Socialist? Did you say Socialist? Isn’t the adjective “rightwing” required by law to be inserted into every reference to rules against wearing the hijab/burqa in certain public settings? Isn’t one always instructed that support of some restrictions is “reactionary”?

Believe UD, who has read hundreds of news articles and essays about this, that the ironclad rule remains: If you want to approach laïcité in France and elsewhere, you must do it ranged about with words like “arch-conservative,” even though the preservation of secularism is typically as important to the left as it is to the right, to the point where a recent rally, in support of a high school principal forced to resign out of fear for his personal safety after he tried to enforce France’s ban on hijabs in public high schools, was organized by the Socialist Party.

Tis the very essence of an inconvenient fact, this. It would be nice if people and organizations outraged by secularism legislation acknowledged it.

… to anyone in Garrett Park who wants some. UD put it on the neighborhood listserv, and it’s almost gone.

They can agree to have seemingly unbiased articles about – I dunno – the safety of OxyContin go out under their name, even though Sackler-funded ghostwriters would have written the articles.

For doing nothing but agreeing to Purdue’s use of their name, these professors could earn (before the whole Oxy thing collapsed) tens of thousands of dollars, and thereby make their own small contribution to millions of addictions and deaths.

There are plenty of examples like this. An economist earns big bucks by letting a corporation use her name on an article touting … let’s see … the superiority of coal over other forms of energy. The safety of dangerous anti-depressants. This or that hormone.

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

There are other ways for professors to trade their reputations for money, and a prof at GW may have availed himself of one of these. Nothing’s been proven, but two affiliated scholars at the Program on Extremism he runs have already resigned in protest against Lorenzo Vidino having reportedly received thousands of dollars for designating certain people terrorists, or terrorist-connected. The money came from rich oil states engaged in convoluted reputational battles with other such states.

Vidino, a dual citizen of Italy and the U.S., argues that even the most moderate Islamist organizations in the West can tilt Muslims toward separatism and violence. [M]any Muslims [think] that he simply dresse[s] up bigotry in academic language. Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia, has described Vidino as someone who “promotes conspiracy theories about the Muslim Brotherhood” and “is connected to numerous anti-Muslim think tanks.” In 2020, the Austrian Interior Ministry cited a report by Vidino as a basis for carrying out raids on dozens of citizens or organizations suspected of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood. No one targeted in the raids has been arrested, much less convicted of any wrongdoing. An Austrian appellate court ruled the raids unlawful.

UD would love to know if he’s declaring this money on his end of year GW Academic Review form.

Idaho is mainly in the news lately for the collapse of its statewide ob/gyn facilities; but the Western Theocratic Territory commands attention for many other reasons. Heerespfarrer Yenor, for instance, inspires that state’s Christian nationalists from his academic appointment at Boise State, an actual university (though largely a jockshop), and this startles the Guardian newspaper.

I mean, the Guardian‘s startled that a respectable academic institition lends its reputation to a man whose howls about liberty, women, free thought, and other abominations I will not share here because obscenity laws forbid it.

Nobody’s startled by the bad boys hiding out in the brush outside of Boise, but, well, a professor.

… to keep ’em dumb!

… ‘bama.

While [a snowboarder] was filming his run, [Keith Robert] Stebbings [of Brighton] is seen [in a video] standing in his path while holding a shotgun. As [the snowboarder] gets closer, the homeowner can be heard saying, “Private property, you (expletive).”

During the confrontation, Stebbings, 67, can be seen pushing [the snowboarder] numerous times, while also pointing the shotgun at the snowboarder and saying “if you do it again there will be holes in you.”

… [A] later investigation found that there was no private property signage at the residence.

Georgia GOP Vice Chairman

Voted 9 Times while Serving

Felony [Check Forgery] Sentence

UD has chronicled for years on this blog the scandalous refusal of ultraorthodox men and women to defend Israel. Even under current combat conditions, they refuse to lift their asses off of their prayer seats.

But now Israel’s high court has frozen yeshiva funding! No money if you don’t fight!

Which means Israel will soon have a two-front war, since the Haredim will respond to this call to civic duty by setting the country’s cities aflame. Operation Black Hats will divert many of Israel’s soldiers to the streets of Jerusalem, where ultra-orthodox mobs will riot mercilessly in defense of their right to do nothing and care nothing for Israel.

See the lunatic with body armor and the AR-15, honey? I want you to smile real big at him while we walk by him out of the store. Now don’t walk too fast or look scared! Just be natural and walk normally and he’ll leave us alone. Okay?

No surprise here. One of the most degenerate Trumpian fanatics, up there with Lara Trump, Eastman will soon lose the law license he used in order to devise the vile and traitorous Jan. 6 plot. The judge who presided over his disbarment trial said Eastman’s “lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.” UD thinks he can still lead a meaningful life hawking sixty dollar a pop Trump bibles.

UD‘s thinking that the disaster in Baltimore might well decrease the number of freight trains that pass through Garrett Park. The longest CSX trains around here have car after car topped with coal.

Yet there he remains, smiling at you from the University of Rochester faculty pages. Now, if someone years ago had put his dissertation through a simple plagiarism check, UR might have been spared a lot of embarrassment, a black eye with grant-givers, and the drawn-out business of keeping his faculty page up while trying to minimize the possibility that he’ll pull a Gino and sue everyone for $25 million. A summary of the whole sordid tale appears here, but all you need to know is that whether the bully is Marc Hauser (like Francesca Gino, another Harvard winner) or Ranga Dias, or Berislav Zlokovic, let the journal/university/NSF beware: research misconduct is a Thing.

… a Rilkean meditation on bridges.

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

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions…For the god
wants to know himself in you.

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

This is by way of a pep talk, mes petites, having to do with nothing less than the imperative to forge a creative, meaningful life. When you were a child (see Intimations of Immortality) the sheer visceral energy of being young, that heedless life force, “carried you over” the darkness and peril of being. But that was kidstuff, and it only pertained to you, and it didn’t mean much beyond simple inarticulate strength and delight in earthly existence. Now it’s time to transcend the unproblematic egotism of youth and offer something to the world, and that will mean struggling with complex, problematic forces to perceive and build so-far “unimagined” connections.

To infuse the world with wonder, to reveal its hidden beauty, means overcoming the dark abyss that lies under all that we do. That abyss (‘Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water, without sound‘) is not merely our own awaiting mortality, but also the soundless nothing the world is without our articulate speech, without our artistic/architectural hand upon the land. So this is the pep talk: You can do it. You can shape and fill the earth with meaning, articulate sound, human beauty. Your soul offers you, grants you, the capacity for this earth-brightening achievement; you must not be afraid to accept what it wants to grant.

For after all, it’s “not too hard” for you to work with the seemingly unbridgeable complications of the world, to take its welter of Things and bring them together in clarifying, enabling ways:

I loved you, so I drew these tides of
Men into my hands
And wrote my will across the
Sky and stars

Indeed, you cannot shirk this imperative, much as you would like to be “swept along” in the abyss. You must be adequate to the challenge of the world.

Use your powers, stretch them out, flex your creative muscles! Stand boldly above the abyss and bring the seemingly irreconcilable complications of a world of turmoil into alignment, so that where there was once nothing there is now something — something upon which your fellow human beings can locate and know ourselves and the world. For the god / Wants to know himself in you. Only through our interiority can the earth arise and know itself. Only our human powers of perception and feeling can intuit and express both the contradictions of existence and their overcoming.

… photograph… but also likes to shake his tush...