… for Israel.

LOLOLOL legal fees settlement defamation questioning ethics LOLOLOLOL.

A young Tunisian woman is sentenced to six months in jail because she retweeted a covid health advisory which uses religious calligraphy.

Making children wear burqas is criminal. Another German state – Baden-Württemberg – bans them for schoolgirls.

Mr. Rosu was [already] wanted in a federal investigation. On the dashboard [of his rental car, investigators] found a key to a hotel room. Hidden in the ceiling of that room, investigators found around 1,000 blank, gold-colored magnetic strip cards and a bag of what appeared to be A.T.M. skimming components, including a magnetic strip card encoder …

At a detention hearing on Thursday afternoon in Anchorage, Mr. Rosu did not enter a plea, according to his lawyer, Ben Crittenden. “We believe in his innocence,” Mr. Crittenden said.

… ME!

Say what you will about our Genius of the Carpathians; he has inspired some of our best political writing, like this short piece from Peter Wehner.

(Wehner’s stylish marriage of crude and cruel brings to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s elegant description of Don Quixote: “a cruel and crude old book.”)

Also some of our best political advertisements, like this Seinfeld takeoff.

Maybe now, with all the extreme weather coming his way, Ed Henry will reconsider his dismissal of the term.

Conor Friedersdorf writes:

[The letter writers use] the same tenuous, abuse-prone, guilty-by-association tactics that the far right has used to tar academics by linking them to Communism or Islamism… [They are] trying to radically narrow the bounds of acceptable speech and inquiry… A closer look at the letter lays bare the specific ideological orthodoxies and political tests that at least hundreds of linguists now feel comfortable openly imposing on their colleagues… [They are] poring over years of individual tweets, asserting uncharitable interpretations of those they highlight, assigning guilt by association, and imposing multiple orthodoxies that are incompatible with academic freedom… The desire to significantly narrow the bounds of acceptable speech is not a fringe proposition; it is a project that hundreds of people in a single academic field are willing to pursue openly.

… won’t amount to much, especially if you’re a woman. And in any case thousands of Sudanese are already in the streets, incredibly pissed off that they will have a slightly harder time slicing their babies’ clits off and killing infidels and homosexuals.

UD‘s talking about that country’s recent withdrawal of some of their more macabre sharia morsels. FGM for instance is indeed illegal now, but it’s been illegal in Egypt for years and even so almost ninety percent of the girls living there today have been relieved of that obscenity, the capacity for female sexual pleasure.

UD assures you that the only cutting edge Sudan is on is this one.

Wee UD was so excited to read the opening pages of Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979). Already tutored in the Wastelander philosophy of her Northwestern University professor Erich Heller (a refugee from Hitler, he came by his despair honestly), she was way ready for the everything’s shit in America thing Lasch had going. She enjoyed imagining herself far superior to the shallow narcissists at the heart of his analysis; and she for sure enjoyed his incessant invocation of an entirely catastrophic US of A.

It took UD years to recognize that total, eloquent denunciations of the total despicableness of this or that culture are seductive and dangerous things. Fascists and communists specialized in them. Sharia-touts will gas on all night about the comprehensive decadence of America and Europe. Cathophates (UD‘s term for Catholics who want to gift us with a Catholic caliphate) write books and books and books with the following come-on: Hey, citizen of a democratic secular state – aren’t you depressed and lonely and empty? Wouldn’t you like to be part of a warm embracing community that will endow your suicidal existence with meaning and purpose and eternal life so you won’t even have death-anxiety?

Elder-UD has learned to appreciate people like Cancel-Culture-Target-du-Jour Steven Pinker. While no Pangloss, he’s not simply one more intellectual trying to snow you with the hopelessness of it all.

Of course UD still thinks things are pretty stinkin’ – what with the ascendancy of Trump – and she still thinks dark-eyed despair sexier than clear-eyed calm… But she’s wary, now, of high-gloss misery peddlers. Cuz most of them are selling something. Something extreme.

The pandemic has shut down all of UD‘s sports scandal fun; and, as this article suggests, big time university athletics might have a lot of trouble bouncing back when covid ends. Oh dear.

Remember the “terrible” (as Masha Gessen called it) Avital Ronell letter? (UD‘s posts about it are here.) Remember the regret its authors eventually expressed after it turned out they got the facts (about whether Ronell sexually harassed a graduate student) wrong, and in a very unseemly way threw their institutional weight around, and thus further abused an innocent grad student?

So… the fools who wrote the anti-Steven Pinker letter everyone’s currently laughing at maybe could have consulted that bit of history before marking up their own missive, with its overripe racism claims and its rich mix of real and forged signatures. Ask the authors of the Ronell letter whether it pays to be a bit … epistoleery…

After [Karen] Littlefair’s son was put on academic probation by Georgetown University, she hired [Rick] Singer’s company to take four online classes on his behalf so he could graduate in 2018, prosecutors said… Littlefair sought a discount on the cheating after the person earned a C in one of the courses, authorities said.

Big bad judge make mommy go jail. WAH!

Our girl Shamima is still at it, trying this way and that way to get back into the country she left in order to be a broodmare for ISIS, whup Yazidi slave girls, and tailor suicide vests to human bombs. What an interesting sojourn that was! And now that an appeals court has ruled she can return to England to try to get her British citizenship back, it’s time to look to the future with fresh eyes.

But, as legal analysts note, Begum is still due to spend forever in the Syrian desert, because the British government is just as fanatical about keeping this incredibly dangerous woman out of the country as she was about tugging her burqa aside for long lines of ISIS sperm depositors. No one’s going anywhere for a long time.

And as for how to think about England ultimately having to spend millions in taxpayer money to transport, house, and protect a vicious, committed enemy of everything for which the country stands…. Well, dedicated UD readers know UD‘s take on that one. No price is too high when the fight is truly for the survival of a free and democratic state. Pay whatever it takes to try her, expose her atrocities, and ship her back.