‘I have come to the conclusion that it is about time I made up my mind whether I am to become a writer… I foresee that I shall have to do other work as well but to continue as I am at present would certainly mean my mental extinction. It is months since I have written a line and even reading tires me. The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take any interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites, or disgusts me. Nothing of my former mind seems to have remained except a heightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph or before some crude Italian gazette-picture. Yet I have certain ideas which I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions or impulses may be purely personal. I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary…‘

A 1906 letter from James Joyce to his brother.

Seen on today’s early morning pick up trash walk. UD thought she’d have plenty to pick up – Saturday was insane with activity all over town – but the town crew must have swept through late yesterday, because the streets were frustratingly pristine. She did collect one half-full bottle (calorie free health drink, natch) in Wells Park, and a black plastic fork in front of the tennis courts, but that was it.

UD also lays some of the blame on fellow Garrett Parkers, who, all day long every day, do exactly what UD does.

‘[B]eing pissed off at the local college is not a valid legal doctrine for taking millions of dollars.’

An AAUP blogger demeans the Ohio jury in just the way the administration of Oberlin College has consistently done: The jurors are vindictive village idiots, unable to understand concepts like harm, defamation, and the rule of law, able to use the legal system only to stick it to the elitists down the block. For those who want to get rid of embarrassingly inexpert juries altogether, the lopsided outcome of the Oberlin trial ($44 million in damages and penalties to the college), in the Gibson Bakery case, is the icing on the cake.

Yet although this clearly was an angry jury, that doesn’t mean their verdict was dumb. The jury knows that Oberlin won’t in the end pay out that much money; they know that an appeal is thunderingly obvious. Appalled by the … well, let’s use the language of the AAUP blogger — a man who is sympathetic to Oberlin…

… Oberlin students behaved disgracefully, only to be exceeded by the incredibly stupid and repulsive actions and comments by Oberlin administrators. Protesters demanded a boycott over a case where the Oberlin students were clearly guilty (and later pleaded guilty) and there was no evidence of racial discrimination. They made accusations of past racism, but never presented any convincing evidence publicly. Oberlin’s administrators were even worse. They hurt Gibson’s business by refusing to stand up on their behalf and by boycotting the bakery for a time. They tried to intimidate Gibson’s into dropping charges against the Oberlin students by threatening to continue their boycott, and even asked the bakery to call the college rather than the police when students shoplifted in the future. And Oberlin’s administrators sent each other very dumb messages that alienated the judge and jury so much that the actual legal regulations about defamation [were overlooked].

Appalled by this behavior, which I suspect was felt as a personal attack on their community’s economy and reputation, the jury decided to communicate as forcefully as possible its unacceptable nature — perhaps with an eye to Oberlin eventually gaining some compassion and rationality along the way. As Bill Maher put it in lamenting Oberlin’s actions, “How do we get mainstream liberals to stand up to that faction?” One way is to jolt them awake with outrageous court awards; once awake, mainstream liberals might ask themselves why Oberlin has as a vice president and dean of students an angry factionalist, a woman way, way out of the liberal mainstream. That happened because no one’s watching. Now people are watching.

In court, one of the College’s attorneys, Rachelle Zidar, argued that the College and [the dean of students] did not seek to injure [Gibson’s Bakery] but rather the pause [in their business relationship] was meant to diffuse tensions that had built within the student body.

Pending an appeal, that’s their only move.

This is one angry jury; they just added $33 million in damages. See this post for details.

Why are they so angry? I’m gonna go ahead and guess.

1. Most people really hate bullies.
2. The jury perceives itself to be defending not just a family but a way of life, and the reputation of its community (which, by the way, voted for Hillary Clinton). These are things they take very seriously.
3. Oberlin has throughout this fiasco handled things with the delicacy, kindness, and rationality of Donald Trump. In the way of Trump, it has basically, and repeatedly, dismissed the jury as losers. The jury did not take this well.

Oberlin at this point desperately needs an outside public relations firm. But apparently it is too clueless even to realize that.

