Two headlines, one week, Jackson State University.

Reagan National [University] has connections to a different kind of troubled institution, via its ties to the University of Northern Virginia. 

In 2011, federal immigration officials raided UNVA, threatening to suspend the college’s ability to accept foreign students. The suspicion: that Northern Virginia was a so-called “visa mill,” a college accused of peddling a chance to live in the U.S. rather than offering a meaningful education. 

The Virginia government closed Northern Virginia in 2013 because it wasn’t accredited. It resurfaced the same year with a South Dakota address — the same one Reagan National used on business filings, plus the same agent, Xianhua Fan, spelled slightly differently from the name listed for Reagan National’s president.

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Reporters unearthed these disturbing facts about RNU; the accreditor missed them. It also missed a few other signs that not all is on the up and up at RNU:

RNU Motto: Crescat Scientia; Visa Excolatur

VISA: Official Card of RNU

Visasion Statement: We aim to be, visa-vi other schools, the very best.

School Song:

F-1 me you sweet sweet visable u

J-1 me cuz that’ll work for me too

Just one look at you my heart grew tipsy in me

You and you alone can get a visa for me

England really doesn’t want his daughter. She can exhaust every possible appeal, but it’s way unlikely that a British court will take her back. He’s living in Bangladesh where she can try claiming citizenship, and though Bangladesh doesn’t want this dangerous woman any more than England does, it just might let her in.

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The national security argument heard in court was that Begum had aligned with the Islamist group not only by travelling to Syria but by remaining until nearly the last days of the self-styled caliphate, thus showing a high degree of commitment to it.

Security sources have gone further, suggesting Begum was a member of al-Hisba, Isis’s morality police, during which time she carried a Kalashnikov and had a reputation for strictness. Begum also allegedly “stitched suicide bombers into explosive vests”. These are all claims the intelligence community stands by, arguing that women are as capable as men of actively participating in a violent regime.

Does one really have to argue this? Isn’t the correct word “noting,” rather than arguing? Do we have to drag little Irma Ilse Ida Grese and company out yet again? “Legal proceedings, [one of Begum’s lawyers argues], ‘fail to provide swift and practical answers to such acute human predicaments as this’.” You said it babe, and that means that just as there’s no way to confirm intelligence claims that she shouldered a big ol’ gun etc. etc., there’s also no way to confirm claims she warnt so godawful bad as all that … It IS a fucking predicament; but nowhere is it written that an entire citizenry has to shoulder the uncertainty inherent in returning atrociously depraved people to its midst.

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In a series of laws in the 00s, Labour allowed government to deprive anyone of citizenship, even if they had been born in Britain, if it was “conducive to the public good” to do so.

Poor Kenan Malik is deprived of his Right Wing Neo-fascists did it argument in yet another lame effort to urge that citizenship is a right that may under no circumstances be taken away. Labour signed off on the law allowing it to be taken away. “In 1870, MPs viewed citizenship as a right that should not be arbitrarily removed by the state.” Ah, the good old days. But of course no one is doing anything arbitrarily. It’s like saying, whenever a child is removed from grossly abusive parents, “parenthood is a right that should not be arbitrarily removed by the state.” I mean, there are justifiable circumstances in these matters, no?

A writer about Parkland makes George Orwell’s point for a world I doubt Orwell could have imagined: One where one country alone boasts 400 million privately held guns.

The 911 call transcript, Humvees disgorging SWAT teams, witnesses hugging and weeping, ambulances rolling away, candles lit at “memorials.” We never see a body. We never see what a .223 round of ammunition can actually do to a human. It has all been sanitized. When I hear a congressman call for a “moment of silence,” I hear him saying, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

We respond to gun violence in such a manner because the thing of which we speak is so hideous that we need to normalize it.

Valentine's Day:  Jordan Peterson Interview at 9:45

It's intolerable to be the beau of the broken,
The dearly beloved to whom their woe is spoken.

