeing its pants giggling and shrugging...
Stable?  Who said stable?  Metastable
Maybe and that's only maybe. Unstable
Is just as likely. Don't sleep too lightly.











-- 

UD had just read him this NPR article, which she thinks might be an out of season April Fool’s gag. Here are excerpts, with occasional parenthetic commentary from UD.

A fungus called Massospora, which can produce compounds of cathinone — an amphetamine — infects a small number of [cicadas] and makes them lose control.

The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive.

“This is stranger than fiction,” Matt Kasson, an associate professor of forest pathology and mycology at West Virginia University, tells NPR’s All Things Considered. “To have something that’s being manipulated by a fungus, to be hypersexual and to have prolonged stamina and just mate like crazy.”

… [J]ust before the cicadas rise from the ground, the spores of the fungus start to infect the bug. Once it’s above ground and starts to shed its skin to become an adult, its butt falls off.

Then a “white plug of fungus” starts to grow in its place.

… The insects have no idea what’s happening.

[It was about here – when the NPR writer reassured us that the cicadas have no awareness they’ve become buttplugged zombies – that ol’ UD began to wonder if something April Oneish might be going on… Don’t worry we’re sure they are unaware… Huh?]

… Males that are infected will continue to mate with females, but they’ll also pretend to be females so they can spread the fungus to even more partners. [Now it’s Lesbian World War Z.]

… “It’s sexually transmissible,” Kasson tells NPR. “It’s a failed mating attempt, of course, because there’s no genitalia back there.”

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

The story’s origin is clearly The Golden Screw story, which my father – with lights out and much spectral OOOOing – told the four Rapp kids every Halloween. UD thought it was just her family’s story – just her father’s creation – until, for this post, she looked it up, and it’s like this major American joke/folktale. Her father’s only contribution was to Judaify the punch line: “And then… [long pause… ] his TUSHY FELL OFF.”

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

Anyway, Mr UD just thought the whole thing was gross. UD of course has been laughing… her butt off.

The [staff of the film Halston included] an intimacy co-ordinator, which [star Ewan] McGregor felt was an especially important development for young female actors…

With the intimacy co-ordinator, he says, “It’s literally like, ‘Are you happy to have your bum touched?’, ‘Are you happy for somebody to put their hand on your chest?’ ‘Are you going to kiss with tongues?’”

And I’m sure we’re very happy CHS did so well (its CEO made $9.1 mill ), though when you read the fine print it turns out they did it through a wily combination of government handouts and suing – during a pandemic – patients who couldn’t pay their bills.

These sorts of suits are such a disgusting practice that almost no other hospital chain files them.

CNN interviewed more than a dozen people sued by CHS hospitals. Most said they had tried to communicate with the company’s lawyers, collections agents or the hospitals directly and found them unresponsive or unwilling to agree to a settlement they could afford.

Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has studied hospital lawsuits around the country, said CHS was far more litigious than most hospital groups, and that the company’s financial aid policy didn’t go nearly far enough. “It’s like Marie Antoinette saying, ‘if somebody came to me begging for food, I would give them cake,'” Makary said. “It’s completely blind to the relentless, aggressive, predatory nature of debt collection on the ground.”

(One simple form of self-defense for some patients involves checking yourself out of the hospital. “[A patient being sued] said in an interview that his bill came after the hospital kept him longer than he had wanted.” You’re almost always free to leave a hospital when you want to – check out the AMA option. If you feel comfortable doing it, you’ll save yourself thousands of dollars, and spend less time living cheek by jowl with those pesky hospital-borne infections.)

Two pics of the little buggers caught in the act of molting. One from UD‘s backyard, one from the front.