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UD thanks tp.

When close to one hundred percent of the people in a part of Arlington Virginia registered opposition to a gun store opening in town near an elementary school, a lawyer for the shop owners expressed bafflement. “What’s the danger they anticipate? Do they think 2- and 3-year-old children are going to come over and buy guns? … Or somebody at the store is going to start shooting up the place? I don’t know what they think is going to happen.”

Perhaps UD can help him out. At 3:00 AM last night, about a mile away from her house…

Four suspects are on the loose and one person is dead after a burglary at a Rockville, Maryland, gun store…

… As there are four possibly armed suspects on the loose, police are urging local residents to navigate the area with extra caution.

… The five suspects rammed into a police cruiser as they were fleeing the scene, causing police to shoot at the car, officials said.

Police later found the car a few blocks away from the area with a dead man inside, according to police.

Police say they found a bag with multiple firearms inside in a backyard not far from the scene. Three other guns were found outside the car the suspects tried to get away in. It appears two stolen cars were used in the incident — one to ram the storefront and a getaway car.

I just don’t know what people think is going to happen.

The American courts are taking care of Purdue; time to direct our attention to Purdue’s overseas conspirator, Mundipharma. Cuz they might be having a spot of trouble addicting us here, what with all the lawsuits, but overseas they are coked to the gills.

As Marx might put it, the people of the globe have nothing to lose but their sobriety; and they have a world of druggy deaths to win.

Look at Italy, a country transitioning from two glasses of wine for dinner to two bottles of morphine for eternity. I’ve just linked to a long article, but it’s worth reading for the bubbly richness of that nation’s surrender to Mundipharma’s ambassador, Guido Fanelli, a man who wants everybody Oxyed unto death. Fanelli’s war plan is so familiar to those of us who have for years tracked academic pharmawhores in the US – the releasing of bogus scientific papers, the organizing of bogus scientific conferences, the gathering-in of kindred prossies from universities and laboratories.

As the U.S. market contracts, opioid consumption is climbing overseas. Canada and Australia are already following America’s catastrophic course, with rising rates of addiction and death. Others may be on the cusp of crisis: Researchers in Brazil report that prescription opioid sales have skyrocketed 465 percent in six years. Overdose deaths are going up in Sweden, Norway, Ireland and England, fueled by prescription painkillers and the illicit drug trade.

Fanelli, “a motormouth and a braggart,” made it reasonably easy for Italian police to discover and record his epic monologues about his Oxy-obtained yacht, so he and various Mundipharma executives are currently somewhat up shit’s creek.

But there’s so much more to come:

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor, published a paper in 2017 pleading with the world to pay attention, especially as prescription rates rise in developing countries with minimal regulation. “As Oxy marches around the world, the things we see in Europe will be disturbing,” he said, “but less so than they will be in Botswana or India.”

The Queen bestows OBEs on two anti female genital mutilation activists, which is great. The more publicity the better. But as one of them points out, you’ve got to start putting people in jail.

Here in the States we’re still working on putting No-Clits Nagarwala in the slammer. UD thinks that eventually this will happen. In the meantime, it’s nice to realize that her life and vocation are ruined, so she can’t cut up any more children.

Crowds of obnoxious Israeli ultraorthodox (there’s no real sense in railing against them, since they will in a few years be ruling a halachic religious state… but let’s fight the good fight anyway) scream every Saturday at people trying to enjoy their dinner at a Jerusalem restaurant. No one’s allowed to open a restaurant on the Sabbath, see.

The eatery’s owner decided she’d had enough; she and her female waitstaff waded into the crowd of ultras and pulled up their blouses to expose their bras, which scared the ultras away.

“Klil Lifshitz, the 28-year-old lesbian who opened Bastet 2 1/2 years ago with a ‘super feminist’ wait staff rather than decamp to liberal Tel Aviv as most of her friends had,” is my heroine; she scared away the ultras.

Maybe if they had some military experience the ultras would be able to stand up to a few bras.