Yet how in hell did that start?
When did I become Miss Lonelyheart?
I'll tell you what I'd really like:
Let's have you think of me as Shrike.
Cynical, cold, and all-obscene,
Indifferent to pain and just plain mean.
Because then you'll all go far away.
You won't press up against me in a panic and say
'Save me from the fact of being me.'

I haven't any shields!  Can't you see?
Can't you see what it betokens?
What a murderous, nasty love you've woken. 

Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear tweet for me!
And may there be no moaning from Bill Barr
      When I’ve destroyed judiciary

   But such support from apparatchiks
      For my love Roger Stone
Who after all his dirty tricks
      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the golf!
And may there be no discontent to quell
      When I absolve.

Bernstein met second wife Susan Goldhor through mutual friends. “I thought he was kind of cute and had a really nice smile,” she recalled. Susan, a biologist with an interest in mycology, recalled Bernstein joking that “I did mushrooms, and he did mushroom clouds.” On their first date, they hiked the White Mountains. Then they planned a longer hike. “I didn’t have the right socks, and I got blisters. These were big hikes every day. I was really having a hard time, I was in pain, I was exhausted, and so I complained to Aron about this. Aron hated whiners, so he wrote me a letter afterward that it wasn’t going to work out, that he wasn’t going to deal with whiners. He was a very, very straightforward person — he didn’t play games.”

She convinced him that she wasn’t actually a whiner, and he took her to a Mozart concert at Jordan Hall. Bernstein loved music, “nothing later than Schubert, and preferably a lot earlier— I couldn’t get him to go to a Mahler concert.” They married in 1990. Hiking was a shared passion, and they bought a vacation home in the White Mountains. “We hiked in summer, fall, and winter — I remember hiking in a blizzard. Until Aron was 86, we were still hiking and snowshoeing together. The hikes got shorter but the pleasure was still there.”

From an MIT News obit for Aron Bernstein, professor of physics.

… stay for the anti-vaxxers!

In secular France, it would seem,

We all have the right to blaspheme.

If you’re worried that’s gone

Listen up to Macron:

It’s the heart of what makes France supreme.

On a long soggy walk today through Garrett Park, the town I grew up in and moved back to twenty-five years ago, I come upon four police cars and a dump truck. The authorities are once again forcibly removing large abundant junk from the front yard of a man I’ve known since elementary school. Indeed, one of the cops routinely sent out for this abatement procedure is also an old school friend of both mine and the junk guy’s — the police dispatch him hoping a familiar face will make the operation less ugly. Less threatening to the junk guy.

Who, given the complexity of human beings, turns out to be a lot of things besides an angry (KEEP OUT signs are everywhere on the lawn) white male. For decades he’s been the town handyman, circulating in his rusted gray pickup and mowing lawns, repairing machinery, whatever. Although his appearance is a little unnerving – à la late-stage Howard Hughes – he is the soul of sweetness and does much of his work around Garrett Park for free (even though almost everyone here is wealthy). He did quite a bit of raking and mowing for us ten or so years ago and we’re still waiting for the bill.

Garrett Park is a very small town and I’ve known it intimately forever. My old friend Bennett’s mother still lives across the street from the handyman, who helps her out with everything all the time. The house on one side of the junked place burned down a few years ago, and a remarkably large number of townies donated money to get the family in it back on their feet. Rebuilt in a chic woody eco sort of way, it recently sold for about a million dollars, and UD figures the new owners would dearly like to see the end of the handyman.

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And how does ol’ UD, notorious for energetically picking up trash on her walks, feel about this town eyesore, kept by a belligerent old acquaintance?

I always say to Mr UD, “When you get old, everything about you gets worse.” He disagrees, in his pollyannish way; but you know what I mean. The pack rat the junk guy used to be is now, age 65, a mad hoarder, made madder by what he sees as neighborhood and police harassment. When you stand in front of his small house and really contemplate his junk (cars, car parts, mowers, trash cans, plant containers, tables, chairs, rakes, snow shovels, radios, tires, piles of jumper cables, loungers, a trampoline, fake flowers), you perceive the expressivity it represents. None of it is placed arbitrarily. This is an aesthetic gesture — something to do, I guess, with his life work — the gathering up and staging of his accumulation, over many years, of unwanted objects from all of us. We’d walk by its display in MOMA with a shrug.