Surely Klil’s next tactic (when the boys get it up enough to come back) is mooning… and after that, well, UD just can’t say.

Always one of the American university’s most criminalized football teams, the University of Florida Gators have lately outdone themselves. Aaron Hernandez’s Former Florida Teammate Charged With Murder runs a headline, and, yes, believe it or not, the team boasted two future murderers playing side by side! Hernandez killed acquaintances; Earl Joiner allegedly killed his wife. Earl Joiner Becomes Second Florida Gator to be Accused of Murder from 2007 Team notes another headline. Storied team! A school can’t pay for this kind of publicity!

A slice of Oberlin College’s administration, students, and faculty ganged up on a local bakery.

Oberlin College staff — including deans and professors — and students engaged in demonstrations in front of Gibson’s Bakery following the arrests of … three students, [a] lawsuit [filed by the bakery] stated. The suit also said Oberlin Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo and other college staff members “handed out hundreds of copies” of a flier to the community and the media stating that Gibson’s Bakery and its owners racially profiled and discriminated against the three students. The court documents include a copy of the flier, which included the words “DON’T BUY.” “This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION,” the flier read, according to the lawsuit.The flier also listed 10 of the bakery’s competitors and urged customers to shop there instead.

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Students carried signs accusing the bakery owners of white supremacy or simply saying “Fuck Gibson’s.”

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All three students eventually confessed, one to having tried to steal wine, and two others to physically attacking a person from the bakery who tried to stop them as they exited the store.

A jury just told Oberlin to pay the bakery eleven million dollars. Punitive damages – to be decided later – may raise that figure quite a bit.

A subtle moral lesson for Oberlin students from the people who run their school:

1. Rush to judgment.
2. Pay for your mistake with other people’s tuition money.

Details.

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Update: Those who argue that this was a bad decision, with frightening implications for free speech on campuses, make two points:

1. It is impossible to assess what damage was done to the bakery by a concerted effort (large protest gatherings in front of the store and broadly disseminated messages to the community to boycott Gibson’s because it was and had long been a racist institution) to shut it down.
2. The attack on the bakery did not come from officials who speak on behalf of Oberlin. Thus, “to punish a college for not reining in its students, administrators, and faculty even when they are not speaking on the college’s behalf represents an extraordinary threat to academic freedom and to freedom of speech.”

As to #1, you can see from these clashing financial experts at the trial that Oberlin did itself no favors by hiring as their expert someone who dismissed out of hand any evidence of harm to the business. No doubt the guy on the other side inflated stuff, but Oberlin’s problem lies in the fact that when a crowd of people vociferously and steadfastly condemns a business as racist, it’s reasonable to expect long-term damage. UD grants that we’re in a rather gray zone here, but if she consults her own response to obscene deep-rooted bigots of the sort the Oberlin literature about Gibson’s evoked (she shrinks away as fast as possible), it’s intuitively obvious to her that many people are going to stay away from the bakery. Serious damage will ensue.

On #2: Actually, a college should – must – rein in people like the Oberlin vice-president and dean of students who stirred up the student body against an innocent business (UD personally thinks the deathblow in that trial came from the parade of African American locals who testified that far from a racist location, Gibson’s Bakery was a place of love) and in texts boasted of her ability to organize the students to do her bidding. Oberlin might have saved itself a lot of grief if it at least issued a statement acknowledging that this woman acted badly. Intemperate ideologues who rush, disastrously, to judgment, don’t seem to UD the very best candidates for deans of students; but if you insist on hiring them, you should be prepared to distance yourself when they make a mess of things. If you choose not to distance yourself, you should be prepared to absorb some legal blows.

Les UDs leave Rehoboth Beach tomorrow.

It doesn’t seem to bother them that, even as their defense of full veiling is going down the tubes all over the burqa-banning world, their arguments remain the lazy, unelaborated claims – with broad-brush insults and fear-mongering thrown in – that everyone has heard and dismissed. Behold Zahra Jamal in Foreign Policy.