Ja, ja, of course I want the police to take it away. It makes you laugh, but after the giggle subsides you’re basically appalled. No one should have to look at that.

Like a lot of aesthetic gestures, it has plenty of aggressivity against the world behind it. But it also expresses that thing all of us are desperate to express. I. Exist. Here. This is my private history, my personal truth, my hard-won, hard-salvaged ship.

They never wanted him as president at Jackson State; but students, faculty, and alumni were overruled and had him forced on them, no doubt for many corrupt reasons, this being public education in the state of Mississippi. But of course they were right not to want him, and now, after his arrest for soliciting a prostitute, giving the police a false name, and possessing marijuana, JSU must yet again search for a president. It has had a long string of these; all flame out quickly, though none as dramatically as this latest guy.

This latest guy presents himself in every possible forum as so jesusy there’s no one more jesusy. It’s all God God God God God from this guy; and UD wishes – she really wishes – people would begin to intuit a possible connection between excess jesusism and bein’ bad.

Guns of course are ubiquitous at frats, but they’re an adjunct to the frat’s extensive drug dealing operation (see pages and pages of guns and frats here), or they’re AK-47s that the lads like to photograph themselves holding, or they’re be-well-son-and-take-care-of-yourself goodbye gifts from Maw and Paw as the little guy heads off to school. And of course they’re notoriously handy when suicide is in the air. All routine American gun use.

Real powpowpow, however, has been thin on the ground. Stuff that draws pledge-blood has been… anemic.

Yes, this Oklahoma State guy (an inter-fraternity council secretary)

used a loaded gun to scare two new fraternity recruits. The victims say (Owen) Hossack pointed the gun at their heads and asked if they would take a bullet for their brothers. Then, police say, he fired the gun …

But I mean big deal nobody got hurt and loyalty is an important value…

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See, if you ask UD the omnipresence of guns, alcohol, drugs, teenagers, secret guys-only events, and loyalty tests should mean that America’s budding Stephen Paddocks begin routinely manifesting themselves at our fraternities. By national standards, shooting a gun at two guys’ heads but not killing them is, uh, kid stuff.

On the other hand, there’s evidence that things are escalating to the serious mass shootings UD keeps expecting. New Mexico State University (feast your eyes) is exactly the sort of walking abortion of a school you’d expect to be a first-adopter here, and sure enough they did manage to draw blood at a recent hazing event.

Dozens of students, including Jonathan Sillas, attended the Kappa Sigma fraternity’s initiation event.

As Sillas was leaving, another student, Miguel Altamirano, pulled him to the side and told him to turn around, according to a criminal complaint.

Altamirano pulled out a .40 caliber handgun, held the firearm against Sillas’ leg and pulled the trigger, the complaint states. The bullet went through Sillas’ leg.

Gun-friendly states always use the passive voice. The bullet went through. The shooter did not put the bullet in Sillas’s leg; the bullet decided to go through Sillas’s leg. And note the other thing going on at hazing events: Sadistic tyranny. Pulled him to the side and told him to turn around. Right out of The Story of O. Frat hazing (and sorority hazing) reeks, my dears, of S&M.

Duh. We all know that. It’s about torturing people pathetic enough to be willing to be tortured in order to join your club.

I mean, datz why I keep wondering why no mass killing at Sigma Alpha Epsilon yet! You know they’ve got guns galore, but no one’s gonna confiscate them because that would initiate a massacre of free Americans by the federal government. Little by little, a pledge shooting here and a pledge shooting there, we’re inching toward mass murder at an American university fraternity. Just be patient.

And it’s UD’s very own George Washington University!

Jean Girard reads Camus while driving.