Her subtitle, in which she evokes the violence of virtually pan-European burqa bans now “crashing down” on these shores (Quebec may soon ban them), sets the hyperalarmist mood of a piece written in the aftermath of countless non-violent and orderly local, regional, and national full-veiling bans. What world is the author living in? And has it not occurred to her that, given present realities, she should make some effort to accommodate herself to ours?

The fundamental polemical quandary the serious burqa defender suffers is this: She seems doomed at once to assert the obviously “sordid” (Jamal’s word) nature of burqa opposition, and to note that huge left and right national majorities, as well as international courts, support bans. To put her position concisely: Everyone sucks.

From beginning to end, Jamal describes enormous populations desperately under the thumb of powerful white nationalists. Somehow these clever charismatic people are convincing mental and moral midgets like Angela Merkel to call for serious restrictions on the burqa.

“For centuries, many Western scholars, church elders, and political leaders justified colonial and imperial incursions with the call to save Muslim women from Muslim men, citing the veil as a symbol of oppression. In contrast, in European and Quebecois political and popular discourse over the past decade, hijabs and niqabs have come to symbolize terrorism, thus reconstituting Muslim women from cause to enemy, from subjugated victim to powerful terrorist. According to proponents, bans on religious coverings are meant to liberate Muslim women from oppression, emancipate them into secularism, and deter them from violence. Burqa bans thus simultaneously falsely frame veiled women as security threats and legalize Islamophobia.”

Can you detect an argument in here? There’s nothing ‘in contrast’ about rejecting the burqa as both an instrument of oppression and a security risk. There’s no religious warrant for it, all ISIS, Taliban, and al Qaeda women and girls must wear it, and it has been used to hide the identity of terrorists and ordinary criminals. In its extreme physical muzzling, it creates a population of women overwhelmingly unlikely to become assimilated into modern open European countries. So, nu?

Weirdly, most of the subsequent essay reviews the spectacular success of burqa bans in Europe, across the political spectrum. Surely this amazing massing of votes and judicial decisions against full-veiling demands a powerful counter-response, one that begins with an effort to understand the determination of millions of ordinary people to ban the burqa.

“Ultimately, veil bans are about the sordid view that human diversity is a threat, and—similar to the flurry of state abortion bans in the United States—women’s bodies must be disciplined and regulated by the state rather than by women themselves to safeguard the nation.”

Yeah, if you want to see the flourishing of human diversity at its various best, take a look at a community of burqa wearers… Veil bans are, among other things, a rejection of the sordid practice of trapping ten year old girls under cloth – of men disciplining and regulating the bodies of helpless children.

Jamal’s essay is so lazy that UD begins to think burqa-defense has degenerated into virtue signaling. The author knows perfectly well that the tidal wave (to use her metaphor) of burqa banning is unlikely to be stopped, even if you spit Islamophobia and white supremacy at everybody. In lieu of serious appraisals of the banning trend, and serious arguments against banning, burqa defenders are left with vacuous indignation.

Ah the still soft voice of the Quaker community that is Sidwell Friends, where simplicity and selflessness are bywords of the faith… To be part of this educational community is to feel and reflect the values of the Society founded by George Fox so long ago.

Or not. Apparently so many Sidwell parents have verbally assaulted the counseling staff for failing to get the kid into Harvard that most of the staff has resigned, and the head of school has written a sweet letter to all parents about how “love blurs our vision” when it comes to the little ones; when we shriek obscenities at the staff we know not what we do.

To which UD says Awwww.

Has headmaster had a chance to look up close and personal at the Varsity Blues folks about to go to prison? Is it really your sense that the problem these people have is fuzzy over-fondness?

Quite a few of your students are cubs of America’s most brutal predators. (See p 113 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work.) Said predators don’t take kindly to kinks in the multigenerational winner-take-all masterplan.

Masters of the Universe don’t barely get into U Minnesota; they power their way into Princeton.

And now Brothers and Sisters, let us pray.